The Pope on Slavery

Many posts have discussed the legacy of slavery.

The first American Pope is very much aware of it.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

OF HIS HOLINESS

POPE LEO XIV

ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON

IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

176. In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” [174] It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. [175] This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. [176] It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.

Endorsing Dred Scott

Richard Fausset at NYT:

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”

Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.

The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. , declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.

Douglass, Slavery, and the U.S. Constitution

Diana J. Schaub, "Frederick Douglass: The Constitution Militant," The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy 22 (Winter 2024).

 In an action almost as momentous as his original escape from enslavement, Frederick Douglass adopted an anti-slavery interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. That 1851 decision took Douglass from a platform avowedly “outside that piece of parchment” to a platform insistently faithful to the words on the page.1

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Once Douglass embraced an anti-slavery reading of the U.S. Constitution, he became a militant constitutionalist. For Douglass, the Constitution was more than a frame of government. The fixity he valued was of a different sort—not a set structure of branches, offices, and procedures, but rather a polestar, guiding progressive improvement. In fact, Douglass named his first newspaper, The North Star, after the “star of hope” that directed runaway slaves in their nighttime travels. When he abandoned Garrisonianism in 1851, Douglass simultaneously began a new publishing venture, the eponymously named Frederick Douglass’ Paper. It was as if the natural celestial pole had been supplemented or maybe replaced by the man-made light of the Constitution. With its Polaris-like Preamble, the Constitution is a permanent source of national self-correction. Because of its orienting power, textual fundamentalism became one of Douglass’s main weapons in the antislavery struggle. For Douglass, behind the Constitution is an ultimate source of illumination: the natural rights theory of the Declaration of Independence. That higher law, in accordance with the truth of human nature, always informs the rule of law. Perhaps most controversially, Douglass argued that the higher law required militant opposition to the unconstitutional 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. In doing so, Douglass believed that he was keeping faith with the letter of the Constitution, as well as the spirit or intentions of the Founders. His vindication of the Founders is more than verbal; it is a summons to imitate them, pledging life, fortune, and sacred honor in the cause of liberty.

All the Presidents' Children

Aaron O'Neill at Statista:

The 45 men who have served as the President of the United States (officially there have been 46 as Grover Cleveland is counted twice) have fathered, adopted or allegedly fathered at least 190 children. Of these 190, 169 were conceived naturally, eleven were adopted and there are ten reasonable cases of alleged paternity (possibly more). Today, there are 34 living presidential children; the oldest of which is Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, daughter of Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson; the youngest is Barron Trump, son of Donald and Melania Trump. John Tyler is the president who fathered the most children, having fifteen children over two marriages (and allegedly fathering more with slaves), while his successor, James K. Polk, remains the only U.S. president never to have fathered or adopted any known children. Coincidentally, as of November 2020, the U.S.' tenth president, John Tyler, has two grandsons who are still alive today, despite the fact that he was born in 1790.

The president, their children and spouse are collectively known as the First Family of the United States; the current first family is made up of President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, as well as their children, Hunter and Ashley. Two of President Biden's children died before he was elected to office; his son Beau died of cancer in 2015, while his one year old daughter Naomi was killed in a car accident in 1972, along with Biden's wife, Neilia (who was also Beau and Hunter's mother). Two presidents' sons have gone on to assume the presidency themselves; these were John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush respectively, while one presidential grandson, Benjamin Harrison, later became president.

Three U.S. presidents have allegedly fathered illegitimate children with slaves. The most well-known and substantial of these allegations relates to Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings; who was also the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha (with whom he had already fathered six children). Following Martha's passing in 1782, its is believed that the future-president would then go on to have a relationship with Hemings that spanned four decades and saw the birth of as many as eight children between 1790 and 1808. Hemings, thought to have been 14 years old at the beginning of the relationship (Jefferson was 44), and her children remained enslaved to Jefferson until his death in 1826. DNA tests conducted in recent years have confirmed a genetic connection between the Hemings and Jefferson families, and the majority of historians accept that Thomas Jefferson was the father of at least six of Hemings' children. Less substantial claims have also been levelled at John Tyler, with political opponents claiming that he fathered several children with slaves in the years following his first wife's death; although these claims have been widely disregarded by historians, with little investigation into their validity. It is alleged that William Henry Harrison also fathered at least six children with one of his slaves, Dilsia, however these claims are anecdotal and have been disregarded or ignored by historians. In spite of this, to this day, there are some African-American families in the U.S. who claim to be the descendants of both Harrison and Tyler.

