We still lie about slavery
We still lie about slavery: Here’s the truth about how the
American economy and power were built on forced migration and torture
Credit: www.salon.com
By EDWARD E. BAPTIST
The Shores family, near Westerville, Neb., in 1887. Jerry
Shores was one of a number of former slaves to settle in Custer County. (Credit:
AP/Solomon D. Butcher)
1937
A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after
slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the
side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he
rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of
decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.
Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont.
Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so
Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis
stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers
of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to
Danville, they didn’t find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover
hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses
downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded
through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing,
came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.
In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville,
like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town.
Anderson, an African-American master’s student from Hampton University, would
not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, would hire him. To put people
back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the
WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build
schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were
hired to interview older Americans—like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully
shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson’s knock.
Anderson had found Ivy’s name in the Hampton University
archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo
had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city
called Hampton—just an American fort named after a slaveholder president.
Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that
divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was
built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point
with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they
had founded Jamestown, the first permanent English- speaking settlement in
North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English
privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-
odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled
in their holds. Read More >>
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