The Living Consequences

Florida’s legislature passed a non-binding resolution yesterday expressing its “profound regret for Florida’s role in sanctioning and perpetuating involuntary servitude upon generations of African slaves.”

Florida thus joins six other states, from Alabama to New Jersey, which have passed such resolutions since early last year.

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The U.S. Senate will consider an apology for slavery and the subsequent history of legalized discrimination, under a plan announced by senators Sam Brownback and Tom Harkin and covered in an article made available by USA Today this evening.

Harkin and Brownback have already lined up 14 co-sponsors, including presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, for their proposed apology, which they plan to introduce in the Senate as early as March.

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In this post, I want to discuss, and link to, the various reviews of Traces of the Trade which have come out during the Sundance Film Festival. I intend to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to offer a thought or two in response to the reviewers.

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Yesterday evening, the New Jersey state legislature passed a resolution offering “profound regret” for the state’s role in slavery, and saying that the legislature “apologizes” for the harm caused by slavery and its aftermath in the U.S.

New Jersey thus became the first state north of the Mason-Dixon line to apologize for slavery. In the past year, five other states have offered various forms of apology for slavery, including Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Maryland.

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According to an A.P. wire story this morning, the New Jersey state legislature will hold a hearing this week on a resolution which would apologize for New Jersey’s role in slavery.

Update: The resolution passed out of committee today, and is scheduled for a vote by the full Assembly on Monday. The N.J. Senate is not currently scheduled to act on the resolution before the legislative session expires on Tuesday.

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The newly-elected prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, has pledged to apologize to the aborginal population of Australia for the historic wrongs committed against it.

Australia’s aborigines suffered official discrimination at the hands of Australia’s white settlers for centuries, and continue to fare much poorer than whites on a variety of social measures. Interestingly, a majority of Australians support an apology, which aboriginal leaders “regard more as a symbolic gesture than as a basis for launching huge compensation claims.”

According to the Boston Globe, Senator Sam Brownback intends to offer a resolution in the Senate this week calling for Congress to apologize for slavery.

Brownback, a social conservative running for president, says that he has a Democratic partner for his proposal, which fits with earlier efforts on his part to address historic injustices committed against American Indians and others.

This resolution would join H.Res. 194, Rep. Cohen’s earlier resolution currently before the House.

Many people are familiar with H.R. 40, the perennial House bill proposing a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and possible remedies. Rep. John Conyers (D), currently chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced this bill in every Congress since 1989. (The bill number is chosen to reflect the phrase “forty acres and a mule,” which came to symbolize the brief and unrealized promise of compensation to slaves freed after the Civil War.)

There are two other major items pending in the U.S. House which also bear on slavery and the slave trade:

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