The Lincoln Film: Not For The Masses, Really?

Painting from Frederick Douglass Series (1939) by African American Artist Jacob Lawrence. Copyright restricted. See http://www.jacobandgwenlawrence.org/artandlife04.html

Dear Students: Today is Thanksgiving.  I saw an early show of Lincoln at my local movie theatre in New Jersey.  I found it both overwhelming and breathe taking, and I was a little disappointed that those of you who had already seen it had done such an inadequate job of describing it. Obviously this is a corner of American history that is somewhat foreign to you. 

There are many things that struck me as extremely relevant to our current curriculum.  It helps in this case to read some of the better reviews, which may help to draw your attention to the more important historical features. I will make a folder of some of the links and place them among your course materials.

In regard to the first question I posed, that is whether it would be a reconciliationist, white supremacist or emancipationist version of the Civil War, it seemed to me that the film touched equally upon all three and ultimately did not resolve itself in favor of any of the three. In this sense, it was a fascinatingly wise contemplation on the legacy of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment. But if I had to choose one, I would choose emancipationist in the sense that everything in the film pointed my thoughts to the future we actually live in, in which we have now a black president who is having as much trouble getting change through Congress as Lincoln had in having the 13th Amendment passed.

The film is about the difficulty of the political process as it occurs in a republic in which freedom of thought and word is a founding assumption.  In the scene near the end of the film in which Thaddeus Stevens and his mistress Lydia Davis are reading the 13th Amendment in bed, this is where D.W. Griffith's white Supremacist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) actually begins. Both Stevens and Davis are horribly caricatured in his film and portrayed as monsters determined to destroy the country and the white majority in favor of the mongrel ambitions of miscegenation and racial mixing. Lydia in particular is demonized.  It seems all the more fitting that Spielberg's film would end with Lydia humanized by the sensible acting of Epatha Merkinson, whom we have all known so many years from Law and Order.  I don't think the part is big enough for an actual nomination but I wish it were.

As for the reconciliationist perspective of a film such as Gone With The Wind (1939), the profound depth and tenderness of the mature relationship between Lincoln and his wife Mary seems to mock the trivial superficiality of such a treatment of the Civil War and hits consequences.  Abraham and Mary's contrast with Rhett and Scarlett couldn't be greater or more revealing.

What makes it such a great lesson for all of us is that it brings the legislation we have been studying vividly to life. I don't think you can come away from watching this film without becoming completely cognizant of what the 13th Amendment achieved (the abolition of slavery), or how it differed from the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as its limitations and ultimately the necessity for both the 14th (citizenship) and the 15th (the vote)Amendment. What is forecast as well, it seems to me, is that none of this legislation would finally succeed in transforming the former slaves into fully recognized and fully participant American citizens.

The portrayal of events takes for granted the omniscience of white supremacy at the time.  The very fact that Congressman Thaddeus Davis, who is in a relationship with a black woman to whom he takes the rough draft of the amendment to read to her in bed, is forced to renounce his own beliefs in racial equality on the floor of the congress in order to get the 13th amendment passed clarifies the hegemony of white supremacy at the time.  Nonetheless, it further embellishes one's enjoyment of these events if one knows what will follow--as you can easily find out by reading, first of all, the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (which you have already been assigned to do), not to mention as well the Reconstruction Wiki I assigned you.

Which brings me to the only disappointment I felt in this film and that is that there are no roles for blacks large enough to get your teeth into, not even that of Nancy Keckley who was Mary Lincoln's dressmaker and companion.  All of the black roles--in particular the soldier in the beginning who completes the recitation of the Gettysburg Address as he wanders off into the night--are lovely and beautiful but they are not allowed to take on important dramatic depth and substance. Perhaps it wouldn't be appropriate to this portion of the history, the month or so preceding the murder of Lincoln, and it seems petty in the end to quibble about this one shortcoming when so many other films in which black actors are featured have none of the pluses of this beautifully and densely written script, but it is hard to believe that this isn't an important consideration.  If it isn't important, why not have the densely written black character instead of not?

