christinkallama , 11 months ago

@TarkabarkaHolgy

#Guano, one of the essential ingredients for #Ammineite, has an amazing (and terrible) history.

Featuring not just birds and bats, but kings and rebels, Black Mutual Aid organizations, and the U.S. Supreme Court...

#MinCup23

christinkallama , 11 months ago

Guano served as a natural, efficient fertilizer, enabling the farming of infertile or depleted farmland. The Incas obtained guano (whose name derives from the Quechua word for manure) from islands off the coast of South America, whose bird habitat was protected by royal decree.

With industrialization, guano deposits attained geopolitical significance, and staking claims to islands of bird poop a matter of international intrigue.

christinkallama , 11 months ago

In 1856 the U.S. passed the #GuanoAct, which allowed Americans to claim guano islands that the President could then recognize as "appertaining" to the U.S.

Under the Guano Act, the U.S. claimed the uninhabited (but regularly visited by Haitian fishermen) Caribbean island of Navassa, an acquisition some sarcastically referred to as "Seward's Outhouse".

christinkallama , 11 months ago

Acquiring the islands was one thing, to acquire the guano required backbreaking labor under extreme conditions. In the nineteenth century, this labor was supplied under conditions of #RacialCapitalism, by Black Americans on Navassa and Chinese laborers in Peru.

The conditions on Navassa were so brutal that Black workers protested, only to be met with violent repression by the white management of the Navassa Phosphate Company, prompting a revolt in which several white men were killed.

christinkallama , 11 months ago

While three men (George S. Key, Henry Jones, and Edward Smith) were initially sentenced to death for murder, their supporters launched a legal challenge to the Guano Act and the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, argued as Jones vs. U.S. before the U.S. Supreme Court and, when that failed, successfully lobbied President Benjamin Harrison to commute the sentences. By that point, the case had achieved such notoriety that he devoted part of his 1891 State of the Union address to defending his decision.

christinkallama , 11 months ago

This support came principally from the Black Baltimore community - especially the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen and the Mutual United Brotherhood of Liberty.

While successful in saving the men's lives, the commutation of their death sentences to life in prison meant that Key, Jones, and Smith would spend the rest of their lives in hard labor in brutal conditions without labor protections. Just as they had on Navassa.