PLACE N RETURN BOX to remove this chockom from your mood.
TO AVOID FINES Mum on or baton dd. duo.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU I. An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity lawman
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THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN AN ERA OF "NATION BUILDING":
SLAVE SCHOLARSHIP, 1956-1971

By

John Campbell McMillian

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History
1997

Professor Harry Reed

 

 

 

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ABSTRACT

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN AN ERA OF "NATION BUILDING"
SLAVE SCHOLARSHIP, 1956-1971

By

John C. McMillian

The civil rights and Black Power movements of the 19505 and beyond
have had a profound shaping effect upon the‘ways in which scholars have
approached the study of southern slavery. At the same time, exigencies
that arose in response the the Black Revolt of this era also served to
heighten the public's interest in slavery, especially where the historical
identies of African-Americans was discussed. By exploring some of the
significant works from this period, as well as the highly charged debates
that they sometimes occassioned, one can gain a good deal of insight into
the Black Power ethic, as well as to the ways that the cultural politics of the
19505 and 19605 managed to heighten the consciousness of millions of

Black and white Americans.

For my parents

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I first returned to Michigan State, in the fall of 1994, things seemed
awfully grim. I was struggling in the wake of a broken relationship, had very
little money, and certainly did not believe that I had any compelling reason to be
pursuing graduate study. It's somewhat remarkable, then, that things have
turned out so well. Accordingly, there are a number of people I would like to
thank.

Many of my professors, for example, have been extremely helpful, both
personally and professionally. These would include Mark Kornbluh, Christine
Daniels, Doug Miller, and Victor Jew. I am especially grateful to David Bailey,
for serving on my thesis committee, and for his advice, encouragement, and
interest in my life and career. Wilma King also deserves special mention, as she
also agreed to serve on my thesis committee, in spite of the fact that I had not
taken a class with her. Though I suspect that she still has some reservations
about this particular study, many of her insights have proved helpful, and as I
revise this paper in the years ahead, I'm sure that her critique will help me to
further refine my analysis.

I would also like to extend a special "thank you" to professor Harry Reed,
who has been a major influence upon my life as a teacher, mentor, and friend.
Though it seems strange to be thinking in these terms just now, it is clear that the
classes I have taken with him, beginning in the spring of 1990, have significantly
shaped the course of my life. I'd further add that there are few people to whom I

iv

 

 

 

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extend so much admiration and respect.

The History Department has offered me a teaching assistantship
for the 1995-96 academic year, and the College of Arts and Letters has awarded
me a generous Graduate Merit Fellowship for the spring of 1997, which has
allowed me to devote a good deal more time to this study than would otherwise
have been possible. Additional financial support and intellectual enrichment has
come from Clayborne Carson and the staff of the King Papers Project at Stanford
University, who gave me the privilege of working as a summer intern in Palo
Alto during the summer of 1996.

Much more valuable than any financial assistance I have received,
however, has been the support and companionship of a number of friends, both
in and out of the History Department. In no particular order, and for a wide
variety of reasons, these people would include Steve Wilkshire, Jeff Janowick,
Matt Holcomb, Rich Van Tol, Brad Wood, Melanie Shell, Shannon Bonner, Laurie
Konopka, Steve Charney, Jeff Toeppner, Jill Replogle, Fern Nietzke, Eddie Stern,
Chris Moore, Christy Hodsden, Jason Appelman, Besnick Aliko and Catherine
Madden.

Finally, and above all, I would like to thank my entire family, and

especially my parents, for their love, support, and encouragement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

FORGING NEW GROUND: KENNETH STAMPP, STANLEY
ELKINS, AND THE RE-BIRTH OF SLAVE SCHOLARSHIP,
1956-1959 8

THE "MOYNIHAN REPORT AND THE VICTIMIZATION
MODEL OF BLACK HISTORY 39

WILLIAM STYRON'S THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER
AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN SIXTIES AMERICA 57

SLAVERY, BLACK STUDIES, AND THE PERILS OF
SCHOLARSHIP 87

BIBLIOGRAPHY 123

vi

INTRODUCTION

As I’m still quite far from finished with my formalized training in the
reading and writing of history, I hesitate to begin this paper with any lengthy
ruminations about its nature as a discipline, or upon the craft of the historian.
Fortunately, however, a scholar whom I have admired has already touched upon
“the hopeless open-endedness of the subject of history,” or, in other words, “its
multi-dimensional quality, its lack of tidy beginnings and endings, its stubborn
refusal to be packaged in any neat and satisfying manner.” Regardless of your
subject, or how much you know, or how many pages you write, there is always
“something that had gone before, or come afterward, which you didn’t have time to
tell about, or which you didn’t know about, and which was nevertheless essential
to the completeness of the tale”. '

These are sentiments I can relate with. This particular study, for example,
is centrally concerned with the ways in which some of the exigencies that arose out
of the Black Revolt of the 1950’s and beyond have had a sort of shaping effect
upon the ways in which scholars have approached the subject of southern slavery.
This is certainly something worth thinking about, for the revolution in slave
historiography between about 1956 and 1974 “must certainly rank as a
historiographical accomplishment of the first magnitude”.2 In Eric Foner’s view,
“the work reappraising the South’s ‘peculiar institution’” is arguably “the finest
body of literature produced by American historians since 1960.”3

Impossible to divorce from this, however, are questions and concerns about

African-American identity. While historians do not generally write for large

 

Kennan, George F. “The Experience of Writing History,” The Virginia Quarterly Review,
XXXVI (Spring 1960) 205.

Dew Charles “T he Slavery Exvcfienoe" in W
W, Boles, John B. and Nolen, Evelyn Thomas (eds. ) (Louisiana State
University Press, 1987) 161.

Foner, Eric. "Slavery and the Origins of the Civil War'" in W, Foner,
Eric (ed. ) (Temple University Press,1990) 74.

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audiences outside of their respective fields, throughout this period, slave studies
flourished to an unprecedented degree. Part of this was simply because, as David
Brion Davis has remarked, “the modern reading public...retains a spasmodic need

’94

for quick historical orientation to immediate crises. Likewise, Kenneth Starnpp
has noted that a “peculiar urgency” seemed to surround much of this work. If
slavery was not of immediate concern to the nation, it certainly lingered, as it does
today, around the peripheries of the public consciousness. Even if the great
majority of Americans have never considered some of the issues that academics
from this period debated, including the profitability of slavery, its psychological
impact upon slaves, and the comparative history of the southern system with other
institutions in the New World, they at least watched Roots. The foremost
consideration, for scholars and the general public alike, was simply this: What did
slavery mean? What was the slave experience like, for both Black and white
Americans, men and women, free and unfree, and what did it do to the nation?

Yet just as slavery and the meaning of Blackness are inseparably linked, so
connected are a broad range of other factors, involving various social, economic,
psychological, and cultural issues, each of which hold an irnponderable number of
variables that one might write upon. While Meier and Rudwick have penned a
study that professes to explore the ways in which “the general social climate”
impinged “upon the consciousness of a number of individual historians” in the field
of African-American history, their focus is really only upon the academic training
and the personal backgrounds and associations of these scholars.5 By focusing too
narrowly upon the goings-ons of various ivory towers, we run the risk of

neglecting an awareness of the ways in which a wider social context invariably

 

‘Davis, David Brion. “Slavery and the Post-World War II Historians,” Daedalus, (Spring 1974) 8.

See Meier August. and Rudwick. Elliot, W215;
1289, (University of Illinois Press, 1986), especially chapter four, "The Historiography of

Slavery: An Inquiry into Paradigm-Making and Scholarly Interaction”.

 

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shapes the sorts of histories we both read and write. For example, where Jonathon
Weiner has written about the debt that the profession owes to such radical scholars
as Herbert Aptheker and Eugene Genovese, David Thelen notes that many scholars
of Black history “drew heavily on the novels and poetry of James Baldwin, Ralph
Ellison, LeRoi Jones, to say nothing of popular music, or popular preachers, or the
examples of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Likewise, New Left
historians were likely inspired by Paul Goodman, Albert Camus, Thomas Kuhn,
and the Rolling Stones, among others.’3 While we may not be able to speak with
any real degree of specificity about the various effects of these sorts of broad
cultural factors, we should at least acknowledge their influence - on both
scholarship and identity.

Finally, it is important to remember that the monographic literature
discussed in this study did not suddenly spring to life in 1956, nor did writings on
slavery abruptly dissipate in 1974. Rather, each of the major works I’ve looked at
were created in response to social and academic climates that had existed
beforehand. Indeed, the general inter-connectedness of these studies, as we shall
see, is somewhat amazing.7 Though I’ve chosen these starting and endpoints with
some care, one might just as easily begin a discussion of the ways in which the
slave experience has been interpreted in American history by looking at St. Jean de

Crevocoeur’s Letters From An American Famrer, first published in 1782. For it

 

‘ Weiner, Jonathon M. “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980,” The
Journal of American History, (September, 1989); Thelen, David, “A Round Table: What Has
Changed and Not Changed in American Historical Practice?," The Journal of American History,
(September, 1989) 397.

To be brief, both Starnpp and Elkins’ books were shaped, in some significant degree, by Richard
Hofstadter, with whom they each had close personal associations. (Hofstadter was Elkins’
dissertaton adviser). While Starnpp and Elkins were the two scholars who would have the largest
effects upon slave historiography during this era, Moynihan and Styron drew especially deeply
from Elkins theoretical framework. Starobin, however, modeled his work on Starnpp’ 5 III:
W, as Starnpp was his dissertation adviser. Finally, Fogel and Engerman wrote
W as a direct challenge to Starnpp, as well as to much of the literature that
Stampp and Elkins had helped to inspire.

 

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was here, of course, that he posed his famous question, “What then is the
American?” As Winthrop Jordan would point out nearly two hundred years later,
perhaps more remarkable than his query was the provincialism of his own answer:
“He is an European, or the descendent of a European...”8 Thus, Crevocoeur
“simply defined the Negro out of American identity’ ’.9 Building only slightly upon
this outrageously narrow perspective, subsequent generations of respected
historians have tended to either marginalize or disparage the experiences of Black
Americans. Save for the pioneering work of such historians as W.E.B. Du Bois,
Carter G. Woodson, and John Hope Franklin, before about World War II, the role
of Afro-Americans in our nation’s development was hardly considered at all.
Additionally, before Stampp’s WW, slave scholarship could
hardly escape the broad shadow cast by the writings of U.B. Phillips, a southern
nationalist who was resolute in his belief of the racial inferiority of Blacks.

By 1970, however, it was clear that something remarkable had happened,
and so noted historian Eugene Genovese remarked that “The full impact of the
Black Revolt of the late 1960’s on American scholarship in general and Afro-
American history in particular has yet to be felt.” In part, he argued that this was
because “scholars...need time to assess political trends and to do the work

”Io

necessary to support their points of view. While these points are well on the
mark, I would add the observation that the chaotic racial politics of this age also
worked to further discourage a critical analysis of Black Power’s influence upon
historical scholarship. Indeed, the tensions surrounding both a general resurgence

in Black nationalist thought and a closely related drive for Black Studies programs

 

:HCrevocoeur J. Hector St. Jean, WWWew York, 1945) 43.

“Woodward C. Vann, “Clio With Soul,” Journal of American History, (June, 1969) 7.

°Ge,novese Eugene, “The Influence of Black Power on Historical Scholarship: Reflections of a
WhiteHistorian,” mute... : . . . .
Hrsm(Pantheon, 1971) 231.

 

 

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led one British observer to remark that on campuses everywhere, “White facial
muscles ache with nervous smiling, black ones with intimidating scovvls.”11
In any case, even under more propitious circumstances, the American
historical profession has yet to offer a thorough examination of the complex
dynamics that shaped the work of Black and white scholars of antebellum slavery
during this period. This paper, it is hoped, will offer something of a framework for
precisely such an undertaking. The “plot,” as it were, is easily summarized. In
reaction to a long-predominate, so-called “Progressive” school of historiography,
by the late 1950’s, Kenneth Starnpp and Stanley Elkins had both penned innovative
and yet controversial studies of slave life. Simultaneously, trends within the
burgeoning civil rights movement began to further encourage a reexamination of the
psychological and historical origins of white prejudice. As various funds flooded
programs for the study of African-American life and culture, slave studies
flourished to an unprecedented degree. Thus, Meier and Rudwick have pointed out
that by the early 1970’ 5, “the J SH (Journal of Southern History) was reading
almost like a JNH (Journal of Negro History)”12 These developments, however,
were not without their intricacies. For one, a large faction of an emerging Black
intelligentsia had aligned itself with the view that African-Americans should have
the exclusive power to define, interpret, and in some cases, even “create” a new,
Black history. White responses to these pressures upon their scholarship were
varied. Some historians began to shift their focus towards trends within the Black
past with which orthodox nationalists could sympathize, paying special attention to
slave resistance and the cultural dimensions of slavery. Yet others, who for the
most part canied strong liberal credentials, nonetheless rejected the notion that
history should exist solely in order to service the needs of the political present.

Having long held a sort of monopoly over slave scholarship, they may even have

 

” Cunliffe, Marcus, “Black Curtute and White America," Encounter (January, 1970) 99.
'2 Meier and Rudwick, W, 178.

postured themselves as gatekeepers into the profession, consciously in opposition
to the “tyranny” that they felt some Black scholars were exercising over white
academics. As a result of these ideological clashes and the vibrant era in which they
occurred, the American historical profession was witness to some of the most
profound, bitter, interesting, and far-reaching controversies of recent memory.

