Black History Month Archives

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

Prior to the publication of “The Case for Reparations” in 2013, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a little-known blogger turned Senior Editor of The Atlantic magazine. Today, Coates has emerged as not only the top contemporary black intellectual, but a leading American thinker – regardless of race – with stinging critiques of President Barack Obama’s administration and American racism. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy traces the evolution of his writing career as it coincides with the eight years of the first black presidency, detailing Coates’ personal life as he completed each assignment, his relationship with Obama, and the public reaction to his essays. Coates chooses an article for each year of Obama’s presidency to describe the disparate moods of Americans towards racism, each essay blending testimonies and historical research. Coates provides a brief introduction to each article, all of which are published by The Atlantic, to describe the financial struggles he and his family faced while establishing himself as a writer, the inspiration and reasoning behind his subject choice, and his post-publication thoughts on each essay.

As Coates became a best-selling author with the publication of Between the World and Me, more attention was placed on his journalistic work. According to the author, these articles are joined here in an effort to provide a fresh take on the previous eight years to describe the historical and contemporary ideas of Black America, from within and without: the black conservatism of Bill Cosby; the nuances of black identity represented by Michelle Obama; the Civil War in the collective black memory and historical imagination; the uses and misuses of Malcolm X’s legacy; the limitations of a black presidency due to “white innocence”; the stifling of black wealth through discriminatory housing policies; the destructive power of negative stereotypes of black families and its relationship to mass incarceration; and Obama’s reflection on his eight years in office. Coates’ concluding epilogue, “The First White President,” describes how the “bloody heirloom” – or centuries of white supremacy and violence against black communities – is used to negate the first black presidency through the election of Donald Trump.

Coates seeks to push boundaries, not only to demystify notions of a post-racial society, but to contextualize America’s first black presidency within the broader scope of American racism. The author explores the complexities of Obama’s attempts to carve out a path in American politics, pitting the impact of black radicalism and the president’s rich knowledge of black history against a persona made palatable for white Americans – what Coates refers to as the “third way – a means of communicating his affection for white America without fawning over it.” The irony in Coates’ assessment is that a distinctly black man, one who refrained from common ideas of assimilation, could rise to the nation’s highest office while still facing the limitations that black Americans experience individually and collectively. While Coates makes the simplified argument that a black presidency does not equate to the end of racism, in these articles he also seeks to uncover the nuances of racial discrimination in Obama’s response to white racial sensibilities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (via Flickr)

The unique writing career of Ta-Nehisi Coates has produced a leading black voice in public discourse on historical and contemporary American race relations. In a way, it is fitting for Coates to trace his writing career alongside Obama’s presidency given the remarkable similarities of a black journalist and a black politician maintaining their distinctive racial qualities when, historically, they would be rejected by white America in such fields. Coates’ platform in The Atlantic gives him for a wide, predominately white audience that most black journalists do not enjoy. Coates recognizes this fact in the introduction to his article on reparations, claiming that this particular essay “was a lesson in what serious writing married to the right platform could actually achieve.” In other words, arguments that not only surround reparations, but the systematic oppression of black Americans found in black publications that target a black readership are reduced by white audiences to unimportant racial grievances who dismiss “legitimate ideas” because they are not considered by “people of the right ‘reputation.’”

When evaluated individually, each of Coates’ articles tackles a sensitive subject involving the black community, past and present, that is often hidden or unacknowledged by white America. Placed alongside each other, Coates’ powerful illustrations capture the broad, ever-changing nature of American racism. Coates’ thoughts, however, are a departure from the black intellectual tradition, most notably due to his lack of religious faith as evidenced throughout his work. Not only does Coates identify as an atheist, but he makes no attempt to comfort his audience by offering faith or promoting values that transcend America’s history of racism and oppression. Instead, he forces his audience to confront the destructive nature of prejudice, telling the reader that no one can save us but ourselves; ultimately, it is up to us to decide the next move.

