Amassing wealth through slavery wasn’t invented in America. It was just perfected here. nnMistakenly dismissed by unreconstructed historians as critical race theory bluster, this estimated $3 billion misappropriation of Black blood, sweat and tears — what John C. Calhoun infamously excused as Dixie’s “peculiar” labor source - nonetheless quantifies at least some of the historic economic injustice inflicted on enslaved persons.
But the resulting reparations movement has been met with special vitriol by the usual state and national Republican power brokers. Race and money still make for a caustic political brew, especially here in the former Confederacy, where economic reconciliation for Black Americans is consistently cited as reverse discrimination — a handy but empty accusation coming from some of the most privileged people on Earth.
While this struggle to restore a measure of stolen wealth continues, a parallel, if symbolic, trend has emerged within and beyond the South. A scattered cluster of petitioners prior to George Floyd’s murder, those bent on felling memorials to slaveholders and slavery defenders (nearly 90 in the South alone) were galvanized by the tragedy. And their efforts continue.
A third avenue for Black liberation is found neither in the realm of reparations, nor the town squares where the statues used to be, but in acts of remembrance at the community level.
As the South’s postwar racism morphed into less overt forms, predominantly Black men incarcerated in county jails and state prisons were conscripted for public infrastructure projects. As with an 1870s railway project here in western North Carolina, Blacks made up 98% percent of the inmates forced to work under brutal conditions.
Even more insidious, most of the incarcerated were jailed on vagrancy charges, taken in custody and loaned out to local political officials as forced laborers. One hundred and thirty-nine souls officially perished on or because of the job, with as many as double that number never reported. Dozens were buried alongside the tracks.
As of mid-October, a granite and bronze memorial attends a section of rail bed just outside Old Fort, North Carolina. Placed there by local truth-tellers, there are no names, only the story and sacrifice of the once forgotten.
Mitigating racism once perfected is the work of many lifetimes; and made exponentially more difficult by elected officials and appointees convinced they live in a post racial America.
In response, progressives do well to stay as diversified in their resistance as racism itself, focused on economic justice, undoing hateful history and calling the roll of the distant harmed.
Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2021
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