ah my name is sharon hughes. my grandma mom could thomas you all and i know that the you my new mom, missy. i'm in cotton. her room bench and put you on a bench with canyon. but it will no woman, poor woman kit in the future with no one in the quiet outline of lambert in the place he 1st saw a room in the room.

ah, you can't understand, you know, says history, understanding the role that slavery played. he was already a very prominent attrition. by the time united states became a nation, it actually to find the nation. slavery didn't just end and go away. we as a country were formed out of a compromise with slavery. the southern colonies were not willing to be part of a union part of a national government. in last years. the 2 shall, slavery was protected in the price of protecting that institution was disproportionate power to the south, politically. and it carries through today. and we possibly could have lightened some of the consequences of slavery if there had not been such

a concerted effort to maintain the differences between blacks and whites. it's kind of like an infection. i think it may go away, but it always bubbles back up to with ha, eventually. i think that's what's happening daily. with all be angry because i'm what's going on right now. why does nothing ever change here? why does this keep happening over and over again? i was born in greensboro, north carolina, into a privileged world where the idea of white supremacy was rarely questioned. as a child, the only black people i ever interacted with in

a meaningful way where the people who worked for us. i felt a huge amount of sadness as a kid, seeing how they and other african americans were treated in the south. i didn't understand it. i knew something was deeply wrong, but it was not ok to talk about it. the sorrow, anger, and lingering questions about the racist south of my childhood shadowed me into adulthood. to my surprise, i discovered that my own uncomfortable journey to talk about this was connected to an untold hidden history of our nation. ah,

the trans atlantic slave trade took off in the early 18th century and produced huge profits. one of the reasons why the honestly to such an advanced country is because, oh, not only slavery, but the slave trade. we know that slavery was financed from places like new york, rhode island, new port, and boston. one of the reasons wall street was created in the 1st place was to finance the slave industry. everything from buying slaves to even mortgaging them. what you see is not only the building, a more ships which employees, workers, your thing, the building of insurance companies, because africans are revolting and you need to have insurance policies. you see the

construction of banking because these voids will have to be financed. and therein you begin to see the seeds, the cult of it, advanced economics of them and the rise of capitalism as clearly on the backs of slavery and the slave african. it was astonishing to me that many of the 1st africans in the american colonies weren't slaves, but indentured servants for a while poor black and white worked alongside each other. the connection between europeans and africans is actually quite robot. lot of marriages formerly, informally, lot of children formerly upon the probably much greater integration between people of african descent and european descent. and we have today indentured whites and

blacks worked for their so called masters for 57 years. africans went from indentured servitude to enslavement. gradually one person, one law and one colony at a time started with a dispossession of native americans. so the concept that they didn't actually have title to the land or deserve the land because they weren't christians. so all of us law around land and the accumulation of land by the english and french and spanish was based upon that. europeans felt completely comfortable going into africa and enslaving people who are also, he's ins, non christians, and bringing them to the new world to south and central and north america. and so, slavery was justified by this. it allowed the conquerors to fill righteous that they were in fact, doing favors to whoever they encountered. it was all re defined as

a benevolent process to most people's mind. america means white and the country was founded by 2 groups. angels and saxons, christian protest in english speaking all these things could bound up together just being christian was not distinction enough to separate who was entitled to civil rights and respect and resources. so christianity became divided into white christians, really white male christians than everybody else. there was a racial supremacy and a religious supremacy intertwine. yet 1000 black and white virginians rose up together in rebellion against rich planters in 1676. the rebels wanted more wealth and power. in the new america,

nathaniel bacon led the uprising baker and on the spot, the political movement, i'm economic movement. it was people demanding democracy, a chance to participate in running the colony, but to new colony and demanding land. there were these people coming together more along class lines than race lines. and even though the colonial government was eventually successful, that really scared them the lead decided to split those groups and the star creating whiteness and the colonies, and part of their charge. paul, the man was to be drafted into the slay patrol to manage the slays for the elite. and they always had this role of allegiance to the elite and managing those underneath for the leaves. this notion of divide and conquer to keep poor whites always knowing that they were not at the bottom,

no muradi grated, you may be as a white, you are white and there's one group below you. this very simple enough. but it was a very recurs virginia, where my ancestors originally settled, was the 1st colony to pass harsher slave laws that legally sealed this new alliance between rich planters and poor whites. the 1st white privilege that we see in this country is what was given to indentured servants, as they were creed up to have some land to have the ability to be in the militia, in the slave patrols together cloth and tools and other things when they were released, they just still didn't have economic power, but they had benefits as white people. and at the same time, enslaved africans had nothing. they had no rights, no property,

nothing in their name at all. ah, growing up, i knew both sides of my family own slaves. but there was never much of a conversation about it. our family history haunted me enough to make this film. my most famous ancestor was a guy named edmund pendleton, who was a judge planter and slave owner. pendleton was my uncle. 6 times removed. i had known a bit about pendleton's life, but in my research for this film, i discovered more details than i ever bargain for. i pendleton was tall, handsome. he was charming. he was a brilliant man. he was an arch conservative. what we would to day called right way extremist. he went from being an arch conservative to being

a spokesman for the revolution. ah, pendleton became the 1st acting governor of the virginia colony. and i was proud to learn that he played a major role in helping to establish the new nation pendleton drafts, the virginia resolution for independence. and that says that the delegation be instructed to propose to declare the united colonies free and independent states. absolved from all allegiance or dependence upon the crown or parliament of great britain. he wrote all those words which were then given to a pony express rider who carried them to philadelphia. when they got to philadelphia. they said, virginia says independence and all the other colonies fell into place.

