Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories. The academic field of history is dominated by white men

handicapped by the inability to see whiteness’s impact on America’s biography.

it isn’t simply a counterfeit version of history, it is a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.

All great music acts must wear jumpsuits. It is a mandate passed down from the Godfather of Soul’s backing band, the J.B.’s. Since then, if you want to be great, there must be a point in your career where you must dress like a NASCAR crew that fell in a vat of sequins and rhinestones.

Angela arrived in America as a passenger of Daniel Elfrith’s thieving, enslaving, kidnapping, village-burning, self-contained criminal enterprise, the Treasurer. It was the ship Argall used to kidnap Matoaka and burn native settlements up and down the coast. It was a stealer of souls that was fueled by greed and theft. And it is as American a thing that ever existed.

For instance, have you ever wondered why each item in the Bill of Rights is an amendment instead of a part of the Constitution? It’s because Madison didn’t think the Constitution needed one since, according to Locke and the rest of the Enlightenment faves, the important rights were universal and God-given. But Virginia refused to ratify the Constitution without one. Patrick Henry, one of the largest human traffickers in Virginia, had already helped craft his state’s Declaration of Rights, worried that the new federal army could arm Black soldiers or—even worse—free their slaves!

“In this state there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states,” said Henry during Virginia’s ratification debate. “May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?”5 Madison borrowed, conceded, and quelled fears of Black retaliation by adapting George Mason’s writings in the Virginia constitution to form the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

When it is taught in schools, the American Revolution is described as having been born out of the white man’s indignation about how he was being governed. And sure, all that stuff about tea and taxes definitely riled up the colonists. But while that was all going down, a rumor was spreading through the colonies that really provoked their anger: allegedly,

England was going to outlaw the practice of owning human beings.

By the time the French took control of one-third of the island and established the colony of French Saint-Domingue (or Santo Domingo), there were zero natives, twenty-five thousand Europeans, twenty-two thousand free coloreds, and seven hundred thousand African slaves,

This seems like it won’t last. The math seems very good for the kidnapped, forced laborers.

a group of enslaved Africans met in the Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Forest) to hold a secret ceremony. Historical accounts would later call this meeting a “voudou ceremony” and refer to the attendees as “slaves.” Had these freedom-seeking Africans been white, we would call them “founding fathers” who were planning a revolution.

A week later, eighteen hundred slave concentration camps would be burned to the ground, and more than a thousand plantation owners would suffer the same fate as that unfortunate hog. The rebels in Haiti were not concerned with taxation, representation, or tea. They were fighting for the universal freedom that all men desire: liberty, straight up.

Napoleon was starting wars all over Europe, so Britain employed a defensive tactic that would later become a foundational principle of all hip-hop battles: “If we’re beefing, then nothing is off-limits!”*

Today, Haiti’s legacy is often tarnished, known more for its tragedies than its rich legacy. But the reason for its impoverishment today is that America and France instituted what is possibly the most racist economic foreign policy that ever existed, and upheld it for over two centuries. They did this while other European powers watched quietly.

what two of the most powerful countries in the world did to Haiti requires a suspension of disbelief, because it is so absurd that it sounds like fiction. Two decades after Haiti gained its independence in 1804, France demanded that Haiti compensate former French slaveowners for the value of all those slaves who set themselves free. Yes, France essentially demanded reverse slave reparations. In 1825, France sent warships to Haiti and demanded 150 million francs. Not only did the United States agree with this, but it backed up France’s demands for the debt on the international stage, imploring European countries to ignore Haiti’s existence until it paid this money. One could argue that this debt, which thrust the new nation into poverty and took 122 years to pay,

Kidnappers forced their victims to pay them for their freedom and the United States supported it! And it took 122 years to pay for themselves? At the point they were finished paying, the enslaved people they were supposedly reimbursing the French for were long dead and so were the kidnappers who had taken them. It was just extortion. In what other war were the winners forced to pay the losers?

Whenever Haiti couldn’t make its payments to the French, the country would take out loans, sending it deeper into poverty, because the loans could only come from French banks.

As late as 1915, nearly 80 percent of Haiti’s government revenue was paid to service its debt. And by the time it made the last payment in 1947—eighty-four years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 143 years after dismantling the shackles of its own slaveowners—Haiti was still in debt. Those payments didn’t include the money that was taken by U.S. Marines when they marched into the Haitian National Bank, took $500,000, and deposited it at 111 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., for “safekeeping” during a period of unrest in 1919.

Neither did the 40 percent of Haiti’s national income that it was forced to pay to the United States and France when the U.S. occupiers wrote the demand into Haiti’s 1918 constitution.

By 1947, Haiti wasn’t even paying France: it was paying an American bank that had bought all of Haiti’s debt from French banks. Located at the same 111 Wall Street, the City Bank of New York was founded in 1812 and expanded by Moses Taylor, who made his fortune by illegally importing slaves to Cuban sugar plantations after slavery was outlawed

So when Haiti made its last payment for dismantling its slavery state, it was actually paying an American bank that was built on slave trafficking—a bank owned by a man who disregarded international law to build the City Bank of New York, an entity that built its power via the institution of slavery, with money part...

