race Archives - Not Even Past

Digital Archive – Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News. That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

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Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened in São Paulo happened in Panuco, Hispaniola, Darien, Tierra Firme, Chile, Massachusetts, Georgia; in short, everywhere.

Monteiro traces slavery back to a widespread Amerindian institution. In coastal Brazil, the Portuguese found a linguistically unified indigenous world, yet one deeply ethnically fragmented. Indigenous societies built sharp corporate identities through raiding and counter-raiding. The Tupi did not incorporate captured rivals into households but dispatched them in rituals of cannibal consumption. The Portuguese used these practices to justify colonization and to build a native labor force.

The Portuguese ransomed captives from the Tupi for axes, scissors, and glass beads. Those “rescued” through trade became slaves. The use of the word rescate (rescue and commercial transaction) for ransom implied that it was better to be a slave in a Christian household than a morsel of a demonic cannibal. Purchasing slaves through native intermediaries was not the only strategy to get cheap labor. Slavers would get licenses to wage war on communities when the latter reportedly engaged in “unnatural” practices.

“Portuguese” raids (that involved hundreds and often thousands of indigenous allies), in turn, would lead the natives to counter-raid the Portuguese who would, in turn, gain new legal justification to wage war. This complex dynamic of just war and rescate did nothing but expand the institution of indigenous slavery in the Americas manyfold. It also imbued ideologies of indigenous captivity with deep religious, theological overtones.

Everywhere the Europeans went in the Americas, slavery flourished. To the theologically mindful, however, it soon became clear that Amerindian captivity was not the preferred route to indigenous conversion but a naked attempt at exploiting indigenous labor in mines, ranches, ports, and households. As in many other places in the Americas, the religious in Brazil began to call into question indigenous slavery. By the mid-sixteenth century in Sao Paulo, the Jesuits became adamant opponents of the Paulistas (settlers of Portuguese and indigenous decent).

The Jesuits created “aldeas” (towns) where captives were catechized. Aldeas, however, also became rotational pools of wage laborers for Paulistas, not slaves. The debate between Paulistas and Jesuits was over whether Indian captives were pliable-for-hire-Christian laborers or commodities whose bodies could be transacted at will and whose status would be inheritable. No one questioned just war or rescate as the preferred way to get converts or slaves.

Monteiro shows that in 1570 the crown introduced legislation to regulate indigenous slavery. Settlers had to justify raids and obtain licenses. The new legislation left paperwork, as raiders had to produce formal declarations of just war to proceed. Occasionally raiders would appeal to the Inquisition to cover their raids into the interior as expeditions to go after alleged heretics. Raiders would also often present their expeditions as mining prospecting.

As parties had to justify the legality of their raids, classifications of natives came in handy. Legal hurdles encouraged the science of ethnology. Monteiro describes how settlers and Jesuits created ever more involved taxonomies, separating agriculturalists from nomadic savages, first on the coast (Tupis vs Tapuia) and later in the interior (Guairá vs. Goiá, Guaikurú, Carijó, Caeté, Tememinó, Kayapó). Slavers clearly preferred Tupi and Guairá whose agriculturalism prepared them to be slaves on wheat growing ranches. Getting Tupi-Guaranies, however, became increasingly difficult as the Jesuits armed the Guarani with guns in their Paraguayan missions.

After 1596, the crown sided with the Jesuits who became default legal wardens of all new captives ransomed through trade or rounded up via punishing raids. Settlers, however, continued to keep the ransomed and the raided as “pieces.” Settlers would use wills to distribute Indians as property but would be careful not to leave notarial records of sales since these records could induce legal challenges and freedom suits. Dowries and inventories, however, still registered Amerindians in household and ranches as transferable property.

The debate between Jesuits and settlers persisted over the entire seventeenth century. In 1639, Jesuits had the Pope reissued the bull of 1537, a brief originally issued to abolish Amerindian slavery in Mexico and the Caribbean. The Jesuits also sought to reduce the power of landed elites by taking them to court and by setting up their own mills to bankrupt their rivals. Finally, in 1649, Paulistas expelled the Jesuits from the province

Pedro Alvares Cabral, after his discovery of Brazil in 1500, with native Indians (via The Jesuits and Slavery in Brazil)

This dynamic crated several different types of indigenous populations in São Paulo. The first group were those members of Jesuits towns of wage earners (aldeas) who came as captives from faraway places and often spoke many different unintelligible languages. After the 1649 Jesuit expulsion, the towns never recovered; they remained small and depopulated even after the Jesuits were allowed to come back to the province thirteen years later.

The second group were the indigenous slaves, working on settler’s ranches and in their households. Monteiro reconstructs the system of slavery in some detail. Slaves grew their own food (corn, manioc) and worked growing wheat. Wheat left the province on the back of Indians slaves too. Porters took the cargo to the port of Santos to be shipped to the sugar plantations of the northeast and Rio. Using slaves, not mules, allowed settlers not to have to invest in road infrastructure between the Paulista interior and the port.

Despite the stifling violence that characterized this society, indigenous slaves enjoyed some agency and some mobility. Slaves ran away. They also used church tribunals to initiate freedom suits. They also sought self-manumission and recreated fictive communities through the use of godparents and cofradias (brotherhooods). By the late seventeenth century, slave agency via runaway slave communities , freedom suits, self-manumission, and creolization, along with the arrival of African slaves, partially put an end to indigenous slavery in the province. Yet far more important to the demise of indigenous slavery was the growing difficulty in getting indigenous slaves from the interior.

The third group were those natives who remained sovereign and who therefore were either the target of raids or co-participants in Paulista raids. These groups disappeared from the coast as they removed themselves into the interior or were wiped out by disease and interethnic warfare (the War of the Tamoio,1550-1570, for example).

Monteiro reconstructs in detail the political economy of Paulista raids to get slaves and thus maintain Brazil’s ability to grow grain. As Tupis abandoned the coast, Paulistas went after the Guarani-Tupi located between Sao Paulo and the city of Asuncion in Paraguay. Monteiro describes how over the course of several decades, raiders organized large expeditions with Indian allies to net hundreds of Guarani slaves from the southwestern interior, particularly the Jesuits’ missions in Paraguay.

Under the false pretense of prospecting for mines of silver and gold to create a legal cover, the largest Paulista landowners led these expeditions themselves. Men like Raposo Tavares built reputations, fortunes, and noble lineages out of his raiding exploits. The era of large raiding expeditions, however, ended in the 1640s when the Guairá acquired guns and resisted large attacks in fortified Jesuit missions. Raids became death traps and a disaster for the businesses of leading Paulistas.

The raids, however, continued as the preferred enterprise of the poor. Raiders pressed deep into the interior of Matto Grosso and Maranhão. These raids lasted years and required involved logistics, including clearing the forest and setting up temporary settlements to grow food. These expeditions would later establish the fame of raiders as the men who first established the national territory of Brazil.

Monteiro brings the legendary raiders down to size. Paulistas built Brazil’s granary on the back of Amerindian slaves and devastating raiding expeditions that permanently changed the social ecology of the interior. Moreover, Paulistas did not create a frontier society of equals but a profoundly hierarchical one, split between ruthless lords and poor settler peasants, whose path to social mobility was the piecemeal collection of indigenous slaves in never ending, pointless raids into the interior. Monteiro also brings the Jesuits down to size. The Jesuits opposed slavery by creating towns of wage earners but their theology did nothing but confirm the authority of “just war” and “rescue” as the twin ideological pillars of slavery. The Jesuits battled slavery without addressing slavery’s underpinning justifications. Historians, however, should remain grateful to the Jesuits because their effort to regulate slavery created a large archive of petitions, declarations, and justifications upon which Monteiro’s masterful study rests.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Negros da Terra stills stands, a testament to the strengths of Brazilian historiography. It is still path breaking when compared with the growing Anglo American scholarship on Amerindian slavery.

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Puritan Conquistadors
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
When Montezuma Met Cortes

The Racial Geography Tour at UT Austin

by Edmund T. Gordon

For almost two decades, Ted Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. This month, that tour goes live online. In honor of the launch of the new website, “The Racial Geography Tour,” we are featuring an interview Joan Neuberger conducted with Prof. Gordon last week.

JN: Let’s start with the origins of the tour: when and what made you want to start?

TG: Well that’s a good question, and there’s no real answer to it. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, and I’m not quite sure when it started, and the impetus for doing it is also foggy. It probably started somewhere around 2000, which means that I’ve been doing it for about almost 20 years now I guess, getting close to that, and I think it grew out of requests that were made to me as a young faculty member here to talk about the racial history of The University of Texas. I remember being invited to talk to the housing staff about racial history, and I think one of the things I wanted to do was talk about the history of the university being integrated in relation to its racial past, and being that it was a housing group I think I began to integrate some of the ideas about building and architecture into that discussion, so it actually started out as a slide show, and then at some point there was someone from out of town who was visiting. I was talking a little about the racial history and I was talking about, well actually we have Confederate statues on campus, and there’s a Confederate flag that flies and I said well hold on a second let me show you, nice day, we went out and started walking around and I think that’s the origin of it, some time ago

And you’ve been doing it on and off for a while. What kinds of responses have you had? Do people come up to while you’re talking and engage with you?

