|
The
Main Event in American
History
by
Marc
H. Morial
President
and CEO National
Urban League
Marc
H. Morial,
President of the National
Urban League, is
the former two-term Mayor
of New Orleans, former
President of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors,
and author of TO BE
EQUAL. He is a
Columnist for MaximsNews.com.
Hear his weekly Radio
Commentary Online.
See
Marc Morial's bio.
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
Please
see All of
Marc Morial's MaximsNews
columns below.*
UNITED NATIONS -
16 February 2005
/ www.MaximsNews.com
/ One
of the many powerful
insights to be gained from
the gripping documentary,
"Slavery and the
Making of America,"
airing this month on the
Public Broadcasting
Service lies in its
unmistakable confirmation
of a tragic fact of human
existence.
That
is that a great, evil lie
-- especially one
motivated by racial hatred
-- can be stronger than
the truth for years, or
decades, or generations.
Last
month's commemoration of
the sixtieth anniversary
of the liberation of
Auschwitz, the Nazi death
camp, was a grim reminder
of how a great, evil lie
can destroy individuals'
and entire nations'
ethical moorings to
disastrous effect.
But
Americans need not look
outside our own boundaries
to understand this:
Sadly, we have
several "case studies"
upon which to draw.
None
is more worthy of
examination than the great
crime of Negro Slavery in
America.
That
despicable "peculiar
institution" was
built over two and a half
centuries upon the forging
of bogus science and
legality and theology into
a great, evil lie that
denied the human worth of
people of African descent.
This
was done before the
American War of
Independence even as white
colonists, including those
who derived their great
wealth and social status
from being slave-owners,
were giving voice to the
most advanced concepts of
liberty the world had ever
known.
The
perversity of that
contradictory posture
inexorably led in 1860 to
the leaders of the
breakaway Confederacy
basing their rebellion on
the complaint that their
"freedom" to
enslave people of African
descent was being
eclipsed.
The
truth about this great,
evil lie and the social,
political and economic
structure it spawned in
America from 1619 to the
end of the Civil War in
1865 was itself stifled
well into the twentieth
century by the dominance
of a school of bogus
scholarship that, hewing
to racial propaganda of
the segregationist South,
obscured all manner of
facts about Slavery.
With
a few (and important)
exceptions, it wasn't
until the mid-1950s that a
group of more honest
historians began to find
the primary documents and
do the path-breaking
research that has produced
a far different picture of
what Slavery was than the
gauzy,
mint-julep-on-the-veranda
version of yore.
Their
research has shown
unmistakably, as Professor
James Oliver Horton, of
George Washington
University, says at the
beginning of the four-hour
PBS documentary,
"Slavery
was no sideshow to
American history.
It was the main
event."
Many
of the facts the
documentary presents,
though somewhat well-known
now, still have the power
to astonish.
For
example, Presidents who
were slave-owners occupied
the White House for 50 of
the 72 years between the
election of George
Washington and that of
Abraham Lincoln.
Further,
by the 1840s the value of
cotton exports was greater
than the combined value of
all of the nation's other
exports -- which made
slaves the most valuable
"asset" of the
United States other than
the land itself.
That
combination produced
tremendous fortunes for
industrialists and
financiers in the North
(and in England) as well
as plantation owners in
the South and helped fuel
the Industrial Revolution.
Slavery
was no sideshow.
It was the main
event.
African
Americans, who built the
foundation for America's
wealth and power, bore an
enormous, tragic cost in
opportunity so long
denied, in so many lives
lost, and in so many
families unalterably
disrupted.
The
poignant stories of what
happened to those
Americans dismissed by
most of their countrymen
and women as "chattel"
are wrenching, and at
times almost unbearable to
watch.
And
yet, "Slavery and the
Making of America"
also shows, intertwined
with the tragedy, that
Americans of African
descent -- both those who
endured outright slavery
and those who were not
enslaved but burdened in
reality with a kind of
"half-freedom"
-- did not passively
accept their predicament.
They
fought bondage in every
way possible, from
petitioning the legal
system to outright violent
revolt.
Equally
important, they used the
qualities all human beings
have of intelligence,
determination,
stubbornness and courage
to become, as Rutgers
University historian
Jennifer L. Morgan, said,
"sophisticated
interpreters" of one
of the most dangerous
social and political
environments any people
anywhere has ever
encountered.
For
me, the most powerful
revelation of the "Slavery"
documentary, and,
generally, of the new
scholarship on slavery in
America of which it is a
part, is the depth of the
allegiance to the American
Ideal African Americans
quickly developed -- and
maintained across three
centuries of relentless
oppression.
I
came away from it
recalling the words of
Langston Hughes'
poem,
"I,
Too.
I,
too, sing America.
I
am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the
kitchen
When
company comes,
But
I laugh,
And
eat well, And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll
be at the table
When
company comes.
Nobody'll
dare
Say
to me
'Eat
in the kitchen'
Then.
Besides,
They'll
see how beautiful I
am
And
be ashamed --
I,
too, am America."
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
*Marc
Morial's Columns in MaximsNews
Please
Visit Here...
Please
CONFIRM your free
Subscription to MaximsNews:
To
Unsubscribe: Unsubscribe@MaximsNews.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Place
YOUR ad
for three months
on www.MaximsNews.com,
plus at least once a week for three
months on MaximsNews
email web-broadcasts,
worldwide.
This entitles you
to post your
Logo, your
homepage website link, and your
two or three additional news
or other announcements with
links to your
specific website pages.
Commercial
and Agency Rates for three
months:
$1200.
NGO
Rates for three months: $600.
*New:
Special
Ad Rates for NGOs & UN
Missions:
Only:
$195 per month
ads@MaximsNews.com
|
