Congressman Al Inexperienced and Senator Elizabeth Warren, together with a number of different nationwide elected officers, joined collectively in a name for this nation to offer at the least a symbolic gesture of honor and acknowledgment to the thousands and thousands of Black individuals whose stolen labor and exploited genius allowed America to develop into a worldwide superpower whereas concurrently facilitating the financial and political rise of numerous European nations.
U.S. senators Corey Booker (New Jersey), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland), Alex Padilla (California), and 63 members of the U.S. Home added their names. Together with Inexperienced’s and Warren’s to a collaborative letter addressed to President Joe Biden requesting that he grant a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to the nation’s financial foundational moms and dads.
HISTORIC REQUEST
The request is being heralded as a historic joint endeavor to acknowledge the profound and enduring contribution of the American enslaved to the financial basis of the US.
Numerous students agree, together with creator, commentator and economist Michael Harriot in his ebook “Black AF: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America,” that with out the compelled and stolen labor and genius of enslaved individuals who introduced their experience in rice cultivation, engineering, animal husbandry and different expertise to develop the crops and industries the hapless “pilgrims” and their descendants lacked the know-how to do for themselves, America as we all know it right this moment wouldn’t exist.
Scholar Shawn Rochester, in his ebook “
,” even put a greenback determine to the labor forcefully and brutally stolen of enslaved Blacks for 246 years.
“The worth of labor extracted, stolen from Blacks might be estimated at a worth between $24 trillion and $97 trillion,” mentioned Rochester, who takes the rounded common of these figures ($50 trillion) in his calculations.
Rochester additionally factors out that in 1860 the worth of the enslaved (i.e. their literal our bodies and the brains, creativity and brawn hooked up to them) was 48% of the full wealth of the South, and price greater than all of America’s main industries mixed.
“The worth of 4 million enslaved Africans when it comes to wealth was $15.5 trillion, whereas when it comes to GDP was about $28 trillion. The common of those two valuations is $22 trillion,” mentioned Rochester.
ENSLAVED BLACKS BUILT AMERICA
These figures don’t even embody the labor compelled and stolen from Blacks in America through sharecropping, convict leasing and the labor extracted from individuals convicted of crimes to this present day that the thirteenth Modification permits for as a result of for the imprisoned, slavery, in line with the U.S. Structure.
Inexperienced and Warren emphasised the important function the enslaved performed in shaping the financial basis of the U.S.
“These notable people contributed centuries of labor by planting and harvesting crops, developing important roads and bridges, in addition to offering the groundwork for profitable industries reminiscent of cotton and tobacco. Their collective efforts propelled the U.S. to the worldwide financial dominance it enjoys right this moment,” said the letter to Biden.
NATIONAL SLAVERY REMEMBRANCE DAY
Inexperienced has additionally been pushing to get Congress to make Aug. 20 the annual observance of Nationwide Slavery Remembrance Day. On Aug. 19, 2023, Inexperienced hosted the 2nd Annual Slavery Remembrance Legislative Replace and Commemorative Breakfast on the Wyndham Resort (8686 Kirby Dr., Houston, TX 77054), the place he supplied attendees with the newest information on the place Inexperienced’s laws stood.
“As a nation, we should acknowledge the horrors of slavery and legislate a future that upholds equality and justice for all,” mentioned Inexperienced on the occasion. “The U.S. at the moment has remembrance days for the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. However for the time being, it doesn’t have an official day of remembrance to honor the thousands and thousands of African individuals who have been kidnapped and shipped to the Americas to be offered as property as a part of the Atlantic Slave Commerce.”
On Aug. 20, 2022, Biden marked the commemoration of Slavery Remembrance Day with an announcement acknowledging the repercussions of slavery, the nation’s seminal sin. Inexperienced believes a Presidential Medal of Freedom can be an extra, monumental recognition of the immense contributions of the American enslaved and a metamorphosis of our historic narrative.
“Whereas this doesn’t treatment all the horrors of slavery, the granting of this medal of freedom would acknowledge the injustices imposed upon the enslaved, within the type of the denial of the liberty that every one human beings earn by birthright,” mentioned Inexperienced.
