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FREEDOMWAYS             FOURTH QUARTER 1966

the British-American colonies, this consisted of Royal Governors and landed proprietors.  The white settlers were regarded as citizens of Britain living in her American colonies.  Basically, therefore, it was the African and the American Indian who were colonized people.  These people were uprooted from their traditional lands while the white settler from Europe, who called himself a British-American, came in search of land to occupy and own.  With the further development of the British colonialist administrative structure these settlers from Britain came more and more to be treated like a colonized people.  The passage by Parliament of the Stamp Tax, Tea Tax, the Revenue Act of 1764, the ending ofBritish troops into oBston to put down civil rights protests, etc., were measures which deepened the sense of "alienation" inherent in the colonial relationship.  Consequently, after a decade or more of protests* the British-Americans revolted against the Crown and took their stand for an independent national existence.

The African population in the British-American colonies at that time made up 20 per cent of the total.  As is well known, one of their sons, Crispus Attucks, was the first "American" to die in the developing revolutionary movement against British colonial rule. Some 4,000 black troops served in the army of the American Revolution.  Despite this, the emancipation of the African popular was not included in the political solution effected by the Revolution of 1776.  The Afro-Americans remained in slavery to the new independent merchant and plantation landlord capitalists who led in the formation of the American Republic. As indicated earlier, African slavery h ad been an integral part of the British colonial structure. The de-colonization of the American mainland achieved by the Revolution of 1776, which at the same time left the institution of slavery intact, meant, in effect, that the African population in America remained a colonized people.

Insofar as the African part of the American colonial population did not share equally in the emancipation effected by the Revolution the revolution was left incomplete. As a consequence, the capitalist institutional structure and racist psychology which have developed in the United States since that time have functioned largely upon the infra-structure resulting from this lingering colonial status of the people of African descent among the Americans.

*See Thomas Jefferson's protest on the treatment of British-American colonies -- Documents of American History, 1795. Edited by John A. Scott.

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