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#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.

Student Showcase – “America’s Dirty Little Secret”: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Harshika Avula, Lekhya Kintada, Daniel Noorily, Bharath Ram, Kevin Zhang
Health Careers High School
Senior Division
Group Website

Between 1932 and 1972, doctors from the United States Public Health Service undertook a project in rural Alabama to allegedly treat “bad blood” and other illnesses among local African-Americans. But these doctors’ real agenda was to observe the impact of untreated syphilis. Over four decades, 600 African-Americans, believing they were receiving genuine medical attention, were given placebos and prevented from treating their syphilis. To this day, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment remains one of the most controversial moments in the history of American medicine.

Harshika Avula, Lekhya Kintada, Daniel Noorily, Bharath Ram and Kevin Zhang created “‘America’s Dirty Little Secret’: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,”a website for Texas History delving into this dark chapter of medical history. Their site explores the study’s origins, how it operated and the individuals it used.

Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo (Wikipedia)

Officially titled “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro,” the experiment, originally designed to study the progression of untreated syphilis in African American men for six months, ran from 1932 to 1972. The study had 600 participants: 399 with syphilis and 201 in the control group. The doctors lured the participants with false incentives, and although penicillin, a cure for syphilis, was available in 1947, physicians did not treat the participants.

Government document depicting number of patients with syphilis and number of controlled non-syphlitic patients, 1969 (Wikipedia)

The 600 sharecroppers involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study sought compensation for the damages incurred during the experiment. The progress of the Civil Rights Movement and the rights previously promised to human research subjects in the Nuremberg Code only served to encourage public support of the trial. After being subjected to prejudice and inequality, the participants and their families felt the court’s award was inadequate. The final settlement awarded $10 million divided among the living patients and their relatives.

The latest terrific work from Texas high school students:

A documentary on one man’s attempt to fight injustice in World War II America

A research paper on the balance between public health and personal liberty

Mapping The Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)

By Henry Wiencek

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It’s hard to conceptualize so many men and women being uprooted from their homes. But Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database helps users understand the vast proportions of this perverse exodus. The site pieces together historical data from 35,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 and arranges them onto graphs and maps, offering readers a geographic, demographic, and even environmental context for the slave trade.

Screenshot of “Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

While people may assume that one singular “slave trade” took place, the database maps demonstrate that many existed. And not just across the Atlantic, but around the globe. Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900 charts the routes slave traders followed from Africa to various international ports. But you might be surprised at some of their destinations—traders ventured from East Africa to Arabia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and even various ports in India. Although the largest number of slaving ships do land in Brazil or the Caribbean, this map demonstrates that Africa’s slave trade was very much feeding a world market. The variety of international ports participating in the trade is also striking. This was not a black market undertaken by a depraved few, but rather a thriving worldwide industry that brought ships, employment and wealth to numerous communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The maps make this point visually with striking impact.

Screenshot of “Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins” (Emory University)

The site also reminds readers that the process of moving enslaved Africans across the ocean was as much an environmental process as an economic one. The map, Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins reveals how oceanic forces played a role in determining the travel routes for slave ships. Red and blue lines respectively denote winds and currents swirling between Africa and the Americas, facilitating particular geographic courses better suited for crossing the ocean. These natural forces effectively created two separate “slave-trading systems,” as the site identifies them: one originating in Europe and North America and the other originating in Brazil. Historians have certainly detailed the racism and greed motivating the slave trade, but comparatively little time examining the environmental processes that made it possible. Particular centers of trade emerged along the coasts of Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa to meet an economic need, but also to harness the currents and winds essential to moving so many men and women such vast distances. And here too, the visual character of the map makes it easy to see how natural forces worked to shape the historical events.

Numerical timeline graphing the number of African captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1500 to 1866 (Emory University)

In addition to these visual aids, the site also includes a more quantitative rendering of this nefarious business. A timeline graphs the number of captives who embarked and disembarked between 1500 and 1867. Users can make the information even more precise by expanding or contracting the time frame or manipulating different variables, including sites of disembarkation, embarkation, and nationality of the slave ship. This visual tool reveals a steadily growing trade, with the number of embarked Africans peaking at around 115,000 in 1792. You will also find a chilling disparity between the number of “Embarked” and “Disembarked” Africans in the statistics—a powerful indication of the deadly voyages these individuals were forced to endure.

