A few years ago I was working with a family that wanted to build a rum distillery on their land—a 2,000-acre sugar plantation that their ancestors had acquired in the 1850s. They insisted to me from the outset that it not be called a sugar plantation but rather a “sugar farm”—with no mention of plantation in marketing materials, despite the fact that for more than 150 years that’s what everyone called the place. They were very aware the name was problematic—with its longstanding connections to slavery and the savage mistreatment of humans. They thought it best to avoid it. I argued […]
Slavery in the United States
7 posts
The hosts of Fox & Friends waited until the final moments of their interview with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to bring up the comments he made about slavery and The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ over the weekend. Cotton used the opportunity to accuse them of spreading “fake news.” “Senator Tom Cotton, you’re in the eye of the storm, you like to take on red-hot issues, including ‘The 1619 Project,’” Brian Kilmeade said as the senator smiled awkwardly. He then quoted directly at length from Cotton’s interview with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “We have to study the history of slavery and […]
One of the earliest newspaper advertisements in what would become the United States read, simply, “A Negro Woman about 16 Years Old, to be Sold by John Campbell Post-master, to be seen at his house next door to the Anchor Tavern.” In addition to being Boston’s postmaster, John Campbell was the publisher of the Boston News-Letter, the continent’s earliest long-running newspaper. As the originator of the American newspaper, Campbell created a template for the editors who followed him. One of the ways he did that was by selling enslaved people. In recent years, many institutions have begun to grapple with slavery’s […]
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Library of Congress While the rebels were defeated more than 155 years ago, it’s clear from Donald Trump and his GOP cult that the Confederacy has survived. Watching Trump’s hate-filled presidency—preventable mass death, raging indecency, and incitement of violence—has been a reality check. Trump’s deadly pandemic neglect and his project of disunion in America are treason metastasized yet again in an America that exists halfway between Jefferson Davis and George Wallace. In a devastating rebuke on Twitter, Trump was recently asked to pick a flag: Old Glory or the Stars and Bars—the “very fine people” whose bigoted […]
Five years ago today, a white neo-Confederate shot dead nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Baptist Church, located just up the street from where a statue honoring John C. Calhoun—who in an 1837 speech famously deemed the enslavement of black human beings “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good”—has stood for more than 130 years in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina. On Wednesday afternoon, Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg announced his plan to send a resolution to the City Council to remove the monument—a move long overdue. In the same speech cited above, Calhoun stated, “never before has the black […]
In the weeks since the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd—an unarmed, restrained Black man—in broad daylight, as he begged for his life, there has been a sort of cultural atonement for the myriad ways white power structures have routinely exploited people of color. Some white folks have resigned; other have joined book clubs; and Hollywood, never to be outdone in the performative allyship department, recorded a funereal PSA. A farrago of pained expressions, darting eyes, and black shirts, the ad featured a chorus of actors, some recognizable and some not, taking “responsibility” for turning a blind eye to racism, thereby facilitating […]
Grant, a History Channel miniseries airing over three nights beginning on Memorial Day (May 25), is an overt—and timely—reclamation project. His reputation having faded over the past century because, as many here assert, the South’s “Lost Cause” rewriting of Civil War history invariably downplayed his accomplishments, Ulysses S. Grant is restored by this informative and entertaining TV documentary to the prototypical modern American hero. Based on Ron Chernow’s critically acclaimed 2017 biography of the same name, it’s a stirring tribute to an individual who embodied America’s finest ideals: hard work, determination, courage, resolve, and belief in democracy and equality for all, […]