Category Archives: Inspiration

Black Lives Matter

History, Inspiration, Race

I still haven’t been able to watch the video of George Floyd’s life slipping away all the way through. I don’t know if I ever can. As we lament Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and what happened to Christian Cooper, what I do know is how familiar this should sound to us. Before there was Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland and Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo, there was Lydia.

Her story is probably unfamiliar because as a slave, she wasn’t even given the dignity of a last name. When she started running from a punishment, the man renting her out from her master shot her in the leg. His behavior was so outrageous that a North Carolina jury in the 1820s convicted him of battery. But then Justice Ruffin, a slaveholder himself, reversed the conviction. With a candor that part of me appreciates, he declared that “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” He admitted that this necessarily followed from a slave system that sought to preserve a master’s power over his human property.

This past semester, I taught this case to a seminar on how race has shaped our legal system to flabbergasted law students. They all worked hard, and more importantly, they all cared about racial justice. I started to ask myself, what does it say about us that we have chosen not to pass down such knowledge? That question tore into me throughout the semester when student after student thanked me for offering the class and told me that they had never read an interview with a slave, read how states themselves explained why they were seceding from the Union during the Civil War (spoiler alert: it was slavery and they said so, not me), heard about debt peonage that echoes into our time, or read research about how segregated our schools still are today.

Many of them were surprised to learn that complaints about police brutality and the criminal justice system didn’t start with Black Lives Matter, the ’94 crime bill, the War on Drugs, or even the Civil Rights Movement. No, so many of us have had an instinctive fear of the police and distrust of the legal system for centuries, and those attitudes have passed from generation to generation. America’s very first prison, the Walnut Street Penitentiary, saw disparities between blacks and whites in the 1780s and 90s. Delegates to Texas’s 1868 constitutional convention found that instead of solving crimes against black citizens, police officers were participating in them. It noted that one county’s sheriff was, as the same time he was sworn to enforce the law, “the head of certain desperadoes who have committed numerous outrages, including murder, on the loyal whites and blacks of the county.” The sinking feeling that so many black Americans feel when they hear “the police are coming” has been a long time in coming. And when authorities did prosecute in Texas after the Civil War? In one case where a black man had been assaulted with intent to kill, the jury actually found the defendant guilty. They fined him a penny.

As a black man and a legal scholar, I can’t wave a wand to end the wealth gap between blacks and whites or change police practices. But what I can do, what maybe I’m uniquely positioned to do because of my life experience and my scholarly interests, is give you things to read. One of the most heartening things I’ve seen come out of this is people really taking education about our country’s legacy of racial injustice seriously. I want to encourage you to be a part of this if you have not been already.

Let me warn you: this list is long. It could take years to get through. But in a way, that represents the journey we will have to take if we want to end our racial inequalities. The black struggle for freedom and dignity has gone on for centuries. It will not end with one tweet or one Facebook post or one march or one election. It will take dedicated effort over time.

Some of what you read will sadden or enrage you. You’ll be angry that Cornelia Andrews was whipped so hard as a child for dropping dishes that she had scars more than 60 years later and that she grew up in a time and place where people who looked like her whispered in hushed tones about which slave had been beaten to death recently. You’ll be angry hearing W.L. Bost talk about having to look on as a child while a slave was whipped until his back was “cut to pieces,” had salt rubbed into the wounds, was made to lie in the scorching sun, and then was whipped again until he died. Your heart will break hearing about the women raped by their masters who “knew better than to not do what he say.” You’ll be chagrined to hear that slavery so reduced one mother’s view of humanity that she was thankful her master wasn’t as mean as the others because he didn’t sell her children away from her. There were no cameras to record their suffering, and there was no me-too movement to let them hold their perpetrators accountable. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t believe them. It was that they believed it appropriate to treat them this way. For the millions of slaves like them, no one will ever say their name.

You will probably be shocked to learn that Indiana once made it a crime for blacks even to set foot in the state, or that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld segregation in City of Boston v. Roberts nearly 50 years before the Supreme Court did so in Plessy v. Ferguson. Some of you will view assertions that we can’t judge slaveholders by modern standards in a new light when you read Quakers petitioning for an end to slavery in the 1600s or Thomas Jefferson lamenting that “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other” even as he couldn’t summon the will to act on that conviction and free his own slaves. It is scary to think that so many people could be exposed to truth, know that truth, and still turn away. And for those of you who’ve had the privilege to get lots of education, it should make you reflect. It’s easy to picture a racist as a poor southerner with a drawl who has little education. But the reality is that some of the worst offenders when it comes to participating in or sanctioning racial bigotry are the most educated. A college or graduate degree might confer prestige and increased earning power, but it does not confer racial enlightenment.

