Subject: Re: Franklin Comment On Reparations Ad:

This was published in the Duke Chronicle in the "Letter to the Editor' section on Thursday, March 29, 2001.

Letter: Horowitz's diatribe contains historical inaccuracies

By John Hope Franklin

Here are a few things to bear in mind when reading the diatribe on slavery and reparations that appeared in The Chronicle a few days ago.

All whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery.

All blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own.

All whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control.

If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder, he would not have blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single group benefited from slavery.

Planters did, of course. New York merchants did, of course. Even poor whites benefited from the legal advantage they enjoyed over all blacks as well as from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them.

Meanwhile, laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of blacks any means of acquiring knowledge-including the alphabet-which is the legacy of disadvantage of educational privitization and discrimination experienced by African Americans in 2001.

Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century.

The pattern of housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in education, the racial profiling, the inequities in the administration of justice, the low expectation of blacks in the discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that blacks have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the widespread opposition to affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by whites for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges of slavery are still with us.

And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us, hiding behind such absurdities as "we are all in this together" or "it hurts me as much as it hurts you" or "slavery benefited you as much as it benefited me," we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive manner.

Most important, we must never fall victim to some scheme designed to create a controversy among potential allies in order to divide them and, at the same time, exploit them for its own special purpose.

John Hope Franklin

James B. Duke Professor Emeritus,

John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies