Slavery is not ancient history. It is very recent history.
By SHMR Researcher, Ayan Ali
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“But slavery was so long ago.” Many of us have heard these words, or something similar, when talking about American slavery and its impact on modern racial inequalities. The phrase is often used to dissociate from or resist acknowledging how the historical violence that slavery wreaked on African Americans is relevant today. Because no one alive today participated in or suffered under race-based, chattel slavery, some assert that slavery has negligible impact on contemporary society.
One of the most damaging myths about American history is that the subjugation of Black lives and communities ended with the abolition of slavery in 1865 and that it occurred so long ago as to no longer have a measurable influence on our lives today.
While this rhetoric attempts to make recent history seem ancient, those familiar with the history of American slavery know that we are not far removed from its horrors and that similar systems of anti-Black exploitation continue to replicate themselves.
As a researcher with the SHMR Project, my duties include creating family trees that link living descendants through the generations to their ancestors who were held in bondage by the Jesuits. During this process, I am consistently struck by the shapes of the family trees, which often resemble hedges more than trees with their low height and broad width. They take on a similar structure across families, stretching far horizontally, but not vertically.
These trees make clear how little time has elapsed since the abolition of slavery. If slavery was in fact a distant memory, we would expect to see tall, long trees with many generations who had lived and died after slavery was abolished. But these short, flat trees demonstrate just the opposite. In some instances, only two generations separate a living descendant from a predecessor who was held in bondage and some even have lifetimes that overlap with an enslaved ancestor.
It is critical to recognize the recency of slavery as we work to dismantle its pervasive legacies. African Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved, and the modern manifestations of American slavery continue to negatively impact Black people across almost every measure: healthcare, employment, incarceration, wealth, education, etc. Most recently, as protests against police brutality persist and countless Black people continue to die at the hands of police officers, the connections between fugitive slave patrols and modern policing have been brought into stark, painful relief.
Rather than distancing ourselves from history, we must instead recognize the implications of our proximity to slavery. While time may move quickly, history is never as far away as we think.
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In 1848, the Jesuits assumed administration of the diocesan St. Joseph College in Bardstown, Kentucky. They decided to keep all the enslaved people currently held at the college by diocesan priests, except Charles, Dave, his wife, Maria, and their children, who left over the course of the month of August 1848. In addition to the people they owned, and those who they borrowed from diocesan priests, Jesuits also rented and borrowed enslaved people from women’s religious orders, other Catholic seminaries and schools, and from lay Catholics in the community. The Jesuits even forced two people, Peter [Barada or Queen], and Mary, from their seminary in Florissant, Missouri, to Bardstown. They also received enslaved people such as Matilda Clark as loans in payment for students’ tuition. Meanwhile, Jesuits dismissed from the college three students “proven to be of mixed blood.”
Enslaved people were forced to perform the “heavy drudgery” of the work in the dining room, dormitories, and infirmary. At the college, they prepared meals for the Jesuits and their students, cleaned rooms, and constructed and maintained campus buildings; several were also sextons at St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral. Read more about their lives in slavery at St. Joseph College on our website.
Image: During the 19th century, enslaved people maintained Spalding Hall, the main building of St. Joseph College. Image taken by Kenneth C. Zirkel
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How Black Lives Matter is Changing the Church by Eliza Griswold. Griswold examines how the Black Lives Matter Movement has influenced some Christian leaders’ frameworks for addressing racism, including the relationship, and sometimes tension, between concepts of, and calls for, racial reconciliation and systemic change.
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirde Cooper Owens. Owens illustrates how American medicine, especially the field of gynecology, relied on the institution of slavery. She writes, "By chronicling the lives of enslaved women, this book demonstrates that slavery, medicine, and science had a synergistic relationship."
I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. This book is "a look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all."
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The Committee on Slavery, Accountability and Reconciliation of the Religious Sisters of the Sacred Heart was formed in 2016. Their mandate is "to focus on the on-going issue of racism in the world and the Society of the Sacred Heart’s participation in the historic sin of slavery. …we commit ourselves to recover the story of slavery in our early days in this country, to share this historical fact as widely as needed, to assist in the attempt to locate the descendants of enslaved persons who lived on property owned by the Society of the Sacred Heart, and to take appropriate steps to address this painful chapter in our history while also working to help transform on-going racist attitudes and behaviors.” In 2018, descendants of people who were enslaved to the sisters planned and held a ceremony to honor their ancestors.
Image: Taken at the 2018 reunion of descendants of people enslaved to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.
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