Slavery

With an expression of "profound regret," Maryland lawmakers have acknowledged the state's participation in slavery and the decades of racial discrimination that stemmed from it. With no debate, and to a smattering of applause, the House of Delegates voted 130-6 yesterday to approve the resolution. Last month, the Senate passed a similar measure. The passage of both versions follows decades of wrangling over the question, and the Virginia legislature's recent acknowledgement of that state's role in slavery.

Resolution seeks apology for slavery Maryland would become the second state to apologize for its support of slavery under a Senate resolution that is expected to easily pass that chamber. The resolution requires the state to express "profound regret" for its role in promoting the slave trade, but it does not call for reparations. Last week, the Virginia General Assembly became the first state to express "profound regret" for slavery. Maryland senators voted unanimously in favor of the symbolic gesture last year, but the matter died in a House of Delegates committee.

For years, visitors marveled over the lushly furnished mansion, the elaborate gardens and the luxurious lives of the inhabitants, with their horse races and imported wines. But they learned little about the lives of the hundreds of slaves at what is now the Hampton National Historic Site in Towson - the men, women and children whose sweat made the estate grand. While the mansion had been preserved, the few remaining slave quarters were not open to visitors until last fall. In fact, they were used for storage.

Annapolis has joined a handful of jurisdictions across the country to officially apologize for its role in the American slave trade. The City Council passed a resolution unanimously Monday, with aldermen Michael Christman and Julie Stankivic abstaining. Sponsored by aldermen Richard Israel and Sam Shropshire, the measure went through substantial revisions, with the final version, drafted by Israel, expressing "profound regret" and recommending that the last week in October be a week for studying slavery.

Harriet Tubman By Beverly Lowry Random House / 432 pages / $32 In 1822, Harriet Tubman, nee Araminta Ross, was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation. She came into the world not simply as her parents' issue but as someone else's property. Along with her siblings, she and her parents were chattel, nothing more. Regularly, the Ross family was splintered by the harsh commerce of slavery. The child known as Minty was routinely beaten by despotic owners - punishment for transgressions that were often minor and more often imaginary.

TEACHING, TO paraphrase a famous Shakespeare quote, is the noblest profession of them all. Barbara Vogel, an elementary school teacher from Aurora, Colo., might be the noblest of the noble.It was in early 1998 that Vogel read an article to her fourth-grade class about slavery in the northeast African country of Sudan. The story was from the local paper, with a headline that read "Slave Dies In Sudan." Vogel read the tale to her class because she felt some correcting was in order. She had taught her youngsters that the days of chattel slavery were long gone.

IT IS a year before the millennium and Theresa Nybol Deng is a slave. In May, she was taken captive when the government-armed militia stormed her village in southern Sudan. Soldiers shot the men, looted the village and carted off as many women and children as they could. Theresa is 12 years old. She can be purchased for $50.If her fate is anything like that of tens of thousands of black Africans who have become chattel in Sudan's civil war, Theresa has been sold and bought. She is likely serving a master somewhere in northern Sudan, Libya or the Persian Gulf.

IT IS a year before the millennium and Theresa Nybol Deng is a slave. In May, she was taken captive when the government-armed militia stormed her village in southern Sudan. Soldiers shot the men, looted the village and carted off as many women and children as they could. Theresa is 12 years old. She can be purchased for $50.If her fate is anything like that of tens of thousands of black Africans who have become chattel in Sudan's civil war, Theresa has been sold and bought. She is likely serving a master somewhere in northern Sudan, Libya or the Persian Gulf.

Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)Thoreau was an essayist, poet and a philosopher.His book "Walden" is a set of 18 essays describing his experience with basic, Transcendentalist living.The essay for which Thoreau is best known is "Civil Disobedience." He wrote it after being jailed for a night.An abolitionist, Thoreau aided slaves in the Underground Railroad and wrote a harsh denouncement of slavery with a lecture called "Slavery in Massachusetts."Pub Date: 01/10/99

YOU probably don't know their names: Courtney Hutt, Tia Jackson, LaTasha Peele, Nikki Harley and Anissa Brown. They're members of the Mu Pi chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. They attend the University of Delaware. And they're very concerned about the reports of slavery in Sudan and Mauritania.So concerned, in fact, that they sponsored a forum on May 7 to learn more on the subject. They did some research themselves. Then they brought in a speaker. At the program, attended by some 40 to 50 students, they read from the testimony of one escaped Sudanese slave who told how she was captured by government soldiers, forced on a tortuous march in which she was raped repeatedly and then given to an Arab family as a slave.

