The Ruffin Field Trip

Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Chapel Hill for a conference on Thomas Ruffin that Sally and Eric Muller put together. They also put together a terrific field trip, which included a trip to see Ruffin's office over in Hillsborough and then some slave quarters. Sally took a bunch of great pictures, but she didn't post them. I thought you'd enjoy Ruffin's office.

Durham modern home tour tomorrow!

There are a few tickets remaining for the Modernist Mini-Tour in Durham tomorrow afternoon, organized by George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses.

Hope to see you there!

A Going Away Present

On Monday the folks at the University of Alabama Law School were kind enough to have a going away lunch for me and George Geis, who's moving to the University of Virginia. It was a real treat to be able to say bye to my colleagues of seven years; Tuscaloosa was a place where I learned a lot--about friendship and legal analysis and where I did some maturing as a scholar, too. I came to Alabama with a bunch of years of teaching experience already, so my experience here was different from the usual entry-level person. In a lot of ways that made it possible for me to focus on learning to appreciate the community and to work on projects that a new faculty member who's still learning how to teach just wouldn't have time for.

Sometimes I worry that my work isn't as interesting as it was before I arrived here. The project that's been most meaningful for me as a scholar was working on Reconstructing the Dreamland. I still think my two favorite pieces of scholarship are an article a German lawyer who came to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century and wrote the first legal treatise in British North America and one on Harriet Beecher Stowe's critique of legal thought in her obscure but revealing novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. All three of those were completed before I arrived here. It's sort of sobering to think that my best work (or at least favorite work) may be behind me. Even my current project, University, Court, and Slave, about which I am very excited, traces its origins to my dissertation--although I refined and expanded it greatly in Tuscaloosa. (You'll be hearing a bunch more about University, Court, and Slave in the near future; it's a project about which I am excited, in part because it's letting me get back to my core area of interest: intellectual history of the old South.)

So why do I like my earlier work--or why haven't I produced some more good ideas of late? Hard to say. I found working on Reparations Pro and Con (written entirely in Tuscaloosa) very rewarding but also frustrating. Quite simply, it's hard to get a grip on our nation's long history with race. And I fear that few people want to have a conversation about race. So trying to write a book that does justice to each side and takes account of the important perspectives coming from each vantage is, well, tough.

But maybe there's something about the career paths of scholars in general that accounts for this. Partly I've been taken away from writing articles in recent years by committee work for the University (always illuminating to serve on university committees--you learn a ton, even if it impedes scholarship) and partly because I've been editing book reviews over at Law and History Review, which I love. Maybe it has to do with how we learn to ask questions, too. The issue I find most interesting in legal history--how legal doctrine relates to culture--is an issue that invites even a novice scholar to ask lots of questions. So by the time I started teaching and certainly by the time I'd been teaching a bunch of years, I'd identified a lot of datasets (from cases to literary addresses to black newspapers to literature to landscape art) to examine. So that even when I'm doing "new" work, it's looking at older questions and at data that I've known about for a long time. Boy, it's a real through to realize that you're looking at something entirely new to the scholarly community--like the manuscript of the first legal treatise in British North America or the transcript of a trial in the aftermath of the Tulsa riot that took place eighty years ago and that no one had used in decades. I've been getting that thrill again with University, Court, and Slave because I've been reading cases, treatises, and literary addresses that are often ignored.

But the project that's going to get me back to the sense of complete novelty (I hope) is still mostly in the future--it's about the idea of equality in early twentieth-century black thought. And it's tentatively called "Reading the Great Constitutional Dream Book." I've presented an early version a few times. But it's only been an outline so far; the vast majority of the work lies ahead. And therein lies the story about the wonderfully thoughtful going away present my colleagues gave me. My working title comes from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. When the elderly couple are being evicted, IM asks what are they being evicted from? They have (almost) nothing--all they had was the "great constitutional dream book." And so my project looks to what those ideas were--and then (and this is the really hard part to levitate) how those ideas relate to the civil rights revolution. Ellison first learned about those ideas of the constitutional dream while he was growing up in Oklahoma City and he wrote about that experience a couple of times--including in three essays published in the Carlton Miscellany in 1980 (Carlton College's literary magazine). Somehow (and I'm sure this cost a fortune in effort and money both) they found an autographed copy of that issue (which also contains terrific articles on Ellison by such Ellison luminaries as Robert Steptoe and John Callihan)! Opening that present at the lunch was just another example (as Ellison said) of the unexpected outdoing itself in its power to surprise! While of course I'd read those essays (several were talks given at Brown University) before, it's a real treasure to have them in their original form.

