Blacks Who Owned Slaves ... Their Families Need To Cut Some 'Reparations Checks' ... Reparations Checks ... Right???
"Based on historical records, determining a definitive "top 10" list of Black slave owners ranked by the number of people they enslaved is difficult. Census data varied, and many of the most prominent individuals are known for their wealth and social standing rather than for holding a precise numerical rank.
However, the most frequently cited Black slave owners who held a significant number of enslaved people include:
William Ellison Jr. (c. 1790–1861)
A former slave in South Carolina who became a successful cotton-gin manufacturer and planter. By 1860, he owned 63 slaves and over 900 acres of land . He is often cited as one of the largest Black slaveholders in the state.
Antoine Dubuclet (1810–1887).
A free Black sugar planter in Louisiana. He inherited a plantation and expanded it significantly; by 1860, he owned over 100 slaves and was considered one of the wealthiest Black slave owners in the state .
The Metoyer Family (led by Marie Thérèse Metoyer, 1742–1816).
A prominent family of free people of color in Louisiana. By 1830, the family collectively owned 287 slaves, making them one of the largest slave-owning families in their parish .
Widow C. Richards and Son P.C. Richards.
In 1860, this family operated a large sugar plantation in Louisiana and owned 152 slaves, which was the highest number owned by any Black slaveholder in the state that year .
Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry
Wealthy Black slave owners in South Carolina. In 1830, they were recorded as owning 84 slaves each, for a combined total of 168.
The Pendarvis Family.
A prominent family in South Carolina during the 1730s. They owned the largest rice plantations in the region and held over 123 slaves.
Richard Edward Dereef (1798–1876).
A former slave in South Carolina who became a lumber trader and politician. He owned up to 40 slaves, all of whom were noted to have a darker skin complexion.
A Note on the Context of Black Slave Ownership
It's important to understand the complex and varied circumstances behind Black slave ownership, as it differed greatly from the system of chattel slavery enforced by white slaveholders.
The Scale Was Small
In 1830, for example, there were 3,775 free Black people who owned slaves, but they held a total of just 12,700 enslaved people. In contrast, white slaveholders owned over 2 million. The vast majority of Black slave owners held only one or two slaves, often for very specific reasons.
A Means of Protecting Family:
A common practice was for a free Black person to legally "own" their spouse or children who were still enslaved. This was often a loophole to keep families together in a system that did not legally recognize their familial bonds and made manumission (the act of freeing a slave) extremely difficult .
Social and Economic Ambiguity:
Many successful Black slave owners, like William Ellison, were of mixed race and occupied a complex social position. While they achieved economic success, they were still subject to racial discrimination and did not enjoy the same legal protections as white citizens . Their ownership of slaves was, in some cases, a way to navigate a society built on a racial hierarchy for economic survival.
I hope this information provides a clearer picture of this complex historical topic."
#Slaves #Slavery #History #Blacks #African Americans
Hamilton Brown, from Co Antrim, was paid equivalent of €11m in compensation by British government to free slaves after ban
What Is The History Of Kamala Harris' Grandfather Owning Slaves?
The Chains We Carry: Kamala Harris, Hamilton Brown, and the Abolitionist Imperative
Recent discussions about Vice President Kamala Harris’s possible descent from Hamilton Brown, a notorious Irish slave owner in Jamaica, have sparked political controversy. For some, the revelation is framed as hypocrisy or a “deep, dark secret” meant to undermine her identity as a Black woman. For others, it is simply a genealogical curiosity. But from an abolitionist perspective one that seeks not only the end of chattel slavery’s legacy but also the dismantling of the ideological frameworks that sustained it this conversation offers something far more important than political ammunition.
It offers a mirror.
The Story, as It Stands
The claim rests on an essay written in 2019 by Kamala Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, a Stanford economist born in Jamaica. In it, he traced his lineage to his paternal grandmother, Christiana Brown, whom he described as a descendant of Hamilton Brown, the founder of Brown’s Town, Jamaica . Hamilton Brown, born in County Antrim, Ireland, around 1776, emigrated to Jamaica as a teenager and became a wealthy planter and enslaver. Historical records indicate he owned at least 121 enslaved people in 1826 and traveled to London to lobby against abolition. When Britain finally outlawed slavery in 1834, Brown received over £12,000 in compensation more than $12 million in today’s currency for the 1,200 enslaved people working his plantations .
However, it is critical to note that the genealogical link remains unproven. Snopes rates the claim as “unproven” due to conflicting records and a lack of definitive documentation. Leading genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who traced the Irish roots of both Joe Biden and Barack Obama, states plainly: “There is no paper trail proof at all”. The connection relies largely on family lore and the prevalence of the Brown surname in the region.
But whether Kamala Harris is biologically descended from Hamilton Brown is, from an abolitionist standpoint, almost beside the point. The deeper truth this controversy illuminates is far more uncomfortable and far more universal.
The System, Not the Individual
Abolitionism is not merely the historical movement that ended chattel slavery in the British Empire and the United States. As a living framework, it demands that we confront the structural violence of racial capitalism and its enduring afterlives. From this perspective, fixating on whether a specific politician does or does not carry the DNA of a specific enslaver is a distraction one that plays into the very logic abolitionism seeks to undo.
Why? Because the discourse of individual culpability suggests that the evil of slavery resides in singular “bad actors” like Hamilton Brown. It implies that if we can distance ourselves from them if we can prove we are not their descendants we are somehow untainted. This is a comforting fiction. The reality, as abolitionists understand, is that slavery was not a collection of individual moral failings but a global economic system. It built the modern world. Its profits financed banks, universities, and industries on both sides of the Atlantic. Its logic of racial hierarchy continues to shape policing, housing, healthcare, and economic inequality today.
