The resistance to dealing with “Founding Fathers and Mothers” who owned, sold, and were related to people they enslaved.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’m tired.
After writing my what has become an annual commentary for Black History Month on slavery and the founding fathers who supported and practiced the institution, I’m still, two days later, having to deal with comments from people who are in denial, want to derail the discussion, or who are just downright defensive and belligerent about the topic. It was: I refuse to honor George Washington, and other 'founders' who enslaved and sold human beings.
As of noon today — there are over 1000 comments. One person, who was offended, posted close to 50 of them.
The good news — the majority of readers have been supportive and appreciative. Thank you!
I am not going to link to the comments. I will however give you a sample. These are not in the hiddens — which would be against the rules to post.
There are lots of ”but, but, but, that was a long time ago” — kind of comments. Since I grew up with a grandfather, who was born in 1875, who had older siblings and parents who had been enslaved — my perspective on enslavement differs. Not long ago for me.
How very noble of you to hold your nose around white guys who have been dead for 200 years. I hope you are refusing to take the day off and are working like it’s just another Monday.
You do realize that was 200 years ago? That those very slaveholders founded America, wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, battled the British, and created the country that has given you every opportunity in your life?...How about celebrating the concepts they arrived at and fought for and not the men living in a slave nation eons ago
Eons? Not really.
Quite a few people decided to to go the route of, “but but but ...slavery in Africa.” Sorry Charlie, no other enslavement systems in world history made race a permanent marker for perpetual enslavement. Period.
The practice of slavery in the Americas is and should be an embarrassment to most if not all of us. All of us… almost. Denise Velez is an example of a possible exception. If the ancestors of hers who were brought to the Americas had been kept in Africa, she’d probably still be a descendent of slaves.
Sigh. Even though the diary provided links to harsh punishments under Washington and Jefferson — and these links are from the actual “visitors to the plantations” websites, some folks either don’t bother to read or are willfully obtuse.
Just setting them free wasn’t — if you cared about them at all — a practical action. Both of those men, and Franklin, and James Madison, all cared a great deal. As much as they could they tried to be responsible and do what they could. Slaves weren’t whipped — GW makes the point and Jefferson and Madison both agree that it doesn’t work
The most right wing meme around, is about indentured servants — which has been soundly refuted, by historians like Liam Hogan
You seem to forget that many white people were indentured servants including my ancestors. The difference between a slave an indentured servant is minimal
Minimal? Nope.
The “relative to the times” meme, overlooks fierce white abolitionists, and slaveowners who freed all their slaves.
Slavery is awful, but you have to judge people relative to their times
Interesting to me — is that not one of the people telling me I should be writing about the ‘pressing issues’ of the day, have ever showed up in any of my posts on the pressing issues of the day.
What George Washington did is not a pressing issue.
These people are all dead. Who cares when we have more than enough to worry about that’s happening right this very minute?
So after wading back into comments, over and over again, with the help of members of this community (thank you again) I’m gonna drop some more early presidential history that people don’t want to talk about.
Just because.
Only this time it’s about founding FLOTUSes.
Starting with Martha Washington.
Martha Dandridge Custis was a wealthy widow when she married George Washington.
She had first married Daniel Parke Custis, with whom she had four children,and was widowed by the age of 25. Two of her children by Custis survived to young adulthood. She brought her vast wealth to her marriage to Washington,which enabled him to buy land to add to his personal estate. She also brought nearly 100 dower slaves for her use during her lifetime. They and their descendants reverted to her first husband's estate at her death and were inherited by his heirs.
What most biographies, and textbooks fail to mention, is that she brought her half-sister with her to Mt. Vernon. Her half-sister was her slave. They shared the same father.
It was a not very well-kept Washington family secret that Martha Washington had a sister who was black. Ann Dandridge was the daughter of Martha Washington’s father, John Dandridge, and an unknown slave of mixed African and Native American blood. After John Dandridge’s death in 1756, Ann, who was a young girl at the time, went to live with George and Martha at Mount Vernon and was kept by them as a slave.
Why didn’t Martha free her little sister from slavery? If she had felt any resentment towards her half-sister, Martha could easily have sold or otherwise gotten rid of her, yet she didn’t. She kept her around, lived with her, let her children play with her, but did not set her free. To Martha, this may have seemed like benevolence. After all, there was no place in 1759 Virginia society for a free black Dandridge female. Ann’s choices in life would have been very limited. She could perhaps have obtained a position as a servant girl to a rich family, but no white man of any substance would have married her. If she had found a black husband, he would most likely have been a slave; her dark-skinned children would have been perpetually at risk of enslavement. Martha may have felt it best to keep Ann enslaved and under her own protection.
