Association For Strategic Culture and Research Foundation

A series of rebellions by the enslaved and the Civil War in the U.S. led to the demise of the system of involuntary servitude. However, the dominance of world capitalism has intensified the economic exploitation of a global proletariat.

Born during the Civil War (1862) in Holly Springs, Mississippi as an enslaved person, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was educated as a teacher at what became known as Rust College and eventually settled in Memphis, Tennessee. She taught for several years in the Shelby County school system where she later became highly critical of the unequal distribution of resources solely based upon a racial hierarchy.

However, within these contexts, the enslaved and free Africans were objectively fighting on behalf of European colonial regimes and not for their own freedom. Although the British and the Americans told the Africans that their service in the war of independence and 1812 would lead to emancipation, slavery and national oppression continued leading up to the beginning of the Civil War.