A Prison Library: Literature and Black Identity

The recent news that the FBI asked for information from the internet archive is further evidence that books are both important ways of transmitting ideas and important signifiers of which ideas readers find important.

It is not just law enforcement that is interested in reading habits, however. We are hearing a great deal about the project of “the history of the Book” these days. It aims to understand the role of books as vehicles of change: how do books contribute to changes in society, how do they help to create and sustain identity.

Sometimes historians look at books, to measure a culture. What does Invisible Man say about the culture of the United States on the eve of Brown? What do Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk say about Jim Crow?

At other times, historians draw inferences about people from their libraries. This post talks about a list of about 120 books on the "black experience" that Judge Don Young ordered to be placed into the Marion, Ohio prison library back in 1972, Taylor v. Perini, 413 F.Supp. 189, 215-19 (D.C. Ohio 1976). What interests me about the list is its potential for mapping the sources of identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What, then, are the books that the judge ordered added? More below the fold.

The Harlem renaissance and its leaders are well-represented: W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk; Richard Wright’s Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children; James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) along with some other Renaissance-era literature, like Rudolph Fisher’s Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Harlem (1932) and Walls of Jericho (1928)). Situated between the renaissance and the 1960s is Invisible Man.

There is the early 1960s literature that captured the possibilities of the Civil Rights movement: Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); King’s Where Do We Go From Here, The Trumpet of Conscience, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), and Why We Can’t Wait; Alan Westin’s Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America (1964); and Howard Zinn’s SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1968). I might also put John Killen’s And then We Heard Thunder (1964), James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968); John Alfred Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) in that category–they are situated in a place between the optimism of the Civil Rights era and the later separatism. They ask, with King, what now?

Then there’s the literature that represents the transition to black power, as well as disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement or western society more generally, such as Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and White Skin, Black Mask (1952); Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark; Benjamin Muse, American Negro Revolution: From Non-Violence to Black Power, 1963-1967 (1968); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America (1970); Harold Cruce, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Louise Meriwether’s My Daddy was a Numbers Runner (1969)). Along those lines, is literature that provides a popular, sociological critique of 1960s society, like Charles Silverman, Crisis in Black and White (1963). And there’s the literature that continued in the late 1960s and early 1970s to seek an answer in more traditional or different places, like Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1967).

As you would expect, there are many on black power: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; Autobiography of Malcom X; Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (1966); H. Rap Brown, Die N–r Die! A Political Autobiography; Lester Julius’ Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gon Get Your Mama; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Maybe I’d put Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning (1971) into this category. And I guess Cecil Brown, Lives and Loves of Mr. Jive-Ass N–r, too. Prison literature, like George L. Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, is surprisingly rare in this collection.

There are a lot of histories: DuBois’ Black Reconstruction; John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom and Reconstruction, Emancipation Proclamation, and Reconstruction; Franklin Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States (1968); Edward Cronon, Black Moses: Marcus Garvey (1960); David Levering Lewis’ King: A Critical Biography; Benjamin Quarrels’ Black Abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln and the Negroes; and The Negro in the Civil War; Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956); C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In (1966); Herbert Aptheker’s Negro Slave Revolts (1943). Along with the histories are other scholarly work that describe and analyze black culture, such as E.U. Essien-Udom’s Black Nationalism (1970); C. Eric Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America (1961); Henry A. Ploski’s Afro USA (1971); Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1970); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America; and Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion (1964); and other work that collects culture, such as Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Song (1953); Arna Wendell Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963).

DuBois’ Black Reconstruction reminds us that there are books on Reconstruction by and for white people and books on Reconstruction by and for black people. Talk about segregation of memory! Jim Crow separated people intellectually, as well as physically and socially.

Of course the classification scheme that I’ve imposed above says a lot about how I view the world of the 1960s and early 1970s, from the vantage of the early twenty-first century. I’m continuing to think about how to classify the books. And as the classifications grow, I find that I want to put books into several categories. It’ll be interesting to see what readers think about the classifications.

There’s a lot more to say about this; prison officials responded that they already had a lot of literature on the black experience in America in their collection. Might be worth comparing the two lists. For example, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery appears on the prison’s list. But nothing like it is to be found on the court’s list of books to be added. One other quick observation: it’s surprising what isn’t in that list. For instance, I would have expected more James Baldwin.

The special master, Vincent Nathan (who used to teach at the University of Toledo Law School), was kind enough to correspond with me about how the list of books was assembled. He remembers that it came from a group of law librarians. The list may, thus, say more about the intellectual interests of librarians than about the needs or attitudes of the plaintiff class. But even then I think it's informative of what people thought ought to be included on a list of the "black experience." Much left to talk about here.