A white slave trader inspecting an African male up for sale, ca. 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sheer numbers documented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are astonishing. With much of the globe participating, an elaborate network of ports, ships and trade routes uprooted millions of African souls with ruthless efficiency. Some users might find the site’s emphasis on graphs and maps to be sanitizing or dehumanizing to the enslaved individuals—too many numbers and figures, not enough people. But the story this site wants to tell is a big and highly important one. The African slave trade had a global reach; it was an environmental force as well as an economic one; and it displaced millions upon millions of men and women from their homes. Visualizing the statistics makes the global reach of their human toll palpable in new ways.

Earlier editions of the New Archive:

Charley Binkow reads through declassified CIA documents relating to the creation of Radio Free Europe

And Henry Wiencek explores a new, more visual, way of understanding emancipation in America

Handbook of African American Texas

By Joan Neuberger

Do you love Texas history? The Texas State Historical Association, which makes Texas history readily accessible through its Digital Gateway to Texas History, now offers a huge, new, terrific series of readings in the Handbook of African American Texas.

Launched on Juneteenth, 2013, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached African American Texans, this 800 article online encyclopedia includes more than 300 new entries and is part of the 26,000 article collection called the “Handbook of Texas.” The project was envisioned and spearheaded by Merline Pitre of Texas Southern University and former TSHA president. She worked with Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell of the University of North Texas and TSHA chief historian.

Read articles about the Victory Grill, originally opened in 1945 for servicemen returning from fighting in World War II (and pictured below).

Or the history of the African Methodist Episocpal Church in Texas (this is the Wesley Chapel AME Church in Georgetown, built in 1904).

Photograph of the front facade of the Wesley Chapel AME Church in Georgetown, Texas

You can read about everything from Black Cowboys to Black Visual Artists, and everything in between: African American Texans in the arts, business, community organizations, education, the military, journalism, religion, sports, and slavery & civil rights.

You can find an introduction to this wonderful new resource in the Newsletter of the TSHA.

Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons.

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.

New Books in Women’s History

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Judy Coffin:

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day, (2013).
A history of shame and changing social norms, of privacy and how a “right” to privacy was established, and of changes in what families will and will not confess — to themselves and to others. It’s bold, refreshing, and readable. (In fact it comes with Hilary Mantel’s endorsement.) Published in Great Britain in January, the book due out here at the beginning of April. You can read the introduction on the Amazon website, and pre-order. This is a book that everyone interested in gender, sexuality, and families will want to read.

Linda Greenhouse & Reva Seigel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, (2010).
Here’s another readable and important book. It reconstructs the everyday politics of contraception and abortion before Roe v. Wade, making it clear that the now landmark decision was one case among many, the justices’ reasoning was rather narrowly cast. This is not an all-roads-led-to-Roe story; it is much more interesting, unpredictable, and historical than that. Siegel is a professor at Yale Law School and Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Lizeth Elizondo:

Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, (2009).
Catherine Ramirez illuminates the ways in which Mexican-American women rebelled and chose to express their individuality by joining the popular zoot suit movement of the 1940s. By focusing on the women behind the suit, Ramirez offers a revisionist interpretation of the involvement of women in the infamous Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943.

Alison Frazier:

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2012).
In one volume, Heffernan presents the essential text and tools for readers to begin thinking through the unique and precious “prison diary” of Vibia Perpetua, the visionary young mother who led a mixed-gender group of Christians to martyrdom in early third-century North Africa.

Laurie Green:

Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, (2012).
In contrast to the enormous attention paid to the acclaimed African American singer, actor, radical and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, his extraordinary wife, Eslanda “Essie” Robeson has remained in the historical shadows. For the first time, in Ransby’s biography, we can grasp her amazing lifework, including her intellectual career as an anthropologist and journalist, and her passionate involvement in women’s rights, racial justice and anti-colonialist movements on an international scale.

Janine Jones:

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of a Harem Girlhood, (1995).
Scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi’s captivating memoir of her childhood in a Moroccan harem during the end of the French Protectorate is not to be missed.

Halidé Edib, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New, 2nd ed., (2009).
Turkish journalist, novelist, and early feminist activist Halide Edib’s lyrical memoir of growing to adulthood during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire is filled with stories of tragedy, love, and strength.

Anne Martinez:

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, (2012).
Schaeffer puts desire in the context of the global economy, class, and cultural citizenship in this book about transnational cyber-relationships since the 1990s.

Joan Neuberger:

Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, (2006).
“I started school in 1948. In my class of more than forty children, I was the only one who had a father.” This memoir traces Marina Goldovskaya’s career in Soviet television and her emergence as Russia’s best known documentary film maker. Along the way, we get an inside look at the everyday politics of survival and success in two of late-twentieth-century Russia’s most interesting industries.

