“Slavery is one of the world’s worst mass atrocities. Twelve million Africans were kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas under horrific conditions, and nearly two million of them died at sea during the agonizing journey.”
So reads the caption on the opening web page of The Equal Justice Initiative, an organization committed to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.
Randall Robinson, in a June 8, 2014 New York Times article, further elaborates, “For 246 years, captured Africans were shackled and packed head-to-foot below-decks in slave ships that trailed blood and corpses across the Atlantic.”
A firsthand account from “a most respectable and intelligent merchant from Liverpool,” published in the November 15, 1823 issue of the Liverpool Mercury–an English newspaper that originated in Liverpool, England and circulated for over 200 years–reads, “In the cruelty and injustice of negro slavery, in the misery it occasions, and the devastation which it spreads over the face of the earth, all the thinking part of mankind are agreed . . . shall we be guiltless if we hold our peace, or relax our efforts until the whole mass of this iniquitous system, with all its ruinous effects, is understood and felt by the country? . . . unite with us to extirpate this evil.”
American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer Christopher Hedges fears “. . . as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.”
Atrocities should not disappear behind the shadows of time. As anthropologists and historians unearth and disclose the outrageous – through our structures for education, cultural remembrance and human reflection – we will, hopefully, become both consciously aware and the beneficiaries of hindsight.
As English author S. J. Watson attests in his critically acclaimed debut novel . . . “It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.”
American slavery has always been dehumanizing and barbaric, often bloody, brutal, and violent. However, it took three-quarters of a century and a Civil War for us to define this as a Nation. In addition, it’s taken nearly a century and a half for us to rise up in our “attained” indignation against the immoral restricting of “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity [children].”
I refer readers to the words of Quaker publisher Samuel Wood, active in New York in the early 19th century. In 1805 Wood published and sold this graphic broadside depicting the sufferings of enslaved people in the West Indies:
“Let now every honest man lay his hand on his breast, and seriously reflect, whether he is justifiable in countenancing such barbarities; or whether he ought not to reject, with horror, the smallest participation in such infernal transactions.”
And yet . . .
(Injured Humanity- Part 2 will appear in the February 9th issue)
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works.
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