Sometimes they do, absolutely have people who join the tour as I’m doing it, and ask if they can follow along and certainly I have a lot of eavesdroppers and folks like that. Almost all the responses I get from both onlookers and people who are on the tour has been positive, well I know this to be the fact, that not that much readily available history of the campus and also not many tours of the campus itself that are available to folks outside the ones that are given to prospective students and all that, so I think there’s a fair amount of curiosity among students and others about the environment that they’re walking through on a day to day basis, so people seem to enjoy hearing about that and they want to know more about it.

There’s a lot in the ordinary (prospective) tours that the tours don’t go into — history of the tower, the kind of history that you’re talking about. What made you want to put it online?

The Littlefield Mansion

There’s a couple of things that made me want to put it online. Well, it wasn’t my idea first of all. The idea came from a young person who was working with us up in African and African Diaspora Studies, she was the electronic specialist or something like that and at any rate she was also the person who was helping me with my calendar, and helping to schedule the tours that I was doing, and she saw that the demand for the tour was becoming larger and larger and it was taking up more and more of my time, and then she also has this kind of digital and media background and thought it might be a good idea, and I think she was actually the one who got in touch with LAITS here and they jumped on it for whatever reasons, and that’s how it got going, so it wasn’t even really my idea. For me, really, it will help because I spend a lot of time giving tours. I gave 25 last semester, and it’s a large amount of time. I’ve got a lot of other things going on, and also people thought that it would be good to have it be available to a larger audience, and so that’s what’s behind it.

So the tour begins at the Littlefield mansion. Why did you start there?

Well, part of it is fortuitous. In recent years, my office was across the street from the Littlefield mansion, and so rather than having me hike some place else to begin, it seemed like a reasonable place to begin, but also it is the Littlefield Mansion. Littlefield personally had a lot to do with the origins of the University, but even more than that, the Littlefields positionality in Texas society is for me kind of indicative or emblematic of the folks who played the key role in the early years of the university, deciding that we need one and also serving the top positions in university, Littlefield’s biography in many ways really brings together a lot of forces that created the early university as it was. Plus there’s a building there that’s named after him, and it’s right across the street from the 40 Acres, so there’s just a number of reasons why it’s a reasonable place to start.

George Washington Littlefield

Let’s talk about his biography a little bit, because as you say it really brings together a lot of the different things that allowed white European people to come to Texas and make a lot of money, and be able to then found a university. So first of all he comes from a slave owning family–

Yes he does, from Mississippi–

A cotton producing family–

Absolutely–

And why did he stop farming cotton?

Well the big issue for Littlefield and all the rest of these folks was the Civil War, and so he went off the fight the Civil War in 1861, was injured, he had his man servant/ slave there with him who rescued him on the battlefield after he’s injured, and brought him back to Gonzalez, Texas where he recuperated, but that was the biggest issue. So after the end of the Civil War, there’s a problem with labor. In other words, where do you get enough labor now that the enslaved folks are free to be able to carry out, but there’s also problems with disease and various other kinds of things, financial disruption after the end of the Civil War, in the time of reconstruction, so he finds it difficult to be able to rebuild his cotton growing operation and then stumbles on to cattle, longhorn cattle.

And so he started raising cattle?

He had always been raising cattle as a side-line on his plantation, or in the area that he owned, but he discovered that by raising his own cattle and then buying cattle from neighboring farms and plantations and then driving them north to Kansas that he could make some money. I think his first drive was in the 1870s and he made a fair amount of money, and then from then on he didn’t actually drive the cattle himself, but he went into that business and became a cattle baron, owning property throughout central Texas, and up in the Panhandle, and in New Mexico, and west Texas, ended up controlling a huge amount of range land.

And where did all that land come from?

Well the land comes from, one of the things I talk about on the tour, is Littlefield was an ex-Confederate, and so in the period of time immediately after the Civil War, he was very much against what he would consider the invasion, the occupation of Texas by federal troops, but its those same federal troops and cavalry who were able to clear west Texas and New Mexico and particularly the Panhandle of the Comanche and other Native Americans who were there, which opened up that territory for people like Littlefield who would be able to exploit them, and then simultaneously, the massacre of the buffalo, over 20 million buffalo, created what Littlefield would see as virgin grass for his longhorns to feed on, and so it’s that kind of combined operation, plus the advent of the railroads pushing west from Kansas City, St Louis into Kansas that enabled them to make millions of dollars.

There are rumors that there are slave quarters in the basement of the Littlefield house.

There are rumors, but of course the Littlefield house was build in the early 1890s, or he occupied it in the 1890s. That’s 30 years more or less after the end of the Civil War, so of course there were no enslaved people who lived in the house, however, ex-enslaved people did and we know that Nathanial Stokes who was his man servant, ex-slave, till the day he died. He lived in the carriage house, above the carriage house and stables in the back of the Littlefield house there, and so I think the quarters that exist in the basement of the Littlefield mansion were probably quarters for domestic servants and many of them were undoubtedly ex-enslaved people, and maybe even his own.

So we’ve really just scratched the surface of Littlefield’s history, and let me just say at this point that there are additional resources on the website that go into more detail on everything that were going to be talking about.

You move from the Littlefield house to what used to be call the Women’s Campus, and this also is a fascinating piece of history that I didn’t know anything about, and I’ve been here for a long time, so can you describe the women’s campus and its architectural layout, and what was significant about that?

Alice Littlefield

The original housing for women on campus was over by where the Flawn Academic Center is now, but in the 1820s, Littlefield in his will left money and a piece of property to build the Littlefield dorm, named after his wife, as a dorm for freshman women, and then in 30s the University decided to create other living spaces for women in that vicinity, Andrews and Carothers were I think both opened in 1935, and so they created a women’s side of the campus. The main building there that kind of defines the whole space is Gearing Hall, the Home Economics building and if there’s any question about who that’s for, there’s a sculpture of a women and child on the façade there. They also put in Anna Hiss Gym, which is a gym for women, as well as playing fields for women behind the gym, and tennis courts just to the south of the gym for women. So it’s an area of campus for women built behind, on the north side, of the Tower, and in the tour I talk about the symbology of having women outside of the public sphere, outside of, or on the opposite side of, the entrance to the University, and what that means in terms of the gendered ideologies of the time.

You talk about how Gearing Hall was designed by the same architect, Paul Cret, who designed the Tower –the Tower’s our big administrative center, it’s the first building on campus, it is where the President’s office is housed now, the central library used to be there, it’s a big important tall building — and the same person who designed that designed Gearing Hall as a flat sort of circular building and the gendered nature of those two structures seems really clear, but you go further than that, and talk about the way they’re placed and the way the Tower even looks. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gearing Hall

Sure. The point I’m trying to make on that whole section of the tour is to talk about how it is that space is gendered and space in terms of location of things, but also the design, the architecture, the naming, etc. And if you look at both the way in which the original women’s dorms, if you think about Littlefield, Carothers, and Andrews — Blanton wasn’t built until 1955, so the honors quad is only formed in the 1950s after they put Blanton there. So it’s a U shape, an open U shape that faces to the gym, and then you have Gearing Hall which is placed right on the axis, the north-south axis behind the Tower, to the north of the Tower, where’s there’s no mall leading up to it, and it opens up, it’s a also U shaped as well, and has a gateway, which opens up to the south with the Tower looming up above it. So it’s clear to me that there’s a kind of receptacle aspect to the architecture of Gearing Hall and a phallic kind of aspect to the Tower as a seat of power and kind of the public symbol of the University, and very masculine in that kind of way, and so there’s a femininity and a masculinity about the way the architecture is designed and Cret [Paul Cret], was the main consulting architect for all those buildings, and either implicitly or explicitly the gendered aspect of it is very clear.

And then you walk around to the west side of the Tower, which also has a really interesting history. The west mall is filled with these large planters and limestone walls, why was that?

