 Greetings. My name is Professor Chris Manjapra. I am a professor of history at Northeastern University and I'm really happy to be sharing this Emancipation Day with you. I wanted to speak for the next little bit about a different story about emancipation than what we're familiar with and it's a story about emancipation and reparations and how deeply interconnected they are. I'm going to also share with you some slides and I hope you'll find this of interest and it's very important that we be having this conversation today on Emancipation Day or in the context of Emancipation Day because this is in fact what our ancestors, this is the kind of thing that our ancestors themselves have been doing since the very first emancipation in the 1830s. So let me begin by sharing some slides. I'll be speaking, I'm really about my book which is called Black Ghost of Empire, the Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation and sharing with you some of the arguments that are part of the book. I want to begin by observing that on the eve of Emancipation Day our ancestors gathered to talk about their business. So here I'm thinking about the eve of August 1st, 1838. If we were to go back to what was happening across the Caribbean on that night it was the case that those who had been enslaved and had been apprenticed were gathering in secluded places, in safe places, in places where they could be together as a community and they were talking about what the future, what their future would hold. So today on this day let us also talk together about our business as a way of commemorating Emancipation Day. So my book Black Ghost of Empire divides all the reparations worldwide into five main types. Gradual emancipations, retroactive, compensated, war emancipations and conquest emancipations and I'll give you a taste for all five of those as we go. Between 1770 and 1920 a succession of interconnected emancipation edicts promulgated across European empires created the conduits for enslavers to actually obtain huge reparations from their states. Emancipation processes brought about the abolition of the formal institution of slavery but they also in some ways transformed slave property into new forms of property ownership for the erstwhile slave owners. What we don't talk about enough is that in every single emancipation that has taken place there has been reparations paid but that this reparations has been paid to the perpetrators, to the slave owners and what I have on the screen here are the five different ways in which these reparations have been paid to slave owners. So here is a map of all the emancipations that have taken place across the Americas and Africa from that 1770 to 1920 period during that more than 100 years of emancipations worldwide. Now in my book Black Ghost of Empire I show that all of these emancipation processes actually perpetuated racial domination and that today we need to actually be reckoning with the havoc and the harm that these emancipations caused far from celebrating an end to slavery what Emancipation Day should really be about is confronting the reality about the injustice by which slavery ended and the long legacies of inequality and oppression that resulted. So just using this map as a brief overview of what I discussed throughout the book mentioned that in the US North is where emancipations began in the 1780s and here we have the beginning of something called post-native emancipation emancipation after birth which meant that in places like Philadelphia women who had been enslaved or who were enslaved beginning in March 1st 1780 their children born of their wounds would be now free so all children born of after March 1780 were so-called born of the free womb but here we have the hitch which is that these supposedly free black children were still to serve 18 to 27 years of apprenticeship in other words to serve in bondage really throughout their whole childhood and into their young adulthood that was the beginning of emancipation and the same method the same technique of paying slave owners sometimes through the in-kind contribution of free labor from the those who had been supposedly freed later on by actual cash and land payments to slave owners these methods begin to crescendo over time as we move into the 19th century so for example in British Sierra Leone and other emancipation colonies that were established by the British from 1807 onwards the British created a system of 14-year-long apprenticeships for those who were freed from supposedly freed or so-called freed from the holds of slave ships in the Spanish Americas beginning in the 1880s we have here also post-native emancipation which meant that it came with freedom came with the requirement for the freed people to still serve in bondage for a period of time the big shift the big innovation in slave owner reparations comes in 1830 really with beginning in 1833 when the British begin the abolition of slavery across their empire here by 1835 they secure a massive loan from the Rothschild family of 20 million pounds and they pay this 20 million pounds in cash to all the British slave owners across the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean and the British government had to then pay back this loan to those who held its bonds and they paid back this long this huge debt over the course of 180 years requiring British taxpayers and those in the British colonies to also contribute to paying off this debt and this payment continued all the way up until 2015 that's right all the way up until our recent memory the British government had been paying off the debt that it took out in 1835 to compensate to pay reparations to all the slave owners of the British empire this created a new precedent a new gold standard for how slave owners should be paid reparations the French also first of all in 1825 they imposed a huge indemnity on Haiti because Haiti had freed itself during its revolution in 1825 22 million francs of an indemnity were imposed on Haiti and it took the Haitian government until the 1940s in order to pay that debt off this was the beginning of third world debt but then beyond that beginning in 1848 the British sorry the French government paid 126 million francs of reparations to French slave owners very much in