African American History Archives - Page 2 of 4

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity

Originally posted on the blog of The American Prospect, January 6, 2017.

For those who believe Donald Trump’s election has further legitimized hatred and even violence, a “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for January 21 offers an outlet to demonstrate mass solidarity across lines of race, religion, age, gender, national identity, and sexual orientation.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (The Center for Jewish History via Flickr)

The idea of such a march first ricocheted across social media just hours after the TV networks called the election for Trump, when a grandmother in Hawaii suggested it to fellow Facebook friends on the private, pro-Hillary Clinton group page known as Pantsuit Nation. Millions of postings later, the D.C. march has mushroomed to include parallel events in 41 states and 21 cities outside the United States. An independent national organizing committee has stepped in to articulate a clear mission and take over logistics. And thousands of local organizations, many of them formed just in the last month, have already chartered buses to bring demonstrators to the National Mall region, where the march is scheduled to kick off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd Street SW.

Despite its “Women’s March” moniker, the national organizing committee’s striking diversity signals an increasing emphasis on defending “human rights, dignity, and justice,” as the event’s official website states, by unifying across difference. The organizing committee includes four national co-chairwomen—Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland—who are African American, Latina, Palestinian American, and white, and who all have extensive backgrounds as social justice organizers and professionals with local, national, and global experience.

Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory serve on the Women’s March national organizing committee (via Huffington Post).

Still, neither the march, scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, nor its organizers can pretend to possess perfect harmony and clarity on the direction of this nascent movement. For example, the initial organizers dropped the original moniker, the “Million Women March,” in response to criticism that it was disrespectful to African American women who had participated in a Philadelphia march by that same name in 1997. The latter had taken place two years after the iconic Million Man March. This year’s initial organizers also faced criticism that the name “March on Washington” failed to show deference to the historic role of black activists in the 1963 March on Washington, recognized as a high point of the civil rights movement. The new national committee explicitly describes its mission as one that builds on earlier movements for social justice.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (via Idealistic Ambitions).

Such internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

By contrast, some historic marches on the Capitol demonstrated racial unity against all odds. The largest convergence on Washington prior to 1963 was the 1932 Bonus Army March, which brought together World War I veterans at the height of the Great Depression. In 1924, these veterans had been honored with the promise of an old-age “bonus” redeemable in 1945. But times were desperate, and the men wanted their bonuses early. An estimated 20,000 unemployed veterans hopped freight trains, caravanned in automobiles, or walked to the capital from as far away as California, and vowed to stay put until the government delivered. Their protests placed them in a direct confrontation with President Herbert Hoover. Things came to a head on July 28, 1932, when General Douglas MacArthur ordered soldiers wielding machine guns, bayonets, and tear gas to evict the veterans from their encampment and torch their tents. The debacle, which featured news coverage of government troops attacking unarmed veterans, is thought to have helped Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover by a landslide that November.

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the surface, the Bonus Army March may appear to have little relevance for organizers of this month’s march. But the gathering was actually a show of unity that brought together both men and women, both whites and blacks. In 1932, not only the veterans but also their wives and children poured into Washington, forming a genuine community. And despite the fact that the U.S. military had maintained racially segregated units during World War I, white and black veterans caravanned to the capital together. For two months, they and their families squeezed in beside one another as their children played between the rows of tents. They experienced MacArthur’s onslaught together, an early demonstration of racial and gender solidarity not unlike what the Women’s March expects to deliver this year.

The Bonus March was still fresh in the minds of another group of protesters, this time comprised only of African Americans, who used the threat of a mass demonstration to pressure the government for racial justice in 1941. It was the eve of the nation’s entry into World War II, and a labor organization known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters initiated a March on Washington Movement that threatened to bring 100,000 African American protesters to the capital on July 1 unless President Roosevelt moved to desegregate the military and order an end to racial discrimination in the burgeoning defense industry. Anxious that reports of racial injustice would damage his credibility with the Allies, Roosevelt blinked on June 25, and this march never took place. In the end, Roosevelt failed to desegregate the military; but he did prohibit discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to mediate disputes.

After Roosevelt desegregated the armed forces, Howard Perry became the first African American US Marine Corps recruit in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The role of women in this World War II–era movement holds a lesson for the women rising up to oppose Trump’s presidency today. It may be widely known that the 1941 protest was a direct precursor of the 1963 March on Washington. But less well-known is that the full, official name of black union in question, led by A. Philip Randolph, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. The avid participation of maids, as well as of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, which included porters’ wives, enabled Randolph to up his original participation projection from 10,000 in January of 1941 to 100,000 just a few months later.

Just as significantly, even though Randolph ended up canceling the demonstration, it spawned a March on Washington Movement, with chapters across the country, that persisted until 1946. Women continued as leaders in both the local and national organizations, and drew particular attention to discrimination against black females in the defense industry and other employment sectors. Women organizing this month’s demonstration at both the local and national levels are drawing on the historic organizing role of women—even those who have been forgotten—to create a lasting movement.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

Perhaps the most famous march on Washington in the 20th century took place in August of 1963, when a quarter of a million people united to demand black civil rights. The march brought together white liberals who turned out to support African Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, in an extraordinary show of unity against racial oppression.

