14 ms·

The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s

330 points by andrewl 8y ago

goatherders 8y ago
It is amazing to realize that in the grand scheme of things we are not far removed from this. Thanks for posting. Interesting read.
- michaelchisari 8y ago
  Around 9% of our population were grown adults when segregation ended. Our history is nearer than we prefer to admit.
  - projectileboy 8y ago
    And it continued in so many ways! When MTV first aired in the early 80s, they would not play videos by black artists.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Citation? That's not my memory.
      - projectileboy 8y ago
        There are a lot of different tellings of this story; here’s one: https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-2834657 https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-...
      - purple-again 8y ago
        Here is the relevant excerpt from the link provided by another user. "Scant" is read by me to mean 'yes there were in fact videos, just not in the proportion to what should have been" in direct response to "they would not play videos" There is no room for 'sides to the story'. It was a statement made and countered by this source. We can take issue with the source if you like, but I looked them up and didn't see anything partisan about them. When MTV debuted on Aug. 1, 1981, at least one black face on the network was a mainstay. It belonged to J.J. Jackson, the sole African American on MTV's roster of video jockeys, or VJs as they became known. Despite Jackson’s presence on MTV through 1986, the network faced allegations of racism for giving scant airtime to videos featuring people of color. MTV executives have denied that racism was at the root of the network’s “blackout,” saying that black artists received little airplay because their music didn’t fit the channel’s rock-based format. “MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel,” said Buzz Brindle, MTV’s former director of music programming, to Jet magazine in 2006. “It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel’s format that leaned toward rock at the outset.” With so few black rockers, adding African Americans to MTV’s roster proved difficult, according to the network’s co-founder Les Garland, whom Jet also interviewed. “We had nothing to pick from,” Garland explained. “Fifty percent of my time was spent in the early days of MTV convincing artists to make music videos and convincing record labels to put up money to make those videos…”
        forapurpose 8y ago
        That tells only MTV's side of the story, and IME everyone has an excuse for discrimination. It's not a signal of anything; it's just part of the process. Also, can you provide a link to the source? To quote, either start each paragraph with ">", or put asterisks (sans spaces) before and after the text.
        laretluval 8y ago
        Who would have sufficient information to tell another side to this story?
        icebraining 8y ago
        Well, it seems interesting that when David Bowie asked the same question to one of MTV's veejays, his answer was more about the sensibilities of the viewers than the lack of supply: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by … a string of other black faces, or black music.” Which is more like saying, "we're not racists, we just have to appease racists to make our profits". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/01/11/how-david-bowie-confronted-mtv-for-ignoring-black-artists-in-the-early-1980s/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
      - mobilefriendly 8y ago
        Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge force in bringing MTV to mass audiences.
    - gaadd33 8y ago
      Were there a lot of music videos made before MTV? Just curious about the progression of them and how they came to be distributed before there was a cable tv channel.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    If there's one thing pretty constant in human history, it's that we do terrible things to each other. Always need to be on guard for this. But don't overlook the good we do. We (the United States) did end slavery, and then segregation, at a huge and bloody cost.
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      I agree, and I'd also point to women becoming full members of society, as individuals, citizens, and workers, after thousands of years of human history (though with much work remaining). But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Generations of African-Americans lived and died under slavery and segregation; that it was stopped eventually did them no good, and more generations continue to face discrimination right now. It's similar to when a person is freed after decades of imprisonment for an unjust conviction: It's better than leaving them in prison, but a great evil was committed. MLK put it well:[0] I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." [0] Letter From a Birmingham Jail by MLK, the most valuable words you can read about the subject of oppression and the response to it: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
      - mncharity 8y ago
        > But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Tick, tick - 4 people were just born. 250 people will be born in the next minute. 360k people will be born today. And also tomorrow. 2.5M this week. 130M this year. In about 6 years, almost all of them will hit school. School. Schools that are pervasively wretched. Can you make them less wretched? You have six years to change the world. For each 4 years your improvements are delayed, your window misses half a billion people. Good luck. Tick, tock. One thing I took away from working on One Laptop Per Child, is that few appreciate the breathtakingly high cost of time.
  - DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
    “We” being some white people, because needless to say, this isn’t news or hard to admit if you’re black in America. If someone wants to argue that racism is over, that it was “a long time ago” it’s not going to be someone still on the sharp end of the stick.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation -- even though I started school 1 year after schools were integrated, there were a lot of remaining signs of the segregation era. The elementary school that I went to in 1st grade was torn down a year later because it was falling apart: that was OK for a black school during segregation, but having half the toilets and water fountains broken wasn't OK for an integrated school.
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation To add to your point, they can see it now: Even though it's not the law, schools are highly segregated and, IIRC articles I read awhile go, funding to schools that are predominantly African-American is much lower.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation Remember? You can see it now. Not just in the South, but in every state. In fact, Oregon is probably the state where segregation and its effects are the most visible today.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    It’s worse than that. It’s not like segregation ended when Brown v. Board was handed down in 1954. The President had to send the national guard to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963. Court supervised desegregation continues for decades after Brown. Key desegregation decisions were handed down from the Supreme Court in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. Of course there was lots of attempts to end-run around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that amounted to de jure segregation. I think a better benchmark is this: public opposition to interracial marriage flipped (from being the majority view to the minority view) between when Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and Google in 1998. Clinton was President, Seinfeld was on the air, and Quake was out.
    - pizza 8y ago
      Many people assume (educational) segregation's gotten better, but there's reason to suspect it's gotten worse > CASHIN: In 1954, 0 percent of black children in this country attended a majority white school. By 1988, 43 percent of black kids did. So we were fulfilling the promise of Brown. We were increasing in integration every year from the mid-'60s to the late '80s. We were closing the achievement gap between black and white kids. > And then, in 1988, we begin to retreat. And in the '90s, the Supreme Court threw three opinions - signaled to lower courts that it was time for federal courts to get out of the business of policing schools' desegregation. And school segregation levels are about where they were in 1968. So we kind of lost 50 years of progress. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state-of-school-integration-64-years-after-brown-v-board-of-educat https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state...
