The uncomfortable truth is that the United States owes its position as the most powerful nation in the world to its slave-owning past.

Rep. Jackson Lee

The 118th U.S. Congress convened earlier this month, and legislation to establish a commission to study reparations for slavery and racism has been re-introduced in the House and Senate.

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The uncomfortable truth is that the United States owes its position as the most powerful nation in the world to its slave-owning past.

Rep. Jackson Lee

The 117th U.S. Congress convened for the first time at noon on Sunday, and yesterday, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) re-introduced H.R. 40, the bill which would establish a commission to study reparations for slavery.

H.R. 40, proposed in every Congress since the 101st, would acknowledge our nation’s unresolved history of slavery and racial discrimination and establish a commission to study its impact, consider a national apology, and suggest remedies. As Rep. Jackson Lee noted in her remarks introducing H.R. 40, it is “a holistic bill” which “establishes a commission to examine the moral and social implications of slavery,” and not just its economic consequences.

Update, January 25: Today, Senator Cory Booker introduced a Senate version of H.R. 40, to be known as S. 40, as he did in the last Congress.

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Senator Cory BookerSenator Cory Booker announced this afternoon that he is introducing legislation to study the possibility of reparations for slavery.

The presidential candidate’s proposal is intended to be a Senate companion to H.R. 40, the reparations bill introduced into the House this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.).

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Yesterday, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) re-introduced H.R. 40 in the new 116th U.S. Congress. This bill, proposed in every Congress since the 101st, would acknowledge our unresolved history of slavery and racial discrimination and establish a commission to study its impact, consider a national apology, and suggest remedies.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) first proposed H.R. 40 in 1989, and he reintroduced the bill in every new Congress until his resignation from Congress in 2017. Rep. Jackson Lee assumed first sponsorship over H.R. 40 at that time, and has now re-introduced the legislation as required with each new Congress.

H.R. 40 has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, on which Rep. Jackson Lee sits. The text of the bill is not yet available to the public, although it is likely to be the same as in past years.

In the last, Republican-controlled Congress, H.R. 40 received no hearing or other consideration. It will be interesting to see whether there is activity on the bill in the new, Democratic-controlled, and more diverse 116th Congress.

Seal of the State of Rhode Island and Providence PlantationsI’ve written before about the movement in Rhode Island to remove the words “Providence Plantations” from the state’s name. Supporters argue that these words constitute an offensive reminder of the state’s, and the nation’s, history of slavery.

Last night, the R.I. state legislature approved the constitutional amendment which would change the state’s name. The measure will go before the voters of Rhode Island next year.

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Traces of the TradeI blogged last week that Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North had been nominated for an Emmy Award in “Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research.”

The list of individuals nominated for the award is now available. In addition to those credited in the film as researchers and mentioned last time, the list includes:

Africanus Aveh (line producer)
Andrew Barr (intern)
Boris Iván Crespo (line producer)
Elizabeth Delude-Dix (co-producer)
Heather Kapplow (associate producer)
Alla Kovgan (writer)
James DeW. Perry (historical consultant)

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Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North has been nominated for an Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

The nomination is in the category of “Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research,” one of thirty-three categories for news reports and documentary films aired on national television in the last year.

Congratulations to Katrina Browne and the rest of our research team—Catherine Benedict, Beth Sternheimer, and Jennifer Anderson.

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I’ve previously blogged about the grassroots effort in Rhode Island to change the state’s name. In short, this movement seeks to remove the words “Providence Plantations” on the ground that the word “plantation” is now too intertwined with slavery.

There is a letter to the editor in today’s edition of the Newport (R.I.) Daily News arguing the case for this name change. The letter is co-authored by my uncle, Dain Perry, and Nick Figueroa of ULMAC:

Newport Daily News

Dain is, like me, a direct descendant of James DeWolf, the leading slave-trader in U.S. history, and appears in the documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Nick is a leading figure in ULMAC, an organization which advocates on behalf of racial minorities in Rhode Island, and which has been pushing for the name change.

As I’ve reported previously, there is a joint resolution pending this year before the R.I. legislature on the name-change issue. The resolution has been the subject of hearings in both chambers this spring; it has passed out of committee in the House, and is awaiting action by the full House.

The letter is well-written and makes a strong case for changing the state’s name. My only quibble would be that the letter suggests that the word “plantation” has gone from being an innocent word to one which is dominated by a “malignant” image, much as the swastika became unavoidably linked to the atrocities of the Nazi era.

As someone who encounters the word “plantation” frequently in contexts unrelated to slavery, I’m unconvinced that this has become nothing less than the “true meaning” of the word today. As many dictionaries, encyclopedias, or the work of many historians would illustrate, “plantation” is still often used in ways entirely unconnected to slavery. Instead, I would have focused on an argument closely related to that offered in the letter and on the blog run by Nick and his group, We Are Not a Plantation: that the historical connection of the word “plantation” to slavery in this country naturally makes its use in the state’s official name deeply offensive to many of our citizens, particularly those with a deeply personal connection our history as a slave society.

To read the letter, you may click on the image above, or read the text of the letter below the jump:

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Seal of the State of Rhode Island and Providence PlantationsThere is an active movement within Rhode Island to amend the state constitution to change the official name of the state, “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

This change would remove “Providence Plantations” from the name of the state, on the grounds that the word “plantations” now has an historic association with chattel slavery and has become offensive to many people.

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On Monday, I gave a series of four lectures on slavery and race in New Bedford and Fall River, Mass.

Local newspaper stories about the talks have appeared in the Fall River Herald News (“Descendant of slave trader talks at BCC“) and in the New Bedford Standard-Times (“19th century tycoon’s descendants tell of North’s role in slavery“).

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