Megan Seaholm:

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, (2012).
The significant role that women played in the rise of conservatism from the 1950s through the 1964 presidential campaign. This careful study of conservative women in southern California explains how “populist housewives” became impassioned activists who influenced the conservative agenda for decades.

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, (2011).
Fifty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, often credited with igniting the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Coontz examines this book and the impact it had on readers.

Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, (2010).
Cultural historian Susan Douglas has written a perceptive and often humorous book about the way that icons of popular culture encouraged a generation of women (the “millennials”) to believe that feminism had accomplished its goals.

Ann Twinam and Susan Deans-Smith both recommend:

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, (2006).
The wonderfully readable and compelling book tells the story of Malintzin, the young Nahua woman who became Hernando Cortés’ translator and mistress during the conquest of Mexico. Townsend takes on the difficult task of giving voice to someone who, while typically vilified as a traitor and sexual siren, left no words of her own. The resulting portrait allows us to see Malintzin’s understanding of her situation and the difficult choices she made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003)

by Cameron McCoy

For African Americans in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a dream destination; black migrants were drawn to it (much as they were drawn to Chicago and Detroit) in search of freedom from the Jim Crow South. However, Los Angeles African Americans quickly confronted their limitations as a minority group. Jobs, housing, education, and political representation spearheaded blacks’ struggles for greater equality in Los Angeles. In L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present, Josh Sides argues that the migratory experience of blacks in Los Angeles was more representative of the history of urban America than that of northeastern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

Sides begins L.A. City Limits by introducing the Great Migration from the early 1900s through the 1930s, as African Americans migrated from Louisiana and Texas. He explores the growth, development, and sustainment of the Los Angeles African American community as compared to the nation as a whole, both in the north and the south. Sides highlights the roles of Leon Washington and Loren Miller as members of the black press, and the significance of the color line in the labor industry as it applied to blacks and Mexican Americans. He discusses the complex nature of racial equality and organized labor among blacks and Mexican Americans. He also uses several examples that emphasize the separation of the races; not along ethnic lines, but rather to the extent of “white” and “non-white.” As Sides notes, “Multicultural neighborhoods brought blacks and other groups into contact with one another not just as neighbors but also, at times, as fellow parishioners, club members, consumers, friends, and even spouses.” Although Los Angeles African Americans did not live in all-black neighborhoods like in Chicago and Detroit, they still struggled to define their status and “were justifiably ambivalent about their progress” prior to World War II.

World War II was a landmark event for African Americans. Between 1940 and 1970, the black population of Los Angles swelled from 63,744 to nearly 763,000. Sides labels this period as the “Second Great Migration,” and provides case studies of the African American experience from three southern cities: Houston, New Orleans, and Shreveport. He then examines how Los Angeles adjusted to this large influx of black southern migrants, revealing the adverse effects of racial segregation, by highlighting major World War II industry opportunities, the “Negro problem,” and the challenges migrants faced as they settled in South Central Los Angeles.

During the postwar era Los Angeles African Americans experienced a negative restructuring of the postwar economy, as economic parity with whites remained outside their grasp. However, there were advances in employment in major industries such as automobile, rubber, and steel manufacturing. Nevertheless, Sides emphasizes that the aerospace industry, which produced significant suburban residential growth, held to racist hiring practices. Despite these economic and employment limitations, Sides concludes that after World War II, life for black men and women in Los Angeles vastly improved. Housing discrimination during the urban crisis in the postwar era, however, together with “ghetto flight” and the emergence of a black middle class widened the gap among blacks, both financially and geographically. In addition, Mexican Americans, who at times adopted a “white or near white” identity, occupied an area within the racial hierarchy where they were viewed with far more tolerance and acceptance than blacks, according to Sides. This increased Mexican integration into white society was largely a reflection of white attitudes toward blacks and Mexicans.

Sides’s treatment of black political activism illustrates the steps Los Angeles African Americans took in responding to workplace discrimination and police brutality. In his treatment of black activism, Sides examines the signature event of the 1965-Watts Riot and the ideological differences between prominent black organizations, arguing that during the 1940s and 1950s the Communist Party was “the most outspoken and militant advocate for black equality in postwar Los Angeles.”

