Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
The Skeleton in the Closet
By George M. Fredrickson
Slave Narratives
edited by William L. Andrews, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Library of America, 1,035 pp., $40.00
Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South
by Marie Jenkins Schwartz
Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $35.00
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
by Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press, 283 pp., $26.00
One hundred and thirty-five years after its abolition, slavery is still the skeleton in the American closet. Among the African-American descendants of its victims there is a difference of opinion about whether the memory of it should be suppressed as unpleasant and dispiriting or commemorated in the ways that Jews remember the Holocaust. There is no national museum of slavery and any attempt to establish one would be controversial. In 1995 black employees of the Library of Congress successfully objected to an exhibition of photographs and texts describing the slave experience, because they found it demoralizing. But other African-Americans have called for a public acknowledgment of slavery as a national crime against blacks, comparable to the Holocaust as a crime against Jews, and some have asked that reparations be paid to them on the grounds that they still suffer from its legacy. Most whites, especially those whose ancestors arrived in the United States after the emancipation of the slaves and settled outside the South, do not see why they should accept any responsibility for what history has done to African-Americans. Recently, however, the National Park Service has begun a systematic review of exhibits at Civil War battlefields to make visitors aware of how central slavery and race were to the conflict.
Review, 4754 words
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