Congress: Compensate Descendants of Slaves Who Built the White House
- by: Susan V
- recipient: US Congress
Michelle Obama’s moving speech at the Democratic National Convention brought attention to the fact that the First Family lives in a house built by slaves. These slaves, maybe some just boys, never got paid a dime for their labor. But their owners did.
According to a Daily Beast article by Michael Daly, the slaves who built the White House toiled from dusk 'til dawn, handling some of the heaviest and most skilled labor, including masonry and carpentry, felling trees and quarrying stone.
And although we have only their first names on record, we do know the last names of the owners who leased them out. We also know that Peter, Ben and Daniel were owned by James Hoban, who designed the White House and oversaw it’s construction - and that Hoban’s children sold these inherited slaves “at a tidy profit,” adds Daly.
In fact, we may know enough to track down at least some of the living descendants of these hard-working laborers and pay them what was due their ancestors.
Daly says it might be fair if that compensation came out of the pockets of the slave owners’ descendants. But the least this country can do is find as many descendants as possible and make sure they all have decent homes of their own in which to live. Sign this petition to ask Congress to find, recognize and compensate descendants of the slaves who built the White House.
To Members of Congress:
While researching a tragedy occurring during Jim Crow rule in North Carolina, it became clear to me that much of the problems of modern society could have been avoided had the United States compensated former slaves at the time of their emancipation - at least putting them on equal financial footing with the average white laborer or simply giving them a piece of land and tools with which to farm. I am writing to ask Congress to do what it should have done long ago and make an effort to find recognize and compensate descendants of slaves who helped build the White House and other government buildings.
[Your Comments]
According to the Smithsonian, Congress did put together a task force in 2005 to look into the question of slaves' role in building the White House and found, "after months of research," that slaves had been "intricately involved in the work." They had also helped build the Capitol Building and other government structures.
Although it was explained that tracking down this information was very difficult work because of poor record-keeping where slaves were involved, we currently have developed more helpful tools and a much larger data-base for tracking descendants - even of former slaves, and it would do justice to these unpaid laborers and to our country's reputation to make another effort to find and compensate their descendants,
Therefore I, the undersigned, am asking Congress to assign a new task force the responsibility of finding, recognizing and compensating descendants of the slaves who built the White House and other government buildings.
Thanks for your time.
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