hundreds of millions of lives. This continued white celebration, the source of Republican electoral dominance in the South since Nixon's "Southern Strategy", continues to damage tens of millions more. Minstrel songs belong in a Museum of Slavery and Racism, not in the school curriculum as a kind of catechism for teaching racism, and not in 21st-Century inaugurations of Governors.
Go to any other country with a history of slavery, and you will find many lavishly-appointed museums of slavery, used mainly to teach schoolchildren about the horrors of slavery and racism. How many Americans know that the founding head of the American Medical Association made Josef Mengele look like Albert Schweitzer? Harriet Washington's new book, Medical Apartheid, explains not only how slaves were bought and subjected to unspeakable experimental atrocities without anesthesia, but also how much trouble she had getting access to the evidence of these atrocities, now in the hands of PR flacks for the medical profession.
Why isn't there a National Museum of Slavery and Racism on the Mall in Washington? See
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/25/wslave25.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/10/25/ixworld.html :
"Deep South slave shrine stirs old hatreds. Last Updated: 12:01am BST 25/10/2003
The branding iron was made to last, its handle burnished by frequent use, its head a simple hand-forged "S", pressed, red-hot, countless times to human skin. Next to it, in the stifling back room of a Mississippi bank, lay a coiled whip, crafted with care, its woven leather still supple after a century in an attic. In a happier world, these objects would have lost their power of terror. They would no longer provoke anyone to murderous hate. But they do. The whip and branding iron belong to Jim and Mary Anne Petty, amateur historians from the seaside resort of Gulfport, Mississippi. They are among the rarest pieces from their unique collection of slavery artefacts, gathered from collectors and private houses across the rural South.
The Pettys want their collection - now 25,000 pieces strong - to form a museum of slavery. No American institution has anything like their collection, and they have received several offers. But to date, each time a deal has been near, nervous politicians have blinked. White supremacist groups have made their anger plain, sending hate mail to the Pettys, and accusing them of faking their artefacts. Bottles have been hurled at their home. For the moment, they stage travelling exhibitions and visit schools willing to host them. They find children horrified by the whips and brands, but baffled by such items as their tiny "Negro shoes" - wooden-soled leather boots for a house slave, of perhaps three or four years old. "Were children slaves?" one black pupil asked recently. "The children have no idea of their history - white or black," Mr Petty said. "They say, 'I'd never let that happen to me'. We have to explain to them the system was imposed by force."
Such ignorance is no accident, Mr Petty says. State schools skirt gingerly around the dark history of the South, fearing the wrath of groups established to defend "southern heritage", such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the League of the South. To Howard Jones, a history professor at the University of Alabama, the Pettys must succeed in their quest to build the Middle Passage Museum, as they call their project. "I honestly believe this is the only collection of its kind," said Dr Jones, whose book Mutiny on the Amistad was adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg. "In order to heal, you have to be forced to look at what slavery was like. There are people still trying to hang on to that whole romanticised Gone With the Wind version of the South. They have to face their history." Dr Jones would like to see the museum set up in the South. "That's going to take someone mighty brave, even prepared to cost themselves a political career."
Rip Daniels, a businessman and broadcaster and the Pettys' most prominent black backer, fears the costs for the couple could be still higher. "What Jim has here is heresy," he said. "These objects show that African Americans did not acquiesce, that they did not submit graciously." Mr Daniels, who owns a local radio station and is one of its presenters, believes that defiant white Southerners are increasingly denying the reality of slavery.
"When you talk to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, they don't talk about actual historical events, they talk of the 'southern gentleman', of how he must have been." To Mr Daniels, whites have two choices. "They can justify their ancestors, or they can accept that they participated in a horrible episode of American history" he said. "As an African-American, I have to accept that some of my ancestors were in chains." Rip Daniels has received death threats himself, including a postcard of a lynching, with the message, "You're next". "There are people who take it upon themselves to be the curators of the Caucasian male ego," he said. "These are people who would plot Jim's demise. ..."
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