tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/black-history-month-2017-35615/articlesBlack History Month 2017 – The Conversation2017-10-25T13:05:51Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/853412017-10-25T13:05:51Z2017-10-25T13:05:51ZWas Emily Brontё’s Heathcliff black?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191833/original/file-20171025-25540-19inv27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Film4/</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Did Emily Brontё envisage her most famous fictional protagonist, Heathcliff, as a black man? In recent years there has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/how-heathcliff-got-a-racelift">extensive debate</a> about whether Heathcliff is <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-possible-ethnic-background-of-Heathcliff-in-Wuthering-Heights">supposed to be black</a>. Much of this discussion centres on the proximity of the action in her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030265?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">to Liverpool</a> – which was a world centre for slave-trading during the period in which the novel is set. </p>
<p>Critics have also focused on the way in which Heathcliff is portrayed in Brontё’s novel. Much has been made of the words of the novel’s main narrator, Nelly, to Heathcliff: “If you were a regular black …” she says. There has been a <a href="https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/faq.php">great deal of discussion</a> of what this might mean. </p>
<p>The novel’s most famous action takes place on the moorlands surrounding the quaint Yorkshire village of Haworth – and moorlands are traditionally associated with uncivilised regions. Heathcliff embodies this idea – he is depicted as the quintessential “savage” whose foreignness establishes his position at civilisation’s periphery. </p>
<p>But historians have found abundant evidence to suggest that Heathcliff’s foreignness is not merely symbolic – it makes historical sense. The novel is set in 1801, when Liverpool <a href="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/europe/liverpool.aspx">handled most of Britain’s transatlantic trade in enslaved people</a>. Evidence of this terrible trade could be seen everywhere – the Brontё critic <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/1474893213Z.00000000082?journalCode=ybst20">Humphrey Gawthrop</a> records <a href="https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/40108/6/Postcolonial%20Literary%20Inquiry%20Submission%203.3.17.pdf">that</a>: “[William] Wilberforce’s colleague, Thomas Clarkson … saw in the windows of a Liverpool shop leg-shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews and mouth-openers for force-feeding used on board the slavers.” </p>
<p>So if Heathcliff was not a black African or descendant of one, historians have comprehensively demonstrated that he very easily might have been. And while the recurrent critical question has been whether Brontё meant him to be black, research on <a href="http://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/listings/region/yorkshire/">Yorkshire’s black histories</a> makes it more pertinent to ask why was he not depicted as black until as recently as 2012? </p>
<p>In the late 1970s, a Latin American television adaptation of Wuthering Heights, entitled Cumbres Borrascosas portrayed Heathcliff as the mixed-race son of Mr Earnshaw. When he brings the boy home, his wife berates him for sleeping with a black woman. This act of cultural translation is likely to have made sense to Latin American audiences, for whom slavery looms large in the collective historical memory. </p>
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<h2>Slavery in Yorkshire</h2>
<p>Until recently, however, generations of Anglophone literary critics overlooked the impact of slave-trading and slave-produced wealth on Yorkshire. Literary critic Terry Eagleton <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/174582212X13279217752787?journalCode=ybst20">said</a>: “Heathcliff disturbs the heights because he … has no defined place within its … economic system.” This flies in the face of a large body of evidence that Heathcliff’s enslaved contemporaries were once central to the region’s economy.</p>
<p>It has been left to Caryl Phillips’s recent novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/18/the-lost-child-caryl-phillips-review-wuthering-heights-emily-bronte">The Lost Child</a> to finally explore the region’s forgotten colonial connections. In his account, Heathcliff is the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw, born of a formerly enslaved woman who is brought to Liverpool docks from the Caribbean. The significance of this was lost on reviewers, who overwhelmingly implied that Phillips’ novel gave Brontё’s story the multicultural treatment and his choice of a black Heathcliff was an exercise of artistic licence rather than basing his depiction of the character on any historical foundation. But Phillips’s knowledge of history clearly trumps theirs. </p>
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<p>Phillips was interviewed in <a href="http://www.lonestarproductions.co.uk/wutheringheights.html">Adam Low’s documentary</a>, A Regular Black (2009), and pointed out that gentlemen like Mr Earnshaw went to Liverpool on business – and the city’s main business was slave-trading or slave-produced sugar, tobacco and coffee. Low’s documentary also highlighted the significance of Heathcliff’s name – a single moniker which serves as forename and surname, as with enslaved people. </p>
<h2>Black history</h2>
<p>The Brontё sisters’ school was just a few miles from the Dentdale home of a notorious slave-owning family <a href="http://www.northcravenheritage.org.uk/NCHTJto2009/Journals/2000/J00A17.html">called the Sills</a>. The Brontё sisters knew about the Sills family, who worked more than 30 enslaved Africans on the grounds of their estate. <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/1287751141">The Legacies of British Slave Ownership</a> database confirms that the Sills family had a large number of Jamaican slaves. The database shows that Ann Sill was posthumously compensated with £3,783 in 1876 for the loss of 174 enslaved people from the family’s Providence Estate. Emily Brontё was aware of local debates about abolition and she knew about the impact of sugar wealth on her neighbourhood through a host of personal associations.</p>
<p>Historians have uncovered many more compelling details of how <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2007/02/15/west_yorkshire_slave_trade_feature.shtml">slave-produced wealth shaped the region</a>. These details combine to suggest that, when Nelly says that Heathcliff is not “a regular black”, she is not being merely metaphorical – she is clearly saying that while Heathcliff may not be like most black people she was aware of, he was indeed black. </p>
<p>Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. It was written in the shadow of two formative international political events which alarmed the British public: the late 18th century French and Haitian Revolutions. Many of Brontё’s readers would have known that the violent Haitian Revolution ended in independent rule and led to the <a href="https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/20330/Final%20Thesis-McKey.pdf?sequence=1">decline of the plantation economy</a>. Christopher Heywood <a href="http://www.academicroom.com/article/yorkshire-slavery-wuthering-heights">details</a> the ways in which the Dales were shaped by the “plantation economy”, with well-known local families making their money from the slave-trade and slave-produced goods, also lobbying parliament against abolition.</p>
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<p>The Heathcliff of Andrea Arnold’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/10/wuthering-heights-film-review">2011 remake of Wuthering Heights</a> is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/how-heathcliff-got-a-racelift">also black</a>. Arnold makes no reference to Yorkshire’s real black histories in interviews about the film. Indeed, her choice of actor happened almost by chance – Arnold does not herself challenge the idea that Heathcliff is not really black. Instead she alludes to “five or six clear descriptions of him in the novel” as a lascar, as “Chinese-Indian” and as a gypsy. Without referring to Yorkshire’s slavery connections, she simply said: “I wanted to honour … his difference.” Philip French’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/wuthering-heights-andrea-arnold-review">review in the Guardian</a>, for example, contained no suggestion that it might be historically legitimate to foreground a black presence in Brontё’s world. Instead, he concluded that the film’s depiction of a black Heathcliff is rather “a puzzle”.</p>
<p>But as the historical evidence builds up, writers and filmmakers are busily uncovering Yorkshire’s obscured histories of immigration and slave-produced wealth. Whether by accident or design, Arnold may well have got it right when she cast Solomon Glave and James Howson as Heathcliff.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85341/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I previously received Arts Council funding and AHRC funding. I do not hold any grants at present. </span></em></p>All the evidence points to Brontё’s most famous outcast being a product of the British slave trade.Corinne Fowler, Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature, University of LeicesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/719352017-02-28T01:58:16Z2017-02-28T01:58:16ZCan the black press stay relevant?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158606/original/image-20170227-20702-69ygab.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 1941 photograph depicts the Chicago Defender's linotype operators.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype_operators_of_the_Chicago_Defender.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mattie Smith Colin was a seasoned reporter for the Chicago Defender when the newspaper sent her to cover the return of Emmett Till’s body. The 14-year-old Chicago native, who was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, had been brutally beaten and shot for allegedly whistling at a white woman. An <a href="http://www.upworthy.com/more-than-6-decades-after-his-violent-death-the-story-of-emmett-till-lives-on">open casket funeral</a> – insisted upon by Till’s mother – followed. </p>
<p>Chicagoans, and much of the rest of the country, recoiled. <a href="http://blackquotidian.com/anvc/black-quotidian/media/CD%209-10-55%20-%20Till.pdf">The ensuing coverage by the Defender</a> and others helped spur the U.S. civil rights movement. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/ct-mattie-colin-obituary-20161228-story.html">Colin died in December</a> at the age of 98, but her work at the Defender, alongside the efforts of other black reporters, editors and photographers, embodied the activist, community-first bent of the African-American press. Dailies and weeklies like the <a href="https://chicagodefender.com/">Defender</a>, the <a href="http://www.stlamerican.com/">St. Louis American</a> and the <a href="https://lasentinel.net/">Los Angeles Sentinel</a> portrayed African-American life in its fullness – civic events, celebrations, religious life, marriages, births and deaths – and they countered the stereotypical ways mainstream media covered blacks (if they were covered at all). </p>
<p>Then – and now – they’ve been a critical voice in reporting the lives of black America. </p>
<p>“At a time when the credibility of media is under attack, it is important to note that for people of color, the mainstream media has always lacked credibility,” said Martin Reynolds, a journalist and codirector of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in the newsroom. “The black press and the ethnic press as a whole have consistently maintained far more credibility in their communities than their mainstream counterparts.”</p>
<p>Is the time right for a new wave of black media activism? And can the black press retain its effectiveness in a new media landscape?</p>
<h2>A force for social change</h2>
<p>In the 20th century, the black press played a critical role in the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>During World War II, for example, the Pittsburgh Courier <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08821127.1986.10731062?journalCode=uamj20">launched its “Double V” campaign</a>, which signaled the newspaper’s support for victory abroad over the Axis powers and victory at home for black soldiers and their families. The weekly – at its height <a href="http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/courier.html">one of the most influential</a> of the country’s African-American newspapers – argued that if black men were dying for their country, then the returning servicemen and their families had earned and deserved equal rights at home.</p>
<p>The Courier’s campaign met resistance. Some commanding officers overseas banned the paper from military base libraries, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover <a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/11/12/classroom-connections-wwii-double-v-campaign-gr-10-12">petitioned the U.S. attorney general</a> to charge black newspapers with sedition. No charges were filed by the government, but the black press’ campaign, while softened, continued unabated and helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement to which Mattie Smith Colin of the Defender had a front row seat. </p>
<p>In September 1955, the Defender sent Colin to cover the arrival of Till’s bloated corpse, capturing the reaction of his mother.</p>
<p>“‘Oh, God, oh God, my only boy,’ Mamie Bradley wailed as five men lifted a soiled paper wrapped bundle from a huge brown wooden mid-Victorian box at the Illinois Central Station Friday in Chicago and put it in a waiting hearse,” Colin <a href="http://bsc.chadwyck.com.libproxy1.usc.edu/common/imageConversion.do?method=viewPdf&pdfPaperSize=letter&pdfHeadAllPages=false&pdfPageRange=1-2&id=HNP_68419_19550910_0008&configPrefix=cdefArticlePDF&pdfHeader=%3Ci%3EChicago%20Defender%3C%2Fi%3E%3Cbr%3E%28Sep%2010%2C%201955%29%20p.1%2C%20col.5">reported</a>. “The bundle was the bruised and bullet-ridden body of little 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till of Chicago, who was lynched down in Money, Miss.”</p>
<p>“Could it be possible,” she continued, “that one of the poorest economic states of in the Union, who should thank Negroes for their agricultural contribution for the meager wealth that it has, is still fighting the civil war?”</p>
<p>The 14-paragraph story, half of which was a series of questions aimed at broader social justice and economic issues in the South, ended with a final question for readers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Or is it as Mrs. Bradley hysterically shouted, about the untimely death of little Emmett, ‘Darling you have not died in vain; your life has been sacrificed for something.’” </p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.upworthy.com/more-than-6-decades-after-his-violent-death-the-story-of-emmett-till-lives-on">A photograph</a> of the teenage boy’s disfigured face accompanied news stories in <a href="https://propresobama.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/1955-san-antonio-express-emmett-till-photos.png">newspapers</a> across the country. First published in Jet magazine, <a href="http://time.com/4399793/emmett-till-civil-rights-photography/">the image</a> served as a rallying cry for the civil rights movement.</p>
<h2>Same problems, different landscape</h2>
<p>Today, many of the issues facing the black community would sound familiar to veterans of the civil rights movement: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/study-finds-police-fatally-shoot-unarmed-black-men-at-disproportionate-rates/2016/04/06/e494563e-fa74-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html?utm_term=.20e43b4d0031">police shootings</a> of unarmed black men; <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarceration-black-americans-higher-rates-disparities-report">disproportional incarceration rates</a>; <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/american-drug-sentencing-inefficient-unfair-and-racially-discriminatory/">discriminatory sentencing</a>; <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/north-carolina-early-voting/506963/">voter suppression</a>; and rising rates of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/asia/kansas-attack-possible-hate-crime-srinivas-kuchibhotla.html?_r=0">violence against minorities</a>.</p>
<p>Some observers say this has created an environment ripe for black media. </p>
<p>“The black press should use this opportunity more than ever to enforce integrity and consistency in telling the truth about community and federal polices,” said Amen Oyiboke, a freelance journalist in Los Angeles and a former reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel. “The black press has to realize, if it doesn’t already, that this is the time to be the backbone that it has always been.” </p>
<p>There are challenges. Readership of black newspapers has fallen every year since 2009, <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/african-american-media-fact-sheet-2015/pj_2015-04-29_sotnm_african-american-media-01/">according to the Pew Research Center</a>. By comparison, web traffic has grown for <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/african-american-media-fact-sheet-2015/pj_2015-04-29_sotnm_african-american-media-06/">digital news sites</a> and magazines serving African-American readers. </p>
<p>While mainstream news outlets have improved their coverage of African-Americans and other communities of color, some observers say they missed openings – and continue to miss chances – to attract broader readership. Coverage remains uneven, while hiring of blacks and other minorities in newsrooms <a href="https://www.poynter.org/2016/american-newsrooms-are-getting-more-diverse-but-its-not-happening-quickly-enough/429850/">continues to lag</a>. </p>
<p>“In a way, some of the legacy media missed some of the opportunities by not incorporating different voices when they could have,” said Mary C. Curtis, a columnist at Roll Call and a former editor for The New York Times. “You would see much more diversity in coverage than you see now, and I think the lack of it does hurt the bottom line.”</p>
<h2>New voices in a new space</h2>
