by BASHIR MUHAMMAD AKINYELE
“White folk’s dreams of capitalism and democracy in the Americas came at the expense of the stealing of Native American lands and the forced servitude of Black people.”
The Broadway show is a fiction and bamboozlement: Hamilton was a depraved enslaver of people, just like most of the Founders of the White Settler State.
“We always want to refashion the Founders to be a mirror for us. My job as a historian is to dislodge misconceptions, not to entertain my students and not to make people feel comfortable. That’s what good history does.” — Nancy Isenberg, Professor of American history at Louisiana State University
“I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat, or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism, we see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don’t see any American dream; we’ve experienced only the American nightmare. We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy; we’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.” — Malcolm X (Omowale El Hajj Malik El Shabazz)
Folks may have to cancel their tickets to Broadway’s hit play called Hamilton in New York City. And the calls for a Black agenda centered on reparations could grow louder in America from Afrikan American community activists. In an article published in the Smithsonianmagazine on November 10, 2020, David Kindy interviews the researcher who has uncovered information on Alexander Hamilton’s involvement in the slave trade. Hamilton is a United States founding father. He has been portrayed by many “credible” historians as an abolitionist. However, progressive historians have counteracted that argument. They say Alexander Hamilton enslaved Black people. Some progressive historians have even argued for many years that Hamilton is at fault for helping to create the constitutional root origins for American slavery, and additionally, participated in slavery. These progressive historians say he did nothing to oppose arguments from other founding fathers for their racist legal support of slavery when the US Constitution formed in 1787. Whatever the case may be, it is an actual fact that the US founding fathers established American constitutional protections for the enslavement of Black people. Based on factual history, many of the founding fathers were slave-masters. And another intellectual has come forward to reveal that Alexander Hamilton was also a slave-master. The scholar’s named is Jessie Serfilippi. In the interview, Ms. Serfilippi tells journalist Kindy that she has documented concrete evidence that shows Alexander Hamilton enslaved Black people in America.
“It is an actual fact that the US founding fathers established American constitutional protections for the enslavement of Black people.”
Kindy writes, “For Jessie Serfilippi, it was an eye-opening moment. As she worked at her computer, she had to keep checking to make sure what she was seeing was real: irrefutable evidence that Alexander Hamilton—the founding father depicted by many historians and even on Broadway as an abolitionist—enslaved other humans.
“I went over that thing so many times, I just had to be sure,” recalls Serfilippi, adding, “I went in to this with the intention of learning about Hamilton’s connection to slavery. Would I find instances of him enslaving people? I did.”
In the document, several line items indicate that Hamilton purchased enslaved labor for his own household. While antithetical to the popular image of the founding father, that reference has reinforced the view held by a growing cadre of historians that Hamilton did actively engage in enslaving people.
Black Agenda Report for more