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Their burdens are lifted: Where the enslaved once toiled, a triumph

WILLIAM PENN imagined his colony, and Philadelphia, as sanctuaries of liberty for oppressed people.

But those people didn't include the slaves he owned.

In 1983, 301 years after Philadelphia was founded by a slaveholder, W. Wilson Goode Sr. was sworn in as the city's first black mayor.

"I felt that I was carrying with me the hopes and dreams of my ancestors," Goode said, "the hopes and dreams of all of those who struggled, those who were lynched and those who were killed trying to gain the right to vote."

Yesterday Goode was just a quarter-mile from the podium where Barack Obama was sworn in — on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a building, which, along with the White House, was built with the use of slave labor — and he said that for some time after the inauguration he couldn't speak because he was unable to form words that suited the occasion.

Tears streamed down his face, he said, as he imagined that those enslaved Africans' prayers had been answered. "Those slaves who built the Capitol and White House, who now are in their final resting place," he said, "can feel content that one of their own will now occupy that space."

J. Whyatt Mondesire, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, said that up until the Iowa caucus last January even he didn't believe that Obama would today be living in the White House.

He couldn't imagine that the slaves who labored at building this country's national edifices ever fathomed the idea.

"Our wildest dreams could only be eclipsed by theirs," he said.

Obama is not a descendant of American slaves (although his wife and daughters are), but he would have been enslaved two centuries ago, said Michael Coard, president of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, the group that pushed for the recognition of George Washington's slaves at the first President's House in Philadelphia.

"But for the coincidence of time, Barack Obama would have been an enslaved African descendant in America," he said. "A man who would have been a slave 200 years ago is the very president of the country that would have enslaved him."

Award-winning poet Sonia Sanchez believes that those slaves who helped to build the White House and the Capitol were inspired by the same enduring, uniquely human value that inspires Obama — hope.

"The whole point of being oppressed is imagining that you can have something more," she said. "Otherwise, enslaved people would have died out; they would have gone extinct. The very fact they continued to get up every morning shows that they believed things could get better.

"We all awaken each morning to an alarm clock of hope."

At the time of their construction, the White House and the Capitol were the largest house and public building in the country, and the visionaries of the city "bit off more than they could chew," said Bob Arnebeck, a historian on the construction of the Capitol and White House.

"Imagine a disorganized work project where the people in charge were not really sure what they were doing and everyone was doing something for the first time," Arnebeck said. "It's as if all the faults of American society back then came together."

Not the least of which was slavery.

When the response to calls for European laborers fell short during the construction of Washington, D.C., the commissioners who oversaw the project fell back on renting, or "hiring out," slaves, according to Felicia Bell, director of education and outreach for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.

The slaves got paid the same as whites and free black workers — $5 a month — but all of their wages went to their owners, Bell said.

On the National Mall, where millions gathered yesterday to watch the inaugural ceremony, slaves in transfer were once held in cages, Arnebeck said.

In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free black man who was captured into slavery, wrote of the painful cacophony of the capital city's contradictions:

"The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slaves' chains, almost commingled," he wrote. "A slave pen in the very shadow of the Capitol."

Even the statue that stands atop the Capitol,called "Freedom," was constructed, in part, by a slave, Philip Reid.

"I was in college," Avenging the Ancestors' Coard recalled, " and I thought somebody was playing a joke on me when I learned" about it. "It's what I call historical hypocrisy. A comic writer couldn't have written this better."

The road from Reid to Obama has been one full of cruel and deceitful plot twists. During Reconstruction, handfuls of Southern black legislators were elected to Congress. Then, Jim Crow reared its ugly head and black legislators were either blocked from politics or discouraged to the point of abandonment.

But even through the darkest times, the leaders of their day were able to foresee a time when the nation would move beyond its own hypocrisy.

U.S. Rep. George H. White, of North Carolina, was the last of the Reconstruction-era black congressmen to leave Washington, in 1901. It would be nearly three decades before a black man would serve in Congress again.

White, who eventually moved to Philadelphia and is buried in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Delaware County, spoke these words upon his departure from Congress, which left the country, once again, in whites-only hands:

"With all these odds against us, we are forging our way ahead, slowly, perhaps, but surely. . . . You may use our labor for two and a half centuries and then taunt us for our poverty, but let me remind you we will not always remain poor! You may withhold even the knowledge of how to read God's word and . . . then taunt us for our ignorance, but we would remind you that there is plenty of room at the top, and we are climbing!

" . . . This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again."

Yesterday, the president and his family became the first black residents to live and not just work in the White House. "The symbolism of that is just shocking," Coard said. "The idea for black kids that 'I don't have to be the chauffeur, or the butler, I can be the guy who has the chauffeur and the butler.' "

Since her birth, America has been a nation of irony, a country of contradictions and a place of paradoxes, inhabited by a people who far too often didn't seem to get the lesson.

But with the inauguration of the first black president on the steps of the Capitol and with his residence in the White House — structures built with the use of slaves — the morals of centuries of American stories were not just acknowledged yesterday, but actualized.

The pilgrimage of African-Americans from enslaved laborers to the U.S. presidency has been one of innumerable miles traveled by an infinite number of people, said Charles Blockson, a black historian and curator of the Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.

"The journey from the middle passage, the journey on the Underground Railroad, the journey of the civil-rights marches, it was all a passage for freedom," he said. "This symbolizes all the struggles, not only of people of African descent but all people of goodwill who contribute to a quest for freedom."

America still has far to go in its evolution, poet Sanchez said, but the Obama presidency is "the beginning of the beginning."

"This is indeed a journey right here in the 21st century to really finalize this whole idea of democracy," she said.