but i was really disturbed to learn that pendleton was also asked to write a controversial line in the virginia declaration of rights. words that would institutionalize white supremacy and reverberate throughout u. s. history. i have written a little bit about virginia founder edmond pendleton, and there's not a lot of people that know very much about admin. pendleton and frances is related to edmund. as i understand the history, they said wait a minute, we can't have these principles of liberty applying to slaves. and so he comes up with the line basically that signals and kind of coded language to the other slave owners, that they're going to exclude the slaves from liberty. that all men by nature are equally free and independent and have certain rights. and he came up with the line when they enter into a state of society,

which everyone understood to mean that the slaves would be excluded. ah ah, there is chance all down through here. new pollen is the larry over here. so your camps are always a little nicer than this. this is evidence of absolute poverty, despair. people in our city and other cities all across america are living like this. we're at the original need and village that opened up in 2018 right now. there's 31 homes on the property. it's a little over 4 acres with 31 homes and a community center. unfortunately, a lot of people don't make it out of edition more homelessness, like, i'm just really happy had made it bad you

with ah, ah, ah, ah, with oh, place were even considered human. so how would they ever be accepted into civil

society? but still, slavery was controversial. i wondered, did pendleton and the other founding fathers have a more pressing reason to break from great britain? london had moved in somerset case in 1772. to abolish slavery with an england. there was a lot of fear and suspicion on this side of the atlantic that that particular decision would have legs. i was always taught the revolutionary war was about things like freedom and taxation without representation. so was independence from great britain, really much more about preserving slavery. almost every founding father was the slave owner. slavery was an integral part, not just of the southern economy,

but the entire northern economy. so it was just completely integrated into the thinking of the wealthy men that wrote the constitution. so the fact that the constitution is a perfect instrument is just bogus from the star if you emit. and this is the only truth if you can arrive at that, because it did not ban slavery and it left it in there and then left it as an open ended question. slavery is definitely one of the root causes of the current political malay that we have today. my uncle led virginia ratification of the us constitution in $1788.00, which included the 3 fifths compromise. slaves were counted as 3 fifths of a voter. both slaves couldn't vote because the south had more slaves than the north . this gave the south one 3rd more congressional seats. an electoral vote for the

next 73 years. slaveholding interests would dominate the government until the outbreak of the civil war. not surprisingly, 5 of the 1st 7 u. s. president were from the south and were slave owners. the stories of i've done the service because you would think they're all the genteel men with wakes and bringing ideas. we're coming up with all of these project. some plans, yes, they get their hands dirty fighting the redcoats, but then his back to dreaming up the bill of rights and constitutions and other brian ideas and without the sort of mock and the grime and the dirt and the blood. that's being said to bill this deciding we never learned that many more slaves and is commonly acknowledged, resisted the brutality, or tried to escape. others organized and rebelled against their treatment. a

successful and bloody revolution led by slaves in nearby haiti established the 1st black land republic in the world. this revolt terrified american slave owners like my ancestors who feared flavor rebellion would spread to the us. in the midst of this national nightmare, there were white people who opposed slavery. ringback there was a growing unease that this might actually be wrong. that morally, it was hard to justify high joiner states had started to either eliminate or gradually abolish slavery. what, what our country look like today. if the remaining 8 states had followed this path, but we didn't, instead, we deepened our commitment to slavery with even harsher laws. one of the main architects of those laws was my uncle. edmund pendleton.

international pressure in the successful revolution in haiti forced the u. s. congress to band the importation of new slaves. so what did southern slave owners do to maintain and grow their profits? they bred more and more slaves. if you travel in virginia today, i think of charles city, which is not that far from richmond. you'll find evidences today of virginia this great reading colony for your breeding africans. like breeding county demand for slaves exploded because of eli whitney's invention of the cotton gin. cotton became the most profitable commodity in the world. in this era, 1000000 out of the 2000000 slaves in the us were brutally separated from their

families and forcibly marched to the deep south to plant and pick cotton. this sight blends into the city landscape of new orleans was one of the nation's busiest slave auction blocks. yet there was not even a plaque or a marker, acknowledging the suffering that took place. here it was and is a familiar white washing of history. the kind peddled to me in school books throughout my childhood. i feel haunted by the spirit of the slave who had been so terrorized here. the frenzy for profits produced by cotton and the sale of slaves in the new states also increased the physical violence against them. more productivity came through extreme punishment with overseers even calculating how

