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American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice
Ira Berlin
Tho' de slave question am settled, de race question will be wid us always, 'til Jesus come de second time. It's in our politics, in our justice courts, on our highways, on our side walks, in our manners, in our 'ligion, and in our thoughts, all de day and every day.
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| —Cornelius Holmes, Winnsboro, South Carolina, c. 1937 |
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| The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States. In the years that followed, southern planters and their allies proved extraordinarily resourceful in inventing new forms of labor extraction and racial oppression, but try as they might, they could not resuscitate chattel bondage. Yet, almost a century and a half later, the question of slavery again roils the water of American life. Indeed, the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of popular interest in slavery, which has stimulated its study and provided the occasion for a rare conversation between historians and an interested public. Slavery has a greater presence in American life now than at any time since the Civil War ended. The intense engagement over the issue of slavery signals—as it did in the 1830s and the 1960s—a crisis in American race relations that necessarily elevates the significance of the study of the past in the search for social justice. |
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The new interest has been manifested in the success on the big screen of the movies Glory, Amistad, and Adanggaman, along with a blockbuster with Oprah Winfrey as producer and star, Beloved.1 They have been followed on the small screen: The four-part TV series Africans in America traced the course of slavery's development from the forcible deportation of Africans to the celebration of an American emancipation; in a televised sojourn through Africa, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. confronted the painful matter of African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade; and HBO's "Unchained Memories" explored the remembrances of slavery collected in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.2 The television docudramas were paralleled by radio broadcasts and audiobooks, of which Remembering Slavery, a collaboration of scholars (including myself) at the University of Maryland, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress, was but one. They come hard on the heels of John Michael Vlach's "The Back of the Big House" exhibition at the Library of Congress and the presentation of the famous Augustus Saint-Gaudens frieze of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment at the National Gallery. Workers in Washington have but recently put the finishing touches on a monument to black Civil War soldiers. Styled after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it lists the names of more than two hundred thousand soldiers and sailors, most of them former slaves. The city of Windsor, Ontario, placed a monument to the Underground Railroad on the border between the United States and Canada.3 A monument to the Amistad captives stands in front of city hall in New Haven, Connecticut. The Amistad itself has been reconstructed at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, and the ship recently completed its journey of reconciliation down the east coast and began a new one around the Great Lakes. The National Slave Memorial Act (H.R. 196), introduced by the Republican representative Cliff Stearns of Florida (who was joined by an unusual coalition of congressmen that included representatives John Lewis and Dick Armey), acknowledges the "injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies," proposing to memorialize slaves on a site to be recommended by the secretary of the interior (a position currently held by a woman who has publicly regretted that the defeat of the Confederacy undermined the doctrine of states' rights).4 |
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