The Works of Steven Hahn

By Jacqueline Jones

This week on February 15 and 16, the Littlefield Lecture Series in the Department of History presents Dr. Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian and Professor of History at New York University. (Details on the lectures below).

Here, Prof. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of The Department of History and regular contributor to Not Even Past, offers a short review essay of Dr Hahn’s major works.

In all his works, Steven Hahn, Professor of History at New York University, seeks to challenge, or at least de-center, prevailing historical narratives especially for the period 1830 to 1920 or so. The results are invariably provocative and fresh.

His first book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983) took us away from the great planters of the South, and examined small, non-slaveholding farmers. Before the Civil War, these family farmers were self-sufficient, growing corn, instead of cotton, and relying on the spinning and weaving skills of their wives and daughters. The war caused severe damage to these homesteads and, in order to repair and rebuild, farmers had to secure loans from local banks and other credit institutions. To get these loans, they had to promise to grow cotton, which could be sold reliably in foreign and domestic markets. Bad harvests meant that increasing numbers of these small farm owners lost their property to the bank, causing tremendous resentment and paving the way for the Populist Party of the 1890s.

His second book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2005) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Merle Curti Prize in Social History, and was also a finalist for both the Lincoln and Frederick Douglass Prize. In this book, Hahn seeks to account for black political organization before and after the Civil War, looking not to the cities or to the North, but to the rural South. Here he finds resistance to slavery before the war and a variety of proto-political organizations after the war. These include extended kin networks, the Republican Party, emigrationist schemes (to go out West or to Africa), and, in the 1920s Garveyism, a movement for black empowerment and pride organized Marcus Garvey. Hahn locates the sources of these organizations in families, churches, and workplaces, and suggests that during Reconstruction and after, black men and women offered up an expansive view of American citizenship—one that highlighted the role of work, family, and schools in defining equality for all citizens. The result of this organizational activity was a nation within a nation—that is, a sense of heighted black collective consciousness–that paved the way for the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century and beyond.

Hahn’s most recent book, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) offers a fresh overview of U.S. history during this period. Hahn chronicles the growth of a centralized U.S. government that was the agent of both industrial capitalism and expansionism of various kinds. He considers the land grab in Mexico (the War of 1848), the destruction of native tribes in the West during the last third of the nineteenth century, and imperialist designs on Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898. He argues that these wars of conquest and relentless expansionism had wrenching effects on various groups—not only blacks and Indians, but also New England farmers and others who lost out when the circuits of international trade came to dominate the American economy. He shows how different groups reacted to these developments, fighting back against employers, landowners, and government officials. This book offers a counter-narrative to the conventional view, which highlights “progress” in the form of technological innovations, the growth in foreign immigration, and the spread of the factory system after the Civil War—all supposed to be ingredients in the forging of a “modern” nation.

In all these works, Hahn brings to the fore groups that have not received their due as political and proto-political actors (small family farmers, slaves and freedpeople, Indians, and industrial workers), in order to provide a fuller, more nuanced picture of the development of industrial capitalism and the role of the state in promoting expansionism (in the form of conquest over vulnerable groups) at home and abroad.

The Littlefield Lectures:

Day 1 | Wednesday, February 15

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41026

Day 2 | Thursday, February 16
Reconstruction and the American Political Tradition
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41028

Directions: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/directions
Parking: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/parking

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary to attend.

More from Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

History in a “Post-Truth” Era.
On the Myth of Race in America.
On Civil War Savannah.

Before Hamilton

By Peter Kunze

In a recent interview with Fusion about how Hamilton (2015) “revolutionized” Broadway for performers of color, the Tony Award-winning lead, Leslie Odom, Jr., recalled,

“I saw a reading of Hamilton at Vassar. There’s four men of color on stage, singing a song about friendship and brotherhood, and it undid me. I had never seen anything, anything like that. And I just knew that this thing was so special, and that the world needed to see it.”

obama_greets_the_cast_and_crew_of_hamilton_musical_2015

Members of the Hamilton cast greet President Barack Obama in 2015, Leslie Odom, Jr. is in the center, in a blue coat (via Wikimedia commons).