the model of what the British had done in the 1830s the Dutch carried on in the same template paying five million guilders in reparations to their enslavers and providing the guarantee of 10 years of apprenticeship of free bondage free bonded labor of the quote unquote freed people after abolition in 1862 take now what happens during the US civil war here in 1865 there is the movement towards a reparations for slavery to the previously enslaved there is a promise that is made that free people would receive land 40 acres of land there is the Freemans bureau that is established and universities like Howard University are also established eventually as all part of a program to in some ways change the system of oppression and to pay a proper reparations in terms of capital transfer to the enslaved but here the Jim Crow system quickly sets in in fact already in 1865 the new president Andrew Johnson annals all of these early reparations projects he reconfiscates the land that had been given to free people and he returns them to the enslavers and then the Jim Crow laws which unfold over the coming decades in fact ensure that the plantation class the plantocracy continues to be paid compensation for the loss of the institution of slavery of the loss of the enslaved during the civil war in Brazil between 1871 and 1888 we have another period of post-1980 emancipation and here the apprenticed enslaved people now supposedly the freed people were to serve in bondage for 31 years in Puerto Rico and in Cuba we have in the 1870s emancipations that provide huge land transfers to enslaved to the enslavers another form of reparations paid to slave owners as well as cash transfers so this all shows you know in a brief overview that you know a historical fact that is all too often not discussed which is the reality that abolition was followed by emancipation processes and that emancipation processes were designed to on the one hand pay compensation huge intergenerational compensation to slave owners and on the other hand to organize the ongoing oppression of the descendants of the enslaved this all leads us to the question about what does it mean for us today and for the reparations movements today so here is just another visualization of the story that I just told you with the different dates of the emancipations across the 19th century all of which paid these reparations to slave owners the history of emancipation then is circular it's a story of repetitions and these repetitions involve a variety of techniques that can compensation to enslavers I've listed them here such as the use of debt the use of the requirement of free labor the payment through cash the payment through land transfers the use of legal systems like Jim Crow of terror terrorization campaigns colonial conquest even as would take place in Africa in the 1870s and the 1880s under the banner of emancipating Africans from the system of African slavery so here emancipations really did reenact the rule of racial property and they extended social bondage forward in time now on the other side of this story we have the history of reparations reparation struggles developed beginning in the very moment that these emancipations these unjust emancipations took place and for me what's most important is to recognize that reparations more than anything are a way of thinking they are a part of the black radical tradition of thought black thinkers articulated ways of resisting the injustice of emancipations and these ways of resisting are what we call the reparations struggle so let me come off my slides here and speak a little bit about the various moments in in some key moments in the reparations tradition and then I'll share some slides with you afterwards and we'll be close to the end of this presentation by then reparation struggles developed beginning in the Americas in places like Boston New York and Philadelphia in and they began in a way that you might not expect with the formation of black churches the New York African society began meeting as early as 1780 in Philadelphia we have the Free African Society beginning in 1878 black voluntary organizations and churches however did not just care for their living members but they sought to redress and to heal the relations with their ancestors this was a form of reparations form of correcting of repairing like the historical process of slavery the work of preserving and repairing relationships with the ancestors of reserving of observing rituals of reverence for the dead was a very important aspect of the black church in New York City AME Mother's Eye and Church at the corner of Leonard Leonard Street and Church Street in 1801 became one of the most important catacombs for emancipated and still enslaved back black people that burial vault in the AME Mother's Eye and Church also importantly served as an important station in the Underground Railroad in the 1780s Ottoba Kogwano a freed African writer from London called for a general reformation of slave-owning societies after slavery ended he insisted that slavery be recognized as a system of robbery and he demanded what he called quote reparations and restitution and he said that this reparations and restitution should include first free education for all those under slavery who had been deprived of the right to read and write also the elimination of afrophobic representations in all corners of public life and the guarantee also of autonomous lands this demand for land was critical for black reparations all the way since the 18 since the 1780s and it did not mean the granting of parcels of land assets alone it meant much more the liberation of black people to nurture their own relationships with each other their own relationships with the earth including their spiritual and ancestral relationships this is what Kogwano said must happen with the guarantee and the deliverance of protection from the ongoing robbery from any ongoing robbery and terror in 1804 reparation struggle propelled the development of the Haitian constitution under Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Dessalines declared in 1804 the sovereignty of the Haitian people from quote any other power in the universe under the name of the empire of Haiti as Haitian historian Jean Casimir has put it