Introduction
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) is an umbrella body for some 20 groups representing about 5000 black Americans. Its main goal is ‘to seek reparations for the 246 years of unpaid labour that our ancestors gave this country.’

In 1993, the organization succeeding in introducing a bill in the House of Representatives pointing out that 4 million Africans and their descendants were enslaved and that the US government legalised slavery from 1789 to 1865. The bill asked the US government
“to acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the United States between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent racial and economic discrimination against African Americans and the impact of these forces on today’s African Americans...” The bill did not get far.

The first slaves & the slave-holding Founding Fathers
It was in 1619 that a Spanish ship carried a cargo of Africans to Jamestown, the post set up by English colonists. They were the first slaves to arrive in the region that was to become the United States.
The US was born in 1776. The Founding Fathers, all of British stock, were rich landowners and merchants. All were slaveholders. Eight of the first nine US Presidents kept slaves. In 1790, 500,000 slaves provided labour and the South was able to produce 1000 tons of cotton each year. BY 1860 the slave population was 4 million and the cotton output had risen to a million tons. The plantation system consisted of the cotton lands in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, tobacco growing in Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky and rice in South Carolina.

Some Famous Slaves
[Pic shows slave being whipped as master watches] Slave revolts were not as frequent or as large as in the Caribbean. A major revolt took place in 1811. 400 to 500 slaves revolted at the plantation of an army official. Armed with cane knives, axes and clubs, they wounded the owner, killed his son and began marching from plantation to plantation, their numbers growing. But the US army soon intercepted them, killing 69 on the spot while 16 were tried and shot by a firing squad.

Some slave freedom fighters became famous.
Nat Turner gathered about 70 slaves in the summer of 1831 and went on a rampage from plantation to plantation, murdering at least 55 men, women and children. They were eventually captured as they ran out of ammunition. Turner and several of his supporters were hanged.

Harriet Tubman, born a slave in 1830, escaped to freedom on her own and then assisted more than 300 others to freedom. She was disguised and always carried a pistol. She said: “No man should take me alive... I have a right to liberty or death”

David Walker was the son of a slave but born free. From the South he moved to Boston in the North and joined other free blacks in calling for the abolition of slavery. His pamphlet, Walker’s Appeal, became widely known and infuriated the slaveholders in the South. In it he denounced American slavery as the worst in history. “... Show me a page of history on which a verse can be found which maintains that the Egyptians heaped insult upon the children of Israel by telling them that they were not of the human family... Every dog must have his day. The American’s is coming to an end.” Walker was found dead near his shop’s door in 1830.

Frederick Douglass, born a slave in 1817, worked as a labourer in Baltimore. He taught himself to read and write and at 21, he fled to the North where he became a writer, lecturer and editor. In his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote: “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves and others masters? ... It was not color but crime, not God but man... what man can make, man can unmake...”

On 5 July 1852, Douglass delivered a stirring address at Rochester, New York about the Fourth of July:
“Fellow Citizens, my subject is American slavery. I do not hesitate to declare that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July... There are 72 crimes in the State of Virginia which if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant) subject him to death as punishment; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the same punishment.
Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe penalties, the teaching of a slave to read or write.
What is your Fourth of July to the American slave? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice extended to us?  I answer: a day that reveals to him the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; ... your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up your crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages...
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”

In 1857, Douglass said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress... Power concedes nothing without a demand...”. In the same year when a slave, Dred Scott, sought to sue for his freedom, the Supreme Court itself ruled that slaves were property and not persons and therefore could not sue.

Abolition of Slavery
It was Abraham Lincoln who argued lucidly against slavery but as a member of the new Republican Party, he was also careful not to alienate the business elites of the North. In 1849, he proposed that slavery be abolished in the District of Columbia which was not a state but directly under Congress - provided the people of the District, most of them white, would agree. They opposed the idea. Though Lincoln opposed slavery, he did not regard blacks as equals and he constantly toyed with the idea of freeing the slaves and packing them off to Africa. He had declared in 1858:
I am not, not ever have been, in favor of bringing the social and political equality of the white and black races; I am not in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people...I am in favour of assigning the superior position to the white race.”

Around this time, there was a growing clash between the interests of northern and southern elites. The North wanted a free market expansion including free labour. The South wanted to hold on to their slaves. When Lincoln was elected President in 1860, seven southern states seceded from the union and later another four states. The Confederacy was formed and the Civil War had begun.

For the abolitionists, the war provided the opportunity to step up their campaign. Petitions for emancipation poured into Congress in 1861-62. In September 1862, Lincoln issued his first Emancipation Proclamation, threatening to free the slaves of those states that continued to fight against the Union. Following the collection of 400,000 signatures in 1864, the Senate declared the end of slavery and in January 1865, the House of Representatives followed. Laws were passed (or amended) in the 1860s and 1870s making it a crime to deprive Negroes of their rights to vote, enter contracts or buy property. In 1875, a Civil Rights Act outlawed the exclusion of Negroes from hotels, theatres, railroads, etc.

Blacks began to be politically active, formed their own churches, tried to educate their children and generally became more assertive. In 1869, black voting led to two Negro becoming members of the US Senate and some 20 became Congressmen. However, 24 northern states refused to grant the vote to blacks.

Gains rolled back
But discontent was simmering in the South. They resented the loss of their slave wealth and the growing prosperity of the north. The whites organised groups like the Ku Klux Klan to terrorise the blacks. They went on a rampage of lynchings, beatings, burning and rape.

The capitalists of the North wanted to exploit the resources of the South such as coal and labour for expanding the rail network. A compromise was worked out in 1877 promising the South a share of the economic benefits and effectively enhancing white privileges. White violence in the 1870s towards the blacks was played down and the US government also lost its enthusiastic about Negro rights. In 1883, the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination and segregation of negroes in public places, was nullified by the Supreme Court. By 1900 all the southern states had enacted legislation enforcing discrimination.

REFERENCE
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (Longman, London 1996)