“The Continuing Struggle for a Substantive
Democracy: From the Atlantic Revolutions to Today”
A panel presentation at the College of
Charleston in South Carolina, June 16, 2017
The
panel was part of a 3-day conference on “Transforming Public History from
Charleston to the Atlantic World,” June 14-16, 2017 that brought together some 300 historians and interpreters who work at
museums, educational institutions, and historic sites, mainly in the South of
the U.S. and Barbados. Conference participants are on the front lines of
interpreting to the public the history of slavery and the voices of enslaved
people. Astonishingly, the true history of slavery – departing from the “happy
slave” narrative long told by institutions, if told at all – is only now
beginning to be told in the public square. One of the many conference workshops
was a day-long discussion on “Giving Voice to Long Silenced Millions:
Interpreting Slavery at Historic Sites.”
The
panel on the “Continuing Struggle for a Substantive Democracy” contributed to
the conference theme by discussing two of the most significant events that
occurred during the 15th and 19th centuries, i.e., the development of
industrial capitalism as a world-wide system and the forced migration of
millions of Africans to the Western Hemisphere.
“These
two phenomena were also interrelated,” reads the panel description. “The slave
trade provided the primitive accumulation of capital, while slave-produced raw
materials (cotton, tobacco, sugar) provided the initial consumer commodities
that fueled capitalism. The central role that African-descended people occupied
in the course of capitalist development also placed them in a strategic role in
the development of democracy, the political system that developed out of
capitalism.”
The
panel interrogated the ways in which African Americans helped to define the
meaning of American democracy through their struggles to end chattel slavery,
realize quality health care, and define the terms of citizenship and how
institutions of public history can provide forms for a public discussion of
these issues.
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Timothy V. Johnson is the director of the Tamiment Library & the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University's Bobst Library. |
Mildred Williamson is the
Director of Research & Regulatory Affairs for the Cook County Health &
Hospitals System (CCHHS) and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of
Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health (UIC-SPH).
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To
order “The Struggle for a Substantive Democracy: An Organizing Framework and
Study Guide for Activists” ($10) and
“Climbin’
Jacobs Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell” edited and
introduced by Nikhil Pal Singh ($20)
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