Teaching history

In September I attended the 2023 conference of ASALH — the Association for the Study of African American Life and history founded by Carter Woodson in 1915. This is an annual gathering of scholars and others devoted to exploring and celebrating the achievements and contributions to our country of African Americans. It was thrilling to be there.

This year’s conference was held in Jacksonville, Florida which caused concern among some who planned to attend. A few scheduled participants determined that recent Florida legislation is so hostile to the teaching of history that they could not in good faith be part of a gathering there.

But the panel I had planned went forward. The conference’s theme was Black Resistance and the topic I chose was “Rosenwald Fellows: Resisting Oppression, Promoting Excellence.” Tyrone McKlinley Freeman, of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy was the excellent moderator. My Rosenwald Campaign colleague and former director of the National Park Service Robert Stanton spoke eloquently about the thirst for education experienced in communities like the one where he grew up in East Texas and the way individuals whose careers had been encouraged by Rosenwald Fellowships contributed to the legal briefs that resulted in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. And Samuel Myers, Jr., a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, gave an animated account of the study of economics — of how unwelcoming it was to African American scholars and how Rosenwald fellowships significantly altered the field by supporting not only his father, Samuel Myers Sr., but several others as they pursued advanced study in Economics at Harvard.

My remarks gave some background on Julius Rosenwald and the creation in 1917 of the Julius Rosenwald Fund “For the Well-Being of Mankind” as the vehicle for distributing some of the tremendous wealth he had earned as president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, the merchandizing powerhouse of the early 20th century. I also talked about how Rosenwald fellowships significantly strengthened the field of history by assisting 23 African Americans to complete advanced study in the field of history, many of whom went on to make significant contributions to the field.

The standout among them was John Hope Franklin who recieved Rosenwald fellowships in 1937 and 1938 which allowed him to complete work for his PhD at Harvard. He went on to a stellar career teaching at Duke and other prestigious universities. Here is the end of my remarks:

“In 1966 Franklin co-authored a textbook for 8th graders called Land of the Free commissioned by the state of California. It included not just a forthright description of slavery but also discussed the decimation of native peoples, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, a critique of McCarthyism and documented the emerging civil rights movement. The book was controversial, denigrated in print as “propaganda and poppycock.” The John Birch Society organized a 100 car caravan from Orange county to Sacramento to protest the book’s adoption in schools despite which it was eventually adopted and was in use there for many years. Franklin later commented that this episode, among others, had suggested to him that “Americans only want to hear ‘happy history.’”

“That anecdote certainly has resonance for us today when we are increasingly facing the reality that not all history IS happy — much of it is just the opposite and if we consider it honestly it MUST make us uncomfortable. That discomfort becomes a catalyst for change. As the Rosenwald Fund understood, it’s imperative to support historians like John Hope Franklin — knowledgeable enough and brave enough to tell the full story.

You Need a Blogpost!

Checking on my website I see that the Blog section seems inactive. Friends I will get back to this very soon! In the last few months I have been unbelievably busy with work relating to the Campaign to Create a Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historical Park. That’s not a good excuse but it’s the truth! Watch this space — more blog posts to come!

A Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Shools National Historical Park? Yes!

Responding to legislation passed a year and a half ago, the National Park Service is evaluating the case for a site dedicated to Julius Rosenwald the the Rosenwald schools. This is an exciting development for the team, of which I am an enthusiastic part, that since 2017 has been working towards creation of such a park. We come at it from different perspectives but all of us on the Campaign board strongly believe that the unique contributions of Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald schools he helped to fund need to be remembered, honored and celebrated.

Among the arguments in favor of a Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historical Site is the fact that although there are 423 units in the National Park Service, not one of these sites honors the contributions to our country of a Jewish American. Rosenwald, with his immigrant parents, his successful business career at the head of Sears, Roebuck & Company, and his exceptional generosity is an ideal representative of this important chapter in our national story.

And the relationship between Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington and their partnership with African American men and women across the South, people who were determined to create greater educational opportunity for their children than they themselves had been allowed, is another part of our national story that needs telling, considering and honoring. Rosenwald used his money not to dictate what he wanted but to encourage and support the efforts of others. Black people in the early decades of the 20th century made heroic efforts to secure schools — and thus enhanced opportunity — for their children and their communities.

Everyone who cares about this story is urged to submit comments before the deadline on July 31, 2022. Here is the web address for the questionnaire

https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=121834

You may also access information about the proposed park and the chance to submit comments at

parkplanning.nps.gov/Rosenwald

Please help make this park a reality! Submit your comments by the end of July. And if you wish to be on the mailing list for our regular campaign updates, please send me an e-mail at scd@his.com. I will put you on the list and welcome you to our ranks.

This park will become a reality!

Happy birthday, Julius Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald was born on August 12, 1862 in Springfield, Illinois. He was the second of six children of Augusta and Samuel Rosenwald, immigrants from Bunde in Hanover, Germany. Sadly, there are no photos of him as a little boy but I imagine he was a lively lad, playing with his sisters and brothers, speaking a bit of German with his parents but English when he was out and about, going to school, learning to read and, eventually, starting to work helping out in his father’s clothing store on Capitol Square.

