Introduction
As a teacher of language and literature I find it quite alarming that the story of slavery has been taught only in bits and pieces in American History classes of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. I would even go so far as to say that the story of slavery is taught in this shard and splintered way in most American History classes and in most public schools across America. What I have never understood are the evasions, restrictions, and omissions of the African experience in America as a full body rather than as a shadow in America's history. This lack of including the whole story of slavery in our history, even up to today, continues to influence the ways in which European Americans have been privileged and the ways in which African Americans have been relegated, by conscious and unconscious efforts, to an approximate subject position in the same American history. This may be in part due to the fact that Africans were considered "approximately" human. The U. S. Constitution determined that Africans measured only three-fifths of a human being compared to the European Americans' whole five-fifths human status.
This three-fifths treatment of the history of enslaved Africans has been this way for as long as I can remember, and this includes my parents' memories and my grandparents' memories. It also includes the actual reality of living such a "shadow" or "less than" life as my great grandparents did as enslaved people. My great grandparents lived the unrecorded life of slavery. Their story is not to be found in school history books which clarify their positive but harsh role as co-constructors of the social, economic and political development of America and their role in the shaping of the American identity. There has been little praise and recognition for their contributions and hard work; little appreciation and little reward.
The need to include the omitted story of Africans in America, this other half of the American body, will always be an issue until it is addressed and dealt with in order that the whole five-fifths of American history come to be about what we really say it means when we shout and praise our form of democracy; when we say that all are entitled to inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The fact is that African people were transported from their homelands involuntarily and in chains to live and serve as chattel in a less than human existence in America. This is the story that must be told in detail without a single omission. And, after all the clearing away of bramble and briar from within this tangled understanding of democracy with its "freedoms of," we may indeed find one blade of human decency called truth. And, truth is the only decency left to the story of Africans who were transported as human cargo and enslaved in America.
Comments: