The Myth of Reparations & How Blacks Owned Black Slaves in America

Brannon Howse:  Let me ask you about racial reparations.  There’s a lot of talk in liberal groups like The Gospel Coalition.  They’re openly now writing articles on The Gospel Coalition website calling for reparations.  What are your thoughts on that?

Mychal Massie:  If they were sincere, they would call on the Muslims for the reparations, because it as the Muslims who were buying – and I should say they would also insist that modern-day Benin and Ghana, which is – which was, in times past, the Ashanti tribes and the Dahomey tribes that were catching other Africans, selling them to Muslims, who then sold them to Portuguese and sold them to the United States – to people in America.  So, if they want reparations, let ‘em go there.  None of them ask the Muslims for – I mean they’ve got the oil money.

Bill Warner: The more you study Islam, the more you realize that the history we teach ourselves has been artificially edited in order to remove the mention of Islam from it.  I’m gonna give you an example today on the study of slavery.  The story we’re told about slavery in America is that evil white men on wooden ships got slaves off the coast of Africa and then brought them here to America and sold them.  Well, there’s some truth to this, but it leaves out important parts.  How did the slaves get into the slave pens, because the captains of the ship didn’t capture them?  Instead, they handed over money and received a bill of sale and an invoice.  How did all this take place?

Well, the slaves were brought deep from the heart of Africa.  They weren’t taken from the coast; they were brought to the coast in order to be sold.  There was a book written, David Livingstone.  In the year 1888, David Livingstone was an abolitionist missionary who was in Central Africa, and he recorded what this process of taking slaves was like.  And I’d like to read you some of the captions, because it gives an almost photographic image of what was going on with the taking of slaves.

We had a long discussion about the slave trade.  The Arabs have told the chief that our own object in capturing slaves is to get them into our possession and make them of our own religion.

And what was our own religion?  Well, our own religion is Islam, but notice again they don’t mention it.

The evils we have seen, the skulls, the ruined villages, the numbers who perish on the way to the coast and the sea, the wholesale murders committed by the Waiyau [who were allies with the Muslims] to build up Arab villages elsewhere.

So, why are they capturing these people?  Not only to convert them to Islam, but in order to get the money, the wealth so they can take it back to their villages.

The strangest disease I have seen in this country really seems to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.  They ascribed their pain to their heart.  It really seems that broken heart is the reason that they die.

The Arabs would often promise a present to the villagers if they would act as a guide to some distant point.  But as soon as they were far enough away from their friends, they were seized and pinned into slave-sticks, or yokes, from which there was no escape.

So, here we see the brutal process in which slaves are manufactured to the practice of jihad against the non-Muslim.  But there’s another aspect to this slave trade.  Muslims are supposed to capture non-Muslims – kafirs – and make slaves of them.  But there’s a large body of Sharia law cases in which black African Muslims complain in courts that the Muslim slave traders will take black African Muslims if they can’t find kafirs.

So, we do have, once you’re running the slave business, you may not supposed to be to capture your own, but in order to stay in business, you will do so.  Now remember, not only do the Muslims run the slave trade on the west coast of Africa, they also ran it on the Mediterranean coast and the east coast.

So, the missing part of the story of slavery in American is this: it was Muslim jihadists who captured the Africans to bring them to sell to the white men on the wooden ship in order they could come to America.  And this is really odd, because when Muslims talk to black Americans, they tell them that Islam is a religion of the black man, whereas Christianity is the religion of the white man.  And yet we can see here that it was Africans being captured by Muslim jihadist slave traders who started the whole process going.

Mychal Massie:  America had slavery, yes.  Slavery was a – was a dehumanizing condition.  But every people in every country in the world have been slaves or engaged in slavery at some point in time.  The Israelites were slaves in Egypt for 400 years before Moses.  Rome – they were slaves and under conquest for – what?  – 300 years.  The white families that had slaves had three to five slaves, and they worked together.

Booker T.  Washington, in his book Up from Slavery, wrote that many of the slaves would stay on after slavery was ended because they felt sorry for their masters who couldn’t take care of themselves, and they needed help to provide.

America owes no one anything but an opportunity.  And we have an opportunity here.  Every man, woman, and child has an opportunity here.  And to not take advantage of that opportunity, to wait for someone to give you something instead of going out for yourself, well in the ad – in the mantra that you hear to that is, “Well, they have to be taught.  Someone has to tell them.”  Well, you don’t need help to teach to shoot basketball.  Education has to be the key.  And when you go to school, you’re not going to school to learn Afrocentric – indulge in Afrocentric curriculums.  You’re not going to get a job in corporate America when you majored in Black Studies.  I’m not even sure what that is, but I know this much, it’s not an employable – it’s not an employable degree.

Reparations – what is it going – what will it accomplish?  And what – and what part of the reparations will the black slave owners have to – will they be assessed for?  Because the – there were black slave owners.  As a matter of fact, Ellison was one of the most prolific slave breeders in South Carolina.  He owned some 900 acres of land.  He owned businesses.

Anderson Burns:  The center of plantation country, the wealthiest area of South Carolina.  He changed his name.  April was now known as William Ellison, the name of his former white owner.  His gin business prospered.  He bought this home, hundreds of acres of land, and eventually 68 slaves to work that land.

Granger McCoy now lives in the Ellison home and says he often finds old cotton gin blades.  What do the Ellisons say when they come?

