Thursday, June 30, 2005

Racial lines drawn on slavery apology

By Luther Keith / The Detroit News

Error processing SSI file Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Let's talk about race -- again.

My June 20 column asking the question about why can't the U.S. government formally apologize for the enslavement of African-Americans provoked a flurry of reader responses, once again underscoring the very different perspectives many black and white Americans have on addressing racial wrongs.

For the most part, I believe this is because black Americans and white Americans have trod different historical paths that can make it difficult -- not impossible -- to see things the same way.

By now, most people agree with the nation's founding principles of equality with freedom and justice for all. The disagreement, still, is often over how we get there in the face of quality-of-life racial disparities in wealth, employment, education, health and other areas.

For many white Americans, continuing to bring up past transgressions and link them to today's ongoing social problems is simply fomenting racial controversy while trying to put them on a guilt trip.

For many black Americans, the failure to acknowledge and fully address the sins of the past represents a form of denial and contempt that continues to isolate and separate them from the nation.

My column was prompted by recent U.S. Senate action approving a resolution, sponsored by two white senators, apologizing for the race-related lynching of nearly 5,000 people, most of them black, between the 1890s and the 1960s. Previous efforts to pass such a nonbinding resolution had been rebuffed, largely due to the efforts of white conservatives, with many of them being Democrats, a party affiliation a number of readers noted that I failed to mention.

Here are some other responses:

• "Why should the U.S. government apologize for slavery? Since when is the government responsible for the actions of regional wealthy plantation owners? Slavery was an accepted practice at the time. I'd like an apology for the death of my ancestors who died fighting in the Union army."

-- Tracy Moy

• "What good would it do for you to apologize for some misdeeds that your grandfather did? Or I mine? None. A government can't apologize, only people can and the people at fault are no longer alive."

-- Jerry Raugh

• "The government never enslaved millions of blacks, nor did the government own slaves. Slavery was a private business and mainly in the South. Why don't you find blacks in Africa who brought the slaves out of the jungle to sell to white slave traders -- ask these blacks for being involved in this trade."

-- Ed Vamplew

• "It is time to extend a formal apology for slavery so that all of America's sons and daughters will understand and accept the wrongs of the past and move on to a more enlightened future. Acceptance will lead the U.S. to the next stage in providing the world a true example in protecting minority rights as we continue to embellish the U.S. Constitution in our ongoing experiment in building democracy."

-- K.J. Hreha

• "I have to disagree that no one who benefited from slave ownership is alive today. If your premise is that the free labor that was provided by slaves allowed those in control in those days to amass billions of dollars of wealth, then you certainly have to concede that the descendants of such people who had controlling interests in those industries benefited through inheritances, stock, and family ownership. If you take a company or industry that amassed wealth by free labor from slaves, any controlling interest that was passed down from generation to generation will have eventually benefited someone alive today."

--Ray Nettles

And finally, there was this comment from Laveda C. Glover-McWillie:

"Thank you for what you wrote. My great uncle, William 'Bill' Bailey, was lynched July 11, 1907, and his body was burned in Athens, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. I didn't find this out until I started to work on my family's genealogy search 13 years ago and didn't find out he was lynched until 2001. I went to the museum to see the ('Without Sanctuary') lynching exhibit and his name wasn't mentioned, but it was listed as an unknown black male lynched in Athens, Claiborne, in 1907."

Luther Keith is senior editor of The Detroit News. His column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached at (313) 222-2675 or lkeith@detnews.com.