<p>While bottom lines <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/newspapers-fact-sheet/">have been damaged</a> by the continuing transition to digital from print, the digital space offers the platform for a renewed push by black media to continue its pointed, voice-driven journalism. </p>
<p>New voices like the <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com">Black Lives Matter</a> movement and <a href="http://bloggingwhilebrown.com">Blogging While Brown</a> – a group of African-Americans from all walks of life – have made significant inroads into Twitter and Facebook. News sites like <a href="http://www.theroot.com">The Root</a>, <a href="http://thegrio.com">Grio.com</a> and other digital publications and social media communities have maintained the point-of-view style of journalism and coverage of the African-American community that black newspapers like The Defender have historically embraced. </p>
<p>But even older publications like the <a href="http://amsterdamnews.com/">New York Amsterdam News</a>, an African-American newspaper based in Harlem and one of the first to cover Malcolm X, have adopted new digital platforms whose voices mirror the point of view reporting of their print versions. The paper’s homepage recently touted an <a href="http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/feb/23/make-america-great-againtrump-must-go-4/">editorial</a> decrying Trump, offered a <a href="http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/feb/15/will-trump-do-better-job-obama-hbcus/">story</a> about the financial health of historically black colleges and universities and reported on Louis Farrakhan’s February address to the Nation of Islam Convention, during which <a href="http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/feb/23/farrakhan-america-will-never-be-great-again/">he said</a>, “America will never be great again.”</p>
<p>If the platform is different, the messages are the same – and they are coming from increasingly younger African-Americans. Earlier this month, children’s publishing company Scholastic <a href="http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press-release/scholastic-publish-activism-book-marley-dias-12-year-old-1000blackgirlbooks-founder-sp">announced plans</a> to publish a book for children and teens about activism. The author is a 12-year-old activist named Marley Dias who inspired #1000BlackGirlsBooks, an international social media campaign designed to collect titles featuring black girls who are the lead characters. </p>
<p>The book, scheduled to be published in spring 2018, will cover social justice, equity, inclusion and volunteerism. </p>
<p>It sounds like a title of which The Defender’s Mattie Colin would approve.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct the caption of the lead image.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71935/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Celis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From the treatment of black World War II veterans to Emmett Till’s murder, the black press helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. What role can it play today?Bill Celis, Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Strategic Initiatives, USC Annenberg School for Communication and JournalismLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/731852017-02-24T02:06:53Z2017-02-24T02:06:53ZHidden figures: How black women preachers spoke truth to power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158161/original/image-20170223-32718-1dleovy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence, Massachusetts.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/masstravel/13943933590/in/photolist-nfbiE7-fA3eGa-7eXAM3-8EitT3-8rwTDn-cjcw8G-6jjvuQ-aujo3H-5xuE3L-8P6YFS-5xqgGr-8EfjTc-6jjtrQ-7cZHed-6jfoDT-6jfohX-6jfkhP-dkKzXm-6jjvVm-6jfcTT-6jfmQK-6jfpQe-6jfnQ8-6jfEJX-6jjs7f-6jfev4-6jjrgb-6jjwqS-6jjwXN-6jjJUC-kGvtF5-6jjQWo-6jfoYZ-6jfpoe-6jjsJm-8EfjFx-6jfF9K-5xqgpV-kGucSV-edpMem-ETLbH-ETLbV-pbRDdk-6fkPN8-QRN7By-6ixS5N-9pNct7-pB24Hd-azmgsm-2C8VGB">Lynne Graves</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Each semester I greet the students who file into my preaching class at <a href="http://divinity.howard.edu/">Howard University</a> with a standard talk. The talk is not an overview of the basics – techniques of sermon preparation or sermon delivery, as one might expect. Outlining the basics is not particularly difficult.</p>
<p>The greatest challenge, in fact, is helping learners to stretch their theology: namely, how they perceive who God is and convey what God is like in their sermons. This becomes particularly important for <a href="http://www.abingdonpress.com/product/9781501818943">African-American preachers</a>, especially African-American women preachers, because most come from church contexts that overuse exclusively masculine language for God and humanity.</p>
<p>African-American women comprise more than 70 percent of the active membership of generally any <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137552877">African-American congregation</a> one might attend today. According to one Pew study, African-American women are among the most <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/">religiously committed of the Protestant</a> demographic – eight in 10 say that religion is important to them.</p>
<p>Yet, America’s Christian pulpits, especially African-American pulpits, remain male-dominated spaces. Still today, eyebrows raise, churches split, pews empty and recommendation letters get lost at a woman’s mention that God has <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=African%20American%20Preaching%20an%20Introduction">called her to preach</a>.</p>
<p>The deciding factor for women desiring to pastor and be accorded respect equal to their male counterparts generally whittles down to one question: Can she preach?</p>
<p>The fact is that African-American women have preached, formed congregations and confronted many racial injustices since the slavery era.</p>
<h2>Here’s the history</h2>
<p>The earliest black female preacher was a Methodist woman simply known as <a href="http://diverseeducation.com/article/8493/">Elizabeth</a>. She held her first prayer meeting in Baltimore in 1808 and preached for about 50 years before retiring to Philadelphia to live among the <a href="http://www.quakers.org">Quakers</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158162/original/image-20170223-32692-1jt2c80.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">First African-American church, founded by Rev. Richard Allen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfsmith/6990618379/in/photolist-iuHAEG-iqCokx-jKgd2h-hYcuBE-iuJZrb-bDJKi6">D Smith</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An unbroken legacy of African-American women preachers persisted even long after Elizabeth. <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/lee-jarena-1783">Reverend Jarena Lee</a> became the first African-American woman to preach at the <a href="https://www.ame-church.com">African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church</a>. She had started even before the church was officially formed in the city of Philadelphia in 1816. But, she faced considerable opposition.</p>
<p>AME Bishop <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p97.html">Richard Allen</a>, who founded the AME Church, had initially refused Lee’s request to preach. It was only upon hearing her speak, presumably, from the floor, during a worship service, that he permitted her to give a sermon.</p>
<p><a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Preaching-with-Sacred-Fire/">Lee reported</a> that Bishop Allen,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“rose up in the assembly, and related that [she] had called upon him eight years before, asking to be permitted to preach, and that he had put [her] off; but that he now as much believed that [she] was called to that work, as any of the preachers present.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lee was much like her Colonial-era contemporary, the famed women’s rights activist <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/sojourner-truth-9511284">Sojourner Truth</a>. Truth had escaped John Dumont’s slave plantation in 1828 and landed in New York City, where she became an itinerant preacher active in the abolition and woman’s suffrage movements.</p>
<h2>Fighting the gender narratives</h2>
<p>For centuries now, the Holy Bible has been used to <a href="http://biblehub.com/1_timothy/2-12.htm">suppress women’s voices</a>. These early female black preachers reinterpreted the Bible to liberate women.</p>
<p>Truth, for example, is most remembered for her captivating topical sermon <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/1851-sojourner-truth-arnt-i-woman">"Ar’nt I A Woman?</a>,” delivered at the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/more-womens-rights-conventions.htm">Woman’s Rights National Convention</a> on May 29, 1851 in Akron, Ohio.</p>
<p>In a skillful historical interpretation of the scriptures, in her convention address, Truth used the Bible to liberate and set the record straight about women’s rights. She <a href="http://www.sojournertruth.com/p/aint-i-woman.html">professed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.” </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158164/original/image-20170223-21964-vvstda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jarena Lee.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tradingcardsnpsyahoocom/7222590166/in/photolist-c1eEqE-c1eEt1-dHhvYD-99Cw6A-99zin4-99zgcc-99CwGW-99Cr5s-99zhTx-99zkva-99Cu3w-99zhaB-99zhDt-99Ct1s-99CshA-99zkeT-99zjLe-99zmjF-99zkLD-99zgVx-99zmPx-99ywgr-99zj4p-99zgqB-8QQ7Rb-99znRD-99zAQg-99zAj4-99CrN7-99CK7u-99Cvyq-99CuAj-99CHPG-99CsvC-99zyJk-99zgET-jYZFwf-99zzhv-99CwwU-99zzMx-99CJmu-99zz2c-99zxWF-99CGeW-5Z9Mr2-99CJSj-99zBAM-99zomH-99zn62-99Crzm">TradingCardsNPS</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Truth, Jarena Lee spoke truth to power and paved the way for other mid- to late 19th-century black female preachers to achieve validation as pulpit leaders, although neither she nor Truth received official clerical appointments.</p>
<p>The first woman to achieve this validation was <a href="http://www.hallofgovernors.ny.gov/wh/Julia-A-J-Foote">Julia A. J. Foote</a>. In 1884, she became the first woman ordained a deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion <a href="http://www.amez.org/">AMEZ</a> Church. Shortly after followed the ordinations of AME evangelist <a href="http://articles.mcall.com/1995-07-13/features/3054687_1_mrs-baker-religious-leaders-harriet-cole">Harriet A. Baker</a>, who in 1889 was perhaps the first black woman to receive a pastoral appointment. <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/30036/jesus-jobs-and-justice-by-bettye-collier-thomas/">Mary J. Small</a> became the first woman to achieve “elder ordination” status, which permitted her to preach, teach and administer the sacraments and Holy Communion.</p>
<p>Historian <a href="http://www.cla.temple.edu/history/faculty/bettye-collier-thomas/">Bettye Collier-Thomas</a> maintains that the goal for most black women seeking ordination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was simply a matter of gender inclusion, not necessarily pursuing the need to transform the patriarchal church.</p>
<h2>Preaching justice</h2>
<p>An important voice was that of Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph. In her role as reformer, suffragist, evangelist and pastor, she daringly advanced the cause of freedom and justice within the churches she served and even beyond during the period of the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration">Great Migration</a> of 20th century.</p>
<p>In my book, <a href="http://baylorpr.es/sGilbert">“A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights</a>,” I trace the clerical legacy of <a href="http://www.njwomenshistory.org/discover/biographies/florence-spearing-randolph/">Rev. Randolph</a> and describe how her prophetic sermons spoke to the spiritual, social and industrial conditions of her African-American listeners before and during <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration">the largest internal migration</a> in the United States.</p>
<p>In her sermons she brought criticism to the broken promises of American democracy, the deceptive ideology of black inferiority and other chronic injustices.</p>
<p>Randolph’s sermon “If I Were White,” preached on Race Relations Sunday, Feb. 1, 1941, reminded her listeners of their self-worth. It emphasized that America’s whites who claim to be defending democracy in wartime have an obligation to all American citizens.</p>
<p>Randolph spoke in concrete language. She argued that the refusal of whites to act justly toward blacks, domestically and abroad, embraced sin rather than Christ. That, she said, revealed a realistic picture of America’s race problem.</p>
<p>She also spoke about gender discrimination. Randolph’s carefully crafted sermon in 1909 “Antipathy to Women Preachers,” for example, highlights several heroic women in the Bible. From her interpretation of their scriptural legacy, she argued that gender discrimination in Christian pulpits illustrated a misreading of scripture.</p>
<p>Randolph used her position as preacher to effect social change. She was a member and organizer for the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/womans-christian-temperance-union">Woman’s Christian Temperance Union</a> (WCTU), which led in the work to pass the <a href="http://constitution.laws.com/american-history/constitution/constitutional-amendments/18th-amendment">18th Amendment</a>, which made prohibition of the production, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. Her affiliation with the WCTU earned her the title “militant herald of temperance and righteousness.”</p>
<p>Today, several respected African-American women preachers and teachers of preachers proudly stand on Lee’s, Small’s and Randolph’s shoulders raising their prophetic voices.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73185/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I have not received any funding for this research. </span></em></p>Since the 19th century, a long line of black women preachers set in motion a tradition that spoke against injustices and questioned patriarchal attitudes. Here’s their story.Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Associate Professor of Homiletics, Howard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/714432017-02-17T02:01:34Z2017-02-17T02:01:34ZWho counts as black?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157004/original/image-20170215-27391-7xf0mh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/multicultural-crayons-representing-different-skin-tones-574934023?src=mYYtqxwJlChMIMQrMUSSiw-1-0">'Crayons' via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For generations, intimacy between black men and white women was taboo. A mere accusation of impropriety could lead to a lynching, and interracial marriage was illegal in a number of states. </p>
<p>Everything changed with the 1967 Supreme Court decision <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395">Loving v. Virginia</a>, which ruled that blacks and whites have a legal right to intermarry. Spurred by the court’s decision, the number of interracial marriages – and, with it, the population of multiracial people – has exploded. <a href="http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_multi.html">According to the 2000 Census</a>, 6.8 million Americans identified as multiracial. By 2010, that number grew to <a href="http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/02/16/57543/in-an-increasingly-multiracial-america-identity-is/">9 million people</a>. And this leaves out all of the people who might be a product of mixed ancestry but chose to still identify as either white or black. </p>
<p>With these demographic changes, traditional notions of black identity – once limited to the confines of dark skin or kinky hair – are no longer so. </p>
<p>Mixed-race African-Americans can have naturally green eyes (like the singer <a href="http://www.arogundade.com/rihannas-tyra-banks-vanessa-williams-eyes.html">Rihanna</a>) or naturally blue eyes (like actor <a href="http://www.wetpaint.com/you-tell-us-what-color-are-jesse-williams-eyes-641896/">Jessie Williams</a>). Their hair can be styled long and wavy (<a href="http://www.essence.com/galleries/hair-evolution-alicia-keys">Alicia Keys</a>) or into a bob-cut (<a href="http://www.etonline.com/news/190948_halle_berry_reveals_new_edgy_shaved_flower_haircut/">Halle Berry</a>). </p>
<p>And unlike in the past – when many mixed-race people <a href="http://racerelations.about.com/od/hollywood/tp/Passing-For-White-In-Hollywood.htm">would try to do what they could to pass as white</a> – many multiracial Americans today unabashedly embrace and celebrate their blackness.</p>
<p>However, these expressions of black pride have been met with grumbles by some in the black community. These mixed-race people, some argue, are not “black enough” – their skin isn’t dark enough, their hair not kinky enough. And thus they do not “count” as black. African-American presidential candidate Ben Carson even <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/ben-carson-obama-was-raised-white-219657">claimed</a> President Obama couldn’t understand “the experience of black Americans” because he was “raised white.”</p>
<p>This debate over “who counts” has created somewhat of an identity crisis in the black community, exposing a divide between those who think being black should be based on physical looks, and those who think being black is more than looks. </p>
<h2>‘Dark Girls’ and ‘Light Girls’</h2>
<p>In 2011 Oprah Winfrey hosted a documentary titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UWwbTglQKg">Dark Girls</a>,” a portrayal of the pain and suffering dark-skinned black women experience. </p>
<p>It’s a story I know only too well. In 1992, I coauthored a book with DePaul psychologist Midge Wilson and business executive Kathy Russell called “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Color_Complex.html?id=3asbkganD14C">The Color Complex</a>,” which looked at the relationship between black identity and skin color in modern America.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DOjgTIN9pTE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for ‘Dark Girls.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As someone who has studied the issue of skin color and black identity for over 20 years, I felt uneasy after I finished watching the “Dark Girls” film. No doubt it confirmed the pain that dark-skinned black women feel. But it left something important out, and I wondered if it would lead to misconceptions. </p>
