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A Free South The Black Arts Movement and the politics of emancipation B Y E L I A S R O D R I Q U E S

I n the 1960s, the free southern Thea ter, an organization founded by a group of activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), traveled to a church in a pre-

dominantly Black, rural corner of Mississippi. There they staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, an absurdist drama about characters conversing as they wait for someone who never arrives. The play may have seemed like a strange choice—who would imag- ine that Beckett might connect with rural Black Amer- icans in the throes of the civil rights movement?—but it found at least one admirer in civil rights leader Fan- nie Lou Hamer. “I guess we know something about waiting, don’t we?” Hamer said from the audience.

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Everyone agreed, and as they discussed the play, the conversation eventually turned to slavery and prisons. “We had this incredible discussion with people who barely had a sixth-grade education,” Denise Nicholas, an actress in the Free Southern Theater, said later. And drama—even high-modernist, experimental drama—functioned as political education.

This was the Free Southern Theater’s goal. As cofounder John O’Neal recalled of its creation:

We claimed to be playwrights and poets; yet the political facts of life presented by the situation we first learned of in the South called for a life of useful (political or economic) engagement. How could we remain true to ourselves and our own concerns as artists and at the same time remain true to our developing recognition of political responsibility?

movement in the South were its electoral victories, which allowed politicians like Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, to allocate funding to Black arts institutions. “The movement in the South,” Smethurst writes, “saw some of the most intense publicly supported in- stitutionalization of African American art and culture of anywhere in the coun- try.” Financing these institutions enabled them to outlast not only the Black Arts Movement’s greatest period of success in Northern cities like New York but also the early stages of post-civil-rights Southern conservatism. Their longev- ity ensured that these institutions con- tinued to provide essential services and arts instruction to Black communities. In his careful attention to this history, Smethurst reminds readers that building solid institutions can provide a means of outlasting the backlash that inevitably follows radical progress.

S methurst’s history begins with Marcus Garvey’s early-20th-century Black nationalism and the Black communism of the 1930s,

which together, he argues, laid the groundwork for the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements. In the 1910s and ’20s, Garvey pushed for the creation of a nation in Africa to which all the descendants of enslaved people could

Their answer was a theater group that aimed, as another cofounder, Doris Derby, put it, “to take the plays out to the rural areas, go around and perform out in the cotton fields or in the churches.” They did so out of the belief that, as Nicholas later explained, “the theater, the images, the language, the physicality of it would open doors in people’s minds that they didn’t necessarily need to read a lot of books to get to.” For the Free Southern Theater’s members, bringing the stage to the countryside made political education accessible while enabling artists to partic- ipate in politics.

As James Smethurst chronicles in Behold the Land: The Black Arts Movement in the South, the Free Southern Theater was just one of a number of institutions that sought to marry art with local Black Pow- er politics in the South. In a sweeping history of arts institutions from the 1930s to the ’80s, the book tells the story of how the turn to Black Power politics in the ’60s produced a corollary Black Arts Movement that was especially long-lasting in the South. The Black Power and Black Arts movements, in Smethurst’s account, were “so twinned and joined at the hip that it is impossible, really, to tell where one begins and the other ends.” While Black Power generally aimed to develop Black autonomy rather than gain inclu- sion in American society, the Black Arts Movement sought to produce a culture that valued Black people and used cultural forms like theater to encourage their entry into Black Power politics.

How the Free Southern Theater and other Southern Black Arts Movement institutions were funded is central to Smethurst’s story. As he notes, among the enduring successes of the Black Power

repatriate. His biggest organization was the Universal Negro Improvement As- sociation, which likely reached millions of people at its height in the early 20th century. While Garvey was largely based in New York City, the association was especially prominent in the South: In Miami the UNIA organized self-defense, and in New Orleans it supported labor organizing and a clinic providing health care to Black people. It also sponsored a jazz band, foreshadowing the twinned emphasis of later Black nationalists on material change and cultural production.

Garveyism declined in the late 1920s, after Garvey’s 1927 deportation to Jamai- ca. In its wake, many UNIA members flocked to the Communist Party, which became increasingly prominent in Black politics, especially in the South, where the struggle against the Depression and segregation attracted many new members to the party and its subsidiary organiza- tions. Art as well as labor politics were central sites for Black and white Commu- nists organizing in the South.

Eventually headquartered in Birming- ham, Ala., a Communist Party stronghold, the Southern Negro Youth Congress was founded in 1937 both to pursue revolu- tionary change and to promote Black art. The SNYC’s Puppet Caravan Theatre performed plays about labor and voting rights for Southern farmworkers. It also provided political experience for activists like Ernest Wright, who helped lead the People’s Defense League in New Orle- ans, which marched for jobs and the right to vote and against police brutality.

Elsewhere in New Orleans, the Dillard History Unit, founded in 1936 and funded by the Federal Writers’ Project, employed the novelist Margaret Walker and contrib- uted to the history The Negro in Louisiana. And in Atlanta in 1942, the visual artist and professor Hale Woodruff joined W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University’s People’s School in creating a program to educate lo- cal adults. In these and other organizations, Smethurst writes, the cross-organizational politics rooted in the Communist Party “became the most viable space for building radical African American institutions with a bent toward Black self-determination in most of the South.”

McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare resulted in the persecution of left- ists in the early postwar years, but many of these Black cultural workers continued to be active in

Behold the Land The Black Arts Movement in the South By James Smethurst University of North Carolina Press. 256 pp. $29.95

Elias Rodriques is the author of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running.