Nevertheless, yearly commemorations of this historic march fail to note unsettling backstories involving women leaders, whose important roles have been largely forgotten. Its top organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, did not invite a single woman to speak, not even Rosa Parks—despite strong criticism from prominent black female civil rights advocates, including the one woman on the central organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Ultimately, organizers did arrange for six women, including Parks, to sit on the dais and be honored as women. But as the program shows, none of the ten keynote addresses heard that day was delivered by a woman.

Most Americans remember only one: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Often forgotten is the full name of the event: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Photographs of the event show hundreds of women bearing signs calling for everything from higher wages and jobs for all to better schools and voting rights. Many are union members. Female domestic and agricultural workers, the backbone of Southern activism since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also marched, at a time when federal law excluded them from minimum wages, Social Security, and from union-organizing protections.

Those photographs are testament to the role of women workers in organizing public protests. One thread running through all of these major 20th-century marches is the way civil justice issues involving race, gender, jobs, wage equity, and immigration all tended to intertwine. In the wake of the bitter election of 2016, post-election analyses have focused disproportionately on “the white blue-collar worker,” “the middle class,” or “the 1 percent.” Overlooked are the economic security and job concerns of Latina, black, and other women who toil in service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs, at wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Such women would be devastated by the social-services restructuring proposed by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.

As women and men march on Washington once again, the demonstrations of 1913, 1932, 1941, and 1963 hold important lessons. The outward show of “unity” at the Woman Suffrage Procession masked its racism. The 1932 Bonus Army March speaks to the potential for diverse groups to come together in the face of extreme adversity—just as progressives are unifying today in the face of Trump. The 1941 march illustrated how organizing for a demonstration can plant the seeds for a sustained movement. And the solidarity celebrated in 1963 hid the relegation of women leaders to second-class citizenship. Ideally, the Women’s March on Washington will both avoid some of these pitfalls and help women forge new alliances that will last well beyond the event itself.

More by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

You may also enjoy:
George Forgie discusses the work the Emancipation Proclamation left undone.

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

By Guy Raffa

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

henry_wadsworth_longfellow_by_thomas_buchanan_read_img_4414-1

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.

Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”

For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

Historical Perspectives on The Birth of a Nation (2016)

“They killing people everywhere for no reason at all but being black.”

—Cherry (the wife of Nat Turner played by Aja Naomi King)

By Ronald Davis

The number of books, novels, articles, plays and movies committed to the life and times of Nat Turner is vast. None of these sources is without controversy. It should be no surprise that Nate Parker’s latest rendition has found its way into the controversy surrounding the life of Nat Turner. Turner and the insurrection he led challenged the perception of the enslaved as passively accepting their enslavement. Early twentieth-century scholars of African-American history often ignored or dismissed the Turner rebellion as an anomaly, as not representative of the institution of slavery in the United States. These writers — U.B. Phillips, Frank Tannebaum, and Stanley Elkins, to name a few — point to the prevalence of revolt in the Caribbean and South America, where large-scale rebellions of the enslaved took place. These scholars deduced that slavery in the United States was mild in comparison to the other slave societies in the Americas because here, in the United States, there were only two or three insurrections of note. Besides the Turner revolt, most early twentieth-century scholars only considered the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the John Brown slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia as evidence of slave discontent and evidence of martial organization. All these revolts, including that of Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia always stood as a reminder that some enslaved people would kill, bleed, and die to establish freedom.

Illustration of Nat Turner’s capture (via Wikimedia Commons).

Nate Parker refashions the memory of Nat Turner, in a sense reclaiming the “fiend,” as described by Thomas R. Gray in The Confessions of Nat Turner, and creating a hero. Parker is not the first (nor I suspect the last) to attempt this revision of Turner. In his 1947 seminal work on enslaved resistance, Herbert Aptheker describes Nat Turner as one of history’s greatest leaders because “he sensed the mood and feelings of the masses of his fellow beings, not only in his immediate environment but generally.” Aptheker’s Nat Turner is an undervalued hero, a man of revolution and liberty: a leader who was able to rouse his compatriots and create in them the desire to fight, and eventually die, for their liberty.

Throughout his life, Nat Turner was the human property of Benjamin Turner, Samuel Turner, Putnam Moore and Joseph Travis. However, in Parker’s film, the audience is presented with only one enslaver, Samuel Turner. Parker portrays Samuel Turner through several different lenses. As children, Nat and Sam are depicted as playmates. Several narratives of the enslaved recount how, in childhood, they played with their enslaver’s children. As Nat and Sam aged, their relationships began to reflect the societal differences between the races. James Curry, a successful runaway from North Carolina, related playing with his enslaver’s children and the feeling of brotherhood between black and white as children. Curry relates that as the children aged they were separated, with white children attending school and black children remaining on the plantation. According to Curry, the children “learn that slaves are not companions for them…the love of power is cultivated in their hearts by their parents, the whip is put into their hands, and they soon regard the negro in no other light than as a slave.” (Slave Testimony 130). After depicting childhood friendship, throughout the remainder of the film, Parker’s Nat Turner wields an almost supernatural influence over Samuel Turner. Parker demonstrates Nat’s psychological influence over Samuel when Nat convinces Samuel to purchase an enslaved woman who eventually became his wife. The depiction of influence continues until Samuel Turner realizes he can commodify not only Nat Turner’s physical labor, but also his mental labor as a preacher to the enslaved.

