Asheville Before School Starts

I made a very quick trip out to Asheville before school starts--been hearing a bunch about the place and, of course, it was everything I'd heard and more. Reminds me of Burlington, Vermont, Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon--the combination of restaurants and grunge and people with money, too. I'm looking forward to spending some more time out there in another year. But right now I want to talk about four things in particular.

As I was driving up Patton Street, towards (what I understand to be) the center of town, I saw an obelisk. And I said, ah, that must be a monument to the Confederacy; I'm guessing it was put up in the early twentieth century. So, after parking the car in a nearby lot (complete with spray-painted "Tourists Go Home"--gotta love the local flavor!) and a walk back there, I see that I was pretty much on the mark. It's a monument put up in the late 1930s to Zebulon Vance--governor of our state during the Civil War. And, of course, it was put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. So I was pretty close; and what to my wondering eyes did appear in front of it, but a smaller granite monument put up in the 1924, also by the UDC, marking Dixie Highway and commemorating Robert E. Lee. So far, so good. Actually, calling this stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel--every southern town needs its confederate monument and they're almost all from the early twentieth century. So you can impress your friends and family by making these kinds of predictions. Let's see, big monument; southern town; ... "well, [affecting voice of authority], I bet that's an early twentieth century monument to the confederacy." And almost all the time you'll be right!

So a walk down towards the enormous courthouse and what do I see: a bunch of hippies surrounding a magnolia tree. As close readers of GreeneSpace will recall, I love magnolia trees--and so does pretty much everyone else, which is part of the reason why the moonlight and magnolia school was so popular. They were camping out, protesting the impending destruction of the tree to create ... a condominium, right next to the park they're building! They crux of this seems to be a decision by the local authorities to sell land left to the city by George Pack. One recent report talks about it in this way: "The park land was willed to the people forever by two deeds of the late and benevolent George Pack. The deeds and land now in question are said by many to have been improperly, if not illegally, sold by Buncombe County Commissioners in November 2006." Hmm, I'd want to see the deeds (or will, I take it in this case)--sounds like a gift in fee simple absolute, but perhaps there was a restriction on use or sale?!

Now, I part company with hippies on some issues--like property rights. However, I'm always happy to see people exercising their constitutional rights in order to encourage the rest of us to spare trees from the ax--particularly the ancient, beautiful, and slow-growing magnolia. Sounds like a new piece of what I might call hippie jurisprudence. There's something about trees, which appeals to my sense of vested rights. The old ones are venerable in part because they are old; they've survived the test of time, so that alone is a reason to preserve them, it seems to me. (Not to mention that trees as a stand-in in southern literature for families.)

Anyway, after a short time at the protest, I spotted yet another monument to the side of the courthouse. And this time as I approached it, I guessed--based on the stones--that it was from the 1880s or 1890s. Bingo! 1893 monument to soldiers at Chickamauga in 1863. Ah, gotta love monuments and monument law--and what a day when you see them all combined.

And now I'm ready for school to start, because this has been just the perfect summer.

Traces of the Trade, on P.O.V. This Tuesday

I've been buried in work on University, Court, and Slave (though you couldn't tell it from how little progress I made last week), so I'm a little behind the curve on this most exciting news. The much-discussed documentary Traces of the Trade will be broadcast on television for the first time this Tuesday, June 24, on the PBS show P.O.V. (In Chapel Hill, POV's broadcast of the film will be on Friday the 27th.) Traces of the Trade is about James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island (one of our country's wealthiest men and a leading figure in the slave trade in the eighteenth century) and a journey that DeWolf's descendants made recently as they retraced the paths of his trade routes and property holdings. They began in Bristol, then went to Ghana and the Caribbean.

I saw a director's cut of this back in 2005 at a conference at Brown University. It was fantastic--absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see the final version. You need to see this. Trust me on this one.

This evening's Bill Moyer's Journal has a short preview, which you can watch here. Also, Sally tells me that the director, Katrina Browne, will be speaking in Chapel Hill on September 6. You may also be interested in c-span's broadcast with Thomas DeWolf, who's the author of a book on this subject, Inheriting the Trade.

Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in June and though my favorite librarian recently told me I should be relaxing now that I'm moved into Chapel Hill, I'm sweating out a paper for a colloquium next week. It's going to be about University, Court, and Slave. I'm trying to get the introduction written so I can distribute it on Monday. But instead of doing that, I'm blogging about a piece of it....

One of the chapters is on Thomas Ruffin, so I thought I'd post a note about an article that I forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review (thanks to Sally and Eric Muller's kindness) on Mr. Justice Ruffin. The article was part of Sally and Eric's conference last fall on The Perils of Public Homage. Chapel Hill residents may find this of particular interest because there's a dormitory on campus named (in part) after him. (It's Ruffin Hall and it's also named for his son.) Anyway, the paper is about two things. First, it's about Ruffin's jurisprudence; second, it's about what we make of the fact that there's a building named after him. The payoff on the later point is that I'm not at all sure the building was named for him because he was a proslavery jurist--in fact, I think that by the early twentieth century that piece of his jurisprudence may have been largely forgotten. And so now, somewhat oddly, the building serves as an occasion to talk about the era of slavery and what that meant to our state and our university.

