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Teachers have been teaching about slavery for decades without any problems.
Why anyone would pretend that there is a problem NOW escapes me.
Whether it's been taught truthfully is a question worth pondering though. HappyTexan has brought up the legitimate point that many are unaware that there were black slave owners at all. This is an interesting fact that is worth mentioning inside the classroom. It's also worth mentioning that many of the black codes created during slavery were fully in use post-slavery right up until the Civil Rights movement, and were used to continue slavery in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi. Blacks could be and were arrested for such terrible offenses (sarcasm) as walking next to train tracks, which sounds an awful lot like fugitive slave laws (translation: keep them from running North). Why is this reality not currently discussed in American classrooms? My opinion is that we're already teaching slavery in such a way as to not offend the sensibilities of an older generation of white Americans who fully supported neo-slavery.
Quote:
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel's production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
I agree. I took some AA History courses in college (I like to debate...)and learned all about black slave owners. I was quite upset!!!
Absolutely understood. I felt the same way when I read the history of Liberia and everytime I hear about Africans killing each other like they are right now in southern Sudan and the Congo.
Since we're teaching children who have never been slaves, never known a slave, never owned slave and have never had parents who were slaves or owned slaves maybe we should teach them the cold hard facts instead of trying to sugar coat the truth about what went on in this country decades ago.
We should also teach them all that they shouldn't feel guilty of anything nor should they feel entitled because of anything they learned in the class.
Slavery is apart of history, so yes the children needs to learn about that. You have never known George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin etc.. Should we stop teaching about them since we have never known them?
There are many adults who should pick up a few books to educate themselves about the history of slavery in America. If one thinks they know all they need to know about slavery, advance to the civil rights movements.
If there is concern that the school isn't providing enough education on the subject of slavery in America there are many children's books on the subject that can be purchased to self-educate and enlighten children.
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)and learned all about black slave owners. I was quite upset!!!
