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.

Of The Dawn of Freedom

Trying to remember how I first came to Dubois.  I know it was after I went to Yale, and the year my own book came out (Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman) in 1979.   


Knowing so little then of Dubois and the Souls of Black Folk (a foundational work in the Afro American intellectual tradition)I guessed was what people meant when they said I was too ignorant to have written a book diagnosing the problems of black gender politics in the 1960s and 1970s.  


It is certainly true that when I wrote Black Macho, I knew virtually nothing of the Ivy League or the HBCUs, nor the many gifts they had shared with one another, black and white sisters and  brothers. But then I encountered Robert Stepto's book Beyond the Veil, which came out the same year as Black Macho.  This book was the beginning of a coherent and theoretical Afro American literary critical discourse for me and a lot of other people. He built his theory of an African American literary canon around "The Souls of Black Folk."

*****
"Of the Dawn of Freedom" is the title of the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois' celebrated masterpiece Souls of Black Folk.  Du Bois tells the story of Reconstruction as rarely heard in 1903, and at least as little known in 2011.  I have heard it said that Souls of Black Folk is too conventional and difficult text for our time but I find it difficult to imagine how one can be adequately introduced to the disappointments and horrors of Federal Reconstruction, particularly for the first time, in a better manner.

This chapter is a work of poetry at the same time that reading it can leave no doubt as to what the problems were, why Reconstruction failed. Du Bois makes it clear, it failed because it did not go nearly far enough.  It did not go nearly far enough because of bitterness and racism that loomed over the newly freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War.

The chapter begins and ends with exactly the same sentence as if to represent a hopeless and circular process: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line . . ."  It's a famous line often taken out of context and used to represent the importance and the depth of the entire book, as though this prediction in 1903 was the most important thing about the book, when in fact what the book communicates about the world that preceded 1903 is much more important than what it can tell us about the future.

But also the beauty of the book is first revealed in the poetry of this chapter in the passages in which Du Bois attempts to capture the misery and hopelessness of the former slaves, a picture he evokes from imagination since he was not yet born when the Civil War occured in the early 1860s.

Quotations from Chapter 2, Of The Dawn of Freedom--

***The war had naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within the lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon; old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt, --a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress.

***Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year's, 1863.  A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist.  Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring "What must be done with the slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?"

***Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them.  In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.  There too came the characteristic military remedy: 

'The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields about the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated 'Field-order Number Fifteen.'

The purposes of the Freedman's Bureau:

****Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed.  They were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in making fair contracts for them . . . 

See lecture by Professor David Blight on Reconstruction at Yale University at the following link:


http://academicearth.org/lectures/black-reconstruction-economics-of-land-and-labor

The Negro Exhibition Complied by WEB Du Bois

Negro Exhibition Diagram, 1900 Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Souls of Black Folk is now available in so many different editions that it is impossible to keep track of them all plus their various additions to the text but The Illustrated Souls of Black Folk edited and annotated by Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. is a particular favorite of mine because of its use of photographs and other materials stemming from The Negro Exhibition, which Du Bois compiled for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Du Bois's purpose was to document for the world the economic and educational advances African Americans had made since their Emancipation from slavery in the United States of America. That Du Bois used photography the way he did at the turn-of-the century had much to do with recent advances in the technology of photography and its popularization via the blossoming popular culture of world's fairs and the related media of the illustrated press, journalism, postcards and film.

Cameras and the film needed to produce photographs were becoming increasingly accessible in middle class and working class communities. Providing the services of a photographic studio where one could purchase a portrait of oneself or of one's family was becoming a popular business in urban black communities as well as in cities all over the world of every description.

These photographs Du Bois commissioned and compiled of black businesses, black churches, black schools, and their occupants were the beginning of a trend in African American popular culture that would continue from the turn-of-the-century through the 1960s. As other media would increase in popularity in mainstream American culture, photography would not be displaced in black communities until much later because blacks had significantly less access to the mainstream of popular culture as represented by the corporatization of film, television, publishing and the mainstream press.

Only since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s have blacks had even hypothetical access to "mainstream" media. What they had instead was a separate press, separate towns, schools, and a largely separate (but not equal) popular culture, albeit in all aspects of performance, particularly musical performance. Ironically, with the success of the Civil Rights Movement came the collapse of much of this separate culture. As is common with popular culture generally, a lot of it has been lost without documentation partly because little value had been placed on it before.

With the rise of a computer technology and the internet, the possibility of making available to researchers generally the record that does survive has intersected with the rise of an audience which values these materials.