To which I have two perhaps contradictory answers.  First, part of the reason it is this way is because of the evils of the star system, and the fact that the name brand combination of the package takes precedence over whatever magic the script and the performance are able to produce. It's got to be an exciting package from the marketing point of view.  Nothing else matters.  Even so I can't imagine that this film will do particularly well at the box office but it should do very well indeed among the awards. 

Just look at the content of the advertising, the focus on the tortured face and figures of the stars--Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Fields--both wonderful but without their former reputations as actors, they would not be able to occupy these roles. Not as unknowns. Which also means the following.  First of all no black woman could be given a major role. Black actresses just aren't there yet. Not even Haile Berry. Not even Vanessa Williams.  Rather it would have to be a black male with a major name, and such a man (Denzel Washington or Sam Jackson or somebody like that) would never take the lesser role that such a part would likely be.  A major black male role would be in danger of completely derailing the subtle balance of the current script.  This film is not about the freedom or the equality of women or of blacks, but rather a moment still pregnant with that possibility.

At the same time, the racial equilibrium of this script speaks to the ongoing power of white supremacy in our culture, to the fact that we still don't know how to imagine what kind of moral and aesthetic hierarchy might actually follow.  That just like Lincoln and his most well intentioned contemporaries we still don't know quite how to incorporate the agency of actual black people (and former slaves) into the mainstream of the story we tell ourselves about the history of our country and our culture.

David Blight on Slavery and Reconstruction on YouTube

David Blight's "The Civil War and Reconstruction," an Open course offered via Yale University's website, via YouTube and via itunes unversity audio and visual files provides a compelling and detailed description of the events and the debates precipitated by the American Legacy of the Civil War and Slavery.  http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119#sessions

His lectures bring back my fond days as a graduate student in American Studies at Yale University and the opportunity to hear the lectures of historians John Blassingame, Edmund Morgan and David Brion Davis among others.  Two years after the publication of my first book (in which slavery is discussed in some detail) in 1980 and 1981, I got my first real chance to study slavery and its consequences in a serious way in a world class library system--via access to primary sources, and the very best of secondary sources, and moreover to learn to know the difference.

Listening to his descriptions of the scholarship of Charles Beard as a progressive historian who saw slavery and the free north as two competing economic systems caused me to recollect that in 11th Grade at the New Lincoln School, we read Charles Beard and Walt Whitman as part of our core curriculum on American history and literature.

I couldn't quite get my fingers around this approach, was somewhat hurt and confused by it.  So much else was going on in my life and my body (I was 15) and there's a particular way in which your mind can wander when you are a teenager in a classroom.  and I remember being frustrated by the lack of talk about the slaves or even abolitionism.  My teacher that year was named Mac Carpenter.  I wish I had had Beisel and Moby Dick (a book I would learn to love some ten years later) instead but had been turned off by the idea that a book about a whale wouldn't be girly enough.  I had no idea who I was then.  

Nonetheless, I have continued to follow the fields of American slavery and abolitionism, as well as the new scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade with the maps and ship manifests.  I just love all that stuff.  My reading in these areas comes out of a true passion for the subject matter and the writing in this field, rather than as a necessity of my teaching.  It has been my good fortune for my study to have occurred during the period of the greatest development in this field of study.  Blight's lectures are a product of this development of study, highly listen-able, and providing as good a beginning as any to the field--knowledgeable regarding the latest transatlantic and colonial scholarship and yet (as he might say) firmly rooted in a deeply Americanist perspective.

-->

Knew him first by his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which I encountered via my grad student (presently Professor of African American Studies at Lehman College) Anne Rice.  Then a few years later I shared a stage with him on D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation at the New School but it was a crowded program and I can't recall what he said at all.  I tried to talk about the music which was written for the movie.  I still had him pegged as someone who was much more interested in the contemporary consequences of the Civil War. 

The next time was my discovery that David Blight was a Professor of History at Yale University via this series of lectures on slavery and reconstruction offered as part of Open University online, based on a year long course as taught at Yale University in 2007. 

I fell in love with it not because I agreed with and celebrated each word, but rather because of its thoroughness, its simplicity and clarity, its fascination with the literature produced by former slave and white Americans, its intensity, its contextualization of abolitionism within the larger context of the myriad causes of Civil War.  His is not the African American perspective, which has been a major influence in slavery scholarship in the past few decades. And it isn’t the White Southern perspective either, which seems to me the focus of the Ken Burns’ documentary version of the Civil War and that of the Civil War re-enactors Blight describes in his book on the topic.  But rather this is finally an accessible Americanist and centrist re-telling of the many stories that make up this great war and its immediate consequences, especially in regard to the Reconstruction Era. 

His delivery is stunningly and entertainingly folksy at times but not Southern folksy, maybe rather mid-Western folksy to the degree that it becomes part of the content.  What better voice could one find to represent the collective madness that descended upon the American republic (as its borders spread West) mid-19^th century and resulted in the collective genocidal impulse Americans visited upon themselves in the form of its Civil War. 

I will attempt to make selections from specific lectures to sample in my classes and to illuminate the content of my courses on “Slavery and the Failure of Reconstruction” as a FIQWS and my World Humanities course 102.

More Images by Jacob Lawrence on the Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass Series by Jacob Lawrence

Relevant Texts History of African American Literature

-->

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION with two audio cds of folk culture. 

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail-contents.aspx?ID=10626

The Declaration of Independence, 1776

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html

David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Article, 1829 (NA 227-238)

http://www.archive.org/stream/walkersappealwit16516gut/16516.txt http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html (text and related materials)

Freedom Riders 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

Director/Producer Stanley Nelson

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html (full text

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jacobs/hjhome.htm (related materials)

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom(1855) http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouMybo.html

and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(1881-1892) http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglasslife/douglass.html

(NA Excerpts, 385-387 and 452-483)

Ida B. Wells Barnett, “A Red Record,” 1895 (NA 675-686)

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14977

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery Excerpt, 1901, (NA 570-602)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/washington/toc.html

WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk,1903 (NA 686-689, 692-766)

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubSoul.html

Ann Petry, from The Street Excerpt 1946 (NA 1496-1516)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Excerpt 1952 (NA 1548-1570)

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (NA 1696-1699, 1713-1727)

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1959 (NA 1768-1830)

Martin Luther King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1964 (NA 1895-1908)

El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, From The Autobiography of Malcolm X 1964

In (NA 1859-1876)

Ntozake Shange, Excerpts. In NA 2553-2559.

Blues People Began Again Thursday, Aug 26th, Assigned Readings

 As of the Fall semester of 2010 at the City College of New York, I will be teaching once again my course Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century, as a special section of World Humanities under the course number WH 10302.  The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:30 p.m.  We will begin in a new way with the discussion of our individual visits to the exhibition For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights at The International Center of Photography located at 43rd Street and 6th Avenue.  We will also be reading the book by Maurice Berger, which accompanies the exhibition, in the course of the semester in combination with our other readings in the Norton Anthology and African American Music: An Introduction.  

From there, we will progress to our chronological reading of African American literature in the 20th century, beginning with chapters from WEB Du Bois's 1903 masterpiece TRHE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  You are invited to supplement the reading of SOULS with visual materials from Du Bois's "Negro Exhibition" at the Paris Exposition of 1900, about which a great deal has been written and said.  


Du Bois's NEGRO EXHIBITION was compiled by him and others  to document the progress of African Americans since their enslavement had officially ended in the United States in the mid-1860s.  He travelled steerage to Paris to install it at the Paris Exposition of 1900, one of the most celebrated of the world's fairs of the period.    


