While You Are At Work, They Take Care of Your Children

No Child Left Unmedicated
By Phyllis Schlafly (2004)

A plan to subject all children to mental health screening is underway, and the pharmaceutical firms are gearing up for bigger sales of psychotropic drugs. Like most liberal, big-spending ideas, this one was slipped into the law under cover of soft semantics.

Its genesis was the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFCMH), created by President George W. Bush in 2002. The [Commission] recommends “routine and comprehensive” testing and mental health screening for every child in America, including preschoolers. The [Commission] proposes utilizing electronic medical records for mental health interrogation of both children and adults, to search for mental illnesses in school and during routine physical exams.

Book: Dreams Of Africa In Alabama

Dreams of Africa in Alabama; The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
Sylviane A. Diouf, 2007

Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)

Description
In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slavery trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as enslaved.

Book: Ain’t I A Beauty Queen

Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race
Maxine Leeds Craig, 2002

 Description

“Black is Beautiful!” The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro became a veritable icon of the Sixties.

Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities.

Too Much Black 1.1

From Too Much Black
By No Black Pete (2011)

It is what they tell us. It is what they want us to believe. That we can have financial independence that will lead to a better life as we are accepted for who we are and where we are at.

Believing the lie made us outsiders, and forever bumping our heads against the glass walls keeping us out. Like unwanted stepchildren we are kept at bay with empty words and holed pockets.

Ben Hausa Ali – White Playing Hausa With Arabs

THE MEMOIRS OF ABD-ALLAH AL-GHADEMISI OF KANO, 1903-1908.
PART I: THE BRITISH CONQUEST OF KANO
By MUHAMMAD SANI UMAR AND JOHN HUNWICK, in: Sudanic Africa, 7, 1996, 61-96

These native servants are the quintessence of loyalty, and devotion, and as time goes on, I am to find out that without them Nigeria would have been untenable by the white man. – F.P. Crozier, Five Years Hard, London 1932, 72-3.

Introduction
Some time in 1902 a young man named Abd-Allah arrived in Kano, ‘from the north’, presumably from Ghadames. We know nothing of the circumstances of his arrival, or of his ancestry. The document translated below is currently our only source of information on him. In it he describes himself as a ‘student’, but it is not clear in what sense he uses that term. There is no indication that he came to Kano to study, but we know that some years later he was acting as a clerk for his paternal uncles in Kano, who were evidently merchants.

Banneker versus Jefferson

 To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, 19 August 1791

From Benjamin Banneker

Maryland. Baltimore County. Near Ellicotts Lower Mills
August 19th: 1791

Sir

I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom which I take with you on the present occasion; a liberty which Seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished, and dignifyed station in which you Stand; and the almost general prejudice and prepossession which is so prevailent in the world against those of my complexion.

I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of Beings who have long laboured under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt, and1 that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and Scarcely capable of mental endowments.

Review Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures: One official story

By Joanne Laurier, 12 January 2017

Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi, screenplay by Melfi and Allison Schroeder, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly

Hidden Figures
Directed by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures recounts the story of three brilliant African-American female scientists who made extraordinary contributions to NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—in the 1960s. The movie is based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.

The film centers on Katherine Goble Johnson (born 1918), a physicist and mathematician who excelled in computerized celestial navigation for Project Mercury, the first US human spaceflight program (including the flights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn) from 1958 through 1963, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon and the Space Shuttle program. She was also involved in the early plans for a mission to Mars.

Margot Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly CV Oct 2013

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY
US Mailing Address: …
Mex Address: …
http://www.margotlee shetterly.com
US TEL: … • MEX TEL: …

CURRENT PROJECTS
Hidden Figures, narrative nonfiction work in progress. Hidden Figures is the untold history of the African-American women employed as Human Computers by NACA/NASA from the 1940s through the 1960s. (Represented by Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency)

The Human Computers Project. Multimedia platform archiving the history of NACA-NACA’s African-American Human Computers and their significance in the context of the US Space Program, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for Gender Equality. Collaborative work in progress with Prof. Duchess Harris of Macalester College.

SKILLS, ACHIEVEMENTS, RECOGNITION

Bristol Slavery Profits

Profits

The profits that traders and plantation owners made from the slave trade and African labour could be large. Such profits were not necessarily put back into the business. Instead, many chose to spend their money on home comforts and invested in property. By the mid 1700s, many people who lived in Bristol who were involved in the African slave trade or who owned (but did not live on) Caribbean plantations moved out of the central area of Bristol. They moved to areas such as Clifton that were considered then to be ‘leafy suburbs’.

Some traders and plantation owners moved further out of the city to live in the surrounding countryside, adopting the style of the country landowner. Henry Hobhouse for example, from a slave trading family, acquired land at Castle Cary, in nearby Somerset. The Harfords, whose brass factories provided trade goods to the slave traders, bought property in Cardiganshire, in south west Wales. Caleb Dickinson (who owned a Jamaican plantation and traded in sugar in Bristol), purchased King Weston house in Somerton, Somerset. The Helyar family, who also owned Jamaican sugar plantations, owned Coker Court in East Coker near Yeovil, Somerset.

UK Plantation Economy

The plantation economy

Land in the Caribbean islands was cheap, but the costs of setting up a sugar plantation were high. Sir Dalby Thomas in 1690 estimated that a 100 acre plantation on the island of Barbados, with 50 enslaved Africans, seven white indentured servants, sugar mill, boiling works, equipment and livestock would cost £5,625 (over £250,000 at today’s values). To recover these costs, the plantations had to produce enough good quality sugar to pay off debts and mortgages and cover the running costs each year. The owners also wanted a profit. Some families, such as the Pinneys of Nevis in the Caribbean and Bristol, were able to build up a fortune based on land, sugar producing and trading.

Enslaved people from Africa were the basis of these sugar fortunes. John Pinney, a plantation owner on the island of Nevis, wrote in the 1760s to his managers “a word respecting the care of my slaves and stock [animals] – your own good sense must tell you they are the sinews of a Plantation and must claim your particular care and attention”. He also wrote that “it is impossible for a Man to make sugar without the assistance of Negroes as to make bricks without straw”.

Bristol Business

Spain’s Slavery Contract
From Discovering Bristol [edited]

Spain was building its empire in the [re]discovered lands of the Americas. It needed people to work in the mines and on the plantations that were developing. At first, the local people, AmerIndians, were used as free labour. They had been in the Americas long before the Spanish and other Europeans arrived. The AmerIndians were enslaved and forced to work by the newcomers. But, the AmerIndian population decreased rapidly after the Europeans [started exploiting and murdering them]. The Europeans came with swords and guns, as well as dogs and horses. The AmerIndians had bows and arrows and spears, and were no match for the newcomers. The Europeans brought diseases such as measles and the flu. The AmerIndians were not used to these new diseases, and they died in great numbers.

In 1500, it is estimated that there were about 50 million AmerIndians in the Americas. By 1600, after 100 years of European warfare, disease and forced labour, this number had been reduced to about 8 million.