Here's the abstract:

"Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments " returns to Justice Thomas Ruffin s opinions, particularly on slavery, to excavate his jurisprudence and to try to assess what Ruffin s legacy means for us today. It begins with an exploration of Ruffin s 1830 opinion in State v. Mann, where he self-consciously separated his feelings from his legal opinion to release a man who abused a slave from criminal liability. Anti-slavery activists frequently wrote about Mann, because of its brutal honesty about the harsh nature of slavery. After discussing Harriet Beecher Stowe s fictional account of Ruffin and Mann in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which further developed the theme of separation of law and morals, the paper turns to some of Ruffin s other opinions. It looks to slavery opinions including Heathcock v. Pennington (which released a renter of a slave from liability for his death in a coal mine) and Green v. Lane (which dealt with a trust to give quasi-freedom to slaves), as well as non-slavery cases like Scroggins v. Scroggins (which argued against granting judicial divorces because that would encourage more of them).

Ruffin s jurisprudence took the world as it was, or as he phrased it, looked to the nature of things. His judicial opinions the monuments he left to us illustrate a world of proslavery moral philosophy. That thought separated humanity from law and then decided cases based on precedent and considerations of utility to society. Ruffin was a great expositor of the system of slavery, as well as a great wielder of what Stowe called cold legal logic.

What should we make of this legacy today? Perhaps Ruffin aided the cause of antislavery through his honesty in State v. Mann. And, thus, perhaps we should honor him for that. Moreover, perhaps the honor he received in the early twentieth century (when a dormitory was named in part for him on the UNC campus) derives from his facility with legal reasoning outside of the slavery context. However, honoring him also runs the risk of honoring proslavery values. Conversely, removing his name from a building now runs the risk of concealing the prevalence of proslavery thought in the nineteenth century. That is, removing a name might facilitate a process of forgetting when universities should be trying to provide a proper context for viewing our past.

The paper's available on the social science research network.

The (Not) Silent Slave

Been absurdly busy getting settled in lovely Chapel Hill. This week I had the pleasure of riding a bus home from work (and it's free, no less!); haven't been able to do that since I left Honolulu a few years ago. And I'm getting used to this most friendly town--what an unexpected pleasure to run into an old friend and now colleague at the Weaver Street Market at lunch the other day. And once I get a little more settled I hope to talk some about my "new urbanist" experience. But right now I have something else to talk about--silence and slaves....

So I understand that Silent Sam's a key monument on the UNC campus. I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time around his statue and elsewhere on the campus. However, these days I'm interested in other antebellum (or maybe in the case of Mr. Sam, bellum) characters who are often silent, though perhaps not quite so silent as Sam: slaves in southern literature. One piece of University, Court, and Slave looks to the ways that slaves are silenced in court--they're rarely permitted to testify. I'm interested in this because it seems such an obvious corruption of seeking truth--but there's a larger purpose that's served by the silence.

But what about slaves who speak in southern literature? We hear a lot from Uncle Tom. And in some of the southern responses we hear from slaves as well--like Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis' Cabin. But what about Beverly Tucker's obscure novel George Balcombe? The last line of the novel comes from a slave, who testifies to the love of Mr. Balcombe: "We been all mighty willing, sir, to have Mass' George for master." Wow--putting words of testimony to Mr. Balcombe into the mouths of the enslaved. Mighty interesting stuff--monuments and slaves who speak intermittently.

87 Years Ago Today... The Tulsa Riot

Well, it was 87 years ago today that the Tulsa Tribune story hit the streets and ignited the Tulsa riot of 1921. The story--called by the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch "the false story that set Tulsa ablaze"--said that "Diamond" Dick Rowland, a young black man, had tried to assault a young white woman in an elevator the day before. After that, white people gathered at the courthouse, where Rowland was being held. They'd come to see a lynching and maybe participate in one.

Meanwhile, over in Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, veterans of the world war met in a back room of the "Dreamland Theater" with a newspaper editor to plan how to stop the lync hing. Their trip to the courthouse to stop the lynching later that evening resulted in a struggle. Immediately it turned into the riot that led to the destruction of the black community. Along Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa this evening the ghosts of 1921 may be walking again, reliving that tragedy....

More on this story here. This is cross-posted from thefacultylounge.

Yale's Hidden, Then Disappearing Portrait

This repeats a post from a few years back over at moneylaw, where I used to post now and then.

Yale recently took down a picture of Elihu Yale, the university's namesake, which depicts a young enslaved male (who is wearing a metal collar) waiting on him. I had never heard of the picture before the story broke. Yet, now that I see it, I think it's an important depiction of the connections between that great university and the institution of slavery. I've posted the picture, from the Hartford Courant website at right.

The article reports that the painting hung in a room where the trustees met, though the room apparently was not generally open to the public. It is going to replace the offending portrait with another one, which does not have a slave in it.

Yale has other portraits of its benefactor, with less historical baggage. A painting of roughly the same size - of Yale standing alone by a table, a seascape behind him - will soon be dusted off and pulled from a storeroom at the Yale University Art Gallery to replace the one up now.

The African slave trade was brought to America by European settlers, desperate for bodies to work the sugar and cotton plantations, to supply their trading empires with goods. In paintings of the time, images of blacks in metal collars, marking them as slaves, were not uncommon, said John Marciari, a curator of early European art at Yale.

"It's a simple but lamentable fact of history," he said.

I think it's important to talk about the past and so I am grateful for the discussion of the Yale portrait. But I also worry when I see an effort to erase history, which may be one effect of moving the portrait. Lots to talk about here, of course. This will be a piece of University, Court, and Slave, of course.

Thanks to the fabulous Jim Campbell of Brown University for alerting me to this story.

A new prospect for Raleigh's monumental landscape

Congratulations to the folks with the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project for securing Gov. Easley's support in their work to establish a monument to the African-American experience in the state on Union Square in Raleigh, the grounds of the Capitol. Initiated in 2002 by the Paul Green Foundation, this project has benefited from the dedicated work of many people, especially our friends Marsha Warren and Reg Hildebrand.