The first story we have about Julius’s childhood is from 1874 when Springfield dedicated a memorial to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the man who had gone from being a local lawyer (and having lived in a house across the street from where Julius was growing up) to being president of the United States during the four ghastly years of Civil War. After his assassination in April, 1865 his body had returned home to Springfield for burial. Now, a stone obelisk was being erected in his memory.

Twelve year old Julius answered an ad in the Springfield newspaper inviting “live, active, energetic boys” to apply for a job selling brochures describing the memorial. As I wrote in You Need a Schoolhouse: The celebrations brought to town military bands; divisions of Civil War veterans; members of the Lincoln family; General William Tecumseh Sherman; and his friend, the general who had won the war and who was then president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In the enormous crowd that gathered for the ceremonies, Julius made $2,50 selling the brochure, “peddling” as he called it. He later recalled observing Grant sitting in his carriage. “He was the first man I had ever seen with kid gloves on his hands,” Julius told an interviewer many years later. “They were yellow in color and I looked so long that I have never forgotten them.” The merchant’s son was picking up the eye of a clothier and the ways of the salesman.

Here is Julius Rosenwald in about 1927 with his wife, Gussie, and eight of their grand children. Perhaps little boy Julius looked like one of them. The one on the right is Richard, son of Julius’s daughter Adele. He was my late and much loved father in law.

Happy birthday, Julius Rosenwald!

John Lewis -- my neighbor

Thirteen summers ago I was a volunteer in a program that gave shelter in the basement of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill to families experiencing temporary homelessness. Among our guests were a ten year old boy named Zach and his mother. One evening, another volunteer, my friend Elizabeth Becker, gave Zach a copy of a biography of Congressman John Lewis, written for young people. A few days later, my friend Susan Sedgewick suggested that it might be possible for us to take Zach to visit the Congressman. That seemed like a longshot but a sidewalk conversation with yet another St. Mark’s friend, Rob Hall, made it possible. Rob had contacts in John Lewis’s office.

The next thing I knew, Rob and I were in the Cannon building, meeting Lewis and he and Zach were deep in conversation. What I had thought would be a ten minute photo-op turned into an hour-long visit. John Lewis asked Zach what he was interested in and the two had a long chat about basketball. They talked about school and hard work and then went on a tour of the office.

It had occurred to me that I might use the occasion of this visit to tell Lewis about the book I was writing about Rosenwald schools. I knew he had attended one in Alabama and I had even thought I might ask him if he would write the introduction for me. But he was focused on Zach and I decided not to intrude on that.

When it came time for us to leave, we asked the congressman if he would sign Zach’s book, John Lewis in the Lead, A Story of the Civil Rights Movement. On the book’s first page Lewis wrote “Keep the Faith,” and signed his name. Later, over lunch, I asked Zach what he thought that meant. Keep the Faith. He paused a moment, then said, a bit tentatively, “Never give up?” Yes, I said. That’s it. Never give up.

In the years since that day I have had the good fortune to meet John Lewis several more times. In Atlanta on a civil rights field trip led by the late Julian Bond, I was able to talk to Lewis and to give him a copy of the book.

Three years ago I was privileged to host a dinner sponsored by Capitol Hill Village which featured Lewis as the speaker and guest of honor. And just last summer, I was part of a group that went to Lewis’s office to tell him about the project of creating a national historic site honoring Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald schools. Lewis was warm and friendly though clearly frail. He agreed to become a co-sponsor of the legislation that would authorize a special resource study of the projected park.

This morning, having just learned of Lewis’s death, I bumped into a neighbor who reminded me of the evening we had spent together with Lewis at my house. She said it had been memorable and special and it certainly was. For me, though, the memory of John Lewis I cherish most is of the meeting in his office and the generosity of spirit and the kindness he extended towards a young boy he had never met before and would, in all probability, never see again.

“Keep the Faith” and “Never Give Up” are words we all need to hear right now. I am so grateful to John Lewis for generously sharing himself with Zach and with all of us. The best way to honor his memory is to remember those wise words.

David Driskell

One of the first things I want to do when we are all out of lock down is visit the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. I’ve been before but the collection is so large and so interesting that it takes several trips to even begin to see it all. This time I’ll be looking for something specific — Behold Thy Son, a painting by David Driskell, the distinguished artist who died ten days ago of coronavirus at the age of 88. It was painted in 1955 when Driskell was a 24 year old instructor at Talladega College reacting to the brutal murder, in neighboring Mississippi, of teen aged Emmett Till.

Driskell was remembered in the New York Times obituary as “a pivotal champion of African-American art,” and described as an “artist, art historian and curator.” I knew him, slightly, as a warm and generous man.

In the spring of 2012, a year after my book came out, I received a package from Mr. Driskell, who I had never met or even heard of. It was a catalog of a recent exhibition of his art and came with a note expressing the “joy” he had felt on reading my book; he said he couldn’t put it down until he finished it. “I think I may have attended a Rosenwald School in North Carolina in the 1940s,” he wrote. He ended with an invitation to visit him at the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. How is it possible that I never did? I so regret that!

