Yesterday, Julian Bond, my fellow Morehouse brother and a lifelong hero of mine, died. I was shocked. He wasn't a young man, but at 75 he was actually on the younger side of the remaining civil rights legends.
After waking up to the news of his passion on Sunday morning, I soon clicked on the New York Times link to his obituary. As always, it was masterfully written and covered a lot of ground, but one section not only troubled me, it troubled thousands of others who read it.
Here it is ....
Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer. Julian’s grandfather James Bond, one of Jane Bond’s sons, was educated at Berea and Oberlin Colleges and became a clergyman. His son Horace Mann Bond expected his own son Julian to follow in his footsteps as an educator, but the young man was attracted instead to journalism and political activism.
Sigh.
Double sigh.
In 2015, it's obvious that America no more understands the nature of slavery than it did 150 years ago. Please allow me a brief moment to explain.
For hundreds of years in America, enslaved Africans had no choice but to work for those who claimed to own them. If you refused to work you'd be killed, tortured, or sold like a cow. The very nature of claiming that you own another human being is fundamentally heinous. Furthermore, when you own another human being and his or her options are to do every single thing you ask them to do or face dire consequences, using words to describe any sexual contact between slaveholders and slaves—words that imply it was either romantic, consensual, or optional—is not just wrong, it's sick and offensive.
To be clear, Julian Bond's great-grandmother was enslaved in Kentucky. When white men on that plantation had sex with her, she was still a slave when they were done. If they hid the fact that they had sex with her from their white wives, that doesn't make Jane a mistress, it makes her a rape victim and the men who had sex with her rapists.
Any person who has sex with someone they claim to own or will not allow to leave, be it in the 1800s or in 2015, is a rapist.
That includes Thomas Jefferson.