OK, so here is why knowing our history is so important to the pursuit of true civil rights for all: 

1)      Recently the CEO of AIG compared the criticism heaped on his company and others like it to the lynching that occurred in the South (AIG received an $85 billion bail-out during the 2008 financial crisis and then 6 months later paid out $165 million in bonuses to the executives whose bad decisions helped cause that crisis).

2)      Critics of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) have been suggesting that it is as harmful as the Fugitive Slave Act (which guaranteed the return of a runaway slave, even one who made it to the “free states” of the North, to his/her master) and that the Republican battle to fight the ACA is akin to the battle waged by a very different incarnation of the Republican Party during the Civil War era.

In attempting to rehabilitate the image of his company, Robert Benmosche likened the criticism of AIG bonuses to the lynching of African Americans, trying, I suppose, to imply that both acts punished an equally innocent group of people.  The outcry, he said, “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, … sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”  (http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/23/aigs-benmosche-and-miller-on-villains-turnarounds-and-those-bonuses/)

Putting aside the question of whether the employees deserved their bonuses, likening verbal criticism to lynching – in which victims were hanged, burned alive, tortured by having various body parts cut off before their death – is the sort of downplaying of the wrongs done to African Americans that makes it difficult to have an open and honest dialogue on race in the United States.  More on that in a minute.

In other recent news, Representative Bill O’Brien (of the New Hampshire state legislature) said that the ACA “is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans and use the federal courts to take them back to federal … to slave states.” (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/09/26/opponents-fugitive-slave-act-claim-highlighted-by-obama/)  When a caller to a radio call-in show suggested that the Republican battle against the ACA sought the same sort of “moral victory” that the Republican Party pursued against “slavery and segregation,” U.S. Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana agreed. (http://www.thenation.com/blog/176478/congressman-agrees-caller-fighting-obamacare-fighting-slavery#)  In fact, though there were “Radical Republicans” who fought a good fight against slavery, President Lincoln insisted for many years that his goal was to preserve the Union, and that he would end or preserve slavery only insofar as that act helped him to achieve that aforementioned goal.  In fact, the legal end to segregation was achieved largely by Democratic leaders, who did get some important support from (mostly Northern) moderate Republicans.

This complete misrepresentation of history allows some of the people in power to downplay the wrongs done to African Americans because of race.  When lynching is dismissed as the equivalent of some bad publicity, and when fighting against the provision of health care to those who need it is likened to the fight against slavery, African American people, their history, and their struggles, are similarly undervalued. 

When I teach the end of slavery, I argue that in many ways, the slaves freed themselves: when they heard Union cannonading, they ran away.  So many runaways flooded Union lines that they forced military leaders in the field to come up with policies to deal with them.  Their numbers continued to swell until Abraham Lincoln himself could not ignore their presence.  Lynching was not only a violent miscarriage of justice, it robbed the African American community of some of its best and brightest.  Victims of lynching were often those who were taking on leadership roles as their communities fought against white supremacy.  Such violence also sent the message to those who were considering challenging the status quo that they would quite literally be putting their lives on the line.  Now, when legally passed acts like the ACA are about to begin, in one small way, to rectify some of these disparities, it is suggested that rather than grant a fuller citizenship to individuals, it will send them back to the days of slavery and segregation?!?  (For more on how the ACA would benefit specifically African American communities, see http://thegrio.com/2013/09/30/what-you-need-to-know-african-americans-and-the-affordable-care-act/.) 

If we diminish the injustices that African Americans have suffered in the United States in the way that these political and economic leaders have, then African Americans who ask for the government to address inequalities that have been centuries in the making are dismissed as lazy beggars with their hands out, needing, once again, to be saved by white men who know what is best for them.