Americans suffer because of a longstanding, deliberate and conscious effort to either obfuscate or to tell outright lies about their nation’s history. Millions of people will say that their country is the greatest in the world not merely because of patriotism, but because the true stories of our history have been disappeared by design. Perhaps the historical topic which is the least known in any substantive way, but which still impacts our lives in 2013, is slavery. Slavery determined how the Constitution is written, why our capital is located where it is, why wars were fought, and as a television show is titled, how the states got their shapes.
It is little wonder that a new film, Django Unchained, has generated so much controversy. The combination of a very painful subject and the lack of information which has been disseminated about it have made a movie a hot topic of conversation. Sadly that discussion has not been very useful.
The Django character is fictional, but history tells us about men who did in fact risk freedom to free their families still in bondage. One man, Madison Washington, failed in his goal to reach his still enslaved wife but succeeded in freeing himself and 130 other men, women and children in 1841…
http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-real-life-django
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