One of the things that is wrong with this way of looking at the issue is the white nationalist assumption that white slavers were repositories of useful knowledge that they sometimes deigned to pass on to the poor benighted enslaved from the backward Dark Continent. I will come back to this point below.

Governor Ron DeSantis, who ordered the new standards, defended this point before an all-white audience on Friday, saying, ”They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is: All of that is rooted in whatever is factual.”

Uh, just so you know, West Africa had a long tradition of producing blacksmiths and likely some enslaved artisans came already knowing all about it.

When challenged to give supporting details, the Florida Board of Education gave a list of 16 persons. On investigation, it was found that more than half of them weren’t enslaved, the rest didn’t learn any useful skills while enslaved, and one of them appears actually to have been white.

The curriculum puts an emphasis on those slaves who worked as tradesmen and artisans (for no salary) as opposed to the vast majority, who toiled as field hands and often were worked to death, as Josh Marshall discusses. He sees a distortion of the record coming from such odd over-focusing on some things and neglect of others.

DeSantis’s sort of discourse ignores that the enslaved were strictly forbidden to learn to read and write English, and the few who did so had to resort to dangerous subterfuges. Not sure how many “useful skills” the illiterate could learn.

Being someone’s property, having him rape you at will, and his ability to sell off your spouse and children whenever he liked, seem to me to outweigh any minor skills an enslaved person picked up. There is not good evidence that very many of them picked up very many marketable skills, and mind you that if the southern slaver states had had their way no enslaved Africans would ever have been able to try to put any of his or her skills on the private market, what with being owned and all.

But let us examine the real direction of useful knowledge, which was often from the enslaved to the ignorant and often unlettered whites who happened to own them.

Sylviane A. Diouf in her Servants of Allah explores issues in the enslavement of West African Muslims in the New World. She argues that because they traveled from town to town seeking knowledge and teaching it, the West African Sufi masters and Muslim clerics were disproportionately at risk of being captured and enslaved, since they were so much on the road. We don’t know what proportion of enslaved Africans were Muslims, but it likely was between 10% and 20%. Because of the large number of Muslim clerics among them, the Muslim enslaved were disproportionately literate in Arabic and in other languages written in the Arabic script in West Africa, such as Wolof, Mandinka and Hausa. She says that many slave-owners prized these literate Muslims, who often also had good book-keeping abilities, and depended on them in that regard, since many white slave-owners were not very literate or well schooled.

Some of the enslaved West Africans were highly educated royalty or scions of old clerical families schooled in Timbuktu, who were well versed in Greek sciences adopted into Islam. Many could have debated Aristotle with any white intellectual if the white person learned Arabic (Thomas Jefferson studied it a bit but remained blithely unaware that some of his own slaves may have been able to read it). Many white slave owners and proprietors of smaller farms wouldn’t have had similar knowledge. Some of the enslaved left behind autobiographies and other documents in Arabic, as with Omar ibn Said.

Judith Carney in “The African Origins of Carolina Rice Culture” discusses how historians have shown that rice cultivation in South Carolina depended on West Africans’ knowledge of the crop and their discovery of a distinctive strain. Wetland rice farming is much more productive that upland rainfall-based farming of the crop. Not only did enslaved West Africans know much more about rice growing than Scottish immigrants to the Carolinas but African women in particular possessed specialized knowledge of growing this crop.

She observes, “In 1453, decades before ships would reach India and Asian rice systems, the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara visited the mouth of the Gambia River and recorded the first European mention of West African rice cultivation: “They arrived sixty leagues beyond Cape Verde [Senegal], where they met with a river which was of good width, and into which they entered with their caravels. . .they found much of the land sown, and many. . . fields sown with rice. . .And. . .all that land seemed. . .like marshes.”

Senegambia was a region from which many enslaved kidnap victims were brought to North America.

She adds, “Wherever rice cultivation occurs in West Africa, women are involved. Rice is either a female crop or onecultivated with a sharply demarcated gender division of labour, men preparing the land for cultivation and women in charge of sowing, weeding and hoeing.”

It is therefore no surprise that in colonial South Carolina, too, “female slaves constituted the majority of ‘prime hands’ on Carolina and Georgia rice plantations.Women were especially involved in the tasks of sowing the seeds, weeding and hoeing, their group labour with long-handled hoes described by one observer of an ante-bellum rice plantation as a ‘human hoeing machine’.”

Leland Ferguson in Uncommon ground: archaeology and early African America, 1650-1800 shows that slaver farm owners often depended on the “pioneering” skills of Africans in clearing wilderness, and their knowledge of how to use adobe in making walled houses, woodworking knowledge of how to carve wood into water buckets and how carve a canoe out of cypress trunks, make baskets, recognize and use useful herbs for seasoning and healing, and their knowledge of pottery. West Africans were often used as coopers because of their woodworking skill in making staves and hoops for barrels. He sees African architectural techniques everywhere he looks in the archeology of the colonial Carolinas.

