HON. MAJOR R. OWENS OF NEW YORK IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Recognizing the Shared History of Slavery of France and the United States

Statement entered into the Congressional Record of the United States Congress by Representative Major R. Owens, 11th Congressional District, Brooklyn, New York. (Retired from Congress, December 2006)

Written by Marian Douglas-Ungaro; marian.typepad@gmail.com

Mr. Speaker: The African slave trade stands out in the annals of world
history as one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity.
It is important that we institutionalize every possible reminder of
this horrible chapter in our civilization.

I want to take this opportunity to commend the French Republic and the
work of Madame Christiane Taubira for setting May 10th as an annual
national day in France to remember its role in slavery and the slave
trade.

On the afternoon of the 23rd of May 1848, Africans and their New World
descendants enslaved by France were set free. That was 45 years after
the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when France sold most of its territory
in the Americas to the fledgling USA, and 15 years before President
Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Madame Christiane Taubira is a member of the French parliament,
representing her native Guiana in South America. She is also an
economist. On May 10th, 2001 Madame Taubira successfully proposed
French legislation that thereafter declared slavery a crime against
humanity, making France the first country in the world to make this
declaration.

Madame Taubira's work in France complements the work of Professor
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall here in the United States. Not only is Dr. Hall a
distinguished historian, she is also a New Orleans, Louisiana native.

Hurricane Katrina's devastation in the Gulf Coast region has given an
urgency and importance to the work of both Professor Hall and Madame
Taubira.

Our active understanding and appreciation of the French and American
culture and history of New Orleans and Louisiana, as part of the Gulf
Coast, will help the people of the region as they restore and rebuild
their community over the coming months, years and decades. We cannot
honor a unique community and its people without honoring its history
that has grown over four centuries from both French and American
roots.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has spent her life honoring the history of her
home region. For 15 years she labored at finding, translating, reading
and transcribing the old French slavery records in courthouses all
over Louisiana, and traveling to study related records she found in
other places.

It is a little-known fact among Americans that the French slave
traders and slaveholders kept far better and more detailed records of
the captive Africans and African Americans they enslaved than did
their British and American counterparts. Dr. Hall's monumental
assembly of these records has been organized in two outstanding
databases available on CD-ROM. These are the Louisiana Slave Database
and the Louisiana Free Database.

The New York Times has called her slave database "the largest
collection of individual slave information ever assembled", and in
1997 the French government appointed her a "Cavalier in the Order of
Arts and Letters." ("Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.")

I do not know whether Madame Taubira and Dr. Hall have met in person
but thanks to the efforts of each in addressing slavery and the slave
trade in world history, their lives already intersect.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's and Christiane Taubira's efforts give all of us
a broader, clearer view of our history internationally, in the US, in
France, and for every other country whose history shaped and was
shaped by the African slave trade. I commend the French Republic and
these two women for their contributions. - end -