Black History and the American Art of Denial

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. uses a lawsuit against a prison for preventing a prisoner from receiving a book about slavery to illustrate America's complicated relationship with black history. He calls it the art of denial. Suggested Reading Three Friends Were Headed To A Beyoncรฉ Concert, But One Dies On the Way. Guess What…

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. uses a lawsuit against a prison for preventing a prisoner from receiving a book about slavery to illustrate America's complicated relationship with black history. He calls it the art of denial.

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A story for Black History Month.

Bryan Stevenson is director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization he founded in 1989 to provide legal representation for the indigent and incarcerated. The EJI doesnโ€™t charge its clients but, says Stevenson, he will sometimes require them to read selected books.

Last year, Stevenson sent two books to prisoner Mark Melvin, who is doing life for a murder he committed when he was 14. One was Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctorโ€™s struggle to bring medical services to Haiti. The other was Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmonโ€™s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of how the South instituted a form of de facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and โ€œsellingโ€ them to plantations, turpentine farms and other places of back-breaking labor.

Stevenson says the prison allowed Melvin to receive the first book, but banned the second. Prison officials, says Stevenson, felt it was โ€œtoo provocative, they didnโ€™t like the title, they didnโ€™t like the idea that the title conveyed. They didnโ€™t read the book, but they were concerned about it and thought that it would be โ€˜too dangerousโ€™ to have in the prisons.โ€

Stevenson filed suit. As the case wends its way through the courts, it speaks with an eloquence to our complicated relationship with African-American history here in this 86th observance of what was once called Negro History Week. America, says Stevenson, struggles with โ€œdenialism,โ€ i.e., a refusal to face its grim past of racial crimes and human rights violations.ย 

Read Leonard Pitts Jr.'s entire column at the Miami Herald.

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