Brown: Natalie Bullock Brown, host
Parker: Dr. Freddie Parker
Williams: Dr. Heather Williams
McDaniel: Dr. Clyde McDaniel
Andrews: William L. Andrews

Brown: Slavery was abolished about 140 years ago, yet many believe African Americans and all of America are still recovering from its lasting effects. Scholars in the academic community call this residual effects, which were recently described in Essence magazine as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. And we'll talk about this phenomenon next on Black Issues Forum.

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Brown: Good evening and welcome to Black Issues Forum. I'm Natalie Bullock Brown. It's been said that African Americans today still suffer from the backlash of slavery: economically, socially and psychologically. We're aware of statistics on black/white disparities in wealth, crime and education, and if you ask any African-American adult, he or she is sure to say they've been party to troubling conversations on race and skin color at some point in their lifetime. But how can slavery still exact a toll on blacks today? Well, tonight we'll take a look at this question and talk about the residual effects of slavery using first-person accounts of slavery: the slave narrative. We'll meet our guests in just a few minutes. But first, producer Stephanie Hirsch brings us more on the slave narrative.

M: There are five slave narratives by North Carolinians who published their stories before 1865 in an attempt to strike a blow against slavery.

Andrews: Those five are Moses Roper's narrative from 1837, Lundsford Lane's narrative from 1842, Moses Grandy's narrative from 1844, and Thomas Jones' narrative from 1854. In 1861, the final and certainly the best known today of the narratives, is Harriet Jacobson's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. That book is widely known today in a way that the four by the four men, Roper, Lane, Grandy and Jones, are not known, but in their own time those four men's stories were far more widely known and read than Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first autobiography by an American woman who had been enslaved. It was the first one we have written by the woman herself. Jacobs wanted to write this story but was also very concerned about telling a story in which she would basically confess to have had two children by a white man out of wedlock in the South. So she changed all the names in the book and went by herself, a pseudonym. She called herself Linda Brant in the book, rather than Harriet Jacobs.

"I was a poor slave girl, only 15 years old. So much attention from a superior person was of course flattering, for human nature is the same in all. I also felt grateful for his sympathy and encouraged by his kind words. It seemed to me a great thing to have such a friend. By degrees a more tender feeling crept into my heart. He was an educated and eloquent gentleman, too eloquent, alas, for the poor slave girl who trusted in him. Of course I saw whither all this was tending. I knew the impassible gulf between us, but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave if her miserable situation has left her any pride or sentiment."

I think that what we can take from these stories today is a great example of people who refused to be demoralized, who refused to give up, who struggled in circumstances that were unjust, but who eventually gave their families an opportunity that they themselves didn't have. And managed to triumph over odds that we would look at today and say, that's a terrible, terrible kind of hurdle to have to get over.

Brown: We're talking about the residual effects of slavery tonight on Black Issues Forum. Right now I'd like to introduce our guests. First, Dr. Freddie Parker, head of the Department of History at North Carolina Central University, and author of two books on slavery in North Carolina: Running for FreedoM: Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775-1835, and Stealing a Little FreedoM: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1791-1840. Next Dr. Heather Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and currently teaches a course on African-American life and culture and slavery. She has also recently published a book titled Self Taught: African-American Education in Slavery and Freedom. And we have Dr. Clyde McDaniel, PhD, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Welcome to all of you.

Parker: Thank you.

McDaniel: Yes.

Brown: Now let's just jump right into a discussion about residual effects of slavery as they manifest themselves today. One of the things that I've read about in terms of how slaves were able to survive is that they adapted, they had to adapt to their new surroundings. What part of, if any, of the adaptation that slaves had to take on may show up in our lives today, and Dr. Parker, why don't you start?

Parker: I think that during slavery times, obviously slaves had to come up with coping mechanisms, they came up with mechanisms of survival, and the residual effects continue right down to the present time. I think that we do adapt, we do change according to situations, and I think that slavery was a lesson that taught them how to change, it taught them to have hope, it taught them to have faith. And I think that is surely one of those residual effects of the institution of slavery. Because it was an oppressive system, folks learned how to create the mechanisms of survival, and we continue to do that right down to the present time.

Brown: But theoretically we're not still under oppression so why do we still have to adapt?