L.A. City Limits is an important work for students and historians of the American West, race relations, and urban studies. Sides takes a defensive position in his study of the city of Los Angeles in comparison to Chicago and Detroit. He argues that scholarly studies overemphasize the Great Migration to northern cities and a study of Los Angeles provides a more comprehensive view of the overall experience. Sides convincingly constructs the racial hierarchy among minorities, providing an element of Latin American studies that is largely absent from most Great Migration studies. Nevertheless, L.A. City Limits does not completely live up to its title. Sides’s work centers on the years 1945–1964, as opposed to the Great Depression to the present. Despite this limitation, Sides’s examination is a suitable companion to works such as Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and James R. Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989).

Photo Credits:

An employee of the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, CA, circa 1940s (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Los Angeles, circa 1950 (Image courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration)

Henry Wiencek Sr on Thomas Jefferson, Slave owner

Laura Miller begins her review of Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, with this:

“No founding father wrote more eloquently on behalf of liberty and human rights than Thomas Jefferson, and none has a more troubling record when it comes to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. At present, the popular understanding of Jefferson’s shilly-shallying on this issue doesn’t extend much deeper than knowing smirks about Sally Hemings and the (unacknowledged) children Jefferson fathered with her. We tend to assume that the dirtiest secrets of the past have to do with sex. But, as Henry Wiencek explains in his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” the real filth is in the ledger books.”

On Friday, October 26, 2012, Mr Wiencek visited us at the UT History department to discuss the new book with Professors Jacqueline Jones and Robert Olwell and answer questions from the audience. Listen to the discussion here or click the link above.

Henry Wiencek, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” Smithsonian, October 2012

Laura Miller, Master of the Mountain reviewed, Salon, October 14, 2012.

Posted Monday, November 5, 2012

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000

by Laurie Green

Fifteen years ago, Alexander Street Press, in conjunction with the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, launched Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000, an online database edited by historians Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. What began as a classroom project designed by Sklar to give undergraduate students the opportunity to collect, edit, analyze – and get excited about – historical documents, went live in December 1997 after being developed into a full-blown documentary database by Sklar and Dublin.

Newly enfranchised women registering to vote, Seattle c.1910 (Wikimedia commons)

The “Documentary Projects,” in particular, will interest Not Even Past readers. Scholars pose a historical question, write an introduction with background information, and offer up a set of documents. In How Did African American Women Shape the Civil Rights Movement and What Challenges Did They Face?, created by Gail S. Murray, a December 1963 letter from Septima Clark to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conveys Clark’s critique of members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, King’s organization, for being more interested in the “glamor” of direct action movements (involving civil disobedience and news headlines), than the day-to-day work of voter education that she believes will bring lasting change to the region. And in Judith N. McArthur’s How Did Texas Women Win Partial Suffrage in a One-Party Southern State in 1918?, correspondence offers evidence of how a group of savvy Texas suffragists negotiated the specific historical context of World War I, Prohibition, and the election of Governor Hobby to procure the vote in advance of the federal 19th Amendment, at least for American-born white women.

I love this database. It allows me to introduce students to primary sources, and allows them to get their feet wet in historical research and encourage them to come up with their own interpretations of documents. In the “Scholar’s Edition” (available through university libraries by subscription), the primary sources are organized by movement, so one can explore controversies related to such topics as the birth control movement, women’s suffrage, anti-lynching campaigns, and union organizing by immigrant women. The “Scholar’s Editon” site also includes a full run of issues of The Ladder: A Lesbian Review (1956-1972) and papers of the civil liberties exponent Elizabeth Glendower Evans, who championed the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti.

WASM has grown exponentially since 1997, adding thousands of new documents a year and growing such features as a book review section, outlines for classroom projects based on the documents, and a monthly online journal that combines standard fare of academic journals with new documentary projects and full-text documents. As has been true with most projects documenting women’s history, Sklar and Dublin’s venture has resembled a social movement in itself; they sought out scholars, wrote emails and hosted conference luncheons not only to publicize the site but to convince scholars of women and social movements to place on line a set of documents they have used in their research. They now have new horizons. Alexander Street Press has just launched Women and Social Movements – International.

Photo credits:

Warren K. Leffler, “Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the 1963 March on Washington,” 28 August, 1963

U.S. News and World Report via The Library of Congress

Harris & Ewing, “No rest for a weary filibuster. Washington, D.C., Jan. 27. Senator Claude A. Pepper, Democrat of Florida who spoke for 11 hours during the current filibuster against the Anti-lynching bill, points out to pretty Mrs. Pepper the interesting sections of his long winded talk as he printed in the Congressional Record,” Washington, DC, 27 January 1938

Harris & Ewing via The Library of Congress

Tips on How to Navigate the Women and Social Movements Website

Black Amateur Photography

by Joan Neuberger

The passion for recording our lives, fostered today by the availability of simple digital cameras and posting sites like Flickr, has a long history. As early 1898, ten years after Kodak released its portable, automatic #1 camera, something like 1.5 million people had seized the ability to shape their own image of the world by purchasing their own cameras.