Haiti is poor because it was forced to pay 90 million francs, the contemporary

equivalent of $21 billion as of 2020, including billions in interest to the City Bank of New York. You probably know the bank by its current name: Citibank.

With these acts signed into law, the Emancipation Proclamation—enshrined in white history as the document that kick-started the freeing of slaves—was essentially a formality, a performative gesture by a president who didn’t have the authority, intentions, or backbone to free the people he had deemed inferior.

This is America—a floor slick with blood. But that is not who we are.

Pleasant earned the nickname “the Harriet Tubman of California,” funding the Underground Railroad and helping self-emancipated slaves to resettle,6 hiring them at her numerous restaurants, boardinghouses, and horse stables. She was known to be a “one woman social agency” in California, providing relief for dozens of Black families.

Perhaps the most common proposal to create some form of economic security for ex-slaves was the freedmen’s pension. Within the African American community, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (MRB&PA) quickly became the most popular grassroots effort to push the idea of compensation for former slaves.

Between 1890 and 1903, six bills were introduced in Congress offering a lump sum, followed by monthly payments, to Black Americans who had outlasted slavery. But after Southern Democrats regained reputation in the federal legislature, anything that offered economic or political support for Black America was dead on arrival. After all, if they couldn’t pass a law that made lynching illegal, reparations were a long shot. But

In 1915, the association filed a class-action lawsuit, Johnson v. McAdoo, in federal court for over $68 million, demanding the return of cotton taxes collected by the Treasury Department between 1862 and 1868. According to the suit, the money was due to former slaves and their ancestors for their unpaid labor. The suit eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which claimed that the Treasury Department had governmental immunity because slavery was constitutional.

If one were to make a list of the most famous figures of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the rest of the names that white people know, one humbly modest statement encapsulates the life of Ella Josephine Baker: She is more important than all those guys.

Baker was instrumental in founding every major civil rights organization during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957, after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, she moved to Atlanta to help form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was Baker’s management and ideas that formed the framework of the organization’s efforts. However, the group’s patriarchal leader, Martin Luther King Jr., blocked her from public leadership roles.

Baker stood up and gave a speech titled “Bigger Than a Hamburger.” She fired the students up by telling them to forget what had just been said, and instead to move toward more radical action, explaining that a youth-oriented, grassroots movement that was more democratic and leaderless could achieve more than just a few integrated lunch counters.

She rejected the messianic traditional male leadership roles and

The results of her actions influenced organizers throughout the country, recasting the disparate fights for equality as one unified civil rights movement.

The landmark Supreme Court case of Bruce George Washington Carver Boynton v. Virginia overturned segregation on interstate commerce, changing the course of history forever. Shortly thereafter, young activists Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and others gained prominence on the Freedom Rides—a joint effort by CORE and the SNCC to enforce Boynton v. Virginia.

The New Negro movement preached armed self-defense and became contagious among the Black World War I veterans who had seen the world and now refused to subject themselves to the racial terrorism that plagued post–Civil War America.

The Black parents were disproportionately paying for white students’ beautiful new schools and the comfort in which they engaged in learning.

Even though South Carolina was 40 percent Black in 1948, statewide, Black schools were valued at $12.9 million while white schools were worth $68.4 million.

South Carolina taxpayers paid for seven whites-only colleges. South Carolina taxpayers paid for zero Black colleges. (South Carolina State College was a land-grant college, which meant it was founded with federal money after the Civil War.) The majority of South Carolina taxpayers were Black. (According to U.S. census workers, most of the school-age population, taxpayers, and wage earners in the Palmetto State were Black.) Every Black person in South Carolina was being robbed, and every white person in South Carolina benefited from it.

Reparations. Period.

When it came to college loans, even colleges in the North rejected Black veterans, and because historically Black colleges and universities were packed to the gills with students who couldn’t attend white schools in the South, in 1946, only 20 percent of the former Black soldiers who applied for education benefits had enrolled in college,

where the population is majority Black are valued, on average, $48,000 less than homes in white neighborhoods. The result is a $156 billion cumulative loss in Black-owned property values, even when the white neighborhoods have the same amenities, crime rates, and resources as the Black neighborhoods.5

Residents who live in formerly redlined areas pay higher interest rates and are denied mortgages more often than whites with the same credit and income,

Justice demands restitution, and until there are reparations, there can be no justice. Until there are reparations, anyone who pledges their allegiance to the flag that stands for a country with “liberty and justice for all” is a liar and a thief.

Black borrowers with the same income and credit history are denied mortgage loans at higher rates. Homes in white neighborhoods are valued, on average, about $48,000 more than homes in majority-Black neighborhoods. Because banks don’t have an unlimited supply of capital, white homeowners benefit from this discrimination.

Black Americans pay higher water bills but white Americans are more likely to have clean tap water. According to a national data analysis, “race is the strongest predictor of water and sanitation access.”17 Even when Black neighborhoods have clean water, the Black residents are essentially subsidizing water for white neighborhoods.18

If one were to create a sentient being out of America’s past and present, it would look like Donald Trump.