Though slaves probably helped build the college that would become the University of Maryland, College Park, the institution was created in part to push Maryland past its reliance on slave labor, according to a study released Friday by history professor Ira Berlin and a group of undergraduate researchers. The new study gives the university a clearer picture of its origins as it celebrates the 150th anniversary of its opening. It paints a complex portrait of a society that was looking to a future beyond slavery while remaining heavily dependent on it. Researchers could find no direct evidence that slaves helped build the Maryland Agricultural College, which opened its doors in fall 1859.

What if Congress apologized for slavery and nobody cared? The Senate late last week followed the House in voting to apologize for slavery and the Jim Crow segregation that followed it. In other words, it only took almost 150 years and the election of an African-American who is not descended from slavery to move Congress to apologize for slavery. Thanks, senators, but you're a little late. As "senior black correspondent" Larry Wilmore quipped on The Daily Show: "I thought Obama's election was our apology."

The U.S. Senate made clear that its resolution Thursday apologizing for slavery cannot be used in support of claims for restitution. Do you think descendants of slaves should be eligible for reparations? Yes 11% No 87% Not sure 2% (3,078 votes, results not scientific) Next poll: : There has been a lot of discussion lately about a rise in youth gangs and criminal activity in Baltimore's suburbs. Do you worry about gangs in your neighborhood? Cast your ballot at baltimoresun.com/vote

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." - Martin Luther King, Jr. That's for Marion Barry, who seems to need the reminder. The former mayor and current city councilman of Washington, D.C., is a longtime supporter of gay rights. So observers were stunned last week when a bill committing the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere passed the council on a vote of 12-1.

A few days ago, a high school student in Sarasota, Fla., failed history and another failed civics. As a result, the one wound up shot in the chest and the other jailed on a charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Here's the story, as reported by the Sarasota Herald Tribune: On the last Friday in April, an 18-year-old white kid named Daniel Azeff and a friend went riding downtown in a pickup truck, yelling racially disparaging remarks and waving a Confederate battle flag. Mr. Azeff's grandfather, Joseph Fischer, told the paper he has cautioned his grandson repeatedly about his fascination with that dirty banner.

A Mercy By Toni Morrison Knopf / 176 pages / $23.95 There are good writers and then there are great, transformative, knock-your-literary-socks-off writers. Toni Morrison is the latter. The citation that accompanied Morrison's 1993 Nobel Prize for literature reads "Toni Morrison, who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." A Mercy tells of just such an aspect. Morrison has often written of America's disturbing slavery-tainted past, as she did in her best-known book, Beloved, published in 1987.

This is how John Davis became a slave: He was walking one evening from the train depot in Goodwater, Ala., when a white man appeared in the road. "Nigger," he demanded, "have you got any money?" The white man, Robert Franklin, was a constable. He claimed Mr. Davis owed him. This was news to Mr. Davis. "I don't owe you anything," he said. But what Mr. Davis said did not matter. He was arrested that night and summarily convicted. A wealthy landowner, John Pace, paid the alleged $40 debt and a $35 fine in exchange for Mr. Davis' mark - Mr. Davis was illiterate - on a contract binding him to work 10 months at any task Mr. Pace demanded.

Things are getting complicated. In the same week that a black man clinched the Democratic nomination for president, the white, Republican vice president was forced to apologize for making a crack that played on the myth that poor white folks like having sex with their cousins. It probably wouldn't have been a big deal had Dick Cheney not singled out West Virginia, the bluest of the red states. He was talking about having Cheneys on both sides of his family and, he said, "we don't even live in West Virginia."

The Rev. James Lawson is out of step with modern Christianity. Take gay marriage. Speaking in support of a proposed state constitutional ban on same sex unions in Florida, one Rev. Hayes Wicker of First Baptist Church in Naples, Fla., was recently quoted by the Naples Daily News as saying, "This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery." As asinine as that remark is, it is perfectly in step with much of modern Christianity, which has spent years demonizing gay men and lesbians.

When I first met Aichana while doing research in Africa, the heat from the Sahara that was sweeping through Mauritania's capital had made it so difficult to sleep indoors that she had thrown a mattress on the terrace of a friend's home. Aichana's dark skin blended easily into the night. The blue scarf she'd wrapped around her long hair was about the only bright spot coming from the shadows. Everything else about her faded into the blackness of the evening. I'd never met anyone like Aichana.