World's Fairs in general were particularly instructive when considering the status of race and African American in the United States and elsewhere.  Especially when the fair was actually located in the United States (as was the case of the Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1896 in Atlanta at which Booker T. Washington delivered his celebrated address), African American artists and various kinds of status reports and exhibitions on African Americans were included. 


On this blog, I have made available a variety of related materials, as well, as a very excellent presentation of Du Bois's exhibition at the Paris fair compiled by Eugene Provenzo, who is also the author of THE ANNOTATED SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.  While the book doesn't have high quality photographs, the website is superb and includes superior supporting documentation related to the exhibition.  


REQUIRED READINGS:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/course-readings-section-i.html

   THE NEGRO EXHIBITION COMPILED BY WEB DU BOIS as introduced by me:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/02/negro-exhibition-complied-by-web-du.html

   AS COMPILED BY EUGENE PROVENZO:

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm

  COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION OF 1893 IN CHICAGO:

http://blackandbluespeople.blogspot.com/2009/03/columbian-exposition_16.html

World's Fairs

There were several significant intersections of world's fairs and issues of race around the turn of the century.

At the Columbian Exposition in 1893, African American composer Scott Joplin introduced ragtime. His most popular piece, Maple Leaf Rag, is included on the cd of music which comes with the Second Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. There are two versions of the Maple Leaf Rag on the cd, including a version played by Jelly Roll Morton, with a variation that helps to explain the musical connection between ragtime to jazz.

At the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago there was a Pavillion devoted to the Republic of Haiti. Frederick Douglass, who was then ambassador to Haiti from the United States, maintained his headquarters there with Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the young poet, acting as his assistant. Douglass was by then an enormous celebrity, highly regarded and respected universally in Chicago despite the spread of Jim Crow practices throughout the country.

Also featured at this fair was an exhibition of Aunt Jemima (played by Nancy Green) and her pancakes, as well as something called the Dahomey Village featuring a collection of people from Nigeria living in a rustic setting and presumably engaged in their normal village life. The Dahomey Village was just one of many exhibits demonstrating various primitive cultures from around the world, some of them directly resulting from the imperial exploits of the United States, others vestiges of imperial exploits of other countries. These exhibits however were confined to the Midway Plaisance where the more entertaining exhibits were made available to the public. Often these exhibits were more popular with fairgoers than the great so-called white cities composed of majestic architectural structures that were supposed to be the main events of the fair.

African Americans were given a special day at the fair, as a consequence of the protest of the lack of an African American presence at the Fair. Unfortunately Puck Magazine used this occasion as an opportunity to circulate one of the most famous of images associated with the black presence at the fair with black people gathering the free watermelons that were supposedly distributed.

Also, although Douglass visited the Dahomey Village and was well treated by the occupants, he did make statements in the press saying that their exhibit was designed to humiliate African Americans, primarily because of the relative nudity of the Africans.

There is also a story that Bert Williams and David Walker and other African American entertainers stood in for African performers until they could arrive. Once they arrived, African American performers were fascinated by the music and dance of the Africans. The result was a Broadway musical called In Dahomey written by Williams and Walker, which was a major success in 1901.

My main source for materials on African Americans and the Columbian Exposition has been "All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White Cityby Christopher Robert Reed, Indiana University Press 2000.

Ida B. Wells, together with her husband and Frederick Douglass, wrote and circulated a pamphlet on racism, including lynchings, in the United States.*
Wells, Ida B. "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature." Originally published 1893. Reprint ed., edited by Robert W. Rydell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. ISBN 0-252-06784-3.More later.

WORLD'S FAIRS

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893

Approaching the turn-of-the-century, there were many world's fairs taking place throughout Europe and the United States.  There were also fairs in the Pacific, Asia and even Africa.  Worlds fairs or expositions were a major form of popular culture dominated by the interests of the wealthy and the bourgeosie, and conceived as family entertainment.  

