On Presidents Day honor their slaves

The host on my classical music radio station has been saying today is officially George Washington’s Birthday. The bit about naming this particular national holiday as Presidents Day got deleted from the final bill before passage.

Whether this day is to honor all the presidents or just the first one Denise Oliver Velez of Daily Kos has something better for the day – honor the slaves of our early presidents. This is still important because blackface is back in the news and the current guy in the White House is a white supremacist.

Velez pulled in a few items from Five Truths about Black History by Jeffery Robinson of the ACLU.

* The first slaves arrived in our colonies in 1619.

* Virginia passed more than 130 laws regulating the ownership of black people – meaning what the white owner was allowed to do to a slave.

* There were 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. 40 of them owned slaves. Ten of the first twelve presidents owned slaves.

Starting with Washington. In 1786 he made a list of his slaves and the total was 216.

Velez has been writing these kinds of articles for Daily Kos in mid February for a few years now. She included excerpts of them in this year’s post.

The first national capital was Philadelphia. Pennsylvania had a law that said if a slave had been in the state for six months, they must be set free. So Washington rotated his slaves back to Virginia just before the deadline. But these slaves saw what freedom was like. Ona Judge was one of those who saw freedom, so escaped to New England. Washington responded with an intense manhunt. Several other slaves created escape plans.

Hercules was the chef for the Washington household. He was the subject of a children’s book about the creation of a birthday cake for the great man. The book’s story supposedly claimed that slaves were proud of the “status” positions – the “good” aspects of slavery. Once the book hit stores it caused such a public outcry it was withdrawn. But how did it make it that far?

On to “All men are created equal” Thomas Jefferson. Velez is quite tired of apologists. Go read about Robert Carter who actually freed his slaves. Plaques at Monticello now discuss how much slave labor was needed to run it.

Then there is James Monroe. He was the target of a slave revolt in 1800 and as governor of Virginia he led the repressive restoration of order (that order being white slave owners in charge). Rebellious slaves were publicly executed.

So what do we do now?

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first black female reporter for the Washington Post wrote about the location of the unmarked grave for slaves on the Mount Vernon grounds. There is now a marker at the location. Go visit.

And the big thing is to change how we teach about slavery. The Southern Poverty Law Center found only 8% of high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War (not surprising from the many decades where that was intentionally obscured). This means updating textbooks and getting Teaching Tolerance materials. Teaching Tolerance tweeted:

If you can’t accurately understand the past—the way in which society has been built and constructed, economically, politically and socially—then you cannot make sense of the present.

Velez lists 10 key concepts from Teaching Tolerance to be taught in schools. Some of them:

Protections for slavery were embedded in the founding documents; enslavers dominated the federal government, Supreme Court and Senate from 1787 through 1860.

Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.

Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.

Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.

Enslaved and free people of African descent had a profound impact on American culture, producing leaders and literary, artistic and folk traditions that continue to influence the nation.

Virginia History has a database of Virginia slave names, so a schoolchild can “adopt” a slave family and follow their history. Other sites have similar data.

The SPLC site includes writings of Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Some things he notes:

* The Preamble to the Constitution lists some lofty goals for the new country. Racial justice is not in the list. Other parts of the constitution protect slavery and the slave trade, guaranteeing inequality for generations.

* Slavery is more than our country’s original sin. It’s also our country’s origin. Slavery was behind our country’s growth and transformation into a new nation.

* Slavery nearly destroyed the country. The South took up arms because they could not allow a world in which they did not have authority to control black labor and black behavior.

* Teaching about slavery unnerves us.

If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? If James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his entire life, refusing to free a single soul even upon his death, then what does that say about our nation’s founders? About our nation itself?