US Slave Blog: Reopening Letter, 2025

To our readers, old and new:

The US Slave Blog returns in 2025 because the truth demands it.

What began years ago as a personal effort to document the hidden, neglected, and deliberately buried history of American slavery has become, unexpectedly, a living archive. This blog grew because people across the country were searching for the truth — the full truth — about the nation we inhabit. They wanted history that was unvarnished, unsanitized, and unafraid to name the brutal foundations of the United States.

And today, that work is more urgent than ever.

We are living in a moment when Black history is being erased in real time.
Government agencies are purging content about Black soldiers, Indigenous heroes, LGBTQ service members, women trailblazers, and anyone whose story disrupts the myth of a whitewashed America.
DEI programs are being dismantled.
Books are being banned.
Public institutions are scrubbing their own archives, deleting the historical record to satisfy the demands of political fear and racial resentment.

This climate is not new — it is simply louder.

From the beginning, the US Slave Blog existed because America has never fully confronted its past. The shame of this nation is not the existence of slavery, but the refusal to grapple with its consequences: the land theft, the generational trauma, the economic exploitation, the legal apartheid, and the ongoing inequalities that reach directly from bondage into the present.

This blog has always been about telling the truth that sits beneath our feet.

Truth like this:
Arlington National Cemetery — the most sacred military ground in the country — was once the plantation of Robert E. Lee, built by the enslaved labor of the Custis estate, Martha Washington’s family.
Those enslaved people were freed during the Civil War and given a small settlement called Freedman’s Village. The U.S. government later betrayed them, seized their land without compensation, and pushed them aside to create the cemetery we honor today.

The marble is beautiful.
The history beneath it is not.
But both are true.

The US Slave Blog was created to preserve stories like these — stories that explain how the past structures the present, how injustice repeats itself when unacknowledged, and how the nation’s collective amnesia harms us all.

In 2025, this space returns with renewed purpose:

To remember what America tries to forget.

To document what institutions choose to delete.

To honor the people whose stories built this country but were never allowed to define it.

To resist historical erasure, wherever it appears.

We will continue to publish archival materials, photographs, documents, forgotten histories, scholarship, maps, oral accounts, and contemporary analysis. We will examine the roots of American inequality, the afterlives of slavery, and the physical landscapes that still whisper their pasts — plantations disguised as parks, universities funded by slave labor, neighborhoods shaped by redlining, and monuments that tell only half the story.

This blog may be dusty in places. It may be imperfect. But it is alive — because the truth is alive.

To every reader who finds your way here: thank you.

Thank you for caring about the parts of history that America prefers to bury.
Thank you for refusing to look away.
Thank you for believing that the truth, even when painful, is a form of liberation.

The US Slave Blog is open again.
Let’s do the work that memory requires.

— Ron Edwards
US Slave Blog