My colleague Jason Young has done amazing work on the Black potters of South Carolina and the African techniques they brought to bear, which can be seen if pottery in the Carolinas in the 1850s and 1860s is compared to that being produced in Africa itself.

So Florida and Ron DeSantis should put all that in their pipes and smoke it. They should be grateful to generations of enslaved Africans for having provided to their white owners an encyclopedia of useful skills whereby the pampered whites could go on to provide for themselves after the end of slavery.

Maybe they should even think about finally paying the arrears owed to the families of those kidnapped Africans for all their contributions to the building of America.

The normal professional ascent of a talented, energetic and ambitious academic suddenly shifted its trajectory in 1913. It did so sharply in two directions. Socialists and progressive liberals hailed Beard for his realistic analysis of the Constitutional Convention as the birthplace of a national government intended from the beginning to serve as the political adjutant of the country’s economic elites. For the left, Beard became and remained a heroic figure and an avatar for the way critical history should be written. Conservatives, however, never would forgive Beard for his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as an assembly of politicians—however brilliant and learned–acting of necessity in the aggrandizement of the elites who had sent them to Philadelphia in 1787, more or less setting the pattern of American politics ever afterward. For making such an argument and documenting it, he became the most famous and influential historian in the country, but also the most notorious and controversial.

The battles over Beard’s interpretation of the Constitution paled by comparison with the fallout from the part he played during the national debates over American intervention in the Second World War. By then he also was the country’s leading public intellectual. He used his influence to oppose Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interventionist policy, arguing that this war—like the Great War that preceded it—primarily concerned empire. He based his appeal on the impartial foreign policy traditions enshrined in Washington’s Farewell Address. Forsaking those traditions in favor of supporting the British, French, and Soviet empires in a war that would be the most catastrophic in history seemed to him like the beginning of the end for an authentic American democratic civilization.

Beard despised the Nazis, but he thought that their defeat was only incidental to the chief aim of the United States government, to establish its hegemony over the world economy. As with the Constitutional Convention and all the American wars beginning with the Revolution in 1775, he understood the Second World War at its deepest level as an economic event. The spectacular rise of American government power that then began with the creation of the military-industrial complex would be the chief legacy of the war and make the United States a permanent garrison state on eternal watch for the welfare and augmentation of the corporate capitalist order. Beard did not get everything right about the Second World War, but he clearly saw the direction in which the country was headed.

In September last year, Beard came under attack on yet a third front, his alleged racism. The attack occurred in the pages of The New York Review of Books in an article by one of the country’s most eminent historians, Eric Foner. I wrote the following letter to the editors of that publication.

To the Editors:

In “The Complicity of Textbooks” (NYRB, September 22, 2022), Eric Foner asserts, “Charles and Mary Beard, in a textbook written in the 1920s, pretty much ignored the abolitionist movement, reflecting not only racism, certainly present in their book, but also the ‘Beardian’ understanding of history as a series of struggles between economic classes, with political ideologies being essentially masks for economic self-interest.”

The Beards certainly were not imbued with all the enlightened attitudes of our time toward human equality. As we might expect of most Americans born in the 1870s, it is unlikely that either one of them could pass a strictly graded sensitivity-training-in-the-workplace examination.

Nevertheless, the Beards did well in debates about human equality of their own time. Mary Ritter Beard advanced women’s history as a vital research field. The Rise of American Civilization, the textbook cited by Professor Foner and which she co-wrote with her husband, brought new attention to women’s issues.

Charles Austin Beard, the leading historian and public intellectual of the day, vigorously opposed anti-Semitism in American life. In 1917, he protested the firing in New York City of three left-wing Jewish school teachers—Samuel Schmalhausen, Thomas Mufson, and A. Henry Schneer—who, according to the New York Times, had been sacked for “holding views subversive of good discipline and of undermining good citizenship in the schools.” Beard vouched for these men and protested in a letter cited by the Times that there had been “no little anti-Semitic feeling in the case.” He also became involved in another notorious anti-Semitism episode more than twenty years later, the denial of an appointment for the historian Eric Goldman at Johns Hopkins University despite the unanimous backing from the history department. Beard, a visiting professor there at the time, criticized the decision as a flagrant instance of prejudice.