Among the textual materials supplementing Souls in Provenzo's version are:

1) "The Emancipation Proclamation"

2) "An Act to Establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees"

3) Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Speech" (a portion of which is included on the spoken word cd)

4) Du Bois's essay "The Talented Tenth"

5) Booker T Washington's "Nineteenth Annual Report of the Principal of Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute"

6) Ida B. Wells' "Tortured and Burned Alive"; "

7) Du Bois's Atlanta University Report on "The Negro in the Black Belt"

8) Du Bois Crisis editorial "Colored Men Lynched Without Trial"

9) Selections from Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro10) Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Negro Spirituals"

The quality of illustration is very poor but the choices are interesting and instructive at least to me, never having had minimal access to any of this material prior to the rise of the internet and the two years I spent at Cornell University as a Visiting Professor, which gave me my first real access as an insider to a world class research library since the time I briefly spent in the early 80s at Yale University.

 Provenzo reproduces via photocopy some of the actual pages of Du Bois's exhibition, some actual images and photographs taken from the pages of The Crisis, the journal Du Bois created under the auspices of the NAACP founded in 1906. Provenzo also includes sheet music covers, political cartoons and illustrations, and 19th century photographs taken from publications dealing with topics discussed in The Souls of Black Folk.

Professor Eugene Provenzo is also the author of a particularly useful reconstruction of the Negro Exhibition online at http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm.  As he notes although much of the material contained in the Exhibition are available in the photo archives of the Library of Congress there are some missing pieces.

Wiliam Edgar Burghhardt Du Bois, "The American Negro at Paris."  The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Vol. XXII, New York, November 1900, #5, pp. 575-577.

The Sorrow Songs in Souls of Black Folk

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
These words are taken from the final essay in Souls on the Sorrow Songs, or the Slave Spirituals. He regards the spirit of African American culture as most epitomized by these anonymous songs composed improvisationally by the slaves, themselves, as they became Christians in a New World of deprivation and torment. While he isn't yet ready to include all of African American music and culture in his highest claims for the "Sorrow Songs," nonetheless he poses the question and the problem of racial differences one last time in this essay.

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Passage also taken from "Of the Sorrow Songs" in Souls of Black Folk.

     African American music has a tendency toward spiritual inflection and in such cases listening is like being in a time machine. In some cases it seems almost as though the chords or the tone transports the listener back into the history, in particular of slavery and Jim Crow persecution.  This seems to me the case regardless the rendition of presentation--whether it is gospel, primitive ring shout or operatic (as it was with the original Jubilee singers and subsequent performance groups).  "Authentic" American music and folk culture is made up of a mysterious amalgam of black and white, sacred and profane, formal and vernacular.  Du Bois' elitism in this regard signals the always present anxieties of the determination in African American pronouncements on the topic.

Chronology: 1861-1909

1861--Southern States form Confederacy in response to election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Civil War begins.
**Confederate States/Territories:Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, Indian (later Oklahoma) and New Mexico Territories--a total of 14
**Union States/Territories:New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, West Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, District of Columbia, Washington, Utah, Nebraska and Colorado Territories--a total of 28

1863--Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in Confederate "rebellious" states "forever free." 186,000 African Americans enlist during the final two years of the Civil War.

1865--Unions wins the Civil War. Lincoln assassinated. Southern states enact "Black Codes." Congress passes 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

1866--Congress passes 14th Amendment granting citizenship to African Americans. Reconstruction begins. Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee. Congress authorizes four black units to fight Indians in the West. Dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by Native Americans.

1868--W.E.B. Du Bois born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt.

1869--Congress passes 15th Amendment giving black men the vote.

1870-1871 Congress passes Federal Ku Klux Klan Acts to protect black voters.

1875--The State of Tennessee is the first to institute Jim Crow (segregation) Law.

1877--Federal Troops withdraw from the South; Reconstruction ends.

1880--60,000 "exodusters" leave Nashville for Kansas to escape Jim Crow.

1880--Slavery abolished in Cuba.

1884--European nations convene in Berlin and divide the continent of Africa into colonies.

1884--Du Bois graduates from high school, the only black student in a class of 13.

1888--Slavery abolished in Brazil.

1890--Du Bois awarded B.A. cum laude in philosophy at Harvard. Begins graduate school at Harvard in political science. Frances Harper publishes her novel IOLA LEROY.

1890-- (Jim Crow Law) Segregation is made law in the state of Mississippi. Begins to use literacy tests to disenfranchise black voters.

1892--Du Bois visits 12 year old Helen Keller (blind and deaf child) at her school in Boston with the philosopher and Harvard Professor William James (brother of Henry James).

1892--Ida B. Wells begins her anti-lynching campaign in response to the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee.

1893--Colombian Exposition in Chicago: Frederick Douglass headquarters at Haitian Pavilion with Paul Lawrence Dunbar as his assistant; Dahomey Village inspired IN DAHOMEY, a Broadway show by Bert Williams and George Walker; the debut of Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima, the pancake queen. Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson" is included in the American art exhibition.

1895--Atlanta Compromise speech by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton Exposition, describing racial segregation as an opportunity and black suffrage as not yet necessary. Du Bois who is the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in this same year, writes Washington a note: "Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta--it was a word fitly spoken."

1896--(Jim Crow) Segregation made law in the state of Louisiana. Plessy v. Ferguson, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Jim Crow Law as constitutional.
The decision stated, "The object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the war, but in the nature of things it could not have intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

1897--Du Bois helps to found the American Negro Academy. Delivers address, "The Conservation of Races," calling on American blacks to serve as the "advance guard" of black racial development globally "and to maintain a separate identity within American society." Becomes professor of economics and history at Atlanta University.

1898--Spanish American War. Black soldiers played a major role in the winning of the Battle at San Juan Hill, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The U.S. victory against the Spanish led to the American possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and the Caroline islands, in one of the most poorly understood episodes in U.S. history.
Link: http://www.spanamwar.com/AfrcanAmericans.html

1898--Wilmington Massacre, in which Dixie Democrats violently remove Republicans from office and prevent blacks from voting.

1899--Charles Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION published. Portrays in a novel the Wilmington Massacre.

1899--Sam Hose accused of murder and lynched in Atlanta. Du Bois recognizes that activism is unavoidable.

1900--Segregation (Jim Crow Law) begins in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

1900--WEB Du Bois travels by steerage to the Universelle Exposition in Paris to install the Exhibition on the Progress of African Americans. Receives gold medal. Attends first Pan-African Conference in London, and delivers speech in which he first says, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

1900--Pauline Hopkins writes and edits THE COLORED AMERICAN, an illustrated African American journal, in Boston. She also publishes her novel CONTENDING FORCES.

1901--Article defending the Freedmen's Bureau, which will later become a chapter in SOULS is published in the Atlantic Monthly in March.*

1903--WEB Du Bois publishes THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, which brings him to national prominence and makes public his opposition to Washington's views.

1906--In homage to John Brown, the Niagara Movement first meets at Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia.

Detail from racist postcard from Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, p. xii in THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW by Richard Wormser, Companion Volume to PBS Series, St. Martins Press 2003.

1903-1909--Jim Crow practices (segregation) spread from Kansas to Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey.

1898-1909--Major race riots in Atlanta, Georgia; Wilmington, NC; Ft. Riley, Kansas, New Orleans, Louisiana; Ft Riley, Illinois, Greensburg, Indiana, Springfield, Ohio; New York, NY.

World's Fairs at the Turn of the 19th Century

Since Du Bois's photographic Negro Exhibition was presented at the Exposition Universelle 1900, one of the most successful of the international fairs, I thought this might be a good time to point out that there are several significant intersections of world's fairs around the turn of the century and African American Cultural History.

Composer Scott Joplin introduced ragtime at the Columbian Exhibition. His most popular piece, Maple Leaf Rag, is included on the cd of music which comes with the Norton Anthology. There are two versions of it, including the latter one played by the great jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, with a variation that helps to explain the transition from 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.

African Americans were given a special day at the fair which was the focus of much negative stereotyping in the Chicago Press.  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.  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.  

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.

Of The Sorrow Songs

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

These words are taken from the final essay in Souls on the Sorrow Songs, or the Slave Spirituals.  He regards the spirit of African American culture as most epitomized by these anonymous songs composed improvisationally by the slaves, themselves, as they became Christians in a New World of deprivation and torment.   While he isn't yet ready to include all of African American music and culture in his highest claims for the "Sorrow Songs," nonetheless he poses the question and the problem of racial differences one last time in this essay.

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Also taken from "Of the Sorrow Songs" in Souls of Black Folk.