Parker: I think that theoretically we're not under slavery, but in practicality in many ways, black people and other people in this country are still oppressed in many, many ways.

Brown: Right, yes. Dr. Williams, what would you have to add to that?

Williams: Well, I have an example. The other day I went to mail my book, right, brand new, hot off the press, and I was mailing it to my family, and the woman in the post office was a black woman and she said, "So what's the name of the book?" And I said, Self Taught: African-American Education. And she said, "Oh, self taught; no wonder we have to be strong, no wonder we're so good at that now." And so she saw continuity in the ability to take responsibility for yourself, to set up structures for yourself. I mean, I see it in charter schools now, right, where public school system is maybe failing people, and whatever you believe about charter schools, you see charter schools and you also see little private schools that black people are setting up all across the country to sort of rescue their children from inadequate education. And so it shows up in lots of ways.

Brown: Other ways that you would describe, Dr. McDaniel?

McDaniel: Well, I'd agree with everything that was said so far. We learn resourcefulness. We learn to make do with less. We learned during slavery to maximize the functions of a given social unit, like a family, when in fact the structure had to be changed depending on the nature of the situation upon us. As in a good example of this, is this business of the matriarchal family: one parent family, woman centered, the woman headed. And we do the best we possibly can with that, resources that were made available for slaves were just unreal. As a matter of fact, another aspect of this business of residual positive effect, if you will, would be our black culture, the way in which we use that as a mediator between us and the hostile, extraordinarily hostile environment we find ourselves with music, dance, singing; character development under the conditions of adversity. Singing, dancing, religion. Those are some of the kinds of things that hang with us even today, even though we are oppressed, we may not be under slavery in a formal sense. We certainly are still oppressed in all kinds of ways.

Brown: Very interesting. Dr. Parker, what other negatives is _____. Dr. McDaniel has eloquently just expressed some of the positive effects, but it seems to me there's probably more negatives maybe than positives.

Parker: I think that the most important negative, residual effect of slavery is the fact that when slavery came to an end, four million people were just put out there, and there was not this attempt to make it an easy transition from slavery to freedom. And though we talked about getting the right to vote and citizenship; what was absent was an economic infrastructure. And if the Thaddeus Stevens, who was a representative from Pennsylvania, if he had gotten through the 40 Acres and a Mule concept, just that concept, if you would simply give every head of household land and the means to cultivate that land, I think Black America would be altogether different today. That the basis of freedom is the ownership of land. And you can have the right to vote; you can have the right to access public accommodations, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you don't have a place to live, or if you don't have the means to make a living. So I think one of the most significant failures of reconstruction was the fact that this economic infrastructure was not provided. And I think we are where we are today because of that.

Brown: Dr. Williams, do you agree?

Williams: I do, and I think that very often we, in our contemporary moment, try to trace every problem that we identify among black people in America, to slavery. And I think that's not always the kind of correct thing to do, because I do a lot of work on slavery. I also do a lot of work on the emancipation period, focusing on black people emerging from slavery. And what you see, for instance, black families, Herbert Gutman has done a book on black families and slavery in freedom, where he finds that if you value two family households and you look at people living in slavery, most of those people came out of slavery in some sort of a two-parent household, even though there had been separation, there was this idea of resilience where people would form new families, and they weren't legally married, but they held a family structure. If you look at education during slavery, most slave states banned literacy for black people, but a lot of people found their way around that and went out in the woods and dug holes in the ground, to set up schools, to teach each other once they had learned. As soon as you learned something, you passed it on. So in terms of valuing education, a lot of people came out of slavery placing a very high value on education and went to great lengths after slavery ended to set up schools. I mean, it goes on and on. We talk about black men not being active participants in families or in our society; at the end of the slavery, the black men are leading the way. You know, there are these political meetings that they're having; they're the ones writing to the North asking for help. Writing to say, why haven't we gotten the land that we've been promised? Why are our children being put to work instead of being sent to school? And so people were beaten down in slavery but there's always, there's the oppression of slavery and teen there's the resilience and the struggle, the resistance of black people coming out. And I think we really need to remember that.