It is generally accepted that two other presidents, Grover Cleveland and Warren G. Harding, fathered children through extramarital affairs. It is likely that Grover Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock in 1874; even paying child support to the mother, acknowledging that he could have been the father. When the child's mother accused Cleveland of rape, he had her institutionalized to discredit these accusations, and the child was taken away and raised by Cleveland's friends. The issue came to light nationally during the 1884 election campaign, but Cleveland still emerged victorious. In 1927, four years after his death in office, it came to light that Warren G. Harding had fathered a child out of wedlock a year before winning the 1920 election. The child was conceived during one of his two long-term, extramarital affairs, and Harding did pay the mother child support, although he kept the affair and child a secret. Harding died before the child's fourth birthday, his family dismissed these claims as rumors, claiming that he was infertile; however, DNA tests confirmed that the child was his in 2015. While there have been numerous accusations of presidents' infidelity in the past century, particularly relating to John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump; Trump is the only president since Harding to have had a child out of wedlock (although the couple did get married two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany).

The Founding and Its Enemies

Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Robert Kagan at WP:

Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy, and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the Revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the Revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.

Juneteenth and General Order 3

 From the National Archives:

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation, U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, which informed the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. Granger commanded the Headquarters District of Texas, and his troops had arrived in Galveston the previous day.

This day has come to be known as Juneteenth, a combination of June and 19th. It is also called Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, and it is the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

The official handwritten record of General Order No. 3, is preserved at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.

“The National Archives safeguards many of the nation's most important records related to African American history and civil rights, and General Order Number 3 is one of those records,” said Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero. "We know from history that certain events took place, and it's always a delight when we can help make history come alive by sharing the actual documentation of those events.”

General Order No. 3 states:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly 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.”

While the order was critical to expanding freedom to enslaved people, the racist language used in the last sentences foreshadowed that the fight for equal rights would continue. Visit our exhibit The Enduring Chronicle: Civil Rights Documents at the National Archives at Atlanta to review the “Early Gains and Losses” in the ongoing fight for Civil Rights.

Terminology: "Slave" v. "Enslaved Person"

 Jay Nordlinger quotes historian Barbara Fields:

Here’s how I put it to my students. The most famous of all abolitionist speeches is probably the one that Frederick Douglass delivered in Rochester, New York, in 1852. (My grandmother told me that her teachers required pupils to memorize it.) Douglass called the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He did not call it “What to the Enslaved Person Is the Fourth of July?” If it was good enough for Douglass, I tell my students, it’s good enough for me.

It is misguided to believe that “enslaved” tells more truth than “slave” because “slave” defines the victim by the perpetrator’s crime. This makes as much sense as rejecting the word “hostage” because it defines the hostage by the crime of the hostage-taker.

When I was a graduate student, it was Herbert Gutman from whom I learned an important distinction. When he spoke about slaves doing work, being punished, choosing spouses, having children, taking care of families, mourning the dead, worshiping God, and so on — in short, acting as human beings — he referred to them as “men and women.” What a powerful statement he made by that simple choice of concrete nouns. I pity the person who imagines herself achieving the same result by substituting “enslaved person” for “slave.

Fort Liberty

Andrea Salcedo at WP:

Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the United States, has officially been renamed Fort Liberty, following a ceremony Friday. The North Carolina post’s new name is part of a congressionally mandated plan to rename military bases, ships and streets that previously honored Confederate leaders.

The plan is the culmination of a years-long effort that intensified in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning it brought over the nation’s history of racism. A panel established by Congress recommended the Army rename nine installations that honored Confederate military officers.

“Welcome to Fort Liberty, the center of the universe,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and the newly christened Fort Liberty, said during the ceremony Friday. “We were given a mission to re-designate our installation, no small task with its history. We seized this opportunity to make ourselves better and to seek excellence. That is what we always have done and always will do.”

The other eight Army bases selected to be renamed are Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Polk in Louisiana; Fort Rucker in Alabama; and Fort Hood in Texas.

The nine Army posts were all built during the first half of the 20th century in former Confederate states. Fort Bragg had been named in honor of Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who was relieved of command after losing the battle for Chattanooga in 1863, though he remained active in the rebel cause, serving as an adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Slavery and GWTW

 At The Ankler, historian David Vincent Kimel writes about deleted scenes in the script of GoneWith the Wind.