You’ll be nervous reading about just how precarious racial progress is when you dig into reconstruction. Many younger Americans have lived with the assumption that racial progress is inevitable, that the black freedom struggle can be represented by one line going up all the time. It probably looked that way in the late 1860s and early 1870s, just a few years after the Civil War. Black men participated in writing state constitutions, went to Congress, became judges, and helped establish bona fide public school systems for the first time in some states. The  picture they painted of what true multi-racial democracy could look like became only a vanishing glimpse. Some Americans participated in a wave of terrorism, voter suppression, and coercion to put blacks back where they belonged. Others who knew better turned their backs. In a historical nanosecond, the fruits of abolition and reconstruction disappeared. In many places, blacks became just as bad off as they had been in slavery. The movement for racial equality is always one backlash away from ending.

But there is more. I hope the list leaves you with the insight that it’s not enough to be anti-police violence or even anti-racism. For people who want to be allies to the black community, it’s not enough to feel sorrow for us. You need to be pro-black. I have seen lots of people criticizing white supremacy and expressing disgust with whites that don’t “get it.” The key in this moment, though, is not to think worse of white people. It’s to think better of black people.

You need to take authentic pride in the contributions we have made. Our experience is not just one of being victimized, it’s one of succeeding even though we were set up to fail. I want you to be grateful for the priceless literary and intellectual inheritance black authors have left us with for centuries. To that end, I’ve included some novels and poetry that have been meaningful to me. I want you to be inspired by Jackie Robinson and Ella Baker and Arthur Ashe and Ida B. Wells, so I have included some biographies. Even as a child, I knew how important it was for blacks to know these stories and to take pride in our achievements. What has become apparent is how important it is for everyone else. Even though the circumstances of the black experience are often to be pitied, we’ve left contributions to be envied.

We live in an era where people talk about wokeness a lot. Sometimes as an epithet and sometimes as a badge of honor. But if to be woke means to be actually enlightened about the racial issues that still plague us, it is something to aspire to. There are a lot of ways you could measure that. You could look at your friend group. You could look at the entertainment you consume. If you’re in a position of authority, you could look at who you hire and promote. You could look at what your house of worship’s demographics are like. One really important question so many of us have overlooked: what’s on your bookshelf?

Take a look at these materials. Read them. Reflect on them. Discuss them with friends and family. You won’t be the same after you do. And then remember that what I have suggested here is but a drop in the ocean of the materials we could read.

General Historical Books

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

A Brave Black Regiment by Luis Emilio

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois

America’s Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles Payne

From Jim Crow to Civil Rights by Michael Klarman

Biographies

Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes by Andrew Young

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe

Jackie Robinson: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northrop

A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula Giddings

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow

Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro by John David Smith

Articles

“Segregation Now” by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the Atlantic

“The Birth of Race-Based Slavery” by Peter Wood in Slate Magazine

“The Free Black Experience in Antebellum Wilmington, North Carolina: Refining Generalizations About Race Relations” by Richard Rohrs in the Journal of Southern History

“The Negro in Indiana Before 1881” by Earl McDonald in Indiana Magazine of History

“From Slavery to Freedom in Mississippi’s Legal System” by James Currie in the Journal of Negro History

“The Continuing Evolution of Reconstruction History” by Eric Foner in the OAH Magazine of History

“Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison” by Leslie Patrick Stamp in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History

“Slavery Revised: Peonage in the South” by N. Gordon Carper in Phylon

“Red Shirt Violence, Election Fraud, and the Demise of the Populist Party” by James M. Beeby in the North Carolina Historical Review

“The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery” by Thomas A. Foster in the Journal of the History of Sexuality

“The Ku Klux Klan During Reconstruction: The South Carolina Episode” by Herbert Shapiro in the Journal of Negro History

Novels/Poetry

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Wench by Dolen Perkins Valdez

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Sula by Toni Morrison

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Primary Sources

Interview with Cornelia Andrews, Ex-Slave Stories (pages 28–31); Interview with W.L. Bost, Ex-Slave Stories (pages 139–146). The Works Progress Administration interviewed many slaves during the New Deal. For a full list of interviews, go here. For the specific interviews, go to volume 11, part 1. You would do well to go through as many of them as you can.

