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VERBATIM POST
My comments are primarily addressed to Cheryl Lynn’s letter, “Don’t sugarcoat rebel flag’s history” [Maryland Independent, May 11].
That door swings both ways. There is not enough sweetener on the planet to mask the sins of man’s inhumanity to man, and that includes African-American history.
Beginning on this continent in 1619, the first 20 Africans were brought to the Virginia colony by Dutch traders and exchanged for food with the colonists. One of those 20 Africans was Anthony Johnson.
By 1623, he had earned his freedom under the indentured servant system. And by 1651, he was prosperous enough to import five indentured servants of his own for which he received a grant of 250 acres as head rights.
Slavery was established in the English colonies in 1654 when Anthony Johnson convinced the Northampton County, Va., court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of a man named John Casor. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime or debt.
Black Africans have been enslaved by Arabs, Europeans and other Africans for centuries before they were brought to the New World and even today in some African countries.
Blacks arrived slowly during the first four decades of colonization. Most white immigrants during this time arrived as indentured servants and many of the first blacks were also indentured and earned their freedom after a period of servitude.
In 1650, there were only 300 African-Americans in Virginia. Some of those were not slaves, any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working off their loans for passage to Virginia.
The growing colonies were remarkably free of racial bias. Free blacks voted, owned land, held elective office and imported their own white and black indentured servants.
The major prejudice of the time was by the English gentry toward lower classes without distinction as to color.
Black and white indentured servants worked together and sometimes ran away together. I doubt that one in 10,000 African-Americans can tell you who Anthony Johnson was because it is not taught as part of black history. That is sugarcoating.
Slavery existed in the colonies under the English flag for 150 years before the revolution and for many years after the revolution under the Star-Spangled Banner.
It took the U.S. government another more than 100 years after that to enact a Civil Rights Act signed into law by a southerner, President Lyndon B. Johnson. As for the more than 200,000 African-American soldiers who fought for the Stars and Stripes in the Civil War, their service to the country was not acknowledged and honored with an exclusive monument until 135 years after the war ended.
African-Americans who served in the Confederate service had monuments erected in the states of Mississippi, South Carolina and others 100 years ago while the veterans were still living.
Even to this day, Veterans Administration-issued gravestones have the designation USCT, for United States Colored Troops, stating a difference between them and their white fellow U.S soldiers.
In comparison, a black Confederate veteran’s stone is the same as a white Confederate veteran’s stone.
During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, there was the largest Ku Klux Klan rally in history where 40,000 hooded Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. Each of them carried a flag, the U.S. flag. Not a Confederate flag of any kind is seen in the entire archived photo.
All the sugarcoating in the world can’t sweeten that segment of history.
Jim Dunbar, La Plata
Via SHNV