(This post is a repeat of one over at blackprof a couple of years ago.)

Looking forward to the Visit

Thanks Sally for that very, very kind introduction and for inviting me to walk into Greenespace and chat for a while. It makes me very happy and optimistic about the future to know that someone as thoughtful as Sally is an elected official. And I'm looking forward to being Sally's neighbor and colleague in a couple of weeks. It's a dream come true to be on a faculty as terrific as UNC's.

I share Sally's interest in things antebellum and in how we remember the past. And because I'm giving a talk on landscape art and property law on Thursday I thought that I'd talk some about that now, because I'm still rearranging my note cards and trying how best to present this material.

The talk, "Property and Progress" (cute play on Henry George, eh?) is on the relationship between landscape art and property law in the years leading into Civil War at one of my favorite--and one of our country's finest--art museums, the Westervelt Warner Museum. The talk centers around my favorite work of American art, Asher B. Durand's Progress (1853), which just so happens to be owned by the museum. This will be a huge treat for me, to have the chance to talk about that most magical of paintings at its home. And, in fact, this talk is part of welcoming it home from travels to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then out to San Diego for a major exhibit on Durand.

I join two themes here--first, the centrality of property and particularly the hand of humans on the land, in antebellum landscape art; second, the ways that antebellum property law reflected and amplified those values. The correlation between them is not perfect. A substantial part of landscape art reveals concern over increasing human intrusions on nature. For instance, Thomas Cole's landscapes frequently disclose an ambivalence about the market. What Cole and a lot of other people celebrate--including Frederick Church's Above the Clouds at Sunrise--is nature freed from humans.

The romantics of the antebellum era worried that someone tried to own the landscape. So when Natural Bridge in western Virginia was offered for sale, John Thompson protested it in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. Thomas Jefferson thought that the Natural Bridge, which he had once owned, should be treated as a public trust. (Frederick Church's image of the Natural Bridge, which is owned by the University of Virginia, is at right).

Landscape painters also captured farms and parcels of land, such as Thomas Cole's Ox Bow in the Connecticut River (right). It shows the landscape around Mount Holyoke. Look from left to right and see the increasing civilization. On the left is wild nature, twisted trees; over towards the right are fields, orchards, roads. Ox Bow was completed in 1836, the same year that Emerson completed Nature. You may recall that Emerson said of landscape that:

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Thomas Cole painted a number of such scenes. Sometimes I've used Cole's 1847 "Home in the Woods," which is in the Reynolda House Museum.

The idea here is to show the ways that humans put their imprint on nature--and how artists celebrated that imprint. George Inness' Lackawanna Valley (below) is a classic example. Look at the machine going through the the fields of cut-stumps; the railroad roundhouse in the background; the smoke stack even further off; what a strange juxaposition (it seems at first) of humans and nature. While it seems strange at first, my point is that landscape art is part of the celebration of human's use of land. The boy sitting in the foreground reminds one of Thoreau who talks in Walden of setting his watch to the railroad whistle. Where the image of Walden is of a secluded place, that solitude was often disturbed by the train whistle and then the sounds of the engine.

There’re some neat connections here between property law’s reverence for private property (and its preference for use of land) and the kind of art that Americans produced. It's fun cultural history, I think. And every now and then there are some unexpected connections between judges and landscape art. For instance, in a lecture in 1844 at Dartmouth, United States Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury referred to Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire to illustrate how nations evolved–“starting first in the rudeness of nature; then maturing to high refinement and grandeur-till, amid the ravages of luxury, time and war, sinking into utter desolation.” The series of five paintings depict the same landscape (look for the mountain in the background), as the country goes from a state of nature, to civilization, consummation, destruction, and then desolation. Sort of sobering, but in keeping with many nineteenth-century Americans’ belief in the cycle of nations.

Others, including Justice Woodbury, saw an unbroken chain of upward progress, often facilitated by the increasing respect for private property. And so there's an odd contrast between Cole, who was ambivalent about humans' imposition on nature and Woodbury and a lot of other jurists, who were enamored of the market. And you know what Woodbury's talk is called? How could it be anything other than "Progress"?!

Yup, colleges in the antebellum era were deeply interested in progress-- technological, economic, and moral (though what that meant was unclear). And so it should not surprise anyone that Jasper Cropsey painted the University of Michigan in 1855 (right). It has everything--the school buildings and church (at right), the fields, the roads, a horse drawn wagon, domesticated animals. The college in the garden, to paraphrase Leo Marx' brilliant book The Machine in the Garden. And another important source for this talk is Angela Miller's fantastic book The Empire of the Eye.