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theB&Ab o o k s a r t s their communities. In 1941, John Biggers enrolled at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he was taught by Elizabeth Catlett, who had worked with the Dillard History Unit. In 1949, Biggers joined Texas Southern University, one of the nation’s histori- cally Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as head of the art department, where he pushed students and instructors to interact with local Black communities. In the 1950s, he began painting murals in poor Black areas in Houston. Biggers was not alone in his persistence: Organizers like Anne and Carl Braden in Kentucky and writers like Sterling Brown in Washington, D.C., continued the project of keeping radical ideas and Black organizing alive in a time of segregation and anti-communist repression.

The Black radicalism that informed the Communist Party and many of its subsidiary groups in the South also provided an impetus for Black activism in an era in which the civil rights movement was heating up. In 1949, the demise of the SNYC led several members, including Esther Cooper Jackson, to move north to work for Paul Robeson’s Black Marxist newspaper Freedom (where a young Lorraine Hansberry also worked).

ranging from direct action nonviolent pro- test to actual armed self-defense.”

Amid the tumult of the civil rights movement, Black artists sought out new means of making their work relevant to Black politics. In 1964, two members of SNCC’s literacy project and a journalist employed by the Mississippi Free Press put their interest in theater to good use by forming the Free Southern Theater. Conceived as a cultural wing of SNCC, the group offered a writing workshop and staged drama for Black Southerners out of its base at Tougaloo College, until police harassment forced it to move to New Orleans. Though rehearsed, the Free Southern Theater’s productions required improvisation because Black Southern- ers often interacted with the performers, including on one occasion when an au- dience member stood onstage for much of the play. One cofounder, John O’Neal, encouraged as much when he told the au- dience, “You are the actors.” The theater group may have read the lines and pro- vided the set, but poor Black Southerners were the actual protagonists, and their lives were the central dramatic arc.

Like many radical Black organizations in the mid-1960s, the Free Southern Theater eventually moved past the inte- grationist politics of the early civil rights movement and began to concentrate on developing Black culture. This focus on cultural nationalism was occasioned in part by the arrival in 1965 of Tom Dent, a New Orleans native who had left the South for New York. In his time in the North, Dent had participated in Black cultural and political organizations whose members included Maya Angelou, Ish- mael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Harold Cruse, and Archie Shepp. But Dent had grown frustrated with the factionalism of many Black Power and Black Arts Movement

activists in New York and decided to return to the Big Easy to help bring their ideas (but not their infighting) home. Once there, Dent soon fell in with the Free Southern Theater, and through his extensive contacts the group garnered new financial, personal, and institution- al support. The following year, Dent became chairman of the theater’s board and facilitated its move from “an inte- grated civil rights institution,” Smethurst writes, “to a more self-consciously Black theater with a strong nationalist bent.” This change meant the departure of the group’s white members, but it also pro- vided new possibilities. Under Dent, the Free Southern Theater transitioned “from civil rights to Black Arts, from Negro to Black, from serving the folk of the Black South to being emphatically southern in a Black modality.”

Organizations across the South fol- lowed a similar trajectory. At Howard University in Washington, D.C., the poet Sterling Brown mentored students who became key organizers in SNCC as well as those who became noted Black Power activists, including Stokely Carmichael, and Black Arts Movement writers, such as Baraka and Toni Morrison. Off cam- pus, the poet Gaston Neal used War on Poverty funds to establish the Cardo- zo Area Arts Committee, which in 1965 started the New School of Afro-American Thought, an education and cultural center that taught literature courses to nearby residents. Its opening event featured Black artists ranging from the Harlem Renais- sance to the Black Arts Movement, from Brown to Baraka. In the following years, it hosted many important jazz musicians, including Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Joseph Jarman. At another HBCU, Nashville’s Fisk University, in 1966, the novelist John Oliver Killens organized the Black Writ- ers Conference. Though Baraka was not among the participants, “the new militant nationalist writing was a specter haunting the conference,” Smethurst notes. In time, that specter made itself felt.

I n the late 1960s and the early ’70s, Black Power radicals and artists opened new institutions and trans- formed older ones to

marry the arts and politics. At the 1967 Black Writers Conference at Fisk, Baraka dominated the proceedings, while several older Black writers, including Gwendolyn

In 1955, Freedom succumbed to a lack of funding, in part because potential donors feared FBI harassment (and rightfully so, since the bureau was known to have pho- tographed the license plates of those who attended Robeson’s concerts). But in 1961, Jackson and other former SNYC leaders started the journal Freedomways, which repurposed 1930s radicalism and socialism for the ascendant civil rights movement. Freedomways published older Black radi- cals like Shirley Graham Du Bois, rising stars like Audre Lorde, and Black nation- alists like Sonia Sanchez. In Smethurst’s words, Freedomways “served as a model of what a radical Black political and cultural journal that embodied the principle of self-determination might be…and practi- cally supported the work and institutions of younger Black artists and intellectu- als.” In so doing, Freedomways created a bridge between different generations of the South’s Black left and helped to lay the foundations for a new era of social activism and radical arts.

