The re-enactment of some of the treatment suffered by black slaves well over 160 years ago traumatized some 12-year-olds on a four-day school trip [Sept. 20, Page 1, "Parent Blasts Slavery Exercise"].
Unless the teachers responsible for the skits treated them as but a small part of the sad history of slavery, much is amiss.
African tribal leaders were themselves willing slave vendors. They sold their brethren captured in endemic, savage tribal wars to not only European Christians but also to the biggest traders in this ignominious business, the Arabs and their Islamic allies. While the former enslaved approximately 11 million human beings, the latter were complicit in 20 million.
Other inconvenient truths were also missing in this dramatization. In the antebellum South, blacks themselves owned other blacks as slaves. So did Indian tribes as the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles until the end of the Civil War.
Were the students told that the idea of the institution of slavery as a wrong was an Anglo-American idea?
It is obvious that the whole program's intention was to inculcate in young minds resentment toward whites. No doubt some of these youngsters will grow up to be Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons.
Joao R. Caxide, Manchester