US Senator describes slavery as necessary evil

WASHINGTON: A Republican Senator for the US state of Arkansas has described slavery as a "necessary evil" on which the American nation was built, the media reported on Monday.

"We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can't understand our country," the BBC quoted Senator Tom Cotton as saying in an interview to The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper on Sunday.

"As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as (Abraham) Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction."

Cotton told the newspaper that he rejected the idea that the US was a systemically racist country to its core, adding that he was introducing legislation to ban federal funds for a project by the New York Times newspaper, aimed at revising the historical view of slavery.

On July 23, Senator Cotton introduced the Saving American History Act, aimed at stopping funding for '1619', the initiative which bases US history teaching around the first arrivals of slave ships in the US in August of that year. (IANS)

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