The New York Times is marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first blacks in America with a three-month editorial series called The 1619 Project. The series will document and narrate how enslaved blacks were already building America at Point Comfort before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. It will also show how blacks have been unsung and unpaid builders of much of the rich nation America has become.
But anyone who knows anything about the history of slavery in America knows that, for 350 of the past 400 years, whites constitutionally and systematically enriched themselves at the expense of blacks. Most notably, this included whites reneging on the infamous 1865 promise to compensate newly freed blacks for their slave labor by granting them 40 acres (and a mule).
And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, “returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.
(The Root, January 7, 2013)
Ever since then, whites have reacted with racial indignation to any attempt at making good the reparations this Order envisioned. No doubt this is because far too many of them never learn a damn thing about the history of slavery in America.
This explains why America has yet to atone for its original sin. It also explains why, despite the Civil Rights Movement and significant black empowerment, the legacy of racism and all its malicious strains endure.
Besides making good on (all) Promissory Notes, the best thing the government can do to facilitate racial justice and reconciliation is to make The 1619 Project a mandatory course in every high-school in America.
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