Opinion/Ng: As we observe Black History Month, what RI’s past sins can teach us – The Providence Journal

It was the last class of my last semester of my last year in college.The course was the theory of quantum physics and, although it was more than four decades ago, I never have forgotten my bespectacled philosophyprofessor with his thick, black, curly hair standing at the front of the classroom, back when we still used chalk and leisure suits were in style.

He was my kind of teacher, part poet, part showman, and all fun. He had the right skill set to teach non-science majors like me about the importance of physics, not the calculations and numbers, but the theorem that the world can be seen in different dimensions.

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Before you graduate, he said to us, I have one final assignment for you.

Some people believe that the solutions to our problems are in the future, yet to be discovered, I recall him saying. Others believe those solutions are rooted in our past, in our history. What do you think is the answer? And with that …, he said, bowing and lowering his outstretched arms as if he were taking acurtain call, …I will leave you with thatfinal riddle.

And off into the world I went.

Of course, the purpose of the riddle was not to find an answer but to examine how we think and how we look atchallenges in life, and to understandthat our conclusion, like those ink-blotted Rorschach tests, says more about who we really are than what we actually see right there in front of us.

So, my answer is history.

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When I first moved to Providence, I could not help but notice that many of the restaurants and shops in downtown taped signs in the windows.Black Lives Matter. Justice for George Floyd. Justice for Breonna Taylor. The call and the passion for racial justice were there in open view, and I learned that my new town did not shy away from the issue but instead embraced it.

To mark Black History Month,I searchedour archives at The Providence Journal on issues related to Rhode Islands history on race, its sins and atonement.

In 2006, The Journal published a 15-part series called Rhode Island and The Slave Trade that detailed how some of our now most-heralded communities Newport, Bristol and Narragansett were bastions of forced labor of human beings brought here in chains. It includes stories about how some of the states forefathers brutalizedliving souls who, to the owners, were no more than possession thathappened to be made of flesh and blood.

But it also outlines how evenin the 1770s a debate was raging in Rhode Island on the morality of slavery, if not its legality.For even in 1787, when Rhode Island outlawed slave trading, the trafficking did not stop.Nearly half of the states slave voyages occurred after trading was banned, with much of the trade relocating from Newport to Bristol.

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The stain of slavery cannot be wiped clean, even if we fill a library full of books about that grim chapter.But remembering that history is a first step.

Our reporter Amy Russo wrote in November 2021 how Brown University released an updated editionof a study examining its ties to slavery more than a decade after it had alreadyacknowledged its complicity in slavery and conceded that the university's prosperity was tainted.

The legacy of slavery is thatit is asin that keeps on taking. But it also affords us the opportunity for redemption.

Amy reported that same monthhow the Providence Preservation Society conceded that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, centuries after the first slave ships set sail from Rhode Island, it had played a role in the displacement ofresidents, mostly African Americans and people of Cape Verdean descent, from the area once known as Lippitt Hill, in the name of historic preservation.

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For the article, Amy tracked down those from a generation displaced by gentrification. "The entire East Side was decimated," Deborah Johnson told Amy, remembering how her world was upended when she was only 11. "It felt to me like it happened overnight.Swoop! Gone."

But in the hopes of righting a wrong, the Preservation Society said it would now diversify its board and advisory committees and assist people of color. It cannot undo the past, but perhaps it can help chart a new future.It's one step, with the promise of many more to come.

Our State House reporter Patrick Anderson has been tracking the two-year effortto implement voters' decision to shortenthe state's namefrom"State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" to "Rhode Island." But printing up new stationeryis one thing; scrubbing words that are literally carved into stone on a building is another.The analogy cannot be ignored. Some sins are not easily erased.

Still, it is one step.

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Voices more eloquent than mine have valued the lessons of history.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana, philosopher.

"Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts." Edward R. Murrow

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

So yes, my answeris history.

David Ng is executive editor of The Providence Journal. Email him atdng@providencejournal.com.

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Opinion/Ng: As we observe Black History Month, what RI's past sins can teach us - The Providence Journal