T he South proved to be an especially fertile ground from which civil rights organizers were able to harvest the fruit of seeds

sown by past radical movements. In the 1960s, the region was home to about half of all Black Americans living in the Unit- ed States. It hosted a large consortium of HBCUs, which provided shelter for teachers who might have fallen victim to anti-communism at other institutions. And the South provided a home base for SNCC, the Southern Christian Leadership Con- ference, and many of the other best-known civil rights groups and organizers. “By the early 1960s,” Smethurst writes, “the South

was the terrain of the most vibrant and diverse grassroots Black polit- ical activity in the United States,

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Brooks, championed the Black Power and Black Arts movements. That same year, one of Brown’s mentees, Charlie Cobb, visited the pan-African Parisian bookstore Présence Africaine, which inspired him to create a Black nationalist bookstore, Drum and Spear, in D.C. with other SNCC alumni in 1968. Another of Brown’s men- tees, A.B. Spellman, moved from New York to Atlanta, where he joined More- house professor Stephen Henderson and the historian Vincent Harding in forming what would become the first Black think tank, the Institute of the Black World, which they founded in 1969. And though the Free Southern Theater stopped its tours that year, in part because of diminished funding, its mission of spreading Black culture and inspiring Black people to create their own cultural in- stitutions was sweeping the South.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the Black uprisings across the nation that followed pushed these organizers to reconsider the rela- tionship between their institutions and local Black communities. At the new- ly founded Drum and Spear, Cobb and others hosted political meetings, classes, and readings, including poetry by Gas- ton Neal. Drum and Spear Press also reprinted C.L.R. James’s 1938 A History of Pan-African Revolt and a translated col- lection of Palestinian poetry, Enemy of the Sun. Elsewhere in the city, James Garrett, whose family had a history of radical or- ganizing and who had helped found the Black studies program at San Francisco State, began running the Black studies department at the newly opened Federal City College. There, he hired Cobb and other SNCC alumni involved with Drum and Spear. As Cobb recalled:

The question of black education turned on the question or issue of what you were going to do with your education once you finished.... The question you had to confront as a college student was, “Upon gradu- ation, how am I going to use my ed- ucation for the black community?”

This pedagogical philosophy reori- ented many disciplines, from science to literature, toward practical means of serv-

ing Black people. Though clashes with administrators led Garrett and others to leave Federal City College and estab- lish a community school, the Center for Black Education, their new approach to the academy influenced other institutions.

Where D.C. became a hub for rethink- ing Black education, New Orleans served as a locus for rethinking Black art. In 1968, the Tulane Drama Review, edited by onetime Free Southern Theater member Richard Schechner, published its landmark “Black Theatre” issue. Among the offer- ings was Larry Neal’s foundational essay “The Black Arts Movement,” which de-

scribed the movement’s ongoing efforts as the cultural wing of Black Power. If the Black Arts Movement sought to create culture that aided autonomous po- litical efforts, as Neal suggested, the Free

Southern Theater put that theory into practice. At the time, its theater troupe for- mally separated from the group’s writers’ workshop, BLKARTSOUTH, then under the leadership of Dent and Kalamu ya Sa- laam. “For Black theater to have viability in our communities we must have a working tie to those communities,” Dent wrote of the group’s mission, “something more than the mere performance of plays now and then.” Consequently, BLKARTSOUTH was composed entirely of New Orleani- ans, presented their original work, and primarily cast residents as actors. By valo- rizing the workshop over the production, BLKARTSOUTH embodied a defining trait of the Black Arts Movement: It val- ued “process over product.”

Groups across the South likewise experimented with creating new insti- tutions to develop Black culture and po- litical thought. In 1969, the Institute for the Black World began running sem- inars in Atlanta. “We were trying to put forward the idea,” Vincent Harding later recalled, “that Black scholarship and Black activism were not meant to be separated…and that all of that should be permeated by the arts as well.” Members of Duke University’s Afro-American As- sociation followed through on Harding’s goals in Raleigh-Durham, when protests on campus led them to found Malcolm X Liberation University, which aimed to provide an alternative education for Durham’s Black residents, including

Duke students seeking refuge from a vi- olent campus. And in Nashville in 1970, HBCU faculty and staff founded People’s College to teach political and cultural analysis in ways that applied to every- day life. They did so because they saw educating Black people and creating a unique Black culture as essential to build- ing Black nationalism.

A s the Black Power and Black Arts movements pro- gressed across the South, they increasingly directed their energy toward elec-

toral campaigns as well as the arts and education. In his 1970 “Coordinator’s Statement,” delivered at the founding convention of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples in Atlanta, Baraka emphasized the importance of voter registration and mobilizing the Black vote. Art played a key part in that effort, with singers like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, and Isaac Hayes supporting Kenneth Gibson’s successful 1970 mayoral campaign in Newark. And these electoral victories, as Smethurst notes, also helped the Black Arts Move- ment by giving “Black people the ad- ministration of political apparatuses with significant control over material resources not before available to Black Power and Black Arts groups.”

Perhaps nowhere was the importance of electoral victories to bolster the Black Arts Movement more on display than in Atlanta. Following his election in 1973, the city’s “culture mayor,” Maynard Jack- son, pledged better funding for the arts. His former speechwriter Michael Lomax led that effort: In 1974 he, the poet Ebon Dooley, and another Jackson cam- paign staffer and writer, Pearl Cleage, founded the Neighborhood Arts Cen- ter, which provided arts education and hosted theater groups in a working-class Black neighborhood. Lomax also helped the writer Toni Cade Bambara secure a position as a writer in residence at Spel- man College, another HBCU. In 1975 Jackson appointed Lomax as director of cultural affairs, a position through which he continued financing Black Arts Move- ment institutions; and in 1978 Bambara, Dooley, and Alice Lovelace founded the Southern Collective of African Ameri- can Writers, which the Neighborhood Arts Center hosted. In 1979 Lo- max helped establish the Ful- ton County Arts Council, which

Radicals around the South sought to

build new institutions of Black culture.

