History of Slavery Archives

15 Minute History – Slavery in the West

Guest: Kevin Waite, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Durham University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed “free states.” According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. “They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states.” But it didn’t end there. The “continental South” as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite “brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.”

Episode 129: Slavery in the West

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IHS Panel: The Confederate Statues at UT

What do statues commemorating Confederate leaders mean? Why has the university decided to remove such statues? And why has the issue been so controversial? On Thursday, August 31 2017, speakers from the University of Texas, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Briscoe Center for American History came together to address these questions and more.

Featured speakers included:

Walter L. Buenger
Chief Historian, Texas State Historical Association; Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History, and Barbara White Stuart Centennial Professor in Texas History | The University of Texas at Austin

Peniel E. Joseph
Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs; and Professor of History | The University of Texas at Austin

Ben Wright
Associate Director for Communication at the Briscoe Center for American History and curator of “From Commemoration to Education: Pompeo Coppini’s Statue of Jefferson Davis” | The University of Texas at Austin

with

Jacqueline Jones, Moderator
Professor and Chair of the Department of History; Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History; and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History | The University of Texas at Austin

This event was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.

Connected content:

Mark Sheaves on slavery and its legacy in the USA
Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry on history and memory in Savannah
Jacqueline Jones discusses Civil War Savannah

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.

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.

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

By Edward Shore

Quilombola Seeds is the second in a three-part series produced by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). It explores quilombola agricultural systems in São Paulo’s Ribeira Valley, the last reserve of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. Quilombos are rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves in Brazil. Onerous environmental restrictions have prevented quilombos in the Atlantic Rainforest region of São Paulo from planting subsistence garden plots that their ancestors maintained for centuries. As a result, quilombos have last many rare varieties of beans, rice, and corn. Malnutrition has skyrocketed. Communities faced food shortages. Now, with the assistance of researchers and the Instituto Socioambiental, the region’s quilombos are fighting back! This video includes English subtitles produced by our public historian, Edward Shore, and ISA anthropologist and videographer Alexandre Kishimoto.

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

By Edward Shore

Dear dissertation advisers and doctoral candidates,

Remain vigilant for signs of Mid-Degree Existential Crisis (MDEC) among graduate students. Common symptoms include sleeplessness, semi-facial paralysis, and hair loss. MDEC is known to occur most frequently in doctoral candidates who have returned to Austin, Texas, after a year of dissertation fieldwork in Brazil. Physicians have prescribed Melatonin, Botox, and Propecia. If you or a loved one suspects that a PhD student is suffering from MDEC, please intervene immediately.

Signed, a distressed fifth year PhD candidate.

I discovered that I was suffering a Mid-Degree Existential Crisis during my third viewing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens earlier this month. I had dragged my partner, Cristina, to the AMC Arizona Center 24 Multiplex to experience JJ Abrams’ interpretation of the space-western saga on the second night of our honeymoon in Phoenix. Cristina gazed spellbound as our young heroine, Rey, the scavenger from Jakku, discovered the Force and defeated the villainous Kylo Ren in a climactic lightsaber duel on Starkiller Base.

“Rey is totally Luke Skywalker’s daughter,” Cristina whispered in my ear.

“This is why I married you,” I thought to myself. But then, as Resistance fighters routed the First Order, a panic attack overpowered me like a Darth Vader chokehold. I struggled to breathe. My heart pounded. My palms grew sweaty. This could mean only one thing: spring semester was right around the corner.

Allow me to explain. Last October, I returned to Austin after nine months of dissertation research in Brazil. My project retraces the historical emergence of Article 68, a 1988 constitutional amendment that extends land rights and recognition to rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves known as “quilombos.” I underscore the law’s importance as a harbinger for the nation’s affirmative action policies, while also analyzing its impact on popular struggles over land, resources, and citizenship in the Brazilian countryside. In addition to archival research, I recorded oral histories of quilombo activists living in the Atlantic Rainforest of São Paulo’s Vale do Ribeira, the last preserve of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state.

Picture of Quilombo of Ivaporunduva and the Ribeira de Iguape River in São Paulo, Brazil — Quilombo of Ivaporunduva and the Ribeira de Iguape River, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of the author.

The Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a São Paulo-based NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of so-called “traditional peoples'” in Brazil, including quilombolas (communities of quilombos), indigenous groups, and rubber tappers, sponsored my research. I lived and worked for six weeks at ISA’s satellite office in Eldorado, a small town of 5,000 inhabitants located in the heartland of the Vale do Ribeira. I shadowed my friends, ISA anthropologists Alexandre Kishimoto, Raquel Pasinato, and Frederico da Silva, who assisted quilombo communities in organizing an oral history project, a farming cooperative, and a “seed bank” of rare subsistence crops that quilombolas and their ancestors had planted in the valley for over four centuries. The experience was exhilarating. It contributed immensely to the conceptual development of my dissertation. Most important, my sojourn in the Vale do Ribeira impressed on me the urgency of using scholarship to advance the social rights of Brazil’s marginalized quilombo population. I had never felt more alive than I did in the field.

Fall semester 2015 was a different story. Re-entry to university life was excruciating. I hit rock bottom. Brazil had offered shelter from writer’s block, fellowship rejections, and the pessimism of a shrinking job market. Back in Austin, I sat at my desk determined to write my first chapter. But the words never came. I tore through dozens of yellow legal pads full of scribbled notes, half-baked insights, and aborted first drafts. Anguish from writer’s block grew so severe that I developed a spasm in the left side of my face that required eight Botox injections near the eyelid to paralyze the nerve. I doubted if I would ever complete a first draft of a chapter, let alone graduate and realize my lifelong dream of becoming a professor. Mid-Degree Existential Crisis is real, even if it’s not. Trust me.

Somehow I persevered. I’m no closer to completing my first chapter today than I was last December. Still, I remain more resolute than ever to write my dissertation. I am finding motivation in a new love for public history and a burning sense of social responsibility.

Picture of Cachoeira do Meu Deus in Quilombo Sapatu, São Paulo — Cachoeira do Meu Deus, Quilombo Sapatu, São Paulo. Courtesy of the author.

My informants in the Vale do Ribeira helped me to realize that writing a thesis and reporting on my findings at academic conferences and in academic publication was not enough for me. They challenged me to make my research public to support quilombos in their efforts to achieve their constitutional rights to land and citizenship. Although the Brazilian government recognizes over 3,000 rural black communities as “quilombos,” fewer than 160 possess title to their lands. Big Agribusiness has largely succeeded in preventing the titling of quilombo lands while conservatives in congress have challenged the constitutionality of Article 68 in federal court. How could historical research empower quilombos to overcome injustices perpetrated by powerful landowners, multi-national mineral companies, and their own government?

I recently posed this question to my friend at ISA, anthropologist Alexandre Kishimoto. His response surprised me. Last August, I assisted Alexandre in recording video testimonies of quilombola leaders in the communities of Ivaporunduva, São Pedro, and Pedro Cubas. The initiative was part of a wide effort to publicize the Eighth Annual Seeds Festival sponsored by the Instituto Socioambiental in Eldorado. Since 2008, representatives from the sixty-six quilombo communities in the Vale do Ribeira convene in Eldorado in August to trade handicrafts, crops, and other agricultural goods. ISA inaugurated the Seeds Festival after local forest rangers prohibited quilombos from planting subsistence gardens in the Atlantic Rainforest. The results of the ban were devastating. Communities that for centuries had planted mandioc, rice, and beans suddenly faced food shortages. Entire species of crops vanished. Malnutrition skyrocketed. With the help of ISA, quilombos in the valley have recovered several varieties of lost seeds. The project has also strengthened the communities’ campaign for land while also pressuring the state government of São Paulo to alleviate onerous restrictions on subsistence farming. Yet change has continued to advance slowly.

Quilombola activists at a demonstration against the proposed construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ribeira de Iguape River in Adrianópolis, Paraná. Courtesy of the author. — Quilombola activists at a demonstration against proposed construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ribeira de Iguape River in Adrianópolis, Paraná. Courtesy of the author.

Alexandre responded to my question by urging me to produce English subtitles for ISA’s promotional videos on the Seeds Festival and to share them with the university community and the public at large. He believes that pressure from the US academy could force local authorities in São Paulo to lift restrictions on quilombola agriculture in the Vale do Ribeira. He also hopes that such a small act might also lead to closer collaboration between ISA, local communities, and the University of Texas to advance the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Brazil’s quilombos. This is why public history matters. This is why I get out of bed in the morning to write my dissertation. This is how I won my battle with Mid-Degree Existential Crisis.

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