“Rethinking Slavery” – A Retrospect
I recently attended the lecture of renowned historian Ira Berlin. Professor Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He has also been the recipient of many awards and acknowledgements over the last decade. In 2002, President Clinton appointed Professor Berlin to the advisory committee of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Berlin was visiting the campus as a result of his recent appointment as a Mellon Distinguished Senior Fellow for the spring semester at the University of Illinois. He hosted an invitation-only conference at the Illini Union entitled “Transforming Slavery” on the day following his lecture.
Usually when I am on my way to see a lecture, I am not exactly “anxious” to get there. I was, however, anticipating Professor Berlin’s lecture very much. I had a strong feeling that Professor Berlin was very well established and respected in his field. However, I became disappointed before the lecture even began. According to various sources I had seen around the University, Professor Berlin’s lecture was supposed to begin at 2:30. My plan was to have a conference at 12:30 with Professor Rogers, eat some lunch, and then head to the lecture at about 2:15. Luckily for me, during my
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conference, I was informed that the lecture began at 3:30. After returning to my dorm, I researched the sources again. I found two sources that had the starting time of the lecture as 2:30, and two sources that had the starting time of the lecture as 3:30. So, needless to say, I was confused. ...
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...of the audience to Professor Berlin’s lecture, I can only say that the reaction was mixed. I noticed that the scholars and professors on hand were captivated by Berlin’s presence and were very attentive. I even noticed that a professor in front of me literally tried to write every word Berlin spoke. As for the attitude of the rest in attendance, it was rather dull. It seemed that there were some people that seemed moderately interested in the speech, while others teetered on slumber. I must admit that I was one of the latter (even dosing off occasionally). It just seemed that, overall, the audience, I included, was slightly disappointed in the content and context of Professor Berlin’s lecture. Although there was a definite feeling that Professor Berlin was a very honored person, he failed to captivate most the audience, which was disappointing to say the least.
When reading about the institution of slavery in the United States, it is easy to focus on life for the slaves on the plantations—the places where the millions of people purchased to serve as slaves in the United States lived, made families, and eventually died. Most of the information we seek is about what daily life was like for these people, and what went “wrong” in our country’s collective psyche that allowed us to normalize the practice of keeping human beings as property, no more or less valuable than the machines in the factories which bolstered industrialized economies at the time. Many of us want to find information that assuages our own personal feelings of discomfort or even guilt over the practice which kept Southern life moving
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
Franklin, J., Moss, A. Jr. From Slavery to Freedom. Seventh edition, McGraw Hill, Inc.: 1994.
Walking into a lecture hall in Gregory Hall, I really didn’t know what to expect. I dressed as I would any other day; an Abercrombie shirt, a pair of frayed shorts and some casual sandals. I sat towards the front of the room and arrived slightly early to ensure a good seat. The name of this Brown v. Board education discussion was entitled, "Rethinking Slavery: 1800-1861,” and was arranged by the Mellon initiative.
David W. Blight's book Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War, is an intriguing look back into the Civil War era which is very heavily studied but misunderstood according to Blight. Blight focuses on how memory shapes history Blight feels, while the Civil War accomplished it goal of abolishing slavery, it fell short of its ultimate potential to pave the way for equality. Blight attempts to prove that the Civil War does little to bring equality to blacks. This book is a composite of twelve essays which are spilt into three parts. The Preludes describe blacks during the era before the Civil War and their struggle to over come slavery and describes the causes, course and consequences of the war. Problems in Civil War memory describes black history and deals with how during and after the war Americans seemed to forget the true meaning of the war which was race. And the postludes describes some for the leaders of black society and how they are attempting to keep the memory and the real meaning of the Civil War alive and explains the purpose of studying historical memory.