<p>The film seemed to suggest that if you are black, you have dark skin. Your hair is kinky. Green or blue eyes, on the other hand, represent someone who is white.</p>
<p>I was relieved, then, when I was asked to consult on a second documentary, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN_81iytSXU">Light Girls</a>,” in 2015, a film centered on the pain and suffering mixed-race black women endure. The subjects who were interviewed shared their stories. These women considered themselves black but said they always felt out of place, on the outside looking in. Black men often adored them, but this could quickly flip to scorn if their advances were spurned. Meanwhile, friendships with darker-skinned black women could be fraught. Insults such as “light-bright,” “mello-yellow” and “banana girl” were tossed at lighter-skinned black women, objectifying them as anything but black.</p>
<h2>Identity experts weigh in</h2>
<p>Some of the experts on identity take issue with the general assumptions many might have about “who is black,” especially those who think blackness is determined by skin color. </p>
<p>For example, in 1902 sociologist Charles Horton Cooley <a href="http://mills-soc116.wikidot.com/notes:cooley-looking-glass-self">argued</a> that identity is like a “looking glass self.” In other words, we are a reflection of the people around us. Mixed-race, light-skinned, green-eyed African-Americans born and raised in a black environment are no less black than their dark-skinned counterparts. In 1934, cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html">said</a> that identity was a product of our social interactions, just like Cooley.</p>
<p>Maybe the most well-known identity theorist is psychologist Erik Erikson. In his most popular book, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Identity_Youth_and_Crisis.html?id=v3XWH2PDLewC">Identity: Youth and Crisis</a>,” published in 1968, Erikson also claimed that identity is a product of our environment. But he expanded the theory a bit: It includes not only the people we interact with but also the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the music we listen to. Mixed-race African-Americans – just like dark-skinned African-Americans – would be equally uncomfortable wearing a kimono, drinking sake or listening to ongaku (a type of Japanese music). On the other hand, wearing a dashiki, eating soul food and relaxing to the beats of rap or hip-hop music is something all black people – regardless of skin tone – can identify with. </p>
<p>Our physical features, of course, are a product of our parents. Indeed, in the not-too-distant future, with more and more interracial marriages taking place, we may find black and white hair texture and eye and skin color indistinguishable. It’s worth noting that there’s an element of personal choice involved in racial identity – for example, you can choose how to self-identify on the census. Many multiracial Americans simply identify as “multiracial.” Others, even if they’re a product of mixed ancestry, choose “black.” </p>
<p>Perhaps true blackness, then, dwells not in skin color, eye color or hair texture, but in the love for the spirit and culture of all who came before us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71443/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald E. Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With the number of multiracial Americans growing, there’s a fierce debate in the black community over who’s black – and who isn’t.Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/726192017-02-15T02:02:43Z2017-02-15T02:02:43ZAmerica’s always had black inventors – even when the patent system explicitly excluded them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157436/original/image-20170219-10209-10w0f9l.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A New York Times article from 1910 describes founding of Mound Bayou, a town founded on the wealth of a steamboat patent.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.sundaymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/19100612-4-ex.pdf">SundayMagazine.org</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>America has long been the land of innovation. More than 13,000 years ago, the Clovis people created what many call the “<a href="http://www.thirteen.org/programs/first-peoples/the-clovis-point--the-first-american-invention_clip/">first American invention</a>” – a stone tool used primarily to <a href="http://www.uwyo.edu/surovell/pdfs/qi%202008.pdf">hunt large game</a>. This spirit of American creativity has persisted through the millennia, through the <a href="http://cambridge.dlconsulting.com/cgi-bin/cambridge?a=d&d=Sentinel19420926-01.2.46">first American patent granted</a> in 1641 and on to <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/articles/2016-01-08/5-reasons-the-us-is-great-for-innovation">today</a>.</p>
<p>One group of prolific innovators, however, has been largely ignored by history: black inventors born or forced into American slavery. Though U.S. patent law was created with color-blind language to foster innovation, the patent system consistently excluded these inventors from recognition.</p>
<p>As a law professor and a licensed patent attorney, I understand both the importance of protecting inventions and the negative impact of being unable to use the law to do so. But despite patents being largely out of reach to them throughout early U.S. history, both slaves and free African-Americans did invent and innovate.</p>
<h2>Why patents matter</h2>
<p>In many countries around the world, innovation is fostered through a patent system. Patents give inventors a monopoly over their invention for a limited time period, allowing them, if they wish, to make money through things like sales and licensing.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156704/original/image-20170214-25992-15ubfe4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Patent Office relief on the Herbert C. Hoover Building.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patent_Office_relief_on_the_Herbert_C._Hoover_Building.JPG">Neutrality</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The patent system <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.32.2.173">has long been the heart</a> of America’s innovation policy. As a way to recoup costs, patents provide strong incentives for inventors, who can spend millions of dollars and a significant amount of time developing a invention.</p>
<p>The history of patents in America is <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=2473390">older than the U.S. Constitution</a>, with several colonies granting patents years before the Constitution was created. In 1787, however, members of the Constitutional Convention opened the patent process up to people nationwide <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=559145">by drafting</a> what has come to be known as the Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. It allows Congress:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This language gives inventors exclusive rights to their inventions. It forms the foundation for today’s nationwide, federal patent system, which no longer allows states to grant patents.</p>
<p>Though the language itself was race-neutral, like many of the rights set forth in the Constitution, the patent system didn’t apply for black Americans born into slavery. Slaves were not considered American citizens and laws at the time prevented them <a href="https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/40/3/distributive-justice-and-ip/DavisVol40No3_Aoki.pdf">from applying for or holding property</a>, including patents. In 1857, the U.S. commissioner of patents officially ruled that slave inventions <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-02-08/how-the-patent-office-helped-to-end-slavery">couldn’t be patented</a>.</p>
<h2>Slaves’ inventions exploited by owners</h2>
<p>During the 17th and 18th centuries, America <a href="http://www.history1700s.com/index.php/articles/14-guest-authors/1084-the-inventions-of-18th-century-which-transformed-agriculture.html">was experiencing rapid economic growth</a>. Black inventors were major contributors during this era – even though most <a href="http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=jgspl">did not obtain any of the benefits associated with their inventions</a> since they could not receive patent protection.</p>
<p>Slave owners often took credit for their slaves’ inventions. In one well-documented case, a <a href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/02/11/5-inventions-by-enslaved-black-men-blocked-by-us-patent-office/4/">black inventor named Ned</a> invented an effective, innovative cotton scraper. His slave master, Oscar Stewart, attempted to patent the invention. Because Stewart was not the actual inventor, and because the actual inventor was born into slavery, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Wz-DTSXeLRYC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=Oscar+Stewart+Ned+patent&source=bl&ots=4AuokDOGVw&sig=p_jIR4bYZPFDk0tnNh74gSae-mI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi3i-vq5oHSAhUD5YMKHXoeDVQ4ChDoAQgxMAg#v=onepage">the application was rejected</a>. </p>
<p>Stewart ultimately began selling the cotton scraper without the benefit of patent protection and made <a href="http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1076.htm">a significant amount of money</a> doing so. In his advertisements, he openly touted that the product was “the invention of a Negro slave – thus giving the lie to the abolition cry that slavery dwarfs the mind of the Negro. When did a free Negro ever invent anything?” </p>
<h2>Reaping benefits of own inventions</h2>
<p>The answer to this question is that black people – both free and enslaved – <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmscientists1.html">invented many things</a> during that time period.</p>
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<p>One such innovator was <a href="http://nkaa.uky.edu/record.php?note_id=648">Henry Boyd</a>, who was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1802. After <a href="https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467111560">purchasing his own freedom</a> in 1826, Boyd invented a corded bed created with wooden rails connected to the headboard and footboard. </p>
<p>The “Boyd Bedstead” was so popular that historian Carter G. Woodson <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=zF6J8Zge4XgC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=Henry+Boyd+corded+bed&source=bl&ots=3U6YlDDtfB&sig=aDbhOuxCX_KQdUdXuiqVB2PQzbY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiU-ZHT1IHSAhXl7YMKHfBRAB0Q6AEIOTAG#v=onepage&q=Henry%20Boyd%20corded%20bed&f=false">profiled his success</a> in the iconic book “The Mis-education of the Negro,” noting that Boyd’s business ultimately employed 25 white and black employees. </p>
<p>Though Boyd had recently purchased his freedom and should have been allowed a patent for his invention, the racist realities of the time apparently led him to believe that he wouldn’t be able to patent his invention. He ultimately decided to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=qjWDoxwT6fIC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=Henry+Boyd+patent&source=bl&ots=BRUsY-wjc_&sig=u-q8LbCuHm4pvav2ExPRJj3kvYg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAkcn-04HSAhUJ5oMKHSz8AygQ6AEIOTAI#v=onepage&q=Henry%20Boyd%20patent&f=false">partner with a white craftsman</a>, allowing his partner to apply for and receive a patent for the bed.</p>
<p>Some black inventors achieved financial success but no patent protection, direct or indirect. Benjamin Montgomery, who was born into slavery in 1819, <a href="http://theblackhistorychannel.com/2013/benjamin-montgomery-slave-inventor/">invented a steamboat propeller designed for shallow waters</a> in the 1850s. This invention was of particular value because, during that time, steamboats delivered food and other necessities through often-shallow waterways connecting settlements. If the boats got stuck, life-sustaining supplies would be <a href="http://blackinventor.com/benjamin-montgomery/">delayed for days or weeks</a>. </p>
<p>Montgomery <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Montgomery">tried to apply for a patent</a>. The application was rejected due to his status as a slave. Montgomery’s owners tried to take credit for the propeller invention and patent it themselves, but the patent office also rejected their application because they were not the true inventors. </p>
<p>Even without patent protection, Montgomery amassed significant wealth and become one of the <a href="http://www.maricopa-az.gov/web/featured-contributors/1963-benjamin-montgomery-inventor-of-the-steam-operated-propeller">wealthiest planters</a> in Mississippi after the Civil War ended. Eventually his son, Isaiah, was able to purchase more than 800 acres of land and found the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi after his father’s death.</p>
<h2>A legacy of black innovators</h2>
<p>The patent system was ostensibly open to free black people. From Thomas Jennings, the first black patent holder, who <a href="http://www.reunionblackfamily.com/apps/blog/show/40925874-thomas-l-jennings-was-the-first-black-man-to-receive-a-patent-the-patent-awarded-on-march-3-1821">invented dry cleaning</a> in 1821, to Norbert Rillieux, a free man who invented a revolutionary <a href="http://blackinventor.com/norbert-rillieux/">sugar-refining process</a> in the 1840s, to Elijah McCoy, who obtained <a href="http://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/the-real-mccoy-patents-ironing-board/">57 patents</a> over his lifetime, those with access to the patent system invented items that still touch the lives of people today.</p>
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<p>This legacy extends through the 21st century. Lonnie Johnson generated more than <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/bulls-eye---super-soaker-inventor-scores-huge-payday-232255648.html">US$1 billion in sales</a> with his Super Soaker water gun invention, which has consistently been among the <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/lonnie-g-johnson-17112946#synopsis">world’s top 20 best-selling toys</a> each year since 1991. Johnson now owns more than 80 patents and has since developed different <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-super-soakers-unlikely-role-in-the-green-energy-revolution">green technologies</a>.</p>
<p>Bishop Curry V, a 10-year-old black inventor from Texas, has already applied for a patent for his invention, which he says <a href="http://www.theroot.com/10-year-old-texas-boy-invents-device-to-stop-hot-car-de-1791880974">will stop accidental deaths of children in hot cars</a>. </p>
<p>Black women are also furthering the legacy of black inventors. <a href="http://www.blackenterprise.com/event/inventor-lisa-ascolese-talks-creating-invention/">Lisa Ascolese</a>, known as “The Inventress,” has received multiple patents and founded the <a href="http://www.aowie.com/about-aowie">Association for Women Inventors and Entrepreneurs</a>. <a href="http://inventors.about.com/od/blackinventors/a/bashen.htm">Janet Emerson Bashen</a> became the first black woman to receive a patent for a software invention in 2006. And <a href="http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/01/09/black-female-physicist-pioneers-technology-that-kills-cancer-cells-with-lasers/">Dr. Hadiyah Green</a> recently won a $1 million grant related to an invention that may help treat cancer. </p>
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<p>True to the legacy of American innovation, today’s black inventors are following in the footsteps of those who came before them. Now patent law doesn’t actively exclude them from protecting their inventions – and fully contributing to American progress.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated on Feb. 19, 2017 to replace a photo that incorrectly identified Thomas Jennings.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shontavia Johnson owns and consults for Jackson Johnson LLC, a business and innovation consulting firm.</span></em></p>American slaves couldn’t hold property – including patents on their own inventions. But that didn’t stop black Americans from innovating since the beginning of the country’s history.Shontavia Johnson, Associate Vice President for Academic Partnerships and Innovation, Clemson UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/717802017-02-10T04:06:32Z2017-02-10T04:06:32ZAfrican-American GIs of WWII: Fighting for democracy abroad and at home<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156252/original/image-20170209-28716-6qsolu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Two U.S. soldiers on Easter morning, 1945.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">NARA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Until the 21st century, the contributions of African-American soldiers in World War II barely registered in America’s collective memory of that war. </p>
<p>The “tan soldiers,” as the Black press affectionately called them, were also for the most part left out of the triumphant narrative of America’s “Greatest Generation.” In order to tell their story of helping defeat Nazi Germany in my 2010 book, “<a href="http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=33/">Breath of Freedom</a>,” I had to conduct research in more than 40 different archives in the U.S. and Germany.</p>
<p>When a German TV production company, together with Smithsonian TV, turned that book into a <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/breathoffreedom">documentary</a>, the filmmakers searched U.S. media and military archives for two years for footage of Black GIs in the final push into Germany and during the occupation of post-war Germany. </p>
<p>They watched hundreds of hours of film and discovered less than 10 minutes of footage. This despite the fact that among the 16 million U.S. soldiers who fought in World War II, there were about one million African-American soldiers.</p>
