The remains of the civil war era Manchester Mill stand, ruined and partly incinerated, on the banks of the Sweetwater Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee River outside of Atlanta, Georgia. A silent sentinel overlooking the noisy rapids of the creek, the mill is a dilapidated paean to slavery era industriousness. You can easily saunter along its mill race, the trench that diverted water from the creek to power its massive water wheel. The wheel helped produce cotton yarns and osnaburg cloth, some of which was used to make confederate army uniforms.
Tiny hints of the mill’s history peek out from its frame. Black soot is smeared on the surface of the bricks that were expertly laid, smaller on top of larger; the Union Army graffitied its calling card on the bricks before burning the mill to the ground on the orders of General Sherman. Informational signs near the mill tell the story of the women working there who were charged with treason, taken to Union POW camps and forced to sign oaths of allegiance before being released.
The mill’s bricks were made from Georgia clay whose deep red color is the result of the rich iron oxide deposits found in its soil. Yet standing one day in the mill’s ruins this past January, I kept imagining that the bricks’ striking red hue was the result of the blood of the enslaved Black people who fashioned, baked and laid them. Though recognized by the State of Georgia as a part of the area’s history, the slave labor that built the mill is presented almost as an afterthought. I am the distant descendant of ancient Israelite slaves who languished and died baking and laying bricks for an Egyptian Pharaoh. The brutality of the past that seemed to pour from the mill's bricks was, for me, anything but an afterthought. I felt their cruel crimson shade stinging my eyes in those few moments at the mill. Closing my eyes, I could see a long line of enslaved people, from the glorious pyramids of ancient Egypt to those ruins on the Sweetwater, passing before me.
History’s truths are everywhere except in the places where we refuse to look at them. The more historical endeavors like the 1619 Project demand our honest attention, the more it seems an extremely vocal segment of our country takes up arms against learning and teaching America’s well-documented history of slavery and its enduring racist legacy. Some of the resistance is caused by blind ignorance, some by overt racism, and some by politicians’ cynical manipulation of our so-called culture wars. Interlaced with all these causes is an elemental psychological reality: no one enjoys being reminded about the darker details of our pasts. Standing at the site of a quaint antebellum era mill on the shores of a beautiful creek, who wants to contemplate the blood and suffering of the enslaved people who built it? The need to perceive our past as wholly righteous, or at least as increasingly innocent with time’s passing, seems to be founded upon a false dichotomy that fits well within the polarizing national narratives we currently tell. If our nation’s history is a mix of sin and virtue, that virtue and our very purpose for existence can be called into question, and even be declared worthless. This dichotomous thinking erroneously ignores the power of collective accountability and self-rebuke to heal the divides that poison our individual, familial, communal and national relationships. My Jewish tradition teaches that at every level of social life, genuine repentance allows us to be stronger and wiser. It must begin with an unvarnished examination of how the many facets of our histories affect what we do and how our societies work. Young Germans are not guilty for the genocides that their Nazi forebears committed during World War II, but they are responsible for struggling honestly with the Holocaust. A white fourteen-year-old American isn’t being told to feel bad about being white when she learns about the racism perpetuated by American society against people of color. She is being challenged to find ways to transform what is still bad about American life into what can be good and better. The American-Jewish philosopher, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, was a refugee of the Holocaust who knew all too well the wages of willful societal amnesia. He summed up the imperative of facing who we are when he taught that in any society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.
An honest reckoning with the enduring injustices of America’s present begins with deep attentiveness to all the stories of America’s past. This includes unearthing stories as local as those of the enslaved people who built Manchester Mill; it includes endeavors as global as applying critical race theory to understand better how American law and culture are often suffused with systemic racism, the enduring legacy of our slavery past. This reckoning is not a blanket condemnation of all white Americans as racist; it does not have to be distortive historical revisionism that dismisses America’s greatness as a big lie. It is what mature adults know is critical to being an adult: learning to confront and tell the truth.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama. (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.