Today was like home coming to be back in Mt. Vernon Middle School with Deb Strouse, the wonderfully creative teacher I met May 8 2002. Because Mt. Vernon had been such an important part of my walk we planned to teleconference from here. However the switch to a different technology meant a switch to a different venue. Tomorrow’s teleconference will be from nearby Fredericktown, but I could not pass up a chance to visit Ms. Strouse’ class, and also talked with a group of students who recently had visited National Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

Perhaps one the most evocative comments of the day came from a white student who spoke of feeling guilty upon seeing the slave pen at the museum. Guilt is one of the many difficult aspects of slavery’s legacy. Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball is one of my favorite books. I often quote Edward Ball’s statement of his feelings as the descendant of slave owners. “ …by skewing things so violently in the past we had made sure our cultural riches would benefit all white Americans.” And later on the same page, “….the slave business was a crime that had not been fully acknowledged, it would be a mistake to say that I felt guilt for the past. A person cannot be culpable for the acts of others, long dead, that he or she could not have influenced. Rather than responsible, I felt accountable for what had happened, called on to try to explain it. I also felt shame about the broken society that had washed up when the tide of slavery receded.”

Each of us can take on the responsibility to ‘try to explain it’ that is to have bold and clear conversations about slavery’s legacy in all of its dimensions. We can do it within trust and honesty.