I did meet Mr. Driskell on several occasions including the premiere of the documentary film, Rosenwald, in which we both appear. And I heard him lecture at the Phillips Collection on Jacob Lawrence, who he considered a mentor. But I never followed up on my intention to get to know him better and go see his work .The one time I called to see if I could come visit he was in Maine where he spent summers raising all the vegetables for his family and painting in a small studio. Reading the obituaries I learned that he grew up in the small North Carolina town of Hollis. His father was a preacher, blacksmith, and carpenter; his mother made baskets and quilts. He attended a one-room schoolhouse and then a segregated high school 25 miles away. When the time came to go to college he was given a scholarship to attend Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. but at the last minute he decided he would like to go to Howard in Washington, DC. According to the New York Times, he arrived after classes had begun and without having applied. But he was persistent and they finally let him in. His first idea was to major in history but his artistic talent quickly showed itself. African American art historian James Porter encouraged him to study art.

In addition to teaching, Driskell was noted for creating the show “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750 - 1950,” which was seen in Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta and at the Brooklyn Museum. Asked about the nature of the works he had assembled, Driskell said , “I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years, and by stable participants I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone.” In another interview he said, “Art was always functional for African people. If there is anything different for us, it’s how we deal with the arts and deal with history.”

Just a month before his death Driskell spoke at the opening of a show dedicated to the works of Romare Bearden at the David Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. I’ll have to go there too when we are all free to roam again. In the meantime, here’s one of his wonderful pictures. It’s called Oh, Freedom

And here’s another. Maybe it’s one of the churches of his childhood. Rest in Peace, David Driskell.

1776 Unites

It was flattering for me to be asked to participate in a program called the 1776 Project, created by Robert Woodson of the Woodson Center for Community Enterprise here in Washington, DC in reaction to the New York Times’s recent suggestion that 1619 — the date of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the shores of what is now the United States — should be considered the date of our national founding. Flattering because several of the names on the list of contributors to 1776 are scholars and writers whose work I respect — Clarence Page, Shelby Steele, John McWorter. Others are folks whose names I don’t know but whose bios suggest serious engagement with the subject at hand. And flattering because Mr. Woodson, in asking me to participate, seemed to have read my mind. I WAS uneasy with the idea of defining our national story as an unending tale of white oppression and black/African American victimization rather than as one of human failure and error, human creativity and aspiration, and a noble, ongoing effort to create a place where all different kinds of people can get along and govern themselves.

Here is the essay I wrote in response to Bob Woodson’s invitation.

Shortly after the publication of my book, You Need a Schoolhouse, Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South,  an interviewer asked me, “What was your big take-away from the research you did?” I had never asked myself quite that question but it didn’t take me long to find the answer.  Respect for African Americans.  The result of my research into the circumstances surrounding the building of schools for African American children in the early decades of the twentieth century was, for me, a newfound respect and admiration for the people who, despite the enslavement of their ancestors and the harsh reality of their present circumstances, did not lose faith with their country in troubled, turbulent, often desperately discouraging times. Like generations of Americans before and after them, they placed great hope for the future in education. In the face of economic uncertainty, frequent violence, and relentless prejudice, they were willing to make sacrifices to ensure that their children had schools to go to.  The 4,977 “Rosenwald schools” for African American children built across the South between 1913 and 1932 were the result of a remarkable three way public-private partnership conceived by Booker T. Washington – money provided by public school systems, grants from Julius Rosenwald, the wealthy president of Sears, Roebuck, and contributions from local communities, predominantly from African American men and women who, dollar for dollar, contributed more to the creation of the schools than their wealthy benefactor.  By the early 1950s one third of the African American children in the South were being educated in Rosenwald schools.

            It was serendipity for me that my book came out just as a movement was gaining steam to preserve many of these simple, mostly wooden structures which, once segregation ended, were usually discarded as no longer needed. A very few continued as schools; some passed into private hands and became houses or barns; others were torn down; many were in such remote locations that no one quite knew what happened to them. In 2002 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the Rosenwald schools to its annual list of most endangered historic sites in the nation.  Proud alumni of the schools had begun an effort, ongoing today, to preserve these schoolhouses and, more importantly, the legacy they represent, a legacy I have experienced when meeting scores of men and women who attended the schools.  Their pride in the forebears whose vision and generosity provided the schools and in the way they themselves benefited from the education they received there filled me with admiration.

            When I began the research for my book I had thought I was well informed.  I of course knew something about slavery and the agony of the Civil War.  I had lived through the tumultuous days of challenge and change in the late 1950s and 60s.  But it turned out there was a significant blank space in my knowledge -- the hundred years between Abraham Lincoln's eloquent call to generosity of spirit and Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream.  After the 13th and 14th amendments and Reconstruction came laws restricting rather than expanding opportunity for African Americans – Plessy v. Ferguson enshrining “separate but equal” in law, states rewriting their constitutions to make it more difficult for blacks and others to exercise the right to vote – along with an extra-legal system of social control, lynching.  In theory I knew about these things but, in fact, I had not understood what they meant. I had thought of prejudice as a feeling. I had no concept of Jim Crow – prejudice enshrined in an ever-expanding body of law, one imitated by the Nazis in the 1930s as they restricted life for Jews.  I thought of lynching as a very occasional horror – not the gruesome deaths of thousands of individuals over a fifty year span, a spectacle sometimes applauded by white mobs that included children. The shame and horror I felt as I learned this history deepened my growing regard for the men and women I was meeting at Rosenwald school events. 