the state of Haiti was born into a world that considered its very existence inconceivable unquote although Haiti was denied official entry into quote unquote civilized the civilized community of nations the Haitian people asserted their own autonomy creating small farming peasant communities beyond the framework of the given state system this was called the la coup system and these la coups were joint family farming compounds and they served as places for people to grow crops for people to also grow medicines and then also for people to practice spiritual well to worship and to practice spiritual traditions historian Jean Henry Gonzalez has showed how on these la coups after the Haitian revolution Haitian people began growing not plantation crops which would be sold abroad but now which had which were like sugar which would to be sold abroad but now subsistence crops beans rice millet bananas sweet potatoes manioc yams foods that were for local consumption and also foods that could be marketed across the Caribbean in inter-Caribbean trade beginning in 1811 the reparations movement took a afro solidarity pan-African turn this is when Paul Cuffy embarked on his prosocianic travels from Elizabeth Island in Massachusetts to Sierra Leone to organize the delivery of agricultural and mechanical tools to emancipated Africans who had been relocated to Sierra Leone during the crackdown on the slave trade which began in 1807 here a first instance of seaborn reparation reparationist afro solidarity would inspire many other projects in pan-Africanism over the coming century these later pan-African projects would be led by folks such as Edward Wilmette Leiden Martin Delaney James Africanus Biel Horton as well as Nora Antonio Gordon Emma Beard Delaney and Alice Victoria Kinlock and by the way Alice Victoria Kinlock was the organizer of the first pan-African conference of 1900 important 20th century pan-Africanists would be Amy Jacques Garvey Amy Ashwood Garvey Marcus Mosiah Garvey and then those who were inspired by the Garvey movement and the UNIA such as Queen Mother Audley Moore and Bernie Grant in the United Kingdom who all of them transmitted this long tradition of reparations as a project to repair the relationships across the African diaspora a project in solidarity in afro solidarity here reparationists were reconstructing black affiliations after the break of the plantation of the slave ship of colonialism and they were creating a new sense of the polyrhythms of the black experience and how to be truly part of the African diaspora we must be in relationship with all other parts not just in relationship but in solidarity with all other parts of the diaspora after the emancipation in the 1830s despite the fact that thousands this is in the British Empire that thousands of acres of land across Jamaica changed hands the vast majority of Jamaica's 2.5 million acres still belonged exclusively to the British Crown this forced tens of thousands of free people to quote-unquote steal their freedom to steal also land by squatting on these crown properties despite now the vagrancy laws that were promulgated to push people off free people across the British Caribbean banded together to form new village communities this happened in Jamaica this also happened of course in Guyana with the Guyanese village movement as emancipated black people and soon indentured Asian people also together pooled money to purchase land tracks in common as many as 80 people would come together to buy land title and despite the 1850s legislation to suppress the village movement by 1861 some 67 000 people across Guyana about a third of the total population lived in such villages free villages also spread across Antigua, Saint Vincent, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts, Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands free villages populated by African indentured servants and by freed previously enslaved people became spaces for Cumina practice for Obea practice for mile practice and for the associated Africana healing and divination traditions in 1865 in the wake of the American Civil War black families on the sea island in Georgia and in Odesta Island in South Carolina and in other areas including Davis Bend in Mississippi began small hold farming on lands received through the reparations transfers by union generals as I mentioned earlier um on in 1865 Oliver Otis Howard the director of the bureau of the refuge of refugees freedmen and abandoned lands declared that quote quote all confiscated and abandoned land and other confiscated and abandoned property was to be quote distributed to refugees and freedmen all 768 590 acres of it but the program was shut down by President Andrew Johnson in September 1865 in fact Johnson initiated a massive reparations program again to the erstwhile slave owners according to the reparations tradition such as expressed in the thought of of Cali House of Marcus Garvey of Ella Baker of Jim Foreman of Queen Mother Audley Moore of Imari Obedele of Fannie Lou Hamer massive transfers of land and the guarantee of sovereignty to go along with those land transfers would be needed on a revolutionary and intergenerational scale to black communities in order to dismantle structures of structural racism and oppression and to ground liberated black and indigenous futures in the material basis of freedom which is the land itself reparations struggle therefore names the struggle to transform an entire system of racial oppression not to preserve it under another name it is the movement for systemic regime wide change its fundamental aim is to destroy anti-blackness and as such reparations are precisely the demand for the impossible at least the impossible as seen by the reigning system that we are in a system that is based elementally essentially foundationally on anti-blackness and on the destruction of lack livelihood so having shared all of that let me conclude by showing you a last set of slides that just revisit some of the key points the key moments that I've shared that I've talked about here's an image of Martin Delaney one of the great Afrosolidarity leaders uh Martin Delaney of the United States and the author of the famous novel Blake and the huts of Africa Delaney himself led a movement a project