Remarkably, much of the excised material in my Rainbow Script was a harsh portrayal of the mistreatment of the enslaved workers on Scarlett's plantation, including references to beatings, threats to throw “Mammy” out of the plantation for not working hard enough, and other depictions of physical and emotional violence. Had these scenes remained in the final film, they would have stood in startling juxtaposition to the pageantry on display at the premiere in Atlanta. At the time of production, GWTW’s romanticization of slavery led African American thinkers like Ben Davis to call it “dangerous poison covered with sugar.” William L. Patterson went even further, describing it as “a weapon of terror against black America.” These voices were in the critical minority in the twentieth century, but over time, scholars have increasingly emphasized GWTW’s promulgation of the mythology of the Lost Cause, an interpretation of the Civil War that romanticizes the struggle as a war of Northern aggression that desecrated Southern honor and culture.

The article starts with a remarkable revelation about MLK: 

At the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind on December 15, 1939, the 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was dressed as a slave. It was the second night of an official three-day holiday proclaimed by the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia. King’s choir was serenading a white audience, directed to croon spirituals to evoke an ambiance of moonlight and magnolias for the benefit of the movie’s famous producer, David O. Selznick.

MLK Day

 Daniel Stid:

We have to avoid the temptation to domesticate Martin Luther King Jr. It is comforting to see him only as the aspirational dreamer of a color-blind society, a vision especially reassuring to white Americans, and leave things at that. But there was a prophetic radicalness to King’s statesmanship, and a telling critique of the American political tradition, that we also must reckon with, learn from, and respond to.

The great political scientist Herbert Storing made this point more broadly in introducing a volume of political writings by African Americans (including King) that he edited and published in 1970. Using the language of that era, Storing observed that,

“When young Frederick Douglass, speaking before the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847, asked, “What Country Have I?”, he put a question that circumstances compel every black American to ask. And when Douglass affirmed that he had no love for America and that, indeed, he had no country, he gave an answer that every thoughtful black in America has had to consider. This was not Douglass’s final answer, as it has not been the final answer of most blacks in America; but the question does not thereby lose its potency [Storing’s emphasis]....In important respects, then, black Americans are like a revolutionary or, more interestingly perhaps, a founding generation. That is, they are in the difficult but potentially glorious position of not being able to take for granted given political arrangements and values, of having to seriously canvass alternatives, to think through their implications, and to make a deliberate choice. To understand the American polity, one could hardly do better than to study, along with the work and thought of the founders, the best writings of the blacks who are at once its friends, enemies, citizens, and aliens.”

It is thus fitting for us to reflect on the writings, speeches, and acts of Martin Luther King Jr. on the national holiday we have established to honor this great American statesman. It is also fitting that the United States has built a memorial to King on our National Mall, poised on a line between the memorials honoring Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It is especially fitting that, backed by Lincoln, King looks across the Tidal Basin toward Jefferson with the steadfastness of one who has come to collect an outstanding debt.

Taney: Good Riddance

 Amy B Wang and Marianna Sotomayor at WP:

The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would remove a bust at the U.S. Capitol of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice who authored the majority Supreme Court opinion protecting slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The House passed the measure by voice vote, and it now heads to President Biden for his signature. The Senate had passed it by voice vote last week.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would direct the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library to remove Taney’s bust not more than 45 days after the bill is signed into law. The bill would also direct the committee to replace Taney’s bust with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice.

In 1857, Taney wrote the decision in the case of Scott — a Black man born into slavery who used the courts to demand his freedom — that Black people were not U.S. citizens and could not expect protections from the federal government.

The Last Day of the Lost Cause

The Confederacy was dedicated to slavery.

Everyone who fought for the Confederacy was committing treason.

Ned Oliver at Axios:

Workers in Richmond, Virginia removed the last city-owned Confederate statue from its pedestal on Monday morning.

Why it matters: The moment marks the close of a two-year effort to remove memorials to the Confederacy in its former capital. City and state leaders had long resisted calls to take down Confederate iconography.

What’s happening: A crane lifted a statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill from the center of a busy intersection just before 10am.

Context: While most city-owned Confederate memorials came down in the summer of 2020 amid widespread protests against police misconduct, Hill’s removal was delayed because his body is buried beneath the statue.

What they’re saying: “This is, I would say, the last day of the Lost Cause,” Mayor Levar Stoney said as workers loaded the statue onto a flatbed trailer.

