The Last Slave Freed in America In 1942

Many people think of slavery as something which happened long ago. It isn’t, there are enslaved people around the world now. The last slave freed in America in 1942 is the official legal definition of a chattel slave freed via acts under FDR. Roosevelt brought this in, so, as to differentiate the US from the Empire of Japan and its abhorrent acts in China during WW2. Yes, I know that most people think that slavery in the US ended due to the Civil War in 1865, but this is not really true.

Slavery In America Did Not End With The Civil War

Abraham Lincoln was murdered by a Southern assassin John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln’s vice president was a Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson. Johnson undermined much of what Lincoln established via reparation legislation for freed slaves.

“Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.  However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.”

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Thus, slavery moved into the hands of the Southern state governments and into their penal servitude systems. 800, 000 Black former slaves were caught up in this way to feed the Southern economies. 4 million slaves in the South were freed, but what did that freedom really look like? Unlike in former slave times, these Black men were no longer valued as chattels worth hundreds of dollars, now they were valued far less as criminals and were treated appallingly, often dying in quick order from being worked to death. The Ku Klux Klan formed around this period after the Civil War and they would terrorise freed Black individuals and families. Lynchings were so popular in the Southern states that they would be announced in newspapers as family entertainments and attract large crowds. Black victims would be hanged and burnt in many instances to public acclaim, as white families picnicked with their children. It is difficult to grasp how vile these white Americans were and are. This manipulation of the judicial and political systems has continued largely unabated to this present day in some form or another.

The US federal government has at various times grappled with theses Southern states to lessen their overt racism and exploitation of Black people.

Black American Slaves Freed & Then Demonised As Criminals

Around the turn of the twentieth century is when the media campaigns to paint Black freed slaves as immoral and criminal kicked off in America. The Black Codes, which made almost all behaviour criminal for Blacks in the South would provide statistical evidence for this. Thus, the South had lost the actual Civil War fought over slavery but in the post war years would win the PR battle. Southern gentlemen vs uncouth criminal Blacks would become the meme of the post war period. This would carry on into the War On Drugs in the latter half of the 20C, where African Americans would be characterised in the media as drug pushing and addicted dangerous criminals.

War On Drugs Depicted African Americans As Gangsters & Drug Addicts

Yes, there are criminal African American individuals, as there are whites’ of the same ilk. However, if you wilfully suppress sections of society economically over generations what do you expect is going to happen. If you treat people like shit, then, it is unlikely they are going to thank you for it. African Americans, as a group identity, have exhibited an amazingly indomitable spirit over the centuries. They have triumphed against the odds and the battle is not over yet. The descendants of these abhorrent Southern ‘gentlemen’ are still at it in their overt and covert wars against Black Americans. This is the trouble with families and traditions, where you get generations hogging the trough. Power has been in the hands of these awful Americans for way too long. Gerrymanders and anti-voting laws are still rife in the South today. Indeed, this is why, via the presidential college system, you can get someone like Donald J Trump winning the 2016 election despite losing the overall vote to Hillary Clinton. American democracy is not truly representative in its current guise.

Joe Biden was born in 1942, which was the year that the last official slave was freed in the United States of America. Black men in America were supposed to get the vote in 1870. In reality, due to the litany of poll taxes, literacy laws and other vile misuses of power by the states it wasn’t until 1965 that many African Americans could get the vote. That is only some 50+ years ago and it takes a long time for the effects of change to manifest in the lives of ordinary folk. The gross behaviours and attitudes of white America in large parts of the country are not ancient history by any means. The odds are still stacked in the favour of white folk in America, with generations of judicial and economic misuses of power marginalising African Americans. Leaders like Ron DeSantis in Florida are a despicable illustration of the extent of this ongoing racial battle in America.

81 year later and the nation is still denying its true character and making things harder for African Americans.

Slavery is one of the most vile things in human history but it was not that long ago and its influence remains. The US with cotton production in the nineteenth century took slavery to economic levels it had never seen before. Overseers were whipping black cotton pickers to achieve ever greater targets. The scars on the backs of the Blacks were layered like brutal sculptures monumentalising the demands of productivity in the new modern world economy. Economists have placed this agro-industrial manifestation at the heart of the industrial revolution and the beginnings of the modern capitalist economy. Banks all over the world were invested and dealing in slave bonds and the immense financial impact of this underpinned the huge leap that happened following the ‘cotton is king’ period. Cotton production from America drove the mills in Northern England and spurred on the technological shifts happening in factories there and everywhere. What do we call this time – the Enlightenment? If you were white it might have been enlightening. Perhaps, we are in the Victorian era, where Anglo-Saxon men with beards knew they were right about everything. They were superior to the savages they conquered and enslaved. Their Christian God vouched safe them on this score. The Southern Baptist church had its beginnings in the lead up to the Civil War because it was deeply committed to the institution of slavery.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom

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