Armie Hammer as Samuel Turner and Nate Parker as Nat Turner in The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight Pictures via wbur).

Perhaps the most historically accurate portion of The Birth of a Nation is Nate Parker’s depiction of various enslavers. Parker sketches the enslavers as violent, when enslaved men are forced fed during a hunger strike; as paternalistic, in the case of Samuel Turner; and as sexually predatory, when Samuel Turner offers the wife of an enslaved man for intercourse with one of the guests at his party. The different types of enslavers portrayed are not all-encompassing; however, within the limitations of movies and film, Parker made specific choices to expand the American public’s understanding of slavery’s cruelties and daily life.

Given the limitations of filmmaking (budget, time constraints on character exploration, and film length) Parker simplified some aspects of slavery while complicating enslaved masculinity and resistance. At times Parker’s representation of enslaved women simplifies the complexities of womanhood in the Antebellum South, leaving much to be desired. Although his movie is essentially one of raw masculinity, the decision to minimize the intellectual influence of enslaved women does a disservice to the strength of women as agitators, resistors, and participants in the Antebellum South’s peculiar institution. By contrast, some women play a very important role in the film; Nat’s mother, grandmother, and wife are integral to his life. However, Parker makes the decision to limit the viewer’s understanding of enslaved women’s complex humanity. There are moments in the film where it appears that Parker forgets that mothers, wives, and daughters performed the same arduous labor as men.

Aja Naomi King as Cherry (via NCR).

Nat Turner was a father, husband, son, and revolutionary. No one word can describe him except “complex.” Parker, however, makes no attempt to complicate Nat Turner; he wants to create a hero. Parker’s Nat Turner makes this reviewer wonder if slavery is a pretext to depict contemporary African-American masculinity in the film. Parker’s desire is to demonstrate that enslaved men were not passive receptors of slavery but active fighters against an unjust institution. The filmmaker emphasizes one trope of masculinity: to fight until the death for freedom. He inscribes his Nat Turner with this type of masculinity and creates a character full of compassion for the downtrodden and rage at injustice. In one scene, when Nat Turner is helping a young white child, the child’s father notices and begins to hit Turner. Turner does not flinch from the blows but stands tall in the face of injustice. Parker’s Nat Turner begins his insurrection because his wife is raped and beaten beyond recognition (the image of Cherry, Nat Turner’s wife, is reminiscent of the beaten face of deceased Emmett Till). Parker makes the impetus for revolution not the rape of his wife but the power structure that would allow this type of brutality to go unpunished. Although there is no evidence to suggest that this was the historic Nat Turner’s inspiration, it remains plausible that Turner or his co-conspirators fought for the mothers, sisters, and daughters sold or raped by enslavers.

800px-james_hopkinsons_plantation_slaves_planting_sweet_potatoes

Henry Moore’s 1862 picture of slaves on James Hopkinson’s plantation (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Nat Turner of historical record is somewhat different than Nate Parker’s representation. Much of what we know of Nat Turner relies on his confession to the attorney Thomas R. Gray (available for free from Project Gutenberg). It is important to interrogate this source, to question Turner’s voice as presented in the text and the motivations of Thomas Gray: was it profit, fame, or a desire for truth that led him to Turner’s prison? As with much of the story of the enslaved, the historical record is woefully incomplete and often clouded in mystery.

Can a movie created for entertainment and education accurately reflect a historical record full of silences? Do the archival silences (i.e. Nat Turner speaking for himself, not as interpreted by another person) of Nat Turner’s life give license to an entertainer; license to create a hero and remove the stain of villainy associated with his memory? Parker does not hesitate to refashion Nat Turner.

Historical marker in Southhampton, VA (via TheClio).

Scholars can and should take issue with many aspects of The Birth of a Nation’s historicity. The film takes wide liberties with history while portraying underrepresented aspects of slavery accurately. However, as a film it also moves into the realm of popular history and some members of the audience inevitably will absorb the film as a factual representation of nineteenth-century Virginia. This is a problem of the film and filmmaking about historic events in general. However, I would challenge myself and other scholars to view Parker’s movie as an opportunity to further affect the public’s understanding of history. It is an opportunity for historians to have a dialogue with the nation about America’s past and to better explain the complexities of American institutions.

Is Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation historically accurate? No. But what historical drama can lay claim to 100% accuracy? Nate Parker did not set out to make a documentary, nor did he write a history of American slavery. He created a movie at a particular moment in American history. A moment where black lives are confined to prisons at disproportionate rates. A moment when much of the African-American population is frustrated with the callousness of society. The Birth of a Nation is a beginning; it is a chance to continue the conversation about racial inequality. Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation should be seen not for its historic content but for its commentary of this moment in American history.

Sources:
John W. Blassingame, ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (1977).

You may also like:
Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux review Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002).
Mark Sheaves discusses Slavery and its Legacy in the United States.
Not Even Past contributors offer an overview of articles about the history of slavery in the United States.

