[This website is about poetry. This blog piece isn’t. But I am posting it anyway. It is part of my story and it is relevant to the day, July 9, 2015]
These days, with South Carolina on the national mind, I write to celebrate my Carolingian ancestors, Margaret and Joseph Gaston. The story goes they moved away from Charleston, South Carolina in 1804 to southern Ohio. The reason, passed through family generations, they did not want to live in a state in which human beings could be owned as property, as slaves.
I have not seen documentation attesting to the historicity of this motivation for moving from slave state to free. The motive is not a verifiable fact but the move is. The story the Gaston family has proudly told for 211 years since Joseph and Margaret arrived in Adams County, Ohio is recorded in a stone block house and gravestones bearing their names, all still standing today.
I choose to believe this story because the story helps me understand my father.
Why he was so deeply offended by injustice?
Why did he stand on the side of justice whenever he could?
He got the ‘justice gene’ passed down through generations. I write today as a very small chip off of that old block. The Confederate flag flying on public property offends me as it does millions of Americans. It must be taken down.
I have a Jewish friend who lost relatives in the Holocaust. He visits Germany several times a year. I would have thought a place of so much malevolence he would avoid like the plague. I asked him why goes? He replied that the Germans as a nation own their history. They do not hide from the Holocaust. Auschwitz is a place of remembrance. There visitors come face to face with evil. There the German nation admits its guilt. Now it is illegal to display the swastika or deny the Holocaust. Germany does not want to forget because Germany does not want to repeat its history.”
We should learn from Germany.
Slavery is America’s equivalent of the Holocaust. During slavery, hundreds of thousands of Africans were brought to these shores as human cargo and sold as property. They were robbed of a life of their own. They were forced to labor with no benefit to themselves. They were abused with physical and mental cruelty. Slavery was an institutionalized and legalized long-running atrocity. It was the law of the land.
As the debate on flying the Confederate battle flag on South Carolina’s State House goes on, it is important to remember that brave men and women can be on the wrong side of justice and therefore, on the wrong side of history. A society founded on racial oppression cannot stand. We may be moved by the physical courage of Confederate soldiers, but we are overwhelmed by their moral blindness. They lived in the face of human horror and failed to dismantle it. Courage in the service of injustice is a nullified virtue.
So I celebrate my Carolina heritage by remembering my ancestors who chose liberty for all over privilege for some. Thank you, Joseph and Margaret. You cannot know me. But as your descendent, I am both proud of you and challenged by your refusal to participate in injustice.
Tomorrow will be a fresh beginning for the quest for racial justice in America.