This essay is developed in four parts. Chapter One looks at Starnpp’s The
WInstitution (1956) and Stanley Elkins Slam“, (1959). In rebutting
Phillips, Starnpp’s work deserves praise as a landmark in American historiography,
though many scholars would make up for some of its shortcomings in subsequent
decades. Ironically, Elkins’ book, though much less well received, has had a larger
influence upon the profession in that it prompted a great amount of discussion upon
the “damage” that North American slavery was said to have wrought upon the
personalities of typical bondsmen. In his view, the Sambo stereotype was not a
racist fantasy, but rather a cruel fallout of racism. In other words, the Sambo
personality was a pervasive phenomenon that had been born out of a “closed and
total system of oppression.” Chapter Two will explore the ways I which the
“damage,” “deficit,” or “victimization” model gained cunency in public policy
debates of the era, largely as a result of the so-called “Moynihan Report” of 1965.
Arguing for massive federal assistance to the Black community, Moynihan hinged
his case on the assumption that “Three centuries of injustice have brought about
deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American.”l3
Consequently, the report drew a firestorrn of protest, leading Elkins to later remark
that by the late 1960’s, “the entire ‘damage’ argument, as applied to any aspect of
Negro life in America, had become untenable.”14 Chapter Three examines the
cultural politics surrounding William Styron’s 1967 historical novel, The

 

'3 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Policy Planning and Research,
United States Department of Labor, (March, 1965) 47.

" Elkins. Wm (Third Edition)
(University of Chicago Press, 1959, 1976) 271.

 

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WW, paying special attention to the ways in which much of
the angry Black response to this work was rooted in the Black Power ethic.
Finally, Chapter Four explores some of the dynamics between the Black Studies
Movement and the approach of slavery historians by focusing, in large measure,
upon the career of Robert Starobin - a white professor whose suicide in 1974 was
seen by some to have been linked to demands that the revolutionary politics of the
era had thrust upon him.

I might add here that though I am generally committed to a theoretical
approach that includes gender analysis as well as the discussion of racial issues,
there is little such discussion in the pages to follow. This stems from the fact that in
the chronology that I have chosen, there does not seem to have been many Black
women historians who were writing on slavery, or who spoke publicly on many of
the issues I have concentrated upon. In a revised version of this work, however, I
plan to extend my discussion to include the publication of Fogel and Engennan’s
W (1975), at which point I hope to weave an exploration of gender
issues into my text.

Though the story I will try to tell doesn’t really start to gather momentum
until the latter half of the 1950’s, as I’ve tried to point out above, we nevertheless
remain victims of the general “messiness” of history. And so long as there are no
true beginnings or endings, it would perhaps be most useful to briefly turn our
attention, at the beginning of chapter one, to the unfortunate body of work that

modern historians such as Starnpp and Elkins have had to contend with.

 

 

 

 

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Historians...write for a time; that is, they write to reflect the concerns of
their day and, it follows, for a period that inevitably is itself soon a part of history.
Only in the rarest instance do thier writings outlast the ethos of the age that
produced them.

- -Merton Dillon
FORGING NEW GROUND: KENNETH STAMMP, STANLEY
ELKINS, AND THE RE-BIRT‘H lgggsLAVE SCHOLARSHIP, 1956 -

Though African-American history may today be one of the liveliest fields in
all of academia, it wasn’t until the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark
sociological study AnAmedeilemma , in 1944, that the subject came to the
attention of most Americans. As a whole, the profession was dominated by what
might be called Traditionalist historiography, reigning from about the turn of the
century to World War II. Generally, this school of thought regarded the Black
presence in the US. as “an unfortunate mistake or at best a nuisance. least of all
did the traditionalists see American development as dependent to any extent upon
the position of the Negro?” As Benjamin Quarles has remarked, “the role of the
Afro-American in our national life was thought to be hardly worth considering. An
intellectual ‘white flight’ held sway; most writers in the social sciences and the
humanities, whatever their individual specialties, assumed that they knew as much
about blacks as they needed to know or as their readers cared to learn. With this
static image, the black was considered something of an intruder, if not indeed an
outsider.”16 Indeed, the state of affairs was such that Frederick Jackson Turner
could write, in a very famous work, that “when American history comes to be
rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.”17

Meanwhile, Charles Beard held that the results of suffrage and the struggle of

Blacks for social advancement in the wake of Reconstruction “would have been

 

’5 Starobin, Robert, “The Negro: A Central Theme in American History," The Journal of
Contemporary History (Great Britain, 1968) 37.

’Quarles, Benjamin, “Black History Unbound.” Daedalus (Spring, 1974) 163.
'7 Turner, Frederick Jackson, W (New York, 1920) 24.

ludicrous is they had not been pitiable.”18 In a “popular history that had won
acclaim from New Deal liberals,” slavery was characterized as a system that
brought “incalculable harm to the white people of the South, and benefited nobody
but the negro, in that is served as a vast training school for African savages...It
taught (Blacks) discipline, cleanliness, and a conception of moral standards.”19
Historian I.A. Newby has gone so far as to identify several different types of
historiography within this Traditionalist framework, making distinctions between
“Invisible Man” history, which “ignores Negroes altogether,” and “spook” history,
which acknowledges “the presence of Negroes but treat the race as a nebulous,
ghostly host, always in the background, whose principle historical function has
always been to constitute a problem for white men to solve or endure.” Closely
related to this is “ghetto” history, wherein Blacks do not figure “until whites
become seriously divided over slavery.” Finally, “Sambo” history simply portrays
African-Americans as “racially inferior” or otherwise stereotypes them “in an
offensive manner.”20
I

The bulk of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips work on ante-bellum slavery, so easily

disparaged from our contemporary vantage point, is perhaps an amalgamation of

the sort of “spook” and “Sambo” histories that Newby discusses. This is not to

suggest, however, that Phillips is a historian whose work we can afford to gloss

over. With the appearance of W in 1918, Phillips’ name

”2' According

“would become virtually synonymous with slavery historiography.
to Thomas Holt, “Modern scholarship on slavery in the US. begins with U.B.

Phillips.”22 In acknowledging Phillips death in 1934, David Potter wrote of “his

 

" Beard. Charles Amndranfloxnmrnnniandflolitis (New York. 1911) 86.
'9 Woodward, w. E. ,W (Farar & Rinehan, 1936) 412, cited tn Davis, David
Brion, “Slavery and the Post-World War II Historians”, Daedalus (Spring, 1974) l.
:Newby, I. A, “Historians and Negroes", The Journal of Negro History, (January, 1969) 35-41.
:Meier. August. and Rudwick. Elliot. Blackliimandthnflistonmmminsion. 4.
22Holt, Thomas C., “African-American History" in Foner,Eric,Ihe_N.e1Ammcan_Hism, 213.

 

 

 

sl.

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10

conciseness, his remarkable accuracy of expression, his avoidance of the trite and
inane, and his profusion of fruitful suggestions...He never set pen to paper without
expressing cogent ideas.”23 Richard Hofstadter added in 1944 that “No single
writer has been more influential in establishing patterns of belief about the
plantation system of the Old South...His mm and M
W111 (1929) are the most widely read scholarly studies of the
slave system, and have become classic sources of information and propaganda

”24 Another testament to the enduring quality 0f

about ante-bellum Southern life.
much of his scholarship lies in the fact that in 1966, just as the Black Power
movement was just beginning to attract the attention of scholars everywhere,
Eugene Genovese read a paper before the American Historical Association which
suggested that Phillips “came close to greatness as a historian, perhaps as close as
any historian this country has yet produced.”25
A bit about Phillips upbringing says a fair amount about the assumptions he
worked with as a scholar. A Georgian native, originally born “Ulysses” Phillips,
he is said to have changed his name to “Ulrich” as a result of his antipathy towards

Ulysses S. Grant. In one biographical profile, a rumor is passed that in 1877,

(before he was born), a detachment of Sherman’s army pillaged his family home,

 

23Potter, David M, “A Bibliography of the Printed Writings of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips”, Georgia

Historical Quarterly (September, 1934) 271; cited 1n Genovese, Eugene, W
‘ ‘ . n (Pantheon Books, 1971) 261.

2’destadter, Richard, “U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,” Journal of Negro History (April,
1944) 109- 110.
2’ Genovese, Eugene, W 262. According to Genovese, this assessment “upset
some people”. In fairness, it should be added that Genovese - along with each of the other
historians cited above - was of course aware of Phillips racism and found it deplorable. In
characteristically feisty prose, he followed the statement on Phillips near “greatness” by remarking
that “We may leave to those who live in the world of absolute good and evil the task of explaining
how a man with such primitive views on fundamental social questions could write such splendid
history. Let there be no mistake about it: Phillips was a racist.” While some have argued that
Phillips was beginning to shy away from a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks towards the
end of his life, Genovese holds that “it is difficult to become enthusiastic about a shift from a less
to more sophisticated racism that could have not stood critical examination even in its own day.”
Where Phillips is still read in many graduate seminars, his texts most often seem to be treated as
mere cultural artifacts. In an effort to focus greater scholarly attention upon his work, Genovese
has elsewhere remarked that “there is infinitely more to be learned from one smart son-of-a-bitch
than an army of well-meaning fools”.

 

11

leaving only a single desk from which Phillips would later write his histories.26
Consequently, his writings tended to cm a romantic and unapologetic, pro-
southem bias. Slavery, in his view, was a benign and “civilizing” institution.
Plantations were said to be “the best schools yet invented for the mass training of
that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes
represented.”27 Patemalistic slaveholders, motivated by a desire to protect their
own economic self-interest, treated slaves with kindness and compassion. Slave
codes, from which one might have gathered a different portrait, were not seen as a
reliable source, as they told very little about day-to-day life in the Old South. Ditto
for numerous travelogues, including those of Frederick Law Olrnstead, whom he
generally distrusted. Yet at the same time, Phillips also argues that as slavery
evolved, it became driven less by a profit incentive than by a desire to maintain
social order. Consequently, the typical bondsman did not work terribly hard. In
terms of food, clothing, and housing, slaves tended to be better treated than many
wage laborers in the north, and plantation life “was punctuated by such congenial
pastimes as ‘the dance in the sugarhouse, the bonfire in the creek with
demonstrations from the sisters as they came dripping out, the rabbit hunt, the log-
rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee, the quilting party, and the crap
garne’.”28 He further suggests that since most slaves were generally content with
their positions in life, episodes of slave resistance were few and far between, and
where they did occur, they were mated in the laziness, shiftlessness, and general
criminal tendencies that resulted from poor discipline and training.

That Phillips’ racial bias seemed to shape many of his findings is obvious.

In illustrating his belief in racial inferiority, there are many sources from which one

 

2° Gray. Wood. “UB. Phillips" in Watchman
glniversity of Chicago Press, 1937) 354-373.

Phillips. Ulfich Bonnell. WWW
Connoloilinsmlatmasllntnnnmnnhuhnfilantationkngimn (New York: D. Appleton, 1918)
343.

2’ Quarles, Benjamin. 171.

12

might draw, though one particular essay from 1938 - “The Historic Civilization of
the Old South” - says a great deal about Phillips’ social views: the “civilization of
the Old South,” he writes, was “wholesome...its tradition of kindliness,
hospitality, honesty, moderation, and good humor is a precious possession, to be
cherished and spread abroad.” In spite of some “well-informed” and “thoughtful
negroes” of the early 20th century, “the mass are somewhat another matter...Most
of them have...yet to begin to suggest, that they can be taken into full fellowship of
any sort in a democratic and civilized order. Their cousins in Africa represent a
wonderful capacity to remain primitive - to perpetuate the crudest human beliefs and
practices. If most of these cousins in America had an effective suffrage, they could
not use it with intelligence and good effect.”29
It is significant to note that Black scholars were the first to point out
Phillips’ bias. W.E.B. DuBois, for example, regarded W as
“curiously incomplete and unfortunately biased...Nowhere is there any adequate
conception of ‘darkies’, ‘niggers’ and ‘negroes’ (words liberally used throughout
the book) as making a living mass of humanity with all the usual human
reactions.”30 Carter G. Woodson echoed these complaints, albeit in a slightly more
restrained tone. Among the author’s shortcomings, he lists an “inability to fathom
the negro mind, his failure to bring out the cycles of the history of slavery, and a
tendency to argue the contrary when facts seem to be unfavorable to the
slaveholders.”31 Finally, L.D. Reddick, addressing a 1936 convention of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, noted that historians of

slavery had heretofore “unexplored” instances of slave resistance, including

 

2’ Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, “The Historic Civilization of the Old South,” Agricultural History
(January, 1938) 149.

30DuBois, W. E. B., American Political Science Review (November, 1918) 722, cited in Smith,
John David. and Inscoe. John C.. WWW
(Greenwood Press, 1990) 83.
3' Woodson, Carter G., Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March, 1919) 481, cited 1n Smith
and Inscoe, 87.