      - Retric 8y ago
        The population is rather segregated, if a kid needs to be bussed an extra 30+ minutes each way it's not nessisarily worth it.
        AaronFriel 8y ago
        You introduced a strawman. If self-sorting has introduced dramatically greater geographic segregation since 1988, the onus is on you to show it before claiming that. In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-ger...
- jfaucett 8y ago
  > It is amazing to realize that in the grand scheme of things we are not far removed from this. With "we" you mean the "united states"? There are millions of people the world over in slavery right now, so "we" in terms of humanity have still not overcome this problem. [1,2] 1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/11/23/247-wall-st-countries-most-slaves/70033422/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/11/23/247-wall-st-... 2. https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/ https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/
  - goatherders 8y ago
    Thanks, doc. Yes, I meant the united states. Yes, I know there is still human bondage out there. Yes, I know the world is bigger than just the USA. I was thanking someone for posting an interesting story. Not everything here needs to be a discussion or nuance and grammar. That's what Twitter is for.
    - jfaucett 8y ago
      no reason to get upset. This wasn't anything against your comment. There's surprisingly a lot of people who don't know there's around 40 million people living in slavery right now. I posted some links so those people can find more information about it.
      - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
        More amazing about the number is that there are now more people living in slavery than there were during the 'era of slavery.' And there's an extremely high chance that you're regularly consuming food that's the product of slavery. Particularly seafood and chocolate. Hershey, Mars, Nestle, Kraft, and some of the largest indirect sponsors of slavery. And then there are slave-like conditions where people's iPhones are assembled in factors by people making next to nothing living in on-site dormitories surrounded by suicide nets. Like many things today, I think the real moral is that people have just become better at managing their image and public relations. And similarly the only reason I post this is because I think people are mostly ignorant of the past and present. We often view history like a Hollywood movie with good guys, bad guys, and a happy ending. Reality is rarely so kind.
- the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  any time anyone uses "its legal" as a justification for something, i always think of this.
- rmason 8y ago
  It's just a reminder that America isn't that old a country. My late father and his brother were teenage boys when this book was written. My dad remembered watching the parades as a young boy for both Marshall Foch (French WW1 general) and Charles Lindberg. He knew friends of his family who fought in the Civil War.
- lisper 8y ago
  Human civilization originated about 10,000 years ago (more or less). The oldest surviving human writings date back to about 5000 years ago. The classic Greek philosophers and mathematicians (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras) lived about 2500 years ago. Ptolemy lived about 2000 years ago. Copernicus lived about 500 years ago. Newton published Principia 331 years ago. Darwin published Origin of Species 159 years ago. Slavery in the U.S. formally ended 153 years ago. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk 115 years ago. Einstein published general relativity 103 years ago. Alan Turing published "On computable numbers" 82 years ago. The first atomic bomb was detonated 73 years ago. Bell's theorem was published 54 years ago. The Apple II was introduced 41 years ago. The Aspect experiment (the first experimental test of Bell's theorem) took place 36 years ago. The Macintosh was introduced 34 years ago. The first exoplanet was discovered 26 years ago. Y Combinator graduated its first class of startups 13 years ago. The iPhone was introduced 11 years ago. Gravity waves were first detected 3 years ago. But nothing at all interesting has happened since then. ;-)
  - koolba 8y ago
    > The Apple II was introduced 41 years ago. This one makes me feel old.
    - code_duck 8y ago
      Periodically, I realize that the 80s are now as far back as the 50s were when I was growing up in the 80s. So also, the 50s now as far back as the 20s were then.
      - lisper 8y ago
        Brace yourself. The 20's are comin' 'round the mountain.
        code_duck 8y ago
        I feel like we’ve had lots of 20s lately... it’s the 30s that I’m concerned about.
- lglk00n 8y ago
  I knew my 100% Native American great grandfather. He was a kid in the late 1800s. Not one to tell many stories. Mostly just a friendly elder who likes to listen to us kids He did share a couple anecdotes about being moved by the government for a book report I wrote in grade school Not very far removed from that bullshit either But yeah American wealth was generated by free enterprise as the story goes, right? What a shithole country
  - eanzenberg 8y ago
    Which country wasn’t?
    - jpster 8y ago
      What’s remarkable in the case of America, however is its reps’ very voluble profession that it is somehow better than other countries, more freedom-loving, more just, etc. with a straight face.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    Native Americans did some pretty despicable things to each other too.
    - acjohnson55 8y ago
      I guess it's a total wash then, eh?
    - danharaj 8y ago
      What exactly is the argument here?
      - neuromantik8086 8y ago
        I think he's just pointing out that the lumping of Native Americans into one discrete category is a bit artificial, since white-native and native-native relations varied widely depending upon the tribe (and the white people). For instance, the Iroquois and white settlers in upstate New York had a much better relationship than tribes in the far west and pioneers I think. On the other hand, the Iroquois hated the Algonquins. An anecdote: I grew up close by the Oneida Indian Nation and one of the town seals for an area village (the aptly named Whitesboro) had a white man choking an Oneida. The seal was depicting a good-natured wrestling match from the 18th century that led to a decent long-lasting relationship between the Oneidas and early settlers, but at first glance it looked very terrible. Someone at the Daily Show discovered this, descended upon Whitesboro and strongarmed them into changing the seal (and honestly they probably should have anyways since it isn't obvious what it meant without more context). What I found ironic was that they interviewed a Lenape (a.k.a. the sworn enemy of the Iroquois) who dutifully informed them how terrible the seal was. In the meantime, more serious issues that the Oneida actually care more about were ignored by the Daily Show. Namely, the Daily Show completely glossed over the fact that the Oneida Indian Nation is essentially a puppet state run by Ray Halbritter, who was illegally elected and essentially does/did the bidding of Sherwood Boehlert (a former white congressman from the area). It probably wouldn't have made for as sexy of a segment, but it still annoys me that of all the white-native issues from my area, they chose to highlight the Whitesboro seal. [edit] There's also the question of Iroquois-Iroquois relations after the Revolutionary War, when some tribes in the confederacy sided with the British and had to flee to Canada and other tribes stayed in New York. Disclaimer: Fact check my statements because I'm not totally sure I understand the Ray Halbritter issue myself / don't think about it on a daily basis.
- azernik 8y ago
  World War II is as far removed from us as the Civil War was to the people living through World War II.
- Ar-Curunir 8y ago
  We're still not "removed from this" in the US; private prisons are basically indentured labour.
  - leesalminen 8y ago
    We still jail people who are financially unable to pay fines. This happened frequently to the indigent population in my town. They would be ticketed for all sorts of nonsense. The jail got so full that the Sheriff just started releasing people.
    - icantdrive55 8y ago
      This has to stop. It's been going on way too long. I think about it every time I see a cop. It's 10x worse than when I was growing up because municipalities realized no one was keeping track of the amounts of the fees/fines, and they just raised them. Along with making everything against some law? I really think the only way to stop it is to tie Fees/fines to income.
- madengr 8y ago
  There is someone alive today whose grandfather was born during the revolutionary war. The key is that they all fathered kids in their 70’s.