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theB&Ab o o k s a r t s funded Black Arts Movement organiza- tions throughout the county. By gaining control of the government’s spending power through the vote, politicians like Lomax and Jackson, and artists like Bam- bara and Dooley, developed Atlanta into a hub for radical Black culture.

Regional collaborations bolstered these efforts. As the Free Southern The- ater and BLKARTSOUTH unraveled in the early 1970s, Dent turned his attention to arts organizations in the South more broadly. He had “a great dissatisfaction,” he later recalled, “with the situation in the early ’70s, because I knew that what they were doing in New York was about on the same level with us, but we just didn’t have any money.” Hoping to gain greater rec- ognition and funding, Dent founded the Southern Black Cultural Alliance, which held yearly business meetings at which various organizations could learn from one another how to solve their problems. The alliance also held a yearly conference that brought Black theater troupes and artists across the South to perform. Dent, Salaam, and others then wrote about the conference for a variety of magazines— most notably Hoyt Fuller’s Atlanta-based First World, which replaced Black World— as a means of garnering new exposure for their work. By helping artists across the South, the Southern Black Cultural Al- liance aided many Black Arts Movement groups in surviving difficult times.

Unfortunately, many of these orga- nizations, in Atlanta and in the South more generally, faltered as the federal government scaled back its local funding in the 1980s. In the same year that Ronald Reagan was elected, First World published its final issue. In 1981, when Lomax be- came chair of the Fulton County Arts Council, the federal government defund- ed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which had supported many local arts organizations; its 1982 replace- ment, the Job Placement Training Act, funded far fewer theaters than CETA had. The Reagan administration also provid- ed fewer community block grants, while increasingly conservative Southern state legislatures slashed the funding for Black Arts organizations. Though some man- aged to persevere, many others had to change their political mission to survive. But as Smethurst reminds his readers,

these organizations would have shut down much earlier had they been in other regions; their diffi-

culties in the 1980s after surviving many other conservative turns was less a mark of failure than it was a sign of success.

I n Behold the Land, Smethurst demonstrates that decades of organizing and institution building, from the Garveyite years

and the Popular Front to the civil rights movement, helped preserve a Black rad- icalism in the South that eventually be- came central to the Black Arts Movement in the region. This radicalism was passed on both directly, as when SNYC members published Black Arts writers in Freedom- ways, and indirectly, as when the South- ern Black Cultural Alliance provided a forum for Black Arts Movement workers to collaborate. But in all cases, the Black Arts and Black Power movements were driven by the goal “to build a new culture of Black cooperation and self-determi- nation.” Doing so through the arts had the potential to reorient Black political relations toward a collective building of Black autonomy. “The great strength of Black Arts, its grass- roots character, makes it hard to grasp,” Smethurst observes. “Black Arts activities and institutions ap- peared in almost ev- ery community and on every campus where there was an appre- ciable number of Black people.” By fol- lowing some of the lines of Black Arts networks, Smethurst gestures toward the broader collaborative endeavors that en- abled the movement to gain a foothold in the South and persevere through periods of conservatism.

Through interviews conducted with its surviving participants as well as archi- val research, Smethurst joins scholars like GerShun Avilez and Carter Mathes in revising the canonical understanding of the Black Arts Movement. Where Margo Crawford has argued, in Black Post-Black- ness, that the movement foreshadowed contemporary Black artists in their com- plication of the meanings of Blackness, Smethurst demonstrates that one way that the Black Arts Movement did so was by building institutions that shaped, if not the contemporary artists directly, then the consumers of the art they produce, the venues in which they produce it, and

the communities in which they grew up. This aesthetic legacy also bred a political one: The Black Arts Movement laid the foundation for contemporary community arts organizations, for the use of Black art in electoral campaigns, and for arts education as a Black radical, political practice. Though many Black Power or- ganizations eventually folded, the Black Arts Movement helped spread and insti- tutionalize their ideas.

This afterlife is especially clear in the long-lasting reach of Southern Black feminism. While scholars like Mary Hel- en Washington and activists like Mariame Kaba have worked to recover the often neglected history and legacy of midcen- tury Black radical feminists, Smethurst’s account also reminds us of the role of those and other Popular Front radicals in the formation of the Black Arts Move- ment, especially in the South. Among the SNYC leaders that Smethurst discusses, for instance, was one Alabaman, Sallye Davis. While she worked as a national officer for the SNYC, she was also raising her daughter, Angela, in the intellectual

and physical presence of Communist Party members. This early exposure to Marxism, one imagines, influ- enced not only Ange- la Davis’s great Black Power autobiography, edited by Toni Mor- rison and published in

1974, but also her intellectual production and anti-carceral radicalism today.

In a similar fashion, the legacy of many Southern Black Arts Movement organizations lives on in the present. As Smethurst argues, they helped “build new African American cultural institutions in historic African American communities that one finds throughout the South to- day, and the desire to construct networks between these institutions.” This institu- tional and coalitional approach ensured that the unraveling of specific institutions did not mark the end of the Black Arts story. If, as Fannie Lou Hamer observed after viewing the Free Southern The- ater’s production of Waiting for Godot, Black people know something about waiting, they also know something about the long campaign. Liberation may not come tomorrow, but building institutions might mean that freedom can be achieved in the future. N

The great strength of the Black Arts Movement was its

grassroots character.

