“Happy Days” ... Or, The Other Side of the Coin (Part One)

(Editor’s note:  This is the first segment in a new multi-part series. …)

Ten years following the Mayflower, a prominent landholder named John Winthrop organizes what would become a 20,000 strong, great migration to New England by 1642.  Before landing, Winthrop delivers a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he asserts:  “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.”

Does today’s America seem like a City upon a Hill, as the metaphor suggests?  Or is America more like a gated community trying to divert its eyes from those in need?

The historical context is sobering.  Over a period of 350 years, some 10 million blacks would be transported to the Americas.  This fact stands as a testament to the greatest forced migration of a people against their will in the history of Western Civilization.  Consider that when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, nearly 50% of the inhabitants of his home state of Virginia, fully 500,000, were African American.  Yet, the interpretation of his political writings in those days seem to ignore that particular demographic reality.

A recent film depicts Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night of 1776 and the ensuing Battle of Trenton.  The film and the valiant struggle it represents are emotionally moving, but the eerie feeling about this version of history is that there are no blacks in it.  No black civilians, no black soldiers, no black slaves or body servants --- just white people bravely and busily creating a new nation.

The cast of Happy Days!

Similarly, the popular TV show, Happy Days, depicting life in the good old days of the 1950s, also has no black characters.  The “other side of the coin” is not be depicted, almost as if it doesn’t exist.  Perhaps, it is wishful thinking. 

Indeed, Jefferson’s own writing indicates that his earliest memory is of being carried on a pillow by one slave riding on horseback to the day he’s lowered into the earth in a coffin made by another.  Yet, he finds it impossible in his domestic culture to effectively denounce, let alone attempt to eradicate, the institution of slavery, in a life cushioned by the subjugation of others.

In 1807 the US legally abolishes the slave trade, which only seems to make slave “breeding” more desirable and profitable to their white overlords.  In the mid-19^th century, the question lingers on what to do with the African American slaves, if freed.

Many in the South favor a mandate to simply send them back to Africa.  The nation of Liberia in western Africa is founded, but only for those who wish to return to a part of their ancestral homeland.  But the plan is scuttled, when it becomes understood that African Americans like it here, too, and aren’t going anywhere again, involuntarily.

Yet following the conclusion of Civil War hostilities through the Reconstruction Era, Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous black abolitionist, notes in 1882 that the newly freed slave “was free from the individual master but a slave to society.  He had neither money, property nor friends.”

One may be assured that a man who is guaranteed the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” after toiling away, displaced for hundreds of years as free labor --- possessing neither money, property, nor friends --- faces a stark reality indeed.

(Editor’s note: The second segment of this multi-part series continues this survey from the turn of the 20^th century to the two World Wars to the turbulence of mid-century.)

-Michael D'Angelo