To gauge America's continued ambivalence about our history of slavery look no further than the current strangled debate over reparations. When that subject got lost in the semantic fray surrounding the Middle East conflict at the summer's UN Conference on Racism, one could detect from some quarters a sense of relief that that Pandora's box had remained closed a little longer. Almost simultaneously, researchers at Yale University reported that some of its most hallowed halls had been named for benefactors whose wealth derived from the slave trade; the volatility of the debate that followed clarified how divisive and unresolved the issue remains in our national consciousness. That report was so vilified in part because it debunked anew the myth still cherished by the North, particularly New England, that only the agrarian South benefited economically from the Peculiar Institution.

Another debunker of this myth is Dr. Richard Lobban, professor of African and Afro/American Studies at Rhode Island College, who has made it his mission to delineate the integral role that the slave trade played in the Northern economy, even after slavery was outlawed. He is particularly interested in bringing to public attention the contradictions that existed between policy and practice at that time, as well as in today's writing of that history. On Saturday, September 29 at 2 p.m. at the Congdon Street Baptist Church, 17 Congdon St., Providence, he'll lecture on one manifestation of such contradiction -- the anti-slavery fleet called the African Squadron.

The squadron was created by the US Navy in 1843 in response to the Amistad debacle, ostensibly to stop slave trafficking. Lobban will discuss the conflicts of interest and intent that characterized every aspect of the enterprise, rendering its mission futile from the start, and will interpret that policy of guaranteed failure in light of the economic interests that the slave trade represented. Of particular note is Rhode Island's leading role in this affair as well as in slave trafficking in general.

The African Squadron's relevance today isn't limited to our unresolved debate on reparations. An expert on not only slavery but also the Middle East, Lobban sees tragic parallels in the US government's policies on both. "In each case we practiced continued compromise and denial," he says. "Then, we founded a government on the ideal of equality, yet built it on slavery; now, we state an ideal of a multi-polar, equitable, global world, yet respond with hegemony to the diverse needs of that world. Both trajectories have led inevitably to the violent explosion that results when ideologies are built on irreconcilable contradictions."

Issue Date: September 28 - October 4, 2001