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Guest Editorial By Avon S. Bellamy

(BALTIMORE - December 28, 2009) - I am writing this article as a brief outline of what would require a lengthy book. Keep that in mind as you read it. I am pointing a penlight on a subject that needs, at the very least, a floodlight. I leave that to those who are better qualified. Let the journey begin.

Many African Americans shudder at the thought of slavery. We are so minimized by the thought of what happened to us in that clearly demonic institution that we miss the good that came from it.

People have screamed with outrage whenever I have introduced the thought that there was anything good that came from slavery. However, understanding that good is exactly what we need to see and realize in order to channel the strength left us by our ancestors. They met the beast head on and prevailed; gained their freedom without an army or navy and without lifting a gun (I am aware that a number of Blacks, slave and free, joined the northern army). They harnessed the power of the religion the White man gave them, and the Bible he used to justify his demonic actions, to call out to the God of All Life for justice and freedom believing that they and their children would walk free on the Earth, and they received what they believed (It was in fact the African way that if your people were defeated in combat by another tribe, that your people took on the worship of their gods because their victory over you demonstrated that their gods were stronger).

But I digress. Let me lay the foundation for my premise that there was good that came out of slavery.

Because tribalism existed on the African Continent, it became possible for white-skinned  outsiders to do business with certain tribal chiefs. Tribalism led to tribal conflicts and wars that led to the victorious tribe enslaving the vanquished tribe. The enslaved members of the vanquished tribe represented wealth for the chief of the tribe that won and they could be dealt with as he pleased. The chiefs traded their slaves for goods manufactured in Europe: cloth, spirits, tobacco, beads, cowrie shells, metal goods, and guns. The guns were used to help expand their tribal power and obtain more slaves. The major go-between in this endeavor were devotees to Islam; Muslims from North Africa.

Slaves were very expensive and of great value to slave-owners who needed them to work their land to produce profit from their agricultural efforts. In 1860, America held 4 Million Africans as slaves at a total value of $4 Billion. That averages to about $364 per slave in a time when a years rent was $130 and the average meal was between 10 – 20 cents. To give you further evidence of the value of a slave, slave-owners offered $40,000 for the capture of Harriet Tubman who freed over 300 slaves. In today’s dollars her reward for capture would be nearly $4.5 Million.

The pictures they show of African men and women chained are not pictures of slaves; they are pictures of a free people who had a unique language, culture and history that shaped them. They had a religion and gods to whom they prayed and made sacrifice. They had traditions, something to look back to, to anchor themselves with, that allowed 

them to resist their captor’s culture and traditions. Many of them died before reaching these shores; some fighting their captors, others because of the diseases they encountered in the holds of the slave ships that carried them through “The Middle Passage” and brought them to these shores.

The slave trade did not make slaves. What systematically happened to the African once he landed on or near American soil is what made him a slave. He was made a slave when he lost his language, culture, religion, gods and history; when his tongue was cut out or he was killed for speaking in his native language or embracing any part of his culture. His children were killed if they spoke anything that wasn’t English. In this manner, he was

separated from everything that made him a free man and he was left to be whatever his captors decreed - both babies and slaves know only what someone tells them about themselves.

In Alex Halley’s depiction of his own family history in the book, “Roots”, this point is well demonstrated (for those readers who have not read the book or seen the television series, please do so). His ancestor Kunta Kinte was beaten until he called himself Toby. And later, he had half his foot cut off to stop him from trying to escape. Slaves don’t try to escape because they have knowledge of nothing other than their current situation. When they possessed knowledge of another reality – fleeing north to freedom for example - they used it. A slave is not chained; a free man, if only free in his thinking, has to be.

So what good can come from a situation in which men have seen their wives and children sold away?  Where those who resisted the de-humanizing aspects of the slave system were hung or literally torn apart by horses; seen their wives and daughters raped while they stood by. What can redeem such a man? Nothing except to overcome it all, as we did.

The reader will doubtless ask, how?

