[Marxism] slavery in NY exhibit

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

NY Times editorial

The City Life
A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery



    *   By BRENT  STAPLES




Published: December 15, 2005

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton
 fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states.
The  fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often
comes as  a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free
North has  been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time
a center  of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other
city in the  country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.
The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this
clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is
being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the
long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.
New York's central position in the slave trade was partially exposed back in
1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan
uncovered a  long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for 
as much
as a  mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New
 Yorkers.
Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children
under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some
enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing  
their
children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically  died
of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and
bought more slaves.
Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South - and just as
pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human  
beings.
The free human labor that ran the city's most gracious homes also helped  to
build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef,
grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 - making
New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery.
Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors to the historical society,
people who thought they knew New York's history well have been badly shaken
to  learn about the depth and breadth of human bondage in the city. As one
distraught patron put it, "The ground we touch, every institution, is affected
by slavery."
Historians who had expected to find early 18th century slavemasters agonizing
 over the moral questions associated with slavery were surprised in a
different  way. One researcher said the record before the Revolutionary War 
contained
not a  single scrap of paper to support the notion of guilt among the
slaveholding  classes.
By conveniently "forgetting" slavery, Northerners have historically absolved
themselves of complicity while heaping blame onto the shoulders of the
plantation South. This cultural amnesia will no longer be plausible after the
country absorbs the New-York Historical Society's eye-opening exhibition, which
vigorously debunks the myth of the "free"  North.
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