.jpeg)
rohn hein
All About Me
Rohn Hein is a first-time author with fifty years of involvement in non-partisan community activism. Starting as a VISTA volunteer in 1973, he worked for five different non-profit organizations working with welfare recipients, senior citizens, urban housing, racial justice, and environmental efforts in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York and New Jersey. For the last 40 years Rohn was an investment adviser while volunteering with social justice activities in affordable housing, racial justice, and environmental issues. Rohn has written testimony presented in the Minnesota and New Jersey Legislature and appeared at numerous churches, city council, county, and regional government agencies.
He works with many New Jersey non-profit organizations on racial justice issue, such as The NJ Institute for Social Justice, Salvation and Social Justice, NJ NAACP, Fair Share Housing, and UU Faith Action. He has worked on landmark affordable housing legislation and on the enactment of a racial justice impact statement on legislation in New Jersey.
My HP Books
The Valet’s Witness, reimagines the drafting of the Declaration of Independence through the intertwined experiences of Edward Rutledge, the youngest delegate from South Carolina, and his enslaved valet, Pompey.
Set in Philadelphia during the charged meetings of the Second Continental Congress, The Valet’s Witness follows Pompey as he navigates the shadow world of black valets, who though invisible to history, bore witness to the same debates, betrayals, and ideals as the delegates they served. Rutledge grapples with the need to protect slavery while seeking independence for the colonies as Pompey quietly gathers stories, overhears arguments, and shares insights with other valets, forming a hidden network of observers whose lives are shaped by the very document that omits them.
Rutledge is determined to eliminate any language in the declaration that might undermine slavery in South Carolina, as he believed had happened one year earlier when most these delegates, including himself, met and agreed to Continental Association that sought a limiting of the slave trade. Meanwhile, black valets for most of the southern delegates at the Second Continental Congress meet and converse about the events that are happening in dining rooms that they share with their masters. The listening skills of the slaves equip them with more information about the happenings in Congress than any other group of people. The slaves reflect on the irony of their enslavement while the delegates negotiate with themselves about seeking to overturn the enslavement by The Crown they believe is limiting their lives.
Rutledge seeks out other delegates who he believes will be sympathetic to the goal of eliminating references to the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence.
Pompey uses the skills of a valet in the plantation system to gather information and to communicate with other black valets who are attending the Continental Congress. Through encounters with his peers, the slaves speak about the events happening around them and how it reflects on their lives in a slave society.
The Declaration of Independence is well known for never mentioning slavery, but The Valet’s Witness shows how that happened.
ADVANCED PRAISE
From his South Jersey home in Cherry Hill — only short miles from Revolutionary War battle sites on both sides of the Delaware River and exactly seven miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia — Brother Rohn Hein has crafted a refreshingly unique historical fictional account of the informal discussions in taverns, at dinners and in sit down formal debates at the 1st and 2nd Continental Congresses.
What’s unique is found immediately in the title of Rohn’s work “The Valet’s Witness” where the black slave servants — of famed and obscure white delegates from the 13 colonies, then states gathered to hammer out the framing values and practicalities of our republic — consistently and skillfully found time from their slave chores to engaged in their own informed … via the black regional grapevine and listening attentively to white reps as they pondered daily over advances and set backs … Pompey, Edward Routlege’s key slave he stationed with him in Philly was a master in studying his master’s thinking and mood swings. He and several of his black peers justifiably became
increasingly suspicious with the realization that the majority of the white framers actually were in favor of black enslavement even hypocritically so while being very clear about about the value that black subjugation brought to the pursuit of white happiness and wealth.
The Routlege brothers slave reliant delegates of South Carolina were centered as Rohn’s voices of white patriotic hope for a conservative
white English style democracy (minus a king) and revolutionary change in politics but not in predatory capitalist politics and economic successes based on black slave labor; Native colonization, land theft even in the restrictions of the Northwest Territories; the general repression of non-citizen people of color and disenfranchised women.
I am grateful that Ron dug deep into the archives and research about not just the white framers of this republic. He has actually opened a unique and exciting way of reading black Revolutionary era history in Philly in addition to Black Founders like George Washington’s nine slaves brought from Virginia to the early Philly White House; the black sailers and longshoreman at Penn’s landing with news of black revolts and freedom and enslavement in the British Caribbean Islands; the free born, highly literate black religious, professional and business elders, and fraternal organization leaders among whom were Bishops R. Allen and A. Jones.
Word! This is an eye opener about the vastly different ways that the still vexing problems of racial freedom, racial democracy, racial capitalism and racial patriotism could have stirred the concerns of unfree and “free” but politically segregated black folk during the Revolutionary period.
Philly proud!
Here Ron’s last line about Pompey and his black slave comrades. In the 1980’s black Harvard Law Professor and founder of Critical Race Theory Derrick Bell made the same observation in his writings attesting to Pompey’s predictive
enlightenment.
“Black valets to the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 knew that the freedom sought by (white) colonists would not be rewarded to them”.
Get the book!
Dr. Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad
Retired Adjunct Prof.
Dept. Philosophy & Religion
Africana Studies
Rutgers U. Camden
Cherry Hill Unitarian Universalist Church member
US Air Force vet
