SLAVERY HURT BLACKS and POOR WHITES

  Discrimination against black people because of the color of their skin is wrong. Slavery hurt Americans from Africa, and that damage is still far-reaching.

 

“A poor black family is much more likely than a poor white one to live in a neighborhood where many other families are poor, too, creating what sociologists call the ‘double burden’ of poverty,” writer Emily Badger says.

America slavery also hurt “poor whites.”

 

“The institution of slavery deprived the majority of poor whites of wealth, culture, and political power,” William M. Brewer said.

 

“Slavery imposed upon this class nearly three hundred years of ignorance, inertia, and peculiar prejudice.”

 

Ms. Keri Leigh Merritt, a historian and writer in Atlanta, GA., is the author of "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South." Writing about years leading to America’s Civil War, Merritt says, “The enslavement of millions of Africans warped the South’s economy, politics, and culture — including in ways that often hurt poor white Southerners. Poor whites were seen as a threat to the ruling planter class in the South.”

 

Merritt estimates poor whites made up about one-third of the white population in the cotton South states. She says they lived hard material lives, “enduring cyclical poverty, hunger, and want, primarily because they were surplus workers competing in a labor market with brutalized, unpaid enslaved people.”

 

After the forced migration of around 800,000 enslaved laborers from the Upper South to the Deep South in the 1830s and 1840s, job opportunities for poor whites were scarce, Merritt says.

 

“By the 1850s, poor white men had either dropped out of the workforce altogether, cobbling together a meager existence by hunting, fishing, and trading with the enslaved in the underground economy, or by trying to work in non-agricultural jobs,” she says. “These ‘mechanics,’ as they called themselves, began forming labor unions, or ‘associations,’ and by the late 1850s many of them were openly threatening to withdraw their support for slavery if something was not done to protect their jobs and their wages.”

 

Merritt argues that the push from poor and working-class whites essentially created a 3-front battle for slave owners, who had to defend slavery against Northern abolitionists, the enslaved themselves, and lower-class Southern whites.

 

“Slaveholders had little chance but to secede to preserve slavery,” Merritt says.

 

She adds that no system of universal or public education existed in the Deep South prior to the Civil War because slave-owners did not want poor whites teaching blacks how to read in the growing underground economy the two groups operated.

 

“Poor whites’ illiteracy also meant that they remained ignorant about nearly everything going on at the national level,” Merritt says.

 

This fact, along with their often being left out of politics, meant that poor whites were completely distrustful of government in general and were politically apathetic, Merritt says, adding, “It was an incredibly unequal society at every level, and whether through incentives or threats or outright terrorism, slaveholders controlled every aspect of politics and suffrage.”

 

Many 1850s church leaders justified slavery.

 

In an article called “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought,” Gordon Rhea writes that some church leaders argued that because Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Job owned slaves, slavery was OK.

 

“While slavery was not expressly sanctioned in the New Testament, Southern clergymen argued that the absence of condemnation signified approval,” Rhea says. “They cited Paul’s return of a runaway slave to his master as Biblical authority for the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the return of runaway slaves.”

 

Some leaders promoted “race superiority” appeals.

 

Rhea writes that in the fall of 1860, John Townsend, owner of a cotton plantation on Edisto Island, authored a pamphlet saying that if Lincoln were elected President, the abolition of slavery would be inevitable and that people who did not own slaves would also be in danger.

 

“It will be to the non-slaveholder, equally with the largest slaveholder, the obliteration of caste and the deprivation of important privileges,” Townsend wrote. “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility … . The poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an equality with himself and his family.”

 

Slavery hurt black people (and poor white people) and warred against these words written by Clare Herbert Woolston: “Red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in His Sight.”

LIKE SHIPS PASSING IN A CORONAVIRUS NIGHT?

 

Pictured are Mrs. Frances Hawkins Crain and Mr. Fred E. Crain, my aunt and uncle.

 

Janelle, my daughter, spends much time at home, virtual-teaching by computer to second-graders. She gets out of her house during some afternoons in order to visit a few shops. Cabin-fever probably forces her to mask-up and venture forth. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives.

Barbara and I saw Janelle during her Christmas two-week break. We met outside for lunch at Greer’s Panera Bread. The wind was cold and strong, and after eating our meals at two different outside tables (so we could social-distance), we retreated to our cars and parked behind Panera. I backed into a space; we left a parking space between us; and Janelle drove straight into the space on the other side of the empty parking space between us. We sat with car windows rolled down and talked — I from my window and she from hers, parked as if our cars were meeting in opposite directions. The expression “like ships passing in the night” came to mind.

Internet sources define “ships that pass in the night” to mean “two or more people who encounter one another in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance.”

“Ships that pass in the night” originates from the poem “The Theologian’s Tale” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem reads, “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

“Ships that pass in the night” is a metaphor referring to “people who meet, share a few words, and separate to continue their way and never see each other again.”

Of course, I plan to see Janelle again, and our relationship is not “without lasting significance,” but the present pandemic seems to have put us into “ships that pass in the night” situations. I phone Janelle about every other day in an effort to maintain our relationship.

On a recent Sunday, George Hembree, a Vietnam veteran and member of Faith Temple Church, brought his daughter, Angela, to Faith Temple. After church, she approached me about the name “Frances Crain” printed in the church bulletin. Frances’ name is listed there in the prayer concerns. Ms. Angela is a nursing supervisor at Spring Park, a Travelers Rest, SC, nursing home where my Aunt Frances, age 93, lives.

“She’s a sweet person,” Angela said about Aunt Frances.

“We recently visited her,” I said.

Barbara and I had not seen Aunt Frances since March 2020; we made an appointment to meet with her at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021. Wearing masks that day, we found the facility’s front door locked. A supervisor sent us to the outside entrance of the memory-care wing.

An aide seated us in the lobby. Two folding tables had been placed side-to-side to maintain a 6-foot space between Aunt Frances and us. An attendant escorted in my tiny aunt, who used a walker and wore a mask.

“Hi, Aunt Frances,” I said. “Do you recognize me.”

“Well, I’m not sure … ,” she said, as she took a seat opposite us.

I lowered my mask to let her see my whole face.

“Oh, it’s Steve,” she said.

I re-positioned my mask.

“How’s Carol?” She asked.

“She’s fine,” I said. Carol passed on in Jan. 2019, and I believe she is in heaven and is fine. Aunt soon asked again about Carol. I figured I better tell her that Carol died, because Aunt might wonder about why I was sitting there with Barbara (my wife since June 2020). I told her that Carol passed.

“Well, did I know about it?” she asked.

I told her she had known and introduced Barbara, whom she met in early 2020. We chatted for a while.

“Has Fred passed on?” Aunt Frances asked.

I explained that Fred, her late husband, died in Feb. 2018. She asked if she lived at Spring Park and, if so, how long had she lived there. She and Uncle Fred lived at Spring Park for a while before he passed.

“You mean I’ve lived here all by myself? she said. “I mean … with no relatives here?”

I told her that she was cared for and loved. I prayed for her before and Barbara and I left.

I often think of this verse, in regard to older people:

After Jesus was resurrected, he showed himself to several disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. He asked Peter about his love for him, then Jesus said to him: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not” (John 21:18).

Whether we’re trying to maintain relationships during the coronavirus pandemic or dealing with other challenges, we can always cast our care upon him (Jesus), for he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).