So Ann lived at Mount Vernon with her half-sister and brother-in-law. What she did there is unknown, but she probably spent much of her time knitting or sewing in the parlor along with the mistress of the estate and the female house slaves. To visitors she would have seemed just another mixed-race servant, perhaps the mistress’s favorite. Martha’s “protective” ownership of Ann was not foolproof. Sometime around 1780, Ann Dandridge bore a son, William. It appears that Martha’s son, an unsavory character named Jacky Custis, exerted the rights of a master over a slave; he fathered a child with Ann, who was his aunt as well as his property. Ann’s son William was both grandson and nephew to Martha Washington. After giving birth to the child of Jacky Custis, Ann married a slave named Costin. The couple had four daughters, all of them nieces of Martha Washington, and all of them born slaves-for-life of the Custis estate. Yet William, her first child and Martha’s grandson, was legally regarded as free, by request of the mistress herself.
William “Billy” Costin has a very interesting history. His wife Delpy (Philadelphia) was the sister of Ona Judge (who escaped the Washingtons)
Costin married Philadelphia “Delphy” Judge, a freed slave of the Custis family. Costin moved to Washington City about 1800 and built a house on A Street South, where the couple raised seven children.
Costin worked as a porter for many years at the Bank of Washington. Around 1818, Costin helped start a school for African-American children, which Louisa, one of his daughters, eventually led. Costin helped found an African-American Methodist Church, co-founded an African-American Masonic Temple and in 1825 helped found the Columbian-Harmony Society, which provided burial benefits and a cemetery for African-Americans. William Costin died in 1842, the year Epiphany was organized. Seven years later, one of his daughters, Harriet Parke Costin, married Richard Henry Fisk at the Church of the Epiphany. The couple is marked as “colored” in the parish register. For many years, Harriet Costin Fisk was in charge of the Senate Ladies Reception Room at the U.S. Capitol.
More detail:
What happened to the child of Jack Custis and Ann Dandridge? The answer became public in, of all places, The Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia: Submitted to the Senate June, 1868, and to the House, with Additions, June 13, 1870. The federal government published that lengthy report in 1871. It contained a thorough discussion of schools in the District, including some for African-Americans started by a family named Costin.
Although this information wasn’t connected to the condition of the schools, the report stated:
This Costin family came from Mount Vernon immediately after the death of Martha Washington, in 1802. The father, William Costin, who died suddenly in his bed, May 31, 1842, was twenty-four years messenger for the Bank of Washington, in this city. His death was noticed at length in the columns of the National Intelligencer in more than one communication at the time. The obituary notice, written under the suggestions of the bank officers, who had previously passed a resolution expressing their respect for his memory, and appropriating fifty dollars towards the funeral expenses, says: “It is due to the deceased to say that his colored skin covered a benevolent heart,” . . .
John Quincy Adams also, a few days afterwards, in a discussion on the wrongs of slavery, alluded to the deceased in these words: “The late William Costin, though he was not white, was as much respected as any man in the District, and the large concourse of citizens that attended his remains to the grave, as well white as black, was an evidence of tho manner in which he was estimated by the citizens of Washington.” His portrait, taken by the direction of the bank authorities, still hangs in the directors’ room, and it may also be seen in the houses of more than one of the old and prominent residents of the city.
One of the books that came to my attention, while teaching women’s studies, was
Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves, by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island. She is also the author of Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South and Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South.
Behind every great man stands a great woman. And behind that great woman stands a slave. Or so it was in the households of the Founding Fathers from Virginia, where slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era, from Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier to the nation’s capital. American icons like Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Marie Jenkins Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually, even in the most intimate of spaces.
Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the First Ladies’ slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the First Ladies and their slaves. For elite women and their families, slaves were more than an agricultural workforce; slavery was an entire domestic way of life that reflected and reinforced their status. In many cases slaves were more constant companions to the white women of the household than were their husbands and sons, who often traveled or were at war. By looking closely at the complicated intimacy these women shared, Schwartz is able to reveal how they negotiated their roles, illuminating much about the lives of slaves themselves, as well as class, race, and gender in early America.
