Little know This History Fact: Black Americans Were Silver People Too

Thanks to Ana of Afro-PanaVisions , we learned ofthe Silver People Chronicle: The Back Punch Revisited - “We can end the silence.” This vital information is a post concerning the recent apology by the Obama administration to the Guatemalan people for another dastardly deed of covertly injecting Guatemalans with syphilis and gonherea then encouraging them to have sex for their experimental purposes.  The post enlightened us to the plight of the  Silver People/Silvermen and about how U.S. officials forced retiring black workers on the Panama canal to allow them to draw spinal fluids later to be sold in Europe to remedy white male impotency. If they did not submit, somehow their retirement papers may become lost or “slow” tracking to processing.

.Ana’s comment triggered a memory concerning the building of the Panama canal in which I once heard Black Americans were part of the workforce. After Teddy Roosevelt essentially stripped Panama from Columbia in order to finish the canal project that the French began and gave up.  The U.S. dove in headlong to finish the canal, for no doubt, a military advantage in the western hemisphere. American culture of that time (and this time as well) compelled them to put white workers in charge over their Black workers that would essentially kill an equivalent of 500 per mile to complete the project.  From 1904 - 1914 the U.S. began recruiting workers from the Caribbean, mainly from Barbados but not to the exclusion of Guadalupe and Martinique. And, never taught to us, from the United States, namely the from the south.

Jamaica however, refused recruiting on their island and imposed a one pound sterling tax on anyone who took the opportunity to work on the canal.  Only highly skilled Jamaican tradesmen could afford the tax  and made the trip to Panama. Secretly hidden in the annals of his-story were the presence of Black Americans that made up part of the canal workforce. Like the Jamaicans, Black Americans part of the skilled workforce on the canal taking jobs as yard masters, hostlers, boat pilots, machinists, carpenters, wiremen, division engineers and postal clerks. The U.S. being true to themselves implemented their Central American form of Jim Crow.

Black Americans, by way of their citizenship, were treated a little better on a certain level ,than other Black people working on the canal. Yet, by 1909 the canal authorities aka U.S. authorities blocked Black workers from any nation, including the U.S., from taking the afore mentioned jobs and implemented the Gold and Silver Roll  The Gold Roll was exclusive to whites in which they were paid in gold and the Silver Roll was payroll for the Black workers, of course as it is today gold holds more value than silver.  Any Blacks holding gold contracts would soon be dismantled.  This was a veiled attempt to hide their new Jim Crow law, but forced all Blacks onto the Silver Roll by way of massive demotions. It’s comprehensible as to why the whites in charge (though it’s said some whites protested the demotions) would try to hide their usual wicked discrimination practice when living conditions for Black workers were separate and unequal. Thus we have the Silver People. Tucked neatly within the Silver People or Silvermen are Black Americans unknown to most of us.