Stokely Carmichael: A Life

June 2016 marked fifty years since Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) called for “Black Power!” during a political rally for racial justice in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael defined Black Power as radical social, political, economic, and cultural self-determination Carmichael’s political legacy indelibly shaped civil rights and Black Power organizing and provides important historical context for understanding the contemporary movement for black lives.

Poised between Dr. Martin Luther King’s shield and Malcolm X’s sword, Stokely Carmichael stands as the bridge between two generations of black political activists. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Carmichael arrived in America in 1952, attended the prestigious Bronx School of Science, and was mentored by Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black social-democratic activist and pacifist who would serve as a key advisor to King and organize the March On Washington in 1963.

Like the current generation of Black Lives Matter activists, Carmichael devoted his energies to exposing American myth and lies. At Howard University he became the most charismatic and outspoken student activist in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus satellite of the larger Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC grew from lunch counter sit-ins that spread across the south, then nationally, in the winter of 1960 into the most important grassroots civil rights organization in postwar American history. The group, guided by the political and organizing genius of Ella Jo Baker, organized for voting rights, set up freedom schools, and civic education in some of the most dangerous parts of America.

While attending Howard University, Carmichael participated in local struggles in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Maryland for racial and economic justice, the desegregation of restaurants and public accommodations, and the integration of the building trades. Beginning in 1961, he traveled to Mississippi where he was arrested as a Freedom Rider and jailed in Parchman Penitentiary, alongside future March On Washington speaker, SNCC chairman, and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. By Stokely’s count, between 1961 and 1966 he was arrested twenty-seven times for civil rights activism.

Like many of his Howard colleagues, Carmichael utilized non-violence as a political tactic, rather than a way of life. His own political philosophy hewed close to the social-democratic teachings of Rustin, the Marxist-Leninism he imbibed in study groups in high school, and the pan-Africanism he reveled in while hearing reports of successful liberation movements in Ghana and listening to South African singer Miriam Makeba (his future wife) on the radio.

Carmichael’s allegiance to civil rights struggle did not prevent him from listening to Malcolm X at Howard University or form friendships with black nationalists and political radicals who fit outside the civil rights mainstream. Despite his militancy, Stokely led the Second Congressional District during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and dutifully protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk in a vain effort to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party Delegation led by sharecropper turned activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat an integrated delegation that organized for democracy under the threat of death convinced Stokely to forever abandon mainstream politics. He re-emerged from the disappointment in Atlantic City as one of SNCC’s biggest voices supporting independent black politics, which took shape in tiny Lowndes County, Alabama during 1965-1966. Carmichael helped to organize sharecroppers, poor people, and community activists to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that would be nicknamed the Black Panther Party.

By the time he called for Black Power in 1966 Stokely Carmichael had become a touchstone to multiple streams of political and cultural radicalism. Carmichael spread the word about black being beautiful before James Brown, came out against the Vietnam War before Dr. King and Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the Black Panthers by headlining “Free Huey” rallies in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

In doing so, Carmichael defied the dictates of American hegemony by traveling overseas to Cuba, challenging the Johnson Administration’s moral and political integrity, and vowing to go to jail rather than ever serving in the armed forces.

Global black lives mattered to Carmichael. During his 1967 tour of Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, and Europe he visited Conakry, Guinea and met former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean President Sekou Toure. By 1969 Carmichael relocated to Conakry where he argued that Pan-Africanism represented Black Power’s highest stage and would, over the next three decades until his premature death in 1998, remain an unapologetic black revolutionary.

Contemporary movements for racial and economic justice owe a deep debt to Carmichael’s legacy of grassroots organizing, student activism, and willingness to speak truth to power. Before Black Lives Matter activists identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Stokely Carmichael called out America as an empire who subjugated black and Third World people domestically and internationally. As a local organizer, Carmichael testified before civil rights commissions, attended conferences, participated in debates, and mapped policy strategies to help build two black independent political parties. Hounded by the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Department, and the CIA, Carmichael remained a committed political revolutionary until his dying breath. Carmichael’s legacy extends to the iconography of the black freedom struggle. His friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer offer nothing less than a political and intellectual genealogy of postwar decolonization and anti-racist movements, one that continue to reverberate from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

Popular Culture in the Classroom

By Nakia Parker

Popular culture can be a powerful tool in helping students understand history. Music, film, TV, fiction, and paintings offer effective and creative ways to bring primary source material into the classroom. Last fall, I gave a lecture on Black Power and popular culture in an introductory course on African American History. We discussed the influence of Black Power ideologies on various forms of popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, we compared album covers, such as the Temptations’ 1967 album In a Mellow Mood, which has an image of the group in tuxedos and close-cropped haircuts on the cover, singing Broadway standards like “Man of La Mancha,” with another album cover during the Black Power era with the group wearing dashikis, Afros, and singing socially conscious songs, such as “Ball of Confusion” and “Message from a Black Man.” We listened to James Brown’s “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” and discussed how artists such as Aretha Franklin, who normally did not take a public stand on social issues, would support causes affecting the black community. For example, Franklin posted bail for activist and professor Angela Davis when she was arrested for murder and kidnapping charges. We also talked about how conditions in urban areas and Black Power ideology in the late 1970’s influenced the birth and evolution of rap music and hip-hop culture, from acts such as Run DMC to Tupac to Kendrick Lamar.