13

“suicide, flight...and group insurrection,” and that the profession needed to offer
“a picture of the institution as seen through the eyes of the bondsman himself.”32
While Reddick’s comments demonstrate a good deal of prescience
concerning future directions of slave historiography, none of the critiques of these
Black scholars attracted anything near the attention of Richard Hofstadter’s essay,
“U.B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,” first published in 1944. This piece is
notable as “the first open challenge to Phillips reputation by a white scholar.”33
While Hofstadter poked at Phillips racism, his central argument was that four of the
chapters of mm were marred by a shabby methodology that
tainted his findings. Through a statistical analysis of Phillips’ data, he revealed that
an inordinate amount of attention was given not only to plantation-size estates, but
to the very largest of these plantations. This was a major problem, since a majority
of slaves did not live on plantations this large. Altogether, Phillips seems to have
drawn generalizations from samples that included about ten percent of southern
slaves and less than one percent of all slaveowners. “It would be too much,”
Hofstadter wrote, “to say that he was studying the upper crust. For the most part
he was concentrating upon the upper crust of the upper crust.” In addition to this
quantitative work, however, Hofstadter also saw fit to issue a stining challenge to

subsequent generations of slave scholars. A “materially different version of the

slave system will doubtless emerge,” he wrote:

when scholars animated by a counter-bias, or perhaps, if it is not

too much to hope for, by a far greater spirit of detachment, have subjected
the system to similarly intense study. There is...nothing inevitable about
his point of view or his technique. Let the study of the Old South be
undertaken by other scholars who have absorbed the viewpoint of modern
cultural anthropology, who have a feeling for social psychology...who
will concentrate upon the neglected rural elements that formed the great
majority of the Southern population, who will not rule out the testimony

 

’2 Reddick, L.D., “A New Interpretation for Negro History,” Journal of Negro History (January,
1937) 20, cited in Meier and Rudwick, 240.
3’ Smith and Inscoe, 183.

14

of more critical observers, and who will realize that any history of slavery
must be written in large part from the standpoint of the slave - and then the
possibilities of the Old South and the slave system as a field of research

and historical experience will loom larger than ever.34

There is some debate as to whether or not this essay significantly impacted
upon the development of slave historiography. Genovese includes it in a list of
“visible” and “widely read” pieces that, taken together, seemed to have inaugurated
a challenge to Phillips views.35 On the other hand, Meier and Rudwick discount it
as “negligible”, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., claims that it did not “seem to have had
much specific influence on historians’ attitudes toward slavery or toward
Phillips.”36 One point to raise here, however, is that Schlesinger’s essay was
published in 1969, whereas in the decade to follow “a veritable avalanche of path-
breaking studies on various aspects of the American slave system appeared. Even a
partial list of the most notable works published between 1967 and 1977 is mind-

”37

boggling. Moreover, Schlesinger employs a curious criterion here for measuring

“influence,” writing in a footnote that: “Neither Starnpp in W

(1956) nor Genovese in W (1965) mention the
Hofstadter piece. S.M. Elkins’s single reference in 51mm (1959), p. 18, is quick

”38 This is, simply, a bizarre statement. Common sense tells us that

and glancing.
scholars often ideologically condition one another in deep and meaningful ways,
which are nevertheless unlikely to often appear in the form of a direct reference.

Moreover, while it is true that Elkins’ discussion of Hofstadter’s piece is brief, he

 

",Hofstadter Richard, “U.B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,” Journal of Negro History,
(April, 1944) 122.

35Genovese, Eugene, “The Influence of the Black Power Movement on Historical Scholarship:
Reflections of a White Historian”, Daedalus, (Spring, 1970), reprinted' in Wk;

,(Pantheon Books, 1968) 236.

36Meier and Rudwick, 245. Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, “Richard Hofstadter", in Cunliffe, Marcus
and Winks. Robin W.. EstmastnmSomnEsaxsonAmnrinnnHistodans (Harper & Row. 1969)
282.
37 Dew, Charles, in Boles and Nolen, 120.
3' Schlesinger, in Cunliffe and Winks, managers, 457.

15

does refer to it as “ingenious” and notes that one of its effects was to shift the moral

”39 Schlesinger

center of gravity amongst scholars “to a strong antislavery position.
may also be unaware that Starnpp once delivered a paper to the AHA, later
published in 1952, which does make direct reference to Hofstadter’s essay of 1944.
In addition to demonstrating a familiarity with the specifics of Hofstadter’s critique,
he quotes him approvingly, and echoes his call for a “materially different version”
of the slave system that would emerge “when scholars with different points of view
and different techniques” approached the subject “with similarly intensive study’ 140
Also interesting to note is that Starnpp and Elkins each had their own, close
personal associations with Hofstadter. Stampp, for example, taught with him for a
time at the University of Maryland and sent him drafts of each chapter of The
Wren , in return for comments and suggestions. Elkins, meanwhile,
originally wrote his book Slayery a5 a Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia under
Hofstadter’s supervision, thanking him in the acknowledgments for “detailed and
searching criticism of the entire manuscript.”41
While it may be impossible to measure the pervasiveness Hofstadter’s
influence with any degree of specificity, we can be reasonably sure that Starnpp,
Elkins, and others all drew inspiration from the political and social milieu of the
postwar world. While the 1940’s were hardly the most progressive years of the
twentieth century, this period was marked by an identifiable increase in racial
consciousness among educated, northern whites. As one scholar has noted, “by
the end of World War 11, white supremacy was no longer a publicly acceptable
doctrine in the North, and civil rights reform to secure legal equality for black

Americans was becoming an issue in national politics?42 One way this can be

 

” Elkins. Stanley. We (University
of Chicago Press, 1959) 18.

’° Starnpp, Kenneth M., “The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery,” American Historical
Review, (April, 1952) 614-618.

" Elkins, Stanley, 51am 311.

’2 Kellogg, Peter J ., “Civil Rights Consciousness in the 19405,” Historian. (November, 1979) 18.

16

measured is through an examination of such organs of liberal opinion as the Nation
and the New Republic, where their general readerships were exposed to essays and
editorials preaching greater racial enlightenment. Much of this was propelled by a
recognition that Nazi racism was not so far removed from notions of white
superiority that were commonly advanced in the United States. In essence, the
afterglow of the Second World War helped to cast a shameful shadow upon our
own caste system. “The many liberals who had begun to see Americans, including
themselves, in a new light also began to realize that...racism made America
vulnerable to enemy propaganda and to loss of support in the nonwhite world at
home and abroad?"3 Finally, exigencies arising from partisan political needs also
played a role in shaping predominate white attitudes. By the late 1940’s, for
example, the Democratic Party felt a strong need to solidify the vote of the Black
electorate, and so during the year of the 1948 national convention, Truman was
offering an unprecedented degree of attention to civil rights. (This was of course a
stark contrast to F.D.R.’s administration, which in the 1930’s could hardly be
moved to pass an anti-lynching bill or desegregate the military).

Along with many other white scholars of Black history from this period,
Starnpp’s intellectual coming of age was rooted in both the Great Depression as
well as an ideologically leftist family tradition. Though he might not have
fashioned a distinct methodological approach to W until about
1950, his hopes for racial enlightenment in the political present were clear enough
in a 1944 book review, where he spoke of “southern Bourbons...still doing
business at the same old stand, while poor whites and blacks glare at each other
across the color line. Indeed, one might ask as ironically as he likes, what is so

‘new’ about the ‘New South’?”44 Elkins, of Eastern European Jewish origins, also

 

‘3 Ibid., 32.

“ Starnpp, Kenneth M., book review of Herbert Aptheker’s MW,
Journal of Negro History (January, 1943), cited in Meier and Rudwick, 138.

17

demonstrated “early concern with racial and ethnic prejudices,” based on his
experiences in the military and while studying at Harvard and Columbia “in the
liberal glow of the Truman Fair Deal.”45 Though they each took their own,
autonomous paths to their respective conclusions about ante-bellum slavery, they
both reflected a growing tide of intellectual reaction against racial discrimination.
Moreover, they were both influenced by a growing sociological assault on racism,
which peaked in the mid-1940’s. Just as civil rights lobbyists “drew intellectual
legitimacy and sustenance” from such works, researchers rooted in a wide range of
disciplines could hardly escape the diffusion of this activist-inspired scholarship
into various textbooks and professional journals. Most typical of this genre was
Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis (1945), and of course Gunnar Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma (1944) - a landmark study so vast in 5c0pe that it may well have
functioned as a scientific paradigm."6 As David Brion Davis remarks in an
invaluable essay on the course of postwar slave historiography, by the early
1950’s, “however parochial their discipline, historians had...become aware of the
growing sociological literature on racial prejudice and ‘the Negro problem’,”
deciding that “their parents’ quiet convictions - the half-whispered ‘truths’ about
Negro character - were dangerous stereotypes that had no place in a nation that had
crushed Nazi racism and committed itself to the defense of the free world?"7
11
Certainly Stampp’s book was part history, and part moral statement. While
it’s generally agreed that Wm is impeccably researched, one
might argue that it is also infused with a Faulknerian sense of the epic and tragic.

Robert Abzug has offered that this quality “comes from depicting slavery as a

 

‘5 “Meier and Rudwick, 140.
“Meier and Rudwick, 136. Also see Southem, David W. ,W

RnlanonsflnllsnandAhmiAnAuancanflllanmlflauflofl (Louisiana State University
Press, 1987).
’7 Davis, David Brion, l.

18

southern tragedy within the broader national history” - a perspective that’s clear
enough from the very first paragraph."8 “T o understand the South,” Starnpp
begins:
is to feel the pathos in its history. This aura of pathos is more than a
delusion of historians, more than the vague sensation one gets when
looking down an avenue of somber, moss-draped live oaks leading
to stately ruins or to nothing at all. For Southerners live in the

shadow of a real tragedy; they know, better than most other
Americans, that little ironies fill the history of mankind and that

large disasters from time to time unexpectedly shape its course.49

If Hofstadter was the first notable white scholar to take on Phillips’ view of
a genial slave system, Starnpp was the first to do so systematically, over the course
of some 430 pages. Foner has opined that W signaled “a full-
scale refutation of the traditional interpretation,” while Abzug has noted that this
book “has been justly credited as a landmark in the rewriting of Afro-American and
race relations history.” Thomas Holt has written that the profession has seldom
“witnessed such a thorough and completely successful revision of a major work of
scholarship,” where David Brion Davis has simply referenced it as “a revelation”
which “transformed the character of the debate”. Genovese, while noting that
Stampp’s book was hardly a bolt from the blue (“The critique of Phillip’s views
and of those from the Big House generally had been building for twenty-five years
or more”) nonetheless gave it credit for standing “the racist work of Ulrich Bonnell
Phillips on its head”.50

Strangely enough, while Starnpp responds to Phillips on an almost point-

by-point basis, he is rarely mentioned directly. Only in the very first chapter is he

 

“Abzug, Robert H. and Maizlish, Stephen E., editors, W
Wang, (University Press of Kentucky, 1986) 3
’9 Starnpp. Kenneth M.. WWW (Vintage
Books, 1956) 3.
’° Foner, 74; Abzug, 1; Holt, 214; Davis, 3; Genovese, W 236.

19

ever quoted, in part to ridicule the assertion, on page one of Wine
91159.11th that one should approach the south by first “discussing the weather, for
that has been the chief agency in making the south distinctive”.51 Stampp’s
contrary assumption is that the south owes it’s distinctive character to slavery, and
that this was rooted in a series of deliberate choices “made by men who sought
greater returns than they could obtain from their labor alone, and who found other
types of labor more expensive.” Moreover, Starnpp quickly dismissed studies ’
premised on the notion that Blacks owned some sort of innate, genetic trademarks
which left them favorably disposed to a life of servitude. Historians who
subscribed to such “artificial” views could no longer be taken seriously, and so
Starnpp cited Myrdal to prove, “beyond any reasonable doubt” that it is “impossible
to make valid generalizations” about the “capacities and personalities” of an entire
race. Indeed, in what was perhaps an unfortunate turn of phrase, Starnpp prefaced
his book with the remark that “innately, Negroes are, after all, only white men with
black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”52
Removed, then, from any inclinations to take a romantic view of the Old
South, Stampp’s portrayal of plantation life is preoccupied with the violence and
cruelty of the system. Though he makes broad allowances for a wide variety of
differences in the treatment of individual slaves, there is little discussion of dances
and com-shucking parties. Owners tended to be “ambitious entrepreneurs,” not
“selfless philanthropists”. In terms of food, clothing, housing, and medical care,
slaves were rarely provided with much more than the bare amounts necessary for
their daily, temporal sustenance. Nor were they the least bit happy or content in
their bondage. Certainly they saw the peculiar institution “chiefly as a system of

labor extortion”. They awoke early and worked late, usually six days a week, and

almost always under the threat of the lash. The entire structure of the south.

 

” PhillipS. l..iin_and_l.ahor_in.lhn_91d.8onth 1.
’2 Starnpp, 5, 10 and vii.

20

including its political and legal systems and social mores and customs, was all
orchestrated in such a manner as “to make them stand in fear”. On the difficult
question of the profitability of slavery, Starnpp argues that owners tended to make a
reasonable retum on their investments.53 This was a result of the fact that, rather
than a school yard, the plantation was most often a sort of factory run with prison
labor.

Consequently, episodes of resistance occurred almost daily. Slaves were “a
troublesome property,” and so, “whether bold and persistent or mild and sporadic,”
this “created for all slaveholders a serious problem of discipline?54 Though large
scale insunections were of course exceedingly rare, slaves often malingered, broke
tools, feigned illness, and stole from their owners at every opportunity. In other
cases, slaves would take part in sabotage on a larger scale, and planters records
show that it was not unusual for a trusted servant to one day be caught spitting in
his master’s coffee or peeing in the soup kettle. Occasions where slaves committed
arson, ran away, and sometimes even physically fought their brutal overseers or

owners all helped to refute the myth that slavery rested upon the “cheerful

acquiescence” of the slaves.
The weakest chapter of the book, “Between Two Cultures,” deals with life

in the slave quarters. Though Starnpp acknowledges the reality of planter
paternalism, his focus here is too often upon the harshness of the treatment meted
out to most slaves. There is little room, in his formulation, for the existence or
development of a viable Black cultural life. Where families in Africa were healthy
and well-regulated, African-American slaves “as at so many points...had lost their
native culture without being able to find a workable substitute and therefore lived in

a kind of cultural chaos.”55 In trying to determine “What else was there in the lives

 

’3 Just for the record, Starnpp further adds that slavery was not very profitable for the slaves.

