To appreciate Black history, read ‘Duke of York’
Throughout the nation, people are celebrating Black History Month. Just last month, we celebrated Wes Moore becoming Maryland’s first African-American governor.
In fact, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown and Speaker Adrienne Jones, along with Anne Arundel County Register of Wills Erica Griswold and Sheriff Everett Sesker, also made it into the history books.
Yet, in order to understand their achievements, you must have an appreciation of Black history. I contend that Black history is American history. There is a book I strongly recommend people read.
It is a book I have given to the president of St. John’s College, Nora Demleitner, Anne Arundel County Public School Superintendent Dr. Mark Bedell, Key School headmaster Matthew Nespole, Mayor Gavin Buckley,
County Executive Steuart Pittman and Congressmen Steny Hoyer, John Sarbanes and Bennie Thompson.
The book, “Duke of York: Father of America’s Slave Society,” meticulously written and researched by Edward Doten, is significant both for what it says and what it does not.
The richly illustrated book represents a factual, vivid depiction and historical account of American slavery that should be taught in schools, but often is not.
The book is not critical race theory asserting that America as a whole or all white people are inherently racist. The author’s philosophy is that of a moderate.
“Duke of York” provides detailed firsthand accounts derived from narratives of the mid-1800s by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northup and others, enabling former slaves to speak in their own words directly to readers.
Doten has reports by white abolitionists, including daughters of a South Carolina Supreme Court justice, adding their own eyewitness descriptions.
The book portrays the daily lives of slaves and the slave society’s pervasive sadism that dominated American life in the North and
South until the Civil War.
American society callously and literally branded slaves as one might treat farm animals and punished slaves with up to hundreds of bloody lashes scarring slaves for life.
As much as half a century after the Declaration of Independence, America’s slave society continued burning slaves alive and chopping off rebellious slaves’ heads for posting on spikes along public roads to terrorize slaves and slave children. Kunta Kinte had his foot amputated after a botched escape.
Notably, Annapolis and Queen Anne’s County are named in “honor” of the Duke’s daughter, Queen Anne. She contracted with the Spanish to provide slaves to their colonies, enabling shipments of hundreds of thousands more slaves to the New World.
America resisted ending its apartheid practices, contrasting with earlier English emancipation. Dr. Peter Kolchin states that with four million slaves by the time of the Civil War, “far more slaves in the Southern states than in all of the remaining slave societies combined(Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico.” For hundreds of years, slavery lay at the core of American culture, government and often religion.
Doten criticizes America’s current education system, which fails to educate disadvantaged youth. Only one of six 8th-grade Black students is proficient in reading and only one of seven is proficient in math. He opines that this prevents acceptable employment, income and wealth for many Blacks.
“Duke of York” is an eye-opening perspective regarding a pivotal element of American history that many of America’s schools, politicians and polite society carefully sanitize.
Yet, it was the late renowned writer James Baldwin, who I once interviewed for WANN radio in Annapolis, who said it best, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
In the case of the “Duke of York,” if the influential people who I have given this book to decide to read it, I anticipate we will begin to face our history and start our journey to truth and reconciliation.