The title of this digital came, of course, from the main entrance sign to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which interprets as “Work Sets You Free”. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis is attempting to sugar-coat America’s past history concerning the atrocities perpetrated against black slaves by their white slave owners by maintaining that a goodly number of those slaves were taught skills that later in life were used to their advantage.

There’s an outside possibility that there might be an inkling of truth to that statement, but it is of little or no consequence in comparison to the beatings, rapes, murders, and lynchings, etc., etc., etc., that slaves had to endure. To try to emphasis one minute, questionable, good over all the overwhelming evidence for bad is an absolute oversight. Shame on you, DeSantis. 2024 GOP nominee Will Hurt wonderfully stated that “Slavery wasn’t a jobs program.”

I draw a similar comparison between the German concentration camp prisoners and the Southern plantation black slaves: both worked themselves to death. The only freedom accomplished from working yourself to death, is that you wouldn’t have to endure another day of tortured servitude.

Hitler was no respecter of persons; he hated any and all peoples that weren’t of Arian decent. Besides murdering six-million Jews, and other ethnic peoples, Hitler is responsible for an unknown number of black peoples’ deaths also. Jesse Owens captured four gold metals at the 1939 Berlin Olympics. Ironically, at a time when American was condemning Hitler about not wanting blacks to participate in the Berlin Olympics, America was treating blacks as if they were still on the plantations. Fortunately for America, Jesse Owens said no to the NAACP request for him to boycott the games in order to draw attention to American black peoples’ plight.

But modern Germany hasn’t bull-dozed over their concentration camps because they’re an historical embarrassment to them. They obviously feel that whatever embarrassment is incurred is but a small price to pay for not letting history get a chance to repeat itself.

And the same should hold true for America’s black history studies. Just because it’s an embarrassment to we Americans to exhibit our “dirty laundry” of slavery, that’s not a justifiable reason to forgo the necessary, continued acknowledgement that work, in and of itself, played no role in any slave’s freedom or future potential vocation. On the contrary, one might say that the slave’s ability to work, in fact, placed an imaginary barbed wire gate in front of any anticipated exit of escape.