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18 | History Today | January 2021

Despite his pioneering role in the struggle for racial equality and justice in Britain, Harold Moody remains relatively unknown. It is now 70 years since the publication of the last substantial biography of his life and career. Yet Moody’s story is significant, not least as a reminder that the history of black people and anti-racist activism in Britain long predates the Windrush generation.

When 492 West Indian migrants disembarked from the MV Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks in June 1948, Moody had already been dead for more than a year. By that time, he had actively promoted the cause of racial equality for the best part of two decades.

Moody also demonstrates how black Britons saw their campaign for the full rights of citizenship as one front in a broader global struggle for racial equality. Although Moody drew much inspiration from the Civil Rights movement in the US, his activism was not entirely imitative. On the contrary, his international vision led him to promote reform throughout the British Empire and beyond.

Harold Moody was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 8 October 1882. He came to Britain in 1904 to study medicine at King’s College London. Despite graduating at the top of his class, he found it impossible because of the colour of his skin to secure a position in the medical profession and had to establish a practice in Peckham, south London. This experience of discrimination, coupled with a devout Christian faith, impelled Moody’s activism.

Harold Moody’s Fight for Racial Equality

Compared with his American counterparts, the pioneer of the British civil rights movement is relatively unknown, but he is no less significant. Clive Webb

The fight for justice: men accused in the Scottsboro rape case, Alabama, 1931. Right: Harold Moody, 1930.

January 2021 | History Today | 19

In 1931, assisted by the African-American activist Charles Wesley, Moody took inspiration from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and established the League of Coloured Peoples. Although its membership never exceeded 500, the League became an influential advocate for equality.

Moody’s sense of common purpose with other campaigns against racism around the world led the League to promote educational and employment opportunities in British colonies throughout Africa and the Caribbean as a means of advancing their eventual independence. It furthermore petitioned the US Embassy in London against the lynching of African

20 | History Today | January 2021

Americans and for the release of the Scottsboro boys, nine black teenagers wrongly convicted of the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931, as well as successfully lobbying on behalf of black seamen against employment restrictions by Cardiff port authorities.

The League made its most important contribution to the cause of racial equality during the Second World War, however, when it helped to persuade the government in October 1939 that British citizens ‘not of pure European descent’ could volunteer for the armed forces and secure commissions.

Discrimination in the military and on the Home Front had led the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper, to demand that the US war effort focus on freedom at home as well as overseas. Moody emulated this in declaring that, for the British government to uphold the democratic ideals for which the Allies were fighting abroad, it also had to address the problem of domestic racism. ‘It is high time’, he asserted, ‘that we realised we cannot be fighting a war against Nazism and at the same time be perpetuating its principles within our own borders.’

An even greater convergence of British and US activism came with the arrival of American GIs to the UK from May 1942. Moody protested against the impact that the racism of many of these soldiers had on West Indian servicemen in Britain, including insults, assaults and exclusion from dance halls.

The League further

responded to social challenges stemming from the presence of the GIs in Britain, commissioning, in 1945, a report for the League of Coloured Peoples on the 2,000 children born to African- American servicemen and white British women. The report’s author, Sylvia McNeill, recommended that the government should treat these children (known as ‘brown babies’) as a ‘war casualty’ and provide appropriate support. Moody lobbied for state intervention, observing that ‘when what public opinion regards as the “taint” of illegitimacy is added to the disadvantage of race, the chances of these children having a fair opportunity for development and service are much reduced’. Far from seeing them as wards of the state, though, the government had many of the children put into private care homes.

The most ambitious expression of Moody’s internationalism came with the Charter for Coloured Peoples. Ratified in July 1944, the document was inspired by the Atlantic Charter, a statement signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941 that outlined Allied aims for the Second World War, including

‘The right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.’ Churchill insisted that the Charter applied only to European countries under Nazi occupation. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister’, he declared in the Commons, ‘in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’

The Charter for Coloured Peoples challenged Churchill. It called for equality of all, regardless of race, and pushed Allied countries to restore self-rule to nations under their colonial rule. In aligning with nationalist movements in Burma, India, Nigeria and elsewhere, the League helped blow what Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would later call ‘the wind of change’ that swept through the old colonial empires.

Criticised for his political moderation by more radical contemporaries, such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James, Moody was nonetheless a pioneering reformer who worked within the political system as an effective advocate for black Britons. At the time of his death on 24 April 1947, he was attempting to raise funds for a new cultural centre that foreshadowed the later emphasis on black culture in the late 1960s. In continuing to push for an end to discrimination, not only in Britain but throughout the world, Moody also articulated an international vision that anticipated the universal message that black lives matter.

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex.

‘The League helped to persuade the government that British citizens “not of pure European descent” could volunteer for the armed forces’

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Origin Stories Annette Gordon-Reed’s personal history of Juneteenth B Y R O B E R T G R E E N E I I

T he publication of the 1619 project by The New York Times in 2019 pushed many Americans to reconsider what they assumed they knew about Afri- can American and, more generally, US history. The project, whose title

refers to the importation of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619, sought to show how, in the introductory words of its special issue, “no aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.”

