Posted by Phil Lee (216.250.238.17) on April 05, 2001 at 20:14:
ANNAPOLIS In Brief
Thursday, April 5, 2001; Page B04
Slavery Apology Briefly Revived
Debate in the House of Delegates yesterday over an arcane resolution to commemorate the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians took an unexpected turn, becoming a heated exchange over another controversial question: whether Maryland should apologize for slavery.
An amendment offered to the Armenian resolution prompted the sudden shift in the debate. The proposal was to attach an essentially unrelated addendum to the bill, apologizing for Maryland's role in perpetuating the atrocity of slavery on the ancestors of the state's African American residents.
"This amendment says, if we're going to make moral judgments about people's conduct, maybe we should start here and now and examine our own history," said Del. Robert L. Flanagan (R-Howard).
Flanagan's amendment prompted several African American lawmakers to express their strong support for the idea of an apology, because, said Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr. (D-Baltimore), "slavery was genocide in slow motion."
Burns sponsored a bill last year that called for an official apology for slavery, but it died in committee.
"Make no mistake about it: We are not done with this issue," Burns said after the Legislative Black Caucus decided not to support the amendment because the subject was too important to ride on the tail of an unrelated bill.
As for the Armenian bill -- which focuses on a massacre in eastern Turkey from 1915 to 1923, events the Armenians label genocide and the Turks describe as an unfortunate consequence of war -- further discussion was delayed until this morning.
-- Matthew Mosk