            I heard from many different people stories about walking to school – sometimes a mile or two or three – and being passed by school buses carrying white children to their schools.  Sometimes the white children laughed or made faces at them.  Once, on a sparkling fall day in Virginia, I heard about this from a group of Rosenwald alumnae as we walked down a country road, past a house flying a Confederate flag. They told me about their textbooks, cast offs from white schools, used and soiled and sometimes with nasty messages scrawled inside.  But I also heard about the devoted teachers who often boarded with local families and offered children steady encouragement with the admonition to “go out and be a credit to your race.”  I was told about “soup day” when one parent would bring lunch for everyone, about spelling bees and dances around the Maypole and the annual recitation of the Gettysburg address.

            Watching documentary footage of women and men walking to work – which they did for almost a year in Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott of 1955 – I realized that many of them or their parents or their aunts and uncles had no doubt been educated in Rosenwald schools.  They had learned there not just spelling and counting, but to embrace a sense of citizenship.  The portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington that looked down from the bead board walls around them and the American flags in the corners of their classrooms were part of the lessons they absorbed. In a long-shuttered school in the Northern Neck of Virginia I put my hand in a dusty box and pulled out a civics text book from 1920.  I opened it and read, “The purpose of the public school is to prepare students to be good citizens.” Learning about a student walk-out at a North Carolina Rosenwald high school that was to be closed because of integration, I began to understand the loss experienced in the black community as the country lurched from mandated separation to enforced integration. In the face of exclusion and hostility, African Americans had built up magnificent institutions – schools, colleges, businesses, churches, sororities.  Not all of these would survive. There would be loss and pain as well as the thrill of progress in the transition to a hoped for more perfect union.

            Like the men and women who contributed to building Rosenwald schools, I believe in the power of education.  To understand the present it is crucial to know what has gone before, not just in order to right the wrongs but to build on the strengths. My own understanding of the present has been immeasurably enriched by deepening my appreciation for what has gone before.  Our present is the result of a painful evolution from our founding, with its tacit acceptance of the fact that the newly established United States was being built on an impossible contradiction – the assertion that “all men are created equal” while one portion of the population enslaved another – through the gruesome physical fight to end slavery and then the struggle to more closely align reality to our majestic national principles. This road has certainly been stony.  Every American needs to know that and feel something of that pain. But the evolution has also been guided by faith in the rule of law, by respect for our founding principles, by optimism, and by powerful voices of reason.

            Among those, no voice was more eloquent than that of Frederick Douglass.  In his brilliant new biography, historian David Blight charts Douglass’s growth over a long career from an abolitionist fueled by fury and outrage to one whose confidence in the future was built on knowledge of and love for, among other things, the Declaration of Independence.  “The forces against us,” Douglass said in one of his many speeches, “are passion and prejudice, which are transient, and those for us are principles, self-acting, self-sustaining and permanent.”

            The principle that all people are created equal, and the notion that they are endowed by their creator with the “unalienable” rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness could not possibly mean more to anyone than to those who, like Douglass, had experienced the hideous indignities of slavery. All Americans owe a debt of gratitude, not just to the founders who, in 1776, so powerfully articulated these magnificent principles, but also to the generations since who have never lost faith in them. 

I, and others, are sure to have a great deal to say about this in the days and months and years ahead. Most of us will wrestle with these issues much as we wrestle with our own fallibilites and strengths. Where we find the bottom line — in shame and horror or in optimism, humility and pride — will differ. But I would hate to see my grandchildren taught that the story of our nation begins in slavery and ends in intransigent racism and inequality. Because I don’t believe that. I really don’t.

History Matters! Take Two...

In 1957 I was in the fourth grade at a Virginia elementary school named Jamestown and we spent a lot of time talking about the founding, three hundred and fifty years earlier, of the English colony for which we were named. We learned about Susan Constant, Godspeed and tiny Discovery, the ships that brought eager settlers from England and deposited them on the shores of the “New World.” My class made puppets and wrote a short play about Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. We did not talk about fear, conflict or starvation. And we certainly didn’t talk about what happened when the Jamestown colony was just twelve years old and another ship, one whose name we don’t know, arrived and brought more people to the settlement.

It was August, 1619 and the new arrivals were Africans who had been captured by pirates from a Portuguese slave ship. They were quickly traded to the colonists for much-needed supplies. We don’t know exactly what happened at that time but we can assume the settlers there used these men and women, as many generations after them would, to till their land, tend their crops, build their houses, and care for their children. We can assume that the enslaved persons slowly recovered from the horrors of the voyage, gained strength, learned English and, somehow, made a way out of no way. They endured.

Last week, in events commemorating this moment, bells rang, drummers drummed and speakers spoke, emphasizing that history is a long story with parts we like — that make us feel good — and others, like the arrival of those twenty enslaved persons, that are painful, difficult, challenging to heart and head. The longer we leave out parts of our national story the harder it becomes to tell it.

