Inside the Beltway

Port for slavery

An enthusiastic Bill Cosby was one of several familiar faces from the black community who filled the Warner Theater on Saturday night for the U.S. National Slavery Museum’s premiere fundraising event.

The 100,000-plus-square-foot museum, when completed over the next two years on 39 acres of Rappahannock riverfront in Fredericksburg, Va., will become the nation’s first museum to tell the full story of American slavery.

Besides myriad exhibits, the privately run museum will support a full-scale replica of a slave ship, a library and archives, 450-seat theater and a commemorative wall and walkway to honor blacks who made significant contributions to this country but never received recognition.

Addressing the Warner crowd was former Virginia governor-turned-Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves who came up with the idea for a museum during a 1993 trip to Gabon, where he spoke to the second African/African AmericanSummit. He now chairs the museum’s board of directors.

Only through greater knowledge and understanding of the history of slavery, Mr. Wilder believes, can America “become free of its legacy.”

Party against slavery

Two significant anniversaries, normally observed two days apart this month, have been combined by the National Black Republican Association (NBRA), headquartered near the U.S. Capitol.

While celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first Republican National Convention, held on June 17, 1856, the NBRA is encouraging state and county Republican Party organizations to also “publicize the facts that the Republican Party freed the slaves and that ‘Juneteenth’ — June 19th — is a celebration of this Republican Party victory.”

Juneteenth, celebrated in many black communities, signifies the date the last slaves in Galveston, Texas, got word that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

The first Republican Party convention (mainly northern Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats) was held in Philadelphia, although their first Republican presidential nominee, John C. Fremont, an explorer, outdoorsman, and former senator from the new state of California, lost the election to “the pro-slavery Democrat,” James Buchanan, states the NBRA.

Historians say it was with this election that the Democrats got tagged a “Southern party,” remaining so through the next century.

But four years later, in 1860, Lincoln was elected as the first Republican Party president, taking office in 1861.

Story Continues →