[Oju]

State's misdeeds

In the nearly 388 years since that great act of inhumanity, Virginia has done a lot to blacks for which it should be sorry.

In 1662, the state Legislature ordered that the race of children born to slave women and "any Englishman" should be determined by the condition of the mother. In other words, children fathered by white men who had their way with black slave women were born slaves.

In the 1830s, Virginia's Legislature passed a law that made it illegal for any blacks - slaves or free - to preach at a religious service.

In 1860, it ordered that any free black who was sentenced to prison for a crime could, at the court's discretion, be sold into slavery.

If you think Virginia's treatment of blacks changed quickly after slavery was ended, you're wrong. In 1924, Virginia's Legislature passed a "Racial Integrity Act," which forbade people from marrying across racial lines.

In 1959, a state court convicted an interracial couple of violating that law after they married legally in the District of Columbia before moving to Virginia.

Desegregation resistance

This act of state-sponsored racial intolerance came on the heels of an effort by a Virginia U.S. Senator to block enforcement of the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation order. Called "Massive Resistance," the effort of Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. Won the support of the state's Legislature, which tried to close Virginia's public schools in 1958 rather than comply with the high court's school desegregation decision.

Why mention all of this? To make the point that slavery had some pernicious aftereffects - and Virginia's Legislature was on the leading edge of many of them well into the 20th century. . . .

Source: DeWayne Wickham, "Virginia finally shows contrition for slavery." (Tue Feb 6, 2007) Yahoo News

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Virginia had the longest slave history in British colonies, with most historians, by and large, suggesting that the first 20 enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619 (though other historians confirm that England’s first slave voyage was in 1555 when slave trader John Hawkins brought 300 slaves to North America [Santa Domingo], causing the Spanish to ban British from trading in the West Indies). Enslaved Africans were actually on the North American continent nearly one hundred years earlier with a documented presence in New Spain (now Mexico) in the 1520s, but it’s Jamestown that is credited with making involuntary servitude an accepted part of American culture long before it became associated with the deep South. . . .

Nearly 300 years of life-long servitude, by an inestimatable number, leaves America in a position it couldn’t possibly repair or reparate. And if they tried to address reparations, where would the number start? Try four trillion dollars (at last estimate, in the late 1990s), which is most of the wealth of the nation. The interest owed on reparations to descendents of slaves in America is in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. This is not a conversation America is looking forward to, because it’s not a debt that America can pay (in dollars-but they can pay it in other ways). . . .

I guess for now, a near apology will have to do. At least until African Americans figure out how to work around the semantics of America confessing for slavery—without paying.

Source: Anthony Asadullah Samad. "Semantics Over Apology for Slavery Keeps Eye On Reparations." Black Commentator