NYU CONFERENCE SPOTLIGHTS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF SLAVERY

by John Taranto

A bronze medallion engraved with equally weighted scales adorned the mahogany podium. To its left stood Old Glory doing what she does best: serving as a silent symbol of the nation's freedom. But to the right of that flag and behind the lectern, over the course of the evening, a distinguished group of scholars and special guests came to bring awareness to what more than one of them referred to as America's 350-year Holocaust.

It was the opening plenary session of "Slave Routes: The Long Memory," a six-day symposium involving workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, dance and music performances and movie screenings at New York University, October 5-10. The idea was to take an in-depth look at what have become the repercussions of the slave trade of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

A crowd of over five hundred mostly African-American, well-educated, middle-aged people filled Vanderbilt Hall in the law school on the NYU campus, frequently interrupting the speakers with shouts of "Yes" and "Teach" and "Speak." That and the absence of many college-, high school- or younger children left the sense that the evening's orators were gainlessly preaching to the converted. Only about 15 percent of the audience was white. The presenters spoke with eloquence, force and persuasive power. Each conveyed a similar but clear underlying idea -- that the slave trade played an enormous role in developing the Western Hemisphere -- but did so from intriguingly different angles.

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Poet Maya Angelou Stirs Listeners During Opening Session of Symposium

by Lisa Zlotnick

"Bid em' in," intoned the regal black lady in red, then quickened her rhythm to finish the verse: "Bid em' in, bid em' in, bid em' in."

The room grew silent and no one stirred.

It was Maya Angelou as auctioneer, reciting, half-singing an Oscar Brown Jr. poem about a young girl's degradation on the slave market: being sold to the highest bidder. ("She's young, she's ripe... 'Strip her down Roy' ...can I get 350? Bid em' in, bid em' in, bid em' in.") The Nobel laureate reminded the assembled that no matter how eminent the participants or scholarly the occasion, there is no possible talk of the Middle Passage, of origins, of distribution, demographics or documentation, or any authentic discussion of slavery that does not begin with the people, the slave experience.

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Courtesy Aiko Ishikawa, WSN