Slavery [View all]

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The recent posts about slavery in our nation have been interesting but seem to be more about blame, guilt, punishment, and reparations. Or a defense of those who were not involved in the slave trade but benefited from it. Not so much about how slavery came to be through the centuries in almost every nation and how most of what we know and what we teach our children was handed down to us by slave owners and the many political leaders, royalty, Popes, and companies who were deeply involved in the huge worldwide slave trade.

A week ago I visited the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, thirty miles north of New Orleans, the first plantation restored to tell the stories of the slaves themselves. It opened this year to the public after 262 years and is still in the restoration process. Ten years ago John Cummings, a white southern Democrat lawyer, who had visited the many beautiful plantations in Louisiana felt strongly that none of them told the true story of life on the plantations. The lovely big houses were reconstructed but the slave quarters were almost completely destroyed; the millions of tourists heard hardly a word about the lives of the men, women and children who worked and suffered until they died to farm tons of cotton and sugar cane for wealthy companies to send around the world. (Hundreds of plantations built by slaves of German immigrants thrived on the Great River Road; only about 60 remain and about 30 are open to the public.)

Whitney was going to be torn down for development when Cummings bought all 1700 acres, hired some of our best historians of African-American life and spent millions to research and to restore Whitney so that it would truly represent what it was like to be a slave on these large "farms". Many slave cabins have been restored and the iron jail where slaves were shackled if they tried to escape. Inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial large polished panels are etched with the names of every one of the 365 slaves who lived at Whitney, where they came from, what happened to their families, and includes many quotes and paintings from the Library of Congress. In time 400,000 Louisiana slave names will be on the huge panels. The Field of Angels is a memorial with the names of 2,200 babies who died before the age of 3.

In the entry building the long and terrible worldwide history of slavery is documented. Did you know that Brazil imported more slaves than any other country? Did you know that the Pope approved Portugal to hold slaves "in perpetuity"? Did you know that most of the slaves coming from the Caribbean were sold in the market of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans? Did you know that the largest slave revolt in US history (never mentioned in our history books) started near the Whitney, almost succeeded in overthrowing New Orleans before the US army captured the slaves, killed most of them and executed the 45 left after a "trial"? Their heads were put on poles up and down the Mississippi River as a warning to any slaves planning to revolt.

It is not much easier to visit the Whitney Plantation than Dachau but it seems to me that we can only be "real Americans" when we stop covering up the parts of history we are ashamed of and believing patriotism is thinking we are an "exceptional" nation. Our children, black, white, Native American will learn that we all can be proud of our country when we acknowledge our history and mean it when we say "never again."