I learned that today was Juneteenth the annual commemoration of the end of African slavery in American in 1865. African slavery was abolished in the British West Indies on August 28, 1833, thirty years before the USA.
@khurtwilliams It is to Britian's credit that they did that. Slavery is such an evil thing and corrupts everyone involved in it. The US had to fight a terrible war to end it.
@bradenslen Europeans abolished slavery or the slave trade almost 80 years before the USA. Even Denmark and Norway banned slavery sixty years before the United States. But even after 1833, “... across the Deep South, African-American men and women were falsely arrested and convicted of crimes, then “leased” to coal and iron mines, brick factories, plantations, and other dangerous workplaces.”: www.freetheslaves.net/about-sla...
@khurtwilliams I did not know that. I know "Jim Crow" voting laws, racism, horrible discrimination and abuse continued after the US Civil War. It's still here.
@khurtwilliams Living near Washington DC, which has it's own similar holiday, Emancipation Day, it's always striking to me when Juneteenth comes around to think about how long it took from the Emancipation Proclimation to the actual end to slavery in the US.
@khurtwilliams And of course your additional comment, about the end of slavery coming decades earlier in the British West Indies, also reminds me how far behind the US was (and arguably still is) on these kinds of issues. I suppose in a practical sense even after the official end of slavery it continued for a long time through lots of loopholes, like prison labor and whatnot.
@bradenslen Unfortuately. Social netowrks ensure we know that it never left and we can no longer stick our heads in the sand.
@DrOct Unfortunately slavery still exists in the USA. We just use a new euphamism for it - human trafficking. It's sort of like using the term "friendly fire" or "involuntary collateral attrition".
@khurtwilliams True. I had thought we had turned a corner when Barak Obama was elected, but it just revealed the deep racism lurking just below the surface.
@khurtwilliams The end of the Civil War in June ended slavery in the south. However it took The Thirteen Admendment which did not take effect until Dec 6, 1865 to free the last 40,000 slaves in Kentucky and Delware
@khurtwilliams @bradenslen @DrOct @klandwehr
This thread has inspired me to write an article that I've just now posted. I would like you all to read it and I hope you will find it interesting. Perhaps post any comments you want to make as a reply to my new posting, just to keep such comments together with that posting, rather than as a continuation of this long thread. Thanks in advance. Ron
@klandwehr Interesting story. Your link didn't work, but I found it easily with a search. It's been a much more rocky road here in the US than some historians would have us believe. Have you read anything about Sundown Towns?
@khurtwilliams, @bradenslen, @Droct @Ron I saw this article The last Confederate Troop to Surrender in the Civil War were Native American-here's how they ended up fighting for the Southabout the last Confedrate command to surrender and I thought it was interesting on so many different levels
@klandwehr There are so many strange ironies in the US Civil War, right at the end, the Confederacy started arming slaves to fight for them and other things. In their desperation they were, perversely, tearing apart the very things and institutions they professed to be fighting for.