- curun1r 8y ago
  The US Government still pays a civil war pension to the daughter of a Union soldier. The last surviving American veteran of WWI died in 2011. Whenever I hear stuff like that, I always have the same reaction you did that we're more connected to these historical events than we think we are.
  - blackbagboys 8y ago
    President John Tyler (born 1790, President 1841-1845) has two living grandchildren.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    I remember feeling this acutely when I say a clip from a TV show in the 50s that had as a guest a man who was present for Lincoln's assassination (as a young child). Pretty wild to think that we're only a few short hops from something that's practically modern mythology at this pt.
- js2 8y ago
  The past is all around us. There's a state park[1] I run in many weekends. It has seperate north and south entrances that are about a 15 minute drive apart, with no road between them within the park. I was curious why the park was built this way. It turns out the park was literally segregated till the early sixties and the north side of the park was for the white folks and the south side of the park for black folks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead_State_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead_State_Park
- jbuzbee 8y ago
  My father, now nearly 87, was born in the deep south 70 years after the end of slavery. If you think about it, as he walked down the streets of his little town at age 10, every single black person he saw over the age of 80, would have been a former slave. Every one.
  - everdev 8y ago
    Well, they'd be babies or young kids, but still born into slavery.
- everdev 8y ago
  Or, only 75 years on from the Holocaust. Both of my grandfathers who I knew who for many years fought against Hitler. The idea of a fascist takeover of Europe or the world was a very real threat for them.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    It's a very real threat to us today.
pizza 8y ago
The book is just now being published but the author died 58 years ago. Thank goodness someone knew about it.
wthsx5 8y ago
> Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama. This is haunting.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  totally agree
- Joeboy 8y ago
  Go here and scroll down for lots more amazing Cudjo words: http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-...
  - incadenza 8y ago
    I thought the part about the dialect was so interesting. It’s tough for me to make out what the dialect would have sounded like. I wonder if there are any remaining parts of the US that use it.
    - evincarofautumn 8y ago
      (Disclaimer: I’m into phonetics but not a dialect expert.) I imagine it would be a blend of his probable native language in Benin, Yoruba, with the English of 1860s Alabama, Older Southern American English[1]. My best guess for the sound would be to listen to a Beninese speaker of English[2] and imagine it with more of what’s now considered an old-fashioned sophisticated Southern accent, and perhaps less French influence. The closest living relative would probably be African American Vernacular English[3]. It’s important to note that the features of the transcription hint at both his and her accent: she was transcribing the sounds as best she knew how to make someone with her accent pronounce them as he did. Transcribing his pronunciation of “what” as “whut”, for example, points to the fact that “what” was likely pronounced with [ɑ] in her accent, rhyming with “cot”, but he pronounced it more or less as we do now, rhyming with “cut”. Transcribing “like” as “lak” implies he had /aɪ/ glide weakening (to “ah”, as in “ah do declayuh”) where she didn’t, at least in some contexts—“my” is still transcribed as such, not “ma”. It’s also likely that he didn’t diphthongise vowels, so he’d pronounce “maybe” as something like /meːbi/ instead of /meɪbi/. “Can’t” as “cain” suggests he rhymed it with “cane”, like some AAVE speakers now. And so on. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Older_Southern_American_English#Phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Older_Southern_American_Englis... [2]: http://www.dialectsarchive.com/benin-1 http://www.dialectsarchive.com/benin-1 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...
Joeboy 8y ago
Questlove of The Roots is a descendant of people who were brought to the US on the same ship.
Pxtl 8y ago
...I was kind of cringing reading the patois-ified spelling of his words until I read it was the insistence of the original interviewer. That's an... awkward decision.
- brosky117 8y ago
  I appreciate being able to read the words the way they were spoken. It doesn’t seem inherently wrong or awkward to me.
  - laretluval 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect It's unlikely that this is a true reflection of the phonetics of what he said.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > That's an... awkward decision. Journalists make this decision all the time: Do they take out the wrong words, grammatical errors, the 'umms' and 'ahhs', or vernacular, and make the speaker look less intelligent (for errors) or simply look like they are trying to characterize the speaker (vernacular), or do they insist on total accuracy? Note that most quotes in print are in perfect English. Anyway, the article addresses your comment: [Zora Neale] Hurston’s use of vernacular dialogue in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was often controversial, as some black American thinkers at the time argued that this played to black caricatures in the minds of white people. Hurston disagreed, and refused to change Lewis’ dialect—which was one of the reasons a publisher turned her manuscript down back in the 1930s. Note that Hurston was a leading African-American intellectual of that era.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  I personally hate it. It's the conversion of an accent to another language for the purpose of atmosphere. It's fine when Scottish poets do it to themselves, but when it's done by someone else it's intentionally alienating. Black Southern accents aren't very different from White lower- to lower-middle-class Scots-Irish dialects, but the choice to transcribe "like" as "lak" for an average Southern white person would strike most people as bizarre.
lukewrites 8y ago
The current issue of The New Yorker also covers the publication of Zora Neale Hurston's _Barracoon_[1], and what I found most interesting was that Mr. Kossola was not the last survivor of that slave ship. > “Oh!” she exclaimed toward the end [of a letter to Langston Hughes], “almost forgot”: she had found another survivor of the Clotilda living on the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles north of Africatown. The woman was older than Kossola, and, according to Hurston, a better storyteller. But there can’t be two lasts or more than one only, so Hurston, perhaps believing that Kossola’s story would be more valuable if people thought it was unique, told Hughes that she planned to keep this other survivor secret: “No one will ever know about her but us.” > Tragically, that proved true. Abandoning her training by Boas, and ignoring the dictates of both honesty and history, Hurston forsook the opportunity to record the story of another survivor. Later scholars have determined that the person Hurston “almost forgot” was most likely a woman named Allie Beren, but no film footage records her face, no known photographs document her home, no oral histories capture her memories. The loss of Ms. Beren's story is tragic; that its loss occurred through Hurston's intentional neglect is infuriating. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hurstons-story-of-a-former-slave-finally-comes-to-print https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hur...
- ianai 8y ago
  It was, and this isn’t an excuse, a completely different time back then. None the less, of all people to stifle a woman’s voice I would not expect another woman.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    I was also surprised that apparently Kossula's account went unpublished due to a 1930s version of political correctness. http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-...
- cm2012 8y ago
  It wasn't her responsibility just because she was there. There are billions of unrecorded stories, it's not like she left her under a rock to die or something.
tomohawk 8y ago
This is the account of a man who was a slave in the US decades after the Civil War: https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentieth-Century-Plantation-ebook/dp/B006K1MWCC https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentiet...
- SaintGhurka 8y ago
