The Half Has Never Been Told

Works Progress Administration (WPA): a bureau of the federal

government created by Roosevelt’s new deal helped to give jobs
to people who were displaced during the Great Depression

English settlers founding Jamestown in North America 1607,

found slaves there
1619 shipload was only the start of the slave trade

Legal Atlantic slave trade ended in 1807, even more enslaved

people had travelled through the point

Charles Mallory, Benjamin Butler

Over the next 4 years, 100000s more enslaved people widened
the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines,
African American men joined the army

Education for African American children

Anderson’s notepads recorded evidence of two halves of
American past that did not fit very nicely: white Americans
wanted to hear of a sanitised version of their past

For years after 1865, white northerners believed that

emancipation was one of their collective triumphs. Yet, their
emancipation was made permanent through the 13th A, that was
not as race-neutral as the 14th and 15th As

White supremacy in the South, (Jim Crow segregation on public

space), disfranchise African American citizens: barring from
the polls, lynching, enforcing black compliance
Biologically distinct human races, justification of the
exclusions of Jim Crow and the necessity of white supremacy
Flawed economic system was less efficient than capitalist
system developing in the North

Slavery was inherently unprofitable: an old static system

Civil war: northerners believed in the unprofitability of
slavery that they believed in free labour to increase cotton
productivity => it didn’t
Slavery is an antiquated market but they believed in the
inherent inferiority of African Americans — validation of
control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people

Woodrow Wilson: paean to white supremacy “History written with

lightning”, soaked into the way America publicly depicted
slavery. Those who rejected slavery too believed that era
before emancipation was idyllic relationship between slave and
master

Changes in the portrayal of slavery:

- Belief that African-americans, collectively created a
culture of resistance, which then enabled them to prevent
whites from successfully exploiting their labour
- Quasi-symmetry with post-Civil war plantation memoirs

1. As an economic system, American slavery was fundamentally

different from the rest of the modern economy and separate
from it.

2. Slavery in the US was fundamentally in contradiction with

the political and economic systems of the liberal republic.
Resolving this would be in favour of the free labour North.

3. African Americans were denied liberal rights and

subjectivity of modern citizens. Killed people, stole
everything.

=> These 123 shape attitudes, identities and debates about

policy