The west campus, pretty shortly after the university was opened in 1883 became an area of residence for, originally faculty members and students, now it’s mostly students. And if you look carefully at the west mall, and you look at the planters and you look at the trees there, you’ll see that trees are much younger than the trees on the south mall and so they’re about 40, 50, 60 years old. So if you think we’re in 2019, you go back 50 years and now you’re talking about the 1960s, the late 1960s — so on the west mall which leads to Guadalupe and west campus where students are on the other side, think about what students were engaged in, in the late 1960s. There was a lot of political activity, civil rights, anti-war, free speech, and all those things were in fine form here at the University of Texas, students used that west mall area as an area of congregation. There was a relatively conservative President of the Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, we’ve got the Erwin Center named after him, who was particularly incensed by the students’ intransience or their rowdiness in terms of their politics, and one of his ways of dealing with it was to order that the University convert the mall into what we have today, putting walls up and down Guadalupe, and putting planters in the middle of the mall, and planting trees and in other ways making it difficult for students, large groups of students, to access, to really control the access to the campus, and to discourage the assembly of students in that particular area. So it’s a politicized landscape, very pretty, but political .

Lets talk about the statues on campus. Statues, everyone knows have been in the news, have been controversial politically. We have some new ones of civil rights heroes Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and other statues are only marked by their former pedestals, so what’s that about? Could you talk about the statues?

I learned a new word with this, the removal of the statues, they’re actually plinths, who knew, and the plinths are still there and actually some of the statues are still there. I don’t know if you’ve been to see the Hogg statue, the return of James Hogg

I wanted to ask you about that…

Right, so the statues were placed actually ultimately in the early 1930s, but George Washington Littlefield began thinking about having statues be placed on campus probably in 1915 or 1916. 1915, if you think about, that’s 50 years after the end of the Civil War. There are some historians who claim that Littlefield was the wealthiest ex-Confederate, and he was very active in the state of Texas and elsewhere in terms of trying to memorialize the Civil War and the folks who fought in it. And he was a very big proponent, as you were mentioning earlier, of the Lost Cause. In fact, he and John H. Reagan were some of the biggest proponents of that.

The Lost Cause is an ideology which tries to say that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Constitution and the individual state’s rights to preserve what they considered to be one of the key aspects of the Constitution, which is the right to private property. So they want to make the claim that what the Civil War was about was a noble cause to enshrine and further the Constitutional rights that were originally granted; that the cause of the Civil War was not slavery itself but this issue over Constitutional and states’ rights within the context of the Constitution.

The Littlefield Fountain

One of the things that’s interesting, in the inscription that existed on the wall just to the west of the Littlefield Fountain, is an inscription that talks about Littlefield’s giving the money to construct this and one of the things it says is that the Civil War was fought for state’s rights and doesn’t mention slavery at all, so slavery gets disappeared. Littlefield is a very big proponent of that and so is J. H. Reagan. In fact, they played a major role in placing the Memorial to the Confederate Dead, which is at the entrance to the State Capitol grounds, which has Jefferson Davis as the largest figure there. Littlefield also, as a proponent of the Lost Cause, unlike other proponents of the Lost Cause who really looked to Robert E. Lee as the key figure in the Confederacy because he’s a less political figure and one who’s less identified with slavery than Jefferson Davis. Littlefield and Reagan were very big Jefferson Davis folks. So Littlefield gave the major part of the money for the Jefferson Davis memorial that’s up in Kentucky and he decided that he wanted to have Jefferson Davis as well as Robert E Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, J. H. Reagan, and James Hogg statues built on campus as a memorial to the Lost Cause. And his original idea was to have a huge bronze arch that extended over the south entrance to the 40 Acres, with Jefferson Davis right in the center of it all.

That got changed because there was some backlash, actually even before Littlefield passed in 1920. Littlefield put this idea and the money for it into his will. But there were people on campus who didn’t want as much of an association with the Lost Cause as Littlefield and some others did so there was some back and forth about that. So that’s when it was decided to add the statue for Woodrow Wilson. And also when it became clear, particularly after Littlefield’s death, that there wasn’t enough money in the will to build the entire arch, that’s when they decided instead of the arch to build the Littlefield fountain, which was a memorial to WW1.

So the idea then becomes that there’s a Lost Cause aspect of it, which was what Littlefield’s original wish was, but there’s also a notion of national unification around WWI but also particularly around the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Because Woodrow Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, a Southern Democrat. He also was a white supremacist. He resegregated the army, resegregated the federal offices in Washington, DC, wrote histories that were relatively sympathetic to the antebellum south and critical of Reconstruction. So this was the kind of figure that Littlefield but also the leadership of the University could get around.

Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1910. (via Wikipedia)

That’s the history of how that got placed. Of course the final placement was the same person, Paul Cret, who was the architect (of the Tower and Gearing Hall), decided that instead of having those statues at the very entrance to the University, to put them along the walkaway thereby tying the tower to the statuary and to the Littlefield Fountain and making of it a, well I have a relatively lengthy analysis of the white nationalist aspects of that whole tableaux, which I lay out in the racial geography tour.

You also mentioned the MLK statue and those others. One of the things that is clear to me is that all these symbols speak to each other. And there almost certainly would not have been a Martin Luther King statue on campus if those Confederate statues hadn’t existed and without a Martin Luther King statue on campus, we wouldn’t have had Barbara Jordan and we also wouldn’t have Cesar Chavez. So they all are in one way of another, in conversation with one another in interesting ways.

And in conversation with the community, right?, because it was protest about Jefferson Davis that led to the erection of a statue of MLK.

Yes, there were students in particular who thought not only Jefferson Davis but the rest of the Confederate statues were problematic. The University back in 70s was not about to move them, or in the 80s or in the 90s or do anything else about them, so one of the alternatives was to produce alternative symbology and that’s where Martin Luther King comes up.

Now if you ask most people on campus if Confederate flags flew in prominent places at U.T. I think even people who really care about these things would be surprised to know that they did. So where were they and how did they fly under the radar for so long?

Well they fly under the radar because most people don’t recognize the national flag of the Confederacy. What they recognize is what has been publicized since the 1950s and 60s, which is the battle flag of the Confederacy, which is St. Andrew’s cross. That became the kind of symbol of the rebirth of Ku Klux Klan, the white citizens’ groups at the time of, as part of the anti-civil rights and anti-Brown vs. Board of Education movements in the 50s and 60s. So most people don’t know the Stars and Bars as the Confederate Flag. That flag flew at least at two places. One was over the stadium over the scoreboard, and it also flew at the Erwin Center as part of Six Flags. Six Flags over Texas. Six Flags over Texas became an important symbol of Texas basically around the time of the Texas centennial in 1936. The Six Flags over Texas of course are Spain, France, Mexico, the Lone Star flag, the Confederate flag, and the United States flag. These are all the countries that Texas was under, one way or another. One of the things that the state of Texas was trying to do in the 1930s was to distance itself somewhat from the Lost Cause ideology, and to project itself as an American state, and as a pioneer state associated with American pioneering move west etc., and as a western state. And so in the sense that the United States was engaged in a struggle for freedom from previous colonial eras, Texas was positioning itself in that same kind of, using that same kind of notion of move towards progress, progress towards freedom, and independence, and so it emphasized its various associations on the way towards this America destiny of westward movement, and increased freedom, and progress, and all that. So within that context, the Six Flags over Texas became one of the key symbols of Texas and the Confederate flag was right there in the middle of it.

There is still Confederate symbology here on this campus. If you go up to the Tower, which was erected at precisely that time, if you look on the outside of tower it says 1836-1936. The Tower was open in 1937, but it was still part of this Texas centennial celebration mode, and if you go up to the second floor and you go into what the main room used to be the university main library and now is the Life Sciences library, and if you look up you’ll see these big plaster cast seals for all the six flags, for all those six countries, and right there is the symbology of the Confederacy. And one of the things that people have no idea about and actually is represented by the fact there are two statues left on the south mall. Those two statues are the assemblage which is the Littlefield fountain and the other one is George Washington. So why is the George Washington statue still there? Well it’s not associated with the Confederacy, but if you go up to the second floor of the Tower and you go into the Life Sciences library and look at that symbol of the Confederate nation, who’s right there in the middle? It’s George Washington on horseback. So in some sense the Daughters of the Revolution who are paying for putting George Washington’s statue on the mall in actually 1930, it didn’t get up until 1955 or 1950-sometime. He’s put there as the father of two countries, he’s the father of the United States, but he’s also the father of the Confederacy and that comes out through this Confederate symbology of which the Confederate flags were part, from the 1930s up until when they were taken down, I guess a year and a half ago.

Names of buildings are especially significant on campus, and you talk about a lot of different names, and naming, and changing of names, so let’s talk about some of those. First of all, the main library on campus, which everyone knows as the PCL, what does that stand for?

Ervin Perry and Carlos Castañeda

That’s Perry-Castañeda. That library was open in the late 70s, in fact must have been 78 because they had their anniversary last year and I think both the Perry and the Castañeda families were present for that. That was quite an event. But yes that library was opened in the late 70s and named after Ervin Perry, who was the first African American who was hired in a tenure track position here at the University of Texas, in the School of Engineering. He actually went on to get tenure and then passed as an Associate Professor. And Carlos Castañeda had been an undergraduate, a Mexican American undergraduate here, and then I think he got his Masters, I believe he got his PhD here as well, came back as a lecturer and he taught for a while, and I believe he was associated with the Benson Library for many years. So that [main] library was appropriately named after a couple of the pioneers in terms of the integration of the University of Texas.