A couple of years ago, I said to Reg that I hoped the monument could be located within sight of the statue to Thomas Ruffin, author of the infamous State v. Mann, which handed to masters almost unlimited power to suborn their slaves through physical "correction." At that time, it was not clear where the monument would be sited.

Symbolically, there could be no better location than Union Square, home of so many of what Catherine Bishir has called the state's "landmarks of power" that by 1915, when the Ruffin statue was erected, some had already said the square was too crowded. Ruffin ended up in an alcove at the entrance to what was then the Supreme Court building, now the Court of Appeals; the spot considered ideal, on Union Square across from the court building, had just been taken by the 1914 monument to the Women of the Confederacy.

Some other monuments on the square include the 1892 Confederate Monument, unveiled by Stonewall Jackson's granddaughter precisely 34 years after North Carolina seceded from the Union; a statue of Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first Confederate soldier to die in battle; and elaborate monuments to Charles Aycock, the "education governor" more recently known for his participation in the Wilmington coup of 1898, and Zebulon Vance, North Carolina's governor during the Civil War and again after the war as federal troops left the state. These monuments were all erected during the great period of the solidification of conservative Democratic power and the institutionalization of Jim Crow. As Bishir writes,

As the southern elite took control of the political process during the decades spanning the turn of the century, it also codified a view of history that fortified its position in the present and its vision of the future.

Throughout America in the decades just before and after 1900, political and cultural elites drew on the imagery of past golden ages to shape public memory in ways that supported their authority. By commissioning monumental sculpture that depicted American heroes and virtues in classical terms, and by reviving architectural themes from Colonial American, classical Roman, and Renaissance sources, cultural leaders affirmed the virtues of stability, harmony, and patriotism. The principal shapers of public memory and patrons of public sculpture and architecture in Raleigh and Wilmington, centers of political and cultural activity in the state, were members of an established elite. They were akin to aristocrats throughout the nation and they were well acquainted with national cultural trends. They also shared certain backgrounds, experiences, and values. All were Democrats, and, with a few notable exceptions, they were members of families of long-established social and economic prominence.

The Freedom Monument Project's supporters have pointed out that "except for an anonymous, wounded black soldier in the N.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, blacks are not represented on the State Capitol grounds." This monument proposes to correct that oversight. It holds the promise of inspiring whole new interpretations of the existing landmarks on and around Union Square--including the imposing statue of Judge Ruffin.


After a bill introduced into the Legislature in 1911 by Gen. Julian Carr of Durham County to appropriate funds for a memorial to the women of the Confederacy failed to pass, Col. Ashley Horne put $10,000 of his own money toward the design and construction of the monument.

Thomas Ruffin's steady gaze still meets visitors to the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The statue was funded by the North Carolina Bar Association and Ruffin's family.

Life against the overgrown

Public Art 360, the regional/national symposium that Janet Kagan & co. successfully pulled off this weekend in Chapel Hill, looks to have been a great success! Wish I could have attended more than just the one session on landscape architecture--but that one was pretty amazing.

Walter Hood, who grew up in Charlotte, is an artist, an architect, and a landscape architect; he's been called "one of the nation's rising stars of landscape architecture." His work is worthy of all those titles, and his mission is to show that the lines of separation are artificial. Given the character of some of his "interventions," I'd say he's a bit of a social worker and an activist as well. According to Metropolis magazine (July 2005),

At 46, Hood is now one of landscape architecture's leading public intellectuals: former chair of the department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Berkeley, Pentagon memorial competition juror, and constant lecturer. As an African American in a profession with seemingly none and an urbanist in a discipline just barely breaking free of the pastoral, he's something of a phenomenon. His faculty position has given Hood the ability to pick and choose projects, a luxury he has exercised carefully and often polemically, working nearly exclusively in the public realm, and often in the inner city.

I was particularly taken by his work in the Phillips community near Charleston, South Carolina, where he helped the residents defeat a proposal to widen a road. The project would have cut the community in two. This achievement was won through the concept of "the overgrown." Imagine a well-manicured suburban back yard at the edge of an undeveloped tract: you are peering across civilization into the overgrown. The overgrown can be used as shield or sword. You can clear your landscape to enjoy using it and perhaps to enjoy the proximity to your neighbor; or, say, you aren't that friendly with your neighbor: you might "let the overgrown take care of it."



Through an aggressive use of the concept of the overgrown--including actual use of plant material to expand the vegetation in key corridors--Hood helped the community persuade the relevant officials that the widening of the road would be an assault upon the community.

(In some back yards, the line between civilization and the overgrown is under constant negotiation.)

The very long civil rights movement

Ken Zogry already had a fine career established in public history by 1998: he had completed two books, both of which would end up winning awards, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (The Bennington Museum: 1995), and The University’s Living Room: A History of the Carolina Inn (UNC: 1999). Then, something happened that changed his life. He was asked to take a look at an endangered house in downtown Raleigh, a house built in 1901 by Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope. Dr. Pope, a graduate of the medical school at Shaw University, was the first licensed African American doctor in North Carolina. His daughters lived in the house until into the 1990s.

In 1998, Zogry prepared a National Register nomination for the house, which by then was surrounded by parking lots. He ended up involved in a 10-year struggle to save the house and to turn it into the first house museum of an African American family in North Carolina. It's not yet open to the public, but there are great plans, and Zogry is the executive director of the Pope House Museum Foundation.

