Weekend Economists Get a Little Drunk January 27-29, 2012 [View all]

[Demeter]

Source
Harper's Weekly (Sept. 30, 1865), p. 613. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)

Comments
Caption, "View of Darlington courthouse and the sycamore tree where Amy Spain, the Negro slave, was hung by the citizens of Darlington, SC". Amy Spain's crime was that she had yelled, "Bless the Lord, the Yankees have come!" The author of the Harper's Weekly article hailed her as a martyr to the cause of freedom for her people.

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=16&categoryName=Physical%20Punishment,%20Rebellion,%20Running%20Away&theRecord=21&recordCount=87


America was built on the backs of slaves, people stolen from their homes and families, pressed into labor for the duration of their natural lives, and their children after them, with abuse and privation always in their faces. They were powerless.

This is nothing special. I will look, but probably all nations were founded on the forced labor and abuse of the laborers. But this is the 21st century. We are above that, aren't we? Have we not evolved beyond such brutality?

While I'd like to reassure people that we ARE better people, I don't think we are there yet. In fact, I think the human race is slipping back into the bad old times, by trick and fraud and and massive indifference for one's fellow man on the behalf of the most successful predators, pirates and hypocrites yet produced. And I'm not referring to the former Third World nations alone. I'm referring to the United States of America.

Today's title comes from that Broadway standard, "Ole Man River", the hit from "Showboat". It's a terrible lovely, melancholy ballad, but we will look at slavery in art in general, not just this one show.

Since February is Black History Month, we will get a head start on it, but broadening the subject to all people around the world. You don't have to be black to be enslaved. And you don't have to be white to be an oppressor.

Paul Robeson - Ol' Man River (Showboat - 1936) J.Kern O. Hammerstein II