many lashes on the back of a slave might generate one more pound of cotton. this cruelty and the forced separation from their families led more slaves to try to escape the united supreme court. sanction a law, the future, the slaves requires the country to hunt slaves, no matter where they are. there's no provision for that in the constitution. so we have this extremely broad reading of the rights of slave owners, which basically says the state can deputized every citizen united states, the hon, down slavery by the slave state of the country is going to all this length to protect slavery. oh, you run by now, i was seeing deeply troubling pattern in her history. white people,

whether they own slaves or not, clearly had a state making sure that the majority of blacks were maintained as slave. but by the mid 18 hundreds, networks like the underground railroad, were helping thousands of slaves flee to canada. and the non slave us states. the immense pressure over slavery led to the start of the american civil war in 18. 61 hanging in the balance where the lives of 4000000 in slave human beings whose monetary value now exceeded that of all manufacturing and commercial enterprises combined. sharon slave steaks had broken away from the us, forming the confederacy. the

american civil war was fought for. flor persecute to save the union. me when i was young, i heard stories about how bravely my ancestors fought and how much the family lost in the war. northern regression. to win the war, president abraham lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation in 18. 63, freeing southern slave. so they could fight for the union. only with the wars end were northern slaves. finally freed. ah, men and women told you only slaves, you're free,

you can do whatever you want to do. there a moment where moment our history is o l i all ali it all free now. yeah, good. all going home is called sometimes a day or jubilee. well, there's no rule jubilee because everybody was uncertain. lex are uncertain. and they did say, how free is free. oh, free is re. the idea that this 4000000 people were set free without any kind of reparation. they had worked their ancestors at work. they helped to build all of the institutions that we think about in the south and in the north, before they're on before the revolution and they got, they received nothing. but we didn't have no, probably. oh, no, we didn't have no idea. did wrong the best you could. white

settlers for getting cheap land in the west under the homestead act. understandably freed blacks wanted land in the south, where most of them still lived. but instead, the federal government abandoned the freed slaves and sold confiscated southern land to northern whites and the railroads. pressured by abolitionists. the federal government amended the constitution by passing the reconstruction amendments, which officially end in slavery and gave us citizenship to ex slaves. the amendments were supposed to protect, freed slaves against future discredit the 3040 template. and when it was designed to try to interrupt the institution of slavery, which requires a re articulation of the entire country and the entire country identity, not just the south of put the entire country

revenue reconstruction more important than anything else. live black men, women, to some extent. when black men learn the uses, a political power by 1870 black males could now vote and vote they did in record numbers. 3 blacks were even elected to the u. s. senate. not until the 1967 was another black elected as a u. s. senator with the white feared more than anything else. the reconstruction of my succeed in my succeeding reordering. so society white's and an intense hatred for lexi wanted to get ahead. if successful, black was a dangerous black and incompetent,

illiterate black hose, though threat his labor was valuable. but the black got out of his place was part of any of the above the place to which she had been assigned. that is the kind of black the whites could not tolerate with . so the country started in that road and then they were there. and they decided to basically to create another expression of racial dominance. the southerners wanted to control these 4000000 people that had been free. they still needed them to do the work. they also needed them to understand and to know their place in this was something, matt, even northerners would come to understand and agree with that. the states were

really free to do whatever they wanted to do in terms of controlling this inferior people as they continue to see them with is the earth's still large enough to satisfy the ambitions of jeff bezos. you know, it's got its tentacles in so many aspects of the economy. there's nothing that amazon isn't trying to get into to step by step. the amazon empire has extended its group on the world that walks like ended up being quite like a dog gets a dog. so amazon looks like monopoly trades like a monopoly makes money like monopoly behaves like monopoly. amazon essentially controls the market place. it's not really a market, it's a private arena, a wild where a single company controls the distribution of all day. the products and the infrastructure of our economy. is this the world according to amazon?

ah, those incidents of havana syndrome, as you mentioned before, things like difficulty concentrating, insomnia memory problems, there are so being asked to be experienced by just about everyone who was ever lived in any given week. right. and so now people all over the who are military personnel or intelligence officers or diplomats working for the american government, are now on the lookout for economic health incidence. and literally, people are getting up in the morning and freezing and attributing it to a van a syndrome because it's so bang. the news in the

us president biden plans to position american troops in eastern europe in a show of force against russia. despite nato's chief admitting, there is no certainty about whether moscow would invade ukraine. meanwhile, germany swims against the nato tide by resisting sending arms to ukraine. a move that's got the backing of the german public. according to recent polls and candidates prime ministers, brand, the huge truck convoy opposing the vaccine mandate as extreme. and despite the growing drivers movement of 1000, now spreading through the capital ottawa, the broadcasting lab direct from our studios in moscow. this is our to international sean.