About 1,800 of the documents Zogry found in the house at the outset are now in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. What especially piqued his interest was a 1906 voter registration card issued to Dr. Pope. "Everything I had learned said this should not exist," he said as he began his talk on Saturday morning at a conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture. The discovery launched him on an investigation into a fascinating and little-known story about black male political resistance to white supremacy in the first two decades of the twentieth century--in Raleigh. The result is his UNC dissertation, which he has just recently defended.

What Zogry has discovered is that Dr. Pope's action in registering to vote was part of a concerted voter registration effort that went on around 1906; then it stopped, to pick up again in 1916. Many questions remain unanswered, including why the 10-year hiatus, but it is clear that there was a strong movement among African Americans to participate in politics even as Jim Crow laws were tightening and the conservative Democrats were shoring up their power after retaking the government in 1898.

In 1919, Dr. Pope actually ran for mayor of Raleigh. He was joined on the ballot by African American candidates for commissioner of safety and commissioner of public works. With no hope of a chance, these men were making a statement: "the strongest possible public action that black leaders could take against disenfranchisement," according to Zogry.

The election was lost, but all was not lost. A student named Ella Baker was attending Shaw in 1918. According to Zogry, the election of 1919 was "a formative experience" for her. After graduation she moved to Harlem and began her life's work--which included becoming "a guiding force" behind both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fact, said Zogry, it was no accident that SNCC was formed at Shaw: Baker could have taken it to any major black school, but Shaw provided "a strong connection to history."

Commenting on Zogry's paper, Fitz Brundgage called Dr. Pope's mayoral election campaign significant because of its threat to the "appearance of hegemony." It was significant "because it underscores the persistence of a commitment to black political action that extends far back," back before the 1950s, back before the 1930s (which is sometimes what we think of as the outer edge of the civil rights movement), back to within the very height of the Jim Crow period. And Brundage would even take it farther back. Rather than read Dr. Pope's story as a predecessor to what was to come later in the twentieth century, he "would read it backward and talk about a continuous black struggle for equality, with varying tactics, but a continuity of struggle," one that has never let up: These various episodes of civil rights activities should not be seen as separate events that just happened, but rather as a long steady march, by actors conscious of their own history from one generation to the next.

Good question: Why don't we celebrate April 9?

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered. The nightmare of the civil war was officially ended; the Union would be one again. Why, then, asks Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory, is this day not celebrated?

Kevin is being cagey here. As he knows better than most, whole books have been written to explain that after the war, what happened was a massive "reconciliation." The Confederacy was not treated like a defeated nation: President Andrew Johnson would not honor the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves. Eventually even ex-Confederate soldiers and their widows received pensions from the United States government. Our men died, your men died, it was awful: let's get over it and get on with things--so went the rhetoric of reconciliation as cities and towns on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line ushered in Jim Crow. It's kind of as if the war didn't happen, or at least that it was all a big mistake. President Wilson spoke at the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg--where Union and Confederate veterans gallantly shook hands--without once mentioning emancipation. So it's little wonder that this day of the great achievement of the Union victory goes unnoticed.

At a Civil War symposium on the UNC campus a couple of weeks ago, Gary Gallagher gave an interesting interpretation of the various ways in which the war was conceived and remembered. Talking from his new book, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (UNC Press), he outlined four dominant narrative traditions that have shaped our understanding of the war.

Gallagher argues that popular understandings of the war have been shaped by four traditions that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to the present: the Lost Cause, in which Confederates are seen as having waged an admirable struggle against hopeless odds; the Union Cause, which frames the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions; the Emancipation Cause, in which the war is viewed as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and eliminate a cancerous influence on American society; and the Reconciliation Cause, which represents attempts by northern and southern whites to extol "American" virtues and mute the role of African Americans.

A celebration of Grant's victory over Lee on April 9, 1865 would fit within the "Union Cause" narrative. And yet, as Gallagher persuasively argues at least as to the way the Civil War has been presented in movies since the movie "Glory" in 1989, the "Union Cause" narrative in our own time is supremely unpopular. In movie after movie--fourteen or so that he discussed--Union soldiers are depicted as ugly, violent, dishonest characters. There is no celebration of the United States as a great nation worthy of victory and respect. Yet as Gallagher further detailed, the goal of preserving the Union for the sake of its own preservation was a dominant narrative just before and during the Civil War itself. How would it look to European countries if this fragile experiment in democracy could not survive even 100 years?

What happened to the positive narrative of saving the Union for its own sake--the cause that Lincoln, among so many others, so fervently believed in? Even slaveholding southerners, at least those of a certain class, were reluctant to let the idea of one nation go for the sake of the rebel cause. Said North Carolina Judge Thomas Ruffin at a peace conference held in Washington in 1861, "I was born before the Constitution was adopted. May God grant that I not outlive it."

The more powerful narrative of reconciliation overcame it, in part; the narrative of the Lost Cause held on for a long time and survives in some quarters; the narrative of emancipation has reemerged since the civil rights movement, coming to fruition in movies like "Glory." But even when emancipation is celebrated, the Union soldiers come off as complete jerks. Why is that?

Gallagher's theory is that Hollywood is speaking to our time, as it always does speak to its own time, always in the interest of box office returns. And that in our time, whether you are on the left or the right, the federal government is not the good guy.

MLK anniversary resources

Legal History Blog has a nice roundup of remembrances on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, including a link to the remarkable speech by Robert Kennedy Jr.

Law and Humanities Blog takes the opportunity to compile a list of movies featuring minority characters and civil rights themes.

