Mindy Thompson Fullilove et al.
Before Charlottesville There Was Jamestown
We don’t know the exact day the British man-of-war, The White Lion, arrived in August of 1619, bringing Africans to be sold into bondage. We do know that its arrival roped the British North American colonies into the institution of slavery and the heinous trade that supplied it. We also know that, realizing there were profits to made from slavery, slave owners and slave traders set about justifying this crime against humanity by saying that Africans were not fully human.
The “not fully human people” recognized the insanity of this proposition. A “Petition of a Great Number of Negroes” to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in 1777, stated:
The Petition of a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian County Humbly Shewing: That your petitioners apprehend that they have in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind, and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever . . .1
Despite the protests of the enslaved, the vicious lie shaped the colonies as they became states in a slave nation. The Constitution included the grim clause that those slaves were to be counted as “3/5s of a person.” The Big Lie had other uses, the slave masters discovered. By making slight distinctions between white indentured servants and black slaves, they could set them against one another, defeating class warfare with the infamous “divide and conquer” tactic.
And that was not all: the Big Lie justified oppressing indigenous people, homosexuals, women, Jews, immigrants, and the disabled, indeed, an endless parade of those labeled “not full people.” The physician in our team—Mindy Thompson Fullilove—has likened this process to the doctor’s “off-label” use of medicines. In U.S. law, once a medicine is approved for a specific indication, it is legal for doctors to use it for other problems for which it seems to be effective. These are called “off-label indications.” One example, from the Pharmacy Times (January 5, 2016), is Prazosin (Minipress), approved for treating hypertension, but also used for nightmares associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, in addition to being used as treatment for Raynaud’s Disease and for poisoning due to scorpion venom. Once blacks were legally codified as 3/5s of a person, the Big Lie could be used “off-label” to stigmatize anybody.
Thus, the history of the United States includes the struggle against abolition, the struggle for women’s equality, and the struggle for protections for working people, and in this process we have gone jittering back and forth between success and setback. Every success follows the creation of solid, intergroup alliances, and every setback is due, at least in part, to the potent weapon of the Big Lie.
We see this pattern in the “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, August 11 and 12, 2017, an effort by the right to push back progress on removing the Charlottesville symbols of white supremacy, which were installed in 1924, at the height of the Jim Crow era. Not only had Robert E. Lee Park been renamed Emancipation Park, but a statue of Lee was to be removed. Many organizations of the right came together, bearing symbols of the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis, and demonstrating their contempt for blacks, Jews, immigrants, and others they saw as less than human. Whipped into a rage by the inflammatory remarks of their leaders, they clashed with counter-protesters decrying white supremacy. Tragedy followed.
The clash in Charlottesville is a predictable outcome of what happened at Jamestown. We cannot divorce ourselves from the long history of the Big Lie, but, like the last fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, we have the power to modify the curse. We are presented with the opportunity to use 2019, the 400th anniversary of The White Lion’s landing, to make our past a compass guiding us to a democratic future.
USES OF ANNIVERSARIES
Anniversaries are peculiar times, with enormous import for individuals and the groups of which they are a part. We don’t have to consciously remember an anniversary for it to have power: we will stub our toe or burst out crying, our bodies doing the work of reminding us that a certain moment in the calendar has come around again. With each anniversary, we may re-engage with the past, understand it from new viewpoints, learn lessons that might have escaped us previously, and feel emotions that have just bubbled to the surface. When we can move through such a time consciously, and with others, we can draw even more benefit from the moment.
Such was the case in Nantes, one of the most prominent of the French cities, which engaged in the slave trade. It had long been recognized by the city’s leaders as the major contributor to the status of the city as one of the largest, and richest, in France. But on the occasion of an important tricentennial celebration of le code noir—the code that established and served to regulate the slave trade and the treatment of those who were placed in bondage—major questions were posed about its problematic past. Will the place of the city as one of the international leaders of la traite—the traffic in slaves—be formally acknowledged as part of its otherwise glorious history?
The creation of a non-governmental organization, Le Triangle Ebene (the Ebony Triangle), provided the impetus for an international colloquium that was organized by the University of Nantes. It engaged historians, academics, and the general public in extensive discussions of the city’s role in the slave trade. As is noted in one of the records of this momentous colloquium:
C’était la première fois en France qu’une manifestation d’une telle ampleur avait lieu sur les sujets de la traite négrière et de l’esclavage.
This was the first time in France that an exposition (demonstration) of this size had taken place to focus attention on the slave trade and on slavery.2
Pierre Perron, the artist who created the poster for the occasion, has often described it as one of the most important of his more than 50-year career. The poster enflamed the conversation, inciting discussions that led to creation of another association, Les Anneaux de la Memoire, and to the eventual creation of the Memorial to the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Nantes. That memorial is one of the most important and significant testimonies to the part a major urban area played in a horrific past, as well as to the city’s evolving commitment to serve as a monument to France’s devise: Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité.
We, the authors of this chapter, had the opportunity to visit the memorial in March 2018 as guests of the city of Nantes. Designed by Julian Bonder and Krzysztof Wodiczko, the memorial has two major components. The first is a plaza dotted with the names of the negriers (slave ships) that sailed from Nantes in more than 1,800 expeditions that transported 550,000 people from their homelands. The second part is an underground space in which slanted glass panels create the feeling of the ribs of a ship, while sharing the words of people who fought against slavery and the slave trade. The descent to the entrance of this part moves us into a darkened, narrow space, and greets us with Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that no one shall be held a slave. The tension is maintained as one walks through the long space, enlivened by anti-slavery words. Typical of the words on the panels is the song, “Oh Freedom,” rendered in French as, “O Liberté sur moi.”3 The fundamental gift of the memorial is the physical apposition of the oppressive, long space, with the force of words that shout our longing for freedom. We are taught that we have and can continue to push against oppression, to create liberty.
DEMOCRACY FOR SURVIVAL
The story of Nantes helps us to see the role that the observance of an anniversary can play in setting a city on a path towards inclusion and democracy. Given the importance of inequality to our national discourse at this time, it behooves us to observe the momentous occasion of 1619 with the solemnity and attention it deserves. We can prepare for the anniversary by studying our history, by visiting sites that hold the stories of the past, and by talking to our elders. We can also prepare by asking museums and libraries, theater directors and orchestras to plan events and exhibitions that will give us insights we currently lack. We have time, and therefore we can make a space for this anniversary.
Nearly 400 years of division have created an apartheid society: we need a new social infrastructure to carry us through the challenges of climate change, decaying physical infrastructure, rapidly evolving jobs, underperforming schools, uneven access to health care, and lack of affordable housing. Our central task is to engage as many individuals and as many institutions in the U.S. as can be mustered to join together and move from inequality to equality, from some people being counted as 3/5s to all being counted as 5/5s. Starting now, we can prepare for the anniversary by deepening our understanding of our history, and then building new coalitions that cross divides to define and address our common needs. This will transform the curse of this Jamestown and is the work of this anniversary.
Mindy Fullilove, William Morrish, and Robert Sember are professors at The New School. Robert Fullilove is a professor at Columbia University.
1 Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 57.
2 Anneaux de la Memoire, retrieved from http://fracademic.com/dic.nsf/frwiki/1822497.
3 Julian Bonder, “On memory, trauma, public space, monuments, and memorials,” Places 21, no. 1 (2009).