angela_davis_enters_royce_hall_for_first_lecture_october_7_1969

Dr. Angela Davis walking to her lecture at UCLA, 1969 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The students were engaged and responded well to the lecture. Many of them commented that considering the Black Power Movement through the lens of popular culture changed stereotypes or misconceptions they previously had of the movement and its proponents. When I asked the class before the lecture what words or phrases came to mind when I said the phrase “Black Power,” some students mentioned the iconic image of John Carlos and Tommie Smith during the 1968 Olympics or they associated the movement primarily with violent rhetoric. In addition, many students’ conception of what constitutes primary sources was expanded. Many were pleasantly surprised to find out that songs and film could be used as primary source material. In fact, for the final project, creating a historical time capsule, many of the students used a song as one of their primary document choices.

Film and literature are useful in teaching history as well. In the same guest lecture, I showed the students brief clips of how African-Americans were portrayed in the films Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and then compared the two movies’ portrayal of black people as docile and subservient to the scene in the 1975 film Mandingo of the slave Cicero defiantly giving a speech before his execution for leading a slave rebellion. Additional useful films include Saturday Night Fever, which covers more than just disco, addressing topics such as racism, class tensions, religion, and gender dynamics. Apocalypse Now and Born on the Fourth of July encourage students to ponder popular artistic conceptions of the Vietnam War during the 1970s and 80s.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American woman to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone With the Wind (via Logo).

For American history before 1865, literature and art can be used as pedagogical tools. When teaching about the formation of “American” identity during the early republic, for example, students might read the short story “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. Key moments in the story, such as when Rip Van Winkle wakes from his sleep and is confused when he is chased out a tavern and called a spy after he declares his loyalty to the British king, can highlight the upheaval and changes in the new nation after independence as well as the emergence of “American” literature. When discussing the institution of slavery, listening to slave spirituals or work songs can give students a sense of every day life for the enslaved. Finally, when teaching about how Native Americans were portrayed and stereotyped during the late 18^th and early 19th centuries before the period of Indian removal, a good painting to analyze would be The Murder of Jane McCrea (1804), by John Vanderlyn, or reading sections of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Both of these sources demonstrate two opposite, but common, views of the time about Indians: as bloodthirsty warriors (Murder of Jane McCrea) or as noble beings, communing with nature (Last of the Mohicans). These images can be supplemented with sources that how Native American life was not static, but adapted to their changing circumstances.

Poster from Last of the Mohicans, a 1920 movie based on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel (via Wikimedia Commons).

As teachers and scholars of the humanities, we constantly need to emphasize the relevance of subjects like history. Using past and present aspects of popular culture as a pedagogical tool is a useful and fun way to remind students why history matters.

History Revealed in a Very Small Place

Editor’s Note: This is the first article we posted about Texas on Not Even Past. Historian, photographer, and Professor Bob Abzug takes us on a short tour of the intersection of Jewish and African American History in one small town in Texas.

by Robert Abzug

Our family knew Luling as a town one passed through quickly on trips from Austin to the Gulf coast, noticing only banners for the next “watermelon thump” and gaily decorated oil pump jacks. Recently it became my unlikely entry point into a visual appreciation of Texas Jewish history and more. I have taken photographs for about fifty years and, for the past twenty-five years have recorded signs of sacred life on the landscape, a project I call “religion by the side of the road.” Mostly, my writing and photography have engaged Protestantism in its myriad forms, though I myself am a Jew. However, in the spring of 2007, Dean Randy Diehl of the College of Liberal Arts asked me to become founding director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the private project took on a form more integrated with my new task. I decided to learn more about Texas Jews.

Jews in Luling? It is hardly Vilna on the San Marcos–there is no synagogue and perhaps no longer any Jews among its 5500 inhabitants. Yet, an online listing of a small Jewish Cemetery (80 graves) in the town piqued my curiosity. My wife and I set out one weekend morning in search of the site and found ourselves amid an old, modest, almost rural African-American neighborhood. Some of the small houses looked as if they had been built in the late nineteenth century. We couldn’t find the cemetery and searched an open lot, thinking–a romantic notion–that its graves had crumbled from neglect, lost under the leaves and dirt.

Instead of Jewish headstones, however, I found a concrete marker commemorating what was once the location of the community’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. At about the same time, a large man in his 50s and his aged mother noticed us and came by. We told them what we were looking for, shared the discovery of the plaque, and learned a bit about the history of the black community. It turns out Jews and African-Americans came to Luling in the 1880s, soon after the town was founded (1874) as a railroad junction for cotton growers. The mother was part of one of the founding families, as were many who still lived there. The Jewish families had since moved to San Antonio, Houston, and other big cities, following a well-worn pattern across the state. We asked after the Jewish Cemetery, and the man noted that just down the street there was a “white graveyard.” I thanked them, and asked them if I could take their picture at the site of the church. We warmly said our goodbyes and walked down the road. (Illustration 1)

Photograph of an African American couple standing next to a marker showing where the Bethel A.M.E. church used to be

We found a small, well-tended cemetery filled with stones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all bearing the signs of tradition–Hebrew texts and Jewish names–and of acculturation. (Illustration 2)

Grave stones from a "white" graveyard in Luling, Texas

Places of origin varied from Germany to Poland to Russia, as well as some noting Texas birthplaces (sadly, numerous infant deaths were marked as well). Anglicized names abounded as well, and one was quite striking in its noting the departed as a member of Woodmen of the World fraternal organization. My favorite stone was that of Harris Rednick, just one letter shy of redneck, whose stone featured what almost certainly was a Texas Star. (Illustration 3)

Gravestone of Harris Rednick from a graveyard in Luling, Texas

We hoped to top off the day with BBQ at the City Market, but alas they had unexpectedly sold out all their brisket and ribs to a passing tour bus! Still, this half-day in Luling became a short course in Texas, Jewish, and African-American history in one place.