There were good reasons to start the project in 1619—many African Americans trace the beginnings of Black America to this moment—and to focus on Vir- ginia, but it could have started earlier, too. The story

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of Africans in North America can, in fact, be traced as far back as 1526 and the creation of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony in what would become South Carolina—a colony that was likely destroyed by a mutiny of the colonists and a slave revolt. More than 140 years later, the colony of Carolina would be founded by English settlers from Barbados who hoped to create a settlement purely for the purpose of plantation slavery.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book, On Juneteenth, considers another set of bifur- cating paths in African American history—this time in her home state of Texas, where both her own history and that of Juneteenth began. Texas, she argues, provides a key to the history of Africans in North America, and, coupled with the rapidly popular- ized holiday of Juneteenth, offers a different perspective from the one to which most Americans are accustomed. For her, the history of Black Texas, in fact, allows one to tell the larger history of Black America. “The history of Juneteenth,” she writes, “which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any [other] state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every

the United States—and in particular its importance in the lives of the country’s “founding fathers.”

Much of this previous scholarship was criticized by Gordon-Reed “as a rejection of black people’s input and black people’s participation in American society.” Along with an emerging new generation of histo- rians, she sought to correct this. As David Walton argued in his review of the book in The New York Times, Gordon-Reed provided a “devastating and persuasive critique of those who have rejected” the possibility of Jefferson having sex with Hemings and “is sure to be the next-to-last word for every historian who writes about this story hereafter.”

The Hemingses of Monticello was argu- ably even more groundbreaking, shifting the traditional lens on Monticello from Jefferson and Hemings to the family tree they produced. The book, for which she became the first African American to re- ceive the Pulitzer Prize for History, was also part of a larger goal at the center of her career: to push Americans to rethink their nation’s past—in particular, its origin myths. Her scholarship, Gordon-Reed explained in an interview, sought to estab- lish “black people’s participation as Amer- ican citizens from the very beginning.” For her, this was more than a matter of the historical record; it was also an assertion

major aspect of the story of the United States of America.”

This is a bold statement. Others might alternately cite the Low Country of South Carolina or the Mississippi Delta or the South Side of Chicago. Yet Gordon- Reed’s contention, by the end of her book, proves hard to dismiss. By using the history of Black Texas, she is also able to tell the story of Black America, and by doing so, she places Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans at the fore- front of US history. If nothing else, she shifts its focus away from the East Coast origin stories of Jamestown and Plym- outh and toward the West. Everything is bigger in Texas, and in the hands of Gordon-Reed, the history of Texas be- comes large enough to encompass the fullness of the American story.

G ordon-Reed has spent her career studying the majestic and often con- founding contradictions of American life and how we

memorialize them. Her two best-known works—1997’s Thomas Jefferson and Sal- ly Hemings: An American Controversy and 2008’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family—told the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was forcibly involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings of- fered a thorough account of the rela- tionship between the two, a subject that had long been ignored by many Jefferson scholars. The book also proved to be something far more: an analysis of those historians who refused to reckon with the centrality of slavery in the founding of

of citizenship. Because white supremacy had so deeply influenced the telling of US history, she noted, “you have to be able to help write the history of the country in order to establish your right to be here, to say that you’re legitimately here.”

This quest to re-center American history around the experience of those who are not white is also at the core of On Juneteenth. By focusing on Texas, Gordon-Reed can tell not only the story of Black America but also “of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immi- gration. It is the American story, told from this most American place.” She does have a point: Nearly every great movement in American history did, at some time, touch Texas. Everything from the rise and fall of slavery in antebellum America to the Populist movement to the civil rights movement and the white backlash against it has left an imprint on the history of Texas, and, in turn, Texas impacted each of them in ways the entire United States had to deal with.

The origin of Juneteenth exemplifies the central role Texas played in the his- tory of Black America. When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston on June 19, 1865, and informed the enslaved that they were free, the Civil War had ended across much of the South, and the region—and most of the nation—was convulsing with the beginnings of Recon- struction. If the Confederacy had won the Civil War, Texas would likely have become the chief example of what that govern- ment would have stood for—not only as a bastion of slavery but as a harbinger of its expansion throughout the Western Hemi- sphere via white settler colonialism and violent confrontation. But with Granger’s emancipatory declaration, and in the after- math of the South’s defeat, Texas became an arena in which those pursuing a more inclusive idea of American freedom bat- tled those seeking to restore the subser- vient relationship of African Americans as close to the old form of slavery as possible. Before the Civil War, Texas took steps in its Constitution to prevent the movement of free African Americans into the state. “Seeing that Black people could exist out- side of legal slavery,” Gordon-Reed writes, “put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves.”

For Gordon-Reed, the histo- ry of East Texas, which was the nexus of slavery in the state and

Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and has written for Jacobin, In These Times, and Dissent.

On Juneteenth By Annette Gordon-Reed Liveright. 144 pp. $15.95

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theB&Ab o o k s a r t s where much of the fight over the terms of emancipation raged, helps tell this story of American contradictions in microcosm. Reconstruction was a bloody affair across the South, but in Texas it was especial- ly grim—in part because, Gordon-Reed notes, the white population still remem- bered that the state had been a repub- lic. The struggles over civil and political rights that roiled the nation during Re- construction were magnified in Texas by the contradictions of self-government— of a white majority seeking to impose its will on a large Black minority.