It started in the belly of the slave ships. We had to forego tribalism and become one people. We could not afford to be at war with each other before so great an enemy. The genetics of the survivors of the horrific journey were blended as we mated for our own purposes as well as for those of a morally bankrupt economic system. The strength in the bodies and minds and character of the survivors became the underpinning for a new people, one birthed in a baptism by fire. We became genetically superior. We became faster, stronger, mentally fitter. Hitler tried to create a super race using the science of genetics to manufacture a superior being for his Third Reich. God created one in the holds of slave ships.

That baptism gave rise to people of high intelligence and incredible inward strength. We created new ways of doing things in agriculture, locomotion, industry, communications, in every field of science. Inventions that came by way of African American minds fueled the industrial revolution. Jan Matzelinger created the shoe lasting machine and made shoes affordable for everyone; Elijah McCoy invented the self-lubricating device that allowed machines to work around the clock; Lewis Lattimer invented the carbon filament that made Edison’s light-bulb practical; Garrett Morgan invented the gasmask as well as the redlight; Granville T. Woods invented the air-brake, the electrified third rail for subway trains, and a telegraph system that allowed communications between moving trains; Andrew Beard invented the automatic coupling device for trains; Alexander Miles  invented the elevator; Frederick Jones invented the refrigeration system that allows trucks and trains to transport perishable goods without spoilage. The mailbox, potato chip,  folding chair, lawn mower, the chip that makes the cell-phone operational have all come from African American minds. Consider what the world would be like without these inventions - to get a full view of what African American males and females have given to America and the world, Google African American inventors and inventions. You will be in for a pleasant surprise.

Scientific accomplishments were not the only things that came out of slavery. The idea of re-establishing family and its importance presented a clarion call for former slave men. When slavery ended, ex-slave men searched diligently to find the wives and children who had been sold away. When they found them they strengthened family bonds. They understood that being free meant being responsible for the women and children in their lives. To our modern shame, the strongest the African American family has ever been was during and following slavery. And since strong families laid the foundation for a community, strong African American communities emerged.

One of the strongest of these African American communities was established in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma - Greenwood. It was referred to as the Black Wall Street. It housed an affluent Black population that, separated from the racist restrictions of White folks, owned its own bank, two airports, several individually own airplanes, jewelry stores, its own transportation company, hospitals, grocery stores, movie theatres, law offices and restaurants. The dollar circulated from 36-1000 times before it entered into White hands. White people led by the KKK destroyed it in 12 hours because a Black man was accused of assaulting a White woman – a crime for which there was no proof. It is the only time an American city was bombed from the air by U.S. military forces. The White folks were envious of the African Americans success. The date was June 1, 1921. It is no mystery why this information was hidden from us. Black Wall Street gave a clear demonstration of what we could accomplish as a people unshackled from White racism.

These people were not slaves and White people got angry because they were not. With the chains off their bodies and their minds, these men-led communities performed exploits in an environment hostile to their every move. While here in 2009, with every educational opportunity and no chains, many of our men shun work to participate in the destructive drug trade – a modern form of slavery for which they blame the enabling hand of the White man while they do all the dirty work themselves. Many of them denounce educational achievement as, “wanting to be White,” refuse to attend school and then complain when no one will hire them. They impregnate women and leave them to raise the babies by themselves, and then write rap songs that call them bitches and hoes. Often times, when trying to tell them about their real history one is rebuffed with, “I don’t want to hear none of that Black shit.”

So here we are with a dilemma. Where are the free men - the ones that build communities with their brain and brawn; the ones that built Black Wall Street in hostile territory 88 years ago?

I fear we have entered into a more insidious form of slavery that has as its principle a semi-literate, angry, fatherless male, with his pants slung off his butt like a jail-house sissy, armed with a gun he did not manufacture, who shuns mainstream education and economic excellence as “wanting to be white”, sells drugs as an economic enterprise and vents his murderous “Daddy Rage” on a community he should be an architect in building. In Baltimore alone this “slave” has cost Billions and taken the lives of over 1200 people in a 5-year period; and all within the confines of our African American community. When we measure this male against the men who built Black Wall Street, the ones we called slave using a standard given to us by our former White masters, who appears to be the real slave? I leave the answer to the reader.

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