5‘ Starnpp, 91.
’5 Starnpp, 340.

 

21

of slaves besides work, sleep, and procreation?” Starnpp, here as well as
throughout the book, makes little effort to investigate the reminiscences of ex-
slaves their folk songs or folk tales, or their religion, which is dismissed as
“striking similar to that of the poor, illiterate white men of the ante-bellum South.”
While there were a few traces of “Africanisms” in Black speech, dance, music,
folklore, dress, and religion, in Stampp’s view, “Before the Civil War, American

Negroes developed no cultural nationalism, no conscious pride in African ways.

Accordingly, “The average bondsman...

lived more or less aimlessly in a bleak and narrow world. He lived
in a world without schools, without books, without learned men; he
knew less of the fine arts and of aesthetic values than he had known

in Africa; and he found few ways to break the monotonous
sameness of all his days...His world was full of mysteries which he

could not solve, full of forces which he could not control. And so
he tended to be a fatalist and futilitarian, for nothing else could

reconcile him to his life.56

As a new generation of scholars built upon Stampp’s work, and as the
scope and content of historical studies shifted dramatically during the 1960’s,
Starnpp would find many of these points met with a sharp rebuttal. Though a
number of monographs subsequent monographs would deal with regional
variations in slavery, the free Black population, and the economic order of the

South, we shall see that the most fundamental transformation in slave

historiography involved a new focus on Black culture. 7 Revisionist historians

explored hitherto unorthodox sources to try and reveal the true nature of slave life,

and as a result, tended to come up with radically different perceptions concerning

the vitality of the slaves’ folklore, religion, family lives, and community

organization.

 

:Stampp, 377, 361.
5l'For specifics, perhaps the single best bibliographic essay on the historiography of slavery 15

included in Peter J. Parish’ 5 WWW (Harper & Row, 1989) 167-188.

 

22

While this point will be developed more fully in chapters to follow, it is
worth noting that Stampp himself has suggested that many of these studies have
served as a useful corrective to his own. In his 1970 paper, “Rebels and Sambos:
The Search for the Negro’s Personality in Slavery,” he acknowledged that though
slaves suffered under an oppressive system, it “nevertheless permitted them a
degree of semiautonomous community life”; that “it was custom for them to live in
family groups”; that Christianity functioned not only as a “means of control,” but
also offered “subtle ways of protesting their condition (as) a system of beliefs that
comforted and sustained them in their bondage...(and an) additional means of self
expression that helped them retain their psychic balance.” Though Starnpp
remained steadfast in his belief that there was never “a truly autonomous Afro-
American subculture...in slavery days,” he did allow that “some ingredients for one
were certainly there,” and so following Emancipation, freedmen, “through their
churches, their music, and a great variety of organized social activities” were able to
create rich and readily distinguishable lives.58 Secondly, in evaluating the
strengths and weakness of any work, it is of course always a fair idea to take in to
account the time and place in which it was written. Stampp’s book, as we’ve
noted, was the first major reinterpretation of slavery in almost 40 years. As Nathan
Huggins has remarked, the idea that slaves “were instrumental in the creation of the
world they shared with the master’ ’ was “out of the question in the late 1950s.”
And though John Hope Franklin refrains from naming names in his 1986 essay
“On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History,” it seems clear that he
recognizes Won as a work that has been criticized by others for
neglecting “some cherished attributes of Afro-American life and history, such as
race pride and cultural nationalism.” While he apparently agrees that such claims

have some merit, he adds that they “overlook the important fact that the historians

 

5' Starnpp, Kenneth M. “Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro’s Personality in Slavery,’
Journal of Southern History,(August, 1971) 382-83, 390. Cited in Meier and Rudwick, 271.

 

23

of (Stampp’s) generation were compelled to fight for the integration of Afro-
9959

American history in to the mainstream of the nation’s history.
Relatedly, Starnpp would also be identified by subsequent writers as a neo

~abolitionist”.6° Oddly enough, in some cases was nearly an ad homineum thrust,
for as the sixties evolved, not everyone appreciated the increasing number of
liberally minded, white historians specializing in Black history. This too, Will be a
point further developed. Worthy of remark here, however, is that for all the
acclaim Starnpp received, he left himself vulnerable to at least two other, closely
related criticisms. First, pervasive through his book is a tendency to sometimes
lapse into an excessive sermonizing or moralizing that seems perhaps out of
character for a historical monograph. Second, Stampp unwittingly came to
symbolize some of the arrogance and paternalism of many white liberals of hrs era
with his aforementioned remark that “innately, Negroes are, after all, only white
men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.” According to C. Vann
Woodward, the remark betrayed a “Northern type” of “self conscious , moral

engagement, explicitly suggesting to “the Brother in Black” an awareness that

slaves were “endowed natively with all the putative white attributes of courage,

manhood, rebelliousness, and love of liberty.”61 Charles Silberrnan, in a widely

read book on race relations published in 1964, simply disagreed with Stampp. To

argue that Negroes are white men with Black skins, he said, “is to pretend that we

are all engaged in a masquerade. ”6 ‘ Elkins seized on this line as well: “Professor

Starnpp,” he wrote, “like his abolitionist forbears, is still as much concerned as they

to prove slavery an abomination and to prove master and slave equal before their

 

’9 Franklin, John Hope. “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History," in In:

Win: Hine Darlene Clark and Holt. Thomas
C. eds. (Louisiana State Press, 1986) 21.
6° 366 Franklin. John Hove. WNW 17; Elkins 22-23; .

" Woodward, C. Vann, 7-8.
‘2 Silberman, Charles E. Witt: (Random House, 1964) 73.

 

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24

Maker ”63 Consequently, other scholars (and presumably, many readers), were

able to draw a clear moral lesson from Wm: “If white Americans

could understand the psychic and cultural traumas occasioned by generatlons of

bondage, they would presumably experience the necessary sympathy and gurlt to

undo the wrongs of the past.”64

Scholars have long debated whether it is a good idea for historians to try

and resurrect a “useable past”. All to often, they assert, various political

commitments or presentist ideologies have marred a necessary respect for the
pastness” of the past. These concerns became more pronounced as hlstorrans

frequently saw their works more or less as political interventions mm the

contemporary debates that raged amongst themf’5 While Starnpp, as we have seen
may have begun his work on slavery during a period of increased racral

enlightenment, it’s doubtful that he ever had an idea of the vast extent to whrch
slavery and issues of identity politics linked to slavery - would later come to play

such a key role in public discourse. As Davis has wryly remarked, “neither Starnpp

nor Elkins wrote for a bullish market”. ('6

That said Starnpp could not have picked a more propitious time to release
hrs book and Holt is not the first scholar to candidly remark that Starnpp 5 success

must be credited, in part, “to the fact that the prevailing ideology of the time was

ripe for his message.”67 It has been made clear that Starnpp began research for his

work during a period of increased racial enlightenment. But by the time hrs book

was ready to be published, the pace of dramatic civil rights activity had increased

 

6’ Elkins, 22-23.
6’ “Davis, David Brion, 3.
“This is not the place for a lengthy investigation into this dilemma, and perhaps the subject rs

best left for discussion by those scholars who feel themselves capable of attaining complete

degrees of scholarly detachment. Peter Novick’ 5 book
Questimlansuhsmmerimflisrmcalflofessjm (Cambridge University Press 1988) Is easily
the best treatment of the ways in which “the ideal and ideal of objectivity” has been “elaborated,
challenged, modified, and defended over the last century".

:Davis, David Brion, 7.
”Holt, Thomas C. in Foner, Eric (ed.), Wm, 214.

 

 

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25

further. One significant victory involved the Supreme Court’s decision in “Brown
v the Board of Education,” which in 1954 struck a major blow against school

segregation. As Harvard Sitkoff has recalled, the implications of the case stretched

far beyond the realm of education:

Euphoric blacks declared that just as the first Emancipation
Proclamation abolished slavery, so this second proclamation

of emancipation would end all Jim Crow...More, it offered the
realbeginning of a multi—racial democratic society. Brown
heightened the aspirations and expectations of Afro-Americans as
nothing ever had before. Nearly a century after their professed
freedom had been stalled, compromised, and stolen, Blacks

confidently anticipated being free at last.68

In 1955, it became clear that a rising tide against African colonialism and
imperialism would parallel much of the struggle for Black liberation in America.
Many scholars and activists, who had heretofore been either ignorant or ambivalent
about Africa, began to take an interest in struggles to fend against EurOpean
domination. George Houser has noted that the Bandung Conference of this year,
which “heralded the organization of colored pe0ples of the world to resrst

colonialism and racism,” had “epitomized the spirit of the era”. Likewise, Homer

Jack an American who attended the conference, wrote that “Bandung somehow

caught the world’s imagination, and early on its leaders were conscious that hlstory

was looking over their shoulder‘ ’.69
Likewise, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, culminating in December, 1956,

doubtless sparked an interest in race relations amongst students, scholars, and the
media While this local movement certainly signified the rise of Martin Luther Klng,

Jr to the national limelight, it also served as an early indication of the ways 1n

 

6’ $Sitkoff. Harvard. W (Hill and Wang, 1993) 22.
”Houser, George M., “Freedom’s Struggle Crosses Oceans and Mountains. Martin Luther King,
Jr., and the Liberation Struggles in Africa and America,” in Albert, Peter J. and Hoffman, Ronald,

(ms. ), A ‘ .
Press, 1993), 170.

 

 

 

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26

which profound changes in racial consciousness (in general), and an awareness of

the strength of collective Black protest (in particular), would later transform the

nation. All of these developments, within a year of W’s

publication, helped to ensure that the revisionary spirit behind the book would not

fall on deaf ears. As Meier and Rudwick have written, as a result of Stampp’s wide
readership and the great amount of acclaim that was heaped upon his book, “What

in 1944 had been a heretical view of a dissenting minority was becoming the

standard interpretation.” Times were “auspicious” for the book’s publication
indeed.7o

111
As something of a corollary to Stampp’s notion of a “peculiar urgency”

surrounding slave studies of the 1950’s, Elkins began his book Slayer: with a brief
discussion of the connection between his subject and the racial politics of the era in
which he was writing. As we have seen, throughout much of the 1950’s, the
nation was witness to a precipitous rise in civil rights activity. Whereas Stampp’s
book came off the press hard on the heels of “Brown v. the Board of Education”
and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Elkins study followed the Civil Rights Act of
1957, the development of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), and the school integration crisis at Little Rock. Meanwhile,
by virtue of the work of such writers as James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, much
of the white reading public was finally beginning to pay attention to the
psychologies of Black Americans. Without referencing any of these particulars,
Elkins nonetheless noted that “How a person thinks about Negro slavery
historically,” typically “makes a great deal of difference here and now; it tends to

locate him morally in relation to a whole range of very immediate political, social,
9’71

and philosophical issues which in some way refer back to slavery.

 

7" Meier and Rudwick, 138-39.

 

he

Pa

O
C0

gull

$11111

27

Though there’s no denying that Stampp’s book was a landmark, it is widely

held that Elkins study has had the larger impact upon the profession, even if few

serious scholars have found his arguments convincing. As British historian Peter
Parish has observed, “His influence is to be measured not in the band of disciples
and converts he inspired, for their numbers were few, but in the army of critics he
goaded into fresh thinking about a whole range of different questions. ’72 Charles

Dew sees Slam as a “seminal work” which “largely determined the direction” of

many subsequent studies. 3 Nathan Huggins has credited Elkins work with having

“led to a transformation and renewal of historical writing on the peculiar
institution,"74 and Starnpp himself has remarked that “It is no small tribute to
Elkins’s achievement that his essay should have provided the focus for virtually all

scholarly discussion of slave personality for more than a decade, and that it elicited

. 75
a volume of commentary, wrth a response from Elklns.”

Though it is often claimed that Stampp’s work paved the way for Elkins to
open new avenues of inquiry, Meier and Rudwick explain that he had already
sketched out most of the ideas in 51mm before reading Starnpp. Yet this did not

prevent him from using Wuhan as a springboard from which to

launch his own concerns. While lauding Stampp’s study as the “culmination and
quintessence” of a movement to replace U.B. Phillips’ books as the “authoritative

statement” on slavery, Elkins was distressed by an unintended consequence: slave

' -, (University

 

"Elkins, Stanley, . . . - ' . ~‘.. , ‘ . .. .- .
of Chicago Press, 1959) 1.

72Parish Petesz WWW (Harper&Row 1989)7
’3 Dew, 121.

74Huggins, Nathan, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth. Slaveryand the Master Narrative of
American History,” Radical History Review #49, 29.

7’ Starnpp, Kenneth, “Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro’ 5 Personality 1n Slavery,”
Journal of Southern History, (August, 1971), in Starnpp, W
W (Oxford University Press, 1980) 50. The book of commentary
Starnpp ls referring to is Lane Ann 1.. (ed) WWW

Cfihas (University of Illinois Press, 1970).

 

 

 

 

28

scholarship, he argued, was running a risk of becoming increasingly redundant.

“Is there anything more to say,” he wondered, “that has not been said already?”

There is now very little that Phillips did with the plantation regime
that has not been done with greater thoroughness by his Northern

successor. Not only has Philips’ moral position been
overwhelmingly reversed, but even his scholarship - though nearly

forty years would have to elapse before anyone finally accomplished
it - has been left in the shade by scholarship more painstaking still.