North Carolina Miscellany documents a peaceful march in Burlington, North Carolina on April 8, 1968.

Events in Raleigh were less than peaceful.

A local apology

With the recent republication of John Ehle's 1965 book The Free Men, a moving chronicle of the civil rights protests that stood "liberal" Chapel Hill on its end in 1963-64, an important, yet little known, chapter in Chapel Hill's history has come to light again. This time last year, UNC's Wilson Library manuscripts division did its own part to acknowledge these events by mounting a fine documentary exhibit and hosting a series of panel discussions. I had the privilege of introducing and moderating a discussion that included Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, and Braxton Foushee, all of whom were students who participated in the demonstrations.



It was very clear to me why Tim West, who heads the manuscripts division, asked me to moderate this session. At the heart of the protest was the refusal of my predecessors on the Chapel Hill Town Council to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. Here's some of what I said at that panel back in January 2007:

I’ve been here almost 20 years. Yet it wasn’t until the NAACP presented us with a request to rename Airport Road for Martin Luther King Jr., three years ago, that I began to get any sense of what had happened here in the early 1960s. We had to learn all over again, from folks like Dan Pollitt who is here, and Joe Straley who is no longer here, that King spoke here in 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins. In the end, we celebrated the name change on May 8, 2005, the 45th anniversary of King’s visit. But getting to that point was not an easy road.When it was the will of the Council in 2004, after three public hearings on the topic, not to vote to change the name of the road but instead to set up a citizen committee to talk about it, that’s when I learned that for some with better memories, it was déjà vu all over again. This is precisely what the Board of Aldermen (as they were then called) did in January 1964, rather than pass a local public accommodations ordinance. That was the second time they had said no to the ordinance, while Franklin Street roiled with demonstrations. Elected leaders did not lead.

The successes of the 1960-61 protests by Lincoln High students and graduates, including Braxton, at Colonial Drug and other places including the bus station and the two segregated movie houses set the stage for the demonstrations of 1963 and 1964. In this period, according to Dan Pollitt, who as a law professor was very much involved, Chapel Hill “joined the ever-increasing number of southern communities to experience an effort at racial integration by tactics variously called ‘creative disorder,’ ‘scofflaw Christianity,’ and ‘insurrection and rebellion.'”

Particularly over the long months of December 1963, January, February, March, and April 1964, university administrators “shut their eyes to the problem with a position of neutrality,” and the board of aldermen, as I’ve mentioned, ducked responsibility, while the demonstrators kept the pressure up. With the exception of the Daily Tar Heel, the local press tried its best to ignore what was right in front of them, except when they condemned it, which they did in their editorials often and with great stridency. The Chapel Hill Weekly, under Orville Campbell’s leadership, started out with some sympathy to the demonstrators but quickly joined forces with the opposing business interest. So did The News of Orange County, edited by Roland Giduz, who was also on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen; and so did the radio station, owned by the mayor, Sandy McClamroch. Then as now, people wondered how an episode like this could have happened in the “southern part of Heaven.”

Roland Giduz, to his immense credit, has apologized. "We should have led the way," wrote the Old Codger Blogger last month.

Today, the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day, set me to thinking again about the purpose of this observance. It seems to me that it is to further the elimination of racial discrimination and bring about natural racial integration.

I harken back to the 1960s in Chapel Hill when the local Board of Aldermen debated enactment of a public accommodations ordinance. That local law would have prohibited racial discrimination in local business service. After many months of deliberation the ordinance failed. The proposal brought on a lengthy trial of conscience throughout the community. As a member of the Town Board I sided with the majority that did not support this ordinance on legal grounds.

Those legal grounds were the fact that municipal governments had no authority to pass laws except those specifically authorized for them. It all became a moot question on July 4, 1964 when the national civil rights law took effect.

Although I believe such authority might yet be illegal, I would support enactment of this local law as I look back on it today. I’d do so on practical grounds, as much as for the fact that I heartily supported then and now the elimination of racial discrimination.The population of Chapel Hill back then would have generally accepted that first public accommodations law to be enacted by a town.

I believe we (the Town Board) erred in not passing that ordinance despite its questionable legality. We (the Board majority) didn’t see the forest for the trees. That is to say, we focused on trying to persuade individual businesses to drop their racial barriers, when the bigger picture was to eliminate all discrimination.

Forty-five years later, does a change of heart matter? I think it does. The very fact of a public apology for an institutional wrong shows that the terms of the debate have shifted. In a new book on the subject, The Politics of Official Apologies, Melissa Nobles argues that, at the highest levels, apologies "help change the terms and meanings of national membership." (Thanks to Al Brophy at Legal History Blog for the tip.)

Thank you, Roland.

The Carrollton Massacre: One of many forgotten histories

At long last, sometime this summer my essay on Elizabeth Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door and the Carrollton Massacre of 1886 was published. It came out in the Winter/Spring 2005-06 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly (Vol. 59, Nos. 1-2), which was published this summer. I recently obtained a .pdf copy to share here with you.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about visiting Carrollton, where the scene of this tragic violence, the county courthouse, still stands. I gave a talk about it as a Hutchins Lecture at UNC last year. The reaction in the blogosphere has been very interesting. A couple of comments to that "field trip" post:

"I live in Carrollton and I don't appreciate you coming into our town and digging up racial history and trying to stir up racial tensions."

"I grew up in North Carrollton and I don't recall ever hearing about the incident at the courthouse that I just read about in the 'field trip' story. I must admit that I am intrigued."

