Here’s a question for you.
Black people want to be paid reparation for their ancestors who were slaves, but where do they send the bill? Who will pay?
This is a problem because back then almost everyone with any money owned a slave or two or a hundred. Owning people was a normal thing to do.
Getting reparations will be hard but they should start with descendants of George Washington who owned 317 slaves. Blacks might get money from the family of Thomas Jefferson, who owned 600 slaves. Ben Franklin owned a family of slaves.
The truth is, almost every president from Washington to Ulysses S. Grant owned slaves. The one president who didn’t was, of course, Abraham Lincoln.
James Madison owned 100, Zachery Taylor, 150, Andrew Jackson had 200. Poor Martin Van Buren only owned 1 slave.
Did you catch the irony that President Grant, the Union General fighting to free the slaves, owned 5 of them himself?
U.S. presidents, landowners, women, children, American Indians, even Black people, all owned slaves.
This is a shock, but you have to understand that the country’s economy depended on slaves. They were as important and necessary as cars are to us today.
Imagine if a person today wanted to abolish all automobiles in the country, you’d think he was crazy. So at the time, if someone wanted to do away slavery he was thought of as totally nuts. Without free labor, America would have collapsed.
Abolitionists were viewed as eccentric. John Brown, the anti-slave leader, was considered a dangerous radical because he wanted to free black people.
So now you understand their world. For instance, according to UC Berkeley history professor Stephanie Rogers, many women owned slaves. Between 1850 and 1860 white women made up 40 percent of slave owners. Even children owned them. It was a common practice to give a slave to a child as a birthday present.
American Indians owned them. Many free Black men owned slaves.
When slaves were freed they turned around and bought slaves! There is a true story about a woman Black slave owner whose husband was her slave, literally. One day they got in a fight and out of spite she sold him to her neighbors. When she cooled down she went to buy him back but they wouldn’t sell him to her.
As soon as Christopher Columbus landed he started enslaving the native people. He began the international slave trade. Should we make Italians pay? Christians in the Bible enslaved people, should the church pay reparations?
Slavery was a horrible thing. African Americans should get some kind of payment but, as you can see, they don’t know where to send the bill?
Dennis Gregory writes a bi-monthly column for West Hawaii Today and welcomes your comments at makewavess@yahoo.com.