My Turn: Sherrilynn Bevel: When is a plantation not a ‘Plantation’?
Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza recently signed an executive order that ”removes the word ‘Plantations’ from any official City of Providence documents, or use in any official ceremonies in reference to the name of the State of Rhode Island or City of Providence.” This has prompted widespread discussion, which many of us welcome as our young people reject silence on issues of racial justice, and demand an honest reexamination of narratives around race.
In August of 1676, Roger Williams, along with many founders of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, affixed his signature to letters ordering the sale of indigenous people (http://www.findingrogerwilliams.com/activities/slavery-letters.html).
Rhode Island Colonial Records (Volume I, page 263) show that on May 18, 1652 representatives of Providence and Warwick passed the following act: “Whereas there is a common course practiced among Englishmen, to buy negroes to the end that they may have them for service or slaves forever, for the preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered that no black mankind, or white, being forced to covenant bond or otherwise, serve any man or his assigns longer than ten years...” (Slavery in Rhode Island, 1755-1776, Johnston, William D., 1894. Rhode Island Historical Society).
This was only eight years after Roger Williams received a charter from the King. So, from the establishment of the colony, the enslavement of Africans was “common.” Clinging to a definition of “plantation” as merely seeding a new geographical area with industrious Europeans is to ignore the realities of the worldwide colonial project. By 1644, the year that the colony was chartered, African victims of the transatlantic slave trade had been subjected to the middle passage for 130 years. Led initially by Spain and Portugal, there had already been over 1,980 documented voyages to acquire and transport human cargo (https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database).
Chattel slavery in the Americas was an established fact. English colonists at Jamestown had purchased “20 and odd Negroes” in 1619. No literate or well-traveled person of the period would have been unaware of the realities of widespread attempted extirpation of indigenous people and the enslavement of these original inhabitants and trafficked Africans.
According to a recent Brown University Steering Committee “Report on Slavery and Justice,” by the mid-1700s, about 10% of Rhode Island’s residents were enslaved. The greatest concentrations of slaves lived in Newport, but many were to be found in South County, where agriculture created plantations which made use of Black labor in a similar fashion to plantations in the Southern colonies.
Anyone who intends to exhibit leadership in its deepest sense, will encourage dialogue, deep learning and invest heavily in all citizens being well-informed. Let us courageously examine what it has meant to treat people as property, and then to compound the injury by a denial of the facts and willful neglect of the consequences to the cultures, economies, families and individuals who lost lives, fortunes, autonomy and peaceful well-being, right here in Rhode Island.
The charters of European countries were agreements vis-à-vis each other as to who would control various territories around the world. The differences of intention toward “savages" and ”slaves" varied only by degree. While Roger Williams represented perhaps the best of colonial intentions, the fact is that the entire system was rooted in theft of the labor of African and indigenous people. The fact is that significant numbers of Black and indigenous people were used as slave labor on plantations here.
It is common where there have been egregious crimes against humanity, for the perpetrators or their descendants to deny and attempt to obscure the truth. Sometimes the past can be uncomfortable to face. Right now, many brave Rhode Islanders of all backgrounds are fed up with the crushing costs of maintaining false narratives. Our young people are demanding to be in right relationship with one another, based on the truth.
Sherrilynn Bevel, of Narragansett, is co-founder of the Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training. She earned her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago and is a level III Kingian Nonviolence Trainer.