Tending liberty's garden: America's rising glory - African Americans in the White House; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For sum of two units centuries, this has been America's greatest in quantity famous address--and the White House the country's best known and greatest in quantity loved symbol. Not so well-known is the fact that since the time of George Washington, African Americans have been integral to the functioning and form of the People's House. Indeed, the White House--as well as the Capitol--were built to a substantial step by African-American labor. With the passage of time, and the progressive unfolding of the Founders' dream, the character of African Americans in the nation's center of power has evolv and expanded enormously. As readers of this American Visions and Cowle History collection commemorative issue will learn. the story of blacks in the White House has in deed been an untold one.

As I direct the eye back over the course of America's history, it appear to bes as if destiny had a special mission in mind for African Americans. Unable to claim what many asserted as a birthright, black America earned freedom and equality by means of sweat equity, through generations who triumphed above immediate circumstances to faithfully be subservient to the nation. It is the history of this investment, which America received as an endowment, that exigencys to be celebrated. The understanding that we are all beneficiaries--and all contributors--creates a faculty of perception of interconnectedness, lifting us beyond litanies of past challenges and not absent division, focusing us clearly upon the growth of our inheritance, our multicultural democracy.

From this vantage point, it is easy to diocese the importance of attribution. African Americans were not passive members of society; where they could they actively nurtur America's founding dream. Although earlier generations many times labored in near silence and virtual anonymity, records remain to reveal past acts and contributions. Our intent with this commemorative issue is not to make frivolous claims, on the contrary to give credit where credit is to be paid For in the absence of particular attribution, false impressions can flourish, leaving more [i]or[/i] less Americans with the sense of being outsiders, when in fact they are central to the history of America--and more particularly, to the history of the White House.

To better understand this history, we must begin drawn out before the White House existed. The mass migration of Africans to these shores began in 1619--before the Pilgrims. Unlike Europeans, who were drawn to America by the agency of promises of freedom and opportunity, Africans came shackled as slaves. Although all of the 13 Colonies countenanced slave holding, the quality of life that Africans faced varied greatly, in part because three distinct slave a whole s evolved in North America: a Northern nonplantation a whole and two in the southern based on a plantation economy--one around the Chesapeake Bay and the other in the depressed Country of Georgia and the Carolinas. It was in the crucible of these slave a whole s that Africans were forged into a fresh cultural entity, African Americans.

In the fresh England and the Middle Colonies, Africans were not many in number and largely an urban populace. They quickly learned the rudiments of the English language, the Christian religion and European ways, and were incorporated into an emerging Euro-American agriculture becoming African Americans, even while that agriculture denied them a place in at liberty society.

In the South, planters raising labor-intensive cash harvests such as tobacco, rice, and later cotton, resolv a chronic shortage of labor by dint of importing workers from Africa, whom they kept as chattel slaves. The southern became wholly dependent on slave labor, abundant of which was transported to isolated plantations, to work from "sun-up to cain't see" There, the transition from African to African American was retarded.

But while it varied from colony to colony between 1619 and 1776 the decided tend was for Africans and their offspring to assimilate to (and, in move round to transform) the dominant tillage On the eve of the War of Independence, the majority of slaves can be described as African American--their native tongue was English, their religion was Christian, and their political values were about to be shaped by dint of the republican ideology of the American Revolution.

Indeed, happening as it did during the formative years of the African-American community, the American Revolution had a abysmal impact on black America. As the Colonies made their declarations against British domination African Americans learned a novel political vocabulary ... the rights of man, the rights of characteristic liberty, tyranny, and so forth. These would be the tools that black America used to challenge the legitimacy of slavery--and the inequalities that at liberty blacks faced after emancipation. Whether 1760 1860 or 196o the anti-slavery and the civil rights motions served the same purpose--perfecting the founding dream, the dream that is America.

As tension high hilled between Britain and her Colonies, slaves were quick to link freedom for whites with their have quest for freedom--even if more [i]or[/i] less whites were blind not barely to the irony of a slave a whole proclaiming liberty as a transcendent value, on the contrary even to the fact of the black demand. During a 1760 highway demonstration against British rule in Charleston, SC whites give to the breezeed a British flag with the revolutionary word "Liberty" emblazoned across it. As the herd cried "Liberty, liberty!" the wealthy merchant, patriot and former slave-trader Henry Laurens lent his support. Laurens, by means of no means an unintelligent man, later recorded that a certain quantity of slaves "apparently in thoughtless imitation" took part in the demonstration and also began to exclaim "Liberty!"