By Ellis Cose
August 23, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Who would have thought the 400th anniversary of slavery in America was worth celebrating? But then “celebrating” may not be the right word for what is turning into a reexamination of America's original sin.
USA TODAY and The New York Times are among the publications undertaking this effort. The USA TODAY project focuses in part on a family that came to be known as the Tuckers, “the founding family you’ve never heard of,” whose antecedents apparently were among those who landed in August 1619 at Point Comfort, Virginia. The Times has taken the anniversary as an occasion to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black America at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Treason made Civil War necessary
A number of conservatives have responded with indignation to this approach. Most prominent is former professional historian and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is apparently fed up with the focus on mistreatment of Africans.
“Certainly if you're an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience. But for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on,” he explained. Instead of emphasizing the critical role played by race-based slavery, Gingrich argues that we should focus on the “several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves."
400 years after American slavery:
Aaron Burr's lawyer owned my family. It has been a long, tragic journey from slavery.
Gingrich’s argument is nonsensical. Whatever one’s race, “there were a lot of other things going on” at any period in history. One does not have to be black to see the importance of slavery to the American story. Nor does the fact that a lot of other things were “going on” make slavery inconsequential or somehow benign.
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