Nova Scotia has introduced legislation to recognize the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
Minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs Tony Ince tabled the bill today to officially designate Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day.
It would recognize the day in 1834 when the British parliament outlawed the owning, buying and selling of humans as property throughout its colonies.
Last year Joe Biden said African Americans who don’t support him “ain’t black,” but this year the Delaware Democrat is open to reparations for slavery, America’s “original sin,” according to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. A neglected historical account provides enlightenment on slavery’s true origins and its most enduring practitioners.
In 1856, British Army officer John Hanning Speke set out to find the source of the Nile. Speke’s massive Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile documents the African societies he found, and the widespread practice of slavery. “To catch slaves is the first thought of every chief in the interior,” Speke wrote, “Hence fights and slavery impoverish the land.”
White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond says it’s “doable” for the Biden administration to make first-term progress on racial equality, while Congress studies reparations for slavery.
h/t Marvin