  The library of congress has two thousand interviews with former slaves. http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/narratives-slavery/file.html http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/n...
mistrial9 8y ago
the land that is now the United States of America, started in fractured parts by many, very different, groups of people. Please do not throw the entire USA into the history of slavery -- many abhorred the practice at every stage, while others did not, and used it to varying extents. A whitewash of history is unfair, but to tar all peoples with the stain of slavery is, as well.
- clay_the_ripper 8y ago
  What exactly is your point? To me, statements like this are like “all lives matter”. Yes. We know. But we don’t need to point this out, because it’s just an undercover way of diminishing the point being made.
  - travmatt 8y ago
    >don’t need to point this out, because it’s just an undercover way of diminishing the point being mad That’s the feature though, not a bug.
  - MadSudaca 8y ago
    What about a statement such as "whites are responsible for slavery". It's true, but not all "whites" were responsible. I think a lot of people wouldn't bat an eye at this comment. However, at an individual level it seems unfair to me, since obviously not everyone that was qualified by the label "white" during slavery is responsible.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >However, at an individual level it seems unfair to me, since obviously not everyone that was qualified by the label "white" during slavery is responsible. All white people as individuals were not responsible for slavery, and some even opposed it, but all still benefited from slavery by virtue of being born into the race, society and class that the slave system was designed to benefit. That is unfair, but nonetheless true.
      - 8y ago
lizardskull 8y ago
For a group of futurists, ya’ll really spend a lot of time looking backwards.
dominotw 8y ago
Apparently a large number of Thai are enslaved on fishing boats, being worked to death. Large portion US fish is being fished by Thai/vitetnamise children.
- curun1r 8y ago
  Close, but the slaves are primarily Cambodian and Myanmarese who flee to Thailand and end up on those fishing vessels. There was a great series of nautical-themed long-form journalism by the NYT a few years ago and one of the stories [0] dealt specifically with this. It's a tough, but great read, as are the other stories from the series. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailand-fishing-sea-slaves-pets.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thaila...
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Malaysia is also heavily involved in seafood slavery. That case was made particularly egregious when the last administration wanted to get the TPP trade agreement passed. Malaysia's rating, on human trafficking and slavery, was upgraded exclusively to allow them to participate even though they had made absolutely no progress on the issue whatsoever.
- rubzah 8y ago
  Italy runs actual slave plantations using migrants. There have been a few cases that made it to public perception recently. Not that it gets discussed much...
DEFCON28 8y ago
Not to detract one bit from the evil horror of Americans who purchased him and brought him to the US but what of the neighboring tribe who captured and sold him? (As is described in this article, and was news to me.) That’s a story I’ve never heard told.
- DEFCON28 8y ago
  > members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States. Even repeating a sentence about this that appeared in the original article gets downvoted and reported. Why is this such a sensitive thing to talk about?
  - crispyporkbites 8y ago
    Because it goes against the narrative that white people have and continue to oppress black people. The reality is much more complex than that.
- paganel 8y ago
  The article touches on that: > There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. (...) As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.” I agree, though, if we want to be more closer to the truth in terms of what really happened back then we need to also focus on how the African slaves really got to become slaves in the first place (most probably as a result of war or rapines).
  - DEFCON28 8y ago
    Yes. And I fully agree that without the demand there would not have been the supply. I’m not trying to start a “butwhatabout” here.
vinayms 8y ago
I have a tangential question, and hope someone can help find an answer to it. I searched a bit but didn't find anything. It seems this man was still in early twenties when he was freed after the civil war. Further, he was a new arrival and not descendant of generations of slaves who had been Americanized and had made the new place their home just as their owners had. So my question is: why he and other new arrivals like him didn't try to return home? Wasn't there any support and means for new arrivals to return? FYI, I know about Liberia, and I specifically want to know about new arrivals like Cudjo.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  It is a little difficult to travel back home when you have no money, and I'm guessing doubly difficult doing so while living as an oppressed person in a nation of racists, who most definitely do not want you to be seen with their white passengers. I'm pretty sure this was a major reason for more folks not returning "home" - no money, no help from the government (freedom was enough to the government at the time). He was lucky enough to be accepted since he was from Africa. Many more weren't from Africa. They. like their parents, were American. Slaves, but still American - complete with conversion to Christianity and the English language. Even if you were lucky enough to have money, this would have made it a tougher decision.
  - not_kurt_godel 8y ago
    Not to mention, home is where he was kidnapped by slavers in the first place. Doesn't seem like the kind of place one would want to go back to after being freed from slavery.
- toxicFork 8y ago
  The excerpt on vulture.com[1] linked in other comments has a bit of info about that: "...Know how we gittee free? Cudjo tellee you dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. We all on dere to go in de Montgomery, but Cap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat dat day. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’ ” Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin’? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, we ain’ no mo’ slave. FREEDOM After dey free us, we so glad, we makee de drum and beat it lak in de Affica soil. We glad we free, but we cain stay wid de folks what own us no mo’. Where we goin’ live, we doan know. We want buildee de houses for ourselves, but we ain’ got no lan’. We meet together and we talk. We say we from cross de water so we go back where we come from. So we say we work in slavery five year and de six months for nothin’, now we work for money and gittee in de ship and go back to our country. We think Cap’n Meaher dey ought take us back home. But we think we save money and buy de ticket ourselves. So we tell de women, “Now we all want go back home. Derefo’ we got to work hard and save de money. You see fine clothes, you must not wish for dem.” De women tell us dey do all dey kin to get back, and dey tellee us, “You see fine clothes, don’t you wish for dem neither.” But it too much money we need. So we think we stay here. ..." [1] https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon...
devnull791101 8y ago
He was captured by a rival tribe, smuggled into the country illegally, freed by the victorious force and the first thing he can think of is compensation. not from his owners, or original tribe, but the now government that fought for his freedom?
- toxicFork 8y ago
  What makes you assume that the first thing he can think of is compensation? It looks like what they first thought of was to find a place to live, and to try to go back home. Regarding compensation: What makes you think that he did not ask for compensation from his owners? If you read a bit more you will see that they did ask their former owners for compensation indeed. "Because Cudjo “always talkee good,” the Africans selected him to approach their former owners and ask for land in exchange for their years of free labor." The quote is from another site linked by Joeboy further down in the comments: https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon...
MrsPeaches 8y ago
There are also a couple of recordings of people who were born into slavery and were then freed. This one in particular still sends shivers down my spine whenever I listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o
fiatjaf 8y ago
Very nice indeed, I can't access the article because I'm automatically redirected to https://www.seuhistory.com/ https://www.seuhistory.com/ when I click.