Not only has the challenge been successful; the victory is
devastating...And yet what is even more striking than Professor

Stampp’s triumph is the fact that the coercion’s of a century-old
debate remain irresistible: he has joined the debate, he may even
have won it, but it is still very much the same debate.

Thus, in an effort to examine “the old subject in new ways,” Elkins divided
his book into three lengthy essays, on “Institutions and the Law of Slavery,”
“Slavery and Personality,” and “Slavery and the Intellectual.” This study will limit
its focus to the first two sections, which involve the impact of slavery upon the
personalities of typical bondsmen - clearly the most widely discussed aspect of the
hoole76 While Latin American slavery may have been cruel, Elkins draws upon
Frank Tannenbaum’s SlaxaangLCihzan (1948) to argue that it was nonetheless a
much more “open” and flexible system than that which ever existed in the US
south. Long accustomed to slavery, New World colonies more or less adopted a
set of social values that had been shaped over several hundred years. Specifically,
there were three separate tiers of interests, involving a national church, a sort of
royal paternalism, and a quasi-medieval planter class, which had been stewed

together within the Latin American system in such a way as to preserve the general

 

7‘ For a discussion of Elkins so-called Antislavery thesis, see Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, “Stanley
Elkins’ Slam: The Antislavery Interpretation Reexamined,” in The American Quanerly, May,
1973, pgs. 154-176. In this piece, Wyatt-Brown attributes a general neglect of Elkins’ antislavery
section to the fact that he “offered no imaginative analogies comparable to those which so
provocatively illuminated slave psychology and Latin racial styles," as well as the fact that “the
causes of the Civil War...did not excite the literary battles they once had. Historians of the ‘60’s,
like everyone else, were preoccupied with racial tensions, not with the rights and wrongs of

sectional disputes." (pg. 154).

 

29

humanity of its slaves. Put another way, “three formidable interests,” though
“distinct and not always harmonious,” were nevertheless all deeply concerned with
the development of slavery as an institution. Accordingly, “this balance of power

left its profound impress on the actual legal and customary sanctions governing the

status and treatment of the slaves.”77 As a result, the Spanish and Portuguese

societies looked favorably upon manumissions, extended legal protection to slave
marriages, and put limitations on the policing and disciplining of their slaves.
Though owners of course controlled their slaves labor, for practical purposes this
was seen as a contractual arrangement. In Elkins’ words, “the master owned the
man’s labor but not the man,” for “master and slave were brothers in Christ.”78
The primary consideration here is “not the severity or the laxness of the slave
systems but the completeness with which the decisions concerning the slave (was)
under the master’s control.” Given a greater array of rights and opportunities,
Latin American slaves tended to have the necessary space to more fully develop
their personalities.

By contrast, ante-bellum slavery developed autonomously, without any
significant institutional safeguards. With unopposed capitalism a driving force, the
result was “unmitigated slavery”. Personal relationships between owners and
slaves were of course subsidiary to the exigencies that created the need for slavery
in the first place, and so slaves were denied the fullest fruits of their humanity.

Moreover, as a result of the “finely circumscribed” and “self-contained” nature of

United States slavery, “virtually all lines of communication to society at large,

originated and ended with the master.”7 Slaves could expect a lifetime of bondage

and servitude, and their family ties were always subject to the whims of their

 

7" Elkins, 31mm. 71.
" Ibid., 76.
7’ Ibid., 63.

30

owners. Matters of policing and discipline, while loosely regulated, were in effect

almost always subject to the will and desire of the planter. Altogether:

the rights and property, and all other civil and legal ‘rights’ were
everywhere denied the slave with a clarity that left no doubt of his
utter dependency upon his master...In this sense, American slavery
operated as a ‘closed’ system - one in which, for the generality of
slaves in their nature as men and women, sub specie aetemitatis,
contacts with free society could occur only on the most narrowly

. . o
crrcumscrlbed of terms.

Elkins hypothesized that this closed system was so pervasive, and so
powerful, that it had had a profound shaping effect upon the personalities of
millions of bondsmen. In this view, the “Sambo” stereotype was no mere
fabrication from Southern lore, but rather an accurate reflection of the predominate
slave personality. In describing Sambo, Elkins did not mean to perpetuate racist
dogma, but rather was trying to describe what he saw as a tagic consequence of
racism. The “typical plantation slave,” Elkins wrote, “was docile but irresponsible,
loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing, his behavior was
full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His

relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment: it
”81

was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being.
Elkins reasoned his assumption from the fact that so many contemporary

observers of slaves, including planters and northern travelers, had left near-uniform
descriptions of this “slavish personality”. In his view, “The picture has far too
many circumstantial details, its hues have been stroked in by too many different
brushes, for it to be denounced as counterfeit. Too much folk-knowledge, too
much plantation literature, too much of the Negroes own lore, have gone into its

making to entitle one in good conscience to condemn it as ‘conspiracy’.” By

 

'° Ibid., 59 and 81-82.
" Elkins, 82,

 

 

31

contrast to this ubiquitous portrayal of Sambo in the south, he notes that “one
searches in vain” for such a personality in the Latin-American system.82

Though Elkins applied theoretical knowledge gained from social
psychology to support his assumption that the plantation system fostered infantilism
“as a normal feature of behavior,” more controversial was his analogy between
slavery and the German concentration camps of World War 11. Both systems, he
argued, were “perverted patriarchies,” where masters or SS guards had complete
control over their dependents. Accordingly, victims of both systems had minimal
communication with the larger society beyond that allowed by their superiors. And
just as slaves were held to have developed childlike qualities over the course of their
lives in bondage, Jewish prisoners were said to have developed - in just a few
months - “types of behavior which are characteristic of infancy or early youth.”
Just as slaves identified with their masters, Jews, “reduced to complete childish
dependence,” identified closely with their Nazi captors.

It is important to note that Elkins carefully qualified many of his main
arguments. The comparison and contrast between Latin American and United
States slavery, he insists, is but a model. To identify “infantile” behavior as
predominate in slave society, he remarked, is to “generalize at a fairly crude level”.
Moreover, he acknowledged a “broad belt of indeterminacy between ‘mere acting’”
on the part of the slave, and his or her “true self”. Finally, though he maintained
the usefulness of the analogy between slavery and the Holocaust, he took care to
delineate, with some specificity, some of their major differences. None of this,
however, was enough to insulate Elkins from broad attacks upon his scholarship.

In analyzing the public reception of Slam, Davis notes that “a
considerable amount of energy has been expended to rebut Elkins”. These would

include attacks on Elkins belief that Latin American slavery was “more open,

 

‘2 Elkins, 84.

 

 

32

flexible, and humane than North American slavery,” and that the southern system
wrought “a fundamental personality change in its victims, reducing the typical
bondsman to a childlike, submissive, carefree and self-deprecating Sarnbo.”83

To the first point, Davis himself has been one of several historians who
have marshaled impressive evidence to suggest that Latin American slavery was in
fact much more harsh than he had surmised. In spite of the laws which governed
the system, overtly racist slaveowners enforced “military-like” discipline with
impunity. They were also perpetually frightened by prospective slave
insunections, and prohibited the teaching of religion to slaves. Though Elkins’
argument hinges less on the cruelty of the slave system, and more on the extent to
which these systems recognize the “basic humanity” of their slaves, Davis suggests
that it is “unrealistic to draw too sharp a line between moral status and physical
treatment?“ Genovese has taken a different tract here, arguing that Elkins was
wrong to conclude that the Sambo stereotype was unique to the slave south. His
claim is that Sambo was the manifestation of a “slave personality” that existed
“wherever slavery existed”. Beneath this thin veneer, however, lay “dangerous and
strong currents” which could prompt slaves to turn “fierce” and‘ ‘violent”. 85

It was this very use of the Sambo stereotype, however, that exposed Elkins

to the sharpest of criticisms. While some have allowed that slaves may have acted
out a Sambo role, this was predominantly a clever means of manipulating their
owners and overseers, who, for obvious reasons, needed to believe in myths of
Black inferiority. Others have persuasively shown that “there were many more

‘significant others’ in the life of the slave than the master, that a self-perpetuating

viable slave culture did emerge to compete with slaveowner’s authority and

 

’3 Davis 4
I”Davis, David Brion, “The Continuing Contradiction of Slavery: A Comparison of British

America and Latin America." in Lane Ann 1 (ed) Wand

111512111123 (University of Illinois Press, 19??) 113.
”,Genovese Eugene D., “Rebelliousness and Docility in the Negro Slave,” in Lane, 43-74.

33

significance, a slave culture which the slaveowners were unable to perceive and
therefore unable to pass down as reality.”86 The most convincing analysis along
these lines may have come from Sterling Stuckey, whose analysis of Black folk
culture, (largely derived from Africa), affirms “the existence of a large number of
vital, tough-minded (slaves) who, though severely limited and abused by slavery,
had found a way to preserve their humanity in the he face of insuperable odds.”87
While Meier and Rudwick have described the historical response to Elkins
as “almost entirely negative,” this is not wholly accurate. John Hope Franklin, for
7 example, heralded the book as one of “the most original and serious examinations
of slavery or any other institution in America,” and applauded it as “bold and
original”.88 Sterling Stuckey considered the early response to Elkins to be
“generally favorable.” “For the most part,” he wrote, there were “relatively mild
criticisms. ” 89 Davis lists John William Ward, Nathan Glazer, Eugene Genovese,
and C. Vann Woodward as important scholars who, though they had some
reservations, felt more or less the same way.90 A more accurate delineation would
be to say that over the course of the 1960’s, major critiques of Elkins built upon
one another, until his work had become almost entirely discredited. This is
interesting because it says a good deal about the ways in which slave scholarship
has evolved. Though Starnpp and Elkins had very different understandings of the

effect of the peculiar institution upon the slave, the locus of each of their studies

was the essential brutality of the system. In Davis’ view:

It is clear that Elkins intended his harsh portrait of slavery to provide
the grounds for continuing white patience and forbearance. In the
1950’s, at least, it appeared that a more sanguine image of slavery
could only reinforce unenlightened complaints that enough

 

:Lane, 10-11.
:Stuckey, Sterling, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos rn Slavery,” in Lane, 268.

:Franklin, John Hope, “Slavery and Personality," Massachusetts Review (Autumn, 1960) 123.
”Stuckey, Sterling, “Twilight of Our Past: Reflections on the Origins of Black History,”in

Amialadl. (1971) 268
90Davis, 4.

34

allowances had been made, that enough time had elapsed for
Negroes to begin to behave like white men.91

Echoing this point, John Hope Franan noted that, “In language as strong

as any used by Starnpp, (Elkins) tells the apologists of slavery that the institution

”92

had a corrosive effect upon every aspect of the slaves being. Both scholars

reacted against the tendencies of their predecessors to minimize the suffering of
slaves, and both men insisted that historians could no longer afford to treat slavery

as a peripheral issue. As a result of both their works, (but because of Elkins in

particular), Eric Foner has written that:

A generation of historians sat out to demonstrate that rather being
transformed in into “Sarnbos” entirely dependent upon their masters,
slaves had created a viable, semiautonomous culture among
themselves. Scholars delved into sources hitherto largely ignored
-slave songs, spirituals, folklore, narratives written by fugitives,
there minisces of ex-slaves interviewed during the 1930’s by the
WPA, marriage registers dating from just after the emancipation - to
demonstrate that slaves possessed their own values, aspirations, and
a sense of identity. Their work formed a major component of the
broader efforts in the 1960’s and 1970’s to rewrite American history
“from the bottom up”. The study of slave culture continued to

dominate writing on slavery in the 1980’s...93

Put another way, by the late 1960’s, focus upon the damage of slavery had
rapidly gone out of style. Kenneth Starnpp has recalled that in 1969, criticism of
his work “seemed to have erupted quite suddenly, with black militants insisting that
because he was a white man, he had no right to do W?“ The
same year, a young Black scholar, discussing plans for an Afro-American Center at
Cornell University, insisted that while some white scholars might be invited to do

research there, he conspicuously noted that others, “like historians Kenneth Starnpp

 

:; Ibid., 10.
Franklin, 124.
:Foner, 75.
Meier and Rudwick, 292.

35

(and) Stanley Elkins,” were hardly likely to make the guest list.95 Stuckey added

that “Elkins’ treatment of Afro-American personality must surely stand as one of the

most intellectually irresponsible of his generatron.”96 Perhaps David Southern has

best summed up the situation:

To say the least, neither Starnpp nor Elkins pleased those who were
looking for a usable black past. In the 1960’s and 1970’s many
militants and some white radicals fiercely attacked both Starnpp and
Elkins for their views of slavery. They vehemently rejected not only

Elkins’ highly questionable “Sambo” image but Stampp’s ldea of
slaves as a “troublesome property.” Prideful blacks demanded that

historians find derring- -do freedom fighters, efficient workers, and
successful culture and family builders minimally scarred by the yoke

of human bondage. 97

Much of this animosity was generated by rapid and unpredictable changes in
the nature and the direction of America’s Second Reconstruction. Long prior to the
riots of Detroit, Watts and Newark or the very first cries of “Black Power” in
Mississippi, millions of African-Americans had already become disillusioned with
the slow progress of civil rights and the overweening paternalism of many white
liberals. While many of the locally based struggles in the south had helped to
inspire and politicize northern Blacks, there was also a growing awareness that the
dismantling of Jim Crow would not significantly bolster their socio-economic
standings. As Bayard Rustin remarked, past about 1963, “No longer were
Negroes satisfied with integrating lunch counters. They now sought advances in
employment, housing, school integration, police protection, and so forth.”98 Whlle
there has always been a contingency of middle-class Black leadership that has

advocated various self-help strategies of racial upliftrnent, as the sixties progressed,

 

9’ «Dunbar Ernest, “The Black Studies Thing,” New York Times Magazine (April 6, 1969) 70.
:,Stuckey “Twilight of Our Past," 267.
”.Soutbem David W Wu
WW (Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 216.
98Rustin, Bayard, “From Protest to Politics. The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,”

Commentary (February, 1965) 25.

