Bench Marks Slavery's Gate -- Let Us Continue to Remember

Last month, a "small bench by the road" was installed on Sullivan's Island, off the South Carolina coast -- home to Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie. The bench does not commemorate any military battles, though; it is an offer from the present to the past, for rest and comfort. It honors the memory of the millions of Africans who entered North America in slavery via this island: six feet long, 26 inches deep black steel bench, facing the Intercostal Waterway.

Toni Morrison was there to see it. She, in her acclaimed novel "Beloved," which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, said the experience of seeing this tribute finally in place, was "extremely moving to (her)."

According to the New York Times, the bench was secured by the National Park Service which laid the foundation that included a bronze plaque explaining its significance. Ms. Morrison said she liked the idea of an "unpretentious" bench for its simplicity and accessibility.

"Well, the bench is welcoming, open," she said -- according to the Times. "You can be illiterate and sit on the bench, you can be a wanderer or you can be on a search."

Let us all be on a search for what we know today as the legacy of American slavery.

Like the De Wolf family. In a book published just this year entitled "Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History," author Thomas Norman DeWolf writes in his preface:

"Everyone has secrets -- shameful episodes in our past that we try to keep buried. Heaven forbid that anyone should find out. What would people say? This book is about one family's secret: my family's. It is also about an American secret of which too few are fully aware.

"When I was a child, I was taught with pride about our Founding Fathers. I reveled in hearing the patriotic stories about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. I imagined myself carrying on their legacy and basked in their glory. I share the human inclination to believe that the noble acts of our ancestors are reflected in who we are today. If new information tarnishes those stories, our pride tends to diminish. What I've learned in the last few years challenges the stories I grew up with.

"During the summer of 2001, I traveled to New England, West Africa, and Cuba with Katrina Browne and eight other distant cousins to retract the steps of our ancestors -- the DeWolfs -- who were active in the slave trade. Katrina had decided to make a documentary feature film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North and (my book) is my story about not only that journey but about what comes after.

"I learned new truths about myself, my ancestors, and the founding of the United States, and that it's impossible to think constructively, and honestly, about race without simultaneously examining issues involving gender, class, and privilege. I learned that slavery wasn't limited to the South: black people were enslaved in the North for over two hundred years, the vast majority of all U.S. slave trading was done by northerners, and, astonishingly, half of all those voyages originated in Rhode Island. Compromises made by my childhood heroes ensured that slavery would continue as the driving force in our nation's economy. Throughout this country's history, white people have benefited as a direct result of the riches in land, money, and prestige that were gained because of slavery.

"A question that white people sometimes ask each other about black people in regard to slavery is 'Why can't they just get over it.' During our journey, several African Americans provided a terse and accurate response: 'Because it's not over.'

Even after the Civil War, blacks were prevented from becoming equal citizens through Jim Crow laws, racial violence, lynching, and various other forms of terror and discrimination. Though civil and voting rights laws were adopted in the 1960s, the pecking order that has been in place for hundreds of years -- with major disparities between blacks and whites in terms of education, housing, employment, health care, and treatment within and by the criminal justice system -- continues.

"It's easy to agree that slavery prior to the Civil War was wrong. It's much more difficult for whites to reflect on the systematic racism that lingers today. In my experience, one of the major impediments to discussing the legacy of slavery is that the subject is so overwhelming. My hope is that focusing on one family's history will help readers get a better grasp on it, so that we can all begin an honest dialogue about race in the United States.

"Our nation was founded on the ideals of equality and freedom, but these 'unalienable rights' have never been secured once and for all for all people. It is a perpetual struggle, on ongoing journey..."

As Frederick Douglass said on July 4, 1852:
"Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine."

Let us openly and honestly RE-MEMBER -- re-assemble the individual pieces to a single whole. Let us rest on this bench -- and others yet to be installed -- and mark its significance to our generation and generations to come.

Live Forward, but Understand by Looking Back

I grew up In Kansas City in the late 50s/early 60s. The only non-whites I encountered at an early age were blacks. My mother taught me to be afraid of blacks -- to move away from blacks on the bus, to lock the car doors when we drove through 'the black part of town.' I came to know that my dad's early childhood buddies in Acheson, Kansas were black. My mom never saw a black person -- growing up on a farm in central Minnesota -- until she joined the Navy in World War II, right out of high school.