Beard also attacked anti-Semitism as an evil force worldwide. In the early- and mid-1930s when many in Europe and America cheered Adolf Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism, Beard relentlessly attacked the Nazi regime. He condemned the Nazis for their anti-Semitism and racist attitudes generally. Writing for The New Republic in 1933 and 1934, he condemned “the customary Nazi savagery in dealing with the Jews” and protested lectures by Nazi spokesmen trying to influence Americans “for the benefit of Hitler’s propaganda game.” In a 1934 address delivered at the New School for Social Research, Beard portrayed Nazism as “a low diabolical philosophy” responsible for a reign of terror in the heart of Europe. That October, he criticized Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law School, for accepting an honorary degree from the University of Berlin. An honor from the Nazis counted against the recipient, in Beard’s moral economy. In a 1936 Foreign Affairs article, he castigated the Nazi system of education for its obsession with racial hygiene and program of crushing “all liberty of instruction and all independent search for truth.”

Did the Beards’ economic interpretation of the Civil War reflect racist motives as Professor Foner states? The Beards hated slavery as an irredeemably evil institution. Their account of slavery begins, “In the bitter annals of the lowly there is no more ghastly chapter than the story of this trade in human flesh.” Slavery comes up for sustained discussion throughout the first volume, always as a tragedy for the country. Among the Civil War-era writers the Beards admired, Ralph Waldo Emerson receives singularly high praise and not only for his penetrating discernment of the connections between property and politics. They also note with evident approval his “resounding blows at slavery as an institution.” They do present the pro-slavery case that the South made for itself, while pointing out that its self-deceptive nature led to the region’s crushing military defeat and long-term economic ruin. They also examine the North’s economic agenda, essentially following the reasoning advanced in brief by Henry Adams—an exemplary historian for them—in his autobiography. Adams synthesized in a single image the ultimate significance of the Civil War as the triumph of Northern economic interests: “The world after 1865 became a bankers’ world.”

The analysis by the Beards, however, cannot be attributed legitimately to racism. They wrote their book during the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Partisans of President Wilson’s interventionist policy in that conflict, they subsequently became disillusioned by the imperialist greed that triumphed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.The war to make the world safe for democracy had taught the Beards to discount professions of idealism about freedom as a persuasive explanation of Washington’s wartime policies. To this rule, they did not make an exception for the Civil War. Not racism, but the logic of their conviction about war in general guided them in their interpretation of the Civil War.

Richard Drake
Missoula, Montana

The letter did not find favor with the NYRB editors. This outcome was perhaps understandable. The editors explain on their website that they receive thousands of such letters. Nevertheless, some effort needs to be made to bring fairness and accuracy to the debate about Beard. We owe him that much. He was, after Henry Adams, our greatest historian. His idea about following the money trail for a proper understanding of American imperialism and militarism constitutes a shaft of light in the fog of propaganda enveloping us today. Dismissing Beard as a racist in this day and age can be an effective—though historically irresponsible—means for getting rid of him once and for all. As ever since 1913, canceling Beard would come as a consummation devoutly to be wished by the guardians of our national mythologies.

Republished with the author’s permission from Counterpunch

The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.

The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.

There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.

In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.

As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.

In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..

Reparations to slave owners

The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.

The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.

The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.

The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.

In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.

Emancipation myths and realities

On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”

At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.

After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.

Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.

All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.

Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.

The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.

Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.

Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Slavery by another name

After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.

And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.

In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.

Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”

Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The meaning of Juneteenth

Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.

On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.

They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.

Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.

At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”

The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.

Kris Manjapra, Professor of History, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In the frontier town of Zaranj on Afghanistan’s border with Iran, young men jostle one another as they cram into pickups that leave at regular intervals to be smuggled across the border. Human trafficking is one of the few sectors of the Afghan economy that is thriving. Another is drugs.

Some 950km to the east of Zaranj, on a remote and cold mountain pass, men with backpacks follow the narrow path to the border-crossing at Tabai, before beginning their descent into the “tribal areas” of Pakistan. Hidden in their loads are bags of heroin, bound for markets in Peshawar and Karachi, with much of it ending up on the streets of the UK.

The trade in drugs and people are growing in importance as other sectors of the economy contract or shut down and poverty deepens.

Both illicit economies involve complex logistics, infrastructure and networks of brokerage to enable and funnel flows of people or illegal drugs out of the country. Both have responded with remarkable speed and agility to the political rupture marked by the Taliban takeover.

In Zaranj, prior to the change of regime, people told us that 2014–15 was the high point of the people smuggling industry, when the labour market contracted and the economy slowed down in response to the international military draw down. Now, the business is booming again, and so are prices.

A report by the Danish Refugee Council found that even before the crisis Afghans were being asked for an average of $1,710 to be transported from Afghanistan to Turkey. It has been estimated that the numbers crossing the border have doubled in recent weeks. Before the Taliban takeover there were around 400 vehicles taking migrants via Pakistan into Iran every day. This rose to some 1,200 in September-October and has now dropped to around 600 vehicles. Fees for the longer Mashkel route via Pakistan initially increased four to sixfold during this period. Official border crossings with Iran are closed for most migrants.

