The Color of History, and the Color of Money

If you study currency around the world you'll find that countries tend to depict the images of their economic strength on paper, and coins. In England, the monarchy is pictured on British money as a symbol of power. In Iran, you'll see pictures of agricultural production, and so on. The point is that countries are proud of the resources that drive their economies.

In the early 1800's, American cotton production was an integral part of the  economy, and the images of enslaved Africans were shown, primarily, on Confederate and Southern currency. The images of slave labor validate the contribution of African Americans to the economy, overall .  

The picture below is graphic artist John W. Jones', "Slave Carrying Cotton", which is shown on 21 different bills of currency. For example, the bill below is from Louisiana. In all, there are 126 such slave images on Confederate and Southern bills.

                                             

The images are from Mr. Jones' book, Confederate Currency: The Color of Money. He discovered them, while working as a graphic artist, when one of his customers asked him to enlarge a bank note

Poet George Moses Horton, first to Protest His Enslavement in Print

Born in 1797, and called the "Black Bard of North Carolina",
poet & author, George Moses Horton was an entrepreneur as much as he was a writer. Although enslaved, he earned enough money selling his writings to buy his freedom, but his "owner" would not allow it. Horton was too valuable an employee to the plantation owner to be set free, a situation that was not uncommon.

Horton left no doubt, however, about his feelings towards slavery. Here is

Give Thanks to The "Real McCoy", and Many Other Black Inventors

Black Canadian-American engineer/inventor Elijah McCoy (1844-1929), a free Black man, had fifty-seven US patents to his name. Most notably, he invented an automatic lubrication system for the steam engines of locomotives and ships that allowed the engines to run for longer periods of time. Previously, an engine's metal parts would over heat, so the engine had to be stopped, allowed to cool down and lubricated again before being put back into use. This was a huge waste of time, and money.

To be sure, there were similar mechanisms in wide use to address the problem of metal engine parts overheating. But, none of them worked as well as McCoy's. These lubricating systems were a boon for the railroads because they allowed trains to run faster without having to be stopped and cooled down. When railroad engineers wanted parts for lubricating their engines they would ask for

Historic Stagville: DNA in the Brickwork

I visited Stagville Plantation, twenty miles north of Durham, NC, about ten years ago. On the eve of the Civil War, it had been one of the largest plantations in the Antebellum South. In 1977 it opened as a museum under the auspices of the State of North Carolina, Division of Historic Sites.

You may have to steel yourself the first time you visit a plantation where your ancestors may have been held in bondage, tortured, murdered, or worked to death. Many myths, and outright lies, have been used to describe what happened in such places. However, the courage, ingenuity and determination required to survive during slavery is the stuff of legend. Enslaved Africans weren't supposed to have those qualities, which is probably why this part of history has never been taught in American schools. 

Stagville had approximately 900 enslaved Africans, working almost