Gates book explores larger ideas
LIFE UPON THESE SHORES:
LOOKING AT AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY, 1513-2008
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Knopf, $50
Americans of African descent have recorded their stories in diverse ways, and Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates has been visibly and vocally engaged in public efforts to give new life to the little-known and recover the long-forgotten of that epic experience. In this beautifully wrought, elaborately illustrated, coffee-table sized book, he chronicles five centuries of history. It contains as much art as politics, as much national treasure as national controversy.
Upon These Shores is more than an encyclopedia, in that it can be read pleasurably. Nor is it didactic. Rather, its purpose is to inform and to sort through historical puzzles. The opening section, “Origins,” depicts the slave trade in the 1600s and the ambiguous character of early slavery: at first, many Africans appeared comparable in status to whites and Indians who cleared land and erected military fortifications, until that ill-defined moment when law and custom changed their time of service from a fixed term to lifelong.
While the economic advantages the slave system offered hardened the hearts of landowners in the 18th century, free black communities also formed, and ex-slaves began publishing emotive autobiographical works. Phillis Wheatley of Boston was a West African-born prodigy whose poetry stirred many on both sides of the Atlantic in the era of the American Revolution; for those who remained suspect, patriot leader John Hancock “authenticated” her gift as genuine proof of the educability of all people. Thousands of black Americans fought alongside white Revolutionaries, while a Virginia contingent that joined the British wore a patch on their uniforms, pronouncing “Liberty for Slaves.”
The traumas of the 19th century are presented in scores of poignant illustrations: a watercolor of the human cargo inside a slave ship; an engraving showing some of the hundreds of blacks who fought with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans; a cotton banner featuring an abolitionist slogan; an 1855 daguerreotype of graduating females at the integrated Oberlin College; a racist handbill describing Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson’s acknowledged slave mistress Julia Chinn — the couple’s light-skinned daughters married white men in Washington.
Sections titled “Race and Resistance,” “War and Its Meaning” and “The Ordeal of Jim Crow” detail the struggle for rights before, during and after North and South came to blows. Gates introduces the African Americans who joined John Brown’s catastrophic raid on the eve of the Civil War; and the “mercurial” Massachusetts Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, who ran the show in Union-occupied New Orleans and declared escaped slaves “contraband” rather than return them to their owners.
General William T. Sherman, LSU’s first president, wanted no black soldiers in his army, yet generously set aside a 30-mile stretch of the Carolina coast for exclusive black settlement. The heroism of black soldiers makes for impressive reading: cabinetmaker Powhatan Beaty, born a slave in Richmond, took command of his company after its senior officers were killed, and won the Medal of Honor.
Iconic photographs of a chain gang and a prisoner being punished, the legendary black frontiersman “Deadwood Dick” (friend of Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill Cody), and the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells segue into the 20th century, as more aggressive approaches to civil rights are tried. George H. White, Howard University graduate and accomplished attorney, was in his day the only black prosecutor in the U.S. and represented North Carolina in Congress from 1896 to 1901, bucking the system and putting on the record some of the more sordid instances of discrimination and violence. He was ahead of his time, and his courageous example deserves memorializing.
Booker T. Washington’s celebrated dinner with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901 seemed for a moment to challenge segregation, but symbolic events such as these proved tentative.
Then, W.E.B. Du Bois hosted the Niagara movement in 1905, and spoke out as no one had before, denouncing racial prejudice and promoting equal access to all forms of education. “Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty” went the Declaration of Principles that emerged from Niagara.
From here, the book goes on to feature both tragic misperceptions and positive outcomes. The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was a particularly egregious example of what can go wrong, when a minor scuffle in an elevator resulted in white mobs burning down blocks upon blocks of middle class black homes and stores, with 68 blacks and nine whites killed over two days. But then we see the Harlem Renaissance in art, the work of Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, the emergence of Jackie Robinson and the added allure he brought to baseball culture.
How much more is there to mark the drama of our own times: black Olympians, Arthur Ashe, Martin Luther King’s Nobel Peace Prize, a “consummate and complete man of letters” in novelist James Baldwin, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, R&B at the Apollo Theater, Alex Haley’s Roots, Denzel Washington and Spike Lee.
The author concludes with the election of 2008, and the first African-American president.
The American culture we know today derived from many sources, of course, and so this well-designed book does far more than trace the evolution of a racialized society or the commodification of a people and their eventual deliverance. It explores the ideal of equality, the art (and craft) of politics, and the meritorious individuals who changed perceptions on a mass scale.
Andrew Burstein is Manship Professor of History at LSU and author of books on American politics and culture. His website is: http://www.andburstein.com.