330 points by andrewl 8y ago

It is amazing to realize that in the grand scheme of things we are not far removed from this. Thanks for posting. Interesting read.

michaelchisari 8y ago
Around 9% of our population were grown adults when segregation ended. Our history is nearer than we prefer to admit.
- projectileboy 8y ago
  And it continued in so many ways! When MTV first aired in the early 80s, they would not play videos by black artists.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Citation? That's not my memory.
    - projectileboy 8y ago
      There are a lot of different tellings of this story; here’s one: https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-2834657 https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-...
    - purple-again 8y ago
      Here is the relevant excerpt from the link provided by another user. "Scant" is read by me to mean 'yes there were in fact videos, just not in the proportion to what should have been" in direct response to "they would not play videos" There is no room for 'sides to the story'. It was a statement made and countered by this source. We can take issue with the source if you like, but I looked them up and didn't see anything partisan about them. When MTV debuted on Aug. 1, 1981, at least one black face on the network was a mainstay. It belonged to J.J. Jackson, the sole African American on MTV's roster of video jockeys, or VJs as they became known. Despite Jackson’s presence on MTV through 1986, the network faced allegations of racism for giving scant airtime to videos featuring people of color. MTV executives have denied that racism was at the root of the network’s “blackout,” saying that black artists received little airplay because their music didn’t fit the channel’s rock-based format. “MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel,” said Buzz Brindle, MTV’s former director of music programming, to Jet magazine in 2006. “It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel’s format that leaned toward rock at the outset.” With so few black rockers, adding African Americans to MTV’s roster proved difficult, according to the network’s co-founder Les Garland, whom Jet also interviewed. “We had nothing to pick from,” Garland explained. “Fifty percent of my time was spent in the early days of MTV convincing artists to make music videos and convincing record labels to put up money to make those videos…”
      - forapurpose 8y ago
        That tells only MTV's side of the story, and IME everyone has an excuse for discrimination. It's not a signal of anything; it's just part of the process. Also, can you provide a link to the source? To quote, either start each paragraph with ">", or put asterisks (sans spaces) before and after the text.
        laretluval 8y ago
        Who would have sufficient information to tell another side to this story?
        icebraining 8y ago
        Well, it seems interesting that when David Bowie asked the same question to one of MTV's veejays, his answer was more about the sensibilities of the viewers than the lack of supply: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by … a string of other black faces, or black music.” Which is more like saying, "we're not racists, we just have to appease racists to make our profits". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/01/11/how-david-bowie-confronted-mtv-for-ignoring-black-artists-in-the-early-1980s/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
    - mobilefriendly 8y ago
      Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge force in bringing MTV to mass audiences.
  - gaadd33 8y ago
    Were there a lot of music videos made before MTV? Just curious about the progression of them and how they came to be distributed before there was a cable tv channel.
- ams6110 8y ago
  If there's one thing pretty constant in human history, it's that we do terrible things to each other. Always need to be on guard for this. But don't overlook the good we do. We (the United States) did end slavery, and then segregation, at a huge and bloody cost.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    I agree, and I'd also point to women becoming full members of society, as individuals, citizens, and workers, after thousands of years of human history (though with much work remaining). But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Generations of African-Americans lived and died under slavery and segregation; that it was stopped eventually did them no good, and more generations continue to face discrimination right now. It's similar to when a person is freed after decades of imprisonment for an unjust conviction: It's better than leaving them in prison, but a great evil was committed. MLK put it well:[0] I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." [0] Letter From a Birmingham Jail by MLK, the most valuable words you can read about the subject of oppression and the response to it: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
    - mncharity 8y ago
      > But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Tick, tick - 4 people were just born. 250 people will be born in the next minute. 360k people will be born today. And also tomorrow. 2.5M this week. 130M this year. In about 6 years, almost all of them will hit school. School. Schools that are pervasively wretched. Can you make them less wretched? You have six years to change the world. For each 4 years your improvements are delayed, your window misses half a billion people. Good luck. Tick, tock. One thing I took away from working on One Laptop Per Child, is that few appreciate the breathtakingly high cost of time.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
  “We” being some white people, because needless to say, this isn’t news or hard to admit if you’re black in America. If someone wants to argue that racism is over, that it was “a long time ago” it’s not going to be someone still on the sharp end of the stick.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation -- even though I started school 1 year after schools were integrated, there were a lot of remaining signs of the segregation era. The elementary school that I went to in 1st grade was torn down a year later because it was falling apart: that was OK for a black school during segregation, but having half the toilets and water fountains broken wasn't OK for an integrated school.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation To add to your point, they can see it now: Even though it's not the law, schools are highly segregated and, IIRC articles I read awhile go, funding to schools that are predominantly African-American is much lower.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation Remember? You can see it now. Not just in the South, but in every state. In fact, Oregon is probably the state where segregation and its effects are the most visible today.
- rayiner 8y ago
  It’s worse than that. It’s not like segregation ended when Brown v. Board was handed down in 1954. The President had to send the national guard to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963. Court supervised desegregation continues for decades after Brown. Key desegregation decisions were handed down from the Supreme Court in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. Of course there was lots of attempts to end-run around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that amounted to de jure segregation. I think a better benchmark is this: public opposition to interracial marriage flipped (from being the majority view to the minority view) between when Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and Google in 1998. Clinton was President, Seinfeld was on the air, and Quake was out.
  - pizza 8y ago
    Many people assume (educational) segregation's gotten better, but there's reason to suspect it's gotten worse > CASHIN: In 1954, 0 percent of black children in this country attended a majority white school. By 1988, 43 percent of black kids did. So we were fulfilling the promise of Brown. We were increasing in integration every year from the mid-'60s to the late '80s. We were closing the achievement gap between black and white kids. > And then, in 1988, we begin to retreat. And in the '90s, the Supreme Court threw three opinions - signaled to lower courts that it was time for federal courts to get out of the business of policing schools' desegregation. And school segregation levels are about where they were in 1968. So we kind of lost 50 years of progress. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state-of-school-integration-64-years-after-brown-v-board-of-educat https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state...
    - Retric 8y ago
      The population is rather segregated, if a kid needs to be bussed an extra 30+ minutes each way it's not nessisarily worth it.
      - AaronFriel 8y ago
        You introduced a strawman. If self-sorting has introduced dramatically greater geographic segregation since 1988, the onus is on you to show it before claiming that. In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-ger...
jfaucett 8y ago
> It is amazing to realize that in the grand scheme of things we are not far removed from this. With "we" you mean the "united states"? There are millions of people the world over in slavery right now, so "we" in terms of humanity have still not overcome this problem. [1,2] 1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/11/23/247-wall-st-countries-most-slaves/70033422/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/11/23/247-wall-st-... 2. https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/ https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/
- goatherders 8y ago
