To the editor:

I am grateful for the recent letters from Matthew Fletcher “An atrocious history” and Charles Cooper “Port marker is a monumental mistake” for helping to sharpen my thinking about our ongoing reckoning with the legacy of slavery. 

While they have clearly different motivations, both letters recount the long and brutal history of human bondage, as a way to assuage our collective guilt over America’s involvement in the slave trade or, in the case of Mr. Cooper’s letter, to attempt to justify it. Both seek comfort in the fact that humankind has engaged in all kinds of “depraved” practices. A list of those enslaved and trafficked throughout history is used to argue that this practice was not unique to any time, region, race, or religion. Both narratives seem driven by a sense that by calling attention to our complicity in the practice of slavery, we are bringing us down as a people or as a nation. 

The effort to memorialize the enslavement of Africans and Indigenous people is not driven by punitive but by restorative ambitions. 

By the need to recognize and to free both the perpetrators and the victims from the burdens of our shared legacy of slavery - to recognize the suffering and contributions of others to this great nation and to build empathy. World religions have various forms of redemptive practices. Most start with a recognition of the act to be atoned for. If you are an addict, you begin with a recognition of that fact and that this condition will always be with you. Our recognition of past wrongs is a critical step in the healing process. A process that requires us to step out of our positions of privilege and recognize the fact that much of what we see in Bristol and in Newport was built on a trade that exploited and enslaved people. 

If we think that slavery is wrong today, we can also take comfort that there were many, throughout history, that also fought against it. In 1652 Roger Williams and Thomas Olney passed a law to prohibit lifelong servitude and sought to also outlaw the enslavement of indigenous peoples. In 1787 Moses Brown and his fellow abolitionists were the first in New England to pass a law preventing citizens of the state from participating in the slave trade. Neither effort had a lasting or broader impact. However, the conflict over slavery roiled the debates over the principles that guided our Nation’s founding documents. At that time slavery was defended using many of the same historical arguments put forward by Mr. Cooper; but we were not content with the status quo. We revolted against tyranny. We debated and ultimately fought a war over slavery. We opened our democracy to all citizens. 

However, we have still not managed to heal the wounds that the trade in human beings caused, and we cannot heal until we acknowledge the harm done by our forebearers and the ongoing legacy of the persecution and prejudice that followed those enslaved and are responsible for the inequities that we see today.

Edgar Adams                                                               

Barrington