There’s no denying that the decision to cast Hamilton with actors of colors—save King George—was an important decision worthy of praise. (The show has also faced criticism, though, for leaving real-life people of color out of the musical retelling.) Odom’s comment, however, should be treated with a healthy skepticism, because it unintentionally obscures the long history of musicals by, about, and for people of color. While Odom celebrates the representational politics of Hamilton, he overlooks the long history of people of color writing, producing, directing, and starring in a theater of their own, on and off Broadway. From the Chitlin’ Circuit to El Teatro Campesino, people of color have long found creative expression on stages across the United States, often when they were excluded from more mainstream venues. Diversity on Broadway remains an important issue and it’s hardly the progressive beacon one may hope. Nevertheless, several key shows and performers paved the way for Hamilton, including Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

lin-manuel_miranda_philippa_soo_leslie_odom_jr-_and_christopher_jackson_white_house_march_2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Philippa Soo, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Christopher Jackson perform at the White House, March 2016 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Musical theater historians note that the Broadway musical is one of only two native-born art forms; the other is, of course, jazz. The defining moment of musical theater’s maturation for many such scholars is the 1927 premiere of Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s bestseller. Perhaps the most iconic moment in the show is when Joe, the African American stevedore, looks out over the Mississippi and bellows, “Ol’ Man River,” a moment immortalized on screen by Paul Robeson. Show Boat’s legacy rests upon its status as an “integrated musical”—that is, a show that seamlessly integrates the spoken dramatic portions (the “book”) with the music. Rather than musical interludes, characters break into song at moments of dramatic tension or comic relief. Sixteen years later, in 1943, Oscar Hammerstein II, now partnered with Richard Rodgers, produced Oklahoma!, which furthered the efforts to unite songs, lyrics, book, and choreography to create a serious work of dramatic literature. Critics at the time praised the arrival of a new American art form—one, of course, that was years in the making and deeply indebted to various European and American cultural traditions.

This narrative of artistic progress, promoted in large part by Oscar Hammerstein II himself, has been challenged in recent years. Last theater season, George C. Wolfe staged Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, not so much a revival as a metamusical about the making of the original show (the Tony Award nominators recognized the show in the Best Musical rather than the Best Revival of a Musical category.) Wolfe argues this popular show was an important forerunner of the “integrated musical,” but equally important, it reminds us of the rich tradition of African American theater and people of color theater more broadly.

pearl_bailey_moms_mabley_the_pearl_bailey_show_1971

Moms Mabley and Pearl Bailey performing on The Pearl Bailey Show, February 1971 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The African American musical, in particular, has a long and storied history dating back before and including Shuffle Along. Performers like Moms Mabley, the Nicholas Brothers, and Lena Horne were featured in Broadway revues, and while Porgy and Bess (1935) was developed by white creators, the opera had an all-black cast and remains a landmark in American music. The late 1960s into the 1970s saw several all-black musicals, including Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), Raisin (1973), Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976), and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978). The most popular was The Wiz (1975), running for over 1600 performances and serving as the basis for the Diana Ross film (1978). Pearl Bailey led an all-black revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1975, furthering the practice of non-traditional casting that has sparked a good deal of debate on Broadway in recent years. In the 1980s, August Wilson began writing the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of ten plays documenting black life during each decade of the 20th century. Of course, some of these shows had creative teams including or dominated by white talent, but the effort to stage black lives should not be dismissed. Many of these shows introduced or showcased the leading black talent of their respective eras.

Screenshot from The Wiz, 1978 (via Youtube).

