While I am happy to see abolitionists recognized, one would think that Ohio was just one big abolitionist camp. It’s a wonder there were any slaves left to fight about if all of the stories of white folks helping slaves to freedom were true. In fact, Southern Ohio was pretty butternut and Copperheads were a real force in Ohio all through the war.
Cincinnati had racist pogroms and very contradictory loyalties during the war; folks with strong business ties to the south and those with strong business ties to the east as well as newly arrived German catholic immigrants, the natural base of the Democratic Party along with a population whetted to the free labor ethos of those pushing west. The city still has one foot firmly in the South and has a history of unofficial Jim Crowism that has yet to fully die. Ohio certainly did have a proud history of abolitionism, especially in the northeast, and conspirators of liberty were active throughout the state with the river, the border, being a central focus. The fact that militant abolitionists were organizing in the area brought plenty of slave-catchers before the war and raids during the war. Oberlin, Ohio was famous for resisting slave catchers and providing John Brown, a sometime Ohio resident, with recruits for the Harper’s Ferry raid.

— Down The Ohio

Obama’s condemnation of “original sin” begets the white Christian nation’s perpetual forgiveness and redemption, but also anticipates the pessimism of those who would rightfully allege that white supremacy’s visceral structures of dominance are endemic to American national reproduction. This attempts to erase the indelible: the social and economic system that rests on the subjection of Africans as racial chattel is not a compartmentalized or reconcilable event in the American white racial destiny, but is the foundation of what legal scholar Cheryl Harris has called the ongoing legal consolidation of whiteness as property, a consolidation that can only occur at the expense of those who are dispossessed and/or actually owned by the white nation.

— “The Dreadful Genius of the Obama Moment: Inaugurating Multiculturalist White Supremacy” By Dylan Rodríguez

Then came Soulja Boy Tell Em. I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He was stumped. I said, “Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters…” He said, “Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa.”
My jaw, at this point, was on the ground.”We wouldn’t be here,” he continued, having no idea how far in it he’d stepped, “to get this ice and tattoos.

— A Rapper Salutes the Slave Trade - The Daily Beast [via]