I have thought about this a lot because of my own experience, realizing how ignorant I was as i set out to write about Rosenwald schools and the situation that created the need for them. I was appalled to realize how little I knew, not just about slavery itself but, more importantly, about the period that came after emancipation when that hopeful moment gave way to vanishing voting rights, lynching and relentless Jim Crow segregation.

So I view it as a hopeful thing that, speaking at events in Hampton last week, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam emphasized the need to fully incorporate black history into school curriculum at all levels. We can’t tell our American story, he said, without talking about who we are — all of us — and how different our experiences have been. “We often fail to draw the connecting lines from those past events to our present day, but to move forward, that is what we must do,” he said, acknowledging his own “incomplete understanding regarding race and equality.”

And it’s my hope that Virginia’s 126 still standing Rosenwald schools and the many, many alumni and preservationists who have worked so hard to ensure their survival, can be part of that process not just for Virginia but for all of us. They have such an inspiring story to tell.

Alumni at Second Union Rosenwald School in Goochland County, Virginia.

American Pogrom

Here’s one way to define the word pogrom —” a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The Russian term originally entered the English language in order to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire.” I was a little taken aback a few weeks ago when, speaking on a radio show about a little-remembered American race riot, my friend Alan Spears used the word “pogrom” to describe what happened in East St. Louis, Missouri in 1917, an episode which paved the way for the race riots that occurred a hundred years ago this summer in Washington, DC, Chicago and other places.

There seems to be disagreement about the dubious honor of being the worst race riot in American history. DC wasn’t quite in that league — something like 12 people died in four days of rioting provoked, in part, by sensational headlines and irresponsible reporting in DC’s four daily newspapers about a black man attacking white women. In the aftermath of the violence, two black men were sentenced to jail for crimes they almost certainly did not commit. Within a few weeks, the Washington situation was overshadowed by five days of rioting in Chicago that left 48 people dead.

I was thinking of all this because earlier this week, in tidying up my desk, I found a newspaper clipping I had been saving. It was the obituary of a woman named Olivia Hooker and she was identified as “One of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race riots.” Ms. Hooker had an illustrious career as one of the first black women to serve in the Coast Guard and as a senior lecturer in psychology at Fordham University. She had also served on the Tulsa Race Riot Commission that in 1997 attempted to determine exactly what happened in that city.

In May, 1921 a black teenager was being held in a Tulsa court house, accused of assaulting a white woman. The riot commission determined that, actually, he had stepped on the white woman’s foot in a crowded elevator. Nonetheless, he was arrested, detained and a white lynch mob formed outside. Black war veterans then began gathering to protect the prisoner and what followed was a gruesome rampage that left Tulsa’s affluent “Black Wall Street” in ruins and as many as 300 African Americans dead. Dr. Hooker remembered it all vividly. She was 6 years old when angry white men raged through Greenwood, the neighborhood where her father owned a department store. Her mother hid her and her siblings under the dining room table but she could see and hear as a mob ransacked her house. “They took everything they thought was valuable,” she remembered. “My mother had [opera singer Enrico] Caruso records she loved. They smashed the Caruso records.” The Washington Post report went on to describe how the rioters set fire to the doll clothes hanging on a line, precious things that Olivia’s grandmother had made for her. Rmembering what happened she told a Post reporter, “It took me a long time to get over my nightmares.”

That certainly fits the definition of a pogrom, I think — deliberate violence against a particular community. A decade before the riots in DC, Chicago, Tulsa and, sadly, many other communities, Julius Rosenwald had made the connection between the violence that was bringing many Jews from Russia and Poland to this country seeking safety, and the emerging pattern of American violence against blacks. One of the first major race riots in the country occurred in JR’s hometown, Springfield, Illinois in 1908. He was not there at the time but it definitely caught his attention. After that, Rosenwald said in a speech that we look down on the Russians for the way they treat their Jews but what we are doing in this country to black people is not that different. This understanding was one of the things that pushed Rosenwald to invest a large part of his fortune in improving conditions for African Americans.He knew we would never be the fully realized Democracy he believed was possible while part of the population was not sharing in the country’s promise.

How right he was. The causes of riots are complex and multiple; each time it happens it’s unique, each time it happens it’s the same. It’s not always a pogrom but it’s worth remembering that racial violence has happened a lot in our country. Remember LA in 1992? Remember Rodney King? Can’t we all get along?

Absalom Boston, Frederick Douglass and Me

For almost two hundred years this simple meeting house on Nantucket has been a reminder of the African Americans who supported the island’s powerful whaling industry and of Absalom Boston, the black mariner and sea captain who was a leader of the community there.. And for the 44 years of my married life Nantucket has been, for me, a place of summer visits. I have passed this building many times and been intrigued by its history. And as I’ve learned more about the Rosenwald schools that came into being in response to segregation it has become even more meaningful to me.

