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Shakles from the 1800s show the method owners used to retrain slaves.
BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Maryland apologizing for slavery will amount to an empty gesture without further action, a historian says.
“We need to have truth and justice commissions to present to the public what slavery did and how we actually are all involved and either benefited or were hurt,” said Melinda Chateauvert, an African-American studies professor at University of Maryland, College Park.
Slavery “has been deliberately obscured, and we don’t have that atonement that really has to come from having an open discussion.”
Democratic Sen. Nathaniel Exum and Del. Michael Vaughn, both of Prince George’s, introduced identical resolutions that would express “profound regret for the role that Maryland played in instituting and maintaining slavery and for the discrimination that was slavery’s legacy.”
Exum said he agrees the apology should serve as a catalyst for future discussions.
“No one has officially said that [slavery] was wrong,” he said.
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Maryland “imported men, women and children, torn from their homes in Africa and subjected to the brutality of the Middle Passage,” according to the resolution.
“Maryland citizens trafficked in human flesh until the adoption of the Constitution of 1864 and ... subjected its victims to unspeakable cruelties, including beatings, rape and the forcible separation of family members from one another.”
Human trafficking occurred in Maryland as recently as the 1930s, Chateauvert said, when Baltimoreans were sold to farmers on the Eastern Shore.
Her suggestion to form commissions is modeled after groups established to address genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, she said.
Virginia became the first state last month to apologize for slavery, and Missouri is considering it.
Four advocates and no opponents spoke at a Senate hearing on the measure this month.
A House hearing has not been scheduled.
kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com
Comments from Examiner Readers
7:06 AM MST on Sat., Nov. 10, 2007 re: "Dred Scott decision is 150 years old"
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4:47 AM MST on Sat., Nov. 10, 2007
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The Undertaker said:
This article is missing facts (such as the fact that Taney freed his slaves and took financial care of them). It is also very biased. Taney was a good man. To lay so much of the blame for slavery on him is a mistake. If it were up to Taney, slavery would have ended. He followed the law the best that he understood it. The fault for injustice lies within the hearts of all men.
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Examiner Reader said:
"Taney, who was born in Calvert County and owned slaves, decided that slaves should not be considered citizens." Actually, what he decided was that the U.S. Constitution meant what it said and that public opinion was not to be the gauge by which the Constitution should be understood. In other words, if one wants to change the Constitution, one should do it by amendment, not through the Supreme Court's collective whimsy.
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Examiner Reader said:
I think you need more information on Dred Scott. like when he was born and when he died, if he died of old age or killed by someone.
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Examiner Reader said:
Wonderful!
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