By detailing the prevalence and prominence of slaves in the daily lives of women who helped shape the country, Schwartz makes it clear that it is impossible to honestly tell the stories of these women while ignoring their slaves. She asks us to consider anew the embedded power of slavery in the very earliest conception of American politics, society, and everyday domestic routines.
Dolley Payne Todd Madison — though born a Quaker, whose family opposed slavery, had no problem immersing herself in it — when she married James Madison. From 1848:
In "Mrs. Madison and Her Slaves" and "Mrs. Madison's Slaves Again,"both published on March 31, 1848, the editors of the Liberator reprint two letters, signed Hampden, that first appeared in the Albany Patriot on February 19 and March 18 of that year. They accuse Dolley Madison of selling her slave Paul Jennings and attempting to sell a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl named Helen (also known as Ellen Stewart). Jennings may have been the source for the information in these letters through an association with the Patriot's Washington correspondent, William L. Chaplin.
To the Editors of the Albany Patriot.
A number of slaves have lived with Mrs. Madison since she has resided in this city. Some two or three years since, she found it necessary to raise money, and offered for sale a trust-worthy, valuable man. He had been raised and nurtured on Mr. Madison's old farm, and was his barber and dressing-man a quarter of a century. To save himself from the dreaded fate of transportation to the cotton-fields or cane-brakes of the South, he induced a distinguished Northern Senator to advance for him the purchase-money, and give him time to work it out. He is now doing this, with his own free hands. Among others, she owned another, fifty odd years of age, and her daughter of fifteen.
About three months ago, the old lady called this girl into her parlor, one day, nominally to bring her some water, but really to show her to a Georgian, as the colored people call the slave-drivers. The girl was quick on the scent, and at a glance perceived she was to be sold. Her mistress (Mrs. Madison) agreed with the purchaser to send the unprotected child to the pump (in the street, of course) at a certain hour on a day fixed upon, when he could conveniently seize her and carry her off! She embraced an early opportunity to retire behind the scenes, and has not made her appearance on the stage since. If in the Providence of God she has reached the North, I hope some good family will rejoice to befriend and protect her.
Immediately after this event, Mrs. Madison, either piqued a little at the loss of her daughter, or from her necessities, offered the mother for sale. By great good luck, she found a family in the city in want of a capable woman like herself. The price was paid to her mistress, and she is now at work with the prospect of freedom some time. The reason assigned for Mrs. Madison's conduct in these cases is, that poverty and want forced it upon her. It is said that she has not cash to go to market with from day to day. The members of her family, therefore, one after one, are disposed of to furnish her with the means of living. I have stated facts enough for once. They are given without embellishment. I hold myself responsible before God and the world for their accuracy in all material points. It is not my purpose to comment upon them. Others may do that, with such views as they entertain. My readers will think them strange, and perhaps hardly credible. Among any civilized people but our own, such statements would be quite beyond belief. We have got accustomed to strange contradictions, and therefore the facts stated by me here may not be denied.
- 'So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
- The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds.'
Washington City, Feb. 19, 1848.
Mentioned above is Paul Jennings.
The author of A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison (1865), a memoir about his service as an enslaved footman in the White House. Born at the Madison plantation, Montpelier, Jennings lived in the president's house during James Madison's two terms as president and, in his narrative, recounts his role in rescuing Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of George Washington before the arrival of British soldiers during the War of 1812. His version of these events gives Dolley Madison a less prominent role than most subsequent histories. Jennings served James Madison until the former president's death in 1836, after which Jennings lived at Dolley Madison's in Washington, D.C. For a time he worked in the White House again, for President James K. Polk.
Madison sold Jennings in 1846, and six months later, Senator Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, purchased and freed Jennings, who then went to work for Webster. In 1848, Jennings was involved in the Pearl incident, a plot to smuggle seventy-seven slaves to freedom aboard the schooner Pearl. The plot was betrayed and the slaves captured, but the authorities never learned of Jennings's involvement. In January 1863, while working for the federal Department of the Interior, Jennings published his memoir in a magazine with the help of John Brooks Russell, a clerk in his office. The Reminiscences were privately published in book form in 1865. Jennings married three times and fathered five children. He died at his home in Washington, D.C., in 1874
You can read his memoir, for free — online.