The economic significance of the drugs trade has also grown. When the Taliban took over, drug prices increased significantly. In Nangarhar, dry opium increased from PKR20,000 (Pakistani Rupee – the equivalent of about £86) to PKR33,000 (£141) per Afghan seer, equivalent to about 1.25kgs. In Nimroz, opium increased from PKR10,000 (£43) to PKR28,000 (£120) per kilo. The spike in prices was driven by traders buying product at a time of uncertainty.

But prices went down and stabilised once it became apparent that the Taliban would consolidate their power swiftly. One sign of confidence in the market has been the opening up of opium bazaars in formerly government-controlled areas. The Taliban’s new monopoly on taxing the drugs trade is manifest in districts such as Durbaba in Nangarhar, where they charge taxes of PKR1,000 (£4.28) per seer of opium, PKR500 (£2.14) per kilo of hashish and PKR2,000 (£8.56) per kilo of heroin.

The Taliban and the drug economy

Under pressure and under conditions of economic decline and an escalating crisis, the Taliban is unlikely to move against the drug economy. The exception is often draconian measures against drug users in Kabul.

There are no signs yet that the Taliban will target other parts of the drug business, such as cultivation, refining, trade and cross-border trafficking. Unlike ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan), drug cultivation and trafficking are not an ideological matter for the Taliban – but more likely a bargaining chip in their negotiations with the west around funding and recognition.

At the same time, those involved in the trade are hedging their bets by stockpiling in case the Taliban’s laissez-faire policy changes.

While the underlying drivers of the drug economy – instability, bad governance and widespread poverty – remain so strong, there is no credible or humane way to achieve sustained reductions in poppy cultivation. Billions of pounds invested in counter narcotics efforts by international actors over the last 20 years failed to do this and the Taliban have neither the resources nor the inclination to enforce drug bans now. To do so would further impoverish a population already in dire straits, and at the same time undermine the Taliban’s core support base in the poppy-growing areas of the Pashtun south. It would also cut off an important source of revenue to the regime.

Borderland businesses

Most of Afghanistan’s illicit drug production and trafficking happens in the borderlands, building on longstanding trading networks and societal connections that predate the modern Afghan state and that have been reinforced and rejuvenated by more than four decades of war.

The sudden withdrawal of western funding has exposed an economy, polity and society heavily shaped by – and dependent on – external financial support, technical assistance and military capacity. In the current context, the Taliban government is going to struggle to support any public sector activity, including the provision of basic health and education services. The possibilities of survival in the borderlands of rural Afghanistan are already severely limited by declining farm sizes and high levels of landlessness, and the repeated droughts wrought by the climate emergency.

People smuggling and drugs are two borderland economies that can be understood as responses to a context of radical uncertainty. Border regions are places of improvisation and innovation, often the first regions to react to moments of rupture and transition. While the licit economy has been hit hard by the banking crisis, the people smuggling and drugs industries continue to be funded by “halwaldars”, the informal money exchange system.

Unfortunately the international response has been ponderous and dogmatic. An indefinite “wait-and-see” approach by western governments, megaphone diplomacy with the Taliban, or efforts to “quarantine” Afghanistan’s illicit flows will all exacerbate a growing humanitarian, financial, and security crisis with regional and global ramifications. Humanitarian and development funding have to be delivered now, and at scale.

Jonathan Goodhand, Professor in Conflict and Development Studies, SOAS, University of London and Jan Koehler, Research Associate, School of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lightfoot’s move has sparked much local and national criticism.

Some Italian-Americans are angry about the mayor’s decision, considering it an insult to their national pride and a fellow countryman. The city’s Italian immigrant community raised the money for the Grant Park Columbus and gifted it to Chicago in honor of its centennial during the Century of Progress and Second World’s Fair in 1933.

Speaking of Italian ethnic pride, Columbus did not have much of that. He swore loyalty to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who controlled what was then called the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. With the exception of a couple of short, unsuccessful French incursions there, Spain dominated southern Italy for generations. Historian H.G. Koenigsberger writes that the Spanish “with their contingents of Italian soldiers, sacked their cities [and] laid waste their countryside … Spain, holding Sicily [and] Naples, … dominated and stifled Italian political life.”

Columbus claimed vast territories in the Americas, took whatever gold he could find, and established colonies all for the greater glory of and to help finance the Spanish crown. At that time and for many years after, it was also the kingdom that militarily controlled and economically exploited the very region of Italy where most Italian-Americans’ ancestors once lived. It is likely that Columbus could not have cared less about poor farmers and fishermen from Naples and Sicily.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Northwest Side Alderman Anthony Napolitano (incidentally, his last name indicates that his ancestors were from Naples) complained that that the dual Columbuses’ banishment was decidedly un-American. He said that they were taken away without “discussion [and] debate.” As a result, the city has “lost its sense of decency and American soul.”