The early 1990s saw shows like Once on This Island (1990), Five Guys Named Moe (1992), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), and Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (1996), showcasing the talents of performers like Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and LaChanze. It also saw the debut of Audra McDonald, perhaps the pre-eminent Broadway star of her generation, having won six Tony Awards for her work in plays and musicals—more than any other stage actor ever. Shows with multiethnic casts, including Rent (1996), The Lion King (1997) and Ragtime (1998), offered a more inclusive theater and vision of America. Nevertheless, Latinx and Asian American performers on Broadway unfortunately remain less visible than their white counterparts. In recent years, the romanticized stereotypes and misguided multiculturalism found in The King and I (1951), West Side Story (1957) and Miss Saigon (1991) have been countered by a musical theater about and by people of color, including Allegiance (2015), Fela! (2009), and Miranda’s earlier effort, In the Heights (2008). Miranda also translated the lyrics of the Puerto Rican characters into Spanish for the 2009 bilingual revival of West Side Story, directed by the show’s original book writer, Arthur Laurents. Unable to compete with the spectacle and backing available to megamusicals, these shows often had relatively short runs. Hamilton, however, may be the first contemporary show to weather the storm and emerge as a long-running success on par with The Producers (2001) or The Book of Mormon (2011). In fact, Hamilton was the highest grossing show last year, followed closely by The Lion King.

In the Heights won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008 (via Playbill).

At this point, it has become nearly impossible for mainstream critics and commentators to discuss Hamilton without resorting to hyperbole. It has received winning endorsements from President Obama to Oprah Winfrey as well as Tonys, a Grammy, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. To be sure, these accolades for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, his production team, and the cast were well-deserved. Yet in appreciating the original contribution of Hamilton, we must not forget the shows that paved the way—shows Miranda has acknowledged in interviews and in Hamilton itself—to understand the rich, albeit complex, history of representation on the boards and behind the scenes of Broadway.

You may also like:
Charlotte Canning writes about internationalism and US theatre during the 2oth century.
NEP contributors discuss great books in US theatre history.
Julia Gossard asks, “Why is Anne Hathaway So Sad?” while examining the history behind Les Misérables.

Beyoncé as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

By Edward Shore

The Digital Public Libraries of America (DPLA) has published sets of primary sources to help students sharpen analytical skills, to empower educators to breathe life into history in their classrooms, and to enlighten anyone anywhere interested in history. The anthology focuses primarily on U.S history from the colonial era to the present. It compiles rare photographs, oral histories, political propaganda, speeches, advertisements, and other primary sources to tell sixty different stories. Themes range from the familiar— the “Exploration of the Americas” and the “Secession of the Southern States” — to the understudied— “Women and the Blues” and “American Indian Boarding Schools.” Each category contains between ten and twelve primary source materials. They humanize historical actors, contextualize major events, and “make real” the seemingly arcane and distant past. The public historians among us can use DPLA primary source sets to lend historical perspectives to contemporary debates.

Take, for instance, the uproar that has followed Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s halftime performance at Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, California. Critics lashed out at Beyoncé and her dancers for wearing Black Panther-inspired costumes and carrying signs demanding justice for Mario Woods. Woods, 26, who was shot dead by San Francisco police officers on December 2, 2015, after he was suspected of stabbing a pedestrian. “I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers,” Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, told Fox and Friends. “These are the people who protect her and protect us and keep us alive.” “I’m tired of #BlackLivesMatter,” added Patrick Hampton, an urban youth minister from New York. “I’m tired of the New Black Panthers. I’m tired of seeing women on TV twerking. I’m tired of the racial division.”

Beyonce performs at the Superbowl. Courtesy of Ezra Shaw/Getty Images.

Sadly, DPLA primary source sets do not elaborate upon the historical significance of twerking. But they can offer clues to explain why Beyoncé and her dancers paid tribute to the Black Panthers and #BlackLivesMatter during the Super Bowl.

Let’s start with the DPLA primary source set related to the “Black Power Movement.” The collection contains sermons, photographs, drawings, FBI investigations, and manifestos to shed light on the political and social movement whose advocates believed in racial pride, self-determination, and equality for all afro-descendant peoples. A sketch of a black man and woman captures an aesthetic that Beyoncé clearly sought to emulate: afro hair-dos, sleeveless blouse, a t-shirt with a raised black fist. That style was closely associated with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which originated in Oakland, California, some fifty miles away from Levi’s Stadium.

