The Living Consequences

The bicentennial of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated at a service of liberation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City on Sunday, January 13.

Traces of the Trade, which is being released in conjunction with the bicentennial, will be represented at the service through resource materials prepared by the Diocese of New York, and Tom DeWolf, the author of Inheriting the Trade, will attend the service.

The service is being sponsored by the Episcopal dioceses of New York, Newark, Long Island, and New Jersey, as well as various Episcopal church offices and organizations.

There is a rumor going around that Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has scheduled a hearing next week on H.R. 40, the bill which would establish a commission to study reparations for slavery.

There is even a press release, apparently issued by N’COBRA, which has been e-mailed to interested persons and is currently making its way around the Internet. This press release gives a specific day, time, and location for the hearing.

However, the House Judiciary Committee has not scheduled a hearing on H.R. 40 for next week, and is not even scheduled to hold any hearings next week.

Whether Rep. Conyers will schedule a hearing on H.R. 40 for another date in the near future remains to be seen.

Update: The committee has now scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, December 18, at 10:00am on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. This is the hearing which was expected earlier in the month, and it should cover H.R. 40 among other bills.

My distant cousin, Tom, has written a book, Inheriting the Trade, about the journey we undertook in Traces of the Trade and due out in January.

Tom has now started a blog on his web site. (My blogroll has linked there for some time now, but he’s actually started posting.) Based on his initial posts, Tom is going to be every bit as insightful a blogger as he is a book author.

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Marcus Rediker has written a fascinating new history of the transatlantic slave trade, The Slave Ship: A Human History. His approach is to focus on the slave ship as a social institution and a window into the slave trade itself.

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H.R. 3432, which establishes a commission to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade, passed the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon.

The bill has already been received in the Senate, where it will be referred to the judiciary committee.

This is good news for those of us who believe that the nation should be paying more attention to this milestone in our history.

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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I congratulate you, fellow citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may … constitutionally … withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights … which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe.

— President Thomas Jefferson, in his annual message to Congress, Dec. 2, 1806

With these words, President Thomas Jefferson proposed abolishing the U.S. slave trade, effective on January 1, 1808, when the constitutional prohibition on outlawing the trade expired. Within four months, both the U.S. and Britain had passed historic legislation outlawing their trade in human cargo.

On January 1, 2008, the U.S. will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade. At least, it may do so. Despite legislation pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, it isn’t clear whether the U.S. will officially acknowledge, much less pause to observe, this early milestone on the road to abolition and racial equality.

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