After a visit to the meeting house this year I looked up Absalom Boston and learned that his parents were a Wampanoag woman with the lovely name Thankful Micah and a black man, Seneca Boston, descended from slaves owned by an island family and granted his freedom as the result of a suit filed by his brother in 1773. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783 so when Absalom Boston was born on Nantucket in 1785 he was part of a free black community. He became a mariner and, later, the first African American captain to sail a whale ship. In1822 he took The Industry with an all-black crew on a six month voyage that returned with 70 barrels of sperm whale oil. This wasn’t a huge catch but the fact that the crew returned without having lost anyone was impressive. Absalom Boston retired from the sea. He went into business running a store and, later an inn, and in 1824 helped found the African Meeting house. It was a school, a place of worship, and a social hall.

When Absalom Boston’s daughter, Phebe Ann, completed her elementary studies at the meeting house she wanted to go to high school. But the local public school said she could not — because she was black — so Absalom Boston threatened to sue the town of Nantucket. Faced with this prospect, and ongoing agitation from black Nantucketers, the town relented and Phebe and another young woman, named Eunice Ross, became the first African American students to attend public high school on the island. When he died in 1855 Absalom Boston was the wealthiest black man on Nantucket.

A name far better known than Absalom Boston is Frederick Douglass — and he, too, has a strong connection to Nantucket. Douglass was 23 years old and newly escaped from slavery in Maryland when he was noticed at anti-slavery meetings in New Bedford and was invited to attend a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting on Nantucket. It was there, on August 16, 1841, in a building no longer standing, the “Big Shop used for building harpooners’ boats, filled to bursting and guarded by Quaker members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with overflow crowd looking in at the windows, that the young Douglass first spoke publicly about his experience. He discovered that his story and his ability to present it were powerful weapons in the struggle to end American slavery. It was a turning point in his life.

So Nantucket is more for me than a place to go to the beach and eat seafood, though I love to do both those things. It’s a place where, each summer, I ponder again the journey that is taking us — Americans — from a place where slavery and injustice to native peoples were accepted as normal to a more welcoming and enlightened place. This struggle is hard. Two years ago the Nantucket African Meeting house was defaced with racial graffiti. By the time I arrived for my summer visit the offensive, repulsive words were gone but the episode was a reminder that this journey is not over. Sometimes the present feels so discouraging. I do find it helpful to remember that the effort to create a place of equality and opportunity has gone on for a long, long time and that among those who came before us were brave and principled people like Absalom Boston and Frederick Douglass speaking out about inequality and being heard. Each summer I hear them again.

I saw quite a few of these signs on the island. Settlers from the Cape Verdes islands off of Africa were important to the whaling industry in Nantucket and continue to be part of coastal, fishing communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

I love this t-shirt — it was given to me by my friends at Second Union Rosenwald School in Goochland County, Virginia.

Chehaw Rosenwald School

This is one of my favorite Rosenwald school images. It shows the Chehaw school, about six miles from Tuskegee and newly completed in 1917, set amidst fields and woods. Looking through some files today, I came across mention of it in an essay by Clinton Calloway, an undersung hero of the Rosenwald school story.

Calloway was a in his junior year at Fisk when he heard a speech by Booker T. Washington that inspired him to want to be a teacher despite the fact that “it offered a very meager salary and no chance to do what I thought bigger things.” Washington’s message “gripped me so tenaciously,” he wrote, that “a short time after receiving my diploma I came to Tuskegee to ‘Let down my bucket.’ In his famous speech at the Atlanta and Cotton States Exhibition in 1895, Washington had told a story about a ship lost at sea that had run out of pure water to drink, reducing the crew to desperate thirst. When they encountered another ship its captain yelled out to the distressed ship to “Cast down your bucket where you are.” They had sailed into the mouth of the Amazon river and the water was pure and drinkable. Washington used the story to encourage people — both black and white — to look on each other, the people amongst whom they lived, as friends and allies.

Washington assigned the young Calloway the responsibility for helping the small farming community of Kowaliga raise money to build a school, which he did, acquiring valuable experience in encouraging community fundraising. While also teaching in the agricultural extension program at Tuskegee, he would travel around to “help give ‘arousements’ as the country people called it,” meetings where men and women would be encouraged to help with the effort to build better schools. Country people around Tuskegee were poor and some felt that if the makeshift schools they had attended in barns and churches had been good enough for them, then they were fine for their children as well. But Calloway had taught every summer during college in small rural schools, spaces he had sometimes shared with chickens, pigs, snakes, and lizards. He had a vision of something better.

When in 1912 Julius Rosenwald gave a grant of $25,000 to Tuskegee it inspired Calloway with an idea he passed on to Washington. Why not use part of that money, just $2,500, to encourage people to donate to schoolhouses. Washington proposed the idea to Rosenwald who liked it. The initial offer of a $300 matching grant was made to six communities close to Tuskegee.

“Every Sunday and three or four days in the week I would invite some friend to go with me into one of these communities to further arouse them from their lethargy so they could qualify for Mr. Rosenwald’s beneficent offer.” Six schoolhouses were built and the enthusiasm they created was such that Rosenwald and Washington decided to commit to building one hundred more. Chehaw, six miles from Tuskegee, was one of these. It was also one of the first of the schools to have, as Calloway put it, “the honor of entertaining Mr. Rosenwald.” During one of his visits to Tuskegee, Rosenwald was invited to stop at Chehaw.