And quite recently,

"As a greatX4 grandaughter of the Confederacy, born and raised in the South of the 1950's, brought up with mint juleps and sitting on the veranda... I just want to say thank you. For far too long the truth of the horrid things that happenned has been hidden or twisted so badly that it could hardly be called truth at all.

"I have my own wound that must be healed... the lynching of L.Q. Ivy in Union County, MS. My grandfather was there when it occurred along with a crowd of several hundred and told me the story when I was a child. I was horrified then and am disgusted now at man's inhumanity to his fellow man."

I've had others say they knew, or kind of knew, about terrible violence way back when in the southern towns where they grew up, things that it wasn't polite to talk about. A crucial part of the rhetoric of the Lost Cause was to ensure that those stories didn't see the light of day.

The story of what happened in Wilmington in 1898 is an important example of the revised understanding of this history that is going on today. What used to be called a "race riot" is now, thanks to a study initiated by the North Carolina legislature, understood as a coup--a violent overthrow of legitimate governmental authority by the conservative white establishment. Al Brophy's work on what happened in Tulsa a little later is another example.

There are lots of stories. Nicholas Lehmann's book Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War provides a larger context to what happened in Carrollton and across the South. From a recent review of the book,

Nearly one month after resigning as governor of Mississippi, Adelbert Ames told a New York Times reporter in April 1876 that he did not blame the northern public for dismissing reports of fraud and violence in southern elections. "Before I went South," the Maine-born, former Union general explained, " ... I do not think that any amount of human testimony could have induced me to believe in such a condition of society as exists in Mississippi." Ames knew that it was difficult for northerners to believe that heavily armed paramilitary organizations would scatter peaceful political gatherings, that ballot boxes were stolen and burned, that public officials could be gunned down in broad daylight in the center of town, and that battles erupted between white and black militias in response to local elections.

The electoral violence of the mid-1870s remains perplexing. Although historians have documented the violent counterrevolution that undermined Reconstruction, the general public knows little of these events and seems skeptical that white terrorists could have so brazenly subverted democratic governance in the United States. Nicholas Lemann's intention in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War is to bring this forgotten story to a wider audience and explain why southern democracy and civil rights were snuffed out.

Stephen Cresswell's Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi After Reconstruction, 1877-1917 also contributes to this new understanding specifically as to Mississippi.

And so, history and memory continue to tussle each other about. Writes Ira Berlin in a recent essay,

Slavery lives--and will continue to live--in both history and memory. But the time has come to put the two together, to join history and memory, to embrace slavery's complex history, to accept the force of slavery's memory, and thereby elevate both. For only by testing memory against history can a sense of a collective past be sustained. Perhaps by incorporating slavery's memory into slavery's history--and vice versa--Americans, white and black, can have a past that is both memorable and--at last--past.

"American Slavery in History and Memory," in Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, ed. Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock (Oxford 2006).

UPDATE 12/03: More on the lynching of L.Q. Ivy mentioned above. Warning: not for the faint.

Wilmington? Forget it.

Blame the messenger: Rep. Thomas Wright of Wilmington, who proposed 10 items of legislation to follow up on the Wilmington 1898 Commission's report on the violent political coup that for 100 years had been called a "riot," is mired in scandal. All but one of his bills seem dead in the water, and that one, one that merely acknowledges that what happened was "a conspiracy of a white elite" (but, as I noted earlier, doesn't really call a spade a spade), "faces uncertainty in the Senate" after passing in the House by only 64-47.

Some commission members, who worked to uncover what had been one of the state's least-known and darkest episodes, say they are concerned that Wright is no longer effective and that their work may not result in the change they had hoped for.
"I had left it up to Rep. Wright to guide us," said Irving Joyner, a law professor at N.C. Central University and the commission's vice chairman. "Now the viability of that strategy is in question."

But is only the messenger to blame?

Leo Daughtry, a Smithfield Republican, was one of those who voted against [the House bill]. He said the legislature should concern itself with the issues of today: roads, public education, taxes. He said he would oppose any plan to fund remembrances of 1898, whether with a monument or with reparations to descendants of victims.
"I don't see where it would serve any purpose at this point to spend money on an event that occurred a hundred years ago that didn't affect any person living today," Daughtry said.

Nation and narration

It's been 400 years since the founding of the Jamestown colony. The queen has come and gone. Over at Cliopatria, they organized a symposium on the very good question that this occasion occasioned:

Why has the American national narrative characteristically taken New England/Puritans rather than Jamestown/Virginia/Anglicans as its foundation touchstone?

As I looked forward to reading the answers, I wondered if anyone would get into the good question behind that one: What about Roanoke?

Turns out, the first one out of the box does just that. In a provocative essay, Rob MacDougall writes,

Like many I expect, I first learned of Roanoke as a kind of ghost story. I don't know which lurid kiddie book I read it in, but I do remember having the distinct impression that "Croatoan" was the name of some slavering forest monstrosity, and not, as it turned out, a nearby Cherokee tribe. The fate of the lost colony remains unknown, but the best guesses say they either got killed by the Powhatans, set out on foot for the Chesapeake and died en route, or went native, interbreeding with the Indians. Whatever became of them, there's a nice lesson there for American history about hubris, failure, and the great unlikeliness of the American experiment.

