In a shocking, racist whitewashing of history, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land claims that Americans didn’t bring the institution of slavery to North America, but rather, ended it once they arrived.
Richard Land is the former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Former, having retired after a plagiarism and racist scandal took him down. Today, Dr. Land is the editor of the Christian Post and the the president of the tiny Southern Evangelical Seminary.
Yesterday, Land was the guest host on Tony Perkins’ “Washington Watch†radio show.
“Movies and books like Dinesh D’Souza’s book ‘America’ are so important,” Land told his audience, “because if you are younger than forty and you’ve been taught in the public schools, you have not learned the real story of America.”
What is the “real” story?
“You have been taught a lie about America as a colonial power, as a rapacious power,” Land claims. “As Dinesh points out, we ended slavery, we didn’t bring slavery to North America. Slavery was there, the Native Americans were enslaving each other before we got here. Eventually, we ended slavery. We have been a civilizing influence in the world.”
In fact, American colonists are responsible for the slave trade in North America, which resulted in millions of deaths of Africans over the course of centuries.
That image up top (full, below) is an engraving titled “The First Negro Slaves Brought to Virginia.”
For a quick look at just how shockingly deadly slavery was, read this via PolitiFact.
Starting in the late 1960s, historians began culling hard numbers on the slave trade from shipping manifests and other original documents. The result is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database. It has tabulated an estimated 80 percent of the traffic in human beings and found about 10.7 million people survived the passage from their homeland between 1500 and 1866. Of that, about 390,000 made it to North American soil. This was about 3 percent of the total.
Historian Herbert Klein of Columbia and Stanford universities, who worked on the database, said that the data suggest about 85,000 people destined for North America did not survive the trip across the Atlantic…Â
…
(The same data show deaths caused by the slave trade in all of North and South America at about 1.8 million.)
However, as exact as this information might be, it only goes so far. Much data is missing, either because it was lost or because no records were kept of the illegal shipments of slaves to North America that took place after 1808. That was the year when the United States banned the importation of slaves from Africa.
Plus, as we noted, the database counts only the deaths due to the capture and transport of slaves and says nothing about the people who died in bondage from brutality, disease and deprivation.
When the Civil War began, about 4 million people lived in slavery. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, half of all their babies died in the first year of life. That was twice the rate for white babies. Stanford Medical School cites the statistic that in 1850, the life expectancy of slaves was four years less than for whites.
Dr. Land’s attempt to erase America’s murder of countless millions of Africans is despicable.
But so are many of Dr. Land’s other claims.
Land has claimed that allowing gays into the Boy Scouts will lead to sex abuse. He has said the devil Is happy “the homosexual lifestyle” causes “destruction.” Land has said, “the dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about is that a high percentage of adult male homosexuals in America were sexually molested when they were children.”
In March, Land claimed that Barack Obama and his presidency are the price Americans are paying because abortion is legal. He also claimed that God will continue to punish Christians until they repent, and that God will “seek to convict” people who are “in an active homosexual relationship.” “I certainly think that elections have consequences and frankly I think that President Barack Obama is a judgment of God on the United States because we have allowed 54 million of our unborn citizens to be aborted legally in the United States since 1973.”
Here are Land’s comments on slavery, thanks to Right Wing Watch.