Juneteenth 2022

Maria Cramer at NYT:

Last June, President Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday, proclaiming it as a day for all Americans to commemorate the end of slavery.

One year later, only 18 states have passed legislation that would provide funding to let state employees observe the day as a paid state holiday, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Opponents of bills that would create funding for the permanent holiday have complained of the costs associated with giving workers another paid day off. Some have said that not enough people know about the holiday to make the effort worthwhile.

For supporters, such arguments are painful to hear, especially as more Americans said they were familiar with Juneteenth. In June 2022, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they knew about the holiday, compared with 37 percent in May 2021, according to a Gallup poll.

“This is something that Black folk deserve and it was like we had to almost prove ourselves to get them to agree,” said Anthony Nolan, a state representative in Connecticut, where legislators argued for hours earlier this year before passing legislation to fund the holiday.

Juneteenth commemorates the events of June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom after the Civil War had ended.

The day has been commemorated by Black Americans since the late 1800s. Though all 50 states have recognized Juneteenth by enacting some kind of proclamation celebrating it, its full adoption as an American holiday has yet to take root.

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The Juneteenth commemoration marks the legal end of slavery in the United States, a hard-fought achievement of the Civil War. General Granger’s announcement in 1865 put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued more than two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, on Jan. 1, 1863.

Database of Slaveholders in Congress

Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez at WP:

From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners.

More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.

The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools.

The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.

See database here. 

Emancipation and Freedom Monument

Gregory S. Schneider at WP:

The man stands 12 feet tall, eyes closed in what might be pain or transcendence, chains falling off his outstretched arms, scars striped across his muscled back. Opposite him, a woman on a pedestal cradles an infant and thrusts a document into the air, her face calm and resolute.

Richmond unveiled a new Emancipation and Freedom Monument on Wednesday — commemorating a far different set of rebels than the Confederate statues that have been coming down for the past year.

Just two weeks after the titanic effigy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from Monument Avenue, city and state officials dedicated a monument that honors the struggle for freedom and equality by centuries of African Americans.

In addition to the large symbolic figures, the monument features names and likenesses of five Black Virginians who fought for equal rights and five who resisted the bonds of slavery. Among the latter group are Nat Turner and the man known as Gabriel, both executed for planning or carrying out slave rebellions.

Juneteenth

 From POTUS:

On June 19, 1865 — nearly nine decades after our Nation’s founding, and more than 2 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally received word that they were free from bondage. As those who were formerly enslaved were recognized for the first time as citizens, Black Americans came to commemorate Juneteenth with celebrations across the country, building new lives and a new tradition that we honor today. In its celebration of freedom, Juneteenth is a day that should be recognized by all Americans. And that is why I am proud to have consecrated Juneteenth as our newest national holiday.

Juneteenth is a day of profound weight and power.

A day in which we remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country –- what I’ve long called America’s original sin. A long legacy of systemic racism, inequality, and inhumanity.

But it is a day that also reminds us of our incredible capacity to heal, hope, and emerge from our darkest moments with purpose and resolve.

As I said on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, great nations don’t ignore the most painful chapters of their past. Great nations confront them. We come to terms with them.

On Juneteenth, we recommit ourselves to the work of equity, equality, and justice. And, we celebrate the centuries of struggle, courage, and hope that have brought us to this time of progress and possibility. That work has been led throughout our history by abolitionists and educators, civil rights advocates and lawyers, courageous activists and trade unionists, public officials, and everyday Americans who have helped make real the ideals of our founding documents for all.

There is still more work to do. As we emerge from the long, dark winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, racial equity remains at the heart of our efforts to vaccinate the Nation and beat the virus. We must recognize that Black Americans, among other people of color, have shouldered a disproportionate burden of loss — while also carrying us through disproportionately as essential workers and health care providers on the front lines of the crisis.

Psalm 30 proclaims that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Juneteenth marks both the long, hard night of slavery and discrimination, and the promise of a brighter morning to come. My Administration is committed to building an economy — and a Nation — that brings everyone along, and finally delivers our Nation’s founding promise to Black Americans. Together, we will lay the roots of real and lasting justice, so that we can become the extraordinary country that was promised to all Americans.

