Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation’s story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn’t have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.
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In 1667 those Virginia lawmakers who insisted that baptism did not free an enslaved person also put themselves in bondage to a racialized corruption of Christianity. A recovery of the earthly and spiritual equality of all people, both in theory and in practice, is the only way to redeem religion from racism.
1669–1674
THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY
David A. Love
In November 1998, I first visited Liverpool while working as a human rights campaigner and a spokesperson for Amnesty International UK. During my journeys to this English port city, I experienced the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in unexpected ways.
I encountered Black Brits whose ancestors had arrived in England hundreds of years earlier. They reminded me of the British role in the triangular trade of Black people and goods across West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and of the Middle Passage, which served as an underwater resting place for millions of souls who succumbed to the hellish journey warehoused in slave ship dungeons.
What struck me most about Liverpool was the extent to which the city visibly and tangibly benefited from the slave trade. Evidence of the wealth amassed from human trafficking is found in much of the city’s architecture. African heads and figures are carved into buildings and adorn such structures as the town hall and the Cunard Building. The entrance to the Martins Bank (Barclays) Building—designed by architect Herbert Rowse—features a relief by sculptor George Herbert Tyson Smith of two African boys shackled at the neck and ankles and carrying bags of money. It is “a reminder that Liverpool was built by slavers’ money and that its bankers grew fat off the whipped backs of Africans when they were bankrolling cargoes of strange fruit bound for the Americas.”
The enslavement of human beings amounts to a grave violation of human rights. The institution of slavery is a sin, a form of genocide, and a system of racial oppression, exploitation, and intergenerational theft that robs people of their freedom of movement, expression, and self-determination. It endeavors to deny people their dignity and humanity, among other things. From the vantage point of the monarch, the oligarch, the slave trader, or the banker, however, human trafficking is first and foremost a for-profit endeavor, a business enterprise designed to enrich its partners and shareholders. Moreover, the profit motive justifies the abuses, and the attendant systems of racial oppression and white supremacy that certainly must follow.
Responsible for transporting more African people to the Americas than any other entity, the Royal African Company (RAC) of England was the most important institution involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Through this company, England developed its infrastructure of human trafficking and supplied Africans to meet the labor demands of the lucrative Caribbean sugar plantations. Between 1673 and 1683, England’s share of the slave trade increased from 33 percent to three-quarters of the market—rendering the nation the global leader of the slave trade at the expense of the Dutch and the French. A precursor to British imperialism and colonialism, the trading company expanded England’s role in the African continent, exploiting the gold and later the human resources on the West Coast in Gambia and Ghana.
The RAC was a business deal and a corporate monopoly designed to financially enrich the royal Stuart family—specifically King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York, who later became King James II—and to allow them independence from Parliament. Originally known as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, the company was granted a monopoly on the shipment of slaves to the Caribbean under the Navigation Act of 1660, which allowed only English-owned ships to enter colonial ports. Reorganized under a royal charter in 1672, the renamed Royal African Company was granted a legal monopoly on the British slave trade between the African continent and the West Indies and “had the whole, entire and only trade for buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for or with any Negroes, slaves, goods, wares, merchandise whatsoever.” It was a joint stock company; its investors purchased shares and received returns on those shares. These stockholders elected a governor who was a member of the royal family, a subgovernor, deputy governor, and twenty-four assistants.
In addition to exporting slaves, the company also monopolized the trade in gold, ivory, malagueta pepper, and redwood dye. The company was authorized to declare martial law and amass troops, to establish plantations, forts, and factories, and to wage war or make peace with any non-Christian nation. RAC military forts existed across five thousand miles of coastline from Cape Salé in Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. West Africans transported to the Caribbean and Virginia were branded on their chest with the company’s initials.
A court on the West African coast was authorized to hear mercantile cases and matters involving the seizure of English interlopers who attempted to operate in violation of the company monopoly. In addition, the crown was entitled to claim two-thirds of the gold the company obtained, upon paying two-thirds of the mining expenses.
A royal proclamation addressed to John Leverett, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1674, granted the RAC exclusive rights to travel from America to Africa for the purposes of trade, and it forbade others from carrying “Negro Servants, Gold, Elephants teeth, or any other goods and merchandise.”
Under the RAC, the slave trade brought considerable wealth to Britain and its cities, particularly the commercial center of London and the major trading ports of Liverpool and Bristol, where the slave ships originated. Ships from Liverpool carried 1.5 million enslaved Africans, or half of the human cargo kidnapped and transported by Britain.
While the RAC and the transatlantic slave trade are things of centuries past, the spirit they embody—of unbridled capitalism and monopolistic business schemes designed to monetize human suffering and reap corporate profits from a free and captive labor force—did not die with the slave trade. After all, section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”—provides a loophole allowing for enslavement to continue.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery ended in name only, as the convict lease system allowed states to lease inmates to planters and industrialists to work on plantations, railroads, and coal mines in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Like slavery, convict leasing was highly profitable and cheap, requiring little capital investment and no expenditures for the healthcare of convicts, who died off and were buried in secret graveyards. Like the slave trade and the Royal African Company, the Jim Crow system of economic exploitation was perfectly legal. The convict lease system was made possible by the Black Codes, which were like vagrancy laws that criminalized minor offenses such as loitering, allowing Black people to be swept up and thrown into chain gangs.