36

many African Americans began to rail against such suggestions. Distrustful of
ivory tower academics, with their judgements formed in “Sociology department
seminar rooms, filled with aromatic smoke from judiciously smoked pipes,
northern leaders refused to attribute ghetto poverty to the shortcomings of Blacks.
Rather, blame was cast it upon a confluence of complex economic factors. As one
scholar has put it, “Elkins’ thesis seemed to provide supoort for a new ‘racism’
based on the concept of ‘cultural deprivation,’ which was replacing crude notions

of biological inferiority as a rationale for denying equal justice to Afro-

Americans.”99 In other words, just as historians had reacted against the “damage
model” of southern slavery, civil rights leaders were becoming concerned that
preoccupation’s with the impact or the legacy of slavery might overshadow wounds
that were presently being inflicted upon the Black community by virulent white
racism. In one scholar’s view, “After the mid-1960’s the slightest mention by

whites of pathology in the black community (past or present) for whatever reasons

brought angry retribution from militant blacks.”100

Yet the largest reason for this emerging ideology can be found in the fact
that the race questions of the 1950’s proved to have had a profound consciousness-
rasing effect. Having effectively toppled Jim Crow and earned equality before the
law, Black Americans shifted their focus to an a array of cultural issues. Foremost
amongst these was the idea that a strong emphasis on Black cultural heritage and
Black identity would help to offset some of the damage that had been wrought by
centuries of white oppression. A natural point at which to begin such an
exploration, of course, was the Black experience in slavery. Malcolm X said as

much with his declaration that “the cultural revolution will be the journey of the

 

9”Frederickson, George M. “The Historiography of Slavery: Stanley Elkins to Herbert Gutman, ”
New York Review of Books (September 30, 1976) in Frederickson, W

W (Wesleyan University Press

1988) 114.
'°° Southern, 216.

 

37

rediscovery of ourselves.” While nobody who was concerned with Black liberation
wished to minimize the sufferings of those who had endured slavery, there was an
inclination amongst African-Americans to focus upon the strength, integrity, and
resistance of their ancestors. The discipline of history was to function, not only for
its own sake, but also as a model of inspiration to Blacks who were still seeking
their full freedom. The idea that slaves had lived in a depressing cultural void, with
their lives stripped of meaning, or worse, that they were docile “Sambos,” was not
merely to provoke embarassment, but rather was worthy of vehement
recrimination. Energy aimed at ending formal barriers to equality could only be met
with diminishing returns, in that the most important victories had already been won,
and besides, this would do little to end white racism. Suddently it seemed clear,
however, that broad efforts towards a revitalization of Black culture might be an
important defense against the effects of white racism. Nobody has expressed this
view as well as Ralph Ellison. “Sociologists,” he said, “are propagating an image
of the Negro condition which is apt to destroy our human conception of ourselves

just at the moment we are becoming politically free.”

We must assert our own values...beginning with s1avery.Contrary
to some, I feel that our experience as a people involves a great deal
of heroism. From one perspective, slavery was horrible and
brutalizing. It is said that “Those Africans were enslaved, they died
in the Middle Passage, they were abused, their families were
seperated, they were whipped, they were raped, ravaged and
emasculated.” And the Negro writer is tempted to agree. “Yes!
God damn it, wasn’t that a honible thing?” And he sometimes
agrees with the next step, which holds that slaves had very little
humanity because slavery destroyed it for them andtheir
descendents. That’s what the Stanley M. Elkins “Sambo” argument
implies. But despite the historical past and the injustices of the
present, there is from my perspective something further to say. I
have to affirm my forefathers and I must affirm my parents or be
reduced in my own mind to a white man’s inadequate - even if
unprejudiced - conception of human complexity...Any people who
can endure all of that brutalization and keep together, who could
undergo such dismemberrnent and resuscitate itself, and endure until
it could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom, is obviously
more than the sum of its brutalization. Seen in this perspective,
theirs has been one of the great human experiencesand one of the

38

great triumphs of the spirit in modern times. In fact, in the history
of the worldwl

Though few have articulated this view as eloquently as Ellison, his was not
an elitist sentiment. Rather, he offered a shared understanding of the meaning of
the Black past that helped to shape the lives of millions of African-Americans who
both participated in and bore witness to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. And
of course, such an understanding retains forcefulness and relevevance, even today.
Elkins has suggested that in reviewing this “precipitous change that occurred in the

intellectual weather of the mid-1960’s, one must see the famous Moynihan Report,

”[02

together with what has happened to it, as a truly critical event. It is to this

subject, then, that we shall briefly turn our attention.

 

'°' Ellison, Ralph, “A Very Stern Discipline: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” Harpers (March,
1967) 83-84. Several scholars cited above, including Elkins, Holt, and Novick, have seized upon
these and other words from Ellison by way of illustrating the point that African-Americans of the
1960’s saw a need to open new avenues for understanding the experience of slavery.

“’2 Elkins, 31mm. (3rd edition) 271.

Qf‘lx‘ilah-A

era-D

ii
is

of;

nhn
the
toll
TESp

enha

The art of conscious accommodation, along with all its psychic consequences, is
one of the skills that Negroes carried with them from slavery freedom.
Accommodation continued to be a part of life for many of them, especially in the
rural South, for another century. Being obliged to wear the mask of Samba,
whatever they may have been inside, (it is) doubtless (that) they were, as in slavery
days, troubled to an extraordinary degree by the problem of role conflict. To
escape this problem seems to have been one of the aims of the black revolution of
the 1960’s and 1970’s, for the search for black identity is in part a search for role
clarity. To end the dissembling, to be all of a piece, to force the white community
to accept them as they really are, not as it so long wanted to see them, is quite
obviously one of the determined goal of the new generation of blacks.

--Kenneth Starnpp

THE “MOYNIHAN REPORT” AND THE
VICTIMIZATION MODEL OF BLACK HISTORY

The so-called “Moynihan Report,” formally titled The Negro Family: The
Case For National Action, was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the
Assistant Secretary of Labor, in 1965. Merely 78 pages in length, about half of
which are filled with government graphs and statistics, it is perhaps best described
as a pamphlet. Though it would eventually be released to the public by the Office
of Policy Planning and Research (a division of the Department of Labor), it was
never intended for public consumption. Rather, it was meant to serve as a sort of
internal memo, thousands of which are produced by the government each year.
Through the lens of social science, Moynihan had hoped to enlighten top
government officials over the failure of federal civil rights policy to meet the
minimal needs of millions of African-Americans. While the report contained little in
the way of policy recommendations, it did make clear that if federal programs were
to include all of our nation’s citizenry in the “full and equal sharing in the
responsibilities and rewards of citizenship,” then they must bear directly upon
enhancing “the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”103

It is perhaps somewhat surprising then, that such a document could

precipitate what has been, according to one pair of scholars, “the angriest and most

 

"’3 Rainwater. ice and Yancey. William 1... WW
(M.I.T. Press, 1967) 48.

39

40

bitter controversy yet among government and private individuals all presumably
dedicated to realizing Negro tights?“ Novick has remarked that “the report
produced a storm of protest from blacks and from white liberals and radicals,” and

105
” More

that “It was widely denounced as a racist slander of the black community.
colorfully, journalist Gary Wills relayed an encounter with a Black police officer he
met who, while speaking of Moynihan, remarked that “what that cat knows about
us colored boys I could put in my eyeball.”106

To many contemporary observers, it had seemed that the assault against
Moynihan had reached a pinnacle in the mid-1960’s. By this point, his analysis
had been effectively discredited in most intellectual circles, and it was clear that it
would not prompt any major policy initiatives. In 1967, two sociologists, Lee
Rainwater and William L. Yancey. offered a judicious, scholarly account of its rise
and fall in their book. ThraMnxnjhdnBenmantheBdlitidmeQntmxem In
1971, however, William Ryan authored a widely read book, WM,
which heaped further scorn upon “the mythology of cultural deprivation” that he felt
“had been projected by Moynihan."'°7 And then in 1976, social historian Herbert

Gutrnan published a massive study, W

M, which, as one scholar has quipped, might be more usefully seen as “an
attomey’s brief in the case of The Black Family v. Daniel Patrick Moynihan?!“
The book was well received and occasioned even more discussion of Moynihan’s
paper. Certainly this was all puzzling enough to conservative columnist Michael

Novack, who wrote in December, 1976, that “eleven years after the Moynihan

 

'°‘ Ibid., 48.

"’5 Novick, 482.

'°‘ Wills. Gary. IhefiednndflrtiLWanAnninuoLAnmgeddnn (New American Library. 1968)
152.

”7 Ryan, William, W (Vintage Books, 1971) 62,

‘°' Novick, Peter, 1. . - - ,
mmmambridge University Press, 1988) 485.

 

41

Report was first made public, feelings still run high. He was branded a racist then,
and the charge is still being made. Why?"109
I

Before examining some of the pedantic details of the report or the reasons
for its hostile reception, it may be useful to briefly describe some assumptions
surrounding the role of the white liberal that were beginning to take shape during
this era. In 1962, for example, NAACP vice president Loren Miller raised
eyebrows with an article in The Nation called “Farewell to Liberals”.llo James
Baldwin, Miller reported, had “shocked or surprised” many white supporters of
civil rights with his declaration that Blacks “twenty years younger than I don’t
believe in liberals at all?“1 Baldwin was thirty eight at the time, and so he was
speaking about an identifiable trend amongst mostly younger African-Americans
who had become frustrated by both the slow pace of civil rights reforms, and their
lack of relevance amongst those in many urban centers. This disillusionment would
spread quickly. A 1963 Newsweek poll, for example, revealed that “skepticism
about white moderates and liberals was on the upswing. As one woman put it, ‘All
Negroes are tired of waiting for the white man to get ready to give him something
that is his.”’“2

As scholars Doug McAdam, Clayborne Carson and others have remarked,
the 1964 Summer Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) was in many ways a watershed event in this regard. Veteran activists who
had been bravely struggling for years in the deep South in order to make only
incremental progress had come to realize that they could only coerce federal
intervention through the involvement of wealthy, white college students from the

North. While this may have led to some moderate success, many of the northern

 

’09 Novack, Michael, “Race and Truth,” Commentary (December, 1976) 55.

3‘: Miller, Loren, “Farewell to Liberals: A Negroes View,” The Nation, (October 20, 1962).
Ibid., 235.

"2 “The Negro in America,” Newsweek, (July 29, 1963) 15-34_

42

volunteers brought with them a good dose of paternalism and self-righteousness
that had become counter-productive. Furthermore, in the wake of widespread non-
compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the refusal of Democratic Party
leaders to seat more than two token delegates from the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP) at that year’s National Convention in Atlantic City,
disaffection with so-called white “moderates” had reached a high point. According
to Cleveland Sellers, most activists left the convention “with the knowledge that our
movement had turned into something else. After Atlantic City, our struggle was not
for civil rights, but for liberation?! '3

Furthermore, by 1964, Baldwin was no longer appropriating the voice of
younger militants in order to malign white liberals, but rather was doing a fine job
of it himself. Speaking to a group of public school teachers in New York, he said
simply "There is no role for the white liberal, he is our affliction?“ Later, he
spoke for many when he told the editors of Commentary that “the liberal record is a
shameful one. And the reason it is so shameful is that white liberals - with some
exceptions - have been unable to divest themselves of the whole concept of white
supremacy...”l ‘5

Such bitterness, as Southern notes. was not restricted to such writers as

Baldwin and Malcolm X.

By 1963, moderate blacks demanded “Freedom Now”.
Race Men” replaced the old accomodationist leaders. The new
leaders directed their appeals less to white conscience than to
white fears. They focused more attention on black identity and
economics and less on integration. “White liberal” joined “Uncle

Tom” as epithets in the militants lexicon.“6

 

”3 Southern, David W., . . . ’ . ‘
W252, (Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 236.

m Baldwin, Glazer, Hook, and Myrdal, “Liberalism and the Negro: A Round-Table Discussion,"
Commentary, (March, 1964) 37.

”5 Ibid., 41.

“° Southern, 235.

 

43

For the purposes of this Study, it would seem that there are two more
specific realms in which the Black critique of white liberalism has special relevance.
For one, there was a concern that the moderate agenda was supportive of
integration only to the extent that Black Americans would be willing to adopt what
have traditionally been “white” world-views and patterns of living. For many
African-Americans, this was hardly a sporting proposition. As the sixties
progressed, they would increasingly seek the freedom to create their own identities,
and in many instances resisted the efforts of those who would impose a sort of
cultural hegemony upon them. Southern has touched on this point with his
declaration that “the closer blacks moved to the threshold of integration, the more
some feared that white culture would swallow up African-American identity.”m
Put another way, the “ideal self ’ was no longer to be synonymous with “white” or

“middle-class” customs and mores. Again, Baldwin was eloquent on this point,

remarking in 1964 that:

...if you don’t know what Ray Charles is singing about,
then it is entirely possible that you can’t help me...there is some-
thing impertinent in the assumptions (whites) make about me. After
all, I have watched the way most white people in this country live. I
have worked in their kitchens and I have served them their brandy,
I know what goes on in white living rooms better than white people
know what goes on in mine. And what I repudiate is the idea thatI
should learn how to live that way...I happen not to own a Cadillac,
but the liberal assumption is that I want one...and ifI had to choose
between the way most white Americans live and my sparelibs and
my watermelon, then I would take my; lsflpaleribs and my watermelon. Of

course, it’s a choice I refuse to make.