And then in the other direction, if we move down to the hill to the Darrell K. Royal stadium, Darrell K. Royal is a hero to many people in Texas. Who was he, why was he celebrated, and what’s left out of the story?

Aerial view of DKR Memorial Stadium on the Texas campus as seen on Sunday April 23, 2017.
RALPH BARRERA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Darrell K. Royal was a very successful football coach, in fact, probably more people know about him and his success than they know about anything else. If you can’t name anybody else associated with the University of Texas, you can usually name either Earl Campbell or Darrell K. Royal. He won three national football championships as coach here, but what people don’t usually know is that his second, the one in 1969, has the distinction of being the last all white national championship football team. Darrell in later years claimed that he didn’t recruit any black folks for the team because alumni wouldn’t like it, which is probably true, but nevertheless, he didn’t, and there’s a movie about when the University of Texas at Austin was to play Syracuse in the Cotton Bowl and the University of Texas football team refused to play or allow Ernie Davis, who was one of the early black stars for Syracuse, to play in the game. There’s a whole movie about that. So racial segregation in Texas football or Texas athletics in general was pretty extreme, although to University of Texas’ credit, we were one of the first schools in the Southwest Conference to integrate. We had our first black track athletes were recruited in 1964, and finally in 1970, actually Julius Whittier, who just passed last year, was the first black football player at the University of Texas to play on a national championship football team, when the University won. But even the basketball team, Royal went on to be the A.D. for a number of years, the athletic director, and his [basketball] coach who eventually integrated the team, I have a quote of him saying that they didn’t have any black basketball players on the team because there were no black boys in the state of Texas who were good enough or tall enough to play.

So in 1954 the Supreme Court decides the famous case of Brown vs. Board of Education and that prohibited racial segregation in public schools. U.T. responded in various ways, but one of the ways is architectural, and your tour takes us to sites of several dorms that were new in the 50s maybe we could talk about that for a bit.

One of the things that happens is first of all, there’s Swett vs. Board of Education which is finally won, the supreme court decision that’s won by Heman Swett along with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the 1950s. So immediately after that we get our first black students at the University of Texas, but they’re all graduate students. And none of the graduate students were allowed to stay on campus until around 1954 or 55 where there was space made in one dorm, which is down by where the San Jacinto garages are for some of those folks. Almost immediately subsequent to that, University of Texas, and this is now after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; in 1956 the University of Texas decides to allow the first black undergraduates to come to campus. At that point they had to decide what to do about housing for those students. The decision was made not to offer housing at all to black women, so most black women who came to the University of Texas in 56 lived in a cooperative down on 10^th St. on what used to be East Avenue — I-35 has now been placed over 10^th St. — in effect the dorm where they lived was destroyed in order to be able to put I-35 through. But anyway it was a co-op, and it was co-op which they shared with women from Huston Tillotson. There were a few black women who were allowed to stay in a co-op, which was across the street from where Carothers is now, where the Belo Communications building is — Whitis House was a co-op in which a small number of black women were allowed to stay, but that was off campus, the University didn’t own it at that point.

The University decided to allow some black men to stay on campus, and those folks were placed in basically two dorms that were dorms that had been purchased after World War II as temporary housing for students on campus. They were army barracks that were dismantled and brought to campus and built back up again. So one was placed more or less where the Alumni Center is now, and the other is placed over where the San Jacinto parking garage is. Ironically, in that period of time the Law School had decided to build a new, very luxurious dormitory for graduate students and law students. It was the first dormitory that was air conditioned on campus. It was opened in 1954 shortly after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the dean of the law school decided to name it after William Simkins, who was a law professor for 30 years, very well known, but he also was grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He and his brother, who was actually a UT regent, had started the Klan in Florida. So right after, within weeks to months after the Supreme Court decision, the head of the law school decides to name a dorm after a grand dragon the Ku Klux Klan, and right behind it is the wooden, tar paper shack, army surplus dorm that they designated for black students, two years later in 1956, so the juxtaposition was hard to miss, pretty complete.

Let’s finish up with something else that surprised me, the story of the Eyes of Texas, the song that students sing without probably knowing the history of it, so you take the tour to the Texas Cowboys Pavilion, which is also right down there by the dorms you were just talking about. Can you tell us about that site and about the activities there?

We cover this in two places. One is in front of the Robert E Lee statue. Robert E Lee, very few people know this, and it does seem strange, but Robert E. Lee became a University President right after the end of the Civil War, so he loses the Civil War and within a couple of years he is the President of Washington University in Virginia, which later became Washington and Lee. He’s the President and there is a young man by the name of Prather who is a law student under him, who subsequently became a President of the University of Texas. Now one of the things that Prather brought to the University of Texas when he came was a saying. Robert E. Lee at the end of every speech he made to his collective students and faculty members would say “The eyes of the south are upon you,” and so when Prather got to the University of Texas he decided to take freely from what Lee had been saying, and at the end of his speeches to his assembled students and faculty members he would say “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” taking it directly from Lee. Students of course found that to be interesting, and they decided to create a satirical song about it that put words to it, “the Eyes of Texas are upon you,” and the words are probably very familiar to many of you who are listening to this, and they put it to a familiar tune, which was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which actually comes from “I’ve Been Working on the Levee,” which is either a work song sung by black folks or a minstrel song that was developed making fun of black folks, but either one, they took that tune. And then its first performances were in minstrel shows, blackface minstrel shows, the Hancock Opera House down on Sixth Street was actually the first time it was performed, and it was performed in blackface. So it comes from the minstrel tradition, it’s a satiric tune, it plays off Robert E. Lee, and was originally sung in blackface.

And how is this connected with the Texas Cowboys?

Well the Texas Cowboys are an interesting group. It’s one of the primary “spirit groups” and has been around for many years. They certainly sing the song and all that but one of the things the Texas Cowboys were most known for was they would put on minstrel shows as part of, sometimes twice a year, but almost always at least once a year, during either the fall Homecoming or during the spring Roundup celebrations. And so they would put on minstrel shows, there were comedy shows and musical shows. As many as 60 of these young people would dress in blackface and cavort around. The racism was so extreme that they also played Mexican Americans in blackface. So you have stereotyping and denigration of Mexican Americans in sombreros and serapes and things like that in blackface, as well what they considered to be black people dressed in stripes and other kinds of disparaging kinds of ways, and that went on until 1964.

Til 1964?

1964-1965 it was outlawed, there was one final young cowboy who raced across the stage in black face, but there’s been kind of racially tinged play, you could call it, associated with the Roundup for years and years, well through the 1990s.

Prof. Gordon

Well thank you for making this history known to all of us in the community, and I think to a lot of people outside the community will be really interested in it. The website will definitely make it accessible for people on campus and off campus too, so thank you and thanks for talking to us today.

Well thank you for bringing me in, and thank you for asking me insightful questions, and giving me a chance to talk about what’s going here on campus, or what went on on campus.

You can listen to this interview on 15 Minute History.

You can see the online Racial Geography Tour at racialgeographytour.org

That website will include further reading on all the topics we discuss.

It’s in Their Blood

By Ted Banks

(This article is reposted from Fourth Part of the World.)

The Progressive-Era white press and their audience had a fascination with Indians judging from the amount of ink that was devoted to musings on their place and progress in society. One component of that fascination, indeed one that was the basis for much speculation on how successfully or not Indians were integrating into white America, was how much “Indianness” could be attributed to Indian blood.

Many observers have noted that notions of blood and “mixing” among whites varied depending on whose blood was being considered. While the “one-drop” rule dictated that a single drop of black blood could overwhelm generations of otherwise Anglo (or Indian) infusion, Indian blood offered no such absolute outcome. At times commenters noted the tenacity of Indian blood, as demonstrated by its ability to preserve Indian physical characteristics across generations. Other times, white observers painted Indian blood as conversely unstable, susceptible to dilution through intermarriage, and seemingly at times, social contact or cultural proximity.

In a 1907 article penned by Frederic J. Haskins titled “Indians Increasing in America,” the author cites several examples of the persistence of “Indian” traits, which he ties to a rough accounting of blood quantum. He notes that the “strength of Indian racial traits is shown by the fact that the 700 persons now in Virginia who can prove their descent from Pocahontas and her English husband, John Rolfe, still have the Indian hair and high cheek bones.” Commenting on a handful of Indian politicians, Haskins introduces “Adam Monroe Byrd, a Representative from Mississippi, [who] is also of Indian blood.” Haskins reports that Byrd “traces his ancestry through a long line of distinguished Cherokee chieftains,” and that “He has the high cheek bones, copper skin and straight hair which indicate the blood of the original American.” Haskins’s article reveals the casual ambivalence with which settlers framed the racial makeup of Indians, and their desire to monitor the relative progress of Indians in America accordingly.

