Claudia H. Jemmott

On 3 February 1991 in Richmond, Virginia as I sat from 6:45am to 12:45pm cross-legged with my meditation group in a Vipassana-style non-guided meditation, I experienced a strong flash of light and a vast vision for what has become the Middle Passage Series—a work in progress of batik silk banners.

This series is dedicated to the Ancestors—African and African-American and Native American whose stories have not been told truthfully, and to those who have been purposely left out of the American history books… a big part of the true story of America, one that shows unfathomable greed as the driving force.

The overall directive in the vision was that the work must be executed with Love and compassion so obviously missing in the slave trade and its aftermath… In my visions, the images of the “humane” packing of human beings (like sardines) into slave ships are on Confederate and American flags, representing those who profited from that trade in human flesh on an unprecedented scale…the batiks are offered in the spirit of truth-telling, which is the foundation for love and hope in our contemporary pandemics: Covid-19, racism, moral bankruptcy, and economic disaster for the marginalized.

My research has taken me on a journey through the hidden stories of my beloved nation: Thomas Jefferson intentionally left out a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence which implied the horrors of slavery and the Middle Passage voyage…instead the document blamed King George for his greed…no responsibility was taken for the greed of enslaving unpaid kidnapped Africans and their descendents to do the work of building the foundations of this country… Likewise, the genocide of First Nations people in order to claim their land was an unspeakable horror ignored by the founders of the new United States of America...the stories of abuses during slavery are reported with impunity in medical journals and memoirs, and they have ensured the fame and fortunes of many of the perpetrators…most notable is the “father of American Gynecology,” Dr. J. Marion Sims, who operated on female slaves without anesthesia to close the vesicovaginal fistula…he operated on 17 year old Anarcha over 30 times in a 4-year period, with cocaine administered between operations to suppress her bowel movements, prevent infection, and keep her compliant.

As a schoolgirl I cried as I read the Diary of Anne Frank and learned the fate of her and her family in the Nazi death camps…but I was not told that her family was denied entrance to the United States because of immigration quotas before they had to go into hiding.

In 1934 a Virginian eugenicist lamented that the “Germans are beating us at our own game” in a speech urging the Virginia legislature to expand its sterilization laws (for blacks and other undesirables). ..American medical research and experimentation on mostly black populations informed so much of the evil that was done in Nazi Germany that much of the Germans’ defense at the 1947 International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg pointed out that American doctors “were guilty of exactly the same abuses--(especially) regularly subjecting prisoners to dangerous, painful involuntary experiments”…the US government, under army intelligence and the OSS (forerunner of the CIA), recruited former Third Reich scientists, granting them immunity, jobs and new identities in a resettlement program for Nazi scientists. This included Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”…the program was called Operation Paperclip: “the US government supplied American hospitals and clinics with 700 Nazi scientists between 1951 and 1955…German physiologist and former Nazi Herbert Gerstner supervised a total body irradiation project” on 30 out of 263 cancer patients at M.D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer Research in Houston, TX…see Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington, AnchorBooks, NY, 2006.

In my visions, the images of the “humane” packing of human beings (like sardines) into slave ships are on Confederate and American flags, representing those who profited from that trade in human flesh on an unprecedented scale…the batiks are offered in the spirit of truth-telling, which is the foundation for love and hope in our contemporary pandemics: Covid-19, racism, moral bankruptcy, and economic disaster for the marginalized.