The United States Needs a Slavery Museum

[struggle4progress]

By Sara Fanning • May 20, 2014 • 12:00 PM

... Horrifying though Bundy’s remarks were (and he did receive a fast rebuke from some of those who had initially sided with him), he’s not the only one who has shared this opinion publicly in recent years. In March, Arizona congressional candidate Jim Brown wrote on his Facebook page that “Basically slave owners took pretty good care of their slaves and livestock and this kept business rolling along.” Last year, Walter Block, who holds an endowed chair at Loyola University, wrote the following in an article on lewrockwell.com: “Otherwise, slavery wasn’t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory.”

What this kind of commentary tells us is deeply disturbing: That we as a nation have failed to educate ourselves about the institution of slavery, and what’s more, that there are Americans who refuse to accept it as the United States’ original sin. To begin to address this ignorance, we need a national museum dedicated to slavery in America—its reality, its history, and its long-lasting effects ...

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/u-s-needs-slavery-museum-81898/

[dsteve01]

1. I agree

I've been to a couple holocaust museums, Hispanic art institutes--but now that you mention it I haven't heard of many Slavery museums. It's a hard thing to discuss--even today.

[MFM008]

2. nooooooooooooo

conservacraps and the SOUTH wont like it. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

[frazzled]

3. There's the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, SC

as well as tours of slave quarters and slave lives at several of the plantations there. Here's an interesting article from the NY Times several years ago about how Charleston and vicinity has upped the visibility of its slave-owning/exploiting past at historical sites around the area, and about how there needs to be more such efforts.

Here, in this lovely town, once one of the most prosperous in the American colonies, there is no escape.

In the Old Slave Mart Museum that opened in 2007, you read: “You’re standing in the actual showroom, the place where traders sold — and buyers bought — American blacks who were born into slavery.”

Or go to Drayton Hall, a local plantation hewn out of the Low Country landscape by hundreds of slaves, who also made its rice fields so profitable. At a clearing in the woods near the entrance, you see an information panel and a memorial arch: this was a “burying ground,” used at least as early as the 1790s, where the plantation’s slaves buried their dead.

Or drive to Boone Hall, another local plantation, which you approach through an avenue of moss-draped ancient oaks that leads visitors to the main house: you see a row of rare brick slave dwellings, placed so no visitor could have missed the immense wealth in human chattel. At one time, these one-room homes were joined by others on each side of the road, creating corridors of the enslaved, ushering guests to the master’s domain.

Or walk into the almost Italianate backyard of the Aiken-Rhett House in town, in which William Aiken Jr., who served as South Carolina’s governor, lived in the mid-19th century. Listen to the audio tour explaining that this was a work yard, and that such yards “were part of every town house in Charleston in the first half of the 19th century and were the domain of slaves.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/arts/design/charlestons-museums-finally-chronicle-history-of-slavery.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Old Slave Mart Museum held its grand opening on Wednesday, October 31st at 11:00 A.M. Drawing upon the most contemporary scholarship, exemplary historical interpretation and rich collections which have been inaccessible for some time, the museum, located at 6 Chalmers Street, recounts the story of Charleston's role as an urban slave-trading center during the domestic slave trade.

Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. said, “ The Old Slave Mart Museum tells an important story in the history of this city and the region. It has been an important site for preservation and restoration and amassing the research and artifacts has been arduous. We are proud of the work done by staff and consultants in presenting this element of our early history.”

While many Americans are familiar with the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and early 19th centuries, many are not aware that the United States constitution, ratified in 1780, contained a provision that led to a ban on the importation of African slaves after 1808, 53 years before the Civil War. It was this vacuum in the increasing demand for labor that the domestic slave trade, in part, filled.

This interstate trade was a hugely profitable economy organized by local and regional slave traders and dealers within the United States who, between 1789 and 1861, forcibly relocated approximately 1 million American-born slaves from the upper South to the lower South. During that same period, over two million African-American slaves were sold in local, interstate and state-ordered sales combined. The Old Slave Mart Museum focuses on the history of this particular building and site and the slave sales that occurred there.
http://www.charlestoncvb.com/visitors/events_news/charleston-news/city_of_charleston_opens_old_slave_mart_museum-787

[WCLinolVir]

4. We would love to have one in Richmond VA.

We have all of these memorials to the architects of the civil war, a Confederate Museum, a civil war museum, but no slave museum. People who make such truly horrendous statements about the conditions of slavery are mentally ill. Just read about the laws that kept evolving for the keeping of slaves, the laws for the recapturing of slaves, the laws to support the industry of slavery, ad nauseum. That really brought it home to me what the society at large tolerated. Do we really think sadism is a modern illness?
Driving through a row of slave houses to see the owner? I suppose brick houses were exceptional, but it makes me think of cattle, or Auschwitz.

[Half-Century Man]

5. I think we should have a Smithsonian hall for "Where we erred".

With exhibits on Slavery, Genocides of the First Nations peoples, Institutionalized bigotry, Massacres caused by Ideology, and Manipulations for Foreign Politics.
Only by acknowledging these failing can we learn from them and not repeat them.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

6. There should be many of those musea.

For all sorts of enslavement and genocide. Not just Holocaust musea, but Native Americans, Africans and African-Americans, interned Japanese-Americans, who were citizens, and many others.

[greymattermom]

7. Cincinnati

http://freedomcenter.org