And he continues,

In Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, Roanoke is not a creepy campfire tale but a tragic road not taken. While Raleigh's ships were settling Roanoke, his friend Drake was buckling swash up and down the Spanish Mainósimple piracy, Morgan admits, "but on the scale that transforms crime into politics." Morgan makes much of Drake's alliance with the Cimarrons, black and Indian slaves escaped from the Spanish. Drake was not above slaving himself, but he made common cause with the "Maroons" and threatened New Spain with a general uprising of its Indian and African labor. As Drake sacked Santo Domingo, Cartagena, and San Augustin, he liberated, or collected, some three hundred Indians and two hundred "Negroes, Turks, and Moors," whom he planned to deposit at Roanoke to enjoy English-style liberty and serve as a rallying point for New Spain's oppressed natives and slaves. "Perhaps it could never have come to pass," Morgan writes, "and perhaps no one really intended that it should." Nevertheless, for him, Roanoke represented "a dream in which slavery and freedom were not yet married, a dream in which Protestant Britons liberated the oppressed people of the New World."

What if this story had become our founding myth, rather than the Pilgrim story? There was no contest, really, but it's useful to remember the contingencies of fate, all those roads not taken. For, as Homi Bhabha has observed, the idea of the nation is always, at bottom, haunted with ambivalence.

Wilmington again: why is the truth so hard?

From this morning's N&O on yesterday's House vote to "acknowledge" the Wilmington race riots of 1898, part of the follow-up to the legislative commission's report on the political coup that threw elected blacks out of office.

In a 67-47 vote, legislators approved a bill that recognized the riots that ousted an integrationist government in Wilmington and bolstered segregationist Democrats.
Rep. Thomas Wright, a Wilmington Democrat, said it was one of 10 bills related to recommendations from the Wilmington Race Riot Commission.
Lawmakers defeated an amendment to add wording acknowledging that Democrats, News & Observer publisher Josephus Daniels and others were also behind the riots.
Rep. Paul Stam, an Apex Republican who is House minority leader, said the bill was rewriting history by leaving out the role of the Democratic Party, the newspaper and others behind the coup.
"If you want to do history, we have to do it right," Stam said.
Rep. Dan Blue, a Wake Democrat, said that both Republicans and Democrats contributed to the problems of racism during the 19th and 20th centuries.
"There's enough blame to go around for everybody regardless of partisan bent," he said.
The amendment's failure led some Republicans to vote against the measure.

That Josephus Daniels did not have a key role, that it was not a specifically Democratic move, is belied by the evidence at every turn. From Tim Tyson's writings in the N&O earlier this year summarizing the report of the Wilmington Commission,

As the 1898 political season loomed, the Populists and Republicans hoped to make more gains through Fusion. To rebound, Democrats knew they had to develop campaign issues that transcended party lines. Democratic chairman Furnifold Simmons mapped out the strategy with leaders whose names would be immortalized in statues, building names and street signs: Charles B. Aycock, Henry G. Connor, Robert B. Glenn, Claude Kitchin, Locke Craig, Cameron Morrison, George Rountree, Francis D. Winston and Josephus Daniels.

They soon decided that racist appeals were the hammer they needed to shatter the fragile alliance between poor whites and blacks. They made the "redemption" of North Carolina from "Negro domination" the theme of the 1898 campaign. Though promising to restore something traditional, they would, in fact, create a new social order rooted in white supremacy and commercial domination.
At the center of their strategy lay the gifts and assets of Daniels, editor and publisher of The News and Observer. He would spearhead a propaganda effort that would incite white citizens into a furor that led to electoral fraud and mass murder. It used sexualized images of black men and their supposedly uncontrollable lust for white women. Newspaper stories and stump speeches warned of "black beasts" who threatened the flower of Southern womanhood.
The Democrats did not rely solely upon newspapers, however, but deployed a statewide campaign of stump speakers, torchlight parades and physical intimidation. Aycock earned his chance to become North Carolina's "education governor" through his fiery speeches for white supremacy.

What is Rep. Blue doing here? As an African American Democrat, a member of the post-civil rights-era Democratic Party, sure he has an interest in airbrushing the fact that the Democrats were the bad actors. But the shifting of the ideologies of the parties across the 20th century is well known. It doesn't make sense to convert the perpetrators of this violence into an amorphous "white elite," nor is it right to leave the crucial roles of Daniels, Aycock, et al. out of this official piece of evidence now added to the historical record. What happened happened.

UPDATE 5/9: some of the back story. (Via Ed Cone.)

Pictorial revisionism

Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite of the University of Virginia show in painstaking detail how a photograph of a group of black Civil War soldiers in the command of a white Union officer is transformed to represent the 1st Louisiana Native Guard of the Confederate Army.

You can buy a copy from The Rebel Store.

History lessons

At the end of a fine tribute to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died on February 28, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus throws down the gauntlet. Having noted Scheschinger's ability, in the pitch of the "anxious" twentieth century, to connect American history to the pulse of the present moment, he looks to our own moment and sees a vacuum: "If our own anxious age is to attain similar heights our historians must help lead the way."

Naturally and for good reason, the blogosphere reacts. Comes Mary Dudziak at Legal History Blog: "This makes me wonder what Tanenhaus has been reading," she writes, as she proceeds to list a handful of recent histories that explicitly touch on current issues. She could have included her own book Cold War Civil Rights. Though its subject isn't the immediate present, its understanding of the international dynamics of the civil rights era certainly resonates in our global era.

