Op-ed: Slaving history must not be forgotten
Read this op-ed in The New Bedford Standard Times, The Lowell Sun, The Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, The Springfield Republican, The Berkshire Eagle, The MetroWest Daily News, and The Federalist.
“In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky … and star-crowned mountains,” wrote African-American statesman and former slave Frederick Douglass. “But my rapture is soon checked … When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding …”
February is Black History Month, but black history is American history and shouldn’t be relegated to one month annually.
Given K-12 education’s general disdain for background knowledge and memorizing dates, most American high school students know little European, African and U.S. history or geography, including the terrifying truths about the transatlantic slave trade.
The slave trade uniquely embodies the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s view that we all share “a single garment of destiny.” Spanning 1444 to 1870, the African slave trade defined our civilization, leaving a haunting global legacy.
The horrifying reality is that human chattel slavery is found throughout history, including ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, which were built by slaves. Slavery has always been linked with wars, debts and monarchies.
Historians David Brion Davis and Hugh Thomas report that in the medieval era, caravanning North African Muslim slave traders began subjugating sub-Saharan black Africans. By the mid-1400s, Catholic Portugal and Spain bound themselves to commerce in human bondage and Protestant Britain later followed.
West Africa — Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Benin — became the Slave Coast, where tribal kingdoms sold inland African neighbors to Europeans in the global triangular trade with the Americas.
Trading companies chartered by European monarchies used African slave labor to extract gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, and cotton from the New World. As historian Howard Dodson reminds us, American slaves primarily produced luxury goods.
“(King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” reads slave-owner Thomas Jefferson’s draft anti-slavery clause, which the Continental Congress removed from the Declaration of Independence. “(V)iolating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people … captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation …”
Nearly every Atlantic country, colony, and religion was shackled to the slave trade, which was central to western commerce for centuries.
The figures are ghastly: Through 54,200 voyages 13 million African slaves were shipped to the New World, including a staggering 2 million who died at sea. One-third of the slaves were women of childbearing age, and one-quarter were children.
Four million slaves were brought to Portuguese Brazil, 2.5 million to Spanish America, and 2 million to the British West Indies for backbreaking work on sugar plantations. Five hundred thousand slaves went to British North America and the United States.
In 1807, President Jefferson signed the legal cessation of the U.S. slave trade; however, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott case ruled that even former slaves had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Slavery wasn’t abolished until after the American Civil War. By then, the U.S. slave population had grown to 4 million.
Students today need to be taught about the realities of slavery to comprehend the potential tyranny found within the human heart. But in 2009, Gov. Deval Patrick ditched the U.S. history MCAS test graduation requirement, which the Baker administration has yet to restore.
New Englanders like to pretend that slavery was a distant, Southern phenomenon, and that the North’s abolitionism absolves us of America’s original sin. But our region also has slave-trading blood on its hands.
Boston, Salem, and Newport were maritime epicenters for slave traders. In the 18th century, 60 percent of North American slave ships were Rhode Island based. Prominent Yankees, including the Faneuil, Brown, and DeWolf families, were among America’s most notorious “man-stealers.”
After escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass wrote several autobiographies. Nearly all start by declaring “slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and … (it’s) the wish of most masters … to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”
In soul-searching about America and Black History Month, our own cultural ignorance can’t hide that national dreams of liberation, deliverance, and freedom were secured on the backs of millions of Africans brought here against their will.
Ending our nationwide abandonment of historical literacy begins with educating all schoolchildren about the hard truths of our shared past.
Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.