<p>They fought in the Pacific, and they were part of the victorious army that liberated Europe from Nazi rule. Black soldiers were also part of the U.S. Army of occupation in Germany after the war. Still serving in strictly segregated units, they were sent to democratize the Germans and expunge all forms of racism.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156253/original/image-20170209-8640-18ygaep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A soldier paints over a swastika.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NARA</span></span>
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<p>It was that experience that convinced many of these veterans to continue their struggle for equality when they returned home to the U.S. They were to become the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement – a movement that changed the face of our nation and inspired millions of repressed people across the globe.</p>
<p>As a scholar of <a href="https://history.vassar.edu/bios/mahoehn.html">German history</a> and of the more than 70-year U.S. military presence in Germany, I have marveled at the men and women of that generation. They were willing to fight for democracy abroad, while being denied democratic rights at home in the U.S. Because of their belief in America’s “democratic promise” and their sacrifices on behalf of those ideals, I was born into a free and democratic West Germany, just 10 years after that horrific war. </p>
<h2>Fighting racism at home and abroad</h2>
<p>By deploying troops abroad as warriors for and emissaries of American democracy, the military literally <a href="http://aacvr-germany.org/">exported</a> the African-American freedom struggle. </p>
<p>Beginning in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, African-American activists and the Black press used white America’s condemnation of Nazi racism to expose and indict the abuses of Jim Crow at home. America’s entry into the war and the struggle against Nazi Germany allowed civil rights activists to significantly step up their rhetoric. </p>
<p>Langston Hughes’ 1943 poem, “<a href="http://eji.org/reports/online/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans">From Beaumont to Detroit</a>,” addressed to America, eloquently expressed that sentiment: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You jim crowed me / Before hitler rose to power- / And you are still jim crowing me- / Right now this very hour.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Believing that fighting for American democracy abroad would finally grant African-Americans full citizenship at home, civil rights activists put pressure on the U.S. government to allow African-American soldiers to “fight like men,” side by side with white troops. </p>
<p>The military brass, disproportionately dominated by white Southern officers, refused. They argued that such a step would undermine military efficiency and negatively impact the morale of white soldiers. In an integrated military, Black officers or NCOs might also end up commanding white troops. Such a challenge to the Jim Crow racial order based on white supremacy was seen as unacceptable. </p>
<p>The manpower of Black soldiers was needed in order to win the war, but the military brass got its way; America’s Jim Crow order was to be upheld. African-Americans were allowed to train as pilots in the segregated Tuskeegee Airmen. The 92nd Buffalo Soldiers and 93rd Blue Helmets all-Black divisions were activated and sent abroad under the command of white officers. </p>
<p>Despite these concessions, 90 percent of Black troops were forced to serve in labor and supply units, rather than the more prestigious combat units. Except for a few short weeks during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 when commanders were desperate for manpower, all U.S. soldiers served in strictly segregated units. Even the blood banks were segregated.</p>
<h2>‘A Breath of Freedom’</h2>
<p>After the defeat of the Nazi regime, an Army manual instructed U.S. occupation soldiers that America was the “living denial of Hitler’s absurd theories of a superior race,” and that it was up to them to teach the Germans “that the whole concept of superiority and intolerance of others is evil.” There was an obvious, deep gulf between this soaring rhetoric of democracy and racial harmony, and the stark reality of the Jim Crow army of occupation. It was also not lost on the Black soldiers.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156254/original/image-20170209-8637-e0mz4x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=635&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Women’s Army Corps in Nuremberg, Germany, 1949.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
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<p>Post-Nazi Germany was hardly a country free of racism. But for the Black soldiers, it was their first experience of a society without a formal Jim Crow <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/breathoffreedom">color line</a>. Their uniform identified them as victorious warriors and as Americans, rather than “Negroes.” </p>
<p>Serving in labor and supply units, they had access to all the goods and provisions starving Germans living in the ruins of their country yearned for. African-American cultural expressions such as jazz, defamed and banned by the Nazis, were another reason so many Germans were drawn to their Black liberators. White America was stunned to see how much black GIs enjoyed their time abroad, and how much they dreaded their <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5630897-the-last-of-the-conquerors">return home</a> to the U.S.</p>
<p>By 1947, when the Cold War was heating up, the reality of the segregated Jim Crow Army in Germany was becoming a major embarrassment for the U.S. government. The Soviet Union and East German communist propaganda relentlessly attacked the U.S. and challenged its claim to be the leader of the “free world.” Again and again, they would point to the segregated military in West Germany, and to Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. to make their case.</p>
<h2>Coming ‘home’</h2>
<p>Newly returned veterans, civil rights advocates and the Black press took advantage of that Cold War constellation. They evoked America’s mission of democracy in Germany to push for change at home. Responding to that pressure, the first institution of the U.S. to integrate was the U.S. military, made possible by Truman’s 1948 <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=84">Executive Order 9981</a>. That monumental step, in turn, paved the way for the 1954 Supreme Court decision in <a href="https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-v-board">Brown v. Board of Education</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156393/original/image-20170210-23316-1kb1z6y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Hosea Williams, World War II Army veteran and civil rights activist, rallies demonstrators in Selma, Ala. 1965.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
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<p>The veterans who had been abroad electrified and energized the larger struggle to make America live up to its promise of democracy and justice. They joined the NAACP in record numbers and founded new chapters of that organization in the South, despite a <a href="http://eji.org/reports/online/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans">wave of violence against returning veterans</a>. The veterans of World War II and the Korean War became the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Hosea Williams and Aaron Henry are some of the better-known names, but countless others helped advance the struggle. </p>
<p>About one-third of the leaders in the civil rights movement were veterans of World War II.</p>
<p>They fought for a better America in the streets of the South, at their workplaces in the North, as leaders in the NAACP, as plaintiffs before the Supreme Court and also within the U.S. military to make it a more inclusive institution. They were also the men of the hour at the 1963 March on Washington, when their military training and expertise was crucial to ensure that the day would not be marred by agitators opposed to civil rights. </p>
<p>“We structured the March on Washington like an army formation,” <a href="http://aacvr-germany.org/index.php/oral-histories-6?id=57">recalled</a> veteran Joe Hairston.</p>
<p>For these veterans, the 2009 and 2013 inaugurations of President Barack Obama were triumphant moments in their long struggle for a better America and a more just world. Many never thought they would live to see the day that an African-American would lead their country.</p>
<p><em>To learn more about the contributions of African-American GIs, visit “<a href="http://aacvr-germany.org/">The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany</a>” digital archive.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71780/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Höhn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When war broke out, Black Americans fought in segregated units to serve their country. The breath of freedom they experienced in Europe flamed the fight for equality when they returned home.Maria Höhn, Professor and Chair of History, Vassar CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/719332017-02-09T03:47:01Z2017-02-09T03:47:01ZAllison Davis: Forgotten black scholar studied – and faced – structural racism in 1940s America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156084/original/image-20170208-17316-1b8pki3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=274%2C217%2C3181%2C2441&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Allison Davis, circa 1965. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the Davis family.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When black historian Carter G. Woodson <a href="https://asalh100.org/origins-of-black-history-month/">founded Negro History Week</a> in 1926 (expanded to Black History Month in 1976), the prevailing sentiment was that black people had no history. They were little more than the hewers of wood and the drawers of water who, in their insistence upon even basic political rights, comprised an alarming “Negro problem.”</p>
<p>To combat such ignorance and prejudice, Woodson worked relentlessly to compile the rich history of black people. He especially liked to emphasize the role of exceptional African-Americans who made major contributions to American life. At the time, that was a radical idea.</p>
<p>W. Allison Davis (1902-1983) came of age in the generation after Woodson, but he was precisely the type of exceptional black person whom Woodson liked to uphold as evidence of black intelligence, civility and achievement. </p>
<p>Davis was an accomplished anthropologist and a trailblazer who was the first African-American to earn tenure at a predominantly white university – the University of Chicago in 1947. But Davis has faded from popular memory. In my book “<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo27595989.html">The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought</a>,” I make the case that he belongs within the pantheon of illustrious African-American – and simply, American – pioneers.</p>
<h2>Allison Davis, forgotten pioneer</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154606/original/image-20170128-30397-1mfnlmz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Allison and Elizabeth Davis in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the Davis family.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Allison Davis and his wife Elizabeth Stubbs Davis were among the first black anthropologists in the country. Bringing their experiences on the wrong side of the color line to mainstream social science, they made landmark contributions to their field, including “<a href="https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2009/3815.html">Deep South</a>” (1941) and “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Children_of_bondage.html?id=yV9JAAAAMAAJ">Children of Bondage</a>” (1940). Those books sold tens of thousands of copies in the middle decades of the 20th century; they advanced social theory by explaining how race and class functioned as interlocking systems of oppression; and they broke methodological ground in combining ethnography with psychological assessments rarely applied in those days. </p>
<p>Allison Davis’ extensive body of research also had a real impact on social policy. It influenced the proceedings in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), undergirded the success of the <a href="https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ohs">federal Head Start program</a> and prompted school districts all across the country to revise or reject intelligence tests, which Davis had proven to be culturally biased. His “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Social_Class_Influences_Upon_Learning.html?id=aCwMAQAAIAAJ">Social-Class Influences Upon Learning</a>” (1948) made the most compelling case of that era that intelligence tests discriminated against lower-class people. </p>
<p>Despite the very real advances that Davis helped to inspire within American education in the 20th century, today those same accomplishments are at risk. American <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/the-architecture-of-segregation.html">schools remain as racially segregated as ever</a> due to poverty and discriminatory public policies. The investment in public education, especially compensatory programs such as Head Start, looks to further diminish amid the growing support for privatization, charter schools, and school vouchers – or, the<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/us/politics/betsy-devos-education-reform-governors-essa.html"> Betsy “DeVos playbook,”</a> as critics describe it. To understand the nature of these issues today, one must understand their history, which Davis’ career helps to illuminate.</p>
<p>Davis’ scholarly contributions are unquestionable when considered now, many decades later. But as the problems above suggest, it is no longer enough to simply celebrate exceptional African-American pioneers like Davis, or just give lip service to their ideas. The next step is confronting the circumstances that constrained their lives. This means viewing their experiences in relation to the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10602.html">structural racism that has shaped American life</a> since colonial times.</p>
<h2>Bending – not breaking – academic color line</h2>
<p>Consider Davis’ landmark appointment to the University of Chicago. Fitting the story into a master narrative of racial progress obscures more than it reveals. While the appointment did represent the crossing of a racial boundary and heralded the many more barriers that would be challenged in the ensuing decades, a closer look at the story gives little reason to celebrate. </p>
<p>Like all black scholars of his time, Davis had to be twice as good to get half as much as his fellow white male scholars (and the situation was far worse for black women scholars like Elizabeth Stubbs Davis). Only through compiling a truly remarkable record of achievement, and only amid the national fervor to make the U.S. the “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, would <a href="http://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.84.4.0534">Chicago even consider appointing Allison Davis</a>. Even then, he only received a three-year contract on the condition that the <a href="http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/hall_of_fame/julius_rosenwald">Julius Rosenwald Foundation (JRF)</a> agree to subsidize most of his salary.</p>
<p>Even with the subsidy, certain university faculty members, such as Georgia-born <a href="https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.OGBURN">sociologist William Fielding Ogburn</a>, actively opposed the appointment on racist grounds. So, too, did some trustees at the JRF, including the wealthy <a href="http://specialcollections.tulane.edu/archon/?p=creators/creator&id=24">New Orleans philanthropist Edgar B. Stern</a>, who attempted to sabotage the grant. Discounting Davis’ accomplishments and implying instead a sort of reverse racism, Stern asserted that “the purpose of this move is to have Davis join the Chicago Faculty, not in spite of the fact that he is a Negro but because he is a Negro.” Similarly myopic charges have been a <a href="https://www.rienner.com/title/Reverse_Discrimination_Dismantling_the_Myth">staple of criticism against affirmative actions programs</a> in more recent times.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156080/original/image-20170208-17349-1p0n8hx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Quadrangle Club was where (white) faculty gathered at University of Chicago, midcentury.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?one=apf2-06088.xml">University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf2-06088, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The opposition ultimately failed to torpedo Davis’ appointment, but it did underscore the type of environment he would face at Chicago. As faculty members openly debated if he should even be allowed to instruct the university’s mainly white students, the administration barred him from the Quadrangle Club, where faculty regularly gathered and ate lunch. In a private letter to him, the university made clear that it “cannot assume responsibility for <a href="http://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.84.4.0534">Mr. Davis’ personal happiness</a> and his social treatment.”</p>
<p>As time wore on, such overt racism did begin to ebb, or at least confine itself to more private quarters. What never did subside, though, was an equally pernicious institutional racism that marginalized Davis’ accomplishments and rendered him professionally invisible.</p>
<p>As Davis collaborated with renowned white scholars at Chicago, his contributions were submerged under theirs – even when he was the first author and chief theorist of the work. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-professors-and-the-poor/">writing for Commentary magazine in 1968</a>, failed to count Davis among his list of black scholars who studied black poverty (even though Davis was among the most prolific black scholars in that area), he registered the depth of Davis’ marginalization. Such marginalization, which stemmed also from Davis’ interdisciplinary approach and iconoclasm, has caused even historians to lose track of him and his important career.</p>
<h2>Davis was ensnared by the racism he studied</h2>
