Local opinion: Of slavery, censorship and teaching

I am a historian — more of the teaching kind than of the writing kind, and, as such, I have learned that so-called historical truth is often more a matter of selection than anything else. Both scholars and teachers of history make selections of materials to research and use and where to place or avoid emphasis in writing and teaching about their selections.

Put another way, history is the past. But, which stories get to be told—and untold?

I am a historian, and I see an African-American history with a plethora of heroes and their heroic resistance against bondage and dehumanization. I see a history that could excise slavery out of its founding document only after a bloody Civil War. I see a shackled people struggle with dignity, grace, resilience, and fortitude, but I also see the parts of the story that President Trump and his minions cannot be permitted to ignore. Nor can the promise of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in our founding documents be erased with new ink, nameplates, signs, jackhammers, or assault weapons and masks. Nor can the ugly story of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery be retold with a restoration of marble statues celebrating the leaders of the Southern rebellion and a cultivation of the white nationalist roots of the post-Civil War Jim Crow era.

The ugliness of the American original sin of slavery is also the American story.

These parts, too, seen by historians (black and white), must be told and cannot be untold or even permanently “whitewashed.” Historians cull through plantation records; local government property records, archives, voter documents and resident lists; birth records; auction transaction documents; newspaper archives; slave ship manifests; archeology and anthropology maps and documents; surviving slave quarters; discovered and repatriated slave cemeteries; diaries and letters from slave owners and literate slaves; slave songs contextualized; and so much more. When they do this work, the brutality and anguish of slave culture leaves the objectivity of the historical record and translates into moral judgment about the desecration of humanity.

I see the lash crack and rip the bare flesh, amid the terror and cries for merciful death, for conjured crimes in misanthropic heads.

I see a people head to toe in vomit and excrement, from the Doors of No Return to Middle Passage, to the other darkness of the next unknowable. I have been to the slave forts and castles in Ghana and Gore Island in Senegal. Those who would deny the legacy of slavery have not.

I see the lash again and again for eating while black, for sleeping while black, and for tolling while black, in total thrall to the whim of self-appointed masters.

I see the bloodied shackles of the auction block. I see suckled babies torn from mother’s breast. I see young girls shackled to perverted master lust.

I see trees made evil at the hands of miscreants. Trees themselves used as spontaneous gibbets. Hewn lumber fit for crosses turned into gallows.

I see George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tulsa. I see firebombed city, pickup truck, and knee. I see Emmett Till and public lynching for fun.

I see Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and Harper’s Ferry. I see Nathan Bedford Forrest, and nascent KKK. I see the KKK urinate on the Civil War’s reckoning. I see urine stain on black judicial robes.

I see the lash crack and rip bare flesh and bone of the Constitutional promise of the republic itself, of the undergirding plinth of the entire Constitution—that human rights are anterior to all government, that they are the essential flesh covering structural bone.

I see the specters Bull, Lester, J. Edgar, Strom, Jesse, George, Stephen, and Donald—chisels in hand at the source awaiting the hammers. I see QAnons, Pretorians, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys — at the plinth with assault weapons and jackhammers.

I see backhoes and jackhammers destroying sections of the “people’s house”, a White House partly built with the soiled black hands of slaves, yearning for the equality promise of the Declaration of Independence. Yearning still.

I see a hooded figure arrive with a scythe and a book titled “The American Story.”

But I also see that “the American story” is many stories — each told with as much accuracy as possible. The slavery and post-slavery stories, accurately told, when accompanied by recognition and acceptance, are the antithesis of a whitewashing of history. Collectively, they are also the antithesis of a blackwashing of history. They are just parts of the American story told — to be juxtaposed against and contrasted with other parts of the same American story. Documented truthful stories can speak for themselves.

Sought-after truth can confirm that Benjamin Franklin’s post-Constitutional Convention comment about America’s future — a rising sun or a setting sun — doesn’t have to be the setting sun of Donald Trump’s creation.