Richmond Confronting the legacies of enslavement

[Emmanuel Dabney]

The article is long thus I will merely direct your attention to it.: http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/ne...224202/319809/

It is pleasing to see this article in the Times Dispatch.

[brown]

Re: Richmond Confronting the legacies of enslavement

Emmanuel,
Thanks for sharing this. It is so true and seemingly worthwhile; I hope it is real and not just lip service. If it is followed through, it can create really change and help to promote meaningful understandings of the past. I also thought the article was well written, in an era when news articles published online don't often show this level of depth or refinement. I included a few quote I found particularly meaningful for those not able to read the whole piece or to tempt a few into reading the whole. I will dedicate my remaining space to those quotes:

"America's amnesia" about its slave-trading past.

History is not always written by the victors.

"There is no white history and black history. There's Richmond history,"

Zur said participants must take the past personally.
"People have a hard time saying the structure, the legacy is bad, even if I didn't create it. Even if I don't actively contribute to it day to day, I may still benefit from it or I may still be hurt by it. And if we're only talking about it as something in the past, as something impersonal, then our conversation can only go so far."

For the first 100 years after the Civil War, conversation about it was dominated by the white veterans and their descendants," said the Confederacy museum's Rawls. "And therefore the bulk of the conversation was about battles and battlefields."
But in the past 20 to 25 years, "we saw this pendulum swing from 'tell nothing but the Confederate veteran's story' and it swung . . . past neutral to 'we're not going to tell the slave story yet, but we're not going to tell the Confederate story either,'" he said. "Richmond turned turtle. It said, 'We can't talk about it; we can't see it; we can't say slavery; we can't say Confederacy.'"

[agintomboy]

Re: Richmond Confronting the legacies of enslavement

Neat article! Thanks Em! Have you started back to classes yet?

Anita

[Becky Morgan]

Re: Richmond Confronting the legacies of enslavement

Interesting and thought-provoking, to say the least. Thank you, Mr. Dabney.