The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same
Since its inception, the English colony, which later becomes the United States, was a place of the haves and have nots.
Mostly the have nots working for one to 2% of the population that control the majority of the new country's wealth,
very much like it is today at Hampton and places like it during the 1700s European indentured servants and enslaved Africans worked side by side. White and black bodies were whipped, ate the same lousy food, wore the same crappy clothing, some cases even escaping together because it was not about your black I'm white. It was more about we are both being oppressed.
The ridges were equal opportunity oppressors. It was more about class than color.
People resisted and fought back, just like today, the powers that be created an illusion of difference based on skin color to create divisions between whites and blacks so they would remain in control. I still today, 1% of the population controls the majority of this country's wealth. Divisions are made based on ethnicity, religion, skin, color and nationality.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fast forward to the 1800s Charles Carn and Ridgeley, Second Master of the Hampton estate, is one of the largest slaveholders and land owners in not only Maryland, but in the United States, he enslaves up to 300 people at any given time, and upon his death, he released some of the enslaved with age stipulations.
A two year old would have to stay if you are 45 years or older, you didn't go free the way he wrote his will, slavery would have never ended.
Destruction of the enslaved families on the Ridgeley plantations is not limited to ages.
Case in point, richly bequeaths a young Phoebe Cummings and her four year old son, Henry, like pieces of furniture to different family members on separate plantations in
in 2018 the dismemberment of black and brown families still goes on.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Baltimore County jail now sits on the very same land that once was owned by a freed African American community from Hampton. It incarcerates the second largest number of black bodies in Maryland and the highest black jail population in the entire United States, the prison pipeline is real, beginning at Hampton to the county jail, all done with the permission of the 13th Amendment.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.
The more things change, the more that some people want them to stay the Same.
Oh,
hold,
low.