The pursuit of emancipation was frus- trated almost from the start. Gen. Philip Sheridan, the military commander of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisi- ana), created by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, worked hard to protect the rights of newly freed African Americans, but as a result he drew the ire of former Confeder- ates and eventually was fired by President Andrew Johnson. (Sheridan purported- ly said, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”) His re- placement, Winfield Scott Hancock, was far more lenient to- ward white Southern- ers who resisted giving Black Americans any rights whatsoever. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted in Black Recon- struction in America, citing a report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Vio- lence in Texas, “Charged by law to keep the peace and afford protection to life and property, and having the army of the United States to assist him in so doing, [Hancock] has failed.”

For generations afterward, African Americans would fight to save Texas from the hell it had been turned into by white supremacy. Black Texans like Norris Wright Cuney would play a pivotal role in helping other Black citizens get involved in their native state’s politics. Cuney him- self would become the Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party in 1886 and as president of the Union League led the national fight against the attempts of the party’s conservative wing to purge what was left of the Southern Black leadership. Like Sheridan, however, Cuney found that his leadership of the

Texas GOP was one of the last hurrahs of the emancipationist spirit of the 1860s. Even if Texas

was the state in which Juneteenth and the celebrations that followed were born, so, too, was it a state of stalwart resistance to Reconstruction and Black freedom.

F or Gordon-Reed, who was born in 1958, this grim past was never dead. Growing up in East Texas, she saw living reminders

of it all around her—both the struggles for freedom and the institutions created by African Americans to survive in a cruel Jim Crow system. Just as in the years after the Civil War, the power and dogged de- termination of white supremacy persisted.

As Gordon-Reed recounts of her own childhood, she initially attended an Af- rican American school, as so many of her friends and family had, before be- coming one of the first Black students in her area to desegregate an all-white school. Entering first grade in the mid- 1960s, she was enrolled in the Ander- son Elementary School, leaving behind

her all-Black school, Booker T. Washing- ton. While some Black parents frowned on the Gordons’ sending their child to a previ- ously all-white school, Gordon-Reed remem- bered the moment as

one that was as much about practicality as politics. Her father, Alfred Gordon Sr., simply believed it made more sense for a school to have students correctly separat- ed by age. Anderson Elementary provided that; Booker T., as it was affectionately known, did not. But it also meant that Gordon-Reed would be the only Black student there.

Gordon-Reed excelled in school, both at Booker T. and at Anderson. At the time, she felt that she “never experienced any different treatment.... In fact, I felt nothing but...support.” Still, she knew and understood that she was different from the other students—and that she had to excel on behalf of the Black community. “This period was intense,” she writes. “My mother remembers me breaking out in hives at one point, a thing I don’t recall.”

Gordon-Reed’s experience of desegre- gation is a valuable one. Often, the story of school desegregation follows a student or students—the Little Rock Nine of Arkansas, for example—up to the school door and then leaves them to be immor-

talized in history. There is little consid- eration about the short- and long-term consequences of the experience on the children. “There was an oddity of being on display,” Gordon-Reed recalls, but few considered the effects of desegrega- tion on the Black students who entered the formerly all-white schools—especial- ly those, like Gordon-Reed, who were on their own. “Not to take anything away from the teachers and administrators at Anderson, but I did make things easy for them,” she adds. Her intellect certainly helped, but so did the fact that, because she was the only Black person enrolled at the school, she was not seen as an “inva- sion” of Black students. “The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers,” she notes.

Gordon-Reed’s experiences after high school were like those of other African Americans who came of age during the civil rights and Black Power eras: increased opportunities for education at the finest of American universities. For Gordon-Reed, that meant attending Dartmouth College in the late 1970s and, eventually, Harvard Law School. But the experience of de- segregating a school—and understanding what that desegregation meant for other African Americans—lingered, both for her and, more broadly, she argues, as a feature of the history of Texas and Black America.

Like her earlier work on the Hem- ingses, On Juneteenth is determined to force us to rethink our origin stories. As Gordon-Reed notes, for example, the push for desegregating schools did mark the beginning of a new turn in Black freedom, but it was also greeted ambivalently by more African Americans than classic nar- ratives of the civil rights movement would have us believe: “Some members of the Black community felt that my parents were making a statement—alas, a negative one— about the quality of teaching and educa- tion at Washington.” Leaving Booker T. for a formerly all-white institution was seen in her African American community as equal parts heroic and bordering on betrayal. For most, Black schools were symbols of community empowerment and self-determination—symbols that, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, would even- tually be degraded and destroyed by an education system that had previously ig- nored them.

Eschewing nostalgia, Gordon-Reed demands that her readers reexamine their

Growing up in Texas, Annette Gordon-Reed saw racism’s past and present everywhere.

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assumptions about American history and their commitments in the present. Focusing on the history of African Americans in Texas helps her make this compelling argument for an update to the story of America: She welds a new narrative onto the one we already have. “Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations,” she ex- plains, but we also need to separate out the “origin stories” we tell ourselves from actual history, making it clear that the two are often not the same.

Gordon-Reed challenged the infallibility and the mythology of the founding fathers through her work on Jefferson and the Hemingses, and in On Juneteenth, she spends a considerable amount of time demarcating the differences between the origin story that places the beginning of the United States in Plymouth—“a founding story about valiant people leaving their homes to escape religious persecution”—and the one that places it in Jamestown colony: “It is difficult to wrest an uplifting story from the doings of English settlers who created the colony for no purpose other than making money or, at least, to make a living for themselves.” Starting before 1619 and beyond Jamestown colony, she argues, also gives the African American experience a longer and more international origin story, touching as it would on the presence of Estebanico, an enslaved African explorer who was part of the Spanish expedition of what is now Texas in the 1530s.

