Womble bill calls for slavery disclosure

[stephanie]

By James Romoser

JOURNAL RALEIGH BUREAU

Published: March 21, 2009

RALEIGH

A state legislator from Winston-Salem wants to require companies that do business with the state to disclose their historical ties to slavery.

Under a bill sponsored by Rep. Larry Womble, companies entering into contracts with the state would have to search their corporate records for evidence that they participated in slavery or profited from it.

A company would have to publicly disclose any records of ties to slavery, including the names of any enslaved workers or slaveholders contained in the records.

"History gives a true reflection of how our country got started," Womble said.

His bill deals only with public disclosure -- it does not call for any penalties against companies that once benefited from slavery. But if a company did not comply with the disclosure requirements, it could lose its contract with the state.

Womble said that it's important for companies to own up to their history if they built wealth based on slave labor.

"It's more or less an educational thing," Womble said. "At least you can acknowledge, ‘Yes, we participated in slavery. Yes, we made a profit off slavery.'"

Rep. Earline Parmon, D-Forsyth, is also a primary sponsor of the bill, which was filed Thursday.

Critics said that the bill is well-intentioned but that it would be impractical and burdensome for companies to try to find records of ties to slavery more than 140 years ago.

"I don't know what kind of record a company could have that would enable it to even answer that kind of question," said Gayle Anderson, the president of the Greater Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce.

Anderson also said that the state should not add more mandates on businesses that are already struggling in the recession. "It just doesn't seem like that is the most productive use of anybody's times," she said.

Another issue is the difficulty of defining the extent to which a company "participated in" or "profited from" slavery.

"It's a tangled web," said Anthony Parent, a history professor at Wake Forest University who studies slavery. "If you were engaged in business in the South before emancipation, you're going to have been somehow tied into the slave system."

Manufacturing companies, for instance, may have employed enslaved workers. Large banks helped finance the buying and selling of slaves.

For other companies, the link to slavery may have been more indirect.

Nonetheless, Parent said, it would be healthy for companies to examine and acknowledge their pasts.


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http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/21/womble-bill-calls-for-slavery-disclosure/news-ncpolitics-state-government/

[Binky]

"History gives a true reflection of how our country got started," Womble said.



Does anyone out there not know by this era as to how America got started? Englishmen and their families came in big, big, big boats to escape the English rule. They came here, with what belongings they could carry, to begin a new life in a wilderness. They came, they killed indians, set up towns etc. and took over.

And then, in later years, african parents sold their off spring in slavery to white, English slave traders and took them to America where they were put on the auction block and sold to the highest bidder. (Some slaves were actually kidnapped by the slave traders.) What a horrible thing for a parent to do. To sell his/her child into slavery in order to make a buck.

[PostmodernProphet]

Does anyone out there not know by this era as to how America got started? Englishmen and their families came in big, big, big boats to escape the English rule. They came here, with what belongings they could carry, to begin a new life in a wilderness. They came, they killed indians, set up towns etc. and took over. .

this may come as a shock to you, but very few European settler's came over here for the purpose of killing Indians and taking over.....there were vast stretches of land that no-one, Indians included, had ever walked over.......Indians didn't learn warfare from the settlers.....it had been their way of life for a hundred years before the settlers arrived......

the Pilgrims didn't come over here thinking, well plan A is to kill all the Indians we meet....in fact, the Indians and the settlers were getting along pretty well until the French started paying bounty on the scalps of British colonists prior to the French Indian wars.......

[Binky]

this may come as a shock to you, but very few European settler's came over here for the purpose of killing Indians and taking over.....there were vast stretches of land that no-one, Indians included, had ever walked over.......Indians didn't learn warfare from the settlers.....it had been their way of life for a hundred years before the settlers arrived......

the Pilgrims didn't come over here thinking, well plan A is to kill all the Indians we meet....in fact, the Indians and the settlers were getting along pretty well until the French started paying bounty on the scalps of British colonists prior to the French Indian wars.......



They came here to make new lives for themselves. I never said they came here THINKING they would take over. I said they arrived here and when making lives for themselves they had to kill indians and make small towns. If it came across the way you put it then I apoligize, because that is not how I intended it to sound. And I never said the indians learned warfare from the settlers. Anyone who paid attention in school would know they already had to learned how to kill long before others arrived here.

[sgtdmski]

Perhaps they can pass a bill that requires every political party to review its history and where it stood on slavery.

dmk