<p>Even the most exceptional African-Americans have never been able to transcend the racial system that ensnares them. Davis’ appointment did not usher in a new era of integration of faculties at predominantly white universities. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=RvlZAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=dilemma+of+the+american+negro+scholar">It took another three decades</a> for substantial numbers of black scholars to begin receiving offers of full-time, tenure-track employment. And <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/opinion/sunday/forcing-black-men-out-of-society.html">because of the vastly disproportionate rates</a> of poverty, incarceration and municipal neglect plaguing the black community, <a href="https://www.jbhe.com">jobs in higher education</a> often continued – and still continue – to be out of reach.</p>
<p>Few people better understood, or more thoughtfully analyzed, these very realities than did Allison Davis. This was a man who laid bare the systems of race and class that govern American life. He understood that education needed to be a bulwark for democracy, not merely a ladder for individual social mobility. He embodied how to confront injustice with sustained, productive resistance. Moreover, this was a man who refused to surrender to despair, and who chose to dedicate his life to making the country a better, more equal, more democratic place.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71933/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David A. Varel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>His landmark contributions to anthropology have faded from memory, despite real-world policy impact during the mid-20th century.David A. Varel, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, University of MississippiLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/714552017-02-08T04:24:12Z2017-02-08T04:24:12ZHow Obama’s presidential campaign changed how Americans view black candidates<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155997/original/image-20170208-9113-p3590h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barack Obama at a campaign stop in 2007.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Nati Harnik</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The relationship between black presidential candidates and potential voters is more complex than it is for their white opponents. My <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/historic-firsts-9780199314188?q=evelyn%20simien&lang=en&cc=us">research</a> on historic “firsts” shows that white voters tend to ascribe characteristics to black candidates that place them at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>That’s why Barack Obama’s presidency became synonymous with an end goal of the civil rights movement and a source of pride for so many Americans. His campaign experience, like that of predecessors Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson, suggests something about the extent to which African-Americans have gained acceptance as legitimate political actors.</p>
<p>Obama more easily mobilized white voters because he was less interested in challenging “the system,” and more ideologically liberal than his predecessors. He also adapted to the political environment, recognizing key voting constituencies. Obama pulled together the type of coalition that Chisholm and Jackson had aspired to lead, composed of college students, hard-core progressives, organized labor and independents.</p>
<p>His candidacy and victory continue to be celebrated as historic achievements to this day.</p>
<h2>Undeniably black</h2>
<p>Presidential <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/jesse-jackson-1984_b_4793293.html">campaigns</a> launched by Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Jesse Jackson in 1984 were aimed at forging interracial alliances. However, each of these candidates failed to build a coalition of historically marginalized groups. Instead, their <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?325324-2/1972-shirley-chisholm-presidential-campaign-announcement">rhetoric</a> primarily appealed to African-American voters in locales where they comprised a majority, or near majority, of the population.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6H6vazOz018?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Jackson speaking at a rally during his 1984 run for president.</span></figcaption>
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<p>As a result, they drew limited support from white voters. For example, by large margins, white voters <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/13/us/jackson-share-of-votes-by-whites-triples-in-88.html">viewed Jackson</a> as less knowledgeable, less fair, less likely to care about people like them and more prejudiced than his white opponents Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.</p>
<p>Like Chisholm and Jackson, Obama’s candidacy in 2008 aroused fears, resentments and prejudices. </p>
<p>He was falsely accused of being a Muslim. Stereotypes were <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/13/yikes-controversial-emnew_n_112429.html">reinvented</a> and popular images reanimated and parodied in blogs, email, tweets and other social media outlets. T-shirts were printed with an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/18/new-york-post-cartoon-race">image</a> of Curious George, a monkey from a well-known children’s book, inscribed with the words “Obama ’08,” comparing African-Americans to apes.</p>
<p>The Tea Party Movement, a conservative wing of the Republican Party, also <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/tea+party+obama/">orchestrated</a> a number of attacks on Obama’s patriotism, religious beliefs and citizenship status through protest rallies and social media. Obama’s racial iden tity and other personal traits remained a matter of public debate long after the general election.</p>
<p>Like his predecessors, Obama was perceived as <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22326360/ns/politics/t/mccain-assails-obama-lack-experience/#.WJkqFG8rKUk">lacking</a> leadership <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-16-obama-experience-cover_x.htm">experience</a>. He was viewed as less competent, less knowledgeable of foreign affairs and more concerned with racial issues like affirmative action and immigration reform.</p>
<p>Because he was undeniably black, he was seen as an “authentic” representative of the African-American electorate, not the entire American electorate. His campaign had to overcome this notion.</p>
<h2>Overcoming race</h2>
<p>Obama employed a race-neutral approach during his first presidential campaign. In his hallmark <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html">speech</a> at the 2004 DNC he said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His rhetoric aimed to satisfy diverse constituents across racial and ethnic groups. Obama used universal, color-blind language that appealed to most Americans.</p>
<p>He focused on quality-of-life issues, such as universal health care, equal educational opportunities and full employment for the lower and middle classes. Doing so increased the likelihood that more Americans would support his campaign. He was less interested in race-specific overtures that directly appealed to African-American voters. As I argue in <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/historic-firsts-9780199314188?q=evelyn%20simien&lang=en&cc=us">my book</a>, “Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics,” Obama unified liberal white voters. </p>
<p>Still, pundits pondered whether a black man, elected by a white majority with support of African-American voters, represented a psychological, but not necessarily a substantive, triumph over race. </p>
<p>His predecessors Chisholm and Jackson had heavily relied on racial bloc voting and the stylistic influence of a Black Power tradition – “speaking truth to power,” dramatic confrontation and public spectacle – for electoral success. Obama was a successful candidate because he was neither righteous nor indignant. He ran a campaign that was racially and culturally inclusive.</p>
<p>Today, there is little question as to whether a black male politician at the top of a major party’s presidential ticket can transform beliefs about African-American men in politics. The outcome of the 2008 American presidential election shows that the majority of American voters are willing to vote for a black Democratic presidential candidate.</p>
<p>However, it is a certain type of black presidential candidate who will find it easier, and others more difficult, to gain white support.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71455/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Evelyn M. Simien does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Black politicians throughout US history have struggled to overcome deep, negative stereotypes held against them by white Americans. Obama succeeded at the highest level. Here’s how.Evelyn M. Simien, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/720482017-02-07T03:40:29Z2017-02-07T03:40:29ZBefore sanctuary cities, here’s how black Americans protected fugitive slaves<p>Over the past year, public debate over the issue of “sanctuary” cities has become increasingly commonplace but no less urgent. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/01/19/us/ap-us-sanctuary-cities-chicago-the-latest.html">Local communities</a> and institutions such as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/01/25/580577182/albanian-immigrant-holed-up-in-detroit-church-to-avoid-deportation">churches</a> have been shielding undocumented children and adults from federal efforts to deport them. And many lawmakers and judges <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/us/politics/justice-department-sanctuary-cities-criminal-charges-elected-offiicals.html">continue to challenge</a> the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize state and local officials who endorse the “sanctuary” movement.</p>
<p>This standoff between federal authorities and local communities is hardly new. As a scholar of slavery and emancipation, I have studied the long history of African-American communities and how they offered sanctuary or protection to the most vulnerable among them. </p>
<p>In particular, I have looked at how in the 19th century, before the abolition of slavery in the United States, free black people openly defied the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/fugitive.asp">Fugitive Slave Law of 1850</a>. </p>
<h2>The law that supported rights to slaves</h2>
<p>The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 built on <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#articleIV2">provisions in the Constitution</a> and a <a href="https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/slaves-court/history.html">1793 law</a> that barred slaves from escaping from a state where slavery was legal to one where it had been banned.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155742/original/image-20170206-27189-1m0u53g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Fugitive Slaves Recaptured: 1850.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/19337155846/in/photolist-vsKYJJ-kZ6wG1-kZ5BjZ-j4V46N-kZ6wtA-g1gbtS-kZ6wVs-kZ53kK-5xuE89-bfYvag-kZ5eoB-axmZDq-A65Fb-kZ5AQc-kZ6wmw-gbpGL6-kZ5B98-boTEEV-9wUYKZ-a6uxGP-95w2ym-kZ5Bhz-kZ53L4-kZ5M4Z-r1nmEW-kZ53C8-fTJQes-5xqgpV-fTJMCX-fTJU5p-5xuEm7-aFuW3M-kZ6wwS-5xuE3L-ambDA2-fTHNKz-a9DD9J-f7EzS-fTHTJd-fTJNkh-acMev-kZ5Bei-8rUaHr-8rXbtw-fTK8TV-8rU3UR-5Sgder-5mbQzQ-8rTYvr-A65Ax">Washington Area Spark</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>While the Constitution mainly called for the return of runaway slaves, the 1850 law <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#toc-article-iv-">vastly expanded</a> the authority of federal law enforcement officials. The law criminalized helping or harboring a runaway slave and denied the accused person the right to offer testimony in her or his own defense.</p>
<p>The 1850 law confirmed what generations of enslaved African-Americans knew too well: They existed as property, not persons, in the eyes of the law. </p>
<p>Enslaved women and men could not enter legal marriages because slaveholders claimed their bodies, time, movement and even reproductive capacity. <a href="https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awlaw3/slavery.html">Law</a> and custom dictated that <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14030.html">enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children</a>.</p>
<h2>Constant threat of enslavement</h2>
<p>Freedom was always precarious for black Americans who stood on the legal margins of society. Blackness and enslavement were so firmly connected in antebellum America that to be free and black was to exist as a civic anomaly.</p>
<p>Free black people were recognized as citizens, though with limited rights, in the states in which they lived. Their standing as citizens of the nation <a href="http://thepenguinpress.com/book/more-than-freedom-fighting-for-black-citizenship-in-a-white-republic/">remained ambiguous</a> until after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States.</p>
<p>The threat of enslavement stalked many free black people. <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html">Solomon Northup</a>, for example, was a free man who lived in upstate New York; in 1841 he was abducted and sold into slavery in Louisiana. The 1850 law made it worse. Those who had seized their freedom by running away became more vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement. </p>
<p>Slaveholders advertised widely for the return of their property – the runaway slaves – and often hired men to track and capture fugitives. Newspaper reports and broadsides announced the arrival of slave catchers, warning free black people to remain vigilant especially in their interactions with the police.</p>
<p>On Nov. 1, 1850, <a href="http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/the-liberator/">The Liberator</a>, the Boston anti-slavery newspaper published by <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1561.html">William Lloyd Garrison</a>, a radical white abolitionist, alerted local residents to the presence of “two prowling villains.” It said that the two slave catchers had come to Boston from Macon, Georgia, with the aim of capturing <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/craft.html">William and Ellen Craft</a>, a runaway slave couple, “under the infernal Fugitive Slave Bill, and carrying them back to the hell of Slavery.”</p>
<p>Prompted to action by the Crafts’ plight, Boston’s black community gathered to plan their opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. They adopted a set of resolutions, including a pledge “to resist oppression” and any attacks on their freedom. </p>
<h2>Escaping bondage</h2>
<p>Many prominent black activists gained their freedom by running away. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are among the best-known fugitive slaves. After liberating themselves, they continued to challenge the laws and customs that stripped black people of their freedom.</p>
<p>After the 1850 law was enacted, many black people set their sights on Canada, convinced they could find safety only outside of the United States. <a href="http://www.macmillanlearning.com/Catalog/product/harriettubmanandthefightforfreedom-firstedition-horton">Harriet Tubman</a> was among them. She shepherded runaways from Maryland through New York and Pennsylvania to Canada, where slavery had been abolished in 1834.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155752/original/image-20170206-27217-wasd4y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A statute of Frederick Douglass at West Chester University.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wcupa/14410155908/in/photolist-nXnPiW-phCWJZ-phSik3-p1qSKT-pfSktC-8ChGva-8CkPG1-p1qRai-p1piEP-p1qLRQ-p1q3k9-p1pmEC-dCgqH8-p1qSbg-phT7N9-phVdui-p1qbRh-GVFRw-ab4J5a-p1qhv1-p1qCUr-phUEKM-phUxca-phSVuh-phSFQU-phD1dT-p1p6xT-p1qZze-phV8ED-p1qRyA-phCtAR-phSEsU-p1qL9g-p1qsy6-p1pRR2-8ChGd6-pfSLX3-phCLxB-p1psAq-p1pqJu-p1qBLe-phSsK5-phUwDr-p1qdAQ-phUxJn-p1pQ7k-phCNz2-p1qK1L-phUWvV-p1r2ma">West Chester University</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most widely known self-liberated slave, also left the United States to safeguard his freedom. <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469628578/colored-travelers/">Douglass had escaped</a> from bondage in Maryland in 1838 and then traveled to England and Ireland. </p>
<p>The 1845 publication of his <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html">“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself</a>” placed him in danger of being captured. Douglass returned to the U.S. in 1847 only after his English supporters negotiated with his owner to purchase his freedom. </p>
<p>Experiences of escape and exile prompted free black women and men to lament America’s denial of their humanity but also invigorated their determination to bring slavery to an end.</p>
<h2>Fighting for freedom</h2>
<p>In the wake of the 1850 law, many black people openly engaged in physical confrontations with law enforcement. Tubman, for example, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674908505">fought the arrest</a> and detainment of accused fugitives. </p>
<p>Almost immediately after the 1850 law was enacted, Frederick Douglass quickly organized a <a href="http://coloredconventions.org">mass gathering</a> in protest. In September 1850, hundreds of black and white <a href="http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2253_reg.html">opponents of slavery gathered in Cazenovia, New York</a> to hear Douglass and other prominent abolitionists, some of them former slaves, speak out against the law.</p>
<p>In his <a href="http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/african-american-newspapers/the-north-star/">published summary of the Cazenovia meeting</a>, Douglass charged, “slave laws should be held in perfect contempt.” He also maintained that enslaved people should defy the laws of slavery and liberate themselves by escaping from their owners whenever they could. </p>
<p>In short, Douglass called on free people, black and white, as well as enslaved people to defy state and federal laws that protected slavery.</p>