And Fox News’ Tucker Carlson claimed that hurling water, firecrackers, and soft drinks at the likeness of the Genoese admiral is just the start of dark, chaotic days ahead for the entire nation. He suggested that “they” will soon arrive somewhere and attack some people with something far more lethal than a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. “Violence rarely remains symbolic,” he said.

Columbus never bothered much about democracy, discussion or debate, and his violence was literal, never symbolic. In addition, he was neither decent nor the embodiment of the “American soul,” as Alderman Napolitano calls it, unless he means that Americans should aspire to the murder and slave trading that shocked even some of Columbus’ contemporaries. The admiral was also a dictatorial, incompetent administrator, obtuse geographer, and ambitious social climber. He lied about the actual amounts of and alleged easy access to gold on the Caribbean islands so that he could ingratiate himself to his benefactors at the Spanish court.

When Columbus first arrived in present-day Haiti and Cuba, which he insisted to the end of his days were located in Asia, there was little gold to be found. He instead filled his ships with slaves—indigenous Arawaks—and sent them back to Spain. Many died from disease or abuse on the way to Europe. In Hispaniola, today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic, the Spanish forced Taino men to dig for gold on the island’s mountains and many were dismembered or killed outright for not supplying the required amounts. Forced labor on cassava plantations was also common, and thousands died from starvation, illness, overwork or suicide. Rape was a grim fact for thousands of native women.

A witness to the early colonization of the Caribbean, a Catholic priest named Bartolomé de las Casas, described how the Spaniards under Columbus “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” Other similarly gruesome examples of Spanish rule are legion and make for difficult reading.

Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program estimates that 25 years after Columbus’ arrival, an indigenous population that numbered between several hundred thousand and one million had been reduced to just 32,000.

One can find better, more deserving heroes who actually exhibited the literal, not symbolic, quality of “decency” that could animate the “American soul.” Since there are now two vacant pedestals, I can recommend at least one person: Her name is Florence Scala.

Most people outside of Chicago do not know who she is. For some who are from the city or its environs, however, she is something of a local legend. There is much to recommend her to statue or at least memorial plaque status.

First, the similarities: like Columbus, Scala was of Italian ancestry. She was born in 1918 to Alex and Teresa Giovangelo, immigrants from Italy who settled in the city’s Near West Side Italian neighborhood. Her father was a tailor and her mother a garment worker. Similar to the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, she also did not discover North America. Other people from Asia did that thousands of years earlier, and there is no statue of them in either Grant or Arrigo Park.

But the differences between the two are more instructive. Besides never having participated in ethnic cleansing, Scala stood up to those in power, while Columbus mostly flattered them. She valued building community, fostering democracy, and providing support to vulnerable people; Columbus and his men decimated entire populations in their quest for wealth, fame, and domination.

Scala, whose family had little money for school, started taking classes at the Hull House settlement, which was run by the socially progressive Jane Addams. Like other such organizations, Hull House was located in and served poor immigrant communities by providing meals and an array of free classes. It also offered no-cost concerts, lectures, and vocational training. In addition, Addams and her staff advocated for political and social reform, championing the rights of women and working people from all backgrounds for many decades. Scala volunteered there for over 20 years. She said that when she began to spend time at Hull House, “Life began to open up,” and she and her family realized that “There was something else … beside sewing and pressing.”

In 1961, the city announced that the University of Illinois at Chicago would be built right in her neighborhood. To make way for it, hundreds of homes and businesses, as well as Hull House, would fall victim to the wrecking ball. There were better places for the university, like areas with no people in them, but the city wanted the Little Italy location. Scala headed up a community organization and went to battle with America’s version of Spanish royalty: Mayor Richard J. Daley, last of the big city bosses.

They marched, started petitions, organized, educated, wrote to and visited government officials. Scala and her group camped out on the fifth floor of City Hall, right outside of Daley’s office. One time, as the mayor was leaving for the day, he passed the little group, and then came back, stopping for a moment where Scala was sitting. He asked if he could buy everyone a cup of coffee. Apparently, the mayor felt a little sorry for them. She declined. He shrugged and walked away.

She had met him before and said that he could be disarmingly friendly, full of Irish charm and promises of new housing. She refused to fall for it. Essentially, Scala told a man, who had the power to make or break US presidential candidates and commanded the obedience of thousands of patronage workers, to take a long walk off a short plank.

Later, Scala said that she should have had that cup of coffee with him. She mused that maybe, since he was also the product of a tight-knit ethnic neighborhood, she might have been able to change his mind.

Their fight made it all the way up to the US Supreme Court, but in the end, the university was built, and most of the Hull House settlement destroyed. Daley got what he wanted and went back on his pledge to build new homes for them.

