Musings of a Madman

People who want to share their religious belief with you almost never want you to share yours.

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: December 15, 2005

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking “Slavery in New York” exhibition, which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.

New York’s central position in the slave trade was partially exposed in 1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.

Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and bought more slaves.

Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South – and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city’s most gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 – making New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery.

Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors to the historical society, people who thought they knew New York’s history well have been badly shaken to learn about the depth and breadth of human bondage in the city. As one distraught patron put it, “The ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery.”

Historians who had expected to find early 18th-century slave masters agonizing over the moral questions associated with slavery were surprised in a different way. One researcher said the record before the Revolutionary War held not a single scrap of paper to support the notion of guilt among the slaveholding classes.

By conveniently “forgetting” slavery, Northerners have historically absolved themselves of complicity while heaping blame onto the shoulders of the plantation South. This cultural amnesia will no longer be plausible after the country absorbs the New-York Historical Society’s eye-opening exhibition, which vigorously debunks the myth of the “free” North. BRENT STAPLES

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.

Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.” Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is — and is not.

In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.

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Minorities Are Willing to Volunteer but Often Are Not AskedBy Rick Weiss

It is a truism that black people do not trust the medical establishment and are reluctant to volunteer for experiments.

And why should they volunteer, the story goes, given the widely known history of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where for decades doctors withheld medical treatment from several hundred black men with advanced syphilis as part of a sordid federal study?

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Few Athletes and Celebrities Have Given
By Darryl Fears

LOUISVILLE — The glamour, the popping camera lights of the paparazzi, and an impressive lineup of movie stars such as Jim Carrey, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Chris Tucker gave a glitzy Hollywood feel to the grand opening of the Muhammad Ali Center in this horse-racing town.

Lonnie Ali, the boxing champ’s wife, could barely hold back tears as she stood in the shadow of the $75 million center, with its soaring butterfly roof and its dozens of exhibits, replete with LeRoy Nieman paintings of “the Greatest” in his glory days

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