For those who would protest and say...’but these are just women of their time’ — I’ll let Abigail Adams reply:
“I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me -- to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” ABIGAIL ADAMS, letter to John Adams, Sep. 24, 1774
Thinking about those who suggested I “get over it,” I grinned when I saw this tweet from Charles Blow:
I not only won’t “get over it,” I’m going to dig more deeply into it. The naysayers have strengthened my resolve.
Dee.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The racial makeup of neighborhoods changes during the workday. See how yours changes with an interactive tool. Vox: American segregation, mapped at day and night
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Government policies forced people of color into poor, racially segregated neighborhoods, which were incredibly harmful to residents. And these neighborhoods ended up being the basis for how we form our social networks.
But if our environments matter so much, what about the place we spend most of our lives: the workplace?
This was the conversation that researchers Matthew Hall, John Iceland, and Youngmin Yi wanted to kick-start.
By tracking the dramatic shift in segregation from day to night, the researchers hoped to get a fuller understanding of how and where we encounter people of other races. Because they tracked people by neighborhood, they could get a granular understanding of what kinds of places become more diverse during the day.
They found that when white people go to work, they are around only slightly more people of color than when they’re in their home neighborhoods. But for everyone else, going to work means being exposed to many more white people — and far fewer people of their own race.
Hall shared their data with us, which we made into the interactive map above. In nearly every community in the US, these patterns — of neighborhoods being relatively diverse during the day but becoming highly segregated at night — are visible to some extent.
One way to interpret this data would be to say that our workplaces and the neighborhoods they’re in help us overcome the stubborn residential segregation patterns that we find ourselves stuck in. In other words, our workplace neighborhoods offer something of an escape from our highly segregated residential lives.
Work segregation is getting worse, and racial hierarchy still reigns supreme
But the study also cautions against reading too optimistic of a take from the data.
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An unidentified sixth-grade boy was arrested in Florida after he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy on Feb. 4, according to NBC News.
The 11-year-old student allegedly called the American flag and school leaders racist and claimed the national anthem was offensive. Bay News 9, a local news outlet, reported that the incident escalated into a confrontation between the child, school officials and officers from the Lakeland Police Department.
The boy was charged with disrupting a school function and resisting an officer without violence.
According to a statement from the school district, the substitute teacher, Ana Alvarez, asked the student, “Why if it was so bad here [you] did not go to another place to live?” The boy replied, “They brought me here,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez involved the school’s office because she did not want to continue in engaging with the 11-year-old.
When the school resource officer went to the classroom, the boy reportedly refused to listen to several commands. He also allegedly threatened to harm Alvarez and get the officer and principal fired for the matter.
The student’s mother, Dhakira Talbot, denied the allegations made against her son. She also told Bay News 9 that the teacher was wrong.
“She was wrong. She was way out of place,” Talbot said. “If she felt like there was an issue with my son not standing for the flag, she should’ve resolved that in a way different manner than she did.”
Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for Lawton Chiles, said students are not required to partake in the Pledge of Alliance. Alvarez was not aware of the policy and will no longer work at the middle school, according to the Ledger.
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In 1869, an Atlantic writer remembered darkening his face with burnt cork and acting out exaggerated caricatures of blackness with little reflection on the racial oppression and violence around him. The Atlantic: Blackface Was Never Harmless
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Long before the future leaders of America were moonwalking with shoe polish smeared on their cheeks, the first blackface minstrels took to the stage in the early 19th century. Beginning in the decades leading up to the Civil War, troupes of white men, women, and children darkened their faces with burnt cork and traveled the country performing caricatures of blackness through songs, dances, and skits. These performances, arising out of Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati, and other cities along the Ohio River, became one of America’s first distinct art forms and its most popular genre of public entertainment.
From the beginning, minstrelsy attracted criticism for its racist portrayals of African Americans. Frederick Douglass decried blackface performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” In venues where black artists were often banned from performing and black audiences, if they were admitted at all, were forced to occupy segregated sections, white entertainers in blackface furthered the same paternalistic and degrading stereotypes that plantation owners and politicians advanced to justify slavery, and helped create a racist symbology that came to represent generations of prejudice. Shows featured a cast of recurring characters: the clownish slave Jim Crow; the obsequious, maternal Mammy; the hypersexualized wench Lucy Long; the arrogant dandy Zip Coon; the lazy, childish Sambo. Some of these archetypes continue to surface in the present day.
