by Dorothy Wickenden | January 2021
Two years into the cataclysmic war, Lincoln found a way to justify emancipation, as a “military necessity.” Frances greeted the proclamation with relief, but not euphoria. She was equally subdued when the Thirteenth Amendment eventually passed, on January 31, 1865, inscribing into the Constitution the eradication of slavery. Back in Auburn, she read the Herald Tribune’s report about the giddy scene in Washington. The visitors’ galleries were full, and senators and Supreme Court Justices squeezed onto the House floor. Finally, Speaker Schuyler Colfax stood and gavelled the room to order, announcing in a quavering voice that the ayes had a hundred and nineteen votes, the nays fifty-six. As Democrats looked on stonily, Republicans threw their hats in the air, cheering and roaring. Women in the gallery waved their handkerchiefs. Artillery at the Capitol fired a hundred-gun salute. The Tribune’s headline declared, “freedom triumphant. commencement of a new era. death of slavery.” It was a historic victory, but it had been won as much by political horse-trading as by deep principle. Henry and Lincoln, in a months-long backroom campaign, had lobbied wavering representatives with bribes and offers of jobs. And, Frances thought, it was too soon to celebrate. The amendment still had to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Half a million men had died in the war, and it was not over. General William Tecumseh Sherman was moving through the Carolinas, and Ulysses S. Grant was eight months into his siege of Petersburg. There were rumors that rebels would attempt to assassinate the President. After reading about the joyous outpouring in the House, Frances wrote Henry a bracingly solemn note: “I congratulate you on the passage of the Constitutional amendment which I know you had much at heart. The prospect of abolishing slavery throughout the United States is indeed cheering.” The battle for equality had barely begun.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [Justice System] [Civil War] [History] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Racial Terrorism] [Prison System] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Quaker]
by Charlotte Lydia Riley | November 2020
The book is a vital call to action: part historical investigation, part manifesto, demanding the reader do away with the existing “brutish museums” of the title and find a new way for them to exist, not as sites of violence or trauma but as “sites of conscience”. Hicks is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, whose website says that it displays “archaeological and ethnographic materials from all parts of the world”. He focuses on one particular region – the kingdom of Benin, now located in modern Nigeria.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [History] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Racial Terrorism] [Economics] [Slavery] [Reparations]
by Jennifer Schuessler | November 2020
“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes. “It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.” The evidence cited in the paper, which was quietly published online last month, is not entirely new. But Ms. Serfilippi’s forceful case has caught the eye of historians, particularly those who have questioned what they see as his inflated antislavery credentials.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Art & Culture] [Denial] [Myths]
by Maia Coleman | November 2020
“I contend that the Thanksgiving myth is just that — it’s a myth, it’s not history,” said Mr. Silverman. The real story, he explained, features far more bloodshed and destruction, including a European plague that wiped out enormous swaths of the native population, the continued exploitation of native people at the hands of the colonists and above all, the grabbing of native lands. The actual Thanksgiving feast was born from a mutual defense pact between the English colonists and the Wampanoags against the neighboring Narragansett tribe, Mr. Silverman said. “Neither side attributed much importance to this event,” Mr. Silverman told the audience. “The Wampanoags never invoked it again, at least on record in any diplomacy between themselves in the English…and English records dedicated two paragraphs to it.”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Myths] [History] [Silencing POC] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Denial] [Systemic Racism]
by Monica Harris | June 2020
Let’s get something straight: white privilege is real. I know because I’ve lived in its shadow my entire life. I’ve felt it even when I’ve tried to forget or pretend it wasn’t there. White privilege wasn’t earned; it was gifted to people who brought others, shackled in the bowels of ships, to serve them. Living in a country where your ancestors were once stuff that other people “owned” leaves wounds so deep they can’t be erased from the collective memory. And when your ancestors were the ones allowed to “own” other people, it creates something equally indelible: an advantage that’s hard-wired into all levels of society. It’s like getting a head start in every race that always puts you a few yards from the finish line. It’s an entitlement that lingers, unspoken, in the back of all minds, silently playing out in everything we say, think, or do.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Policing] [Slavery] [Implicit Racism] [Economics] [Black Lives Matter] [Police Shootings] [Denial] [Civil War]
by Renee Ghert-Zand | November 2020
Early 1920s newspaper ads for the blockbuster New York Yiddish stage shows Dos Khupe Kleyd (The Wedding Dress) and Yente Telebende (Loquacious Battle‐Ax), featured a Black artist among the spotlighted performers. This was Thomas LaRue, a Yiddish-speaking singer widely known in the interwar period as der schvartzer khazan (The Black Cantor). Although long-forgotten now, LaRue (who sometimes used the surname Jones) was among the favorites of Yiddish theater and cantorial music. Reportedly raised in Newark, New Jersey, by a single mother who was drawn to Judaism, he even drew interest from beyond the US.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [History] [Cognitive Dissonance] [Art & Culture]