to create links between African North America and Africa and the west coast of Africa in the 1850s and the 1860s I mentioned Edward Blyden who was born in the Caribbean in St. Christopher and became a major political leader and intellectual in Liberia and in Sierra Leone and was a major Pan-Africanist Ana Julia Cooper an American political scientist who argued that there could be no proper end to slavery without a turn to what she called reciprocity the requirement of reciprocity um require and reciprocity being um fundamentally the ensure the the assurance that no group in society could do unto another group um without um without having to be concerned about the consequences uh that itself would suffer in other words reciprocity is the ideal that when I touch you I'm also aware that you are touching me and precisely what slavery was when you think of it is a system of non-reciprocity in which slave owners were able to touch the beings and the lives of the enslaved without being touched in return and that non-reciprocal system in fact continued after slavery because of the injustice of how emancipations took place I mentioned in brief Nora Antonio Gordon who was a spellman trained missionary who served in East Africa and her form of missionization did not involve um bible thumping conversions but rather working closely with um African women uh and supporting their their child rearing child education learning from them sharing stories um working closely in the home uh of African women and creating bonds of solidarity um along gendered lines and I also mentioned Alice Victoria Kinlock uh who was in fact the founder of the first the the leader of the first pan-african conference in London um in eight 1901 to which but W. Du Bois and other many other major black thinkers attended really kindling this movement towards um the pan-african conferences which would continue throughout the 20th century I mentioned Marcus Mosiah Garvey as well as uh Amy Garvey both Amy Jacques and Amy Ashwood Garvey and Marcus Mosiah Garvey inspired by the pan-africanism of the older generation really created a huge international uh movement that spread across the Caribbean across North America and across parts of Africa and demanded uh the sovereignty for all African peoples in the diaspora Queen Mother Audley Moore uh a major reparations activist of the mid 20th century and Fannie Lou Hamer who between 1969 and 1976 established the Freedom Farm Collective in which cotton lands across the seven acres of cotton land across the Mississippi Delta were converted into farms for subsistence crops so that both black and white farmers in the Delta the poor farmers could feed themselves so here we have a very inspiring story about how black people in solidarity pressed their interests um demanded justice uh in the context of failed emancipations they were all reparationists and that's really the bottom line that I want to end my comments with is to say that when we talk about our business in the context of emancipation and its failures what we really should be talking about is the reparations movement in all of its different forms this may include and you can look at the 10-point Caribbean caracom reparations plan this includes the forgiveness of debt of third world debt of the debt that has been unjustly imposed upon Caribbean nations this includes um the uh uh support of education this includes the transfer of land the transfer of money capital of financial capital from the coffers of the descendants of the enslavers to those of the enslaved it also by the way involves the restitution of cultural objects and here I want to briefly mention that um the the that there are many cultural objects that are held in museums across Europe and North America which belong in fact to descendant communities who have suffered the injustice of having them either stolen or looted and this also includes the remains of ancestors the the physical bodily remains of ancestors which are held in museums like the British Museum or in the case of the the the ship called the London which sailed from St. Lucia to the west coast of the United Kingdom in 1796 those remains are held in a depot of the Devon Museum system and it's the case that the activists such as Bernie Grant had been working you know in the 1990s in order to free those ancestral remains to repatriate them to rematriate them to bring them back home those remains still remain um in the same museum vault and so that's just another dimension of what the reparations work that we have before us is reparations is about land it is about capital it is about the it is about debt forgiveness it is about a proper acknowledgement and apology by perpetrating societies something that for example Kogwano-Otoba Kogwano demanded it is about the reparations is about the insistence on a new system of a new way of reciprocity and and justice it is about the restitution of cultural objects it's about all of these different dimensions which are required as the basis for a just future nothing less in a world of anti-blackness we have been taught to accept much much much less and taught that we should be grateful for pittance but in fact what reparations activists have always insisted on is that you do not get freedom in part measure or in fractional amounts freedom has to be cut through cut from the whole cloth and that whole cloth of freedom is in fact what the reparations demand is about and it's for that that we will continue to discuss our business to plan our business to make our demands to organize together and to also stand in solidarity in afro solidarity because when you think of it it is pan-africanism it is afro solidarity that that in some ways is the deep the deep meaning of reparation struggle this radical mode of thought that we have been given by our ancestors and that it is up to us to continue to practice so with that let me end these comments wish you a very reverential and family filled and community filled emancipation day with you and your ancestors and I look forward to hopefully one day seeing this movement this reparations movement taken to its next stage its next stage in this upward spiral we shall I'm sure see that in the coming decades in the coming years and the coming decades thank you very much