Four years before Haskins’s piece, an article on the upcoming Indian exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair played the other side of the ambivalence spectrum while employing much the same rhetoric regarding Indian racial traits. Titled “Pageant of a Dying Race,” the feature dramatically promised the “last live chapter of the red man in American history is to be read by millions of pale faces at the Universal Exposition.” Like Haskins, the author of “Pageant of a Dying Race,” T. R. MacMechen, describes the persistence of Indian racial traits, observing that “(the) blood of Pontiac, of Black Hawk, of Tecumseh and his wily brother, The Prophet, flows in the veins of the descendants who will be at the exposition,” and that “(no) student of American history will view the five physical types of the Ogalalla Sioux without memories of Red Cloud, nor regard the (word unclear) without recalling the crafty face of that Richelieu of Medicine Men, Sitting Bull.” However, MacMechen argues that despite the seeming durability of Indian traits, “the savage is being fast fused by marriage and custom into a dominant race, so that this meeting of warriors becomes the greatest and probably the last opportunity for the world to behold the primitive Indian.” In MacMechen’s account, marriage and custom function as ways to counterbalance, or perhaps mask, the otherwise durable Indian blood.

Festival Hall at World Fair (via Wikipedia)

White supremacy dictated the ways in which whites interacted with racial “others,” but not in such a way that all of these interactions were uniform across groups. That is to say that while intermarriage between blacks and whites was prohibited throughout much of the country on either a de facto or de jure basis, intermarriage between settlers and Indians was, at least at times, encouraged. A 1906 Dallas Morning News piece reported that “Quanah Parker is advocating the intermarriage of whites with the Indians for a better citizenship among the Indians.” The piece noted that “Quanah’s mother was a white woman and several of his daughters have married into white families.” The item quoted Parker as saying “Mix the blood, put white man’s blood in Indians, then in a few years you will have a better class of Indians,” and noted that “(Parker) hopes to live to see the time that his tribe will be on the level with those of pure anglo-saxon blood.” Another DMN article from two years later seems to reveal a gendered wrinkle to such unions, reporting that “(with) the coming of Yuletide Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Indians realized one of the greatest ambitions of his life when his young son, Quanah Jr., a Carlisle graduate, was married to Miss Laura Clark, a graduate of the Lawton High School last year,” and that “(this) is the first time in the history of Indians of this section where an Indian has been married to a girl of white blood.”

If persistent racial traits were attributed to Indian blood, but Indians were being “fast fused by marriage and custom” into white society, the result might be some Indians in unexpected places, or at least circumstances. Haskins, in his piece, noted that at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, “. . . the strong voice at the entrance of the Indian Building calling through a megaphone, . . . (the) barker who thus hailed the passing throng in the merry, jocular fashion of the professional showman was a full-blooded Indian boy, a product of the new dispensation of things, just as Geronimo was of the old.” Of Charles Curtis, a US Senator from Kansas, Haskins observed that “(he) is not of pure Indian heritage, but his mother belonged to the Kaw tribe. . . . He has the hair and color of an Indian, but in politics does not play an Indian game.” A Dallas Morning News correspondent reported in 1906 that Quanah Parker had been elected a delegate to the Republican convention, but that he had declined, stating that he had no interest in politics. The anonymous scribe went on to comment that

Quanah is a half-breed, his mother having been Cynthiana (sic) Parker. Having
white blood in his veins, his conduct is absolutely incomprehensible. For who
ever heard before of a white man, or any kind of a man with white blood in his
veins, who did not want the honors or the salary of office? Still we must remember
that Quanah is King of the Comanches, and that is a pretty good position itself.

The writer’s tone indicates he was speaking somewhat in jest, but the gist of his comment was that Quanah, although possessing “half” white blood by his estimation, was “playing the Indian game” by staying out of politics, and, in doing so, positioned himself a world away from “any kind” of white man.

(via Wikimedia)

This is all to say that if one wanted to track the uses of “blood” in white America’s Progressive-Era discourse on Indians, the results would be—excuse the pun—mixed, to say the least. Like their feelings on Indians in general, the habitual deployment of blood as an explanatory concept nonetheless exhibited a remarkable ambivalence; white Americans seemed to think both that “Indian blood” definitely was of immense importance and that it could mean about anything they needed it to. This ambivalence stands out even more starkly when compared to the aforementioned belief in the complete impenetrability of African blood of the same period. A cynical reading might well deduce that white Americans said anything and everything about blood that would help to fortify white supremacy. A devil’s advocate counterpoint might argue that the rise of the eugenics movement indicated that white Americans of the time indeed believed in at least some of what they said. And still another would remind us that both of those could be, and probably were, the case.

Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)

By Isabelle Headrick

The Isle Bourbon and the Isle de France lie in the southern Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. France acquired the islands in 1638 and 1715, respectively, and developed Isle Bourbon as a provisioning stop for grain and livestock for ships traveling between Europe and India. Although these islands shared certain features with France’s Caribbean colonies, they also differed from them in the practices of racial ideologies and the economic and slavery regimes. For example, the sugar monoculture revolution did not arrive to Bourbon and Isle de France until the early nineteenth century, after the collapse of the sugar economy in St. Domingue. In this very specific context, the narrative frame of Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies hinges on a betrayal.

Madeleine’s Children tells the story of Madeleine, an enslaved woman of Indian (southeast Asian) origin who was manumitted in 1789 by her wealthy French owner, Marie Anne Routier, yet was not informed of her manumission until Routier’s death nineteen years later. Routier also left Madeleine a financial bequest large enough to pay for the freedom of her enslaved twenty-two year-old son, Furcy. However, soon after (1809), Routier’s son-in-law, Joseph Lory, tricked Madeleine out of this bequest and acquired the ownership of Furcy. Furcy sued both for his freedom and for money owed to him several times without success until achieving de facto freedom in 1829 and official free status in 1848. Peabody’s inquiries revolve around the ways that that betrayal, and the consequences for the betrayed, interacted with geography, colonial politics, the legal and bureaucratic system, and economic and family entanglements. She underscores the complicated family relationships by exposing the likelihood that the frequently abusive Eugénie Lory, Marie Anne’s daughter and Joseph’s wife, was Furcy’s half-sister through the patriarch of the family, Charles Routier. In the context of growing animosity between the creole elites and the French colonial authorities, aggravated by the Indian Ocean turn toward sugar production and consequent need for slaves, Furcy’s claim to freedom and reimbursement ignited a political crisis in Bourbon.

Through her study of ship passenger lists, censuses, bills of sale, and other autobiographies, Peabody sets herself the ambitious goal of understanding both the practices of enslavement by French Indian Ocean creole elites and the experiences of slavery and freedom from the perspective of the enslaved. This is particularly challenging given the paucity of narratives by freed-people from the world of French slavery (compared to British and American abolitionist literature). However she assembles enough information about Madeleine, Furcy, and the Routiers-Lorys to emphasize the centrality of family in either unmaking or making the enslaved or freeperson’s sense of self and place. Both Madeleine and Furcy were torn from family by their owners, and their first actions upon achieving freedom were to re-embed themselves firmly in family and economic society—Madeleine, by acting (unsuccessfully) to secure her son’s freedom, and Furcy, by setting up a confectionary business, marrying, and raising children. Likewise, the meaning of travel could shift dramatically, depending on one’s position. For the enslaved, travel usually caused catastrophic dislocation and rupture, while for the colonial elites, it reinforced their place in family and commercial global networks.

Map of the Isle Bourbon (via Wikimedia)

Readers familiar with Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, will appreciate the significance that Peabody attaches to legal and bureaucratic documents, not only for later historians but for people fighting to obtain or maintain their freedom. In the case of Furcy, who may have been the best-documented slave in Bourbon, Peabody had to rely on archives that were incomplete. Some particularly important documents, she surmises, may have been missing by design. She argues that slavery was a system that was maintained not only through the state’s coercive laws, but by corruption and manipulation of those laws and falsification or elimination of documents on the part of the owners. This manipulation had ramifications both contemporaneously and in future years: critical documents would turn up absent, obstructing later legal recourse for Furcy. Therefore Furcy was a victim not only of the institution of slavery but of Lory’s personal corruption and unscrupulousness—traits, Peabody argues, that typified the French Indian Ocean creole elite class. The historian’s efforts to make sense of the corrupted archive, or “the chasm between the written documents and the lived experience of slavery and freedom,” is one of the pervasive themes of Madeleine’s Children.