African American music has a tendency toward spiritual inflection and in such cases listening is like being in a time machine.  In some cases it seems almost as though the chords or the tone transports the listener back into the history, in particular of slavery and Jim Crow persecution.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow--PBS Series

The first two parts of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow are 60 minutes each. A lot of information is communicated in a fairly efficient manner. If you had seen DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) (the entire film can be viewed at video.google.com or read the two books -- The Klansman (1903) and The Leopard's Spots (1901) by Thomas Dixon upon which the plot of the The Birth of a Nation was based-- you will recognize many of the images and substantial portions of the narrative, except that Griffith simply reversed antagonist with victim, making blacks the antagonists and whites the victims who then bravely bring the "Negro rebellion" under control. It is just crazy but it is a skillfully made film, in fact innovative in the genre at the time and there were no lack fo racist audiences who were eager to see it in 1915. It didn't help at all that the president then, Woodrow Wilson, had it screened it at the White House and then endorsed the film in a statement that was then included in the film.

The odd thing about The Birth of a Nation, which presents itself as being about the Civil War and Reconstruction, is that it is actually about events related to the political ascendancy of Jim Crow taking place at the turn of the century and in the early 20th century.  In this we see a characteristic danger in historical film dramas (from Gone With the Wind to JFK), which is that they almost always reveal a lot more about the time in which they were made than about the period represented.

But the important thing about paying attention to this now is to see what happens when people get confident enough to believe that the situation is settled and that nothing can overturn the progress that has been made. In a country of our size and history, that probably won't ever be true. So I think one should be careful and humble.

I am hoping we can find time to schedule some portion of a screening of The Rise and Fall. The book by Richard Wormser (St. Martin's Press 2003) has some interesting illustrations, as does the dvd (which can be purchased via California Newsreel) and the PBS website.

As somebody who is interested in tracking the history of images in photography and film for what the surviving fragments can tell us about events and people, it is irritating beyond belief to encounter again and again this dumbed down techno-wizardry which will use the ocean lapping up on the beach or the side of a boat as a perpetual stand-in for the slave trade, or any vaguely old vaguely humble group of blacks in a photograph to stand in for a group of slaves, or ex-slaves or migrants to the North, as the case may warrant. The photographers are never identified even when they are known. The situation in which the photograph is known is never talked about.

They call them stock images or stock footage.  It happens all the time in films and other uses of photographs and I never was bothered about it at all until I became a student of African American history and culture, so I would suppose it happens with images of people in every society now.  The way images are used in a technological society is designed to eventually make it impossible to track their genealogy of creation and use.  

Photographic and filmic images rarely come with provenances in the way that art images are expected to have, and when they do, it is a deep dark secret difficult to obtain and impossible to make public.

In the Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, I recognize a fair number of photographs that are used.  

In particular one photographer who did very special work, Julian Dimock.  Soon after the turn of the century, he and his father, a writer of travel literature, went on a trip to Columbia, South Carolina and Beaufort, North Carolina and took a number of pictures of the people in the black communities there immediately following the downfall of the Republican Party and the forcing out of office of all black office holders.  

The Souls of Black Folk was published right before their trip.  The resulting photographs, are a perfect accompaniment to Du Bois's text. These photographs were taken in Beaufort, North Carolina (an isolated region of the state) and Columbia, South Carolina of  black men, women and children following the so-called "Wilmington Massacre" portrayed strikingly by the African American writer Charles Chesnutt in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) in which white racists physically prevented black registered voters from voting in local elections and also forcibly ejected local black office holders from office.  

The people look poor and a little shabby but their dignity and coherence is striking. In particular, most of the photographs were of children who make the best photographic subjects in all circumstances. Dimocks' pictures had been hidden away in the Museum of Natural History for decades when somebody there decided to publish them in a book so that we could see what this community looked liked given the extraordinary political pressures of the time. Several of these photographs are used in the documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, without any mention of their origin.  Probably the reason why it took so long for Dimock to be presented in such a monograph is partly because the lack of popularity in our time for photographs of black people taken by white photographers, particularly in this period of Jim Crow history.  

Included in Dimock's collection was a photograph of Robert Smalls, a native Beaufortian whose life is described in Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915.  Smalls had served five terms as a U.S. congressman but by 1904 when Dimock took his picture such offices were no longer viable for blacks because of Jim Crow laws. 

This shuffling of unidentified images is a technique which has existed for a long time, but which has become associated in my mind with Ken Burns' approach to documentary as popularized in his series on The Civil War.  The historical critique of his documentary on The Civil War is more highly developed than the criticism of his many other documentaries, as demonstrated in Robert Brent Toplins' Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (Oxford University Press 1996).