"(CNN) – Remember the big makeover the Oval Office got last week while President Obama was on vacation?
Well, there’s a problem with the presidential rug.
The floor piece has quotations from four U.S. presidents and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — or does it?
One quote reads, “The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice.”
As the Washington Post’s Jamie Stiehm points out, the quote attributed to King is not really King’s quote at all.
It’s Theodore Parker’s.
King often quoted and paraphrased Parker, an abolitionist and minister from Massachusetts, who in 1853 proclaimed, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one ... And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
It does not look to me like Benjamin Franklin quoted from the koran and called for Christians to be enslaved.
It looks to me like he quoted from a speech given by someone else, who quoted from the koran and called for the enslavement of Christians - and that he did so as part of his effort to point out the evils of slavery.
I think you need to give a better summary of this, because most readers will freak out. What Franklin was doing was saying that, supposing that apologies for slavery were applied to Christians, how would people feel about it?
That said, it’s a bizarre thing, because the Latin countries, with the exception of Portugal, were not involved in the slave trade except tangentially. For example, in the case of the Amistad, the Spanish captain did not transport slaves, and certainly didn’t sell them, but had taken this “cargo” on because something had happened to the original ship...and the only reason the Amistad had a rebellion is that he felt bad for the future slaves, did not manacle them, let them have recreation and sleep on deck, and forbid the crew to watch them. I think he was perfectly right in doing this, but it was a little naïve, and that’s why the ship was overrun and the captain was killed.
You can’t blame the slaves for doing this, but in terms of the slave trade, chattel slavery at that point was entirely an American institution. The British had practiced it but abandoned it in the 18th century, the Spanish and Italians had never practiced it.
Chattel slavery means the slave is a possession (chattel) with no rights, but slaves in Spain had usually been bought from the Arabs, where they were chattel, but then were given basic legal and religious rights and were supposed to be able to earn money, save, marry, receive religious instruction, and be able to buy their freedom or be freed by their owner.
In the US, it was forbidden in certain counties in SC and GA to even preach to the Africans, let alone baptize them, because that meant they were human beings and much of the South subsisted on the “two creations” theory. This was based on the two Creation accounts in Genesis, interpreted to mean that whites had been created first and everybody else had been created to serve them.
But of course since the Dems and Obama have a vested interest in our knowing nothing about the reality of slavery and attitudes here, most Americans are completely ignorant of this.
Obama blaming slavery on Christianity!!! Gimme a break! For one thing, even the most liberal “Christians,” the Quakers, who were big in the slave trade, bought their product from the Muslim slave hunters in Africa.
Interesting.
"Few of them will return to their countries, they know too well the greater hardships they must there be subject to: ...they will not adopt our manners:..: must we maintain them as beggars in our streets; or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage; for men accostomed to slavery, will not work for a livelihood when not compelled."
And further:
"Sending the slaves home then, would be sending them out of light into darkness. I repeat the question, what is to be done with them? I have heard it suggested, that they may be planted in the wilderness, where there is plenty of land for them to subsist on, and where they may flourish as a free state; but they are, I doubt, too little disposed to labour without compulsion, as well as too ignorant to establish a good government... While serving us, we take care to provide them with every thing; and they are treated with humanity."It's ironic that many of these things are indeed the present condition of the inner cities, two centuries later. And now we have a new class of economic indenture in the form of illegals, and a hot debate about "what is to be done with them?" There are differences, however; most illegals, having come here voluntarily, will indeed work hard. The mental condition of resentment in that percentage of descendents from those brought here as chattel centuries ago is proving more difficult to amend.