She kept on advocating for the people of her neighborhood, fighting real estate and big business interests and epidemic-level corruption. In 1963, Scala ran as an Independent candidate for the notoriously corrupt First Ward, lorded over by shady Alderman John D’Arco. Before losing the race, her family’s building was bombed. Still, she stood her ground, refused to move away, and remained active in community organizing.

Later, she and her brother, Mario, converted the first floor of their building into a restaurant. She called it Florence.

Scala died in 2007. She was 88.

Those whom we choose to honor are commentaries about the kind of America we would like to be. Crucially, some of our poor choices of flesh-and-blood candidates have been and will continue to be quite literally fatal if we reject the priorities of decent people like Florence Scala.

With or without a statue, she is worth remembering when we cast our ballots in November.

———-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

WGN News: “Christopher Columbus statues removed”

Back in 2017, then Trump chief of staff John Kelly created a controversy with an argument from historical relativism, defending the honoring of Confederate figures. I addressed his glib argument, and reprise it here in honor of Juneteenth.

Juneteenth.com explains the origins of today’s commemoration of the end of slavery:

“Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.”

Kelly said on Laura Ingraham’s show,

“I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society and certainly as, as individuals, when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say what those, you know, what Christopher Columbus did was wrong,” he said. “You know, 500 years later, it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then.”

Kelly seems to imply that in 1861, most people in the world believed in slavery and so you can’t blame the American South for retaining it. I’m not sure how much actual history Gen. Kelly has read, but this premise is not true. For one thing, a majority of American states had abolished slavery. Ohio did in 1802, and by 1804 all the northern states had. Haiti had made a revolution in the 1790s to abolish it, finally formalizing emancipation in 1804. Chile abolished it in 1823, Mexico and Central America in 1824 (Anglo-Texans resisted this measure, what with being enlightened white people and all and in 1836 they made it legal again in Texas). Spain banned slavery in its European territory in 1837. Kelly’s argument that most people believed in slavery at that time so you can’t judge American plantation owners is false. The Southern states were outliers in the New World along with Brazil, and Anglos actively rebelled against an enlightened Mexico over the issue.

In 1846, the Bey of Ottoman Tunis, Ahmad, issued a decree banning slavery in his realm. He had himself been a slave and was convinced by the British consul to take this step. (See Ismael M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (U of Florida 2013).

Ahmad Bey’s decree was sent to the US Consul in Tunis, Samuel Daniel Heap, and he likely reported it back to President James K. Polk. Moreover, it was widely reported in the American press. In a letter Ahmad Bey wrote to the British and other Western consuls he spoke of “our aversion to the thraldom imposed on the human kind, which debases it to the condition of the brute creation . . .” and then he said,

“this affair never ceased to be the object of our attention . . . and we have thought proper to publish that we have abolished slavery in all our dominions, for we consider all slaves existing in our territory as being free, and do not recognize the legality of their being kept as property.” He sent notaries to the Sufi centers to write out deeds of manumission in which “no right of property in their persons” shall be alleged by their masters. (Abolition of Slavery in Tunis.: TRANSLATION., New York Evangelist; New York Vol. 17, Iss. 14, (Apr 2, 1846): 54.

Ahmad Bey

Since the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture permits but discourages slavery, Ahmad Bey actually engaged in modernist jurisprudence to interpret the text as being in accord with his decree. Many clerics and Tunisian slaveholders disagreed. Ahmad Bey’s immediate successor in the 1850s was unenthusiastic about the decree and may not have enforced it, but he did *not* repeal it and it was in force under Muhammad III in the 1860s.

The need for a modernist theology was universal, since American Christians at the time faced the difficulty that the Old Testament clearly authorized slavery and the NT even advised returning a runaway to his master. Evangelical fundamentalism is probably rooted in part in a need for pro-slavery Christians to interpret the Bible literally so as to uphold slavery. That is why there are to this day vanishingly few African-Americans in the Southern Baptist Convention, and why polling shows Evangelicals to be Trump’s strongest supporters.

Precious Rasheeda Muhammad wrote a fine survey for MPAC of Muslim American history and brought the following to my attention.

Sen. Charles Sumner gave a speech in Congress in 1860, the first since he was viciously beaten by a South Carolina representative, in which he praised the Qur’an’s emphasis on manumission as a good deed and on human treatment of slaves!

In the 1860s, during the Civil War, Tunis authorities pressed the US to go through with abolition. Consul Amos Perry wrote to Secretary Seward on Dec. 7, 1864, explaining that Ahmad Bey had abolished slavery in 1846 and adding: “that the actual Bey entertains similar sentiments I have ample proof.”

He encloses a letter to the US from Gen. Hussein, the president of the municipal council of the city of Tunis. Hussein wrote to Perry that he understood that the latter,

“coming from a country where liberty and slavery for a long time existed and flourished side by side, and where they are at present involved in a death struggle for supremacy, you find many facts in the history of Tunis calculated to throw light on the legitimate influence of those two antagonistic principles.”