Brown: Dr. McDaniel, one thing that Dr. Williams said that interests me when I think about it in terms of what, I guess, the myth or the impression is today, is about black men actually being leaders during slavery and actually trying to make things better for their new families. I mean, trying to fight for rights that had been afforded them or had been promised them. Why is there such a discrepancy now, why does the black man get such a bad rep today?

McDaniel: During Reconstruction, right after slavery, of course we were living in a patriarchal society, that is to say, male-dominated kind of society, in addition to white dominated. And we did defer to men for leadership positions, so we were started a cordon, with the help of the Freedmen's Bureau and so forth, leadership and headship roles to blacks, we gave to males as much as possible. And that was one of the things, but this didn't last long enough, it only lasted a short period of time, you know, from 1877 right up to somewhere over there, in about 1890 or something, 1880s or so, blacks really began-there were reprisals and retaliations in an attempt to get blacks back in their places. But that awful period that occurred right at the tail end of Reconstruction, and right on up until the '20s, certainly attempting to hold that vote, particularly declare the black males the object of much of that hostility and violence with black males, get them out of those leadership positions. That certainly intimidated people to a large extent, and it kind of by default gave headship to the extent that there was headship, to the females. And then when it urbanized and moved on up to the North of course, there was the ____ sentiment and all that sort of stuff, which again undermined the role of the male. And a lot of things for their election was expected, and self-fulfilling prophecy kind of took hold there. And males kind of moved out, and not out of other things like sister Williams taught me after a while about how we don't necessarily have to look at slavery as such to accomplish some of our negative residuals. We can talk about the social system that we live in and this economic, political, and you name it. But the system itself-we call it institutional racism incidentally.

Brown: Well, I actually wanted to go back to Dr. Williams, because something that you said prior to the show really struck me, that we're not-we're still sort of in recovery mode. That a lot of times we think about slavery as the beginning of-well, it was the beginning of emancipation, but there's so much has happened in the past 140 years. Elaborate please.

Williams: Well, yeah, I think you have to have this long view, and in American history it's not that long; it hasn't been that long here. But I think not to just stop in 1863 or 1865, but to really follow through as Dr. McDaniel was saying, you go into the-black men get the vote in 1870, but by the end of the 19th century, the vote has been taken away from-

McDaniel: Away, yes.

Williams: Right. And so you have upsurges and then you have defeats. And you get to the 1960s and you see this incredible Civil Rights movement in which men and women are involved, but black men again, are out in front because we're still, still it's a patriarchal society in a lot of ways. But then on the heels of that you get Reagan, you get Reaganomics and you get a new face put onto racism and you get black men branded as criminals. And then more and more, black men-opportunities are reduced for them within the society, so it's not just that somebody says you're a criminal. There are a lot of black men who are criminals obviously. But then there are a lot who are-people have done studies on the discrepancies in sentencing between crack cocaine and cocaine, right? And so if black men are involved in it, or black people, because a lot of women also get locked up for extensive periods of time. That the society keeps changing and adjusting and that there are new ways to keep black people in a subservient kind of position. Black people fight for right to be admitted to college. I went to a top college in the country because other black people had fought for that, to give me that opportunity. It's not because I was so smart-and there are lot of smart black people for centuries, right, who didn't get that opportunity. But then I went into college in the '70s with this idea of affirmative action hanging over my head, right, so that when you get an opportunity and you go to college and you do well, there's still this sense of, well, she's only there because she's black. And somebody did say that to me when I was admitted to college. It didn't matter that he was out smoking pot and playing guitar, while I was doing 60 extracurricular activities in school, right? And so the ways of tainting the kind of progress that people make, and I think it's really dangerous. And it's aimed at getting into your head and making you think that you're not good enough and you can't do well.

Brown: Dr. Parker, you wanted to say something?

