As a historian and college professor, I give Jack Kelly’s recent Post-Gazette column “Remnants of Slavery” an “F” for misusing history to serve ideological goals. Mr. Kelly’s account of slavery and more recent race relations in America is false and bears all the hallmarks of propaganda.
His assertion that American slaves were “treated less harshly than in most other places where slavery has been practiced” was exactly the argument made by 19th century slaveowners. Historians studying this topic consistently demonstrate the horrors of American slavery. In his classic Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin notes that slaveowners constantly devised new ways to punish their slaves including a coffin that slowly crushed a person over twenty-four hours.
Sarah Grimke wrote about growing up in South Carolina in the early 1800s and recalled meeting a woman who delighted in talking about the many bizarre, sadistic punishments she used on her slaves. She would tie a leather strap around a person’s ankle and then around their neck, forcing them to stand on one foot. If they tried to lower their ankle, the strap choked them. One hour in this position produced intense agony. To punish her maid for petty theft, the woman cut slits in the maid’s ears with a knife. The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 declared that for the punishment of slaves for robbery or any major offense, they should suffer sixty lashes, be placed in the stocks, and have their ears cut off. For minor offenses, the person was to be whipped, branded, or maimed. And children were routinely ripped from their parents and sold to distant owners, spouses forcibly separated, and enslaved women raped by White men.
Even a cursory glance at the history of American slavery reveals shockingly inhuman treatment. In fact, at a time when other nations were abolishing slavery, American slavery became more violent and based on race. The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 specified that “all Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion…shall be held to be real estate.” The law also made slavery a lifelong condition inherited at birth based on whether the mother was free or enslaved—not simply a case of “bad luck” in Mr. Kelly’s words.
When Abraham Lincoln took office, he still had hope that the seceded states would return to the United States and avoid conflict. For the next two years of the war, he repeatedly defined the Civil War as a war for Union. Only at the beginning of 1863, did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation and redefine the goal of the war to end slavery. Even then, many Union soldiers fought to preserve the Union and many who opposed slavery did so because of its deleterious effects on White workers and White farmers.
Furthermore, to argue that Whites gave African Americans their freedom ignores that U.S. citizens and office holders (and the British colonists that preceded them) created a legal system of slavery, profited handsomely from it, and perpetuated that system for two and a half centuries. It also ignores that African Americans—by ceaselessly struggling for freedom, by rebelling in one generation after another, by resisting a brutal and pervasive system of oppression, by joining the abolitionist struggle when they did escape, and finally by joining the Union army—risked more and did more than anybody to end American slavery. John Hope Franklin’s wonderful textbook From Slavery to Freedom is a comprehensive look at that many generations-long struggle. First published in 1947, it has been revised several times and is still in use today.
When Mr. Kelly argues that “no Black American living today has suffered” from slavery and that “most are better off than if their ancestors had remained in Africa,” he ignores the fact that African nations did not exist in a vacuum. Colonialism visited profoundly harmful effects on many African nations shaping their economic and political struggles, in some cases up to the present day. He glosses over inequalities and injustices that followed the U.S. Civil War, which included lynching, segregation, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, banking discrimination, judicial discrimination, disenfranchisement, and police brutality up to and including murder.
Americans have taken many important steps to overcome this legacy of racism and White privilege—but never without facing long, hard-fought campaigns by African Americans and their allies. There have been numerous thoroughly researched and well-written accounts of African American struggles, many by noted historians here in Pittsburgh including Edda Fields-Black, Patrick Manning, Marcus Rediker, David Garrow, Laurence Glasco, and Joe Trotter, to name several.
To write, as Mr. Kelly does, that the Black community suffers “in large part because White racism is blamed for social dysfunction” points to his ideological reasons for writing the column. His arguments are repeated on one “White nationalist” website after another. White supremacists believe that historians’ overemphasis of the enslavement of Blacks and lack of attention to the enslavement of Whites is part of a broader movement to deprive Whites of their heritage and power. One such website argues that saving White heritage is critical to the race’s survival and recalling the numbers of White slaves is part of that effort. The site also advertises a book whose title declares “White Guilt Equals White Extinction.” What is most disturbing to me is that the Post-Gazette would give this kind of propaganda greater validity by printing it.
Looking back in history and identifying closely with the White race and then defending or apologizing for their actions is not productive. It is better to look at the present moment and ask what you are doing or not doing to help achieve an equal or just society. If you are writing diatribes that try to minimize the horrors of American slavery and condemning activists who raise awareness when police kill unarmed African Americans, you are part of the problem.
Dr. Lou Martin is chair, Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies at Chatham University
About Post Author