Spanish St. Augustine, Gordon-Reed writes, had long existed partly as a settle- ment for Africans who’d escaped slavery in the English colonies, and ignoring the presence of Africans in other European settlements in North America—whether established by the Spanish, the French, or the Dutch—led to what she calls “an ex- tremely narrow construction of Blackness.” By considering the other Black Ameri- cas—those formed outside the reach of the English-speaking colonies—Gordon- Reed also helps us better understand the relationships among African, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans and reminds us of the non-Anglophone influences on the formation of what became the United States. By incorporating so much recent scholarship on the Atlantic world and the early encounters among various ethnic and racial groups in North America, she argues, we can understand “that the ori- gin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than the story of twenty Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619.”

A s readers come to the end of On Juneteenth, they be- gin to realize that as much as the emancipation in Galveston and the orig-

inal holiday of Juneteenth frame the book, contrasting these different origin stories is one of its central premises. Even the origin story of Texas comes under scrutiny. Building on the schol- arship of others, Gordon-Reed notes that the early days of Texas’s struggle for independence from Mexico were also tied to the institution of slavery. Rather than pursue freedom, the white Ameri- cans who fought for Texan independence sought to create a slaveholding republic.

Growing up in Jim Crow–era Texas, a young Annette Gordon was not taught this. When it came to the Alamo, the birthplace of modern Texas, she writes, “I didn’t know that an enslaved person was there.” For Americans who wish to avoid the unpleasantness of racism in our country’s past, Gordon-Reed points to the documents themselves. “Race is right there in the documents—official and per- sonal,” she writes. Texas’s own constitu- tion, promulgated after independence in 1836, explicitly excluded free people of African descent from citizenship. Black people in Texas were to be there for one reason: enslavement.

Gordon-Reed also writes of how Tex- as’s oft-recounted origin story elides the plight of Indigenous peoples. The early Republic of Texas under Sam Houston could potentially countenance living side by side with Indigenous groups like the Alabamas and Coushattas, but later Texas leaders insisted on the familiar American pattern of driving Indigenous groups from their lands. This experience of oppression also linked the fates of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples: Both had a com- mon enemy in white supremacy, one that was around after slavery’s abolition. As a young girl coming of age during not only the civil rights and Black Power eras but also the rise of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, Gordon-Reed wondered why Indigenous and African groups had not joined forces against the Europeans in North America. One com- plicating factor was certainly that some Indigenous peoples also held Africans in slavery. “There was no ‘natural’ alliance” between the groups, Gordon-Reed writes,

reminding us once again of the problem of crafting myths about the past, as opposed to cold, hard actual history. “Writers, and consumers, of history must take great care not to import the knowledge we have into the minds of people and of circumstances in the past,” she warns.

On Juneteenth begins and ends with the holiday of the same name, and here too Gordon-Reed reminds us that like origin stories, our regional and national holidays say a great deal about the stories we wish to tell about ourselves. While at the beginning of the book Gordon- Reed expresses surprise—and a little consternation—that a holiday celebrated primarily in Texas during her life has become nationally known, at the end she reminisces about how Juneteenth was an important part of her life, and one that incorporated cultural traditions from other groups.

Juneteenth celebrations, Gordon-Reed tells us, included the traditional “red ‘soda- water’”—a delicious strawberry-flavored drink that some argue traces its origins to the hibiscus tea of West Africa—seen at so many African American holiday gath- erings, but they also included the prepa- ration of tamales, a dish originating with Mesoamerican civilizations, and pointed to the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americas intersected in Texas. Such a set of culinary rituals, Gordon- Reed writes, made the day “so very Texan.” But as she goes on to argue, it also made the day—and its history—so very American.

Making Juneteenth into a national hol- iday not only nationalizes Texas’s history but, Gordon-Reed argues, also serves as a moment of national reflection on the effort needed to destroy slavery and, in its aftermath, the struggle to affirm a new birth of freedom. With Republican politicians pushing to abolish critical race theory and the continued assaults on use of the 1619 Project in the classroom—not to mention the raging debates about Con- federate statues and other “Lost Cause” memorials—it is clear that powerful lead- ers in society also understand the impor- tance of historical memory. Besides origin stories, Gordon-Reed reminds us, history provides us with a way to think about the present and future—and, just as with the past, the remaking of our contemporary world will likely be messier, if potential- ly more emancipatory, but also more tragic than any of us is will- ing to fathom. � N

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SW 408 Statistical Application Directions: Students will review and analyze a peer reviewed journal article.

Complete each section, at least one paragraph per section and summarize in your

own words. Students may refer to their class notes or the textbook for clarity on

terminologies. *Make complete sentences, use appropriate grammar,

appropriate spelling, etc.

1. Title of Article:

2. Summary (introduction, background about the article

what is the article about, purpose, etc.):

3. Identify the hypothesis (if there is not one, formulate one):

4. Method (procedures, participates involved, techniques,

instruments, way of collecting/analyzing the data, etc.):

5. Results (findings, what happened, outcome, achievement

or failure, etc.)

6. Conclusion (overview of the article, considering all the

facts-was the hypothesis true or false-explain, etc.):