Parker: Yeah, I think an important ingredient in all of this, is adaptability. I mean, we see Reconstruction come to an end in 1877, and people talking about this idea that it's like ice water being injected in our veins. But what happens in the early 1880s with the advent of Jim Crow laws and with the increase in the number of lynchings, black people are able to navigate their way through the system. For example, between 1880 and 1920 we have the emergence of black businesses. We are adapting. Politically you can't make it, but if we have black solidarity, if we have self help, then we can do for ourselves. And so you have thousands and thousands of businesses coming on the scene. In 1914 there are 40,000 black businesses across the country. And so even though, despite in many cases the ugly residual effects of slavery, despite whatever is thrown at you, you're still surviving. I mean, I use the expression "still standing". After everything that's been thrown away, you have 38-39 million black people in this country today-

McDaniel: And as a group we started way back a long time ago, protesting-as individuals and as a group, protesting, confronting, taking issue with the treatment that we were accorded. You see, during that same period of time we're talking about, Booker T. Washington was doing some things down there in Tuskegee, and accommodation, it's just the kind of strategy that was necessary under the circumstances. Of course a lot of people criticized Booker T. Washington, as a strategist, as accommodationist, they said why don't you just confront the system just a little more? But under the circumstances in the South, whereas W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP group, a little bit more forceful, a little bit more overt up North, as well as the Gar____ movement a little later on, see, and plus, black people getting out of Dodge. They were leaving in droves, starting in 1890, getting out of the South, moving to the Southern cities first, and then from that, moving on up to the North for various kinds of reasons. There were push and pull factors for God's sake, that got them out of there. But they were moving, taking, it's what we call agency, acting on their own behalf as best as they possibly could. Individually, as well as as a group. Like that young lady who stayed in that loft for seven years, who took the bull by the horns and acting on her own behalf, even if she had to sustain such a long period of negative treatment away from the children and all that. We're subjected to so many micro-insults every day as black folk that we can't even say anything about, it goes under this rubric of institutional racism. You have to take the bull by the horns, sometimes you yourself individually have to kind of confront it right there where it is. We've been working in all kinds of ways. The progress that has been made by us during all of these periods of time in an adaptive fashion, even that we're resilient, it's been like you were saying a few minutes ago, like a drunk person walking forward: two steps forward, one to the back, one to the side.

Brown: Well let me jump in here because I have-you mentioned Harriet Jacobs again, and in her book she gives an account of the sexual harassment she had endured at the hands of her slave master and later at the hands of her seducer. And Dr. Williams, I'm wondering what can we learn about the sexual dynamics that exist between blacks and whites today that may have begun, and I know this is going off the deep end, but at the same time it's important because I think it's one of the sexual tension between the races is one of the probably most insidious things that we're dealing with as a residual effect of slavery, in my opinion.

Williams: That's a big question. I don't know that I see so much sexual tension. I see movements that in terms of actions that are being played out in a way that I've never seen before in my lifetime.

McDaniel: You know there's something, I must have come up with this back in the '60s, back when I was a kid. I haven't ever read that Harriet Jacobs narrative there, but I came up with that, because I was looking at how pretty people are destroyed, pretty women particularly, by the object of incredible sexual violence, and maybe destroyed before they can even reach, get out of their 20s, in the inner city and the ghetto. It could be that if you are very attractive, you're the object of so much attention, and this is what happened with Harriet Jacobs as a matter of fact. Got her so much attention, she couldn't take it, she had to do something radical; leave her children and go over there and stay for seven years in that loft.

Brown: Let me get Dr. Parker in.

McDaniel: But that sexual attraction, and then two men, two different white men gave her babies.

Brown: Right. Dr. Parker, I'm going to give you the last word on this, if you'd like to take it.

Parker: I think as Dr. Williams said, the attractions are more tolerable now, because every southern state passed a law which forbade interaction between blacks and whites; surely they couldn't get married. And the Virginia law actually was on the books until about 1972, banning marriage between-right. But miscegenation was huge. I mean, we have this array of color in the black community today because of that, the rape of black women and of course black men taking white women to bed. But we seem to be just a bit more tolerant today with that. But still, people have problems with that. Black people have problems when they see a black man with a white woman, and we just have problems with that. I'm very optimistic. I think in a couple hundred years we'll be okay. [LAUGHTER]

Brown: Well, on that note, I want to thank our guests. I'd like to thank Dr. Freddie Parker, Dr. Heather Williams, and Dr. Clyde McDaniel for coming out tonight. And if you'd like a transcript of tonight's program, information on our guests, or would like to send us a comment, visit us online at www.unctv.org/bif. You can also reach us by phone at 919-549-7167. Thank you for joining us tonight and every Friday night at 9:30 for Black Issues Forum. I'm Natalie Bullock Brown reminding you to be encouraged, no matter what. Good night.

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