“Mr. Rosenwald, a big-hearted lover of humanity, gladly consented and made the journey with me in the School’s Ford from Tuskegee to Chehaw. The people had cleared away all rubbish, their school house was clean and brilliantly lighted. the men, women and children gaily dressed and in a joyful mood. They had made huge bonfires to light our way to the school. We went up the walk with fire burning our pathway on each side and lusty yells of “Hurrah for Mr. Roosevelt.” (Some had confused Mr. Rosenwald with Col. Roosevelt.) They escorted us to the platform — Mr. Rosenwald with a beaming face and twinkling eyes as the people showed by group yells and songs their appreciation of the friendly interest manifested by Mr. Rosenwald. The chairman of the trustee board expressed in a very crude but straight forward way the gratitude of the community for interest in helping them to get away from the awful condition of a short while ago.”

What an image! Rosewald driven to the school over rutted country roads in a Ford and arriving to bonfires and cheers for the former president with the similar name, a man who like Rosenwald served on the board of Tuskegee.

And what a contribution Clinton Calloway made, understanding the importance of getting the public school systems to buy into the school-building program. He knew the country people served by the schools didn’t didn’t want to feel that building them “was just another movement of ‘White Folks’ to turn over the management of one more thing in their communities which the Negroes had been managing.” He prided himself on hiring excellent “young Negro men” as Rosenwald school agents..

“No longer is the Negro Youth willing to sit all day on backless benches,” Calloway wrote, “gazing at wooden shutters, looking down through the cracks at crawling reptiles. He demands better schools, efficient teachers and laughs at ‘What is good enough for us is good enough for our children.’”

A Wall

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down….” I was trying to remember those words of Robert Frost yesterday when I took a visit to this wall in Arlington County, Virginia. It’s not far from where I lived as a child and yet it’s worlds away from my experience. This wall was built in the 1930s to separate the African American neighborhood of Hall’s Hill from the adjacent developing white Woodlawn community.There’s a historical marker next to this chunk of wall that describes it as “a reminder of racial segregation” which it certainly is.

I’ve written before about redlining and my surprise at discovering how recently it was still in use in Washington, DC — the practice by credit agencies and banks of withholding investment in certain neighborhoods deemed undesirable, surrounding them with red lines on maps and, by restricting investment there, ensuring they would not prosper. This was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 yet its effects linger on.

But a wall — a physical barrier to keep people away from each other — is just so tangible. I’ve seen walls — walked on the Great Wall of China, stood by Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, touched the Berlin Wall. I even have on my desk a little souvenir piece of that memorial to the lost cause of Soviet imperialism. In Bethlehem I walked through the maze that precedes and then allows one through the separation wall between Israel and Palestine. And I get up every morning to news reports about a potential wall on our southern border designed to restrict illegal immigration and certain to communicate the message that walls send — keep out! MY neighborhood will be better if YOU aren’t here. Stay where you are! You are better off if you never venture away.

Segregation was an attempt to ensure that our country remain something that it had actually never been — uniformly white. One of the first Englishmen on our shores married a native American, Pocahontas, and they gave birth to a long line of descendants. Our third president had children with an enslaved woman. Yes, playing in the neighborhood and going to school together DO mean that our races will mix, as they always have, just the way the English and German, the Norwegian and Russian, the Jewish, the Armenian, the Scottish, the Chinese and Italian have done. It really doesn’t matter whether we like this or not. It WILL happen. And, of course, it’s one of our great sources of strength.

I did enjoy this from the Hall’s Hill historical marker: “During the late 1950s, children from Hall’s Hill removed a small section of the wall to create a passage to a nearby creek. In 1966 Arlington County removed a larger section of the wall, allowing full access to and from Hall’s Hill.” About the time children were removing slats from the wooden portions of the separation wall, I was growing up a few miles away. One of my favorite things to do with my sisters and friends was to walk to a nearby creek. There was nothing special about the creek — it was way too shallow for swimming or even wading. But going there seemed like sort of an adventure and we loved it, as I’m sure my neighbors a few miles away did. They were probably boys and that would have seemed strange to me — I was from a family of girls — but otherwise, I bet we would have gotten along great. I like to think we could have been friends.

Archer Alexander

Who is Archer Alexander? If you live near where I do, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, you are probably familiar with his face. You see him every time you walk through Lincoln Park. We all recognize the face and form of Abraham Lincoln on the Emancipation Statue that greets dog walkers and kids coming home from school at the western entrance to the park. But, until now, I did not know the name of the man who was the model for the kneeling figure of the newly emancipated slave. It is Archer Alexander. Last week, thanks to a neighbor who lives right next door to the park, I learned Archer’s story.

Archer Alexander was an enslaved man in Missouri during the Civil War who decided to risk his life to help the Union army. Having learned via an overheard conversation that a band of rebels had sawed the timbers of a bridge where Union troops would soon be passing, he decided to warn the Union troops of the danger. On the run from slave catchers who suspected what he had done, Alexander made his way to the suburbs of St. Louis where, by remarkable good fortune, he came to the attention of William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister and co-founder of Washington University. (His grandson would be the poet T.S. Eliot) The two men became friends — Alexander worked for the Eliot family for the rest of his life. Eliot immortalized Alexander in two ways — he wrote the story of his life and he had him photographed. He then sent the images to his friend Thomas Ball who was in Italy sculpting a monument to Lincoln and to Emancipation.