  Thanks, doc. Yes, I meant the united states. Yes, I know there is still human bondage out there. Yes, I know the world is bigger than just the USA. I was thanking someone for posting an interesting story. Not everything here needs to be a discussion or nuance and grammar. That's what Twitter is for.
  - jfaucett 8y ago
    no reason to get upset. This wasn't anything against your comment. There's surprisingly a lot of people who don't know there's around 40 million people living in slavery right now. I posted some links so those people can find more information about it.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      More amazing about the number is that there are now more people living in slavery than there were during the 'era of slavery.' And there's an extremely high chance that you're regularly consuming food that's the product of slavery. Particularly seafood and chocolate. Hershey, Mars, Nestle, Kraft, and some of the largest indirect sponsors of slavery. And then there are slave-like conditions where people's iPhones are assembled in factors by people making next to nothing living in on-site dormitories surrounded by suicide nets. Like many things today, I think the real moral is that people have just become better at managing their image and public relations. And similarly the only reason I post this is because I think people are mostly ignorant of the past and present. We often view history like a Hollywood movie with good guys, bad guys, and a happy ending. Reality is rarely so kind.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
any time anyone uses "its legal" as a justification for something, i always think of this.
rmason 8y ago
It's just a reminder that America isn't that old a country. My late father and his brother were teenage boys when this book was written. My dad remembered watching the parades as a young boy for both Marshall Foch (French WW1 general) and Charles Lindberg. He knew friends of his family who fought in the Civil War.
lisper 8y ago
Human civilization originated about 10,000 years ago (more or less). The oldest surviving human writings date back to about 5000 years ago. The classic Greek philosophers and mathematicians (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras) lived about 2500 years ago. Ptolemy lived about 2000 years ago. Copernicus lived about 500 years ago. Newton published Principia 331 years ago. Darwin published Origin of Species 159 years ago. Slavery in the U.S. formally ended 153 years ago. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk 115 years ago. Einstein published general relativity 103 years ago. Alan Turing published "On computable numbers" 82 years ago. The first atomic bomb was detonated 73 years ago. Bell's theorem was published 54 years ago. The Apple II was introduced 41 years ago. The Aspect experiment (the first experimental test of Bell's theorem) took place 36 years ago. The Macintosh was introduced 34 years ago. The first exoplanet was discovered 26 years ago. Y Combinator graduated its first class of startups 13 years ago. The iPhone was introduced 11 years ago. Gravity waves were first detected 3 years ago. But nothing at all interesting has happened since then. ;-)
- koolba 8y ago
  > The Apple II was introduced 41 years ago. This one makes me feel old.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    Periodically, I realize that the 80s are now as far back as the 50s were when I was growing up in the 80s. So also, the 50s now as far back as the 20s were then.
    - lisper 8y ago
      Brace yourself. The 20's are comin' 'round the mountain.
      - code_duck 8y ago
        I feel like we’ve had lots of 20s lately... it’s the 30s that I’m concerned about.
lglk00n 8y ago
I knew my 100% Native American great grandfather. He was a kid in the late 1800s. Not one to tell many stories. Mostly just a friendly elder who likes to listen to us kids He did share a couple anecdotes about being moved by the government for a book report I wrote in grade school Not very far removed from that bullshit either But yeah American wealth was generated by free enterprise as the story goes, right? What a shithole country
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  Which country wasn’t?
  - jpster 8y ago
    What’s remarkable in the case of America, however is its reps’ very voluble profession that it is somehow better than other countries, more freedom-loving, more just, etc. with a straight face.
- mikec3010 8y ago
  Native Americans did some pretty despicable things to each other too.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    I guess it's a total wash then, eh?
  - danharaj 8y ago
    What exactly is the argument here?
    - neuromantik8086 8y ago
      I think he's just pointing out that the lumping of Native Americans into one discrete category is a bit artificial, since white-native and native-native relations varied widely depending upon the tribe (and the white people). For instance, the Iroquois and white settlers in upstate New York had a much better relationship than tribes in the far west and pioneers I think. On the other hand, the Iroquois hated the Algonquins. An anecdote: I grew up close by the Oneida Indian Nation and one of the town seals for an area village (the aptly named Whitesboro) had a white man choking an Oneida. The seal was depicting a good-natured wrestling match from the 18th century that led to a decent long-lasting relationship between the Oneidas and early settlers, but at first glance it looked very terrible. Someone at the Daily Show discovered this, descended upon Whitesboro and strongarmed them into changing the seal (and honestly they probably should have anyways since it isn't obvious what it meant without more context). What I found ironic was that they interviewed a Lenape (a.k.a. the sworn enemy of the Iroquois) who dutifully informed them how terrible the seal was. In the meantime, more serious issues that the Oneida actually care more about were ignored by the Daily Show. Namely, the Daily Show completely glossed over the fact that the Oneida Indian Nation is essentially a puppet state run by Ray Halbritter, who was illegally elected and essentially does/did the bidding of Sherwood Boehlert (a former white congressman from the area). It probably wouldn't have made for as sexy of a segment, but it still annoys me that of all the white-native issues from my area, they chose to highlight the Whitesboro seal. [edit] There's also the question of Iroquois-Iroquois relations after the Revolutionary War, when some tribes in the confederacy sided with the British and had to flee to Canada and other tribes stayed in New York. Disclaimer: Fact check my statements because I'm not totally sure I understand the Ray Halbritter issue myself / don't think about it on a daily basis.
azernik 8y ago
World War II is as far removed from us as the Civil War was to the people living through World War II.
Ar-Curunir 8y ago
We're still not "removed from this" in the US; private prisons are basically indentured labour.
- leesalminen 8y ago
  We still jail people who are financially unable to pay fines. This happened frequently to the indigent population in my town. They would be ticketed for all sorts of nonsense. The jail got so full that the Sheriff just started releasing people.
  - icantdrive55 8y ago
    This has to stop. It's been going on way too long. I think about it every time I see a cop. It's 10x worse than when I was growing up because municipalities realized no one was keeping track of the amounts of the fees/fines, and they just raised them. Along with making everything against some law? I really think the only way to stop it is to tie Fees/fines to income.
madengr 8y ago
There is someone alive today whose grandfather was born during the revolutionary war. The key is that they all fathered kids in their 70’s.
curun1r 8y ago
The US Government still pays a civil war pension to the daughter of a Union soldier. The last surviving American veteran of WWI died in 2011. Whenever I hear stuff like that, I always have the same reaction you did that we're more connected to these historical events than we think we are.
- blackbagboys 8y ago
  President John Tyler (born 1790, President 1841-1845) has two living grandchildren.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  I remember feeling this acutely when I say a clip from a TV show in the 50s that had as a guest a man who was present for Lincoln's assassination (as a young child). Pretty wild to think that we're only a few short hops from something that's practically modern mythology at this pt.
js2 8y ago
The past is all around us. There's a state park[1] I run in many weekends. It has seperate north and south entrances that are about a 15 minute drive apart, with no road between them within the park. I was curious why the park was built this way. It turns out the park was literally segregated till the early sixties and the north side of the park was for the white folks and the south side of the park for black folks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead_State_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead_State_Park
jbuzbee 8y ago
My father, now nearly 87, was born in the deep south 70 years after the end of slavery. If you think about it, as he walked down the streets of his little town at age 10, every single black person he saw over the age of 80, would have been a former slave. Every one.
- everdev 8y ago
  Well, they'd be babies or young kids, but still born into slavery.
everdev 8y ago
Or, only 75 years on from the Holocaust. Both of my grandfathers who I knew who for many years fought against Hitler. The idea of a fascist takeover of Europe or the world was a very real threat for them.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  It's a very real threat to us today.