Transcript of 1868 Texas Constitutional Convention, Report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence.

1688 Quaker Petition Against Slavery

Query XIV and Query XVIII of Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

Transcript of Arkansas’ 1868 constitutional convention, pages 490–512

Southern Declarations of Secession

Court Decisions

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198 (1850)

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)

Clark v. Board of School Directors, 24 Iowa 266 (1868)

State v. Mann, 2 Dev. 263 (N.C. 1829)

Reflections on Martin Luther King Day

History, Inspiration, politics, Race

Today, Martin Luther King is arguably the closest thing we have in this country to a national saint. What I mean is, most of us think of him as someone who produced a miracle in achieving civil rights. He’s someone that all Americans feel like they can rally around. Politicians from both parties routinely quote him. A snippet from one of his speeches is supposed to settle debates by itself.

I’m sure this adulation would surprise Dr. King. I’m reminded of that when I read his letter from the Birmingham jail. I’ll never get over what a remarkable document it is—he produced something more cogent and more knowledgeable from a jail cell than many of us could do with a computer and internet access and unlimited time. The letter quotes from the Bible, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Socrates. Anyway, at the time, clergy in Birmingham criticized Dr. King’s actions as untimely and called them extreme. That view didn’t disappear when Dr. King died in 1968. During the congressional debate over whether Dr. King should have a national holiday, Jesse Helms accused him of “action-oriented Marxism,” and claimed he harbored “radical political views.” The result (according to Helms) was that Dr. King’s “very name itself remains a source of tension, a deeply troubling symbol of divided society.”

What Dr. King did in his letter, among other things, was take on the idea that moderation was the highest good, unity the most important consideration. The ministers who had attacked him didn’t want him to rock the boat too much or cause too much division. They used the word “extreme” as an epithet to undermine his cause. No one wants to be seen as extreme, after all. But Dr. King reminds us that the same Jesus his clergy critics professed to worship gave his followers an extreme definition of love: that they were to love their enemies. He goes on to quote Lincoln’s admonition that America could not remain a nation half slave and half free, and Thomas Jefferson’s claim that all men were created equal, ideas that many saw as radical at one time.

After recounting our heartbreaking experience with slavery and the daily indignities racism inflicted on blacks, Dr. King demonstrated that the black community stood at a crossroads. For those who wanted change, there were those “who have lost faith in America” and “have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil,’” and those in King’s movement. The question Dr. King posed is “not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” That is a question that should stay with us.

Dr. King teaches us that there is never a good time to demand justice. Frequently, calls for a more just society will strike those in power as “extreme.” Today, most of us take for granted that amusement parks shouldn’t close their doors to blacks and that blacks traveling should not be denied lodging at hotels because of their race. And yet those ideas were well outside the mainstream for much our history.  So for those working towards a more just society, I hope Dr. King’s example gives you heart. If you’re willing to persist in the face of criticism, you may find that what is radical today will be conventional wisdom tomorrow.

When Life Closes Doors, Watch This is Us

Inspiration, Pop Culture

Last week’s episode of This is Us got me thinking about how we deal with closed doors in life. In the episode, we see repeated flashbacks to Kevin’s high school football career. He was such a standout quarterback that he could turn his nose up at a scholarship offer from the University of Pittsburgh—surely he was going to Notre Dame or another powerhouse program. The NFL would follow.

His knee had other ideas. On one play, a defender tackled him hard in the knee and he had to be taken off the field in a stretcher. After an MRI, his dad had to give him the terrible news. His knee would likely never allow him to play football again. In an instant, dreams he had harbored for years were destroyed. What sticks with me is what his dad told him next: I know football isn’t the only talent you have. It may take you a while to figure out what that talent is, but it’ll be special.

I’m sure that must have been so hard to believe laying there in that hospital bed. But as we find out, Kevin ended up having a successful acting career. In fact, his talent for acting is something he probably wouldn’t have discovered if he had kept playing football. Looking back, Kevin’s life turned out far differently than he had imagined as a teenager. But can we really say it was worse?

Somebody reading this may have just found out that a door they had been working towards most of their lives suddenly closed. For you, I say take heart. Whatever talent it was you used to pursue that opportunity, it isn’t your only one. That door may no longer be open, but somewhere there is another one that is.