Gen. Hussein allowed that the Qur’an permitted slavery, as did Judaism and Christianity, but said that it forbade mistreatment of the slave and made it a grounds for obligatory manumission.

He concluded

“O inhabitants of America . . . since God has permitted you to enjoy full personal liberty and to manage your civil and political affairs yourselves, while many other people are deprived of such distinguished privileges and blessings, it would not tarnish the lustre of your crown to grant to your slaves, as an act of gratitude for the favors God has bestowed on you, such civil rights as are not denied to the humblest and meanest of your citizens. . . Humanity invites you to eradicate from your Constitution all that can give countenance to the principle of slavery . . . In concluding this letter, Monsieur . . . permit me to express my profoundest regrets for the war that afflicts and saddens your land, and my tenderest sympathies for the slaves there doomed to suffer.” (Via FRUS .

There is more warmth, more humanity and more principle in this one paragraph from a mid-nineteenth-century Muslim in Tunis than in all the utterances ever voiced by John Kelly.

So no, historical relativism can’t help here. If the Tunisian government was willing 170 years ago to reinterpret the Qur’an itself so as to abolish slavery in the northern tip of Africa, there was no excuse for Robert E. Lee to capture escaped slaves and sell them back into slavery. There aren’t two legitimate sides to this issue.

———

Related video:

ABC News: “What is Juneteenth?”

I should declare my interest. In 1959-1961 my father, who was in the Signal Corps, was stationed at an annex of Fort Bragg at Fuquay Springs, NC, where I spent some of my childhood. It was a thrill for me to be called there once for consultations on fighting al-Qaeda. And, I love North Carolina. But the name of the base, Ft. Bragg, sticks in my craw as a historian and here is why:

1. Braxton Bragg’s father was a racist murderer. He actually went to jail for having taken the life of a freed slave. You could say we can’t blame Braxton for his father’s sins, except that Braxton went on to be a plantation slave owner himself and showed no evidence of disapproving of what his father had done.

2. Braxton Bragg (1817-1876) was the worst general to command men in the Civil War. He lost almost all of his campaigns and was relieved of battlefield command by Jefferson Davis. “Malign and detested,” according to historians, his association with the Army of Tennessee gave it a bad name! Quite apart from the little matter of treason, it is embarrassing to have an important base named for a major screw-up.

3. Bragg did, early in life, serve with distinction in an American campaign, the Mexican-American War. But that conflict was a detestable colonial war of naked aggression and should be disqualifying in itself.

4. Michael Newcity writes at TodayDuke,

“Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, Braxton Bragg lived the life of a genteel planter on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana where slaves put in back-breaking labor in unspeakable conditions to bring molasses to market and earn Bragg a profit. He met any Northern criticism of slavery with harsh criticism. After Lincoln’s election in 1860 he was a proponent of Southern secession.”

Braxton owned over a 100 human beings in Louisiana. Sugar cane plantations were notorious for working their slaves into an early grave. His was one of only 2,300 plantations large enough to have more than 100 slaves.

A biographer, Samuel J. Martin, quoted Bragg as saying of his plantation (which, remember was organized wage theft on a large scale), “Every plantation is a small military establishment. I don’t mean the old fogy notion of white belts, stiff leather stocks, and palms of the hands to the front, but discipline, by which we [gain] regulatory methods, economy of time, labor, material.” Bragg, the biographer says, treated his slaves as he had his troops so as to achieve “more profit and pleasure to the master.” I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Here is a document having to do with his ownership of his fellow human beings, as though they were so many sticks of furniture. In this one, he not only stole their labor and made them work for free, he actually rented them out, as though they were a spare bedroom, taking the payment for their work:

5. Bragg did win just one important battle, at Chickamauga in Georgia, where his forces killed 1,657 Federal troops and wounded 9,756. Americans will never forgive Usama Bin Laden for killing nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But Bragg killed many more than that in his various campaigns, in the course of losing all but one of them. You might as well name Ft. Bragg Ft. Bin Laden. After all, Bin Laden had been a US ally in the 1980s in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, just as Bragg had fought in the Mexican-American War. If you could forgive the one, why not the other? Both just took a wrong turn later in life, right?

John Kelly’s ignorant remarks about the Civil War and compromise on Laura Ingraham’s show have rightly angered a lot of people. One of the arguments he made was for historical relativism:

““I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society and certainly as, as individuals, when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say what those, you know, what Christopher Columbus did was wrong,” he said. “You know, 500 years later, it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then.”