Much of these fairs were officially devoted to exhibitions of architecture, art, film and photography, as well as industrial and technological advances.  They included sometimes massive displays of commodities and/or raw materials gathered from successful often imperialist or colonialist military campaigns leading to the opening of new markets combined with various technological breakthroughs.  What makes these events difficult to imagine or recollect today is because we really don't have anything like them.  Probably the most similar would be the formation of a successful mall on the weekend or a car or technology fair.  

The issue of the fairs for our study relates to photography and visual art in which people of color often appeared.  Artists and photographers made images of peoples of color that was sometimes included in the exhibitions.  Frances Benjamin Johnston took pictures of black students and faculty at Hampton Institute, Tuskegee and public schools in Washington D.C. some of which were included in Du Bois's Negro Exhibit featured at the Paris Exposition.  Some of the photographers Du Bois included were black.  There was at least one black photo historian and photographer Deborah Willis has been able to identify in her book on the subject and in her remarks concerning the collection of the exhibited photographs and documents deposited at the Library of Congress.  

The fairs continue in interest throughout the turn-of-the-century beginning with the Columbian Exposition in 1893 where Frederick Douglass, who was then ambassador to Haiti was permanently stationed in the Haitian Pavillion.  Paul Lawrence Dunbar served as his young assistant.  George Walker and Bert Williams were among the American performers who substituted for the Africans who had not yet arrived to populate the Dahomey Village.  Once the members of this incorporated village had arrived, Walker and Williams stayed around to observe the music and the dance, prompting them to construct the highly successful show In Dahomey, which toured Europe and had a successful run on Broadway. 

Human exhibitions were also a major part of what took place at these fairs.  These were exhibitions in which people were presented engaged in typical activities usually from someplace recently the object of military conquest. For instance there were displays of Native American villages, Asian cities and a "Dahomey Village."  In St. Louis there was a display of a group of Pygmies.  Sometimes these displays were incorporated as regular traveling units and they would go from fair to fair for hire.  

Two years after the Columbian Exposition in 1895 at the much more racially segregated Atlanta Cotton Exposition, a "Negro Department" with its own building was featured. Booker T. Washington made his famous Address compromising the political and intellectual aspirations of African Americans at this very same fair. 

Du Bois's Negro Exhibition--1900 Paris Exposition

This link will take you to a selection of photographs from the Negro Exhibition as composed by W.E.B. Du Bois (the author of Souls of Black Folk) and installed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1900. The entire collection of photographs are publicly available online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

These photographs are composed of a variety of image types. They include portraits of graduating classes at black colleges, individual three-quarter portraits, images of run-down black communities, successful black businesses, buildings of black colleges, black businesses and black churches. Not much is known about most of the photographers who took the pictures or the people in the photographs but Deborah Willis has related that which is known at the website at the Library of Congress. And I am sure there will be more information forthcoming as people learn of these images from 1900.  For instance, there is one photograph of the offices of Pauline Hopkin's The Colored American.

These photographs were composed and exhibited just three years before DuBois published Souls of Black Folk.  Part of the response of some of the leading citizens of the black community to Jim Crow segregation and genocide was to build a separate set of resources and communities in which every effort was made to provide equal facilities especially for the young people of these communities, particularly given the obvious implications of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Decisions, known to many as "the separate but equal" decision. 

The photographs gathered by Du Bois and exhibited in Paris document that effort.   Nonetheless, the tragedy of this period is that the "separate but equal" approach only resulted in more inequality at every conceivable level.  Du Bois suggests in The Souls of Black Folk, citizens protect their rights through the use of the ballot. Without the ballot any minority population is defenseless and will incur outright hostility rather than support.  Or at least this seems to be the way it went. 

Another aspect of interest from a racial standpoint were the many entertainment features of the fairs, often located in their own section called the Midway at the Columbian Exposition and the Pike at the St. Louis Fair of 1904.  Also, President McKinley was murdered at the 1901 Buffalo Fair.

1904 St. Louis World's Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.  The Midway was called the Pike in St. Louis.

Native American Rider at Pan-American Exhibition, Buffalo 1901.  

The Crowd at the St. Louis Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.