We can’t learn from an invisible history

Whoa! On April 5, the statue of Irishman John O’Donnell, who settled in East Baltimore in 1785 on land that is today the trendy upscale Canton neighborhood, was dismantled.

Eight hundred people signed an online petition to remove him from the park of his name because he owned a 1900-acre plantation managed by 36 slaves. For Baltimore to heal and become “a city welcome to everyone, everywhere” this symbol of the enslaver and oppression had to go.

And oh, by the way, so should the name of the park and the street that carries his name and his wife’s name and even Canton be changed. Invisible, in the notion of the ancient Egyptians, means you didn’t exist.

John O’Donnell, however, did exist for 20 years in East Baltimore.

Who was John O’Donnell? Born in Ireland in County Limerick in 1749, John took to the sea at an early age, spending much of it in India.

By some accounts, he captained the ship Pallas that sailed from West to East, China to Baltimore carrying exotic goods — tea, silk, ceramics — from the city of Canton in the early 1780s. Profits for China goods were high, so O’Donnell may have been the initiator of what would become the lucrative China Trade favored by Thomas Jefferson. In later years, it created a lot of famous American families’ wealth.

America was still at war with England in 1780 and trade with America was limited. No American ship had traded with China, a nation closed to “foreign devils.” This would change in 1784 when Robert Morris of Revolutionary War fame outfitted the Empress of China with 30 tons of ginseng harvested from the Appalachians. (Ginseng was a commodity favored by the Chinese for its health benefits.)

The Empress of China would become the first American ship to trade in the only open Chinese port, Canton. The Chinese wanted ginseng. We wanted tea.

And so the China Trade began with a few other exotic goods, furs from us and silk, porcelain and lacquered goods from them thrown in. Kidnapping people for slavery was not part of the China Trade.

ODonnell traded in Baltimore harbor in Chinese exotic goods and became one of the wealthiest men in the new nation. He was described by Tench Tilghman on meeting with George Washington as a well-mannered man of vision.

He died in 1805 and his sons sold the property for housing to meet the needs of new workers along a growing Baltimore harbor.

In the 1700s, slavery was not new to the world. Man’s inhumanity to man goes back to the beginning of humanity. For thousands of years, every conquering army enslaved the conquered, Black, brown or white made no difference. Slavery continues today. It is called sex trafficking.

In 1807, England abolished the slave trade they had begun in Africa in the 1600s to fuel the sugar industry when indentured servants were in short supply. But the owning of slaves was not outlawed until decades later and not made illegal in Maryland until 1864.

Thousands of plantations in this nation held over several million African slaves. That is a tragic history that cannot be erased. It existed.

Talking has long been associated with healing. We need to tell the stories of this past and discover how it morphed into the racism we experience today. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Lest we repeat ourselves in new and different ways, social injustice will continue. Let’s tell the stories, evaluate, educate, separate fact from fiction, legislate when needed and move on with actions that in fact bolster relationships and make a lasting difference in our quality of life.

How does invisibility truly bolster healing?