Abolitionist or Terrorist?
FAYETTEVILLE, N.Y. — ON Feb. 14, a group of activists in Charleston, S.C., unveiled a life-size statue of Denmark Vesey, a black abolitionist who was executed in 1822 for leading a failed slave rebellion in the city.
For many people, Vesey was a freedom fighter and a proto-civil rights leader. But the statue, the work of nearly two decades, brought out furious counterattacks; one recent critic called him a “terrorist,” and a historian denounced him as “a man determined to create mayhem.”
Radio hosts, academics and newspaper bloggers condemned the project as “Charleston’s parallel to the 1990s O. J. Simpson verdict,” and suggested other African-Americans they believed more appropriate subjects of memorialization, like the rock pioneer Chubby Checker or the astronaut Ronald E. McNair.
There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.
Vesey was as complicated a figure as the world that produced him. He was born around 1767, probably on the island of St. Thomas. As a child he was purchased as a cabin boy by Joseph Vesey, a Charleston-based slaver, who settled in the city just after the Revolution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/opinion/abolitionist-or-terrorist.html?_r=0
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