“There’s always been a resistance to it, in part because it was so demeaning,” says Lisa M. Anderson, who has studied the history of minstrelsy and other performances of race as a professor at Arizona State University. “The shows really were set up to demean blackness and black people.”
But to many white audiences and entertainers, the performances seemed innocuous, fun, even esteemable in their representation of African Americans. Early audiences were composed mainly of white working-class people and recent immigrants, for whom, Anderson says, the exaggerated characters onstage enhanced a feeling of racial superiority and belonging—and provided cheap, accessible entertainment. The shows reflected back a foolish, animalistic image of blackness that was already ingrained in the national culture; the racism was so familiar to observers that it could be lauded as artistic or progressive, or even overlooked entirely. That indulgent ignorance has followed blackface through decades of criticism and transformation, and into the present day.
Two Atlantic articles from the late 1860s provide insight into minstrelsy’s heyday in the mid-19th century.
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New York City will ban discrimination based on hairstyles, a rule meant to stop policies that penalize black people.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights issued the new regulationson Monday. Believed to be the first in the US, they give African American New Yorkers the legal right to wear their hair in afros, cornrows, locks, twists, braids, Bantu knots and other styles.
The guidelines target grooming policies maintained by some employers and schools that prohibit hairstyles such as dreadlocks. In December, across the Hudson river in New Jersey, a high school wrestler was forced to cut his hair before competing, an incident that sparked outrage.
“Bans or restrictions on natural hair or hairstyles associated with black people are often rooted in white standards of appearance and perpetuate racist stereotypes that black hairstyles are unprofessional,” the commission guidelines state.
“There is a widespread and fundamentally racist belief that black hairstyles are not suited for formal settings, and may be unhygienic, messy, disruptive, or unkempt.”
In 2016, a federal court ruled that it was legal for an Alabama company to rescind a job offer from a woman who refused to cut her dreadlocks.
The New York commission in contrast enforces far-reaching anti-discrimination rules within the city, including sanctions on businesses and landlords that persistently refuse to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.
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A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men. Slate: Equal-Opportunity Evil
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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers opens her stunning new book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, with a story about Martha Gibbs, a sawmill owner in Mississippi who also owned “a significant number of slaves.” One of them, Litt Young, described her owner as a woman in total control of her financial affairs, including the management of her enslaved workers. Young remembered, for example, how Gibbs’ second husband tried and failed to convince her to stop ordering her overseer to administer “brutal whippings.” After the Confederates surrendered, Gibbs “refugeed:” She took some of her enslaved workers to Texas, at gunpoint, and forced them to labor for her until 1866—“one year after these legally free but still enslaved people ‘made her first crop.’ ” Then, writes Jones-Rogers, “Martha Gibbs finally let them go.”
Early books about female slaveholders, written in the 1970s and 1980s by historians of women’s experiences, tended to be about elite, wealthy Southerners who fell into that role when their husbands or fathers died. The women in these histories were depicted as having had a conflicted relationship with their role as slaveowner, and some historians posited that these plantation mistresses themselves were restricted and oppressed by the patriarchal society of the Old South. In this telling of history, the women who owned people didn’t directly involve themselves with the day-to-day management of enslaved workers, and certainly not with the selling and buying of the enslaved.
It’s these assumptions about female slaveowning as a kind of passive, half-hearted practice that Jones-Rogers is challenging with her book—and with them, the idea that white women were innocent bystanders to the white male practice of enslavement. Her goal, she told me in a phone interview, was to paint a picture of the way white women economically benefited from their own slaveholding. For some women, slaveholding helped them attract husbands. Within their marriages, a woman like Martha Gibbs who owned enslaved people might retain a measure of independence by maintaining control of “her” slaves. And if those husbands died, or turned out to be failures at business, their wives figured out ways to retain the human property that would ensure their continued material security.
Jones-Rogers began this shift in historical perspective by looking away from letters and diaries of elite white women that formed the documentary basis for earlier histories, and toward the testimony of the people who had been in bondage. Looking at life narratives of formerly enslaved people recorded during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration (Litt Young’s was one of these), Jones-Rogers found multiple instances of these witnesses naming the women who owned them—not simply as “mistresses” but as owners, with everything that entailed. She found stories of times when these women “reinforced their property claims in conversations with or in the presence of their slaves” and “challenged their male kinfolks’ alleged power to control their property, human or otherwise.”