In the conversation with other historians, Peabody seeks to deepen understandings of freedom and slavery by enlarging the focus to include the French empire as it reached beyond the Atlantic. Her attention to the slave smuggling triggered by the abolition of transoceanic slave trading reinforces studies of contraband in the late eighteenth century. And while Madeleine, Marie Anne and Eugénie all inhabited a reality far from the revolutionary feminists in mainland France, Peabody is deeply invested in understanding the experiences of women, including highlighting the entangling practices of employing enslaved women as midwives and wet-nurses. Focusing on one family’s experiences reveals the complex and messy underbelly of an empire in the process of transformation and France’s bumpy trajectory toward the promises of the 1789 revolution.

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

By Micaela Valadez

Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city contributes to the growth of a largely white upper-middle class demographic who can afford living in proximity to Austin’s finest and natural recreational spaces. A look at Austin’s past reveals a pattern of racial discrimination as the city constantly places the needs of white residents, boosters, developers, and investors above those of Black and Latino residents.

Andrew M. Busch’s new book, City in a Garden traces one hundred years of Austin’s urban, environmental, political, and social history. Busch explains that Austin’s investment in big business and innovative environmental development projects was and still is an investment in the social construction of whiteness that has paid off beautifully for upper-middle class white people. Busch argues that no matter how sustainable Austin is, or remains, there is a troubling “shadow” constantly growing behind the “garden” that combines the urban and the natural. The shadow is a century of racial discrimination in the form of federal, state, and local urban development policies that built an environmentally sustainable and desirable playground for white upper-middle class people. Simultaneously these policies and city planning projects kept Black and Latinx people out of any real decision making processes, leaving them with the least desirable spaces in the city, spaces that remain underfunded and subject their residents to constant threat of removal and displacement.

Busch’s main purpose is to expose the complexities that arise when space is racialized through the process of urbanization. He foregrounds Austin as an exceptional case that further complicates the relationships between city leaders and developers, environmentalists, and the Black and Latinx communities as they all make claims for their ideas of how Austin’s space should be utilized. Furthermore, Busch suggests that the “history of human-environment interaction in Austin has revolved around managing water as well as enhancing access to and preserving unique environmental characteristics that have high use and exchange value” (14). This is apparent from the beginning of Austin’s city planning history.

From the late 1890s to the 1930s, city leaders focused on subduing the water system in and around Austin and successfully dammed the Colorado River. The project signified the capability of harnessing nature to provide residents, farmers, and especially companies with cheap power and flood control. In the 1930s, as the population grew, and new land became available to build on and to accommodate new types of labor, suburbanization and the Federal Housing Association (FHA) continued to place white communities’ needs above all others. While the FHA demarcated Black and Latinx spaces as “dilapidated” and ripe for redevelopment, the Home Owners Loan Corporation made sure that white neighborhoods remained white through restrictive covenants and other illegal methods that kept most people of color in south and east Austin. By the 1950s, rampant deindustrialization in Austin made working-class industrial jobs harder to get in the city. The process of ridding Austin’s inner city of heavy industry incentivized middle and upper-class labor and the companies that would employ them with new recreational spaces, the convenience of suburban life, and tax breaks for oil and high-tech companies. For Black and Latinx communities, the removal and redevelopment projects that resulted from mid-century urban renewal only served to exacerbate racial segregation as new housing was built on the east side of Austin.

Downtown from Austin’s Famous Zilker Park (via Wikimedia)

As the book enters the 1960s, Busch strengthens his argument. Austin’s environmentalists started to challenge urban and environmental projects that posed a threat to the natural environment and recreational spaces. The best example here is their fight to ban motorized vehicles from the west side of Town Lake while the east side had to contend with massive motorboat races that drew thousands of people throughout the year and posed a threat to Latinx communities. Destroying the east Town Lake community’s park to build a stadium for the races sparked the organization of people in the community as well as organizations active in the Chicano and Civil Rights Movements. After six years of protest, the city finally moved the boat races without the aid of white environmentalists who never considered the negative effects that their efforts had on Latinx communities. Overall, the 60s and 70s proved that liberalism fell short for marginalized communities and white environmentalists only considered natural spaces as an environment in need of protection from city development projects.

In the 1980s, Austin leaders began to aggressively diversify the local economy as defense, oil, and high-tech industries effectively sparked the process of globalization. The University of Texas was integral in this economic transformation and supplied these new industries with skilled labor and state-of-the-art research capabilities funded mostly by federal defense contracts. This massive shift caused the city’s white population to expand residential areas in the north and the west. While these residential areas began to threaten physical spaces that environmentalists considered pristine and worthy of protecting, Black and Latinx residents living to the east and south saw production facilities move in to their neighborhoods making life more hazardous.

In examining the 1990s, Busch focuses on the bifurcation of the environmental movement in the fight against aggressive private and federally funded urban expansion. Traditional white environmentalists took on the encroachment of private development in pristine and untouched natural space. For this group, unchecked development threatened the Edwards Aquifer, an essential source of water and important part of Austin’s ecosystem. East Austin environmentalists agreed that the aquifer needed protection but added that their communities needed just as much protection from both old and new environmental hazards facing Black and Latinx people. For eastsiders, environmental injustice was a civil rights issue. They constructed “the environment as a hybrid landscape, one where natural and built reinforced one another and combined to undermine minorities health and access to jobs, education, and recreation…” (226). But, as Busch argues in the epilogue, eastside environmentalists lost to their white counterparts as the 2000s saw an increased development in east Austin because building east would not disturb any protected environments, eased the increasingly expensive housing crisis, and proved to be extremely profitable. Using the epilogue as a kind of policy proposal, Busch argues for a more equitable city planning and economic structure by way of creating jobs that do not just serve a certain sector of Austin’s growing population. He asserts that historical exclusion should be met with contemporary inclusion in every aspect and that gentrification poses an immediate threat to impoverished communities who are already being pressured to leave because of a lack of economic opportunity. Busch suggests that rent control, direct subsidies, and other mechanisms should be employed to create “a holistically livable environment” for all Austinites.

Busch’s book is important for students in a variety of disciplines, residents interested in city development and planning, city planners, housing and economic justice activists, as well as environmental activists. City in a Garden also leaves the history of Austin ripe for further research. In what ways did Black and Latinx residents challenge, participate, and/or survive the growing spatial disparities of their white counterparts? A research project on the historically Black Wheatsville community could provide some answers. What was life like in pre-WWII Austin for residents living in areas affected by environmental changes and hazards? An inquiry in to Mexican agricultural workers living in colonias around Austin might shed light on how changes in Austin’s economy – transitions from agricultural, to industrial, and in to oil and technology – affected where Latinos’ in Austin lived and worked over time. Readers interested in education might also be intrigued by the brief mentions of educational segregation and its lasting problems in Austin. With a hundred-year historical sweep the questions this book fosters seem endless, which is an excellent problem to have.

Overall, City in a Garden reveals a complicated past littered with good and bad decisions in hopes that people in the present and future might reckon with and correct the inequality literally built in to Austin’s city limits.

Eddie Anderson, the Black Film Star Created by Radio

by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley

In December 1939 Academy Award nominated, African American actress Hattie McDaniel was barred from attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Georgia because of her race Just four months later, a quite different scenario played out in New York City. In April 1940, the first elaborate premiere of a Hollywood studio-produced film was held in Harlem, the cultural capital of black America. Paramount Studios sponsored two simultaneous world premieres of Buck Benny Rides Again, a movie which, in every way but actual billing, co-starred American network radio’s premiere comedy star, Jack Benny, and his radio valet and butler, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. One gala was held at the studio’s flagship theater, the Paramount, in midtown Manhattan. The other was held at the Loew’s Victoria Theater on 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem. In a most unusual move in an industry that limited roles for African-American performers to tiny, often uncredited parts as servants, Paramount also aggressively promoted the film’s surprise, break-out co-star, African American actor Anderson.

Eddie Anderson and Theresa Harris in Buck Benny Rides Again

Paramount’s publicity department released a barrage of publicity in New York and in major African American newspapers across the nation, touting “Hollywood goes to Harlem!” for the separate premiere of Buck Benny Rides Again on the night before, April 23, 1940. The Victoria Theater was a 2,400 seat picture palace adjacent to the Apollo Theater. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Jack Benny’s film co-star, was given the “hail the conquering hero” treatment in Harlem—an estimated 150,000 people lined the streets as Anderson and major political, social, and entertainment dignitaries of black America paraded to the theater. Jack Benny, his radio cast members, film director Mark Sandrich and Benny’s radio comic nemesis Fred Allen, all appeared on stage at the Victoria to praise Anderson. After the show, Anderson was honored with receptions at the Savoy Ballroom and the Theresa Hotel. The event was extensively covered in breathless detail by the nation’s black press, and blow-by-blow coverage of the premiere was carried on a local black-oriented radio station.