Black Panther Party logo, circa 1966. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Black Panthers’ 1966 party platform called for “an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.” We can surmise that Beyoncé’s tribute to the Black Panther Party was an expression of solidarity with the Bay Area African-American community after another fatal police shooting. According to the Guardian, the number of people killed by US police in 2015 reached 1,000 after Oakland police officers shot dead a man who allegedly pointed a replica gun at them. It was the 183rd such death recorded in California, by far the highest of any state. What better place to publicize police violence than the Super Bowl, the nation’s most popular television event where approximately 70% of athletes on the field were black?

The public historian can synthesize materials from several DPLA primary source sets to tell a larger story about race relations in the United States. For instance, the Transatlantic Slave Trade collection offers the historical context for Beyoncé’s message of protest. I came across an advertisement for a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina. “To be sold on board the ship the 6th of May next!” the caption reads. “A choice cargo of about 250 fine healthy NEGROES! The utmost care has been taken, and shall be continued, to keep them free from the danger of being infected with small pox onboard!”

Advertisement for a slave auction in Charleston, SC. Photo courtesy of Digital Public Library of America.

This disturbing image underscores the callous normalization of violence against black bodies. It also helps to explain why it was so critical for Black Power activists to foster black pride and reclaim human dignity through the articulation of a bold, uncompromising Afrocentric message and aesthetic. (If you are curious about what smallpox looks like, you can consult the “Exploration of the Americas” collection. It contains a 1910 photograph of a man infected with variola, better known as smallpox.)

Finally, let’s respond to criticism that black activists have fostered “racial division.” DPLA primary source materials on the secession of southern states include an 1861 pamphlet, “The Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union,” that highlights the origins of such divisions in the ways state governments codified racial apartheid into law. “We hold, as undeniable truths, that the government of the various states and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and for their posterity,” the manifesto proclaimed. “That negroes were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

If any one group was most to blame for the promotion of “racial division” it was southern legislators. One should not need to remind Rudy Giuliani and Patrick Hampton that state-sanctioned apartheid persisted in states like Texas a full century after the conclusion of the Civil War. The legacies of secession and Jim Crown still loom large today. On January 8, 2016, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for a Constitutional Convention to restore states’ rights. DPLA source sets reveal the extent to which white supremacists invoked “states’ rights” to defend slavery and segregation. Meanwhile, four in ten Trump voters in South Carolina wished the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Racial division persists in the United States. DPLA primary source sets such as “The Secession of the Southern States” illuminate its historical, structural foundations.

DPLA primary sources may not win hearts and minds at Fox News. Still, they can help anyone acquire a richer account of the Black Power Movement than Texas SBOE-sanctioned text books. The collection possesses several shortcomings. Although it furnishes educators with ample documentation to challenge those who reduce the Black Panther Party to “thugs,” DPLA primary source sets do little to explain why critics have associated the movement with violence in the first place. It also fails to highlight women’s voices within the Black Power Movement. Where are selections from Assata Shakur’s autobiography? Why not include excerpts from Angela Davis’s memoirs? These and other sources can give necessary and even richer background to contextualize Beyoncé’s performance and its historical implications.

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.

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro Leagues

By Edward Shore

I “discovered” Willie ‘El Diablo’ Wells two years ago on a hot spring afternoon in East Austin. I had decided to skip writing and opted for a stroll down Comal Street, but I was cooked. “Damn it!” I muttered. “It’s too early in the season for this heat!” I took shelter under the pecan trees at the Texas State Cemetery. A bronze headstone caught my eye.

Headstone of Willie "El Diablo" James at Texas State Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the author. — Headstone of Willie “El Diablo” James at Texas State Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the author.

“WILLIE JAMES WELLS, EL DIABLO, 1906-1989. PLAYED AND MANAGED IN THE NEGRO LEAGUES, 1924-1948…BASEBALL’S FIRST POWER-HITTING SHORTSTOP…8-TIME NEGRO LEAGUE ALL-STAR…COMPILED A .392 BATTING AVERAGE AGAINST MAJOR-LEAGUE PITCHING.”