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Haitian President Jovenel Moise has rejected calls for his resignation and promised unspecified economic measures after more than a week of deadly anti-government protests.
His administration rocked by soaring inflation and accusations of corruption, Moise said he will not allow the country to fall into the hands of criminals and urged dialogue to end a recent wave of violent demonstrations in the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Moise's stance came as the United States issued a "Do not travel" advisory to the island and Canada made plans to evacuate more than 100 of its citizens from a resort in Haiti.
For more than a week, protesters have set cars ablaze and clashed with police amid gasoline shortages, reports of widespread looting, and demands that Moise and Prime Minister Jean-Henry Céant step down.
Several people have been killed, according to local media reports. CNN hasn't been able to independently confirm the number of protest-related fatalities.
Haiti has seen bursts of deadly demonstrations since July, following a government-imposed fuel hike, prompting the US Embassy to warn citizens to stay off the streets. At the time, Céant replaced former Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant, who resigned in mid-July before an expected parliamentary vote of no confidence.
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Apathetic voters are planning to boycott this weekend’s election—and may inadvertently boost the country’s most fervent separatists. Foreign Policy: Slouching Toward Secession in Nigeria
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In the shop, an argument ensued: to vote or not to vote. Udeze thought voting was a terrible idea. Ikenna, his fellow shopkeeper in the area, argued against the IPOB’s proposed boycott: Given the IPOB’s separatist agenda, to participate would be treasonous.
Emmanuel Okezie, Udeze’s shop assistant, was certain he would not be voting. It was a decision he made with his mother and siblings after the oil companies in his home village of Owaza in Abia state polluted the land, making it impossible for local farmers to farm and fish. Okezie and a few other people in the community protested—but within a few weeks, the community was fortified with a military presence, presumably dispatched by the Nigerian government, effectively stifling any future protests.
As Nigeria’s general election approaches this weekend, Okezie is one of many registered voters based in the former independent state of Biafra who are choosing not to participate. But most don’t support the separatism advocated by Okafor-Mefor. They are simply tired of the Nigerian government’s negative impact on their lives. Biafran separatism, however, stands most to benefit.
Owaza, Okezie’s village, is home to more than 100 oil wells, with at least 80 controlled by the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, but has only one public medical center. Members of the community have bemoaned a lack of social amenities despite the huge amounts of money that have been made from the natural resources there. “My mother might have cancer now because of the oil companies, but the government has not done anything about providing health care or holding the oil companies accountable,” Okezie said.
IPOB has long used Radio Biafra to spread precisely this message: that Nigeria’s central government has chronically neglected the region. Of course, the party isn’t interested in persuading the government to provide better services. Its goal is to secede from Nigeria to become an independent country, and it believes that a general boycott in the region will force the Nigerian government to give in to its independence demands.
The idea of an independent Biafra dates back to 1967. That year, the premier of Nigeria’s Eastern region, Odumegwu Ojukwu, announced an independent republic. What followed was a 30-month war that led to the deaths of more than 2 million Nigerians and the reabsorption of the region back into Nigeria.
Dreams of a separate Biafran state had largely disappeared in the intervening years. But the region’s grievances never entirely went away. Many residents of eastern Nigeria still feel marginalized from the rest of the country—not least because to quell subsequent talk of secession, the Nigerian Army stationed a permanent presence in the region, which has led to occasional human rights abuses. The central government has only grudgingly invested in the region.
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Brazilian activists have taken to the streets in five major cities after the death of a young black man who was restrained by a supermarket security guard.
Campaigners said the protests are feeding a nascent Black Lives Matter movement in Brazil, where nearly three-quarters of all homicide victims are black.
Outside the Extra supermarket in the upscale Barra da Tijuca neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, demonstrators chanted the name of Pedro Gonzaga, who died of a heart attack in hospital on Thursday after being immobilised with a “sleep hold” by a security guard. Protests were also reported in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza. Another took place on Saturday in Recife.
Lyz Ramos, 19, a student painting placards in Rio, said: “We have to take a position against this to stay alive. It’s a basic issue.”
Gonzaga, 19, was immobilised by Davi Amâncio. Video footage showing the prone Gonzaga underneath Amâncio while onlookers pleaded for him to be let go generated widespread anger. One woman can be heard saying: “He is suffocating him.” He was taken unconscious to hospital, where he died.
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