pizza 8y ago

The book is just now being published but the author died 58 years ago. Thank goodness someone knew about it.

wthsx5 8y ago

> Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama. This is haunting.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
totally agree
Joeboy 8y ago
Go here and scroll down for lots more amazing Cudjo words: http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-...
- incadenza 8y ago
  I thought the part about the dialect was so interesting. It’s tough for me to make out what the dialect would have sounded like. I wonder if there are any remaining parts of the US that use it.
  - evincarofautumn 8y ago
    (Disclaimer: I’m into phonetics but not a dialect expert.) I imagine it would be a blend of his probable native language in Benin, Yoruba, with the English of 1860s Alabama, Older Southern American English[1]. My best guess for the sound would be to listen to a Beninese speaker of English[2] and imagine it with more of what’s now considered an old-fashioned sophisticated Southern accent, and perhaps less French influence. The closest living relative would probably be African American Vernacular English[3]. It’s important to note that the features of the transcription hint at both his and her accent: she was transcribing the sounds as best she knew how to make someone with her accent pronounce them as he did. Transcribing his pronunciation of “what” as “whut”, for example, points to the fact that “what” was likely pronounced with [ɑ] in her accent, rhyming with “cot”, but he pronounced it more or less as we do now, rhyming with “cut”. Transcribing “like” as “lak” implies he had /aɪ/ glide weakening (to “ah”, as in “ah do declayuh”) where she didn’t, at least in some contexts—“my” is still transcribed as such, not “ma”. It’s also likely that he didn’t diphthongise vowels, so he’d pronounce “maybe” as something like /meːbi/ instead of /meɪbi/. “Can’t” as “cain” suggests he rhymed it with “cane”, like some AAVE speakers now. And so on. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Older_Southern_American_English#Phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Older_Southern_American_Englis... [2]: http://www.dialectsarchive.com/benin-1 http://www.dialectsarchive.com/benin-1 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...

Joeboy 8y ago

Questlove of The Roots is a descendant of people who were brought to the US on the same ship.

Pxtl 8y ago

...I was kind of cringing reading the patois-ified spelling of his words until I read it was the insistence of the original interviewer. That's an... awkward decision.

brosky117 8y ago
I appreciate being able to read the words the way they were spoken. It doesn’t seem inherently wrong or awkward to me.
- laretluval 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect It's unlikely that this is a true reflection of the phonetics of what he said.
forapurpose 8y ago
> That's an... awkward decision. Journalists make this decision all the time: Do they take out the wrong words, grammatical errors, the 'umms' and 'ahhs', or vernacular, and make the speaker look less intelligent (for errors) or simply look like they are trying to characterize the speaker (vernacular), or do they insist on total accuracy? Note that most quotes in print are in perfect English. Anyway, the article addresses your comment: [Zora Neale] Hurston’s use of vernacular dialogue in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was often controversial, as some black American thinkers at the time argued that this played to black caricatures in the minds of white people. Hurston disagreed, and refused to change Lewis’ dialect—which was one of the reasons a publisher turned her manuscript down back in the 1930s. Note that Hurston was a leading African-American intellectual of that era.
pessimizer 8y ago
I personally hate it. It's the conversion of an accent to another language for the purpose of atmosphere. It's fine when Scottish poets do it to themselves, but when it's done by someone else it's intentionally alienating. Black Southern accents aren't very different from White lower- to lower-middle-class Scots-Irish dialects, but the choice to transcribe "like" as "lak" for an average Southern white person would strike most people as bizarre.

lukewrites 8y ago

The current issue of The New Yorker also covers the publication of Zora Neale Hurston's _Barracoon_[1], and what I found most interesting was that Mr. Kossola was not the last survivor of that slave ship. > “Oh!” she exclaimed toward the end [of a letter to Langston Hughes], “almost forgot”: she had found another survivor of the Clotilda living on the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles north of Africatown. The woman was older than Kossola, and, according to Hurston, a better storyteller. But there can’t be two lasts or more than one only, so Hurston, perhaps believing that Kossola’s story would be more valuable if people thought it was unique, told Hughes that she planned to keep this other survivor secret: “No one will ever know about her but us.” > Tragically, that proved true. Abandoning her training by Boas, and ignoring the dictates of both honesty and history, Hurston forsook the opportunity to record the story of another survivor. Later scholars have determined that the person Hurston “almost forgot” was most likely a woman named Allie Beren, but no film footage records her face, no known photographs document her home, no oral histories capture her memories. The loss of Ms. Beren's story is tragic; that its loss occurred through Hurston's intentional neglect is infuriating. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hurstons-story-of-a-former-slave-finally-comes-to-print https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hur...

ianai 8y ago
It was, and this isn’t an excuse, a completely different time back then. None the less, of all people to stifle a woman’s voice I would not expect another woman.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  I was also surprised that apparently Kossula's account went unpublished due to a 1930s version of political correctness. http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-...
cm2012 8y ago
It wasn't her responsibility just because she was there. There are billions of unrecorded stories, it's not like she left her under a rock to die or something.

tomohawk 8y ago

This is the account of a man who was a slave in the US decades after the Civil War: https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentieth-Century-Plantation-ebook/dp/B006K1MWCC https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Powerful-Twentiet...