Kelly seems to imply that in 1861, most people in the world believed in slavery and so you can’t blame the American South for retaining it. I’m not sure how much actual history Gen. Kelly has read, but this premise is not true. For one thing, a majority of American states had abolished slavery. Ohio did in 1802, and by 1804 all the northern states had. Haiti made a revolution to abolish it in 1804. Chile abolished it in 1823, Mexico and Central America in 1824 (Anglo-Texans resisted this measure, what with being enlightened white people and all and in 1836 they made it legal again in Texas). Spain banned slavery in its European territory in 1837. Kelly’s argument that most people believed in slavery at that time so you can’t judge American plantation owners is false. The Southern states were outliers in the New World along with Brazil, and Anglos actively rebelled against an enlightened Mexico over the issue.

In 1846, the Bey of Ottoman Tunis, Ahmad, issued a decree banning slavery in his realm. He had himself been a slave and was convinced by the British consul to take this step. (See Ismael M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (U of Florida 2013).

Ahmad Bey’s decree was sent to the US Consul in Tunis, Samuel Daniel Heap, and he likely reported it back to President James K. Polk. Moreover, it was widely reported in the American press. In a letter Ahmad Bey wrote to the British and other Western consuls he spoke of “our aversion to the thraldom imposed on the human kind, which debases it to the condition of the brute creation . . .” and then he said,

“this affair never ceased to be the object of our attention . . . and we have thought proper to publish that we have abolished slavery in all our dominions, for we consider all slaves existing in our territory as being free, and do not recognize the legality of their being kept as property.” He sent notaries to the Sufi centers to write out deeds of manumission in which “no right of property in their persons” shall be alleged by their masters. (Abolition of Slavery in Tunis.: TRANSLATION., New York Evangelist; New York Vol. 17, Iss. 14, (Apr 2, 1846): 54.

Ahmad Bey

Since the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture permits but discourages slavery, Ahmad Bey actually engaged in modernist jurisprudence to interpret the text as being in accord with his decree. Many clerics and Tunisian slaveholders disagreed. Ahmad Bey’s immediate successor in the 1850s was unenthusiastic about the decree and may not have enforced it, but he did *not* repeal it and it was in force under Muhammad III in the 1860s.

The need for a modernist theology was universal, since American Christians at the time faced the difficulty that the Old Testament clearly authorized slavery and the NT even advised returning a runaway to his master. Evangelical fundamentalism is probably rooted in part in a need for pro-slavery Christians to interpret the Bible literally so as to uphold slavery. That is why there are to this day vanishingly few African-Americans in the Southern Baptist Convention, and why polling shows Evangelicals to be Trump’s strongest supporters.

Precious Rasheeda Muhammad wrote a fine survey for MPAC of Muslim American history and brought the following to my attention.

Sen. Charles Sumner gave a speech in Congress in 1860, the first since he was viciously beaten by a South Carolina representative, in which he praised the Qur’an’s emphasis on manumission as a good deed and on human treatment of slaves!

In the 1860s, during the Civil War, Tunis authorities pressed the US to go through with abolition. Consul Amos Perry wrote to Secretary Seward on Dec. 7, 1864, explaining that Ahmad Bey had abolished slavery in 1846 and adding: “that the actual Bey entertains similar sentiments I have ample proof.”

He encloses a letter to the US from Gen. Hussein, the president of the municipal council of the city of Tunis. Hussein wrote to Perry that he understood that the latter,

“coming from a country where liberty and slavery for a long time existed and flourished side by side, and where they are at present involved in a death struggle for supremacy, you find man facts in the history of Tunis calculated to throw light on the legitimate influence of those two antagonistic principles.”

Gen. Hussein allowed that the Qur’an permitted slavery, as did Judaism and Christianity, but said that it forbade mistreatment of the slave and made it a grounds for obligatory manumission.

He concluded

“O inhabitants of America . . . since God has permitted you to enjoy full personal liberty and to manage your civil and political affairs yourselves, while many other people are deprived of such distinguished privileges and blessings, it would not tarnish the lustre of your crown to grant to your slaves, as an act of gratitude for the favors God has bestowed on you, such civil rights as are not denied to the humblest and meanest of your citizens. . . Humanity invites you to eradicate from your Constitution all that can give countenance to the principle of slavery . . . In concluding this letter, Monsieur . . . permit me to express my profoundest regrets for the war that afflicts and saddens your land, and my tenderest sympathies for the slaves there doomed to suffer.” (Via FRUS .

There is more warmth, more humanity and more principle in this one paragraph from a mid-nineteenth-century Muslim in Tunis than in all the utterances ever voiced by John Kelly.

So no, historical relativism can’t help here. If the Tunisian government was willing 170 years ago to reinterpret the Qur’an itself so as to abolish slavery in the northern tip of Africa, there was no excuse for Robert E. Lee to capture escaped slaves and sell them back into slavery. There aren’t two legitimate sides to this issue.

———

Related video:

TYT: Deplorable John Kelly’s Revisionist Civil War History