Anderson’s role in the Buck Benny film as Jack’s valet “Rochester” carried over from radio, in a witty and “hip” display of intermedia storytelling and crossover fame. Anderson’s performance stole the movie, as it gave “Rochester” far more screen time than black actors had found in any Hollywood film that had not been a black cast feature. Buck Benny featured Rochester’s witty retorts to Jack’s (whom Rochester cheekily calls “Boss”) egotistical vanities, croaked out in his distinctive, raspy voice. The film and the role positioned Anderson as one of the most prominent African American performers of the era, despite—and because of—mainstream white racial attitudes of the day. It took star status in a rival medium (as co-star with a white comedian) for a black actor to achieve prominence in American film.

Buck Benny was among the highest grossing movies of the year at the American box office in 1940. Throughout the nation, movie theaters billed the film on marquees as co-starring Benny and “Rochester.” In many theaters, especially African American theaters in the South, but also in white and black neighborhood movie houses elsewhere across the nation, the marquee billing put “Rochester’s” name first above the title. The film’s box office success led to recognition of Anderson and Benny as spokesmen for civil rights and integration. The two were named to the Schomburg Center Honor Roll for Race Relations for their public efforts to foster interracial understanding. This moment before World War II further raised the consciousness of a young generation of African Americans to fight for civil rights, in an interlude before racist white backlash coalesced to further limit black entertainers in American popular media. Anderson’s success caused him to be hailed in black newspapers as being a harbinger of a “new day” in interracial amity and new possibilities for black artistic, social, and economic achievement.

Eddie Anderson’s radio-fueled movie stardom complicates the shameful Hollywood story of racism, racial attitudes, and restrictive limits on representations of African Americans in film and popular entertainment media in the late 1930s and World War II era. A middle-aged dancer, singer, and comic who’d forged a regional career in West Coast vaudeville and mostly un-credited servant roles in Hollywood films, Anderson rocketed to stardom due to his role on Jack Benny’s Jell-O program, one of the top-rated comedy-variety programs on radio in the 1930s. Anderson’s “Rochester” role in his first years on Jack Benny’s radio program (1937-1938) had contained heavy doses of minstrel stereotypes—stealing, dice-playing, superstitions—but from the beginning the denigratory characteristics were counterbalanced by the valet’s quick wit and irreverence for Benny’s authority, accentuated by his inimitable voice and the wonderful timing of his pert retorts and disgruntled, disbelieving “Come now!” This spark of intelligence and individual personality that Benny and his writers gave Anderson to work with, which he so embellished with his performance, made him an immediate sensation on Benny’s show.

Rochester critiqued Benny’s every order and decision, with an informality of interracial interaction unusual in radio or film depictions of the day. His lively bumptiousness raised his character above other, more stereotypical black servants in American popular media. Rochester could appeal to a wide variety of listeners, as historian Melvin Ely notes of “Amos n Andy.” He always remained a loyal servant and had to follow Benny’s orders, so he was palatable to those listeners most resistant to social change. Yet, in a small way, Rochester spoke truth to power, and he was portrayed by an actual African-American actor, so he gained sympathy and affection among many black listeners.

The enormous box office success of Eddie Anderson’s three co-starred films with Jack Benny in 1940-1941 fueled optimistic hopes in the black press that prejudiced racial attitudes could be softening in the white South. Rochester was hopefully opening a wedge to destroy the old myths that racist Southern whites refused to watch black performers, the myths to which racist white film and radio producers so stubbornly clung. The Pittsburgh Courier lauded Anderson as a “goodwill ambassador” bringing a message of respectability and equality to whites in Hollywood and across the nation. The hurtful representations of blacks in the mass media of the past could finally be put aside, The Los Angeles based African American newspaper, The California Eagle, optimistically argued in an editorial that Anderson’s example pointed to new hopes for interracial tolerance and black cultural and social achievement:

Two years ago Americans became conscious of a new thought in Negro comedy. It was really a revolution, for Jack Benny’s impudent butler-valet-chauffeur, “Rochester Van Jones” said all the things which a fifty year tradition of the stage proclaimed that American audiences will not accept from a black man. Time and again, “Rochester” outwitted his employer, and the nation’s radio audiences rocked with mirth. Finally, “Rochester” appeared with “Mistah Benny” in a motion picture – a picture in which he consumed just as much footage as the star. The nation’s movie audiences rocked with mirth. So, it may well be that “Rochester” has given colored entertainers a new day and a new dignity on screen and radio.

Eddie Anderson’s cross-media and cross-racial stardom was very real in the U.S. popular media between 1940 and 1943. Unfortunately, a series of unforeseen events, and the growing racial strife in the nation during the war curtailed Anderson’s film career. MGM attempted to build Anderson into a greater star, featuring him in its all-star black cast dramatic musical production of “Cabin in the Sky” with Lena Horne. But “Cabin in the Sky” was released in summer 1943, just as race riots erupted in Detroit and other manufacturing and military base cities over labor strife. Timid film exhibitors did not play up Anderson’s film or stardom for fear of violence playing out in their theaters. Racist white backlash against blacks gaining footholds of integration and prominence in American public life began spreading across the south. Anderson’s subsequent appearance in “Brewster’s Millions” (Paramount, 1945) caused the film to be banned in Memphis for its portrayal of pleasant interracial interactions. Although he remained the most prominent (and highest paid) black performer on radio and television through the late 1950s, his stardom faded to being only a core component of the Jack Benny ensemble.

From Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of Radio Comedy(2017).

More about radio, film, and race in the US

Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos n Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. (1991). Ely examines the complexities of how two white entertainers created two comic black radio characters that divided American audiences, who either loved or loathed the most popular show on radio from 1928 until 1950.

Michele Hilmes. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (1997). This marvelous cultural history of the rise, flourishing, and demise of radio in American culture broke new ground in discussing the importance of gender and race for radio producers, narratives, and listeners.

Miriam J. Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood ( 2016). Petty uncovers the many subtle ways that black film performers layered meaning, dignity, and outstanding talent into the minor roles they were given in American films.

Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and the Politics of Race (North Carolina, 1999). Savage explores the opportunities that wartime needs for African-American participation and support provided for more equitable representation and address in the nation’s most widespread media form.

Quotations:

“Rochester: A New Day” California Eagle 24 April 1941: 8.

“Harlem’s Reception for Rochester at Film Premiere Tue, will top all previous ones,” New Amsterdam News 20 April 1940: 20.

“New Yorkers all set for Rochester’s Film Premiere,” Chicago Defender 20 April 1940: 20.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)

By Marcus Oliver Golding

Archives, especially state archives, have political agendas. Whether private or public, holdings of individual, institutional, and government documents can serve to invade and control the lives of citizens and societies. Their organizations shape historical knowledge and national narratives about the past. Kirsten Weld addresses these political issues of government intrusion, historical memory, and archival knowledge production by focusing on The Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives in Guatemala (The Project). Weld identifies two different political agendas structuring the National Police Archives from its professionalization in the 1950s until the state of decay in which it was found in 2005. The first agenda served the purpose of surveillance and social control, using archives as a weapon against people considered enemies of the state during the Guatemalan Civil War between 1960 and 1996. The records’ rescue gave these archives a new social purpose geared towards democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for victims of the state’s war crimes. The book chronicles the transition from the first political agenda into the second with the goal of capturing the process through which a new historical narrative about the war was produced.

Weld argues that how people think about archives is critical to understand their role in the generation of new historical narratives. Archival holdings are also telling about the relationship between citizens and the state in the construction of these national histories. The Project helped transform negative perceptions of archives as dumpsters that perpetuate silence and political apathy, into treasures seen as tools for democratization and empowerment. The author combines historical and ethnographic perspectives to understand how the Police Archives transitioned to a new agenda of democratic opening and citizen’s accountability for crimes perpetuated by the state during the Civil War.

Weld uses ethnography and oral histories to explore how The Project came to be, the tensions that erupted between older and new generations working at the Police Archives, and the dangerous political context in which they had to work. She shows how former guerrilla fighters began an uncertain effort to recover the police archives until the institutionalization of the initiative through foreign funding. Due to the messy and decaying state of the police documents, archival preservation required former guerillas to learn concepts of original order, provenance, and chain of custody in order to know how the National Police organized information. Therefore, the norms outlined in the International Standard for Archival Description would undergird the new organizational logic of The Project from the onset.

Working in The Project also entailed understanding the goals that drove people to get involved with the Police Archives in the first place. Weld shows that former revolutionaries were driven to work on The Project by powerful experiences of loss and militancy, fueled by the desire to restore honor and agency to the dead. The young people she studied who came from militant families saw the preservation of police documents as a new way to continue the revolutionary struggle. To those without revolutionary ties, the archives represented a way to put academic training to use and to advance in the recovery of historical memory and truth telling. These experiences will shape the legacy of the Guatemalan Civil War and the next generations’ interpretations of the past.

