Black history

Erasing slavery from American history

A recent directive from the Department of Defense Education Activity, which oversees schools at Army bases, has been interpreted by staff at Fort Campbell to include purging of any books which reference slavery or Civil Rights, according to Clarksville Now.

As offensive as this is, I hope that the order will be taken quite literally, and not selectively, just so we will be able to see and know what is at stake. Why am I saying this? Let’s play this out.

Start with the Founding. Enslavement is in the Constitution. Right there in Article I, Section 2. It’s known as the “three-fifths clause,” where enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of the census which determined how many representatives a state would get in Congress. So if you are purging any book that mentions slavery – you will of necessity have to eliminate any books that discuss the Constitution. And, well, quite literally, the Constitution itself, I suppose!

Books about the American Revolution will have to be purged, because numerous enslaved people fought for the British, because the British promised them freedom in exchange for their support.

Books about the Lewis & Clark Expedition will need to be removed. William Clark’s enslaved man, York, was an essential part of the Corps of Discovery.

Many of the stories of Westward Expansion will have to be removed. The Northwest Ordinance which served as the foundation of most of the Midwestern states, was notable for its prohibition against slavery. And if you talk about the exclusion of slavery, that begs the question – what should I know about slavery? Clearly it must have existed in order for it to be specifically mentioned and excluded.

And the list goes on. The creation of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Missouri Compromise. Bleeding Kansas. And at last, the Civil War.

To omit all books containing reference to slavery also means that books about our greatest and most beloved president, Abraham Lincoln, will have to be discarded. After all, you can’t have the Emancipation Proclamation if you don’t acknowledge slavery.

Add on to that the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, which contain direct references to slavery and the birthright citizenship of those people formerly held in bondage.

Slavery is the foundation stone of racial discrimination that persists and has real consequences in the present day. The aftermath of slavery can be traced beyond the Civil War into Reconstruction and racial violence, Jim Crow laws, the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, segregation, unfair housing and redlining, underfunded schools, poverty, shortened lifespans, hate crimes, police violence, mass incarceration, obstructing voting rights, and more.

Truly if you erase slavery, you erase the entirety of American history. You simply cannot study the American past, without acknowledging and knowing about the evil institution that was an inherent part of our country from the very start. The legacy of slavery continues to cast a long shadow over American freedom and civil rights, still to this day. It is something we all need to know more about – not less.

Learn more:

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrahim X. Kendi (affiliate link to Amazon)

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (affiliate link to Amazon)

The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, Ala.

Civil Rights in the Archives – Access

In the current issue of American Archivist (v. 77 no. 1), Alex H. Poole‘s fine article, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American South,” details the incredible, nearly unbelievable difficulties black scholars had in gaining access to the raw materials of history. Winner of the Theodore Calvin Pease Award for the finest work by an archival studies student, Poole is working towards his Ph.D. at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

Poole’s extraordinary article chronicles the hardships encountered by noted African-American scholars such as John Hope Franklin, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, and Helen G. Edmonds, among others. All of these individuals were well-established, respected scholars with Ph.D.’s, with university positions. Yet, when they tried to enter places like UNC, the Woman’s College, and other all-white institutions with major research collections, their presence could “generate a panic and an emergency among the administrators that was….an incident of historic proportions,” in the words of John Hope Franklin (as quoted by Poole).

The first dilemma the white staff faced was whether to admit Negro scholars at all. From the 1930s through the 1950s, most white institutions did not have formal policies in place. In the age of “separate but equal” most facilities assumed that black scholars would perform research at black institutions. At times, administrators at white institutions might reluctantly grant access, if it could be proven to their satisfaction that their repository was the only facility that housed the needed materials.

Even then, granting an African American scholar access was merely the first of a series of hurdles. A letter of introduction might be required, presumably written by a white scholar who could vouch for the African American’s credentials.

Where the black researcher would sit to do his or her work presented an enormous crisis. One library director wrote that white researchers would raise an “objection” if a black researcher was seated in the same reading room. In a number of cases, black scholars were given keys to the stacks, where they could work in a study carrel, alone and out of sight.

Yet another problem encountered by black scholars doing research at white institutions in the Jim Crow South was the indelicate matter of access to restroom facilities. Segregated restrooms apparently had stalls with steel doors; under no conditions would an exception be made to allow blacks to use white-only facilities; and the facilities were white-only because no provision had been made to provide “colored only” restrooms on an all-white campus. On at least one occasion, a black professor suffered the indignity of having to use a janitor’s closet, and Helen G. Edmonds was forced to make a long walk to Morehead Planetarium when she was doing research in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC.

Poole’s article contains many more details, and touches on issues of the facade of Southern “manners” for both races during Jim Crow. He illuminates the power that resides in access to archives – and the ways in which access (or lack thereof) correlates to the production of history. Finally, he concludes with jab at our modern consciousness, encouraging all archivists and administrators to understand how our work intersects with social justice, and urging us all to take this into account in our daily actions, from the reference desk to acquisitions.

Part 1 in a series.

Part 2 – Collections

Part 3 – Description

Part 4 – Acquisitions