<p>African-American history is American history. Black people’s lives, their words and actions, including their commitment to defying the laws of slavery, helped define the meanings of freedom and citizenship in the United States. </p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 6, 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72048/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Krauthamer received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003; 2001).</span></em></p>In the 19th century, slaveholders advertised widely for runaway slaves and often hired men to track and capture fugitives. African-American communities offered sanctuary space to the runaways.Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of History, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/710642017-02-07T03:40:02Z2017-02-07T03:40:02ZThe story of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, America’s first black pop star<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155706/original/image-20170206-23515-cpxxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maud_Cuney-Hare-222-Elizabeth_Taylor_Greenfield.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1851, a concert soprano named <a href="http://jams.ucpress.edu/content/67/1/125">Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield</a> embarked on a national tour that upended America’s music scene. </p>
<p>In antebellum America, operatic and concert songs were very popular forms of entertainment. European concert sopranos, such as <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/peopleevents/p_lind.html">Jenny Lind</a> and <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/catherine-hayes-the-irish-nightingale-1.1099691">Catherine Hayes</a>, drew huge crowds and rave reviews during their U.S. tours. Lind was so popular that <a href="http://www.davincibaby.com/jenny-lind/">baby cribs still bear her name</a>, and you can now visit an unincorporated community called Jenny Lind, California. </p>
<p>Greenfield, however, was different. She was a former slave. And she was performing songs that a burgeoning field of American music criticism, led by John Sullivan Dwight, considered reserved for white artists. African-American artists, most 19th-century critics argued, lacked the refined cultivation of white, Eurocentric genius, and could create only simple music that lacked artistic depth. It was a prejudice that stretched as far back as Thomas Jefferson in his “<a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffvir.asp">Notes on the State of Virginia</a>” and was later reinforced by minstrel shows. </p>
<p>But when Greenfield appeared on the scene, she shattered preexisting beliefs about artistry and race. </p>
<h2>‘The Black Swan’</h2>
<p>Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was born into slavery in Natchez, Mississippi, around 1820. As a girl, she was taken to Philadelphia and raised by an abolitionist. </p>
<p>Largely self-taught as a singer, she began her concert career in New York with the support of the <a href="http://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/buffalo-newspapers-on-elizabeth">Buffalo Musical Association</a>. In Buffalo, she was saddled with the nickname “the Black Swan,” a crude attempt to play off the popularity of Jenny Lind – known as “the Swedish Nightingale” – who was wrapping up one of the most popular concert tours in American history. </p>
<p>In 1851, <a href="http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1892/10/22/page/8/article/death-of-col-joseph-h-wood">Colonel Joseph H. Wood</a> became Greenfield’s promoter. Wood, however, was an overt racist and inhumane promoter known for creating wonderment museums in Cincinnati and Chicago that featured exhibits like the “Lilliputian King,” a boy who stood 16 inches tall. With Greenfield, he sought to replicate the success that another promoter, P.T. Barnum, had with Jenny Lind. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=484&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155487/original/image-20170203-14009-p494pk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph H. Wood’s museum in Chicago.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Encyclopedia of Chicago</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a letter to Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, a physician, newspaper editor and Civil War hero, wrote that Wood was a fervent supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and would not admit black patrons into his museums or at Greenfield’s concerts. </p>
<p>For Greenfield’s African-American supporters, it was a point of huge contention throughout her career.</p>
<h2>Critics reconcile their ears with their racism</h2>
<p>In antebellum America, the minstrel show was one of the most popular forms of musical entertainment. White actors in blackface exploited common stereotypes of African-Americans, grossly exaggerating their dialect, fashion, dancing and singing.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155563/original/image-20170205-18286-1k3qoiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1101&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of Zip Coon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, the popular song “Zip Coon” portrayed African-Americans as clumsily striving for the refinement of white culture. The cover of the sheet music for “Zip Coon” shows an African-American attempting to mimic refined fashions of the day and failing. The song goes on to mock its subject, Zip Coon, as a “learned scholar,” while putting him in situations where his apparent lack of intelligence shows.</p>
<p>Greenfield’s performances, however, forced her critics to rethink this stereotype. The Cleveland Plain Dealer described the confusion that Greenfield caused for her audiences: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It was amusing to behold the utter surprise and intense pleasure which were depicted on the faces of her listeners; they seemed to express – ‘Why, we see the face of a black woman, but hear the voice of an angel, what does it mean?’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Critics agreed that Greenfield was a major talent. But they found it difficult to reconcile their ears with their racism. One solution was to describe her as a talented, but unpolished, singer. </p>
<p>For example, the New-York Daily Tribune reported that “it is hardly necessary to say that we did not expect to find an artist on the occasion. She has a fine voice but does not know how to use it.” (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003ZHVC66/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">We see a similar phenomenon today in sports coverage</a>, in which black athletes are often praised for their raw physical athleticism, while white athletes are praised for their game intelligence.)</p>
<p>By performing repertoire thought too complex for black artists – and by doing it well – Greenfield forced her white critics and audiences to reexamine their assumptions about the abilities of African-American singers. </p>
<h2>A star is born</h2>
<p>On Thursday, March 31, 1853, Greenfield made her New York City premiere at Metropolitan Hall. </p>
<p>Originally built for Jenny Lind, it was one of the largest performance halls in the world. The day before the concert, the New-York Daily Tribune carried an ad that read, “Particular Notice – No colored persons can be admitted, as there has been no part of the house appropriated for them.” The ban resulted in a citywide uproar that prompted New York City’s first police commissioner, George W. Matsell, to send a large police unit to Metropolitan Hall.</p>
<p>Greenfield was met with laughter when she took to the stage. Several critics blamed the uncouth crowd in attendance; others wrote it off as lighthearted amusement. One report described the awkwardness of the show’s opening moments:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She was timidly led forward to the front of the stage by a little white representative of the genus homo, who seemed afraid to touch her even with the tips of his white kids [gloves], and kept the ‘Swan’ at a respectful distance, as if she were a sort of biped hippopotamus.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite the inauspicious beginning, critics agreed that her range and power were astonishing. After her American tour, a successful European tour ensued, where she was accompanied by her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. </p>
<h2>A singer’s legacy</h2>
<p>Greenfield paved the way for a host of black female concert singers, from Sissieretta Jones to Audra McDonald. In 1921, the musician and music publisher <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/pace-harry-1884-1943">Harry Pace</a> named the first successful black-owned record company, <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/aah/black-swan-records-1921-1923">Black Swan Records</a>, in her honor. </p>
<p>But these achievements are byproducts of a much larger legacy. </p>
<p>In Stowe’s novel “<a href="http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/songs/sohp.html">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</a>,” one of the slave children, Topsy, is taken in by a northern abolitionist, Miss Ophelia. Despite her best attempts, Ophelia can’t reform Topsy, who continues to act out and steal. When asked why she continues to behave as she does – despite the intervention of implied white goodness – Topsy replies that she’s can’t be good so long as her skin is black because her white caregivers are incapable of seeing goodness in a black body. Her only solution is to have her skin turned inside out so she can be white. </p>
<p>Stowe’s argument was not that we should begin skinning children. Rather, Topsy is a critique of the act of “<a href="https://newnarratives.wordpress.com/issue-2-the-other/other-and-othering-2/">othering</a>” African-Americans by a dominant culture that refuses to acknowledge their full humanity. </p>
<p>After Greenfield’s New York concert, the New-York Daily Tribune recognized the monumental nature of Greenfield’s heroics. The paper urged her to leave America for Europe – and to stay there – the implication being that Greenfield’s home country wasn’t ready to accept the legitimacy of black artistry. </p>
<p>But Greenfield’s tour did more than prove to white audiences that black performers could sing as well as their European peers. Her tour challenged Americans to begin to recognize the full artistry – and, ultimately, the full humanity – of their fellow citizens.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71064/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Gustafson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the 19th century, critics and audiences thought blacks were incapable of singing as well as their white, European counterparts. Greenfield forced them to reconcile their ears with their racism.Adam Gustafson, Instructor in Music, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/724822017-02-07T03:39:31Z2017-02-07T03:39:31ZExploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155718/original/image-20170206-23515-zcczvw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C17%2C945%2C687&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida around 1915</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/criminal-justice-reform">Obama administration</a> pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/about/our-editor#mission">The Marshall Project</a>, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/">Black Lives Matter</a> and <a href="http://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/">The Sentencing Project</a> are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.</p>
<p>But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.</p>
<p>If anything is to change – if we are ever to “end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country,” as <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=1c1Iz75PaggC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=racial%20nightmare&f=false">James Baldwin</a> put it – we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it. </p>
<p>During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062370860/a-short-history-of-reconstruction-updated-edition">Black men voted</a> and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807858219/self-taught/">Black literacy surged</a>, surpassing those of whites in some <a href="http://media2.newsobserver.com/content/media/2010/5/3/ghostsof1898.pdf">cities</a>. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived. </p>
<p>As the prominent historian <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=cwVkgrvctCcC&lpg=PP1&dq=foner%20reconstruction&pg=PR23#v=onepage&q=massive%20experiment%20in%20interracial%20democracy&f=false">Eric Foner</a> writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, “Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”</p>
<p>But this moment was short-lived. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Reconstruction_in_America.html?id=IqDEhQtoYEkC&source=kp_cover">W.E.B. Du Bois wrote</a>, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”</p>
<p>History is made by human actors and the choices they make. </p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/">Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name,”</a> the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”</p>
<p>Designed to reverse black advances, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Forever_Free.html?id=10NdBej1_JEC">Redemption</a> was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. “Redeemers” employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155714/original/image-20170206-18511-ka7tsl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Juvenile convicts at work in the fields, 1903.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress/John L. Spivak</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.</p>
<p>The South’s new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the South’s agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy. </p>
<p>How to build a new one?</p>
<p>Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” to continue as “a punishment for crime,” they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.</p>
<h2>A new form of control</h2>
<p>With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_Dies_Get_Another.html?id=im68YsXbvZ0C">the convict lease system</a>.</p>
<p>Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469630007/chained-in-silence/">women</a> and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.</p>
<p>Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as <a href="http://www.slaverybyanothername.com">200,000 black Americans</a> were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.</p>
<p>For both the state and private corporations, the opportunities for profit were enormous. For the state, convict lease generated revenue and provided a powerful tool to subjugate African-Americans and intimidate them into behaving in accordance with the new social order. It also greatly reduced state expenses in housing and caring for convicts. For the corporations, convict lease provided droves of cheap, disposable laborers who could be worked to the extremes of human cruelty.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/738-twice-the-work-of-free-labor">Every southern state leased convicts</a>, and at least nine-tenths of all leased convicts were black. In reports of the period, the terms “convicts” and “negroes” are used interchangeably.</p>
<p>Of those black Americans caught in the convict lease system, a few were men like Henry Nisbet, who murdered nine other black men in Georgia. But the vast majority were like Green Cottenham, the central figure in Blackmon’s book, who was snatched into the system after being charged with vagrancy. </p>
<p>A principal difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, the laborers were only the temporary property of their “masters.” On one hand, this meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be let free. On the other, it meant the companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers’ longevity. Such convicts were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.</p>
<p>The living conditions of leased convicts are documented in dozens of detailed, firsthand reports spanning decades and covering many states. In 1883, Blackmon writes, Alabama prison inspector Reginald Dawson described leased convicts in one mine being held on trivial charges, in “desperate,” “miserable” conditions, poorly fed, clothed, and “unnecessarily chained and shackled.” He described the “appalling number of deaths” and “appalling numbers of maimed and disabled men” held by various forced-labor entrepreneurs spanning the entire state.</p>
<p>Dawson’s reports had no perceptible impact on Alabama’s convict leasing system.</p>
<p>The exploitation of black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/738-twice-the-work-of-free-labor">central to southern politics and economics</a> of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to black progress during Reconstruction – highly visible and widely known. The system benefited the national economy, too. The federal government passed up one opportunity after another to intervene.</p>
<p>Convict lease ended at different times across the early 20th century, only to be replaced in many states by another racialized and brutal method of convict labor: <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/738-twice-the-work-of-free-labor">the chain gang</a>.</p>
<p>Convict labor, debt peonage, lynching – and the white supremacist ideologies of Jim Crow that supported them all – produced a bleak social landscape across the South for African-Americans.</p>
<p>Black Americans developed multiple resistance strategies and gained major victories through the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow fell, and America moved closer than ever to fulfilling its democratic promise of equality and opportunity for all.</p>
<p>But in the decades that followed, a “tough on crime” politics with racist undertones produced, among other things, harsh drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that were applied in racially disparate ways. The mass incarceration system exploded, with the rate of imprisonment quadrupling between the 1970s and today.</p>
<p>Michelle Alexander famously calls it <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">“The New Jim Crow”</a> in her book of the same name.</p>