Secondly, this backlash against white liberals was often directed more

specifically towards white academics, (and more specifically still, towards white

 

“7 Southern, 238.
"' Baldwin, Commentary, 38.

44

social scientists). Many African-Americans thought that whites tended to be too far
removed from Black culture to see more than crude stereotypes, or that they would
only interpret Black patterns of living through a white lens. As noted researcher
William Julius Wilson has put it, a common assumption was that “because white
sociologists have neither directly engaged in the black experience, nor been
socialized in the life of black people, they do not possess the unique values and
perspectives necessary to orient oneself to the problem or to fully comprehend the
subtleties of black life styles, the nuances of black behavior, and the meanings of

black conduct?119

Others held grave suspicions that sociologists who were
studied Black lifestyles were operating in bad faith, and that their work betrayed a
deeper, somewhat disingenuous tendency to promote white interests. One writer,
who has studied the role of the whites in the Black Revolution, remarked that
“Negroes are apt to regard any research in their world that is undertaken by whites
as a form of ‘exploitation,’ to quote one student. According to another student,
they ‘observe Negroes through their little microscope of manipulation.’”120
Consequently, William Holland, in his article “White Researchers in Black
America: The Epistemological Boondoggle,” listed a number of reasons for which
‘white researchers are finding it difficult to continue teaching and researching in

”121

certain ethnically oriented areas. Southern has added that “Suspicion about

virtually all white scholarship was life amongst Black intellectuals”:

According to (one) scholar, blacks felt that social science
findings had been “useless and false” for blacks and “useful and
false” for whites. The Black Caucus of the American Sociological
Society went so far as to demand predetermined results from social

 

”9 Wilson, William J., “The New Black Sociology: Reflections on the “Insiders” and “Outsiders”
Controversy,” in Blackwell, James E. and Janowitz, Morris, (eds. ) Blaskjaaialagimflistahaal
(University of Chicago Press, 1974) 323.

Wheaties.

"° Levy Charles J mmmesmmmmmymem (Appleton-Certain-
Crofts, 1968) vii.

‘2' Holland, William R., "The White Researcher in Black America: The Epistemological
Boondoggle,” Public Policy, (Winter, 1974) 77.

45

research. It called for sociologists to produce research “which
validates social humanism, liberation, and the legitimacy of the
struggle of oppressed people for self-determination.” Many
observers in the late 1960’s noted the feelings of resentment and
the great depths of disagreement and misunderstanding between
black and white scholars at professional meetings of the various

. . . . . . 1..
drscrplmes 1n the socral scrences.

Certainly African-Americans of the era had good reason for their skepticism
concerning the inability or unwillingness of sociologists gain a meaningful
understanding of Black life and culture. Just as historians had earned some
contempt for failing to treat Black History as a serious discipline, white sociologists
owned an equally shameful record. Pioneering scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois,
Charles Johnson and E. Frankhn Frazier never received a degree of recognition in
accord with the significance of their accomplishments, and they were typically
forced to work with limited funding, in segregated institutions. Moreover,
sociologists seemed to have played a role equal to historians in perpetuating
negative stereotypes without proof or even an adequate amount of investigation.
Indeed, the situation was such that in the summer of 1965, shortly after the
Moynihan Report had begun to attract national attention, Newsweek could speak

this generally about the typical “Negro child”:

(He) has hazardous life. For one thing, his parents are likely
to be divorced or living apart...For another, the Negro child is fairly
likely to be illegitimate...In addition, the Negro child is far more likely
to be a relief recipient...He is normally unsuccessful in school...He has
trouble getting a job...and he is so psychologically and educationally
bankrupt he can’t escape to the armed forces. These and other
characteristics about lower class Negroes are symptomatic of an
ailment that began with slavery...Slavemasters began the process
by denying Negroes the sacrament of marriage, by breaking up
families on the auction block...Thus scarred by history, the Negro
family was already fragile by the eve of the great black Diaspora to

the cities. (Italics mine)

 

122 Southern, 266.
“B “New Crisis: The Negro Family,” Newsweek, (August 9, 1965) 32-35.

46

II

In another era, then, perhaps the Moynihan Report might not have been so
quickly engulfed in a storm of criticism and protest. As Rainwater and Yancey
have pointed out, amongst professional sociologists, there really was nothing in
this study that could be considered “new” or “startling”. Rather, in a “dramatic”
and somewhat polemical style, they suggest that his goal was to orient public policy
to a commonly accepted view of the plights of Black Americans. In fact, much of
he report was modeled after the work of the famous Black sociologist E. Franklin
Frazier. Southern echoes this point, claiming that “in its pessimistic tone and its
recognition of the crisis” surrounding the Black underclass, “the study only
reiterated what many social scientists had been saying for some time.”'24
Additional support for The Negro Family was gained from Myrdal’s AnAmariaan
Dilamma and Kenneth B. Clark’s study of Harlem, Dahgfihaha (1964), which also
made frequent use of the concept of “pathology” in describing family instability in
inner-city America.

Moynihan’s argument, though somewhat lengthy, is easily summarized.
Collectively, he thought that African-Americans had no hope for achieving a
meaningful degree of social and economic equality with white Americans unless “a
new and special effort (was) made.” In spite of the fact that Blacks seemed to have
gained full recognition of their civil rights, the social conditions surrounding their
family lives had continued to deteriorate. As evidence, he presented the facts that:
a) Nearly a quarter of urban Negro marriages are dissolved; b) nearly a quarter of
Negro births are illegitimate; c) as a consequence, almost one fourth of Negro

families are headed by females, and (I) this break-down of the Negro family has led

to a startling increase in welfare dependency.

 

m Southern, 253.

47

In Moynihan’s analysis, the roots of this problem can be found in slavery,
in the effects of reconstruction on Black family life, in the impact of unemployment
and poverty upon Black families (particularly the Black male) and the fact that “the
American wage system” has no mechanism to insure that family needs are met. As
a result of higher fertility rates amongst Blacks, he expected the scope of these
problems to magnify.

Following from this, he argued that most lower-class families were afflicted
by a “tangle of pathology.” Under this rubric, he posed the facts that “the Negro
community has been forced into a mauiarchal structure”; that student achievement is
considerably more rare amongst Blacks than whites; that Black communities are
plagued by “higher rates of delinquency and crime”; that African-Americans
disproportionately fail the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures “ones
ability to perform at an acceptable level of competence,” (thereby offering an
indication of ones prospects in the job market); and, finally, he discusses the
general “alienation of Negro men which results in their withdrawal from stable
family-oriented society, in higher rates of drug addiction, (and) in despair of
achieving a stable family life.

All of this information is presented by way of building “A Case for National
Action.” While Moynihan’s report did not include any specific policy proposals, it
was clear that he had hoped for “a kind of sweeping domestic ‘Marshall Plan’ of
federal assistance to the black community”125 in the form of jobs, job training,
increased educational opportunities, and better designed welfare and social
programs.

Of specific interest here is the fact that Moynihan hinged part of his case
upon what has alternately been called the “damage,” “deficit,” or “victimization”

models of slavery, which of course was largely drawn from Stanley Elkins’ study.

 

'25 Elkins, Stanley. W (University
of Chicago Press, [Third Edition] 1959) 271.

48

Thus, as Novick has pointed out, “The Elkins thesis was no longer of merely

‘historical interest,’ but was perceived as central to contemporary debates on social

pOIicy.”126

His first assumption was that slavery “was the most awful the world has
ever known.” With lengthy citations from Tannenbaum (whom Elkins had drawn
from) and sociologist Nathan Glazer (who was very much influenced by Elkins),
he reasoned that “American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its
lasting efi’ects on individuals and children (italics mine), indescribably worse than
any recorded servitude, ancient or modem.”127 Thus, in what has been called “the
most hyperbolic passage in a document not generally given to understatement,”128
Moynihan claimed that “it was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that
white America broke the will of the Negro people.”129

Before the report ever became public, Moynihan had co-authored a speech
that incorporated many of its findings, which President Lyndon Johnson delivered
to graduates of Howard University in June, 1965. The address was notable for the
fact that instead of merely focusing upon the need to end segregation, Johnson
spoke of the urgent need to improve the social and economic conditions of African-
Americans. Upon reciting a litany of statistics that drew attention to a widening
gulf between Black and white Americans in employment, income, and infant
mortality, he suggested two causes. First, African-Americans were “trapped...in
inherited, gateless poverty” brought upon by an inadequate distribution of
government services; secondly they remained afflicted by “the devastating heritage
of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice.” Like

Elkins, Johnson was careful to point out that he did not believe these problems to

be the result of innate racial differences (as many presidents before him had), but

 

'26 Novick, 483.
'27 Rainwater and Yancey, 15.
m Novick, 482.
'29 Rainwater and Yancey, 15.

49

rather, “they are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past
injustice, and present prejudice?”0 His solution? Jobs that pay a family wage,
improved housing opportunities, welfare programs, and medical care, as well as a
plea for “an understanding heart” amongst whites. In order to facilitate discussion
on these issues, he announced a fall White House conference, “T o Fulfill These
Rights,” which would be attended by a wide array of government officials,
scholars, and Black leaders.
111

Martin Luther King, J r., Roy Wilkins (NAACP), and Whitney Young
(Urban League) had all read drafts of this speech and offered their approval, and it
was well received in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Each
of these papers, however, painted somewhat contradictory portraits of the speech’s
main theme. While the Times suggested that the federal government would be
shouldering a heavier burden in an effort to promote family stability amongst
African-Americans, the Post reasoned that the thrust of the speech was “self

9

improvement’ . “Implicit in his discussion,” said their editors, “is the fact that the
government cannot reach all of the sources of maladjustment, except in a remote
way...there is a need for... group efforts and a general improvement of the social,
moral, and intellectual environment in which people live.” Thus, as Rainwater and
Yancey have pointed out, “You could pay your money and take your choice.”
Either the President was asking African-Americans to “pull up their socks and stop
asking the government for so much money,” or he was encouraging the
development of “massive federal programs” to aid Black communities.131
With such media scrutiny of the speech, along with the fact that the Watts riot of
that summer focused greater attention upon the plight of urban Blacks, it was only a

matter of time before the intellectual underpinnings of Johnson’s address would be

 

"° Ibid., 28.
'3' Ibid. 135, 244.

50

made public. In fact, by the time the Moynihan Report began running off the
presses of the Department of Labor, most of its contents had already been leaked to
various press representatives. (It was noted above that Moynihan never imagined
his report would be read by more than a hundred or so government officials. As it
turned out, over 70,000 copies were printed). Altogether, the effect of this
coverage “was to subtly exaggerate the already dramatic and sensational aspects of
Moynihan’s presentation,” thereby deepening “the impression that the report dealt
almost exclusively with the family, (and) its ‘pathology’ and ‘instability’ as the
causes of the problems Negroes have.” Thus, much of the press commentary about

132 Little was said about

the report had an “Alice in Wonderland” character about it.
the “vicious cycle” of poverty that Moynihan felt was a consequence of
unemployment, an insufficient wage system, poverty, and urbanization. Indeed,
these figured as his largest “explanatory variables”.

Certainly Moynihan’s critics were quick to deny that ghetto life was marked
by a “tangle of pathology”; Rather, they suggested that Moynihan had rushed to his
conclusion, seeing only instability and family breakdown, where in fact he should
have found healthy, cultural adaptations to white oppression. As Ellison argued,
“Moynihan looked at a fatherless family and interpreted it...in a white cultural
pattern. He wasn’t looking for accommodations Negroes have worked out in
dealing with fatherless families. Grandmothers very often look after the kids. The

mother works or goes on relief. The kids identify with stepfathers, uncles, even

the mothers’ boyfriends. How children grow up is a cultural, not a statistical

 

I32

Ibid. 153. Interestingly, Rainwater and Yancey point out that part of this problem resulted
from the fact that stylistically, Moynihan greatly overused the word “fundamental,” where in many
cases it is clear that he simply meant “important”. For example, he spoke of family structure as
“the fundamental problem," and the deterioration of the family as “the fundamental source of
weakness in the Negro community.” The matriarchal family structure was “the fundamental fact”
of Black family life. And, “the fundamental, overwhelming fact” is the high rate of Black
unemployment. “This set of ‘fundamental’ quotations about the family was widely quoted and
appear as much more accusatory in short press articles than in the report itself.” 161.

51

pattern.”133 Floyd McKissick, then director of the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) remarked that his “major criticism” of the report was that “it assumes that
middle class values are the correct ones for everyone in America.”134 Frank
Riessman further observed that Moynihan’s thesis was “one-sided” and that he
ignored the extent to which “the Negro has responded to his oppressive conditions
by many powerful coping endeavors,” one of the most extraordinary of which “has
been the extended, female-based family.”135

More importantly, it was held that in attributing unfortunate ghetto behavior
to the legacy of slavery, (for which no contemporary American could be held
responsible), Moynihan had employed a rather disingenuous maneuver, typical of
white liberals. In effect, he was absolvin g government officials “from the true
causes of family instability - racism and discrimination in the here and now.” As
such, the phrase “blaming the victim” was first entered into the lexicon of public
discourse by way of William Ryan’s critique of the Moynihan Report. Reducing

Moynihan’s study to “a subtle form of racism,” he noted that:

We are told the Negroes condition is due to his “pathology”,
his values, the way he lives, the kind of family life he leads. The
major qualification - the bow to egalitarianism - is that these conditions
are said to grow out of the Negro’s history of being enslaved and
oppressed- generations ago... .Liberal America rs pleading guilty to
the savagery and oppression against the Negro that happened 100

years ago, in order to escape trial for the crimes of today. '63

James Forman echoed this complaint, writing that in “laying primary blame

for present-day inequalities on the pathological condition of the Negro family and

 

”3 Corry, John, “An American Novelist Who Sometimes Teaches," New York Times Magazine,
(January 20, 1966); in Maryemma, Graham and Singh, Amritjit (eds) WW
IEllison (University of Mississippi Press, 1995)

3‘Rainwater and Yancey, 200
'3‘ Riessman, Frank, “In Defense of the Negro Family,” Dissent (March April, 1966); in
Rainwater and Yancey, 475.
'36 Novick, 482.