All photographs by Robert Abzug.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

By Kali Nicole Gross

The discovery of a headless, limbless, racially ambiguous human torso near a pond outside of Philadelphia in 1887, horrified area residents and confounded local authorities. From what they could tell, a brutal homicide had taken place. At a minimum, the victim had been viciously dismembered. Based on the circumstances, it also seemed like the kind of case to go unsolved. Yet in an era lacking sophisticated forensic methods, the investigators from Bucks County and those from Philadelphia managed to identify two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a black southern migrant, and George Wilson, a young mulatto that Tabbs implicated shortly after her arrest. The ensuing trial would last months, itself something of a record given that most criminal hearings wrapped up in a week or so. The crime and its adjudication also took center stage in presses from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri.

Gross2 — Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison,” “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887.

The nature of the case allowed otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to become fodder for mainstream public discourses on race, gender, and crime. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants, George Wilson, would further inflame public anxieties about shifting notions of race and power in the Post-Reconstruction era, especially in regard to miscegenation and passing. The investigation itself and the treatment of the African Americans involved also afford a rare window onto early bigoted police practices such as racial profiling and issues of police brutality as well as sketching a nuanced portrait of intraracial violence. The murder and its investigation shed a rare light on the legal responses to urban violence and shows how those responses fundamentally contributed to crime in the black community.

Equally important is that a wealth of records and press coverage of the case allows for a richer understanding of the life of the infamous Hannah Mary Tabbs, the otherwise ordinary black woman at the heart of the story. What makes Tabbs such a provocative figure is that her life encompassed an extreme combination of the mundane and the extraordinary—a range that more wholly elucidates the complexities of black urban life. In many respects, Tabbs embodied those traits most common to the city’s black southern migrants. Like nearly fifteen percent of the city’s black residents, she migrated from Maryland roughly a decade after the Civil War. In accord with ninety percent of working black women in Philadelphia, she labored as a domestic—first for a Center City attorney and later for wealthy farmers in Eddington, where the torso would be found.

dd45259436fae5e600b63714126f2c30 — Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao

But Hannah Mary Tabbs also possessed a darker side. She had an adulterous affair with the victim, a man ten years her junior and, at the very least, participated in his murder. The home that she shared with her husband doubled as the scene of the crime. John Tabbs had an airtight alibi. Hannah Mary, however, could not account for her whereabouts and during the investigation, several witnesses would come forward and testify to her long history of violence. In addition to threatening her immediate family members, including her husband, she was reputed to have routinely and “violently insulted inoffensive persons.” The range of victims knew few boundaries, young and old, male and female alike—yet she never attacked whites. Tabbs undoubtedly knew all too well of the inadequacy and injustice of police protection for the black community, as well as the severity of the consequences she would face if she deigned to assault a white citizen.

Yet Hannah Mary’s violence also had practical functions. Black women were especially vulnerable to violent crime and had little recourse with respect to justice. Being an all around tough customer could serve as its own protection—people in the neighborhood knew that Hannah Mary was not someone to be messed with.

MaryFields — Mary Fields: “…a two-fisted, hard-drinking woman, who needed nobody to fight her battles for her. She smoked homemade cigars & carried a six-shooter plus a shotgun.” 19c American Women.

These aspects of her life, when taken together with Hannah Mary’s experiences in Philadelphia’s justice system, distinguish her from many of her peers. But where Hannah Mary Tabbs’s life diverges from the “norm” effectively maps the typography of black daily life as well as urban social strife. Her relationships offer an unusual glimpse of domestic violence—one that challenges customary definitions. Tabbs’s skirmishes with the victim, her neighbors, and family members provide a broader view of social tensions and the kinds of violence that occurred within black families.

Her erotic pursuits, too, afford a different understanding of how black women in the nineteenth century navigated sexuality. Most historians interested in black sexuality point to black women dissembling their sexuality in an effort to stave off potential sexual attacks. While certainly true, this phenomenon has made it difficult for historians to get a sense of how African Americans engaged in sexual pleasure. Tabbs’s passionate affair along with how she used violence to safeguard the relationship move us past silence about black women’s desire for sexual gratification at the same that it points to the lengths that some might have had to go to obtain it.

This case, this story, and the black woman at the heart of it forces us to move past binary notions of race, gender, and sexuality but also, too, it resists snap judgments about who exactly is good or evil and calls into question the validity of standard notions of justice.

Adapted from Kali Nicole Gross’s new book: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Top photo: Rogues’ Gallery Books (1887) Courtesy of the Philadelphia City Archives.