The growing visibility of this collaborative effort, however, made it the target of military pressures, which raised concerns about the welfare of the archives and its personnel. This threat of violence was not new and was preceded by what the author calls “the archival wars,” — battles between citizens and the state over the access and meaning of state documents. Weld presents the different strategies rulers and ruled have used since the beginning of the Civil War to limit or expand access to records. These include legislation to block or undermine the preservation of state information, the demand to know what information the state holds about a particular citizen, or the successful publication of reports about disappeared Guatemalans.

Drawing from state archives and human rights reports, Weld also focuses on the institutional history of the National Police. The restructuring of this institution from 1954 to 1974, through counter-insurgency aid from the U.S, led to the establishment of efficient record keeping systems as a means to enact effective social control. The Central Records Bureau and the Regional Communications Center are just two initiatives that helped the Guatemalan state monitor its citizens. Better archives, modern equipment, and professional personnel became synonymous with the battle against “subversion.” This counterinsurgent mentality of the police accounted for most of the urban violence in the 1980s. The transition to democracy in 1986 perpetuated the counterinsurgency approach into the post-conflict period, explaining the militarized and centralized nature of the new National Civil Police.

Finally, the author delves into the successes and risks that the new archival agenda of social reconstruction and historical revisionism faces in Guatemala today. By working toward the passage of national archives system laws, and creating archival science programs in national universities, the Project has inaugurated a new archival culture in Guatemala, one that seeks a more democratic and transparent relationship between government and citizens. But the military’s institutional opposition to The Project reveals resistance to a new historical memory that subverts old narratives of a triumphant nation against communism.

Weld combines an impressive set of written sources with an ethnographic approach and oral histories of people who worked in the Project. These sources serve her well in capturing the transition from one archival agenda to the other. The author’s writing style is clear and fluid. This is a critical study that intertwines new interpretations about urban violence in Guatemala with a growing literature on historical memory and the politics of state archives in post-conflict societies.

The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Slave passes were an early form of racialized surveillance, small pieces of paper with the power to decide where black men and women could travel, who they could meet, and whether they might be subject to violence. Digitized by Galia Sims, The documents in “Guards and Pickets: Paperwork of Slavery” provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, like passes, jail fees, marriage certificates, patrol invoices.

More on Sims’ project and The Public Archive here.

How do we talk about Enoch? Enoch Powell, Race Relations, and Public History in Britain

Embed from Getty Images

by Edward Watson

Fewer British politicians in the 20^th century have been as inflammatory as Enoch Powell. On April 20, 1968, the Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary criticized mass immigration from the Commonwealth into the UK during an address to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. Dubbed the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell claimed that the anti-discrimination Race Relations Bill of 1968 would provide immigrant communities with the means to “overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

Powell’s speech caused uproar. The Times condemned it as “an evil speech” and Powell was promptly dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative leader Ted Heath. However, Powell had his supporters. In fact, a Gallup poll in 1968 found that 74% of respondents supported his suggestion of repatriation. Powell subsequently became a mythologized and divisive figure. For the far-right, “Enoch was right” became a key rallying cry of anti-immigrant sentiment. For many on the center and the left, Powell embodies an openly vitriolic, racist strand of British politics.

BBC Radio 4, a highbrow wing of Britain’s public service broadcaster, decided to air a dramatic reading of Powell’s speech interspersed with commentary from journalists and academics in commemoration of the speech’s 50^th anniversary. The presenter, BBC media editor Amol Rajan, promoted the program on Twitter, claiming that “on Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio.” The BBC has widely come under fire, most forcibly from Labour peer Andrew Adonis and academics. Dr Shirin Hirsch, who had been interviewed for the broadcast, tweeted that she was “disgusted by the way the BBC are promoting this show. I made a mistake and was interviewed for this but I have been sick with worry since seeing the way this is being presented.” Considering the divisive nature of Powell’s speech, many questioned the decision to give an uncritical platform to the far-right while others focused more on the decision to commemorate the speech at all. Rajan later defended the decision by arguing that “the speech is broken up, and critiqued by voices from across the spectrum. Not just read out in a single go.”

On Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio (by actor Ian McDiarmid). Please join us @BBCRadio4 8pm. Super-brains Nathan Gower + David Prest have done an amazing production job. Great guests too: https://t.co/3XvDMSH16d
— Amol Rajan (@amolrajan) April 12, 2018

The BBC’s broadcast touches on numerous ethical and methodological issues for public historians. How do we deal with difficult subject matter? What is the best medium for a critical analysis of such an incendiary speech? How should such a broadcast be marketed? What are the risks of presenting the speech as a commemoration? Its hype as “the first time” the speech had been broadcast was fundamental to the controversy. Historians often use anniversaries as an opportunity to disseminate their own work and engage with a public audience. In this instance, the seemingly celebratory nature of the significance of Powell’s speech was widely criticized. Historicizing Powell’s speech is important and we have to establish critical and reflective ways of covering Powell in the wider context of race relations in Britain. There is no singular correct way to do this, but a dramatic reenactment of the speech seems inappropriate, especially as there is no recording of Powell’s most famous and divisive line, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

This is not to say that Enoch Powell should be ignored. Powell’s speech represents an important juncture in British political and cultural history. Prior to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, Commonwealth citizens had extensive rights to settle in the UK. Race riots, most notably in Notting Hill and Nottingham in 1958, inflammatory speeches (such as Powell’s), and restrictive immigration laws were indicative of intense debates surrounding race relations in the UK. In 1964, the hugely controversial election in Smethwick in the West Midlands highlighted the prevalence of racism in British politics, as the Conservatives were widely reported as adopting the slogan “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour.” By the time British citizens of South Asian origin faced a campaign of discrimination from the Kenya African National Union (KANU) government in 1967, racial tensions and white British concerns over the influx of immigrants from the Commonwealth were immensely influential over government policy. The Kenyan Asian crisis, as it came to be known, prompted the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill in 1968, which reduced immigration from the Commonwealth to 8500 per year and a mere 1500 from Kenya specifically. 80,000 people in Kenya, who had previously been entitled to British passports as Citizens of the UK and Colonies, were effectively rendered stateless. In an effort to appease their critics, the Labour government passed the Race Relations Act in 1968. The act made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to a person on the grounds of race or national origins. Powell rallied against the Labour government’s bill and the levels of immigration, arguing that it was “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He believed that racial tensions “of American proportions” which were “interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.”

Embed from Getty Images

The specific context to Powell’s speech is often forgotten and there are historical and political ramifications in understanding its background and subsequent influence. For the left, so eager to portray the Labour party as the bastions of racial equality, it represents a colossal failure in terms of immigration and race relations for Harold Wilson’s government. On the far-right, Powell’s mythology is increasingly synonymous with all anti-immigrant sentiment. Understanding Powell’s background illuminates why his speech was so dangerous. Powell has been caricatured as a demagogue and a rambling racist, but he was a highly respected, classical scholar with an astute awareness of how he could manipulate history for political means. Powell believed history “was always a series of myths and the point was to choose the most appropriate ones for the hour of national need.” He was an articulate and charismatic orator. This was no incoherent, raving outsider, but a calculated and educated member of the political elite.

This is what made his speech so divisive and why it continues to have relevance in British political life to this day. In 2014, comedian Russell Brand called UKIP leader Nigel Farage a “pound shop Enoch Powell” on the BBC’s political TV show Question Time. Welsh UKIP leader, Neil Hamilton, defended Enoch Powell, arguing the idea that Powell was a “racist villain” is “absolute nonsense.” Even more recently, Commonwealth immigration has hit the headlines with the Home Office coming under fire for destroying landing cards from the “Windrush generation,” with thousands of children who were brought to Britain from the West Indies in 1948 now at risk of deportation. Days ago, Labour MP David Lammy, lambasted the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for appeasing the anti-immigrant sentiment of the far-right, arguing that “if you lay down with dogs, you get fleas.” The ghost of Enoch Powell looms large over UK politics. We would do well to figure out an appropriate way to discuss Powell’s speech in its historical context as well as how it fits into contemporary political discourse. Understanding Powell’s strand of racist rhetoric derives from a closer reading of his speech and the context in which he delivered it. In this sense, the BBC’s decision to critique the speech amidst the dramatic reading is important. However, if Britons are to have a more meaningful discussion about the history of race relations, then the discussion must go beyond a dramatization of Powell’s speech. Moreover, public scholars need to do more thinking in terms of how to appropriately frame such a difficult discussion.

Also by Edward Watson on Not Even Past:

Review of Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?
History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums
History in a “Post-Truth” Era

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.

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