4.0
My Face Is Black Is True
ByPublisher Description
Acclaimed historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, demanded reparations for ex-slaves. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House (1861-1928) went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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4.0
“for my class :)”
““If the government had the right to free us, she had a right to make provision for us. And since she did not make it soon after Emancipation, she ought to make it now.”
My Face Is Black Is True
details Callie Guy House’s life, heartbreaking journey and resilient spirit in remaining steadfast in leading the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association — one of the first organizations to campaign for reparations for chattel slavery in the United States. It was not only an awakening step forward for the ancestors in light of that time, it’s a mission that will never cease until fully achieved by us descendants. For that reason, she never failed. She created the spark.
The United States is our homeland through lineage, and the ancestors forcibly built from scratch while generating the country’s wealth (that made it the powerhouse it is) through federal and state-sanctioned domestic slave trading, slave breeding farms (reproductive labor), and other forms of increasing a capitalistic strong arm, leading to the idea of the country mortgaging the ancestors, turning those mortgages into bonds, resulting in the ancestors being the first (human) stocks and bonds sold on Wall Street, for example.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans have experienced the concentration camp extermination in Mississippi known as the Devil's Punchbowl by US troops, businesses and neighborhoods burned and bombed through federal and state sanctions, properties seized (land theft) through eminent domain and turned into things like man-made lakes and bridge pathways, Jim Crow, redlining, domestic terrorism, genocide, stolen intellectual property for decades, inhumane medical experimentations (early gynecology and the likes of having Henrietta Lacks’ cells being taken without consent to aid in (the world’s) medicinal research for everything from AIDS and cancer to the polio vaccine and Covid-19, for example). All of this to generate the wealth of the US government through sanctions, while harming us and stunting/stealing our wealth.
The lineage-based reparations movement for the debt owed to Black Americans continues just as Callie Guy House led. We’re closer than ever and will def succeed in receiving and passing down the owed wealth our ancestors never had a chance to pass down to us descendants instead of poverty and the lack thereof.
SN: NAARC and NCOBRA, which this book mentions, are organizations made up of people with different ethnicities/homelands who want to undermine lineage-based redress for the unconstitutional and harmful “race-based reparations.” That’s yet again stealing wealth. They will never prevail.”
About Mary Frances Berry
Mary Frances Berry was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She received a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Howard University, a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan, and a juris doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School.
Dr. Berry has received many awards for her public service and scholarly activities, among them the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award.
In addition to having been the chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for eleven years, Dr. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history of American law. The author of eleven books, she lives in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Berry has received many awards for her public service and scholarly activities, among them the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award.
In addition to having been the chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for eleven years, Dr. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history of American law. The author of eleven books, she lives in Washington, D.C.
Other books by Mary Frances Berry
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