America Needs a National Slavery Monument
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE
DEC. 5, 2015
Fresno, Calif. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY years ago today, America ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the country. It was a momentous victory. But it also prompted a protracted campaign to whitewash how slavery would be remembered, one waged in Southern parks and squares, on the regions university campuses and statehouse grounds. By the 1930s, Confederate monuments stood watch all over the South, buttressing a white supremacist interpretation of the past ...
Hundreds of .. monuments convinced generations of white Southerners, and others, that the Confederacy had gone to war to defend states rights, liberty and the Southern way of life. Anything but slavery.
Meanwhile, a second set of monuments depicted slavery as a benevolent system that fostered loving relationships between masters and slaves. In 1896 in Fort Mill, S.C., a Confederate veteran installed a monument dedicated to the faithful slaves who ... guarded our defenseless homes, women and children during the Civil War.
The Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, unveiled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1914, features a black body servant following his master off to war and a mammy taking charge of a white soldiers infant. In 1923, the Daughters obtained Senate approval to erect a mammy monument in Washington, a national memorial to those who, according to one congressman, desired no change in their condition of life ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/opinion/sunday/america-needs-a-national-slavery-monument.html
mwrguy
(3,245 posts)Proserpina
(2,352 posts)http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/19/nancy-pelosi/legend-slaves-building-capitol-correct/
Every now and then, a fact goes viral. Current case in point: that slaves helped construct the U.S. Capitol, where the son of an African man is set to be sworn in as the nation's 44th president.
Pundits and politicians have mentioned this dozens of times in the past few days, wielding it as potent shorthand for all the historical import of the moment.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, mentioned it in her remarks at the Dec. 2, 2008, dedication of the Capitol Visitors Center:
"The Capitol was built by slaves," Pelosi said. "Today, I want to talk about the fact that it's so appropriate that, though long overdue, this Capitol Visitors Center is ready for 2009, which is the 200th anniversary, the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator."
We wanted to find the details behind the assertion and give it more context.
It turns out there's far less in the historical record on the subject than one might expect. Early historians of the Capitol's construction were largely indifferent to the work of common laborers, both paid and slave. Records from the time are spotty.
Only in the past 15 years or so has attention been trained on the role slaves played in constructing perhaps the nation's most important building and the work has been led not by professional historians, but by individuals who developed a personal interest in the subject, such as retired Washington television reporter Ed Hotaling and freelance writer Bob Arnebeck.
In 2005, Congress appointed a task force to research the subject, which issued a report in conjunction with the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, finally bringing a measure of scholarly rigor to bear on the topic.
The task force acknowledged it was not able to tell the full story. "No one will ever know how many slaves helped to build the United States Capitol Building or the White House," says the 2005 task force report, entitled History of Slave Laborers in the Construction of the United States Capitol.
But the task force did find plenty of evidence of slave involvement in the Capitol's construction. Perhaps the most compelling evidence were records of payments from the commissioners for the District of Columbia the three men appointed by George Washington to oversee the construction of the Capitol and the rest of the city of Washington to slave owners for the rental of slaves to work on the Capitol. The records reflect 385 payments between 1795 and 1801 for "Negro hire," a euphemism for the yearly rental of slaves.
Slaves were likely involved in all aspects of construction, including carpentry, masonry, carting, rafting, plastering, glazing and painting, the task force reported. And slaves appear to have shouldered alone the grueling work of sawing logs and stones.
Slave crews also toiled at the marble and sandstone quarries that provided the stone to face the structure lonely, grueling work with bleak living conditions in rural Virginia and elsewhere. "Keep the yearly hirelings at work from sunrise to sunset particularly the Negroes," the commissioners wrote to quarry operator William O'Neale in 1794.
The commissioners' use of slave labor was unremarkable for the time. When the Capitol was constructed, from 1793 to 1826, the building trades in almost every colony augmented the work force with slave labor. This would have been especially true in the Potomac region the home of about half the 750,000 African-Americans living in the United States, according to the 1972 book Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, by Letitia Woods Brown.
Most of the slaves who worked on the Capitol are known by first name at best the records refer to a payment of $13.00 to slaveholder Teresa Bent for "Nace," for example, and $23.00 to Elizabeth Brent for "Harry" and "Gabe."
But one particular slave, Philip Reid, achieved some renown as an individual. He was a slave laborer for Clark Mills, who was hired to cast the Statue of Freedom, the Capitol's crowning feature. The government paid Reid $1.25 a day for his work.
The statue, a draped female figure holding a sheathed sword in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other, stands atop the Capitol dome, 288 feet above the site of Obama's swearing in.
Pelosi might have specified that slaves were only part of the work force, but they were involved with almost every aspect of construction for at least the first several years. We find her statement True.
The Supreme Court was completed in 1935
KT2000
(20,590 posts)The text books make a big deal out of the white men who "built" this country and only regard the slaves in off-hand manner if at all. The record should be set straight with full recognition of this country's dependence upon slavery, how they were captured to come here - the whole story.
Have always wanted to see a monument with an inscription that says something like - In recognition of the captured, unrecognized, uncompensated, freedom denied, men, women, and children who built this country.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Abouttime
(675 posts)We, the United States of America owe all African Americans reparations. Making them whole would be th best monument.
potone
(1,701 posts)And long overdue. This is an essential part of our history that we need to accept, as hateful as it is.