I was enchanted. After all, I’m a massive baseball geek. My morning ritual consists of making coffee, singing along to Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack,” and scouring the dark underbelly of the Internet: the fan blogs of my beloved Arizona Diamondbacks. I own a substantial collection of baseball bobblehead dolls. Furthermore, I am an active member of a ten-team Fantasy Baseball Dynasty League. If you don’t know what any of this means, you’re better off for it.

Buried alongside slave owners, the founders of the Texas Republic, and Confederate veterans lay the remains of Willie “El Diablo” Wells, a native Austinite, Negro Leagues standout, and 1997 inductee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Only I had never heard of Willie Wells before.

“Ignorance is pitiful,” Wells told the Austin American Statesman in 1977. “If you are ignorant and stupid, you are sick- white, black, green, I don’t care.”

I felt ignorant. I felt stupid. I was crushed. Why had Willie Wells fallen through the cracks of my encyclopedic knowledge of baseball?

Major League Baseball made black ball players like Willie Wells invisible for over seventy years. A “gentleman’s agreement” among American League and National League owners upheld Jim Crow segregation in the national pastime until 1947. African American stars like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck O’Neill earned a living playing for Negro League teams like the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays, and the Newark Eagles. Between 1923 and 1924, a teenager named Willie Wells starred at shortstop for the Austin Black Senators, a feeder team for Andrew “Rube” Foster’s National Negro League. Wells signed a $300 contract to play for the St. Louis Stars when he turned 18 years old. He chose the Stars over the Chicago American Giants so that his mother could make the day-long train ride from Austin to watch her son play ball in St. Louis.

1928 National Negro League Champion St. Louis Stars. Photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum.

Wells emerged as one of the Negro League’s brightest talents. He and center fielder, James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, propelled the St. Louis Stars to the 1928 National Negro League World Championship. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) published this photo of the 1928 championship team in celebration of Black History Month. Wells stands third from the right, the only player flashing a smile. His close friend and fellow Hall of Famer, Cool Papa Bell, is seated third from the left.

A terrific base runner and prolific power hitter, Wells honed his craft in the Mexican and Cuban winter leagues, where he earned the nickname “El Diablo” for his ferocious play. He and hundreds of other Negro League players gravitated to Latin America. “One of the main reasons I came back to Mexico is because I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States,” Wells told the Pittsburgh Courier in 1944. Support for integration grew in the National League in 1946. But Wells was too old to make the jump. Instead, he spent the 1946 season in Montreal coaching Jackie Robinson to master the double-play pivot at second base before his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The story of how Jackie Robinson integrated baseball on April 15, 1947, is well known. MLB has celebrated Jackie Robinson Day since 1997 and all 30 clubs have retired Robinson’s jersey number, “42.” Yet baseball has failed to honor the hundreds of lesser-known African American players like Willie Wells who missed a chance at fame and fortune to segregation. Why? Racism remains embedded in the fabric of our national pastime much like it did in 1887 when Adrian “Cap” Anson, captain of the Chicago White Stockings, refused to play against a Newark, NJ, team with a black pitcher, George Stovey.

Jackie Robinson with the Kansas City Monarchs, 1945. Photo courtesy of the Digital Public Libraries of America and the Library of Congress.

Observe the stunning decline of African American major leaguers. In 1986, roughly 20% of the league was African American; in 2015, that number fell to 8%. The unprecedented growth of the NFL partially accounts for baseball’s diminishing popularity. Still, the sport continues to discriminate against people of color in subtle but pernicious ways. Andrew McCutchen, starting center fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the game’s most prominent African American star, recently penned an op-ed that addressed baseball’s failure to attract black youth. He identified the prohibitive costs of year-long youth baseball- equipment, private coaching, tournaments, and travel- as major deterrents for low-income athletes and their families.

