Happy New Year & New York Times Op Ed Article worth reading

I managed to make it to the Christmas eve evening service. It was great although I would rather sing in the choir than in the congregation. I am slowly coming back from the reactions to chemo even though I have four more treatments to go, I seem to be tolerating them better.

I would like to point out an Op Ed in today's (December 30, 2007) New York Times about the end of the slave trade in the United states. It is worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30foner.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Here is a summary of it.:

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom

By ERIC FONER

Published: December 30, 2007

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

-----"In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade."

Note: New York City was a center for the slave trade and our Congregational forefathers were actively engaged in the slave trade.

"From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.
By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty."

OK. Enough I hope you will read the full article in the newspaper today or in the library some time this week.
Jeannette