On Flags, Monuments, and Historical Myths

By Joan Neuberger

In response to student demand and in the wake of decisions made elsewhere in the southern U.S. to remove Confederate flags, UT-Austin President Greg Fenves appointed a Task Force to consider the removal of monuments to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders that occupy a central site on the UT-Austin Campus.

A graffiti-covered Confederate statue on the quad on the campus at UT Austin

Understanding history and separating historical analysis from historical myth is essential for any society. One of the many disturbing aspects of Dylann Roof’s murder of nine African Americans on June 17, is his justification of White supremacy on historical grounds. And one of the signs that we could be doing a better job as historians is the CNN poll that shows the majority of White Americans see the Confederate flag as a “symbol of southern pride” rather than a “symbol of racism.”

Over the next few weeks, Not Even Past will offer readers historical sources, readings, and commentary on these events. Last week, Mark Sheaves collected past articles devoted to the history of slavery and its legacy in the US and provided us with an annotated list.

Today we offer the historical analysis and commentary from journalists and historians primarily writing online. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more reading and news from the Task Force. (We will add to the list as relevant articles appear.)

First, “Causes Lost But Not Forgotten: George Washington Littlefield, Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memories at the University of Texas at Austin,” an article by Alexander Mendoza about the controversies that have dogged the statues since their inception.

“Monuments to Confederacy have their own History at Texas Capitol,” by Lauren McGaughy

Memorial plaque of the Children of the Confederacy Creed erected by the Texas Division of the Children of the Confederacy

Many southerners claim that Confederate flags and monuments are reflections of southern “heritage,” not racism. On the Nursing Clio blog, Sarah Handley-Cousins discusses the uses of heritage as a concept and a badge, “Heritage is Not History: Historians, Charleston, and the Confederate Flag.”

A 2011 Pew Research Center survey that showed that more people believe the Civil War was fought over states’ rights rather than over slavery.

In “Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong,” James W. Loewin addresses some of the ways southerners rewrote Civil War history in Texas and elsewhere.

To document the centrality of slavery to the reasons southern states went to war, Ta Nehisi-Coates wrote “What This Cruel War was Over,” arguing that “the meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.”

(And in case you haven’t read Nehisi-Coates’ searing history of relentless White efforts to prevent Blacks from obtaining economic security, here it is: The Case for Reparations.)

Finally, Bruce Chadwick on one of the most pernicious, and successful, purveyors of myths about “the southern way of life,” D.W Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation, 100 years old this year.

Added July 8-9, 2015:

On discussing the commemoration of the confederacy with students:
David C. Williard, “I don’t want my students to simply choose sides in a polemic between heritage and hate.”

It’s complicated. Not very, but a little.
Richard Fausset, “‘Complicated’ Support for Confederate Flag in White South.”

Added July 14, 2015
Many people argue that removing monuments is erasing history:
Alfred L. Brophy, “Why Northerners should Support Confederate Monuments“

Slavery and its legacy in the USA

By Mark Sheaves

Not Even Past has published many feature articles, book and film reviews, and podcasts on slavery and its legacy in the USA. The history of slavery is an important issue today, and the articles we publish aim to make publicly available the academic research and historical perspectives on this topic produced by graduate students and faculty at UT Austin. This body of work provides an overview of key issues important for anyone wanting to understand slavery and its legacy in the USA.

How has slavery shaped racial politics today? What was it like to be a slave? How different was the experience of slavery on plantations and in cities? Was the Emancipation Proclamation successful? How has slavery been portrayed in popular culture? Can slavery be mapped? Below you will find a thematic list of articles we have published offering some answers to these key questions.

Race and slavery’s lasting legacy:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, an exploration of the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history.

Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan offer historical perspectives on the casual killing of Eric Garner, highlighting slavery’s lasting legacy and the historical value of black life.

Concerned by misconceptions about slavery in public debate, Daina Ramey Berry dispels four common myths about slavery in America.

blacklives — Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

Urban Slavery:

In their article Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry explain the importance of understanding urban slavery: “Because of the great economic and social dominance of rural plantation-based slavery in the Americas, historians have long assumed that slave labor was not suited to cities and therefore slavery in American cities was insignificant. But a re-examination of slavery in cities throughout the Atlantic World has demonstrated the importance of urban areas to the slave economy and the adaptability of slave labor and slave ownership to metropolitan regions, especially port cities such as Savannah. Urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world.”

Interested to learn more about urban slavery? You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, a study of the unanticipated consequences of the Civil War for Confederate slaveholders and the dramatic efforts of the city’s black people to live life on their own terms in Savannah.

Tania Sammons’ essay on Andrew Cox Marshall, a former slave who went on to become a successful businessman and religious leader in pre-Civil War period Savannah.

From 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry talks about Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris offer further reading recommendations on Urban Slavery.

Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153

Experiencing Slavery:

Slavery is often discussed in terms of numbers and dates, human rights abuses, and its lasting impact on society. To be sure, these are all important aspects to understand, but one thing that is often given relatively short shrift is what it was like to actually be a slave. What were the sensory experiences of slaves on a daily basis? How can we dig deeper into understanding the lives of slaves and understand the institution as a whole?