Yet the problem runs much deeper. Take, for instance, the exclusionary hiring practices in MLB front offices. Since the “Moneyball revolution” of the late 1990s, many clubs have favored advanced statistical analysis, “sabermetrics,” over traditional scouting to assess player value. Owners have tasked Wall Street executives and Ivy League graduates with backgrounds in finance, management, and statistics with overseeing baseball operations. The result? The rise of a new boy’s club that hires and promotes its own. Owners have flagrantly skirted the “Selig Rule” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for vacancies at general manager and manager. Dave Stewart of the Arizona Diamondbacks remains the lone African American GM in the game. Al Avila of the Detroit Tigers is the only Latino GM. After the Seattle Mariners fired Lloyd McClendon last October, baseball lacked even a single black manager until the Los Angeles Dodgers hired Dave Roberts in December.

Baseball’s discrimination problem doesn’t stop there. The Atlanta Braves will abandon Turner Field in downtown Atlanta for the greener (whiter) pastures of Cobb County in 2017. On the field, players and coaches police a new color line by admonishing African Americans and Afro-Latinos “to play the game the right way.” This vacuous cliché stands as shorthand for “know your place.” In other words, “don’t insult a white pitcher by flipping your bat after launching a majestic home run into the bleachers, or else.” Owners have also taken steps to erase the historical memory of the Negro Leagues. Last year, the Pittsburgh Pirates removed seven statues of Negro Leagues players from “Legacy Square” at PNC Park. One of the casualties was a monument to legendary power-hitter and hometown hero, Josh Gibson. It is no wonder, then, that the story of Austin’s Willie Wells remains unknown to even diehard baseball fans.

St. Louis Browns pitcher Leroy "Satchel" Paige relaxing in his bullpen rocking chair during a game, 1947. Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum. — St. Louis Browns pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige relaxing in his bullpen rocking chair during a game, 1947. Photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum.

Fortunately, the Digital Public Library of America offers an essential introduction to the history of segregation in baseball. Educators can use these and other primary sources in their classrooms to both contextualize and personalize the painful history of Jim Crow. A discussion of the Negro Leagues and race in Major League Baseball in 2016 might also serve as a launching point for students to grasp the pervasiveness of racism in the Unites States. By sharing materials with the public, DPLA will ensure that the tragedy of Willie Wells, Smokey Joe Williams, Monte Irvin and countless others will not easily be forgotten.

To learn more about the Negro Leagues, visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO, and the Digital Public Library of America.

Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

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.

Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison," “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887. — 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 rare light on the legal responses to urban violence and show 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.

Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao. — 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.

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.” Source: Wikipedia

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.

This piece was 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).

For further reading, see:

Anne Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (1997).
A seminal examination of women’s experiences in the penal system in the West in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Butler unearths the unending violence women, particularly women of color, were subjected to in custody. At the same time, it gives voice to figures that rarely speak in history.

Mara Dodge, “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835-2000 (2006).
Dodge provides an exhaustive study of the histories of women incarcerated from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first. She meticulously examines the gendered treatment of female inmates punished for bad manners, fighting, and lesbian relationships. The book shows how race and gender collided with the criminal justice system.

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (2010).
This work is a rich examination of the experiences and views of black working-class women who found themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system in early-twentieth-century New York. In addition to exploring the impact of urban and penal reform on those black women, Hicks critically contrasts the racial uplift agendas of both middle-class black and white female reformers.

Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015).
Dr. LeFlouria’s riveting work powerfully unearths the experiences of Georgia’s exploited and often overlooked labor force, namely black female convicts. Through painstaking research, she portrays black women as sentient beings (humans who had lives, loves, triumphs, and sorrows) and as prison laborers brutalized by convict leasing.

LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois, 2016).
Dr. Harris’s extraordinary book offers an unprecedented account of African American women’s employment outside of the customary realms of domestic service and agricultural work. It is a provocative examination that compels readers to interrogate notions of labor through an intricate, incisive intersectional lens.

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