Slavery was about much more than working for nothing

Late last year Bryan Stevenson, a Cape Henlopen graduate, was in town to speak about his book “Just Mercy,” which had recently debuted on the New York Times bestseller list.

Stevenson, who heads the Equal Justice Initiative in Birmingham, Ala., has spent much of his adult life defending prisoners on death row.

As Stevenson discussed race and slavery and their effects on the U.S. criminal justice system, he said something that struck me. In America, he said, many people think of slavery as Africans brought here for enforced labor.

Well yes, I thought, that pretty well sums it up.

But according to Stevenson there was far more to slavery here than compulsory servitude. Slavery has existed in many times and places, but in America it was different.

In America, he said, “We actually created an ideology about people of color … that they’re not fully human.”

While obviously racist, this ideology is not without a certain logic. After all, we had proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

Holding fellow human beings in bondage, then, didn’t exactly jibe with the lofty ideals expressed in our founding document. We needed a way to bridge this gap. Enter an ideology that held the enslaved African-Americans were less than human.

We are still struggling with that ideology. In 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but it couldn’t abolish or even begin to address how 250 years of a racist ideology had hardened the human heart.

In his commentary last week, Reid Beveridge said that I was “a little off the reservation in comparing the Confederate flag to Nazism.” To this he added, “A little!?!,” as though any comparison was ridiculous.

(“Off the reservation,” by the way, is a phrase best consigned to the same linguistic dustbin as “cotton-pickin’ hands.”)

I had written, “Unfortunately, the Confederate flag carries as much baggage as the Nazi swastika.”

Beveridge disagreed. He wrote, “Hitler was not seeking to get other people to work for him for nothing. He was killing them for disagreeing with him.”

Here Beveridge speaks directly to the point Stevenson was trying to make. Slavery in this country was about more than working for “nothing.” It was about the ideology that made slavery possible in an America that supposedly believed “all men were created equal.”

I’m not going to argue which was more monstrous, the Nazism that killed 6 million Jews or the 250 years of American slavery that killed and brutalized millions of African-Americans. (Millions died because of slavery. Many died on the slave ships before they even arrived; coming up with a good number is tough.)

Those who consider Nazism worse have no quarrel with me.

But both Nazism and the American slave system were made possible by racist ideologies that held that other groups were somehow subhuman.

And because of that ideology, Stevenson said, “Slavery didn’t end. It just evolved. It became something else. Between Reconstruction and World War II, we had decades of terror.”

Jim Crows were enacted, the Ku Klux Klan was formed, and some 4,000 people of color were lynched in lawless executions sometimes carried out by entire communities.

In fact, Southern whites were so successful in suppressing the black population that in 1931 - 66 years after the end of the Civil War - Democratic Sen. Duncan Fletcher of Florida could deliver this boast to his fellow Southerners:

“The South fought to preserve race integrity. Did we lose that? We fought to maintain free white dominion. Did we lose that? … I submit that what is called ‘The Lost Cause’ was not so much ‘lost’ as is sometimes supposed.”

And, yes, we had our problems here in Delaware, within living memory. In “The Milford Eleven,” Orlando Camp talks about his experiences as one of 11 black students who were part of the first attempt to integrate Milford High School, following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954.

The first day was fairly calm, but fear and bigotry soon took hold as a man from Baltimore, Bryan Bowles Jr., arrived and began fanning the flames of racism. (Car dealer I.G. Burton was among the few voices of reason.)

He knew just how to do it.

Before 2,500 people at the Harrington airport, Bowles held up his 3-year-old daughter and said, “Do you think I’ll ever let my little girl go to school with Negroes? I certainly will not.”

In the end, Milford’s first effort at integration failed, such was the public backlash.

Several years later, Gov. George Wallace defied federal authorities trying to force integration of Alabama schools. His symbol: the Confederate battle flag, which he also used as the background for his election campaign poster.

Earlier, Southern “Dixiecrats” had adopted the Confederate flag as their symbol after Democrats made civil rights part of their party platform.

Move forward to 2015 and look to Dylann Roof. His reported comments during the attack on nine men and women gathered for Bible study - “You rape our women” - echo the racist fears stirred up by Bryant Bowles.

Online, Roof appropriated the same symbol as Gov. Wallace, the Confederate battle flag.

That, unfortunately, is what the Confederate flag represents, however well-intentioned some people may be when they fly the flag. I don’t question their sincere desire to honor their ancestors.

But the flag itself is indelibly tied to a racist ideology.

This is something the German neo-Nazis understand. Barred by law from displaying the swastika, they sometimes fly the Confederate flag.

Also, thanks to reader Janis Freeman for sending me a link to Bryan Stevenson’s five-minute video “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” In it, Stevenson makes clear, in an entertaining way, just how straight the line is from slavery to our present-day criminal justice system. Check it out on YouTube.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.