The Debt: What America Owes...
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Constantino Brumidi in 1864, just as the hideous 246-year old American
institution of slavery was drawing to a close. According to the United
States Capitol Historical Society, Brumidi's Apotheosis of George
Washington had been painted in the eye of the Rotunda's dome to glorify
"the character of George Washington and the principles upon which the
United States was founded.
Sixty-odd robed figures are arranged in heroic attitudes around a
majestic Washington, before whom a white banner is unfurled bearing the
Latin phrase 'E Pluribus Unum,' or 'one out of many.' But all of the
'many' in the fresco are white.
Beneath the eye and around the rim of the Capitol dome stretches a gray
frieze depicting in sequenced scenes America's history from the years of
early exploration to the dawn of aviation.
The frieze figures are not all white. Native Americans appear in several
of the scenes.
[Although the practice of slavery lay heavily athwart the new country
for most of the depicted age, the frieze presents nothing at all from
this long, scarring period. No Douglass. No Tubman. No slavery. No
blacks, period.]
At ground level, set back into the circular stone wall are several huge
oil paintings. We see the explorer de Soto discovering the Mississippi
River, Pocahontas receiving the baptismal sacrament, and there is
Columbus triumphantly landing in the Americas.
[No reference is made to blacks or slavery in any of the paintings. In
the whole of the Rotunda, only a small bust of Martin Luther King Jr.
intrudes on an overall iconography of an America that is
self-consciously homogeneous and pleased with itself. The King bust is a
poor likeness of the man. Its aspect is forlorn. The shoulders sag. The
head is bowed, implying surrender, not prayer. The eyes look into the
floor, as if the figure understands but cannot quite bear what is going
on around it in the Rotunda. A nearby statue of a standing,
upward-gazing Thomas Jefferson serves to underscore the King figure's
meekness.]
The frescoes, the friezes, the oil paintings, the composite art of the
Rotunda - this was to be America's iconographic idea of itself. On proud
display for the world's regard, the pictorial symbols of American
democracy's subtenets: fairness, inclusiveness, openness, tolerance,
and, in the broadest sense, freedom.
To erect the building that would house the art that symbolized American
democracy, the United States government sent out a request for one
hundred slaves (African human-beings). The first stage of the Capitol's
construction would run from 1793 to 1802. In exchange for the slave's
(Africans) labor the government agreed to pay their [owners] five
dollars per month per slave (African). Slaves (African human-beings)
were not only made to labor on the Capitol building but also to do much
of the work in implementing Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's grand design for
the whole of the District of Columbia.
<snip>
The third phase of the Capitol construction (the second occurred after
1812) would take place during the Civil War, just as Brumidi set about
to paint the first of his "liberty" frescoes for the building.
<snip>
Atop the dome of the Capitol stands the 'Statue of Freedom' in the
figure of a Native American female warrior clad in a star-festooned
helmet and flowing robes. The statue was designed for $3,000 by Thomas
Crawfor in Rome, Italy, in 1856. In 1863, it was cast in bronze in
Bladensburg, Maryland, at a foundry owned by Clark Mills, whom the
government paid $23,736 for his work.
Philip Reed, a slave (African) owned by Mills, was given the
responsibility for casting the 'Statue of Freedom' and loading its five
sections, each weighing more than a ton, onto reinforced wagons for the
slow trip to the east grounds of the Capitol. There, Reed and other
slaves (Africans) reassembled 'Freedom' to make certain that all of its
peices would fit together. The task of assembling 'Freedom' took
thirty-one days. The statue was then disassembled, hoisted, and
reassembled by slaves (Africans) on the 'tholos,' a pedestal on the dome
surmounted by a globe.
<snip>
Describing his (Robinson) fascination of architectual designs and
buildings:
Buildings are like people in other ways as well. They clothe themselves
in veneers of deceitful finery. They cornice. They gild. They dazzle.
They inspire. They lie. And they keep their secrets very well. Beneath
the grandeur, I thought as my eyes were drawn back up into the dome.
<snip>
Everything about the room was dwarfing - the scale of the art, the size
of the round chamber, the height of the sheer majesty of the dome. It
had all combined to achieve the Founding Fathers' objective, which was,
I am certain, to awe. And to hide the building's and America's secrets.
I thought, then, what a fitting metaphor the Capitol Rotunda was for
America's racial sorrows. In the magnificence of its boast, in the
tragedy of its truth, in the effrontery of its deceit.
This was the house of Liberty, and it had been built by slaves
(Africans). Their backs had ached under its massive stones. Their lungs
had clogged with its mortar dust. Their bodies had wilted under its
heavy load-bearing timbers. [They had been paid only in the coin of
pain.] Slavery lay across American history like a monstrous cleaving
sword, but the Capitol of the United States steadfastly refused to
divulge its complicity, or even slavery's very occurrence. It gave full
lie to its own gold-spun half-truth. It shrank from the simplest
honesty. It mocked the shining eyes of the innocent. It kept from us all
- black, brown, white - the chance to begin again as co-owners of a
national democratic idea. It blinded us all to our past and, with the
same stroke, to any common future.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century African Americans lag the
American mainstream in virtually every area of statistical measure.
Neither blacks nor whites know accurately why.
The answer can be found only in the distant past, a past as deliberately
obscured as the Capitol's secrets.
Solutions to our racial problems are possible, but only if our society
can be brought to face up to the massive crime of slavery and all that
it has wrought.
No race, no ethnic or religiouis group, has suffered so much over so
long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who
benefited, with the connivance of the United States government, from
slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that
followed it.
As Germany and other interests that profited (owed) reparations to Jews
following the holocause of Nazi persecution, America and other interests
that profited (owe) reparations to blacks following the holocaust of
African slavery which has carried forward from slavery's inception for
350-odd years to the end of the U.S. government - embraced racial
discrimination - an end that arrived, it would seem, only just
yesterday.
For centuries, blacks have fought their battles an episode at a time,
losing sight of the full ugly picture. Seeing it whole, all but defies
description.
<snip>
This book is about the great still-unfolding massive crimes of official
and unofficial America against Africa, African slaves, and their
descendants in America.
Reference:
THE DEBT: What America Owes To Blacks
by Randall Robinson
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