Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

Symbols of democracy, pinned up against the coast

Outhouse of bureaucracy, surrounded by a moat

Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight

Overlords escape in the evening with people of the night

Morning brings the tourists, peering eyes and rubber necks

To catch a glimpse of the cowboy making the world a nervous wreck

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

(mmmm-hmmm)

May not have the glitter or the glamour of L.A.

May not have the history or the intrigue of Pompeii

But when it comes to making music, and sure enough making news

People who just don’t make sense and people making do

Seems a ball of contradictions, pulling different ways

Between the folks who come and go, and one’s who’ve got to stay

It’s a mass of irony for all the world to see

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital

It’s the nation’s capital, it’s Washington D.C.

Seems to me, it’s still in light time people knifed up on 14th street

Makes me feel it’s always the right time for them people showing up and coming clean

Did make the one seem kind of numb

Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C

A Description of a Washington, D.C., Slave Pen

E. S. Abdy description of a Washington, D.C., slave pen

E.S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour...One day I went to see the "slaves' pen"--a wretched hovel, "right against" the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening. The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its owner, (a man of the name of Robey,) and his unfortunate victims. It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air. At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared, looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze; the weather being extremely hot. In this wretched hovel, all colors, except white--the only guilty one--both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion. The inmates of the gaol, of this class I mean, are even worse treated; some of them, if my informants are to be believed, having been actually frozen to death, during the inclement winters which often prevail in the country. While I was in the city, Robey had got possession of a woman, whose term of slavery was limited to six years. It was expected that she would be sold before the expiration of that period, and sent away to a distance, where the assertion of her claim would subject her to ill-usage. Cases of this kind are very common.

Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834, Volume 2, London, 1835

(source: PBS Africans in America)

Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.

An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.

In "An Example for All the Land," Kate Masur offers the first major study of Washington during Reconstruction in over fifty years. Masur's panoramic account considers grassroots struggles, city politics, Congress, and the presidency, revealing the District of Columbia as a unique battleground in the American struggle over equality.

After slavery's demise, the question of racial equality produced a multifaceted debate about who should have which rights and privileges, and in which places. Masur shows that black Washingtonians demanded public respect for their organizations and equal access to streetcars, public schools, the vote, and municipal employment. Congressional Republicans, in turn, passed local legislation that made the capital the nation's vanguard of racial equality, drawing the attention of woman suffragists hoping for similar experiments in women's rights. But a conservative coalition soon mobilized and, in the name of reform and modernization, sought to undermine African Americans' newfound influence in local affairs. In a stunning reversal, Congress then abolished local self-government, making the capital an exemplar of disfranchisement amid a national debate about the dangers of democracy.

Combining political, social, and legal history, Masur reveals Washington as a laboratory for social policy at a pivotal moment in American history and brings the question of equality to the forefront of Reconstruction scholarship.

An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.

White House and Capitol Built by $5 a Month Slaves

UK Independent article on 14 July 2000, "The White House and Capitol built by $5-a-month slaves," by Andrew Marshall states:

To most Americans, the White House and the Capitol building are mighty symbols of the freedoms they hold most dear. But two centuries after George Washington established the nation's capital, Americans have discovered that most of the labourers who built these monuments to American greatness were black slaves.

US Capitol 1790 Drawing

To most Americans, the White House and the Capitol building are mighty symbols of the freedoms they hold most dear. But two centuries after George Washington established the nation's capital, Americans have discovered that most of the labourers who built these monuments to American greatness were black slaves.

US Capitol 1865

The revelation has come not from historians, but from a local television reporter, who unearthed payslips dating back 200 years. He found that 400 of the 600 workers whose sweat and toil built the White House and the Capitol were slaves, and that their wages were stolen by their owners.

[The wages weren't actually "stolen" per-say, blacks just worked for 300 years without ANY remuneration, compensation. No money, no thanks for making me rich off of your unpaid labor cards, nothing. Nada, zilch, nothing. Just work and die, you slave. That's what being born a slave in the USA was.]

The payslips, dating from 1792 to 1800, were unearthed from the archives of the Treasury Department. Further research has shown slave labour was used until the completion of the Capitol building in the 1860s; Britain had abolished all slavery in 1833. Slavery was banned in Washington in 1865.

[The author is from the United Kingdom, so we'll forgive him for not having the correct dates, since the Bill to emancipate slaves in the District: Passes the Senate, April 6, 1862. However, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that ended US enslavement, with the exception of prison labor loophole was in 1865]

The reporter, Edward Hotaling, came across the records while researching the 200th anniversary of the White House and the Capitol. Each payslip bore the name of the plantation owner, the slave and the wages paid to the owner: $5 a month.

A campaign has now been launched to install a memorial to the slaves who put up the buildings, led by two blackCongressmen, J C Watts, aRepublican, and John Lewis, a Democrat .

Mr Watts said: "Up until now, few have known of the extraordinary contributions made by African-Americans in the building of our US Capitol. It's time the role AfricanAmerican slaves played be fully realised, and they be given the honourable recognition that they deserve."

