Old Money in the South

[VivisMom]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3023686#3023730

rateyes  (1000+ posts)       Mon Mar-17-08 03:43 PM
Original message
Old Money in the South
 Advertisements [?]I live in the state of Georgia. If you're ever in this neck of the woods, take a drive through places like Madison, GA and look at the huge antebellum homes that were spared Sherman's march to the sea. Understand that there are quite a few very rich people who own hundreds and thousands of acres of land, handed down to them from generation to generation. Old money.

Most of that old money was made on the backs of slave labor, and what some called "poor white trash" in the cotton fields and the peanut farms and tobacco farms. The slaves built this part of the country, for the benefit of their owners, and the descendants of the slaveowners still benefit from it, at the expense of the slaves' descendants. For the most part, blacks still work for whites...and, a helluva lot of them for minimum wage, or at least not a fair wage.

Is it any wonder that blacks who live in poverty might be just a little ticked off at the injustice?

God bless America. Uh huh.
 

Oh, FFS! There are plenty of prominent blacks who have risen from poverty: Oprah, Bill Cosby, Colin Powell. Hell, I'll even include Barack Obama. And even Bill Cosby will tell you that the people keeping African-Americans down are African-Americans.

There are plenty of whites in poverty, too. Just an FYI. 

NYCALIZ  (1000+ posts)       Mon Mar-17-08 03:48 PM
Response to Original message
1. I'm okay with blacks being ticked off at people that owned slaves
 are any of those people still alive today?

rateyes  (1000+ posts)       Mon Mar-17-08 03:50 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. No, but the descendants who have benefited from slave labor
 and are now benefiting from "almost" slave labor (with the sorry assed minimum wage) are still alive.

Who sets the minimum wage? Old white men that YOU HELPED ELECT TO CONGRESS, RETARD!

katsy  (1000+ posts)      Mon Mar-17-08 04:00 PM
Response to Reply #1
6. Sure.
 Except they are harder to fight now.

It's a judicial system that renders unequal justice.

It's a private, for profit, prison system that pays slave wages to the incarcerated.

Racial profiling.

It's NCLB and even if students graduate high school, few have the ability to attend college.

It's Katrina.

It's being poor without hope.

It's being outsourced to countries where slave labor is acceptable.

Many poor, urban, black youth do not graduate HS because THEY ARE NOT ENCOURAGED TO! There are no role models for them! They see drug dealing as glamorous and a way to make easy money, and choose to do that instead.

I'm so sick of this 'whitey keepin' me down' BS. My students (poor, black, inner city Baltimore youth) would always say that the white man was keeping them down. When I asked them how...none of them could answer.

[LadyLiberty]

Oh, FFS! There are plenty of prominent blacks who have risen from poverty: Oprah, Bill Cosby, Colin Powell. Hell, I'll even include Barack Obama. And even Bill Cosby will tell you that the people keeping African-Americans down are African-Americans.

There are plenty of whites in poverty, too. Just an FYI. 

Yup, and they live right in Madison, too and on the outskirts. Aside from historical Madison, that area is a very poor, rural area. And the historical part of it consists of about 3 streets. It is gorgeous, though, and those old homes do cost a mint to keep up.

There is no slave labor working those places today, so this moonbat is out there. Also, these houses are very close together, not on hundreds/thousands of acreage like they lied and said (in order to go off on a lunatic rant about how oppressed the blacks are). These houses are as close together as mine is in my subdivision in urban Georgia. Unless they have land elsewhere, the owners of these homes in "downtown" Madison just don't have hundreds/thousands of acres. I don't know that one of those homes even had one acre.

VV, this is more smoke and mirrors from the DUmp in order to make a pathetic case.

[jtyangel]

I have a little story to tell about my heritage that would turn them on their asses, but I'll keep it to myself. 

[franksolich]

You know, given the peripatetic nature of American society, it's not likely those old plantation homes are currently owned by the same families that had them 150 years ago, and in fact it's probably very likely most of them are owned by northerners who moved south, especially the past 50 years.

Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce had one down there in South Carolina, which I guess is now a monastery; they got theirs during the 1940s.  And I don't think either Harry or Clare had any connection with antebellum slaveholders.

I had a great-aunt who had one down there in North Carolina, and she was Pennsylvanian.

A pretty big spread she had.

It's my impression that Reconstruction pretty much demolished all the old slaveholding families.

[Rebel]

It's my impression that Reconstruction pretty much demolished all the old slaveholding families.

Apparently, that's not enough. They should have been murdered along with their offspring, siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, friends, acquaintances, Pastor, fellow church members, and the rest of their distant familial ties.

[Freeper]

It's my impression that Reconstruction pretty much demolished all the old slaveholding families.

Apparently, that's not enough. They should have been murdered along with their offspring, siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, friends, acquaintances, Pastor, fellow church members, and the rest of their distant familial ties.

Funny how the primitives don't seem to mind the terrorism that Sherman spread but, his target was "rich" white people. 

[Rebel Yell]

The "Old Money" does exist down here, but it's not being made off of the backs of slaves decendants.  The "Old Money" is being taxed to pay for the welfare being collected by the decendants of slaves.  The tables have turned.  Who works for the benefit of who, now?

[Freeper]

The "Old Money" does exist down here, but it's not being made off of the backs of slaves decendants.  The "Old Money" is being taxed to pay for the welfare being collected by the decendants of slaves.  The tables have turned.  Who works for the benefit of who, now?

Most of the "old money" comes from carpetbaggers anyway. Sherman devastated the state of GA most never recovered from it.

[LadyLiberty]

The "Old Money" does exist down here, but it's not being made off of the backs of slaves decendants.  The "Old Money" is being taxed to pay for the welfare being collected by the decendants of slaves.  The tables have turned.  Who works for the benefit of who, now?

Amen to that 

[DixieBelle]

I see they are showing their knowledge of history again. *Eyeroll*

[ReardenSteel]

You know, given the peripatetic nature of American society, it's not likely those old plantation homes are currently owned by the same families that had them 150 years ago, and in fact it's probably very likely most of them are owned by northerners who moved south, especially the past 50 years.

Good post. Great point. (once I looked up peripatetic, lol)

I would go even further myself. While I accept that most of the "plantation" homes are likely under new ownership and I grant that some here have a greater knowledge of both the history of the South and it's current trends, I would stipulate that even if the descendants of the slaveowners were still the homeowners in question, DUmmy  rat-eyes' OP would still be wrong. The idea that past slave owners accumulated so much wealth from that vile and feudalistic system so as to sustain a family for a century and a half (6-7 generations?) is absurd.
I believe it stems from the typical DU ignorence of economics and the stupid idea that wealth is a static quality. But to presume that generations of families can survive decade after decade doing nothing by their own initiative, putting no self sustaining thought or labor into their existance and surviving, even thriving on "old money" alone, for that period of time makes a mockery of the word naive.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Ayn Rand