<p>Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/criminal-justice-reform">2.2 million behind bars</a>, even though crime has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. And while black Americans make up only <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/how-many-americans-are-unnecessarily-incarcerated">13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 37 percent</a> of the incarcerated population. Forty percent of police killings of unarmed people are black men, who make up merely 6 percent of the population, according to a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/12/26/a-year-of-reckoning-police-fatally-shoot-nearly-1000/">2015 Washington Post report</a>.</p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose otherwise.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72482/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bryan Bowman received funding as a recipient of the Alan L. and Carol S. LeBovidge Undergraduate Research Scholarship in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kathy Roberts Forde does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the 12 years following the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. This moment was short-lived.Kathy Roberts Forde, Chair, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, UMass AmherstBryan Bowman, Undergraduate journalism major, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/717552017-02-07T03:39:22Z2017-02-07T03:39:22ZWill Trump’s ‘color-blind’ pro-business policies help black entrepreneurs too?<p>A <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9211.html">growing body of research</a> has shown the power of entrepreneurship to help solve the economic problems of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Immigrant-Entrepreneurs-Venturing-Abroad-Globalization/dp/1859736394">disadvantaged groups</a> such as women, immigrants and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Enterprise-America-Business-Japanese/dp/0520024850">racial and ethnic minorities</a>. </p>
<p>This finding can be traced to a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004A16GSU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">longstanding vision</a> of entrepreneurship established by black Americans as a <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/browse/book_detail?title_id=1487">means of supporting their community</a> and overcoming discrimination. The tradition enjoys enduring popularity as contemporary <a href="http://onlineathens.com/stories/072201/new_0722010070.shtml#.WJDfU7GZOV4">social surveys</a> commonly report that more African-Americans regard self-employment as a desirable occupation than other racially defined groups.</p>
<p>Yet despite their commitment to entrepreneurship, blacks continue to have lower rates of self-employment than whites and other groups. The self-employment rate for unincorporated white-owned businesses was 6.9 percent in 2015, almost double the 3.6 percent for black-owned ones, according to the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/self-employment-in-the-united-states/pdf/self-employment-in-the-united-states.pdf">Bureau of Labor Statistics</a>. Moreover, black-owned businesses <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262514941_sch_0001.pdf">tend to be smaller</a>, have fewer employees, generate less income and are generally less successful than those owned by whites. </p>
<p>Now that Republicans – who have long resisted efforts to pursue race-based policies aimed at supporting historically disadvantaged communities – control Congress and the White House, will those figures become even more lopsided as Donald Trump limits or ends affirmative action style policies that spurred big gains in the past? Or could “color-blind” pro-business policies such as reducing taxes and regulation lift all boats, including those of African-Americans, in equal measure? </p>
<p>To answer these questions, it helps to understand the reason black entrepreneurs are underrepresented in the first place. In a <a href="https://scholars.opb.msu.edu/en/publications/a-critical-race-theory-approach-to-black-american-entrepreneurshi">recent paper</a>, one of us (Gold) examined common explanations for why this is the case. </p>
<h2>Critical disadvantages</h2>
<p>While some researchers and pundits have, controversially, blamed a <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807859100/the-history-of-black-business-in-america:-capitalism-race-entrepreneurship/?title_id=1487">lack of work ethic</a> or aptitude for the dearth of African-American entrepreneurs, such race or ethnicity-based explanations of human abilities have long been discredited in social science. More commonly, a broad consensus of research shows that a variety of race-based forms of discrimination and disadvantage have played a critical role in limiting blacks’ ability and opportunity to start their own businesses. </p>
<p>Even a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, blacks continue to suffer a <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/">wide range of disadvantages</a>. For example, blacks are commonly assigned lower credit ratings than whites who earn much less. Their neighborhoods are underserved by banks. In addition, black entrepreneurs are often excluded by racial barriers from networks that business owners rely on to get to know each other and exchange referrals, information and investment opportunities. </p>
<p>As of 2009, the <a href="http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapiro-thomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf">average white family’s wealth</a> was US$113,000. In contrast, the average black family’s wealth was about $5,700. </p>
<p>This has meant that <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262514941_sch_0001.pdf">blacks generally lack the resources</a>, such as investment capital, education and previous work experience, needed to achieve entrepreneurial success. </p>
<p>Based on these findings, government policies that sought to encourage the growth of black entrepreneurship have commonly done so via affirmative action <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000VXD9PE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">to compensate</a> for this unique legacy. These included training and loan programs and requirements that government contracts reserve a fraction of work for minority-owned businesses. </p>
<h2>Affirmative action backlash</h2>
<p>However, affirmative action policies that allocate governmental benefits on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender have been controversial, to say the least. They have been attacked by conservative politicians with legislation, social movements and <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/affirmative-action-court-decisions.aspx">court decisions</a>. </p>
<p>Since the 1990s, the anti-affirmative action movement used state electoral initiatives to appeal directly to resentful white male voters – a group that became a key Trump constituency. The strategy led to the <a href="https://tcf.org/content/commentary/what-can-we-learn-from-states-that-ban-affirmative-action/">implementation of anti-affirmative action laws</a> in several of the country’s largest and most diverse states. From 1996 to 2010, California, Washington, Michigan, Nebraska and Arizona all passed such laws.</p>
<p>Among other factors, reductions in government and private sector support for minority entrepreneurship coincided with the decline in the number and <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2010/09/art2full.pdf">profitability of black-owned businesses</a>.</p>
<p>Now that Trump occupies the White House and Republicans enjoy majorities in both the House and Senate, indications are that the new administration will withdraw support from affirmative action and other race-based policies that encourage black entrepreneurship. In 2015, candidate <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2015/10/18/donald-trump-talks-taxes-trade-11-and-why-takes-personal-shots-at-political/">Trump asserted</a> that “I don’t think we need it (affirmative action) so much anymore.” </p>
<h2>Trump and black entrepreneurs</h2>
<p>So what does this mean for black self-employment?</p>
<p>For a start, it probably means African-Americans will no longer be able to access affirmative action policies to help them overcome their disadvantages in starting or running businesses. </p>
<p>On the other hand, however, black entrepreneurs may benefit from the Trump adminsitration’s promised creation of a social and economic climate conducive to business growth via pro-business policies such as lowering taxes and <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-signs-executive-order-requiring-that-for-every-one-new-regulation-two-must-be-revoked-234365">reducing regulations</a>. In addition, Trump aims to invest extensively in <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/an-americas-infrastructure-first-plan">infrastructure spending</a> and <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/27/news/trump-manufacturing-jobs-initiative/">revitalize American manufacturing</a>. </p>
<p>At least in theory, these pro-business policies could benefit black entrepreneurs – alongside everyone else. Infrastructure investments and boosting manufacturing may be significantly beneficial to African-American entrepreneurs, especially if such contracts are distributed in a manner that matches these entrepreneurs’ skills and abilities. Historically, African-Americans have been active in manufacturing, albeit as workers rather than business owners. However, given their familiarity with this industry, the growth of manufacturing might yield special benefits.</p>
<p>Of course, the potential benefits received by black entrepreneurs under Trump’s economic policies depend on how these activities are organized and funds allocated. For example, will small businesses get a generous share of the contracts compared with large companies, few of which are owned by African-Americans? (<a href="http://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-businesses/">Virtually all</a> black-owned businesses are small in size.) </p>
<h2>A test of ‘color-blind’ policies</h2>
<p>All in all, this will be a test of whether the benefits of pro-business policies that don’t favor a particular group or race end up boosting black economic activity. Historically, as the data show, this has not been the case thanks to the legacy of discrimination, from slavery to Jim Crow to <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262514941_sch_0001.pdf">modern-day prejudices</a> in the financial system. </p>
<p>If the pro-business environment is set up in a way that facilitates the growth of black entrepreneurship, the benefits of these policies should be evident in due time. Results could then support the virtuous circle that leads to increased earnings in black communities, which in turn spurs greater patronage of and investment in other black-owned businesses. </p>
<p>However, if entrepreneurial growth is negligible, then we may conclude that pro-business policies of the sort that were created by the Trump administration are insufficient to allow for the fulfillment of African-Americans’ longstanding desire to create a viable business community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71755/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven J. Gold has received funding from the Aspen Foundation, Michigan State University, Wilstein Institute, American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation , Haynes Foundation, Ripon Educational Fund, Whizin Institute</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeffrey R. Oliver does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite an entrepreneurial heritage, black self-employment rates are about half that of whites. Could a rising economy lift their boats too?Steven J. Gold, Professor of Sociology, Michigan State UniversityJeffrey R. Oliver, Visiting Assistant Professor, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/714672017-02-06T04:52:25Z2017-02-06T04:52:25ZUncovering the roots of racist ideas in America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155385/original/image-20170202-1665-l2b1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Little Rock protest, 1959
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia/John T. Bledsoe </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Donald Trump proclaimed during <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/">his inaugural address</a>, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”</p>
<p>Opening our hearts to patriotism will not solve the problem of racist ideas. Some of the nation’s proudest patriots have also been the nation’s most virulent racists. The organizing principle of the Ku Klux Klan has always been allegiance to the red, white and blue flag.</p>
<p>Lacking patriotism is not the root of racist ideas. But neither is ignorance and hate, as Americans are taught so often during Black History Month. </p>
<p>Contrary to popular conceptions, ignorant and hateful people have not been behind the production and reproduction of racist ideas in America. Instead, racist ideas have usually been produced by some of the most brilliant and cunning minds of each era. And these women and men generally did not produce these ideas because they hated black people. </p>
<p>In my book, <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2016winner_nf_kendi-stamped-from-the-beginning.html#.WJI60rYrJ0s">“Stamped from the Beginning,”</a> I chronicle the entire history of racist ideas, from their origins in 15th-century Europe, through colonial times when early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to their emergence in the United States and persistence into 21st century. I distinguish between the influential producers of racist ideas, and the consumers of them. And I study the motives – and historical circumstances – behind the production of racist ideas. My persisting research question was not merely what racist ideas influential Americans produced, but why they produced those racist ideas at a particular time and how those ideas impacted America.</p>
<p>What caused Thomas Jefferson to decry <a href="http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl232.php">“Amalgamation with the other color”</a> in 1814 after he had fathered several biracial children with Sally Hemings? </p>
<p>What caused U.S. Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837 <a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/">to produce</a> the racist idea of slavery as a “positive good” when he knew slavery’s torturous horrors? </p>
<p>What caused <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29547">President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906</a> to affirm that “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration … of the hideous crime of rape” when he probably saw <a href="https://archive.org/stream/southernhorrors14975gut/14975.txt">the data</a> that showed that rape was not the greatest existing cause?</p>
<p>What caused <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html">think tankers</a> and <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18489466">journalists</a> after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of a post-racial society during all that <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-hatecrimes-idUSTRE4AN81U20081124">post-election violence</a> against black bodies? </p>
<p>Time and again, racist ideas have not been born and bred in the cradle of ignorant, hateful or unpatriotic minds. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto black people.</p>
<p>The common conception that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, and that racist ideas initiate racist policies, is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship – racial discrimination has led to racist ideas which has led to ignorance and hate.</p>
<p>“Stamped from the Beginning” shows that the principal function of racist ideas in American history has been to suppress resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed and confined so many black people. </p>
<p>From the beginning, Americans have been trying to explain the existence and persistence of racial inequities. Racist ideas considering racial inequality to be normal due to black pathology have locked heads with anti-racist ideas that consider racial inequality to be abnormal and the effect of racial discrimination. Anti-racist ideas have called for the justice of equity, while racist ideas have called for the law and order of inequality.</p>
<p>A year after young black men were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/08/the-counted-police-killings-2016-young-black-men">nine times</a> more likely than other Americans to be killed by the police, President Trump has not said anything about protecting black lives from police violence. He is not issuing any executive orders banning racist cops or armed white supremacists from black communities. He made abundantly clear what lives matter to him on his new White House website. </p>
<p>“The Trump administration will be a law and order administration,” <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/law-enforcement-community">reads the page</a>, “Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community.” It adds: “President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump administration will end it.”</p>
<p>In his inaugural, Trump suggested there can be racial unity in his law-and-order America. He quoted the Bible. “‘How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.’” </p>
<p>One thing from my research is clear: Racial unity is impossible when racial inequalities are created and maintained by racist policies that are justified by racist ideas. Racist ideas have always been like walls built by powerful Americans to keep us divided, and these walls have always normalized our racial divisions and inequities.</p>
<p>Americans no longer need the law and order of inequality, poverty and black death. Americans no longer need walls of racist ideas. Americans need the ordering justice that honors and protects the women and men in that unfailingly imperiled uniform – the uniform of blackness. Only then, I believe, will God’s people have a chance to live together in unity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71467/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ibram X. Kendi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ignorant and hateful people are not behind the production of racist ideas, as Americans are taught so often during Black History Month.Ibram X. Kendi, Professor of History, American University School of International ServiceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/600162016-05-26T01:22:21Z2016-05-26T01:22:21ZAfter the rediscovery of a 19th-century novel, our view of black female writers is transformed<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124044/original/image-20160525-25218-1fa4dn4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Victorian-era, middle-class black women who loved to read and write didn't have many role models. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.jeffreygreen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Fisk-Singers-1876.jpg">Jeffrey Green</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2012, I was in the United Kingdom working on a follow-up project for my books “Black London” and “Black Victorians/Black Victoriana.” While looking through old British newspapers, I was astonished to read an 1893 announcement in The Daily Telegraph proclaiming Sarah E. Farro to be “the first negro novelist” with the publication of her novel “True Love.” </p>