The truth is that I have lived my life aware of injustices and inequality between blacks and whites, and actively fighting against them on primarily political levels, but without the understanding that history brings -- looking back -- to the era of open, unrepentant slavery in this country through and after the Civil War. As recently as last Monday night I stumbled upon a feature on the International History Channel that spoke about this repression.
Entitled "Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War," the description for the program I found on the 'History International' website reads:

"Despite common belief, the Civil War does not end in 1865, and the blood of many Americans continues to flow freely. It is a period know as 'Reconstruction.' America is supposed to be reunited and healing its wounds, but what emerges is a picture of murder, terrorism and chaos as 'free' black men and women remain enslaved by a south that does not completely surrender. Insurgencies led by ex-Confederate soldiers rip through every southern state. America's first terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, is formed (in Pulaski, Tennessee). Hundreds (including many black ex-Union Army soldiers) are butchered in citywide race riots (about voting rights), like the infamous New Orleans Massacre of 1866. Counter insurgency groups form, like the (native American) Lowry Gang, who fights a guerrilla-style battle against (terrorizing) Confederates, and northern carpetbaggers like D. P. Upham battles the Klan in Arkansas. All Americans feel the Civil War's aftershocks for years, while some believe its tremors are felt even today."

I agree with the latter.

The Walls We Build

July 25, 2008
“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races, and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
– Illinois Senator Barak Obama, speaking in Berlin on July 24, 2008

Tonight I’m thanking God for:

1. Illinois Senator Barak Obama’s arrival on the national, and now international, political scene as presumptive Democratic candidate for President in this November’s general election
(remember, he started his campaign from the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois)

2. Being alive to see the United States of America finally have a person of African descent running for the highest political office in the land!

3. The long presidential primary season which is giving non-black cultures in America a chance to digest over time their introduction to black American culture through Senator Obama and the events of his campaign, and to begin to envision and accept the very real possibility of a mixed-race black man as President.

And so much more meaning this has for me, being from Chicago and a very active participant in the rainbow coalition that twice elected the late, great Mayor Harold Washington the first black mayor of Chicago. Harold came back to the Chicago scene – back from his long journey from Springfield to Washington – at a time when City government had been consistent only in its reinforcement of racial division through a system of distribution of spoils that totally neglected all non-white neighborhoods.

Not that there is ‘ebony-and-ivory’ perfect racial harmony here now; but it’s MUCH better than it has ever been. During Harold’s time, there was also great advancement of understanding among minority cultures – blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans. It was a significant time of successful, meaningful, down-in-the-trenches coalition building.

I remember last fall having an informal discussion with some of my black and mixed-race co-workers about Barak’s chances to become the presidential candidate of a major party. Every one of my co-workers argued vehemently with me that Barak could only hope to become Hillary’s running mate – I was the hold-out who believed that perhaps our time was coming on a national level.

This is a huge time for white America; and I’m holding my breath! Can it be that one of the lessons from the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright incidents during the last several months, is the recognition that all cultures have “hidden discourse” – those ‘truths’ that they whisper among themselves, within the safety of their own “walls” – that can only seem embarrassing or absurd to ‘outsiders’? Rev. Wright held up a mirror for white America; can we see? Can we tear down the very walls we have built? Can Barak's candidacy help every culture of America – especially white America – hear the ‘Wake up!’ call, like the closing message in Spike Lee's School Daze?

Bi-polar America

Reflecting on ‘race in America’ before, during and after the July 4th national holiday this election year, I’ve come to the conclusion that my country has a personality disorder: we’re bi-polar.

One pole of our personality is anchored in some truly awesome and inspiring principles and ideals that date back to our country’s Declaration of Independence. From its preamble:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

Thrilling, right? Perhaps these are principles to die for, but we waive the flag with national pride and march to war to 'liberate' others when we have yet -- after more than two hundred years -- to implement these ideals in own society.

Because the other pole of our personality is anchored in what Barack Obama described in his March 18 speech this year at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, as “this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the (national constitutional) convention to a stalemate until the Founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years and to leave any final resolution to future generations.”

By the way, that’s us – their ‘future’ is, and has always been, our present.

Schizophrenic: heal thyself!