Text Says: Cotton Was King

Who grew, picked, and made cotton possible?

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Episode 32

1 minute of reading

From: Kerry
Cotton and Power
To: Chance sent - Gmail 11:28 PM

Hi Chance—

It is almost midnight, and I haven’t even started getting ready for bed. Lately, I seem to be awake and tired at the wrong times of the day and night…ugh!

Thanks for pointing out the bondage and foreign nations reference on page 351. Disgusting!

I went back and read that section more carefully. I see that cotton has more words and is presented as more powerful than people……The people who were growing the cotton, picking the cotton, and making the industry of cotton possible are largely ignored.

How is it that the product of cotton is more powerful than the people who made the product possible?

Words and phrases such as: white-carpeted acres of the south; precious supply; cotton threads; and ‘Cotton was King’, make me want to shriek……Did the authors of the book want high school students to conjure a vision of the beauty and usefulness of cotton while ignoring the people who labored in the fields and were relegated to live in the slave quarters? I read somewhere that the plantation owners gave fifteen cents a day to entire families for food…criminal!

What did you think of the part that said in Britain ‘Cotton was King,’ the cotton gin was his throne, and the Black bondsman were his henchmen?....again no reference to where the cotton came from.

When it said that cotton was a powerful monarch, I wondered if dictator or oligarch or autocrat would have been more appropriate.

I want to be asleep before midnight……I’ll send you another email in the morning about what my school is doing to become a Teacher Powered School. There are some exciting things going on.

I am also overwhelmed.….and not getting enough sleep!

More later—

Kerry