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Like every year, on this third Monday of January, Americans celebrate Martin Luther King Day. The day is a holiday to commemorate the birth of the icon of the struggle for civil rights. His fight seems today more than ever to reason with the news.
The police violence of which African-Americans in particular are victims, the laws restricting access to the vote… Martin Lutter King “would certainly lament the state of the country today”, estimates this Monday, January 17, 2022 the American press. How can American history help us understand the persistence of these debates in the United States in 2022? For this, we go back with our guest of the day to the origins of the American Congress.
During the first seven decades of its existence, one subject dominated the debates: slavery. Grace to lengthy investigative work by the Washington Post, we discover that 1,715 elected members of this Congress were slave owners at some point in their lives. “30% of members of Congress have been slaveholders”, summarizes Virginie Adane, lecturer in American History at the University of Nantes. “At the end of the 18th century, it was the southern representatives who owned the most slaves. A significant number were Democrats. In the 19th century, the Democratic Party was the one that represented the slave south, conversely the Republican Party was founded as the abolitionist party. explains Virginie Adane according to whom “by this strong presence, legislators could seek to protect and preserve the institution of slavery”.
The question is therefore to know to what extent this could have influenced the history of the country, its laws and its organization. Undeniably, there is “an anchoring of the institution of slavery in the writing of the institutions and laws of this country”, explains our guest. “The legacy is important because even though these elected officials no longer owned slaves after abolition, they retained that anchor, so the organization of society in the Southern states remained racialized. It explains a lot of the discriminatory laws, the segregation laws, and also a lot of the socio-economic inequalities that still exist today,” notes the researcher. “This shows the anchoring of the history of this country and its society in the institution of slavery and in its racial inequalities which intersect with social and economic inequalities”.
Haiti: the maternity hospital of Léogâne closed because of gangs
Last week (Wednesday, January 12, 2022), a gang from the Martissant district of Port-au-Prince kidnapped the truck from Hôpital Sainte Croix, in Léogâne, a town some 40 kilometers southwest of the capital. Haitian. On board: two drivers and the new $38,000 electric generator recently purchased on credit. The next day, the two drivers were released. But, the gang members demand the money to return the truck. Since then, medical personnel have been forced to use the flashlights of mobile phones to carry out caesarean sections, because it is above all a question of women who come to the Hospital of Sainte Croix to give birth.
Argentina facing the Omicron wave
Also confronted with the variant of Covid, the country records on average more than 100,000 new contaminations per day, with a positivity rate which rises to 70%, more than any other country in the world. As a result, the test centers are under tension. At the national level, nearly 7 out of 10 tests come back positive. The number of deaths and the occupancy of intensive care units remain relatively low, but are increasing. For the moment, the government is not considering new restrictions as our correspondent explains to us. Theo Conscience.
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