Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
AMERICAN CONTRASTS
The United States of America is a classic study in contrasts, in radical racial disproportion: Doctrinal and historical, judicial and political, fictional and actual, spiritual and physical, in its "citizenship" order.
The case of the slave Nat Turner of Virginia and of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi is representative of the classic contrasts. In a heroic effort to free himself and other black slaves from their thralldom, he rose up in rebellion in August 1831, slaying 60 white people. Jefferson Davis, by contrast, as President of the Confederate States of America, slew a very large percentage of the nearly 1,000,000 people who died in the American Civil War that he led, in a bid to secede for slavery!
Today the memory, even the mere mention of Nat Turner is anathema. But the memory of Jefferson Davis is revered in statuary at hundreds of locations nationwide , his venal, treacherous, overthrow attempt is codified in "lost cause" nostalgia.
Turner sought freedom and justice for all of fellow black slaves. Davis sought to expand black slavery's scope from the South to the Pacific Ocean and to the Caribbean Seas.
Now within America's Founding Father's documents, the case of Nat Turner is naturally more just, more consistent than Davis'. But one would not know it to be true from textbooks, movies, statues, case law, police conduct, statutes, newscasts, newspapers, budgets.
Alt-right, alt-wrong, alt-equal is and was the United States of America's study of contrasts, as proven by the fact of Nat Turner and Jefferson Davis' contrasts.