Word: freedmen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After Jefferson's death in 1826, Thomas, Madison and Eston all ended up as freedmen within 25 miles of one another near the town of Chillicothe, Ohio. The brothers were quite fair, being only an eighth black, and Jeffersonian in appearance: tall with reddish hair and gray eyes. But Thomas would become a leader in the black community, founding an African Methodist church. Madison put down roots near a mulatto settlement and also stayed in the black community. "Though we consider it a gift of God, our one enduring question is why Madison chose to stay black when it might...
...successful peers castigate them for "acting white." One black counselor said black students should not take difficult advanced-placement courses because they wouldn't do well in them. You could argue that such self-destructive behavior reflects a so-called slave mentality, but history suggests otherwise. The newly emancipated freedmen valued two things above all else: their own land and education. They certainly didn't think learning was "white...
...mule? I'm referring to the land and farm animals freed slaves like my grandfather George White expected to get after the Civil War to help them support themselves and make their new liberty real. For most of them, of course, the promise never materialized, even though the Freedmen's Bureau had the authority to rent abandoned or confiscated Southern farmland to freed slaves until they could afford to buy it. If that brave promise had been kept, Mr. President, you wouldn't be embroiled in the latest debate about a government apology for slavery. If the freedmen had become...
...like hitting the lottery. So here's another idea. Use the money to uplift those who have been most hurt not only by the legacy of slavery but by existing discrimination and poverty: the urban and rural black poor. Put the money into a fund--call it the New Freedmen's Bureau--to finance the construction of schools, housing, transportation grids, factories, you name it, in the most depressed areas where the descendants of slaves are a majority. Use it to help finance new black-owned companies, to put poor black kids through college and endow cash-poor historically black...
...concepts of whiteness to locate their crystalization in the unique experience of Irish immigration. No other European ethnicity began so penniless, oppressed and spurned as the Irish Catholics did when they first arrived, or worked and languished in worse conditions. Irish considered themselves the blacks of Europe and black freedmen viewed themselves, according to some literature of the day, comfortably superior in position to that of the Irishman. Somewhere in the crucible of New England urban labor competition, the Irish forged a new white identity for themselves to ensure their place next to native born whites...