Guyana Village Movement and U.S Black Wall Street- a century after for Black Wall St.
Africans in the New World are made to feel they must carry the burden of having to prove their worth because they are often accused by others of being lazy and unambitious. But were their stories to be truthfully told they would reveal to the contrary and bring to the surface the various acts of sabotage to hinder the determination of Africans to thrive in post slavery societies.
Slavery for Africans in the New World was brutal and inhumane. Slaves were treated as property (chattel) to be sold, violated, and discarded at the whims and fancy of his ‘owners.’ The enslaved worked and lived under arduous conditions, and their labour exploited for free. This form of slavery lasted for centuries. With emancipation in Guyana (1838) and United States (1862) freed Africans set about creating a life and economy for themselves independent of their former masters.
In Guyana, plantations were being bought out by the freed and converted into villages. In less than 50 years after British Emancipation Africans could have boasted about purchasing numerous plantations on the coastlands and establishing a Village Movement and Economy not seen in this part of the New World. But the acquisition of the new wealth created envy by the former slave owners who engaged in many devious acts to undermine the African economy. Lands were deliberately flooded to destroy the crops and livestock of the freed, undermining economic independence to force them back to work on the plantations.
On May 31 and June 1,1921, a white mob looted, burned and killed Africans in Tulsa. Last week Tuesday (June 1) President Joe Biden, observing the centenary of the massacre, said, “only with truth can come healing” and that “hell was unleashed, literal hell was unleashed.”
Watch the documentaries recounting this American tragedy.
