Commentary: A Statue Honoring Denmark Vesey Would Not Only Teach About Slavery, But Also Hypocrisy
Date: Tuesday, November 20, 2007
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
If all goes well, a monument will soon help Henry Darby to not just teach lessons in American social studies, but lessons in American hypocrisy as well.
Some 20 years ago, Darby, a black social studies professor in Charleston, S.C., began working on an idea to build a monument to honor Denmark Vesey. Vesey was a free black man and African Methodist Episcopal Church leader who, in 1822, was convicted of plotting with other free and enslaved blacks to rebel against their white oppressors.
But that planned insurrection, which historical accounts say would have been the biggest slave uprising ever, never got off the ground. Two house slaves ratted them out, and Vesey, along with 34 of his compatriots, were hanged.
According to USA Today, Darby thought that Vesey, whose story is a huge part of the history of Charleston -- once America’s chief slave port -- deserved more to mark his existence than a plaque at a house. But when he presented a proposal for a Vesey monument in 2000, some people lost their minds.
Some deluged the local newspaper with letters that, in essence, accused Vesey of being Adolph Hitler’s darker predecessor because he reportedly urged his followers to allow no whites, even women and children, to survive. To them, honoring Vesey would be the same as honoring a mass murderer.
How laughable. And how hypocritical.
What’s laughable is the fact that slavery, the thing that made Charleston’s economy thrive, was rooted in genocide. African religions were forbidden, as were African names. Families were separated. Floggings and rapes were seen as business as usual, not as brutality.
Yet some contextually-challenged white folks are appalled that anyone subjected to those horrors would be traumatized enough to want to kill anyone who looks like them?
They need to get real.
While I don’t condone violence and murder, even if Vesey did say kill all the whites -- an account that is disputed -- the year was 1822. It wasn’t as if he and his compatriots had any kind of legal options other than rebellion to stop their white oppressors from tormenting them.
In fact, if they had tried a legal route, they would have just received more torment for being uppity.
But what’s hypocritical is that if people want to oppose a monument to Vesey on the grounds that he was hatching a genocidal plot, perhaps they need to advocate the razing of monuments to people who actually succeeded in doing it.
They could start with Andrew Jackson.
The seventh president of the United States has a number of statues dedicated to him. Towns and cities, including Jacksonville, Fla. where I live, are named after him. So is Jacksonville, N.C.
Yet he was one of the biggest purveyors of genocide in the history of this country.
In 1830, Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which forced Indians who lived east of the Mississippi in lands coveted by whites to leave their homes and to go west. During the next three years, thousands of Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and Chickasaw Indians marched in the cold and snow -- under the escort of soldiers -- into Oklahoma on what became known as the “Trail of Tears.”
Thousands of them died along the way from starvation, disease and exhaustion.
Still, that’s a thought that Darby who, according to USA Today, now sits on the Charleston County Council, might want to bring up should he get any more grief from anyone about the Vesey monument -- which both the city and the county council have agreed to fund. Right now, the debate hinges on which Vesey to represent: the outspoken church leader and carpenter who could speak several different languages, or the one who might have plotted to plunge Charleston into chaos and rebellion.
I say they should figure out a way to make the statue true to the whole person that Vesey was.
Me, I don’t think there are two Veseys here. People who are educated and skilled will, at some point, probably try to figure out a way to rid themselves of whatever shackles are binding them from living up to their potential. Vesey might have been a free black, but he was still black at a time when blacks weren’t considered human, and it’s not surprising that his intellect would lead him to want to change those conditions for himself and other blacks -- through any means available at that time.
That’s why, if anything, the Vesey statue ought to be designed so that people can learn about him and not necessarily celebrate him. It ought to inspire lessons not just on American slavery but on American hypocrisy; on how if Vesey was indeed behind a slave insurrection that never happened, the catalyst for it was a desire for freedom, not dominance.
It also should show what can happen, or what can almost happen, when oppressed people decide that it’s time for a change.
Even if they can’t count on the law to help them.
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