Top Tweets for #BlackCode

The erasure of the Kingdom of Kush, the Malian Empire, the Kingdom of Dahomey, Great Zimbabwe, and dozens of other sophisticated African civilizations from global historical education was not an accidental omission — it was a deliberate intellectual project pursued by European colonial academics who understood that the premise of African inferiority required the elimination of evidence that Africans had built literate, mathematically sophisticated, architecturally advanced, and diplomatically complex civilizations centuries before European contact. The Mali Empire at its peak under Mansa Musa in the early 14th century controlled territory larger than Western Europe, administered a complex trans-Saharan trade network in gold, salt, and manuscripts, and maintained the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, which enrolled an estimated 25,000 students and housed a library containing between 400,000 and 700,000 manuscripts covering mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, and theology. When Mansa Musa performed his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, his caravan included 60,000 people and 100 camels each carrying 136 kilograms of gold. He distributed so much gold during his passage through Egypt that he caused a decade long inflation of gold's value across North Africa and the Middle East, a macroeconomic event documented by Arab historians and economists of the period. Great Zimbabwe, the stone city complex in present day Zimbabwe whose construction required sophisticated engineering knowledge and administrative organization to quarry, transport, and assemble without mortar, was attributed by early European colonial archaeologists to Phoenicians, Arabs, and ancient Israelites in sequence, each attribution motivated by the determination to find any explanation other than the one supported by the archaeological evidence: that it was built by the ancestors of the Shona people who inhabited the region when Europeans arrived. The archaeologist J. Theodore Bent, who conducted the first formal excavation in 1891, was explicitly commissioned by Cecil Rhodes with instructions to find evidence of a non-African origin. The systematic suppression of African historical scholarship extended into the colonial educational apparatus, which ensured that generations of both African and European students received no substantive instruction in pre-colonial African civilization, creating an intellectual vacancy that colonial racial ideology filled with the fiction of a continent without history. #archaeohistories

Most people think slavery only happened in the South... but in 1851 nearly 500 Mormon settlers brought dozens of enslaved people to California, a state where slavery was already illegal, and never told them they were free. 👀 One of those enslaved people was a woman named Biddy Mason who walked 1,700 miles on foot from Mississippi, took her enslaver to court when she finally learned the truth, and died one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles. There is a monument in San Bernardino honoring the men who built this city... but there is nothing honoring the enslaved people who built it?‼️🤔

I was born in a bourgeois community and had some of the better things in life, but I found that there were more people starving than there were people eating, more people that didn't have clothes than did have clothes, and I just happened to be one of the few. So I decided that I wouldn't stop doing what I'm doing until all those people are free. —Fred Hampton