An Open Letter to President George W. Bush About Apology, Healing and Reconciliation

Last week the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath. For reasons best expressed in the below letter to President George W. Bush, I believe that last week's resolution was the wrong resolution, passed by the wrong political party, at the wrong point in American history.

A simple resolution passed by a voice vote in a Democratically-controlled Congress does not have the same significance or moral force as a joint resolution passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President in a Rose Garden Ceremony.

In honor of the firestorm unleashed, when the Washington Post quoted me accurately as stating that the Republican Party needed to initiate the apology because it "would have [helped] shed that racist scab on the party," I have decided to release a letter I sent to President Bush early last spring...

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20502

Dear President Bush:

I am writing to thank you for appointing me to serve on the National Endowment for the Humanities Council and the Tennessee Advisory Committee for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. It is an honor and a privilege to be a member of your administration and to share membership with you in the body of Christ.

I am the black woman in red who stood behind you last month when you held a press conference urging confirmation of your stalled nominees. Like you, I am a born again Christian.

For the past four years I have been convinced that you are the president who should take the lead in urging Congress to pass a joint resolution apologizing for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath. Racial healing and racial reconciliation were meant to be important elements of your legacy to our nation. Somehow they have gotten lost over the past eight years.

I have a vision of how the apology should be offered, the form it would take, and what it would mean for the health of our nation. What I envision is a joint resolution passed by both houses of Congress and signed by you in a Rose Garden Ceremony televised around the world -- a ceremony in which the apology would be read and accepted by individuals chosen to represent each of America's major racial and ethnic groups. As part of the ceremony, members of the respective groups representing all Americans would pledge to work together to address societal problems as one nation under God. This ceremony would bring a measure of closure to the nation's racial wounds and would promote the racial healing and reconciliation which this nation needs.

The apology can be written in such a manner that it does not impute guilt to individual white Americans. Instead, it would be an official acknowledgment that the United States government should have acted sooner to end the "peculiar institution" and Jim Crow segregation that followed. Our history shows that blacks and Cherokee Indians were also guilty; they too held slaves.

Consider that several states have taken the initiative on the matter. Since February 24, 2007, when Virginia became the first state to address the matter, Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and New Jersey have passed apologies or expressions of regret. Indeed, around the world, nations and leaders have apologized for atrocities and suffering caused by governmental actions.

Although some may argue that an apology for slavery would open the door to racial reparations, the likelihood of that happening is remote. As your legal advisers can confirm, the legality of slavery before the passage of the 13th Amendment would make a claim in tort proceedings highly dubious. The statute of limitations has long since expired, and there is no living wrong-doer or victim with constitutional standing to bring a legal claim. Legal precedent demonstrates that an apology for slavery would not trigger legal liability.

We as a nation would reap enormous national and international rewards from such a goodwill gesture -- spear-headed by you in the sunset of your administration. Your leadership on this matter would become an integral part of your legacy as an openly Christian president. It would help the Republican Party reclaim the mantle of the party of Lincoln. Indeed, it would be a win-win for the Republican Party. Democrats in Congress would have difficulty opposing it, given the current social and political dynamics.

In conclusion, I would like to thank you once again for selecting me to become a member of your administration. A national apology for slavery and a Ceremony of Forgiveness in the White House Rose Garden would be remembered for a long time. They would give public shape to what I believe you have privately desired. And they would demonstrate to the world that racial reconciliation was an important part of the Bush legacy. Please let me work with your staff to draft a bill that you can support, and one that would make the national apology for slavery and its aftermath a reality in 2008.

Respectfully yours,

Carol M. Swain
Professor of Political Science and Law
Vanderbilt University

Alas, I never received an acknowledgment from the Bush White House.

A national apology for slavery and its aftermath is a matter dear to my heart. My support for this action has been published in several forums. See "An Apology for Slavery," The Washington Post, July, 16, 2005; "Does White America Owe Black America An Apology?" USA Today Magazine, January 2004; and, a February 5, 2005 interview with Marvin Olasky of World Magazine "Saying Sorry". For reasons contained elsewhere, I am not a supporter of slave reparations, but I certainly see value in an apology properly done.

Follow Carol M. Swain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CMSwain

Comments

[tnbluegirl]

While I don't think the current apology is utterly meaningless, I agree that it would have been more meaningful (and shocking?) if it had been offered by southern GOP leadership. The Democratic Party has a nasty history regarding race up to the Civil Rights Act- but as Lyndon Johnson predicted, racists nationwide abandoned the party in droves thereafter, only to be embraced by the Republican "southern strategy." As such, both parties have their crosses to bear and as our governmental representatives both have a role to play in making amends...
And while individual culpability is of course at the root of slavery and Jim Crow, local, state and federal government upheld those systems through legal enactment and enforcement. And given the lasting nature of government bodies, they are the true legacy bearers and thus the entities best suited to apologize. But as with any apology, the proof is in the pudding. You can always "say" you're sorry, but what you do about it afterwards is the part that really counts...

[jhamm1]

"The apology can be written in such a manner that it does not impute guilt to individual white Americans. Instead, it would be an official acknowledgment that the United States government should have acted sooner to end the "peculiar institution" and Jim Crow segregation that followed."

Actually, an apology on behalf of "individual white americans" would probably be meritted under the circumstances, considering the unique distinction that places slavery as a product, not of the establishment, but an atrocity perpetrated at the discretion of the general population. In fact, unlike the vast majority of nations in which atrocities were perpetrated, in which such practices were discontinued by the collapse of the regimes in question, Jim Crow segregation and equality did not prevail until the government literally intervened, forcing desegregation policies at the widespread discontent of the vast majority of the resident whites.

Unlike Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, King Leopold II's reprehensible practices in Zaire, and so on, American slavery and follow-up segregation remain provisions in which the general population are largely to blame.

[GreatNews27]

I fear that if GWB and comrades are punished, torture will not be used in the future. That would literally put hundreds of psycologists out of work not to mention all the medical doctors without whose assistance torture would not have been possible. How can we sustain a fuedal state if the powerful cannot torture the powerless? Torture must be decriminalized as well as death due to torture. We can hardly defend this barbaric country without barbaric means, can we? Besides, torture is a growth industry. Careers in torture should be encouraged. Students can practice on immagrants in red states. The time is now. We must sieze it.