Introductory Comments
There abides in the worlds of Punditry and
Specious Assumption the notion that the legacy of slavery is the unresolved
dilemma that has prevented attainment of full racial justice in these quite
un-United States.
Such a notion reveals a facile grasp of
prevailing realities in certain historical periods and inability to identify
moments of lost opportunity.
Perpend:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison produced
the most cogent syntheses of the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke (author
among other works of Second Treatise on Government) and Montesquieu (Spirit
of the Laws). Jefferson imbibed the works of Locke and worked his
innovation on Locke’s emphasis on the fundamental freedoms of life, liberty,
and property, changing the latter to the “pursuit of happiness.”
Montesquieu most clearly articulated the division of a national government into
three equal branches that especially in separating the judiciary from the
executive and the legislative thrust a seminal notion into the ether of
political theory. Madison’s synthesis of Enlightenment ideas as principal
author of the United States Constitution represented an enormous advance
in the production of a political framework for the establishment of nationhood.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their
colleague George Washington, the latter both as head general in the American
Revolution and first president of the new nation, created a political entity
that rivaled, with the potential to exceed, Great Britain as the world’s
paragon of democracy. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, were
imperfect, as was the nation that they created:
Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all
expressed misgivings about the institution of slavery while amassing fortunes
on the basis of that very institution; and the new nation was established
on the basis of a citizenry limited as to gender and ethnicity.
The great democratic treatise that is the United
States Constitution tacitly (given powers assigned to states that were
mostly governed on classist prerogatives) the vote only to white male owners of
considerable property, counted Native Americans not at all, and those in
bondage as three-fifths-persons for the purpose of determining representation
in the United States House of Representatives. Seventh president Andrew
Jackson has been considered by many historians as the chief executive most
responsible for expanding the electorate to include those white men who did not
own property; he had also led military battles against Native Americans,
proposed removal from land sought by white settlers, and was a vigorous
proponent of slavery.
Thus, the architects of the nation that would
in time, on the basis of constitutional amendments and the capacity for
legislative innovation, tend toward increasing democratization, were all
proponents of slavery who launched a nation upon racist assumptions and a
limited notion of “the people.”
Those are the facts.
What do we do with the contradictions?
Do we jerk down all sculptured monuments and
all nomenclature on edifices honoring those most responsible for establishing
the foundation of the United States as an imperfect experiment in
Enlightenment values, founders who could be construed as racist and sexist
believers in democracy and republican governance?
Perhaps we should dismantle those monuments
and remove those names; but as we do, we should be aware of the ironies
that should instill in us enormous feelings of cognitive dissonance.
……………………………………………………………………………..
We might consider as we judge slave-holders at
the turn of the 18th into the 19th century that slavery
was widely practiced and accepted in various forms throughout the world by the
late 18th and early 19th centuries and that the long
tenure of that institution on the international stage waned as the 19th
century unfolded. For citizens of the United States, the greatest shame
is not having embraced the institution of slavery during a time of the
institution’s historical entrenchment, but in promoting post-manumission forms
of that same institution, with ever more virulent racism. In the
aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction and the 1896 Supreme
Court decision for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, conditions abided
wherein the Jim Crow system and vigilante violence induced African Americans to
flee from the rural South to the urban North, where they were typically
residentially confined to certain areas at the urban core.
Nearly 100 years ensued between 1877 and the
legislative initiatives of the 1960s that ended most legal forms of
discrimination. White and African American middle class flight left
behind an increasingly impoverished population at the urban core, including
areas such as North Minneapolis and those areas of South Minneapolis extending
from East Lake Street. And at that historical moment an approach to
education, transmitted increasingly from the 1920s until taking firm hold by
the 1970s, denied a knowledge-intensive education to those most in need of
knowledge and skills necessary for highly remunerative employment and civic
participation.
The citizenry is produced mainly by the
institutions of family and public education. Public education is the main
conveyor of attitudes and information shared by the populace as a whole.
The shortcomings in ethical values and subject area knowledge in the curriculum
of locally centralized systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools produce
the level of immorality and ignorance that we now witness in our society.
Thus, the United States is now mired in a
predicament produced by an intellectually corrupt approach to education that
has inflicted us with a populace bereft of knowledge of natural science and
history; and no consensus as to shared
public values.
…………………………………………….
The great lost opportunity of American and
United States history began precisely in 1877 with the Compromise of 1877. At that point, there was hope for redressing
the abusive system of slavery, practiced the world over for centuries and raised
to highest level of cruelty in the plantation economies of the Americas,
including those of the American South, United States. That lost opportunity produced the misery that
should never have been, pervasively felt during 1877-1965; but lingering still at the urban core. Failure to bring African Americans into full
citizenship according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments to the United States Constitution held implications also for Native
Americans and other historically abused peoples.
Civil rights and fair housing laws of the late
1960s and early 1970s gave economic and residential opportunity to those of any
ethnicity with the wherewithal to realize the American Dream, but left behind a
restive population dwelling at the urban core.
The problems of those populations linger still and, though justice will
be better served with reform of police and other institutions, resolution can
only happen with the overhaul of K-12 education; such a revolution in public education will
create culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied
citizenry, end cyclical poverty, and finally resolve the cognitive dissonance
long abiding in the conveyance of the tale of United States history.
The articles of this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis,
Minnesota give a concise, information-packed account of African American
history as context for grasping the events productive of cognitive dissonance
and for resolving the historical tension that gives us both our present
struggle and another opportunity that we must not fumble this time, as we did
in 1877.
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