African American leaders very early on understood the uses of photography for both self-expression and political struggle. Leigh Raiford notes, in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, that Sojourner Truth supported her cause by selling photos of herself at lectures and Frederick Douglass wanted to use photography to portray black life more accurately.

Inexpensive cameras offered everyone in the twentieth century the ability to represent themselves, including people who felt misrepresented. One of the most interesting segments of the exhibition, “For All the World to See,” mentioned in a previous blog on African American online history, is devoted to everyday, amateur, photography, “In Our Lives We are Whole: Snapshots of Everyday Life. 1935-75.” The online exhibit begins by saying:

“As the popularity of increasingly inexpensive and easily accessible cameras swept the nation in the early twentieth century, black Americans, like their white counterparts, relied on the snapshot to record and commemorate their lives and achievements. In the end, millions of African Americans took cameras into their hands and used them as the ultimate “weapon of choice” against racism. Snapshot by snapshot, these amateur photographers did for themselves what decades of mainstream representation could not: made visible the complexity of a people.”

Historical amateur photography, African American family photo albums, individual shots and series can be found all over Flickr. For example, informal photos and professional portraits can be found on the Black History Month set on the Flickr site of the Florida State Library and Archives.

An extraordinarily rich collection of everyday photos can be found on Flickr’s Black History Album and its related website, Black History Album. This family photo above, of a grandmother and her grandchildren, labeled “Happy Family,” was taken in 1902 (used with permission). For Black History Month, this website posted a survey of the books by Black photographers, beginning with Picturing the Promise: The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington. The site includes everything from the Civil War, through the Civil Rights movement, such as this beautifully captured everyday scene of an African American man going in the “colored entrance” of a movie house on a Saturday afternoon in Belzoni, Mississippi in 1939 (used with permission).

Today, African American amateur photography is supported by a wide range of institutions. In Chicago, for example, a group of professionals and amateurs have founded the Chicago Alliance for African American Photographers. The mission of the CAAAP is to document, preserve, and exhibit photographs of African American life. You can take a look at one of their exhibits, “The Awakening.”

African American History Online

By Joan Neuberger

If Digital History is “using new technologies to enhance research and teaching,” as the excellent website from the University of Houston puts it, then African American history is being well-served digitally. In honor of African American History month, I survey here one enormous and useful website that gives us all access to a very wide variety of materials.

Together, The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have constructed a wonderful site here for African American History Month, to “join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.”

This year’s theme, chosen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is Black Women in American Culture and History. But the sources available on this extensive website don’t seem to focus on women (maybe we have to wait until Women’s History Month in March for that). But the offerings are wide ranging: texts, podcasts, photographs, and videos of everything from Art and Baseball to poet Yusef Komunyakaa and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

One of the things I like best about this website is that each link makes it possible to learn a little about a subject and move on or to learn much more by following links deeper into the public digital offerings of each of these great institution’s holdings.

In this blog post I can only scratch the surface of this rich site.

Beginning with the homepage, links will take you to a handful of featured collections including the Library of Congress’s collection of Carl Van Vechten’s photographs of people connected with the Harlem Renaissance and to the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s current exhibition on slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello. It also has a link to the National Park Service’s online exhibit about the Tuskegee Airmen.

The largest subsection linked from the homepage is list of Exhibits and Collections, where links will take you to collections in the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The National Park Service, and the Smithsonian. Some of these are themselves quite extensive. Under “Culture and Folklife”, one collection from the Library of Congress, links to an exhibit, “African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship,” that includes dozens of full text books, including Phyllis Wheatley’s 1773 poems, an 800-page book on the Underground Railroad, several fugitives accounts of escape, recapture & re-escape, a number of works on the slave trade and slave revolts, songs and photographs from the abolitionist movement; photographs and newspaper articles dominate the twentieth-century section of the site. Each item can be easily followed into the Library of Congress collections for similar or related items. The African American Odyssey page also includes links to deep collections on Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, African American pamphlets from the 1820s-1909, and the 18-19c history of Slaves’ experiences with the courts. And that is just one page in one section of the African American Odyssey.