Granger McCoy:  They’re looking for the home place.

Anderson Burns:  All descendants of what many of us thought an impossible oxymoron, a black slave owner.

Granger McCoy:  I had a black ophthalmologist come through here – Ellison – and we sat on this couch right here.  And his great-great-granddaddy owned 68 slaves.  And here I am, white over here, and my great-great-granddaddy didn’t own any slaves.  And it was like a – somebody blew a dog whistle in a kennel.  Everybody just kind of turned the head, not knowing how to handle all this.

Female:  History tumbles you.

Anderson Burns:  And what little we can learn about Ellison as a slave owner isn’t pretty.  The book Black Masters chronicles Ellison’s life in the antebellum South and suggests that his slaves were the worst fed and clothed of any in Stateburg.  It also suggests that Ellison was a slave breeder, selling off infant girls, a practice even some white owners found cruel.

Whatever the case, Ellison certainly had a good relationship with other white aristocracy.  This contract shows that Ellison didn’t just buy a home in wealthy Stateburg; he bought it directly from former Governor Stephen Miller, a governor and former slave trading property.

He was the wealthiest black man in South Carolina, the fourth wealthiest in the South, wealthier than more than 90 percent of whites.  For Hidden Columbia, Anderson Burns, ABC Columbia News.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr:  You have all of this in the South.  You have the most prosperous slave plantation in the history of America was in Louisiana, and it was owned and operated by blacks.  But to cover up that, they will say, “Well, they bought – they bought others out of slavery.”  No they didn’t.  They bought slaves, kept them in slavery, and had ‘em working on their sugar plantations.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr: Do you know in 1860 census, there were 440,000 – about – free Negroes.  I mentioned that earlier.  More than half lived in the states that were the Confederacy, and the border states where slavery was free.  And they stayed there, ladies and gentlemen, unmolested, including my family, in eastern West Virginia.  They stayed there because that’s where they had their family, and that’s where they had their property.  Remember, their property was – they had to be given property in Virginia and many of these other southern states.  What are they gonna do, go to New York?  Live in Harlem?  Hang out and listen to jazz with Dizzy?  You know, Charlie Parker?  They stayed where they were raised.  And many of them – this is the worst – this is the worst – the dirtiest secret in African-American history is that a surprisingly high percentage of the free Negroes in the South owned slaves themselves.  And some of them owned – we explain it away by saying, “Oh, but they only owned their mother, or they only owned...”  Yeah, they owned their mother, they owned their sister, they owned their wife, and they owned some other workers, too.

A great – a surprisingly high number owned workers who they did not liberate throughout the South.  It’s – there were enough black free Negroes who supported the Confederacy that they voluntarily formed a regiment in the state of North Carolina to fight for the Confederacy.  And black Confederate troops are featured on the cover of Harper’s Weekly in 1863.

We have our own mythmakers in the African-American historical establishment.  All the Egyptians were – looked like Michael Jordan.  All our people were black gods and kings.  You know?  We were not complicitous in the slave trade.

There wouldn’t be a slave trade – Africans sold other Africans to white people.  That was the slave trade.  That’s the first thing we honestly have to admit.  It was black kingdoms – like Queen Nzinga’s kingdom in Angola – what’s now Angola.  Ghana, Dahomey.  They grew rich from the slave trade, selling other Africans.  They would go wage wars just to sell other black people to white people.

This is something we’ve been so ashamed about; we pretend that it’s not true.  It is the nasty, dirty secret of African-American history.  We are just as corrupt and despicable as any other people.  And if we have the right to oppress, we will oppress just like the white man oppressed us.  That is human nature; unfortunately, that’s just the way it is.  And the only way to overcome that is to be honest about it – it’s to be honest about it, admit the truth, and then all try to do better.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr:  I did my first series on the African.  I have a new series that will be out in February on Africa.  I talk about the African role in the slave trade.  But this is like saying that your tie is crimson.  Every scholar knows this.  Ninety percent – no one disputes this figure – of all the slave ships that crossed the ocean were captured by Africans, sold along the coast to white people called factors, and then shipped.

Male 6:  Right.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr:  It was a business.  And there were Africans who grew rich, and they were African elites, merchants who grew rich on the slave trade.  But no scholar doubted that.  But when I revealed that in 1998, people – they said, “How could you do that?  You’ve revealed –” No one said that I was wrong.  They said, “You told our deep, dirty secret.”

Male 6:  Right, right.

Mychal Massie:  America had slavery, but America is the only nation in the world that had the good sense and decency to abolish it.  Reparation isn’t going to accomplish anything.  We have reparations.  We have free education.  We have the ability to go to college, not on skin color Affirmative Action, but because you’ve earned the right to be there.  Your grades are such.  “Well, they come from schools that are poor.”  Well, you know, let’s talk about that.  Those schools are being headed and taught by black people.  In Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago – it’s not the white teacher there.  You’ve got blacks that are in these schools.  But people do not want to look at this clearly.

And when you talk about reparations – again, I’m being reiterative, what do you hope to gain for it?  And they’re – the number I heard thrown around was something like $6 trillion, if I recall.  Well, who’s going to pay that?  And how are you going to parse that out?  I was never a slave.  My mother wasn’t a slave.  My grandmother wasn’t a slave.  My great-grandmother was.  So, do I get something because of her?