Contributing failures in life to slavery is a popular relief mechanism, it is a fact that all people of African descent in America are not desendents of slaves. It is also popular for Blacks to blame the Jews for their economic deprivation; there were free blacks in the new world before the Jews arrived in 1634, when a small band of twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New York.
In 1644, a group of eleven blacks were given acreages comprising what is now New York's Greenwich Village...and remained so for the next 200 years. In Dorchester, Massachuesetts,...'Boston Ken' owned a hundred acres of farmland in Guilford, Vermont, and received equal shares in all six divisions of the township. They became wealthy raising Apples, corn, wheat, rice and tobacco.
Oppression began to rear its ugly head when whites figured out that these prosperous black men may becomme an economic threat to the white establishment and white power. The white majority began making and passing laws to limit the use of the product, artisans, which impacted their way of life and the progress for back people. They would not be deterred. In 1736, Emanuel Manna Bernoon and his wife Mary, opened an Oyster Bar in Providence Rhode Island. Duchess Quanino opened a catering business. During this time , blacks were founding fathers such as Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a fur trapper who founded Chicago: and the twenty-six men and women who help to found Los Angeles Ca.; Marie Rita Valdez, a great grand daughter of one of these founders who owned the land that is now Beverly Hills, then known as Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas; Robert Bogle, was the most sought after event planner by 1810. He was the first to advocate the orgaanization of domestic service.... Everybody who was anybody, white or black, and eho had the money, sought the expertise and signature of Bogle.
All over the eastern seaboard, former slaves, and Free Blacks were making their mark and becoming wealthy. They did not sit back and wait for 'George to do it'; He took the bull by the horns and carved his niche in the emerging America...The real American Dream.
There were wealthy Free Blacks in the South as well. Black planter, Cyprian Ricard owned a Louisiana plantation with $225,000 and 91 black slaves. In 1840, there were at least eight black brokers in New Orleans, who dealt with cotton futures, and commercial banking. John C. Stanley...accumulated proberty worth $40,000. By 1853, it was estimated that Blacks owned property worth $1,000,000 and had invested $839,000 in businesses in and around New York City. In Philadelphia, they had invested $800,000 in realestate by 1856.
WHAT HAPPENED?
---Certain People...Birmingham
Posted By: Thomasena Martin-Johnson
Friday, August 24th 2012 at 9:14PM
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