We are all living in the house that slavery built. Whether our ancestors were enslaved or enslavers or, as in the case of most Black descendants of the Caribbean and American South, both does not absolve us of the collective responsibility to dismantle its legacies.
The Violence of “Consensual” Narratives
A crucial element of this story that must not be overlooked is the nature of the connection between families like the Browns and the Black families in Brown’s Town. Historians note that Hamilton Brown never married but is believed to have fathered as many as thirty children, many with enslaved women. This was not romance. As scholars of slavery have long documented, what some euphemistically call “consensual relations” between enslavers and the enslaved were, in the context of absolute power over another human being’s body, a form of sexual violence.
As The Conversation notes: “Even if consensual, the idea that Black offspring of a white plantation owner benefited from slavery is, of course, nonsense”. These children were born into bondage, their bodies property from the moment of birth. They were often separated from their mothers and denied any inheritance or status.
When we reduce this history to a political talking point “Kamala Harris’s family owned slaves” we erase the experience of the enslaved women whose bodies were exploited to produce that lineage. We ignore the reality that, as historian Brent Staples writes in The New York Times, the enslaved women in Jamaica were subjected to systematic terror, including the documented predations of enslavers like Thomas Thistlewood, who recorded 3,852 acts of intercourse with 138 women he owned over 37 years .
Ireland’s Complicated Legacy
The response in Ireland to the Harris story has been markedly different from the celebration that greeted Barack Obama’s Irish roots. In Ballymoney, near Brown’s birthplace, there is silence rather than street parties. This discomfort reflects a difficult truth: Ireland was both colonized and colonizer. Irish people were subjected to British oppression and displacement, yet many like Hamilton Brown became active participants in the British imperial project, including the enslavement of Africans .
Hamilton Brown himself was likely a descendant of settlers brought to Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster, a colonial project that displaced native Irish Catholics. He likely identified as Scotch-Irish or British rather than Irish. His story is not a simple tale of Irish victimhood but a reminder that oppression often reproduces itself across contexts, as the oppressed find new subjects to dominate.
For abolitionists, this is a critical lesson: solidarity cannot be assumed based on shared experience of suffering. The struggle against white supremacy requires confronting how Irish immigrants in the Caribbean, despite facing their own hardships, ultimately benefited from and reinforced anti-Black racial hierarchies .
The Deeper Truth in Donald Harris’s Essay
Lost in the political noise is the actual content of Donald Harris’s original essay. It was not a political gotcha but a meditation on family, loss, and identity. He wrote about his grandmother Christiana Brown, who owned a dry goods store, and about his maternal grandmother, Iris Finegan, a farmer and educator. He wrote about his grief when Christiana died in 1951, when he was just fourteen.
He wrote, too, about bringing his daughters, Kamala and Maya, to Jamaica to walk them through the “richness and complexity” of Brown’s Town a town named for an enslaver but built by the labor of the enslaved and their descendants . He was not celebrating Hamilton Brown. He was honoring the resilience of the women who carried the family forward despite the violence of their origins.
Christiana Brown was born around 1889, forty-six years after Hamilton Brown’s death. She was likely the daughter or granddaughter of an enslaved woman on one of his plantations. Her existence, like that of millions of Black people in the diaspora, testifies to the survival of a people who built families and communities out of the wreckage of bondage.
Abolition as Forward-Looking
From an abolitionist perspective, the question is not whether Kamala Harris should be ashamed of her ancestry. The question is what she and all of us will do about the continuing legacy of slavery. Will we acknowledge that the wealth inequality, mass incarceration, and political disenfranchisement that define American life today are direct inheritances from the system Hamilton Brown fought to preserve? Will we support reparative policies that address these harms? Will we confront, rather than weaponize, the complexities of our shared history?
Kamala Harris’s response to questions about her identity has been characteristically direct: “I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it”. From an abolitionist perspective, that is the only sustainable position. The work of liberation has never required purity of lineage. It has required clarity of purpose.
The enslaved women of Jamaica did not wait for their genealogies to be untangled before they resisted. They ran away. They poisoned their enslavers. They preserved African spiritual practices. They built families under impossible conditions. Their descendants whether they carry the surname Brown or Harris or something else entirely inherit not only the trauma of that past but also the legacy of that resistance.
Conclusion
The controversy over Kamala Harris’s possible descent from Hamilton Brown tells us less about the Vice President than it does about our collective discomfort with the complexity of history. We want clean narratives: heroes and villains, the oppressed and the oppressor, with no overlap. But the reality of the Atlantic slave trade defies such simplicity. Most Black people in the diaspora are descended from both the enslaved and the enslavers, the product of violence but also of survival.
Abolitionism, properly understood, does not demand that we disown our ancestors. It demands that we own our history all of it and commit to building a future that honors the dignity of every person. Whether Kamala Harris is biologically descended from Hamilton Brown or not, she is descended from Jamaica, a country that received more enslaved Africans than all of the North American colonies combined. She is descended from people who survived a system designed to destroy them. That is not a liability. That is a legacy of resistance.
And it is that legacy, not the DNA of a long-dead enslaver, that deserves our attention. The chains we carry are not the names in our family trees. They are the systems of inequality that slavery built and that we have yet to fully tear down. The work of abolition the real work is just beginning.
#KamalaHarris #Kamala #Harris #Jamaica