This site now gives us access to hundreds of early sound recordings (and related photos and print materials). My favorite example (one of ten collections listed for African American History Month) is “‘Now What a Time’: Blues, Gospel and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-43.” Listen, for example, to Sonny Chestain playing “Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home.” Or listen and look through the “John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip,” which Karl Miller discussed in his feature last month here on NEP. Here is Aunt Mollie MacDonald singing (and clapping) “Rosie.” That’s Mollie on the right in this fuzzy photo.

There are also eleven portal-links related to the history of slavery. A collection of materials on the transformation of Protestantism and construction of black religious experience from 1780-1925. Six sites on African Americans serving in the military. An exhibit about President Obama taking the oath of office on the Lincoln bible. Twelve sites listed under Culture and Folklife, that range from Florida to Chicago and Ohio and include 62 StoryCorps recordings of present-day interviews. Choosing at random, I listened to James Ransom and Cherie Johnson talking about their neighbor and Sunday School teacher, Miss Divine: “One of the things you prayed for, if you were in Miss Divine’s class, was ‘Lord, please let me get old enough, to get out of this class.’”

And even after all we’ve known and read and heard and watched about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, listening to Antoinette Franklin and Iriel Franklin talking about the strong women in their family brought me to tears.

Another fascinating set of sources is the collection of “First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920”, which includes more than a hundred diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives, all scanned and easily readable right on the site. The travel accounts alone range from an AME Bishop’s voyage to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1893, to the account of a young white woman, coming of age during the Civil War and moving through Mexico to Cuba where her family recreates the planation life they’d known at home.

There are thirteen sites on the Civil Rights movement, including some we have seen before here on NEP, like the beautiful NEH/PBS multimedia site to accompany the documentary on the Freedom Riders.

There is a link to the National Archives materials on the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” This page includes a list of discussion questions for teaching (or just thinking), youtube videos about the march, and links to other notable figures in African American history.

Visual images available for learning about African American history could be better represented here, but some searching and clicking reveals some very interesting materials. Most of the links I mentioned above have substantial visual components but the direct links to art exhibitions and to images are disappointing. The “Images” slideshow presents a fairly random selection of historical prints and photographs, an interesting introductory survey of sorts, but one that could have used more written descriptions of the images. And when you go down to “Images Used on this Site,” you only get links to a few individual shots from the very rich collections available deeper into the links listed under “Exhibits and Collections.”

The links under Art and Design are mixed. Several of the titles link to exhibits that are no longer available and most of the museums display only a tiny portion of their collections. Two of the links, however, are more satisfying. The Smithsonian’s African art museum offers a nice introduction to their collection with adequate historical and artistic descriptions. The National Museum for African American History and Culture has a couple nice exhibits (but not easy to find since the link is listed under the title of an exhibit that is gone). Eventually you get to “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” a wide ranging collection of images and material objects, accompanied by informative discussions of the role of the visual in inspiring activists and in providing evidence of atrocities that motivated others. Another part of the exhibit is devoted to the ambivalent images of African Americans broadcast on film and TV, and later, images produced by and for African Americans representing themselves in more complex ways, from the Black Panthers to ordinary people with snapshot cameras. I especially liked the exhibit of snapshots by ordinary people.

Back on the homepage, links to Audio/Video offers another extensive list of interesting things. There are videos of authors reading and discussing their own works, such as this one of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Komunyakaa from the 2011 National Book Festival. Lectures from the National Archives on a variety of historical topics. And music, poetry, and performing arts tapes of many other kinds.

Finally, this website offers a wide-ranging collection of materials organized specifically for teaching. The NEH has an excellent site, with the silly title, “Edsitement,” which offers teaching materials on the humanities broadly defined. Here there are links to targeted subjects like the NAACP’s challenge to D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation and JFK, the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights Movement. The National Archives’ teaching sites also present a wide range of great topics: The Many Faces of Paul Robeson, The arrest records of Rosa Parks, and a special page with resources for middle and high school students preparing projects for National History Day.

After spending several hours (much more than I planned) exploring this website, and finding a surprising number of thoroughly enjoyable and informative sites, I should say that while there is an enormous amount of diverse and high-quality material, none of it is a departure from the traditional kinds of sources that historians have learned to consult. Photographs and songs certainly open up new corners of historical experience for our consideration, but they don’t fundamentally change the way we work. Ultimately digital history may change the way historians conceptualize the past, but for that we have to look elsewhere. Stay tuned.

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