Juneteenth not only commemorates the past. It calls us to action today.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 19, 2021, as Juneteenth Day of Observance. I call upon the people of the United States to acknowledge and celebrate the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of Black Americans, and commit together to eradicate systemic racism that still undermines our founding ideals and collective prosperity.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Three-Fifths Update

 Oliver Willis at The American Independent:

On Tuesday, during a debate on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly, state Rep. Justin Lafferty, a Republican claimed that the Three-Fifths Compromise was about "ending slavery."

"We ended up biting a bitter, bitter pill that haunts us today. And we did it to lay the foundation for all this that we enjoy in this country," Lafferty said, referencing the compromise.

He added, "The Three-Fifths Compromise was a direct effort to ensure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country."

Additionally, Lafferty argued that not counting enslaved Blacks as a whole person was a praiseworthy achievement.

"By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery," he said. "Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War."

The claim is inaccurate and ahistorical. The Three-Fifths Compromise, in which enslaved Black people were counted as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of counting the American population, further enshrined the institution of slavery in America.

After the compromise was agreed to in 1787, millions of human beings lived in bondage until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the abolition of slavery through the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Nathan Bedford Forrest Was a Racist and a Traitor

 Matt Shuham at TPM:

In 1978, a bust of the slave trader, Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was installed in the Tennessee capitol building, immediately prompting protests.

Forty-three years later, the effort to remove the bust has some state Republicans grinding every bureaucratic lever at their disposal to a halt, the latest in a long line of fights on the general’s behalf. This week, several Republicans backed a bill to sack members of a historical commission that voted to remove the bust.

Larry McCluney, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, thinks the solution is simple: those offended by the Forrest’s likeness should simply look away.

“We’re dealing with a time period now where everybody is offended by something,” McCluney told TPM. “They talk about the issues of slavery, racism, white supremacy — well, you know, our nation has a history of that, and it’s been around a lot longer than people realize.”

Nowadays, it’s a bit more difficult for elected Republican politicians to stick up for Forrest, whose presence in the capitol is at the center of the fight over the legislation to replace the historical commission.

“I don’t know that it’s specifically related to the three statues that are up on the second floor, but that could be the motivation behind it,” Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R) told reporters Thursday when asked about the bill.

“But overall, not looking at the motivation, I think it’s a good thing,” he added.

McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) have written to the state’s attorney general, raising concerns that the commission didn’t follow the legal requirements for issuing its decision.

Justin Jones, a young activist who has pushed for years for the statue’s removal, said the vote to move the bust out of the Capitol felt like a victory. To Jones, the bust has a clear purpose.

“It’s meant to remind us that, even though they did remove those ‘colored’ and ‘white’ signs in the 1960s and 70s, they never replaced it with a ‘you’re welcome’ sign,” he said. “This symbol is a reminder that we’re not welcome there.”

Civic Nationalism v. Ethno-Nationalism

 Colin Woodard at Zocalo Public Square:

[Historian George] Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

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But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

Discourse About Race

Adolph Reed Jr. at The New Republic:

Discourse about race and politics in the United States has been driven in recent years more by moralizing than by careful analysis or strategic considerations. It also depends on naïve and unproductive ways of interpreting the past and its relation to the present. I’ve discussed a number of the political and intellectual casualties of what we might call this Great Awokening, among them a tendency to view the past anachronistically, through the lens of the assumptions, norms, and patterns of social relations of the present.

That inclination has only intensified with proliferation of notions like Afropessimism, which postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal “anti-blackness.” Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world. Most famously, The New York Times’ award-winning 1619 Project, under the direction of Nikole Hannah-Jones, asserts that slavery and racial subordination have defined the essence of the United States since before the founding—a brand of ahistorical moralizing that is now being incorporated into high school history curricula.

Yet, as I have argued, the premise that subordination to white supremacy has been black Americans’ definitive and unrelenting experience in the United States is undone by the most casual observation. As just one instance, I recall a panel at an early 1990s conference on black politics at Harvard Law School, organized by the school’s black student group, on which a distinguished black Harvard Law professor declaimed—with no qualification or sense of irony—that nothing had changed for black Americans since 1865. Until recently, this obviously false contention could make sense as a rhetorical gambit, indeed one that depended on its falsity for its effectiveness. It was a jeremiad dressed up as an empirical claim; “nothing has changed” carried a silent qualifier—that whatever racial outrage triggered the declaration makes it seem as though nothing had changed. This kind of provocation pivots on the tacit rhetorical claim that the offense it targets is atavistic—but in order for it to gain any significant traction, it requires that we understand that things have changed to the extent that such offenses should no longer be condoned, accepted, or taken in stride.