(ThyBlackMan.com) Michelle Obama gave a magnificent speech during the Democratic National Convention on July 25, as the first lady reflected on her family’s nearly eight years as residents of the White House, as its first African-American inhabitants.
“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” Mrs. Obama said in her keynote address. “I watch my daughters — two beautiful, intelligent, black young women — playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly defended the working conditions of slaves while building the White House with the following clarification during The O’Reilly Factor on Tuesday, July 26:
“Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802. However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So, Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it all? There will be a quiz.”
Well, Mr. O’Reilly, usually the giver of a quiz has a correct answer key, and I doubt the veracity of yours.
Lynching, also known as capital punishment, was a very common practice after the Civil war; this practice had already started in the slavery era. Slaves were often lynched if they committed crimes like writing a letter to a white woman (slaves were forbidden to read and write) as seen in the case of Saxe Joiner who was hung on a tree by an angry white mob and left to die because he wrote to a white
woman. He was jailed at first, but the mob thought it was too gentle a punishment for a slave who was having an affair with a white woman, and so they decided to punish him further themselves.
Slaves who escaped to the North often told stories of their sufferings in the hands of their masters. Gordon, one of the slaves who escaped, said they were beaten with sticks, chains, rawhide whips and sometimes he would even have to be bed-ridden for two months after a serious beating. The doctor who treated him had pictures of his scars as proof and it was published in the newspapers.
Before the slaves were purchased, both the male and female slaves were brought out fully naked for the buyers to inspect. They would have their bodies, including their private parts poked at by many people before they were purchased.
In 1781, a slave ship ‘Zong’ made a wrong turn and got lost and while trying to find their way back, they started running out of food and water. These slave owners decided to throw 133 slaves into the sea so that they would collect insurance on them. The slavers were actually able to collect the insurance, as nobody charged them for this wicked act.
Pregnant slaves were not left out of the suffering and punishment. Their masters would dig a hole in the ground and force them to put their bellies in the hole before they started beating them mercilessly. The masters did this to avoid causing harm to the babies since the children were also their future slaves.
Any slave that tried to escape to the North was hunted down with specially trained dogs. When these dogs and their masters caught up with the slave, they would beat the slave to the point of near death. A vacillating President Abraham Lincoln passed a decree in 1865, to stop slavery but these white southern plantation owners with the help of white legislators quickly passed laws allowing plantation owners to use black prisoners as slaves. This law allowed them to start arresting thousands of black people and they used them as slaves on their respective plantations. This enclave of ‘lawmen” has morphed into what we know today as police.
Any captured slave that was too sick to make the journey across the sea was thrown into the sea, sometimes along with the other slaves he was chained to. The slavers did this to avoid passing infection to other slaves.
The females were often sexually assaulted and raped by their owners and some of them even got pregnant by their masters against their will. When the master’s wife finds out about this, she would punish the slave seriously and sometimes try to kill or sell off the children the slave had from her husband. Sometimes, the masters would gather the slaves both male and female from 13 years and above into one room and urge them to be sexually engaged. They did this to encourage reproduction to breed more slaves. The females often got raped as discovered by the Carnegie Mellon University. Slaves would sometimes get separated from their family either as a punishment or just for the slavers to make extra money. This was considered the worst thing that could happen, when a wife was separated from her husband and children from their parents and sold to different plantations.
When slavery was finally prohibited in the United States, many plantation owners had to be forced to set their slaves free. The premise gave rise to the concept of “Juneteenth.” Juneteenth is the oldest recognized celebration that marks the end of slavery in the United States. It started in Texas, but the largest celebrations in modern times are in Milwaukee and Minneapolis – showing how far the idea has traveled over the years. Juneteenth is always observed on or around June 19th; the day that slaves in Galveston, Texas learned that they had been freed by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The only problem was that the slaves in Texas finally heard about their freedom in 1865 – two and a half years after it was adopted. How is that for the Bill O’ Reilly slavery deniers club?
In conclusion, the irrationality of the discredited Confederate constitution summed it up this way: “Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” said Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens in his “Cornerstone Speech.” “This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Staff Writer; Stanley G. Buford
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