Mr Lewis added: "Who were these men who worked here? What happened to them?"

Congressman Tony Hall, a Democrat, who is white, said:"The government has never really apologised for slavery. With the Civil War, with all that President Abraham Lincoln achieved, and with the civil rights movement's successes, I found that hard to believe."

US Slave Philip Reid Cast The Statue of Freedom

Her name is Freedom, but she owes her existence to a slave.

The Kathy Keily of USA Today reported: For much of the summer, a small team of conservationists perched atop the U.S. Capitol has been working to protect a relic of American history with a little-known back story.

So as the preservation work continues on Freedom Triumphant Over War and Peace, as the allegorical statue is formally known, it's a good time to pay tribute to some of the unsung heroes of the Capitol: the slaves who helped build it. One of them was Philip Reid, without whom the 19½-foot, 15,000-pound bronze piece might never have occupied its place of honor above the nation's capital.

American sculptor Thomas Crawford created the plaster model for the statue at a studio in Rome during the mid-1800s and shipped it to Washington in five pieces. After it arrived, officials decided to assemble the model so passersby could admire it while the Capitol dome was under construction. According to a contemporary account, it was "put together so nicely by an adroit Italian employed about the Capitol that no crevices were perceptible."

That turned out to be a problem when the time came to transport the model to a nearby foundry where the bronze version was to be cast. It was too big to move in one piece, and the Italian workman who knew where the joints were refused to divulge the secret, holding out for a big raise.

Foundry owner Clark Mills assigned the task of solving the puzzle to Reid, one of his most skilled workmen — and one of Mills' slaves. Attaching a rope to Freedom's head, Reid used a block and tackle to tug gently upward until hairline cracks in the plaster began to reveal the statue's separate pieces.

Pay stubs unearthed later revealed that Reid also worked on the casting of the bronze. The government paid slaves' owners for most days they worked, but the slaves themselves were compensated if they pulled a Sunday shift. Reid earned $41.25 for working 33 Sundays in 1861 at $1.25 a day.

By the time Freedom was raised atop the Capitol dome in December 1862, Reid was a free man. The District of Columbia's 3,100 slaves were freed that year by an act of Congress. According to a document on file with the National Archives, Mills sought $1,500 in compensation when Reid was freed. Altogether, the federal government paid almost $1 million to D.C. slave owners.

Today, the plaster model of Freedom that Reid helped disassemble is on display in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building's rotunda. Inside the Capitol, there are dozens of displays about the artisans who helped create it. But the work of Reid and other slaves remains an all-but-untold story. The U.S. Capitol Historical Society mentions it in a traveling exhibit about the history of African-Americans in the Capitol, but no permanent memorial exists in the building itself.

After Ed Hotaling, a journalist who was working for a Washington TV station, uncovered documents in 2000 attesting to the work of the slaves, Congress promised to come up with a way to commemorate the contributions of slave laborers at the Capitol. A task force has yet to come up with a plan. Brenda Jones, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who is a member of the task force, says the group is still "trying to determine what would be the best way to honor slave laborers."

Hotaling worries that the effort could lose momentum. "I think politicians are embarrassed and don't know how to deal with it," he says. Instead, he argues, America's leaders should be doing everything they can "to encourage further discussion and study of the role slaves played in creating America's temple of liberty. They made an enormous contribution to American life."

Philip Reid, a thirty-nine-year-old slave from South Carolina, cast and helped to save the model of the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol Dome.

source: USA Today, "Slave had a hand in statue of Freedom," by Kathy Kiely, 14 Aug. 2007

Statue of Freedom's history

Author Jesse J. Holland, speaking on PBS's News Hour stated: "The Statue of Freedom was created by an American art student named Thomas Crawford. He actually won the competition to decide which statue would crown the Capitol. He put together a statue of a woman. And, on top of the statue, he put a liberty cap, which is a small hat."

"The person in charge of the Capitol construction vetoed the whole project. The person in charge was Jefferson Davis. And, when he saw the picture of the Statue of Freedom, he noticed the cap that was on top of the statue. And, being a student of Roman history, Jefferson Davis knew that the only people in Roman history who wore liberty caps were freed slaves."

"Well, Jefferson Davis, who goes on to be the president of the Confederacy, says, there's no way he's going to allow them to put a statue of a freed slave on top of the Capitol. So, he tells Thomas Crawford that, you either change the statue, or we're going the commission to someone else."

"Now, like I said, Crawford was an art student. Art students always need money. So, instead of changing the statue, what Thomas Crawford did was, he took the liberty cap off, and he put an American eagle helmet on. So, most people look at the Statue of Freedom now and they think, this is the statue of an American Indian on top of the Capitol. No, it's not. It's actually a statue of a freed slave with an American eagle helmet on top." -- Jesse J. Holland

source: Transcript PBS News Hour, "Author, Jesse J. Holland, Offers Insights on Slavery, the Capitol, and Obama's Inauguration" 16 Jan. 2009