Following the enforcement of emancipation and the passage of the thirteenth amendment in 1864, African Americans found themselves in a contradictory position of both newfound freedom and great discrimination. The newly freed slaves of America faced a society that mere years ago, considered them as nothing greater than property. During this period, two leaders of monumentally opposed schools of thought emerged in the African American community. Booker T. Washington, and William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B) Du Bois. These two thinkers were some of the most influential educators, authors, and orators of the American 19th century, and were also frequent critics of the other's methods and ideas. This was due to a sharp disagreement on the ‘right’ strategy for improving the condition of the black community. While they might not have agreed on the means, both of these remarkable men at least shared that common goal, and their efforts are best demonstrated by looking to the long standing success of institutions they founded and worked ( the Tuskegee institute and Atlanta University respectively). That being said, the diametrically opposed philosophies they supported still stand today, and each 'camp' can be identified in many contemporary debates over discrimination, society, and how to end racial and class injustice.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Restating Positions on Slavery: December 1860.” Simpson, Brooks D., Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean 109-110.
In “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sets out a powerful argument for reparations to blacks for having to thrive through horrific inequity, including slavery, Jim Crowism, Northern violence and racist housing policies. By erecting a slave society, America erected the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. And Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. Paying such a moral debt is such a great matter of justice served rightfully to those who were suppressed from the fundamental roles, white supremacy played in American history.
On July 5th of 1852, the Ladies Antislavery Society of Rochester requested that emancipated slave, Fredrick Douglass, speak for their celebration of the United States’ national independence. Douglass accepted this request and presented a powerful speech that explained and argued his true beliefs and feelings concerning this event. He considered their decision to request him as a speaker on that day to be a mockery of his past and of the ongoing status of blacks as slaves in America at the time. Nevertheless, Douglass skillfully constructed his speech utilizing various methods that forced his audience to take him seriously and think twice about the issue of slavery in America. His passion about the subject, his ability to captivate his audience, and his persuasive skills combine to form a clearly effective speech that continues to be studied to this day. Douglass warmed up his audience by commending the moral and patriotic excellence of their forefathers. He then delivered the argument of his speech which cleverly criticized the hypocrisy of the institution of slavery and those who tolerated or supported it. Yet, to conclude his speech, Douglass asserts that there is still hope for the young nation so as not to leave the audience completely discouraged. The way in which Douglass constructed and delivered this speech had a lasting impact and left his audience with an effectively argued point to consider.
American History, though relatively short compared to the history of the rest of the world, is a topic taught during all levels of education. From elementary school to college, educators inundate students with the facts and theories regarding the transformation of this country from the dense wilderness of the 1600s to the bustling cities of today. While there are many events and time periods in this nation’s history that have shaped its culture and society, one of the most thoroughly studied eras in American History is that of slavery in the antebellum south. Every third grader through college senior has taken at least one class in which the teacher or professor throws out facts and figures about the horrors of slavery, or shows pictures of the squalor of slave quarters with the intention of shocking and upsetting the inhabitants of the classroom. Most students, however, are never taught the whole story. They never learn about the lives behind the numbers or the events behind the pictures. Additionally, most of the stories students do learn about are purely negative and typically about the life of a male field hand. Hardly any lectures focus on the few positive aspects of slave life or the characteristics of life as a female slave. In her novel, Kindred, Octavia Butler aims to reveal what life was actually like for slaves, especially female slaves, in the years preceding the Civil War. Though this book is classified as science fiction, Butler’s depiction of slavery is surprisingly accurate, however not entirely complete. Through the course of the novel, Butler investigates every aspect of female slave life from birth through death including the work expected of a bondwoman, treatment of slaves by white owners, marriage and child b...
Froner’s account of the efforts of slaves to get north to freedom emphasizes that, although there were many heroic whites who helped, even their efforts would hardly have been possible “without the courage and resourcefulness, in a hostile environment, of blacks,” ranging from those northern free blacks who served on abolition committees to “the ordinary men and women”
Pruitt, Sarah “5 Things You May Not Know About Lincoln, Slavery, and Emancipation” History. Readers Companion to American History. 2012. web. 30 October 2013.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.