On 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry discusses teaching the “senses of slavery,” a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present

You may also like:

Let the Enslaved Testify: Daina Ramey Berry discusses the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source.

Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

Labor and Gender:

Daina Ramey Berry discusses her book Swing the Sickle, an incisive look into the plantation lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Georgia.

For further reading, consult this list of classic studies, new works and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.

Emancipation Proclamation:

On the afternoon of January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing approximately three million people held in bondage in the rebel states of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards rectifying the atrocity of institutionalized slavery in the United States, but it was only one step and it had a mixed legacy, as these essays by UT Austin historians remind us.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished. One hundred years after it was signed, they viewed the civil rights movement as an effort to fulfill its original intent to bring not only legal freedom, but economic justice and individual dignity to the descendants of US slaves.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained and she offers us alternative sources for learning about the historical violent abuses of slave life.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

You might also like:

Jacqueline Jones on The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation

Henry Wiencek recommends Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial

Slavery in Popular Culture:

Historical films and books always distort the historical record for dramatic purposes. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. How has the history of slavery been presented in historical films?

Jermaine Thibodeaux reviews 12 Years a Slave (2013) and talks about the difficulty of dramatizing the ‘Peculiar Institution’.

Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany Gill, and The Associate of Black Women Historians comment on The Help (2011).

Nicholas Roland offers historical perspectives on Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux discuss Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) and Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993)

Mapping Slavery:

Henry Wiencek recommends two significant digitalization projects that help capture broad trends related to slavery and emancipation in the US:

Mapping the Slave Trade using Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Visualising Emancipation(s)‘, a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

First photo via The Texas Tribune

#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy

The historical value of black life and the casual killing of Eric Garner.

by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan

This article first appeared in The American Prospect (December 5, 2014).

In less than a month, our nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. This should be a time of celebratory reflection, yet Wednesday night, after another grand jury failed to see the value of African-American life, protesters took to the streets chanting, “Black lives matter!”

Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

This legislation declared that a grand assembly [jury] could “acquit” those who killed their slaves during a “correction” because a slaveowner could not be guilty of a felony for destroying “his owne property.” Given such laws, the history of commodification before 1865 is clear: The enslaved were chattel—movable and disposable forms of property valued only as long as their labor produced wealth for their owners. A slave in need of “correction” could be destroyed with impunity. Black life existed on a pendulum, either valued or worthless according to the vagaries of the marketplace. With the abolition of slavery, it appeared that black life would no longer be determined by the starkness of a racial marketplace; however, in the aftermath of slavery, the devaluation of black life continues.

The abolition of slavery did not do away with the commodification of black people. Instead, in a nation founded on the idea that black life was only of value when it produced wealth for the elite, free black people became associated with sloth and violence. Slavery meant that black people had no intrinsic human worth, but were only of interest for the monetary value that they could convey. Apparently, freedom could not dislodge the fundamental belief that casual killing could be excused. Free or not, black men and women have remained disposable.

In 1886, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon of this “crime.” Twenty years after slavery, the state exonerated the murder of an African American, killed in full view of a judge and jury in a courtroom. Clearly Geiger’s life, and the lives of the black women he was defending, had no value in the eyes of the jury. Black death was deemed the legitimate and justifiable response to a black man who’d transgressed the boundaries of his proper place.

We live at a moment when many black men and women have secured our economic and social standing in this country—a moment at which black men and women occupy positions of prominence, influence and wealth. And yet this spate of murders at the hands of law enforcement clearly tells us that, on a fundamental level, black life does not matter. What does it mean that in 2014 we must warn our children that any one of us can be recast as dangerous monsters, whose pleas for breath, ignored on camera, might awaken the sleeping giant? We must say to ourselves and our children that, for many people, our lives, no longer associated with the accumulation of wealth for others, now do not matter at all.

How could this happen?” This is the question our own children asked us in the wake of the grand jury decisions regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner. This is the question reverberating in our communities. This is the question we ask ourselves. And yet, as scholars of slavery we know the answer. It happened because life that is bought and sold is life that can be reduced to surplus. Life that can be disposed of. Life that can be dismissed.

We are appalled by these deaths. But we are equally appalled by our ability to make sense of them. We live embedded in the afterlife of slavery. We are a nation that has failed to grapple with our past.

When the Virginia House of Commons argued that no one could be charged with committing a felony for a homicide that amounted to the destruction of their own property, it set in motion a racial logic in which we are still entangled. No one will be punished for the taking of black life. Darren Wilson’s actions are understood by the grand jury and many members of his community as unfortunate—but justified. The only valuable thing lost during those four hours as Michael Brown’s body lay uncovered in the street was Officer Darren Wilson’s peace of mind. Million-dollar war chests and speaking engagements will compensate Wilson. Because in the current racial marketplace, the only people compensated for the loss of black lives are those who take them. Black life is only valued when it’s harnessed to white capital.

What we are left with is a perversion of value. A society in which the taking of black life—in public, on camera—is of no consequence. Black men and women appear to be disposable to all but the families and communities who mourn them. We are reduced to the fury and loss and pathos encompassed in our screaming assertion that black lives matter.

Daina Ramey Berry, an associate professor of history and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project.

Jennifer L. Morgan, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, is currently a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.

« Previous Page