Another potential ROCKlamation project?

Every time I listen to the well-intentioned and hopelessly oblivious activists of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana ROCK), many of whom seem to have consciously refrained from any objective study of history that does not begin with the words “Holy Bible,” I immediately think of articles like this one. It is an obituary that appeared in a recent issue of The Economist.

Is the institutionalized “exploitation of blacks” part of the hallowed American history that ROCK seeks so avidly (and for the most part thoughtlessly) to reclaim? How many Christian pulpits supported the institution of slavery?

Take your time, soldiers. It isn’t like really I expect a coherent answer to be forthcoming, although you’d think that an organization fronted by a highly trained lawyer making almost 100 Gs per annum just might be able to articulate the occasional historical analogy that doesn't have to do with with puritanical sex preoccupations.

I'm so naive.

John Hope Franklin (April 2, 2009; from The Economist print edition)

John Hope Franklin, historian of race in America, died on March 25th, aged 94

Militancy was not in his nature. He was too scrupulous a historian for that, and too courteous a man. Asked whether he hated the South, he would say, on the contrary, that he loved it. His deepest professional debt was to a white man, Ted Currier, who had inspired him to study history and had given him $500 to see him through Harvard. Yet, alongside the dignity and the ready smiles, a sense of outrage burned. He longed to tell white tourists thronging Washington that the Capitol had been built by slaves, and that Pennsylvania Avenue had held a slave market, “right by where the Smithsonian is”. Profits made possible by enslaving blacks had not only allowed Thomas Jefferson to enjoy fine French wines: they had also underpinned America’s banks, its economic dynamism and its dominance in the world. The exploitation of blacks was something he admitted he had “never got over”.