From where I sit, historians are speaking effectively to the present. I'm thinking of the work going on to reconsider Southern history as a whole. The names David Blight, Gaines Foster, Kirk Savage, and Fitz Brundage may not be household. Around North Carolina, though, at least Tim Tyson is. Their messages are consistent: the Lost Cause was highly motivated mythology. The ways in which we remember the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are worth revisiting and revising. There's at least a dotted line between the essays in Brundage's essay collection Where These Memories Grow and the 2004 conference on UNC's campus to look more closely at the university's Reconstruction history. Blood Done Sign My Name, required reading at UNC and elsewhere, tapped into veins of other memories, giving people permission to talk about race in more honest ways. This reconsideration has risen to such a pitch that even the National Park Service offers a contextual take on the creation of the Lincoln Memorial. Kevin Levin quotes from the NPS's discussion of the memorial's symbolism:

The period between 1865-1909 was a period marked as a time of incredible technological advances, rapid industrial growth, and imperialistic expansionism; of enflamed patriotism during and after the Spanish-American War; and a continuance of Jim Crow laws, the exploitation of the working class, and Tammany Hall-style politics. Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the predominately white, classically minded and university educated, upper-middle class generation of architects and engineers that built the Lincoln Memorial would stress the theme of National Unity over that of Social Justice.

Mr. Tanenhaus has a lot of good reading waiting for him. These are not grand narratives in the Schlesinger style. But they add up to something important and maybe a little threatening. Is it a technical glitch that the passage Levin cites from the NPS pages is not to be found now, or did the National Review have something to do with it?

Over at Cliopatria, more responses to Tanenhaus.

UPDATE: Tanenhaus responds: "where are the master narratives of our moment?" The assumption in that question, I think, gets to the heart of the debate he's set off.

Beloved (belated)

Toni Morrison's masterpiece, the best American novel of the past 25 years according to a New York Times survey, came out 20 years ago. For that long, through its rapid canonization in college English departments and its popular acceptance as a classic, I avoided it. A slave mother would rather kill her children than see them into the life she'd known? I didn't care to suffer the details.

This semester, thanks to Minrose Gwin's seminar in southern literature, history, memory, and trauma, which she has generously allowed me to audit, I put myself to the task.

Morrison has said that she started writing because she couldn't find the kind of novel that she wanted to read. "I want to write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding--people who can't be faked, people who don't need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria," she has said.

It's one thing to know that enslaved families had no legal protection, that on whims of others they were broken up, split apart, auctioned, bartered and traded away. From the point of view of the master class, it was economics: "most commonly the articles [the enslaved] sell best, singly; and therefore they ought, in general, to be so offered," wrote North Carolina judge Thomas Ruffin (Cannon v. Jenkins, 1830). And it's one thing to know that attempted flight from slavery was perilous and just as likely to result in families broken, unable to reunite or even to know who survived and who didn't. Morrison plumbs the depths of these stories.

Beloved carries the reader toward trauma, shattering and irrevocable. The form, inseparable from the content, conveys as much: "124 was spiteful" reads the alienating first line. With time and patience you discover that 124 is a house number, that the house is not just filled with spite but is the very source of spite, owing to the presence of an agitated baby ghost; that the ghost is capable of being run out of the house, only to return, palpably and insistently, as a young woman offering some potential for healing. But no one emerges whole in the end. These lives are unable to gain the consistency or coherence that could anchor them in wholeness, though there's plenty of effort and longing.

It's one thing to know that babies were separated early from their mothers. It's another to learn that the only thing Baby Suggs can remember about her firstborn is the way she liked the acrid taste of burned bread.

"We could move," [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law.
"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. "My firstborn. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."
"That's all you let yourself remember," Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself--one alive, that is--the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. . . .

Sethe tries not to remember, yet she can't not remember. "The undoing of the self in trauma involves a radical disruption of memory," writes Susan J. Brison,* "a severing of past from present and, typically, an inability to envision a future." Time contracts to the present moment. Having been reduced to objects ("articles" as Judge Ruffin called them), having lost faith that the world holds any safety, victims of trauma are abandoned to a primal searching for a self.

Beloved has a basis in fact, the story of Margaret Garner, a fugutive slave from Kentucky. Writes Morrison in an introduction to the novel, "The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, confining. Too little imaginative space for my purposes."

Last fall when I spoke on Elizabeth Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door and its reinscription of an actual event, the Carrollton Massacre of 1886, I was asked a great question: what is the relationship of the novel to the history? It's a question that deserves a long answer, because the relationship of history to fiction is deep and tangled; but the short answer is this: History can tell us what happened and, to an extent, why. But it takes a skilled novelist to tell us how it felt. A suspicion of this truth--or, perhaps, in Brison's words, "an active fear of empathizing with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own"--is what kept me from approaching this powerful, essential American novel for so long.

*Susan J. Brison, "Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self," in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Univ. Press of New England, 1999).

Elihu Yale: what's wrong with this picture?

Since 1910, presiding over meetings of the trustees of Yale University has been a portrait of Elihu Yale, attended by a slave. Word about it got out in a major way after a student slipped into the board room and took a digital photo. "Elihu Yale apparently did not own slaves but critics over the years have objected to the painting's racist overtones and the significant place it is displayed at the university named for him," the Hartford Courant reports.

Although Elihu Yale was not himself a slave owner, over the past several decades students have spoken out about the portrait’s implication of slavery. There are two other portraits of Elihu with black servants in the Yale collection.


“Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” [University Vice President and Secretary Linda] Lorimer said.

But even if Elihu Yale owned no slaves, it remains that eight of Yale's 12 residential colleges bear the names of slaveholders, including John C. Calhoun: In Calhoun College, "[s]ome of the stained-glass windows in the . . . dining hall depict slaves picking cotton," according to the Yale Daily News. Picking the remnants of slavery out of Yale, or Brown, or New York City or just about any place on the eastern seaboard with any history at all is pretty impossible. Plucking a picture off a wall is easy, in some ways too easy. Yale's history might be better acknowledged and dealt with if that troublesome portrait were to hang around a bit longer.