What, then, of the centerpiece of the talk: Durand's Progress? It’s a great canvass for seeing all sorts of images of what "progress" meant-–the shift from the native Americans over on the left (the state of nature), then moving across the canvass to the right, the telegraph wires, the steam boats, the canal, the peddler, the boy bringing the cattle to market, the church, the railroad roundhouse....

The talk is particularly meaningful for me, too, because it's the last lecture I'm giving in Tuscaloosa. So it'll be fun, but sad, too, because I'll be saying goodbye to a painting I love and a lot of friends, too.

Alfred Brophy

You can call him Al, and call yourself lucky.

It's a pleasure to lend some Greene space to Al Brophy, professor of law at the University of Alabama, soon to be of the University of North Carolina. Can't wait to welcome him and Barb in person as they settle in to their new Southern Village home. Meanwhile, he's agreed to sit a spell here and test out a few ideas.

I first became aware of the prodigious Alfred L. Brophy's work seven or eight years ago when I started seriously researching the life and career of Judge Thomas Ruffin. Already by then, he had a long list of law review articles out there, a J.D. with a Ph.D. in history. He seemed larger than life! How refreshing to find out, years later, when we had him up here for our symposium on Ruffin and State v. Mann, that he isn't very tall. Al is quite down to earth, smart and funny and full of interesting ideas.

Please join me in welcoming Al to GreeneSpace and to Chapel Hill.

Magical mystery tour

We went to the mountains this weekend. I knew we were going to the mountains, presumably the North Carolina mountains, but more than that, I did not know. It was an anniversary and Mother's Day weekend surprise. (When you get married in Chapel Hill on Mother's Day and graduation weekend, you are setting yourself up for festive anniversaries.)

We went so far out I-40 that I thought we might end up in Asheville, but instead we hung a right and climbed up N.C. 226A to Little Switzerland. Which was magical. Dark and rainy when we got to the Little Switzerland Inn, but the next day was perfect. Started out with good coffee in Spruce Pine at DT's Blue Ridge Java. On to Emerald Village to pan for gemstones and a tour of the historic Bon Ami mine. (The Bon Ami Company mined here for feldspar from 1924 to 1959.) A late lunch at the Little Switzerland Cafe. Then a lovely hike on the Blue Ridge on the Crabtree Meadows trail. After that, some of us were up for shuffleboard. Dinner in Spruce Pine at Downtown Danny's. What a lovely day.


Waves of mayapple, punctuated by trillium. The mayapple here is as tall as it gets, about 18 inches. I'd never seen it more than half that tall.


Crabtree falls.


Shuffleboard, Little Switzerland Inn.

Sunday, a drive home in the rain, capped by another late lunch at the Fiesta Grill.

New Orange County homelessness plan web site

Carson Dean, our new coordinator for Orange County's Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, has hit the ground running. I got a chance to see him in action on Wednesday afternoon, when he met with two rising UNC seniors who will be planning their senior class project, which they want to focus on homelessness. Earlier on Wednesday he had met with students from Hunger and Homelessness Outreach Project (HOPE) of the Campus Y together with other student groups interested in working on homelessness issues.

To the rising seniors, he made a couple of suggestions including one that would give support to homeless people as they enter the work force for perhaps the first time in many years, or ever. Increasing employment is one of the key goals of the plan, and Carson has been holding meetings already with key players to talk about that.

And meanwhile, he has dramatically improved the web site for the plan, upfitting it with lots of useful and current information.

Carson's official title is "coordinator" of our 10-year plan--which is exactly right. Within Orange County already there are lots of resources for addressing the needs of the homeless and those most at risk. The success of the plan depends on putting those resources to the most efficient use--coordinating these multiple efforts--as much as it does on getting new resources in place. Looks like he's off to a great start.

Check out the web pages and see how you can get involved.

Attacking the canvas

Lynn Boggess is a great painter and a pretty good carpenter too. Blogging about our visit to his opening at Tyndall Galleries on Saturday night, Paul talks about his use of the trowel as his instrument of choice, as well as his amazing homemade easel (one of several). Folded up, it looks like a shallow wooden crate. With a few turns of a power screw in reverse, it transforms into a three-legged construction capable of accommodating a canvas in rugged terrains.

The paint on Boggess' works is so thick it takes about ten years to dry out fully, he speculates.

You don't have to know all that to appreciate his art, but it really does make you appreciate the work that goes into it.