After a blood-gushing fight to the end, a 389-year-old U.S. monster perished Nov. 4, 2008.
Yes, American slavery finally expired.
Of course, in 1865, when most states ratified the 13th Amendment, Congress had declared it dead. Mississippi's legislature was the holdout, managing to delay ratification until 1995!
Yet the mutated monster lived on until Election Day 2008.
U.S. slavery was born Aug. 20, 1619, in Jamestown, when a Dutch ship landed 20 chained Africans. This was more than a year before the sainted, white Pilgrims stepped onto Plymouth Rock.
Blacks managing somehow to survive weeks of confinement in miserable holes of Yankee and European trading vessels became America's bondservants.
But now slavery's finally dead. On the other hand, the U.S. Civil War expired 32 years ago — precisely at 2:30 a.m. CST, Nov. 2, 1976. That was the hour my home state of Mississippi, where my family has lived for seven generations, joined the rest of the South.
Before that time the Magnolia State had held back. At the revival meeting the choir was repeating verse 59 of “Just As I Am.” Yet unrepentant Mississippi stayed on the back pew.
Finally, at 2:30 she joined at the altar her neighboring states to cause Americans to elect a Georgia farm boy and Southern Baptist the first president from Deep Dixie, thus ending the Civil War.
And now, this Nov. 4, slavery has met its mortal blow. To be sure, the St. George who slew this demonic dragon didn't descend from slaves. His father voluntarily came to the U.S. from Kenya, East Africa. Kidnappers wrenched the slaves mainly from the west.
Yet this brave, gifted knight received his commission and medals in earlier fights against evil. Leaving Harvard Yard's heady air, eschewing Wall Street's canyons, he chose basic training in Southside Chicago's ghetto. Yes, there, working with poor folks — many of whose grandparents came to the Windy City from Mississippi in the Great Migration.
The fiend slavery, branded by John Wesley “that execrable sum of all villainies,” torturer and murderer of uncounted millions, victimizer of white and black alike, is finally dead.
Only the stinking, decomposing carcass is left, like a mammoth, beached whale. Now the U.S. faces the enormous challenge of safe, sanitary disposal of this public hazard.
Around the lifeless monster lie lesser demons that also appear dead. Bastard sons Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Poll Tax, Lynch Law. Grandsons White Citizens' Council and State Sovereignty Commission.
And great-grandchildren Willy Horton, Swift Boat, Evil Axis, Gay Basher, and a host of Weathermen.
But some onlookers claim these mini-monsters are only asleep — blissfully dreaming of a sure resurrection.
Are they right? DWYN M. MOUNGER is a member-at-large of East Tennessee presbytery presently living in Jackson, Miss.
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