Historians by Another Name

I had the extreme good fortune (not to mention honor) of sharing a lunch table with Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon this past Thursday. Blackmon is the head of the Atlanta bureau for the Wall Street Journal, and his book--pictured above--has been lauded for its very blatant reprimands of white capitalists who manipulated and abused black workforces in the South even after the Civil War.

Our conversation at lunch ran a gamut from the fate of newspapers (bleak recently, but looking up in a scaled-down skin, Blackmon insists) to the state of funding for undergrad scholarships here at UGA (oft-bleak as well) to the collective memory of racial violence. I shared some experiences I've had discussing race with freshmen in the survey-level American history courses. At least once a semester, a violent photograph (usually pulled from the frightening but also amazingly teachable website Without Sanctuary http://withoutsanctuary.org) or a story in one of our primary source readers will elicit a starkly emotional response from a group of suburban Atlantan students who are young enough to have thought that racism in America wouldn't be something they'd be forced to confront. Tales of lynchings and convict-leasing in their backyards, and suddenly (and rightly so), they're put face-to-face with the mistakes made and suffered by those people from which they come most directly. I've let tears fall in my classroom (from my eyes as well as from my students'), and I push my students to step out of the comfort zone their parents have so carefully crafted for them. There is no worth in generations improving themselves economically, or even intellectually really, if they are not also improving the way they see the world, as well as their own hearts.

Blackmon suggested that each year these students are reaching the same moment that many communities do when they uncover a long-hidden racial crime or memorialize a forgotten hero. The first burst of memory is hyper-emotional and typically inspires activism, education, and further research. The memorialization of the four African-Americans who fell at the 1946 Moore's Ford lynching, not far from where I sit here in Athens, is a good case in point. Every year now, locals host a memorial rally to honor victims who for decades had received no retribution and no sanctuary against their perpetrators. The problem comes, Blackmon says, when communities or individuals reach a "burn out" phase after the initial memorialization. After making a point to remember, or even to shout the memory or write about it, many people have a hard time understanding why they should make the effort to continue to do so.

But we all should, and that's the message behind Slavery by Another Name. Calling a spade a spade, or in this case calling racism, well, racism, is often like pulling teeth that should have been pulled a long time ago. Some will scoff at you, ask you to tone your accusations down for the sake of those who have died and can no longer defend themselves. Those are the people who remain scared by the past, or scarred by it in ways they won't allow to heal. But some will become so inspired by the idea of memory and the recognition of its power that they will light a metaphorical candle from your torch. That's what Blackmon has done for me, and at a time when I'd lost some faith in myself academically.

He and I discovered, over the course of the day, that his dad had worked for the very same paper company that I wrote my undergrad thesis on at Louisiana Tech University. I spent almost a year interviewing black mill workers, many of them retired and quite advanced in age, in the tiny towns of Hodge and Jonesboro, Louisiana. As places they're gothically beautiful. The emptiness, in the skeletal woods, along the railroad tracks, or in the dusty shacks that dot the highway, at second glance always seems to hold countless secrets. Hanging over all of this like steel fangs are the smokestakes of Continental Can (oddly, it produced paper bags)--the mill that made these towns, segregated them, and then served as a civil rights venue at which many black workers took their stand in the fifties and sixties, at water fountains and in the mill yard. Trading oral history experiences with Blackmon (who speaks eloquently on the subject and, as a journalist, knows how to get people talking about things they wouldn't normally), the memories of my days traversing those North Louisiana highways with a voice recorder hit me hard again. And I realized that I've spent the last four years trying to make myself into a type of historian I cannot, and will not, be.

In keeping with the theme in my own head, a minor controversy erupted among some of my departmental colleagues at Blackmon's public lecture on campus. Apparently, earlier in the day at a smaller question and answer session (that, sadly, I missed because I was TAing), Blackmon had come down a little hard on academic historians, positing that they're often held back by their attachment to archives. The archives are simply the first step in an uncovering process, Blackmon seemed to be implying. I couldn't agree with him more. But several of the academic historians-in-training present that afternoon (and of course they'll remain nameless here, although one of them is so overwhelmingly pretentious that he's almost begging for my mention) took issue and made a point to defend themselves. Journalists like Blackmon USE our material, they insisted. Writers like Blackmon stand atop years and years of accumulated historiography and gain the fame that workhorse academics should be attracting, they said. This isn't a new argument. It's perhaps the most important debate among our kind.

It's not a question of style. There are academics who write prose like masters, like poets. My advisor Stephen Berry is one of them, and his book on Lincoln and the Todd family, entitled Hosue of Abraham, is unabashedly readable. What many professional historians don't do well are emotion and scope. Blackmon's comment seems to me mostly on coldness, on a lack of passion. The argument in his work is not revolutionary, no. Historians have been chipping away at this period between the Civil War and World War II rather persistently. But Blackmon made these revelations of racial prejudice and violence ALIVE again through an innovative use of sources, a palpable sense of passion for the work that is at once both objective and subjective (and it needs to be both), and the courage to made BROAD and important conclusions that will affect readers and enter cultural conversations. Academics are mostly writing to other academics these days, and they're speaking to one another in closed off conference rooms. I've been wading these waters for four years, trying to stay afloat in an ocean of information that is barely an inch deep. The professionalization of academia (the subject of Louis Menand's newest book, by the way) has been its downfall. And if academics have a problem with the lauding of work like Blackmon's, then they must put their words into action by making themselves relevant again.

The "regular" folks who approached Blackmon after his talk were enlivened and emboldened by his words and the message in his work. When I started my graduate career, that was the same goal I had in mind. The end-product of my work, I thought, would be relevance. I would have something to say that people needed to hear. I would pull memories from some and push them on others, like Blackmon has, and I would examine with depth the emotions of Americans, of southerners, of both pain and triumph. That's what I did when I was 20 and naive. I need some of THAT girl back.