SaintGhurka 8y ago
The library of congress has two thousand interviews with former slaves. http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/narratives-slavery/file.html http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/n...

mistrial9 8y ago

the land that is now the United States of America, started in fractured parts by many, very different, groups of people. Please do not throw the entire USA into the history of slavery -- many abhorred the practice at every stage, while others did not, and used it to varying extents. A whitewash of history is unfair, but to tar all peoples with the stain of slavery is, as well.

clay_the_ripper 8y ago
What exactly is your point? To me, statements like this are like “all lives matter”. Yes. We know. But we don’t need to point this out, because it’s just an undercover way of diminishing the point being made.
- travmatt 8y ago
  >don’t need to point this out, because it’s just an undercover way of diminishing the point being mad That’s the feature though, not a bug.
- MadSudaca 8y ago
  What about a statement such as "whites are responsible for slavery". It's true, but not all "whites" were responsible. I think a lot of people wouldn't bat an eye at this comment. However, at an individual level it seems unfair to me, since obviously not everyone that was qualified by the label "white" during slavery is responsible.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >However, at an individual level it seems unfair to me, since obviously not everyone that was qualified by the label "white" during slavery is responsible. All white people as individuals were not responsible for slavery, and some even opposed it, but all still benefited from slavery by virtue of being born into the race, society and class that the slave system was designed to benefit. That is unfair, but nonetheless true.
    - 8y ago

lizardskull 8y ago

For a group of futurists, ya’ll really spend a lot of time looking backwards.

dominotw 8y ago

Apparently a large number of Thai are enslaved on fishing boats, being worked to death. Large portion US fish is being fished by Thai/vitetnamise children.

curun1r 8y ago
Close, but the slaves are primarily Cambodian and Myanmarese who flee to Thailand and end up on those fishing vessels. There was a great series of nautical-themed long-form journalism by the NYT a few years ago and one of the stories [0] dealt specifically with this. It's a tough, but great read, as are the other stories from the series. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailand-fishing-sea-slaves-pets.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thaila...
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Malaysia is also heavily involved in seafood slavery. That case was made particularly egregious when the last administration wanted to get the TPP trade agreement passed. Malaysia's rating, on human trafficking and slavery, was upgraded exclusively to allow them to participate even though they had made absolutely no progress on the issue whatsoever.
rubzah 8y ago
Italy runs actual slave plantations using migrants. There have been a few cases that made it to public perception recently. Not that it gets discussed much...

DEFCON28 8y ago

Not to detract one bit from the evil horror of Americans who purchased him and brought him to the US but what of the neighboring tribe who captured and sold him? (As is described in this article, and was news to me.) That’s a story I’ve never heard told.

DEFCON28 8y ago
> members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States. Even repeating a sentence about this that appeared in the original article gets downvoted and reported. Why is this such a sensitive thing to talk about?
- crispyporkbites 8y ago
  Because it goes against the narrative that white people have and continue to oppress black people. The reality is much more complex than that.
paganel 8y ago
The article touches on that: > There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. (...) As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.” I agree, though, if we want to be more closer to the truth in terms of what really happened back then we need to also focus on how the African slaves really got to become slaves in the first place (most probably as a result of war or rapines).
- DEFCON28 8y ago
  Yes. And I fully agree that without the demand there would not have been the supply. I’m not trying to start a “butwhatabout” here.

vinayms 8y ago

I have a tangential question, and hope someone can help find an answer to it. I searched a bit but didn't find anything. It seems this man was still in early twenties when he was freed after the civil war. Further, he was a new arrival and not descendant of generations of slaves who had been Americanized and had made the new place their home just as their owners had. So my question is: why he and other new arrivals like him didn't try to return home? Wasn't there any support and means for new arrivals to return? FYI, I know about Liberia, and I specifically want to know about new arrivals like Cudjo.

Broken_Hippo 8y ago
It is a little difficult to travel back home when you have no money, and I'm guessing doubly difficult doing so while living as an oppressed person in a nation of racists, who most definitely do not want you to be seen with their white passengers. I'm pretty sure this was a major reason for more folks not returning "home" - no money, no help from the government (freedom was enough to the government at the time). He was lucky enough to be accepted since he was from Africa. Many more weren't from Africa. They. like their parents, were American. Slaves, but still American - complete with conversion to Christianity and the English language. Even if you were lucky enough to have money, this would have made it a tougher decision.
- not_kurt_godel 8y ago
  Not to mention, home is where he was kidnapped by slavers in the first place. Doesn't seem like the kind of place one would want to go back to after being freed from slavery.
toxicFork 8y ago
The excerpt on vulture.com[1] linked in other comments has a bit of info about that: "...Know how we gittee free? Cudjo tellee you dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. We all on dere to go in de Montgomery, but Cap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat dat day. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’ ” Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin’? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, we ain’ no mo’ slave. FREEDOM After dey free us, we so glad, we makee de drum and beat it lak in de Affica soil. We glad we free, but we cain stay wid de folks what own us no mo’. Where we goin’ live, we doan know. We want buildee de houses for ourselves, but we ain’ got no lan’. We meet together and we talk. We say we from cross de water so we go back where we come from. So we say we work in slavery five year and de six months for nothin’, now we work for money and gittee in de ship and go back to our country. We think Cap’n Meaher dey ought take us back home. But we think we save money and buy de ticket ourselves. So we tell de women, “Now we all want go back home. Derefo’ we got to work hard and save de money. You see fine clothes, you must not wish for dem.” De women tell us dey do all dey kin to get back, and dey tellee us, “You see fine clothes, don’t you wish for dem neither.” But it too much money we need. So we think we stay here. ..." [1] https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon...

devnull791101 8y ago

He was captured by a rival tribe, smuggled into the country illegally, freed by the victorious force and the first thing he can think of is compensation. not from his owners, or original tribe, but the now government that fought for his freedom?

toxicFork 8y ago
What makes you assume that the first thing he can think of is compensation? It looks like what they first thought of was to find a place to live, and to try to go back home. Regarding compensation: What makes you think that he did not ask for compensation from his owners? If you read a bit more you will see that they did ask their former owners for compensation indeed. "Because Cudjo “always talkee good,” the Africans selected him to approach their former owners and ask for land in exchange for their years of free labor." The quote is from another site linked by Joeboy further down in the comments: https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-excerpt.html https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon...

MrsPeaches 8y ago

There are also a couple of recordings of people who were born into slavery and were then freed. This one in particular still sends shivers down my spine whenever I listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o

fiatjaf 8y ago

Very nice indeed, I can't access the article because I'm automatically redirected to https://www.seuhistory.com/ https://www.seuhistory.com/ when I click.