<p>I wondered: who was this woman? And why didn’t we know about this reportedly groundbreaking novel? </p>
<p>The Daily Telegraph didn’t get it exactly right: We know now that Farro wasn’t the first African-American novelist. Nonetheless, she appears nowhere in the canon of African-American literature. </p>
<p>After doing more research, I soon realized that Farro had made her mark writing about white people, and that this may also be the reason her work was forgotten. Learning of a black woman whose race was documented, whose novel was published – but who disappeared in the historical record – can change how we think about African-American literature.</p>
<h2>Farro joins a small club</h2>
<p>Searches of American census records show that Sarah E. Farro was born in 1859 in Illinois to parents who moved to Chicago from the South. She had two younger sisters, and her race is given as “black” on the 1880 census. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124052/original/image-20160525-25231-1t90wxg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page for ‘True Love.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her novel, “True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life,” was published in 1891 by the Chicago publishing house Donohue & Henneberry. It was one of 58 books by Illinois women writers exhibited at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition">World’s Columbian Exhibition</a> (World’s Fair) in 1893. Newspapers in the U.K. and the U.S. heralded the book. Toward the end of her life, in 1937, Farro was feted at a celebration of Chicago’s “outstanding race pioneers.” Apparently, she never wrote another novel. </p>
<p>“True Love” disappeared from the historical record, and for decades historians recognized only three other 19th-century novels written and published by African-Americans. </p>
<p>One other, “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” was recently found in manuscript and published, even though the author, Hannah Crafts, is only circumstantially (although convincingly) identified. With my discovery, Farro becomes only the second known African-American woman novelist published in the 19th century. And she now joins William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frank J. Webb as the only African-American published novelists in the entire <em>century</em>. </p>
<p>When I returned to the U.S. from the U.K., I was able to track down only two copies of “True Love” in libraries – one at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago and the other at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – and headed to Chicago to read it. To briefly summarize: the novel tells the story of a man whose quest to marry his love, Janey, is thwarted by Janey’s selfish sister and mother. Generous and beloved Janey nurses her sister through a fever, only to catch it herself and die.</p>
<p>The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign later digitized it for me, and now <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=YrtDAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PP3&ots=u7125Uz8Od&dq=sarah%20farro%20illinois.edu&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=sarah%20farro%20illinois.edu&f=false">it’s available online for anyone to read</a>. I also found an original copy on eBay and immediately bought it for US$124.</p>
<p>The eBay listing makes no mention of her race; nowhere except in early newspaper pieces is she identified as a black woman, so this important piece of history has remained invisible until now. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124045/original/image-20160525-17595-1bsgdv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Farro’s was one of 58 books by female writers featured at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/4837166785">Boston Public Library/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An unexpected subject matter?</h2>
<p>The reason for “True Love’s” disappearance might be simple: It takes place in England, a place Farro probably never visited, and all of its characters are white.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124047/original/image-20160525-17595-4v8yr4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Makepeace_Thackeray_by_Jesse_Harrison_Whitehurst-crop.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As literary scholar <a href="http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/ElizabethMcHenry.html">Elizabeth McHenry</a> has shown, 19th-century black women’s literary clubs, which catered to mostly middle-class members and aspirants, primarily read prominent white English and American authors, in addition to black political writers. It was natural, then, that when Farro took up her pen she emulated her stated favorite novelists: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Oliver Wendell Holmes – writers of popular fiction admired by black and white readers alike. </p>
<p>Had Farro’s role models been black female authors who had written novels about black women, she may have crafted a different kind of novel.</p>
<p>Today we assume that early African-American writers inevitably wrote about race, that 19th-century writers necessarily referred to experiences of slavery and struggle and that their access to literacy – let alone the Victorian literary canon – must have been limited. Finding Farro’s novel changes that. Because we didn’t realize that authors like Farro existed, we had limited our perspective on their work. </p>
<p>As McHenry <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Readers-Recovering-Societies-Americanists/dp/0822329956">writes</a>, “the danger of privileging [slave narratives] is that we risk overlooking the many other forms of literary production that coexisted alongside [them].” </p>
<p>We have much to learn about what black women read, what they wrote, and for whom. In this case, it seems that many of Farro’s readers must have been white women. </p>
<h2>The significance of <em>not</em> writing about race</h2>
<p>Ironically, though Farro was first celebrated and brought to public attention precisely because of her race, she doesn’t fit the mold of familiar early African-American writers. Nor is she similar to those who have been revived and “rediscovered.” Perhaps the aforementioned Brown, Webb and Wilson were noticed and celebrated not just because of their race, but because they all wrote <em>about race</em>. </p>
<p>Farro’s novel, on the other hand, is a domestic romance that tends toward melodrama. Although she explicitly sets it in England, she also betrays her unfamiliarity with that country. For instance, she gives British incomes in dollars and mentions that a character wants his wedding to take place before Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, a Chicago publisher saw fit to bring out her book.</p>
<p>Sarah E. Farro’s rediscovered novel tells us that black women of her time read, discussed and emulated the works of people who were not like them. Farro lived in the North through the end of slavery, preceded the Great Migration, published a novel as an American Victorian and lived through – and past – the Harlem Renaissance. </p>
<p>Surely those writers owe her a debt of gratitude, just as we have an obligation to bring her back into the fold of African-American and women novelists and to think about how these discoveries change our views of the African-American experience.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gretchen Gerzina does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When biographer Gretchen Gerzina came across an old British newspaper article calling Sarah E. Farro “the first negro novelist,” she wondered: who was Farro, and why had she been lost to history?Gretchen Gerzina, Professor of English, Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/379072015-02-27T11:09:40Z2015-02-27T11:09:40ZThe forgotten voices of race records: Pullman Porters, the Rev TT Rose, and the ‘Man with a Clarinet’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73244/original/image-20150226-1819-pfhq3u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ma Rainey was one of Paramount Records' most popular artists.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/11/01/242155743/holding-music-history-in-your-hands-why-archives-matter">JP Jazz Archive/Redferns</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1920s and 1930s, record sales of black artists were very lucrative for the music industry. As a June 1926 article from Talking Machine World explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Negro trade is…itself…an enormously profitable occupation for the retailer who knows his way about…. The segregation of the Negro population has enabled dealers to build up a trade catering to this race exclusively.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet record companies routinely took advantage of the more unschooled, vernacular performers – especially black ones, who were already denied access to broader markets. It was standard operating procedure back in the days of <a href="http://www.centerstage.org/marainey/DigitalDramaturgy/TheBlues/RaceRecords.aspx">“race music”</a> – the name given to recordings by black artists that were marketed to the black buying public. </p>
<p>“Some will rob you with a six-gun…and some with a fountain pen.” So said Woody Guthrie in his song “Pretty Boy Floyd.” </p>
<p>Bottom line: if record companies could get away with it, there was no bottom line. No negotiated contract to sign. No publishing. No royalties. Wham bam thank you man. Take a low-ball flat fee and hit the road. Anonymity was also implicit in the deal, so many black artists were forgotten, their only legacy the era’s brittle shellac disks that were able to withstand the wear of time. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73233/original/image-20150226-1761-1l7m71u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Some will rob you with a six-gun…and some with a fountain pen’ – record companies like Paramount routinely exploited black musicians in the 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.goldminemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/SeeSeeRiderBlues.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the most prominent early race labels was Paramount Records, which, between 1917 and 1932, recorded a breathtaking cross-section of seminal African-American artists. </p>
<p>In 2013 I learned that Jack White of Third Man Records (in partnership with Dean Blackwood’s Revenant Records) would be putting together a compilation of Paramount’s historic recordings. The project would be a grand collaboration of two deluxe volumes that would contain <a href="http://revenantrecords.com/musics/products/the-rise-and-fall-of-paramount-records/">a stunning 1,600 tracks</a>. </p>
<p>I was part of a team of researchers and writers tasked with unearthing new information about the featured artists and their songs. For me, it was an opportunity to put a face on some of Paramount’s more enigmatic artists. Listening to track after track, a zeitgeist began to coalesce. As voices from the grooves accrued to tell a story of a collective black experience, I came to see these performances as cumulative cultural memory – each track a brushstroke in a painting of a long-forgotten landscape. </p>
<p>Here’s a taste of what I found. </p>
<h2>Pullman Porters Quartette</h2>
<p>The Pullman Company, manufacturers of railroad passenger cars, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Rails-Pullman-Porters-Making/dp/0805078509">was magnanimous towards its African-American workforce</a>. Among other benefits, they provided in-house musical instruction, which included a cappella quartet singing lessons. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73242/original/image-20150226-1828-173ppum.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pullman Company employed a large number of African Americans as porters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7351/10376546093_164a800266_b.jpg">Flickr/antefixus U.E.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Pullman quartets, I learned, were a franchise: multiple configurations of singers performing concurrently under the company banner. They put on concerts, either performing live on the radio, or on long haul train routes as a form of passenger entertainment. The men who made the records were billed as the “President’s Own” – the working Pullman porters considered the company’s premier lineup.</p>
<p>In the late 1920s, The Pullman Porters Quartette of Chicago recorded a number of sides for Paramount. One tune was “Jog-a-Long Boys,” where they sang of sad roosters and being turned down by widow Brown, the “fattest gal in town.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCyUnyRwOPU">The chorus went</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jog-a-long, boys, jog-a-long, boys,</p>
<p>Be careful when you smile,</p>
<p>Do the latest style,</p>
<p>But jog-a-long, jog-a-long boys.</p>
<p>Jog-a-long, boys, jog-a-long, boys,</p>
<p>Don’t fool with google eyes,</p>
<p>That would not be wise,</p>
<p>But jog-a-long, jog-a-long boys.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At first, it seemed as if it were no more than a silly ditty performed in upbeat counterpoint harmony. Then it hit me: they were making light of a horrific reality – specifically, that a black man who dared to smile or even look askance at a white woman was putting himself in grave danger. </p>
<p><em>Look your best, but don’t forget your place…and just jog along, boys.</em> </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TvGJ-rzyxSA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Jog-a-long Boys,’ by The Pullman Porters Quartet of Chicago.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Horace George</h2>
<p>Horace George of Horace George’s Jubilee Harmonizers was a showman and an opportunist, a versatile musician who performed in whatever style sold, whether it was novelty gospel, blues, comedy or jazz. </p>
<p>His gospel group cut one record for Paramount in 1924, but he first surfaced as early as 1906, advertised in the Indianapolis Freeman as “the great clarinetist, comedian, and vocalist.” A few years later, George found himself in Seattle as the “Famous Colored Comedian…who gives correct images,” and later as the “Man with the Clarinet” in a touring black vaudeville troupe, the Great Dixieland Spectacle Company. </p>
<p>In the late 1910s, a black newspaper – the Indianapolis Freeman – called Horace George “a novelty on any bill.” The novelty? He could play three clarinets at once! </p>
<h2>Rev TT Rose</h2>
<p>Beyond the rollicking piano-driven gospel sides he cut for Paramount in the late 1920s, nothing was known of Rev T T Rose. Rose’s “Goodbye Babylon” was the title track of Dust-to-Digital’s 2004 Grammy-nominated collection, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2004/03/the_bloody_and_the_beautiful.html">Goodbye, Babylon</a>. It was also inspiration for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9hHxm5qbEk">a rock ‘n’ roll tune by the Black Keys</a>. And Rose’s recording of “If I Had My Way, I’d Tear This Building Down” – later performed by artists ranging from Rev. Gary Davis to the Grateful Dead – is one of the earliest known recorded versions of that song.</p>
<p>Rev Rose’s personal story was the most heartening of all. He lived in Springfield, Illinois, and I located his 90-plus-year-old daughter Dorothy, who described her father as a man on a mission to end racism and institutionalized segregation.</p>
<p>As a child, Rose had witnessed the aftermath of the infamous <a href="http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/iht329622.html">1908 Springfield Race Riots</a>, an event that precipitated the formation of the NAACP. In the late 1920s Rose moved from Chicago to Springfield, in order to minister the city’s black community. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.uis.edu/informationtechnologyservices/teaching-and-learning/revealingvoices/">In an oral history recording</a>, Rev Rose described Springfield as “just really a type of Southern town” with an “overpowering resentment of the Negro…distrust and the fear that the Negro might someday become stronger.” When he returned to Springfield, he observed that the time that had elapsed since the race riots was “a very short span of time to erase all the scars and the prejudices and the hate that was engendered…in that very unfortunate affair.” </p>
<p>It was a hate, he continued, that “Kind of hung like a cloud from an atomic bomb over the whole neighborhood” causing the black citizens of Springfield to go “into themselves quite a bit.”</p>
<p>After his short recording career with Paramount in the late 1920s, Rev Rose went on to become a regional bishop in the Church of God in Christ. He recorded because he thought songs could both uplift and spread messages of hope and perseverance in the struggle for Civil Rights. When he sang “If I Had My Way,” it’s clear that the building he wanted to tear down was no less than the edifice of racism. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lord, if I had my way,</p>
<p>Oh Lord, if I, if I had my way,</p>
<p>In this wicked world, if I had my way,</p>
<p>God, knows I’d tear this building down.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oqc9BQihB24?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘If I Had My Way,’ by Rev TT Rose.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jerry Zolten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the 1920s, many black musicians were exploited by record companies, and faded into anonymity. Here are some of their stories.Jerry Zolten, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.