When I was a freshman at Morehouse College in 1990, one of the first major adjustments that I had to make was realizing that during Atlanta's bitterly cold winter months, that if I wanted to pleasure read rare books, or thumb through the latest editions of periodicals like Time, National Review, or U.S. News & World Report, that I had to leave the warm confines of my Graves Hall dorm room to walk about a mile to "Club Woody," the Robert Woodruff Library that serviced the entire Atlanta University Center.
Snow days? I'd walk. Cold and rainy or sleet filled days? I'd walk, resolved to soak up as much information as possible because I loved learning—period!
Club Woody-my old home away from home
While I probably sound like an aging curmudgeonly man, I tell my daughter and mentees all the time that their generation should be geniuses due to the fact that no matter how inclement the weather is outside, that they do NOT have to leave the comfort of their homes, apartments, or dorm rooms to gain knowledge—all that they have to do is cut on their smart phone, I-pad, or laptop—and allow their minds to wander.
The ease of information access, however, has not stopped what I often lament as the "dumbing down of America." Over the past two decades, people have reveled in being "low information," so much so that whole media empires and political careers have been launched by deriding "intellectual elites," the academy, and any undertaking that causes folks to read, reflect, and analyze the past, present, and prospects for the future.
Since history is my first love, and as one who holds two degrees in the subject, I recognize that not everyone will be just as giddy to run across articles or books that chronicle our collective existences from antiquity to today. But as an historian who also holds a law degree, such allows me a greater appreciation for American literary giant William Faulkner's words from Requiem for a Nun that, "In the South, the past isn't dead..it isn't even past." In fact, the “South” can be substituted for any region, which is why I still bristle at the latest act in the modern "Know Nothing" movement—the incessant right-wing attacks on "Critical Race Theory," and the insinuation that Black people are whiners and "victims" simply for demanding acknowledgement that modern day problems, from education and employment, to crime, to health care disparities, all circle back to 256 years of slavery—and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow segregation in America.
Louisiana's Angola Prison circa 2011 bears a resemblance to Southern plantations circa 1619-1865
No worse example of this phenomenon exists than those internet idiots who insist that the Civil War had nothing to do with Black enslavement, but was solely due to southerners yearning for "States' rights." When I am feeling charitable and patient, I sometimes will remark to the blissfully ignorant commentator that "you do realize that your ancestors were seeking their ‘States' Rights’ to own enslaved Blacks?" My comment/query is usually followed up by some inane comment or personal attack from the original poster that compels me to withdraw from teaching the unteachable; the same simply goes to show that basic information is not being taught in secondary schools—and the incurious have no interest in a simple Google search to learn what is readily available, if not painfully obvious.
In fact, my own simple Google search this morning yielded an article that the NY Times published in January of 1861 featuring an excerpt from the London Times about South Carolina's secession in December of 1860: “...But the most melancholy part of the matter is, that during the seventy years for which the American Confederacy has existed, the whole tone of sentiment with regard to Slavery has, in the Southern States at least undergone a remarkable change. Slavery used to be treated as a thoroughly exceptional institution -- as the evil legacy of evil times -- as a disgrace to a Constitution founded on the natural freedom and independence of mankind. There was hardly a political leader of any note who had not some plan for its abolition. Thomas Jefferson himself, the greatest chief of the Democracy, had in the early part of this century, speculated deeply on this subject; but the United States became possessed of Louisiana and Florida, they have conquered Texas, they have made Arkansas and Missouri into States, and these successive acquisitions have altered entirely the view with which Slavery is regarded...The South has become enamored of her shame. Free labor is denounced as degrading and disgraceful; the honest triumphs of the poor man who works his way to independence are treated with scorn and contempt. So far from treating Slavery as an exceptional institution, it is regarded by these democratic philosophers as the natural state of a great portion of the human race; and, so far from admitting that America ought to look forward to its extinction, it is contended that the property in human creatures ought to be as universal as the property in land or in tame animals."
Approximately 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed at Antietam Creek in September of 1862—all to settle the issue of Slavery in America.
Now, one need not graduate with honors to interpret that the 1861 editors of the London Times, observing from afar, realized in real time what was at issue in America's Civil War--Slavery! But to let the revisionist shepherds and their simple sheep tell it today, any discussion about how America grew into an economic superpower based upon free slave labor and nearly free Black labor on sharecrop farms during Jim Crow is besmirching the "greatest country that ever existed."
Such is why my rather laconic wish this Christmas Season is that Santa Claus magically delivers some basic curiosity—along with truth telling history books like Dr. John Hope Franklin's “From Slavery to Freedom" and Lerone Bennett's "Before the Mayflower"—and a pocket Constitution for all of our fellow Americans who fire off on social media each day fully devoid of even the most basic facts about the nation that they claim to love.
I read every column, to learn. Thank you and Happy Holidays. I try to stay in my lane and learn, not coment on issues that I have not had as a white woman.
To Curiosity!!