The memorial was created through a fundraising effort begun by a newly emancipated Virginia woman, Charlotte Scott, who donated the first $5 she earned in freedom to a memorial. Others contributed as well. It was dedicated in 1876 with former president Ulysses S. Grant in attendance and a rousing speech by Frederick Douglass who lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood where the statue was located in a large park.

The figure of the newly emancipated slave in the statue is not well known like Lincoln. It is so good to know who it is — Archer Alexander. He never saw the memorial where he is a stand-in for all the men and women emancipated after the Civil War. Not everyone likes the statue which some find offensively paternalistic. For me, though, knowing something of Archer Alexander’s story makes it less so. He was a real person and as such helps me to think about the enormity of slavery and of its legacy.

Rosenwald Park Campaign

Washington DC’s very elegant Cosmos Club was perhaps an odd venue for kicking off a campaign to create a National Park Service site celebrating the accomplishments of a son of Jewish immigrants who partnered with former slaves and sharecroppers to build schools for their children. But this is a city full of contradictions and so there it was — gold chaldeliers, tasty hors d’oeuvres, Rosenwald school alumni, National Trust for HIstoric Preservation staff, fundraisers, volunteers and a slide show about Julius Rosenwald’s life and accomplishments.

Two years ago I met Dorothy Canter. She had just seen Aviva Kempner’s documentary film, “Rosenwald” and had been blown away by it. She could not believe that she, a Jew, did not know the story of Julius Rosenwald’s life and philanthropy. As a longtime volunteer with the National Parks and Conservation Association, and a person knowledgeable in the ways of Washington, she set to work. I was one of her first recruits to the effort which now includes fundraisers, people with congressional connections, staff of NPCA, and several longtime employees of the National Park Service. One of these is the Honorable Robert Stanton who ended his forty year tenure at the NPS as its director.

Mr. Stanton’s remarks last night were passionate and moving — about the tragic turn of events at the end of the Civil War that took the country from passage of the 13th and 14th amendments assuring full rights and equal protection to all citizens to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and the concept of “separate but equal.” It was not until 1954 and another Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that it was determined that separate never could be equal in education (or, a few years later with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in any other area).

But in the time between those two court decisions, the void in education for African American children in the South was at least partly filled by the partnership between local communities and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Between 1913 and 1932 the Fund gave $4,364,869 to build over 5,000 schoolhouses, shop buildings and teachers’ homes in fifteen southern states. A lot of money — but not quite as much as the $4,725,891 given by the parents, grandparents and neighbors of the rural black children those schools were built to serve.

What a remarkable story. As Mr. Stanton and other speakers (including me) said last night, this legacy is extraordinarily worthy of national recognition.

For more information visit https://www.rosenwaldpark.org

The Centennial of Artist Charles White

If artist Charles White were alive he would have turned 100 on April 2.  A major retrospective of his work spent the summer at the Art Institute in Chicago, where White grew up, and will reopen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 7.  In February it will move to Los Angeles.

I will certainly travel to Manhattan to see the show.  White is a significant figure in twentieth century American art, best known as a chronicler of African American experience. He called his 1967 book “Images of Dignity” which exactly captures the essence of what he worked to communicate. White consciously sought to use art to build confidence and pride in the community he loved.

“Painting is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent,” he told an interviewer in 1940. “If I could write, I would write about it. If I could talk, I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.” In 1943 and 1943 he was able to pursue that goal with the assistance of two Rosenwald fellowships.

There are so many interesting things about White and his career I hardly know where to begin. As a rebellious teenager growing up in Chicago with a busy, overburdened mother and an alcoholic step-father, White spent a lot of time in public libraries, in particular the George Cleveland Hall library where a dynamic librarian was eager to share the emerging work of the Harlem Renaissance There White discovered and was fascinated by Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” a collection of writings by and about African Americans with illustrations by Aaron Douglas. The book was a revelation to him — despite the impression he had gotten from his largely white high school that blacks were not a significant part of American history or cultural life, here was evidence to the contrary. When a scholarship allowed him to study at the Art Institute of Chicago he not only got training in drawing but was drawn into a stimulating world of left-wing politics, artistic experimentation and interracial cooperation. Soon he was painting “Five Great American Negroes,” a mural featuring Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, Marian Anderson and George Washington Carver. Working on another mural for the 1940 American Negro Exposition he met fellow artist Elizabeth Catlett who became his first wife (and who later became, like White, a Rosenwald fellow.)

White’s career took him from Bronzeville in Chicago to Hampton, Virginia, to New York City and then to California where he moved with his second wife and enjoyed sustained success. Serving in the army during World War II White had contracted chronic lung disease which he never entirely overcame and which led to his death at the age of 61. But he lived long enough to be one of the ten black artists honored at the White House by President Jimmy Carter in April 1980. Among them were several friends from his days in Chicago and three other Rosenwald fellows — Richmond Barthe, Jacob Lawrence and Hale Woodruff.

I look forward to deepening my acquaintance with White’s work next time I’m in New York.

Charles White photographed by Rosenwald fellow Gordon Parks.