By Aswad Walker
Congressman Al Green and Senator Elizabeth Warren, along with a host of other national elected officials, joined together in a call for this nation to provide at least a symbolic gesture of honor and acknowledgment to the millions of Black people whose stolen labor and exploited genius allowed America to become a global superpower while simultaneously facilitating the economic and political rise of countless European nations.
U.S. senators Corey Booker (New Jersey), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland), Alex Padilla (California), and 63 members of the U.S. House added their names. Along with Green’s and Warren’s to a collaborative letter addressed to President Joe Biden requesting that he grant a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to the nation’s economic foundational mothers and fathers.
HISTORIC REQUEST
The request is being heralded as a historic joint endeavor to recognize the profound and enduring contribution of the American enslaved to the economic foundation of the United States.
Countless scholars agree, including author, commentator and economist Michael Harriot in his book “Black AF: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America,” that without the forced and stolen labor and genius of enslaved persons who brought their expertise in rice cultivation, engineering, animal husbandry and other skills to develop the crops and industries the hapless “pilgrims” and their descendants lacked the know-how to do for themselves, America as we know it today would not exist.
Scholar Shawn Rochester, in his book even put a dollar figure to the labor forcefully and brutally stolen of enslaved Blacks for 246 years.
“The value of labor extracted, stolen from Blacks can be estimated at a value between $24 trillion and $97 trillion,” said Rochester, who takes the rounded average of those figures ($50 trillion) in his calculations.
Rochester also points out that in 1860 the value of the enslaved (i.e. their literal bodies and the brains, creativity and brawn attached to them) was 48% of the total wealth of the South, and worth more than all of America’s major industries combined.
“The value of four million enslaved Africans in terms of wealth was $15.5 trillion, while in terms of GDP was about $28 trillion. The average of these two valuations is $22 trillion,” said Rochester.
ENSLAVED BLACKS BUILT AMERICA
These figures don’t even include the labor forced and stolen from Blacks in America via sharecropping, convict leasing and the labor extracted from persons convicted of crimes to this day that the 13th Amendment allows for because for the imprisoned, slavery, according to the U.S. Constitution.
Green and Warren emphasized the vital role the enslaved played in shaping the economic foundation of the U.S.
“These notable individuals contributed centuries of labor by planting and harvesting crops, constructing critical roads and bridges, as well as providing the groundwork for lucrative industries such as cotton and tobacco. Their collective efforts propelled the U.S. to the global economic dominance it enjoys today,” stated the letter to Biden.
NATIONAL SLAVERY REMEMBRANCE DAY
Green has also been pushing to get Congress to make Aug. 20 the annual observance of National Slavery Remembrance Day. On Aug. 19, 2023, Green hosted the 2nd Annual Slavery Remembrance Legislative Update and Commemorative Breakfast at the Wyndham Hotel (8686 Kirby Dr., Houston, TX 77054), where he provided attendees with the latest news on where Green’s legislation stood.
“As a nation, we must acknowledge the horrors of slavery and legislate a future that upholds equality and justice for all,” said Green at the event. “The U.S. currently has remembrance days for the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. But at the moment, it does not have an official day of remembrance to honor the millions of African persons who were abducted and shipped to the Americas to be sold as property as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade.”
On Aug. 20, 2022, Biden marked the commemoration of Slavery Remembrance Day with a statement acknowledging the repercussions of slavery, the nation’s seminal sin. Green believes a Presidential Medal of Freedom would be a further, monumental recognition of the immense contributions of the American enslaved and a transformation of our historical narrative.
“While this does not cure all of the horrors of slavery, the granting of this medal of freedom would recognize the injustices imposed upon the enslaved, in the form of the denial of the freedom that all human beings earn by birthright,” said Green.