52

community, Moynihan has provided a massive academic cop-out for the white
conscience.” Though “well-intentioned,” his analysis “provides fuel for a new
racism.” Disruption in Black communities, he argued, had taken hold not merely
because of “the restraints of our past” but “because of systematic and continued
discrimination.” Thus, in failing to pay due attention to this fact, he characterized

137 .
” Others saw this

the report as “irresponsible, dangerous, and just plain wrong.
as a deliberate means, on the part of Moynihan and his supporters, of trying to
exonerate centuries of institutionalized racism.

Relatedly, many felt that in drawing attention to delinquency, crime, school
dropouts, and unemployment, Moynihan gave fuel to the conservative view that
federal intervention would be ineffective in improving the lot of African-Americans
in urban centers. Others feared that since Moynihan argued “the demand of Negro
Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met” with the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, he was discouraging further voting and civil rights legislation.
Finally, a number of critics tried to show that the report was marred by
methodological weakness and naive interpretations of statistical data that did not
support its main conclusions, especially with regard to discussions of illegitimacy,
criminal behavior, and welfare dependency.

The fall conference that President Johnson had mentioned in his summer
commencement address took on a greater sense of urgency in the wake of the Watts
riot of August, 1965. To be sure, the riots informed much of the nation of the
perils of urban ghettos. At the same time, however, they may also have fanned the
flames of anti-Moynihanism, as Black leaders reacted defensively against a number
of commentators who were quick to cast blame upon “hooligans” and “avaricious

criminals”. Where many hoped that rioters would simply be punished with tougher

“law and order” policies, Sitkoff explains that another wing:

 

I37

Rainwater and Yancey, 410.

53

explained the riots as a response to deprivation, as a consequence
of the inequalities and inequities of the ghetto,as a cry from the
forgotten people of the Negro Revolution; and they advocated
programs targeted to African-Americans for better housing,
quality integrated education, improved job opportunities, and
more generous welfare benefits.13

In consequence, a number of civil rights leaders found that they had
suddenly lost a great deal of credibility. The fact that some of the Black rioters took
to the streets shouting “Long Live Malcolm X” reveals a great deal, for clearly his
assassination in February, 1965, had left a gaping hole in Black leadership. While
many Black moderates who had fought courageously in the south could take credit
for impacting upon the psychologies of northern African-Americans, their work had
not led to any fundamental improvements in their lifestyles. As one “long-time
observer of the movement” commented, immediately after Watts, “there was a
whole series of mea culpas on the part of almost all the civil rights leaders” who
were quick to admit “We are guilty, we have failed, we have established no contact
with people.”

Accordingly, many well-established African-American leaders were in no
mood to talk about “pathology” upon their arrival to the White House in the Spring
of 1966. In their efforts to see that the week-long riots were met with a helpful
government response, and in order to try and bridge their leadership into Black
ghetto communities, it was necessary that they focus upon articulating the deeply
felt bitterness of their constituents. Charles Silberrnan touched on this point in his
article “Beware the Day They Change Their Minds,” the title of which was
borrowed from a Langston Hughes poem. “The explosive increase of Negro

anger,” he argued, had made it “virtually impossible for any Negro leader - indeed,

 

'38 Sitkoff, Harvard. W (Hill and Wang [revised
edition], 1993) 190.

54

any Negro intellectual - to acknowledge publicly the need for change within the

””9 The newspaper commentary of Whitney Young - then the

Negro community.
executive director of the Urban League - seems to offer support for this view. In an
October article for the Amsterdam News, Young discussed Moynihan’s essay with
approval, agreeing that families in Black communities were in significant disarray
as a result of varying forms of white prejudice. By January of the following year,
however, one observer noted that a second column on the subject was marked by
“a defensiveness about the problems of the ghetto that was completely new” to his
writing. This, he felt, might be seen as prima facie evidence of a shift in the mood
of Black leadership. The period after Watts, he argued, gave rise to “a real
intensification of Negro sensitivity...the movement changed, very radically in a
short time.”140
Sensing this, the executive director of the White House conference - which
had been built upon the theme “To Fulfill These Rights” - jokingly informed its
participants at the very first session that “I have been reliably informed that no such
person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists?!“ Though Moynihan did indeed have
some involvement with the conference, the subject of the Black family, which was
originally to be a focal point, was instead featured in only one of eight panel
discussions. And while he was able to briefly answer some of his critics, claiming
that he only meant for the report “to bring about action” and “to show what
unemployment does to people so we could do something about the problem (of

unemployment),” Newsweek magazine reported that Moynihan figured prominently

in a number of angry hallway conversations. While “the report was hailed within

 

"9 Ibid., 431.
"° Rainwater and Yancey, 247-248. Rather annoying is the fact that this “long time observer of
the movement” is not identified. The authors note in the preface to their book that some of the
people they interviewed preferred to remain anonymous.

Ibid., 248.

55

the movement last spring,” it had since “come under increasing criticism as off-
target at best, subtly racist at worst.”142
IV

There is a close link between negative assessments of both Elkins and
Moynihan. As we have seen, the victim-pathology model of slavery had far fewer
detractors at the tail end of the 1950’ 3. Many professors whom Meier and Rudwick
interviewed could not recall any of their Black students taking exception to Elkins’
book in college classrooms until about 1963, and some even endorsed it for the fact
that it so forcefully blamed whites for the travesty of slavery. Yet as African-
Americans began to assert greater amounts of pride in their history through various
cultural mechanisms, and as they became increasingly militant in their demand for

the full recognition of their freedom, this paradigm suddenly seemed disjointed

from contemporary realities. In other words, various:

dictates of protest strategy, fused with the swelling sense
of pride and militance among blacks and the growing salience of
nationalist sentiments, rendered illegitimate the pathological model
of Negro behavior and spelled the downfall of the Elkins thesis that
had become so fashionable. As a matter of fact, it would seem to be
scarcely coincidental that the Elkins thesis became the object of
systematic attacks not long after the appearance of Moynihan’s report.
What had happened was that, as Elkins later recalled, “without
anyone’ 3 quite realizing it the entire ”damage argument- as applied

to Negro life 1n America- had become ideologically untenable. ””3

 

Scholar Kenneth Lynn has made virtually this same point, writing - in
questionable taste - about the “Bedford-Stuyvesant stomping” that Moynihan
received, and which “changed dramatically...the tenor of slave scholarship.”
Though “the report discussed black pathology in far more moderate terms than
Elkins Slavery... 1965 was several worlds removed from 1959. The lesson of

 

"2 “Civil Rights. What To Do Next?”, Newsweek, November 29, 1965.28.

”Meier August and Rudwick. Elliot. W
(University of Illinois Press, 1986) 251.

56

Moynihan’s experience was not lost on the slave historians engaged in research in
the late 1960’s.”‘44

Langston Hughes had warned America, in the early 1940’s, that while
“Negroes” seemed “Sweet and docile, Meek, humble and kind,” the nation would
do well to “Beware the day they change their minds!” Nonetheless, as Black anger
seemed to suddenly begin to explode in all directions, much of world was stunned
and surprised. In order to fully understand the significance of the Black Revolt past
about 1965, one has to be willing to grant, first, the legitimacy of the rage of the
militant spokespersons, and second, that broad changes in the cultural politics of
the era have transformed, probably forever, the ways in which Black and white
Americans will live together. Though the events surrounding the publication of
William Styron’s 1967 historical novel, WW, tell us a
great deal about the Black Power ethic, they also speak to the ways in which
scholars’ perceptions of slavery shifted very visibly over the course of a few short

years. This, then, will be the subject of the next chapter.

 

'“ Lynn, Kenneth “The Regressive Historians,” 495.

WILLIAM STYRON’S THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER
AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN SIXTIES AMERICA

By the fall of 1967, what has come to be known as the “Black Revolt” of
the 1960’s was well underway. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s popularity amongst
African-Americans was in steady decline, and talk of lunch-counter protests, non-
violent direct-action, and civil disobedience had already begun to seem somehow
dated or old-fashioned. In response, a new Black politics, focusing attention on
issues of separation, self-determination, and self-defense began to gain credibility.
Riots in Detroit, Watts and Newark, the militancy of the Black Panther Party in
Oakland, and cries of “Black Power” amongst African-Americans of all social
classes began to reveal, among other things, the full depths of the chasm between
Black and white America. Yet if Black Americans were engaged in a war for
political and economic equality, they were every bit as much engaged in a cultural
war. Black cultural nationalists began to speak of “a culture, a style of life, a
cosmology...and a set of aesthetic values that are distinct from that of white
Americans in particular and white Europeans or Westerners in general.”145 While
some Black artists and intellectuals simply took this to mean that they therefore had
a particular message which they were obligated to pass on the majority culture,
more militant spokespersons such as Amiri Baraka and Ron Karenga began to
speak in favor of an art that was exclusively designed to serve the needs of their
revolutionary agendas. In particular, they held that Black Americans must become
culturally aware of the triumphs, glories, and achievements of their race. At the
National Conference on Black Power in 1967, participants overwhelmingly passed

a resolution that, among other things, placed a premium on the notion of self-

 

“‘ Bracey, John H., Meier, August, and Rudwick, Elliot. WW (Bobbs-
Merrill, 1970). pg. xxi.

57

58

definition, arguing that “Black people have consistently expended a large part of our
energy and resources reacting to white definition”.146

It was in this context, then, that Random House Books released their first
printing of William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning historical novel, The
Confessions of Nat Turner. Since at least the middle of the 19th century, few
historical personalities have symbolized Black resistance to white oppression with
as much clarity and forcefulness as the slave rebel Nat Turner. Yet somewhat
paradoxically, the historical record surrounding the facts of Turner’s life and the
slave revolt which he led is incomplete. The only significant primary source on the
matter is Turner’s infamous jailhouse “Confessions”, from which Styron
borrowed the title of his novel. Although Turner’s remarks were purported to have
been transcribed faithftu by TR. Gray, a white racist lawyer who interviewed
him on the eve of his execution, there are a number of reasons for which few
scholars have taken this seriously as a reliable document. That Styron would have
the temerity to write a historical novel that portrayed Turner as something of a
fanatic, with ambiguous motives, self-doubt, and an infatuation with a local white
woman, was seen by many Black intellectuals (and some whites) as either
conscious or unconscious racism. Specifically, they seethed at what they argued
was a deliberate falsification of history. Indeed, the white Marxist historian Herbert
Aptheker set the tone for much of this criticism with his declaration that “History’s
potency is mighty. The oppressed need it for identity and inspiration; oppressors
for justification, rationalization, and legitimacy. Nothing illustrates this more

147
” In response, a

clearly than the history writing on the American Negro people.
number of leading white scholars (and a few Blacks) came to Styron’s defense,

decrying the “hysterical” and “overblown” reaction of the Black critics, fervently

 

"‘ Barbour. Floyd 3., editor. WW (Extending Horizon
Books, 1968). pg 195.
"7 Aptheker, Herbert. “A Note on the History,” The Nation (October 16, 1967).

59

arguing that he was in fact “the better student of history”. Consequently, the
protracted and bitter feud which resulted, featuring so many notable scholars and
critics, has been labeled by one writer as “The most bitter, interesting, and far-
reaching literary controversy in recent memory.”148 Others have looked upon the
tempestuous debate as yet another piece of evidence indicative of the widening
ideological chasm between Black and white America: “For blacks, the praise and
adulation initially accorded the book in the white community indicates how little
understanding of black America survives in the white world. Americans, black and
white, still have a long way to go.”149
Accordingly, there have literally been scores of review essays and academic
papers which have sought to analyze this debate in one fashion or another, along
with at least two edited anthologies and one full-length monograph from Albert
Stone, published in 1992. The great majority of these papers, however, have
tended to simply argue a position on the issue, taking into account notions of
historical accuracy, artistic license, and the utility of a white writer assuming the
voice of an African-American. And although Stone’s work is a well-written and
voluminous account which takes a sort of macro-view of the controversy, it is at
best only marginally concerned with the socio-historical context from which it
emerged. As such, this chapter aims to expatiate not so much on the subtle
intricacies of the debate, but rather upon the larger context from which the Black
response emerged. Though notions of authorial “objectivity” carry little currency
these days, I have nonetheless tried to illustrate, in a fair an impartial manner, the
sources from which many of Styron’s critics drew their fire, paying special
attention to much of the rhetoric that surrounded Black Power, the Black Arts

Movement, and Black Studies programs that were beginning to arise at universities

 

m Fremont-Smith, Elliot 1n Duff, John B. and Mitchell, Peter M. W

Wanamamamflcfihw, 1971) pg 117
M9Ibid., pg. 119.

60

across the nation. A topic which clearly demands further investigation, however,
and which I h0pe to pursue in the course of a larger work, would involve a careful
study of the sociology of knowledge that lay behind the white counter-response.
Why, one wonders, were so many white intellectuals eager to argue so ardently on
Styron’s behalf? Relevant to this discussion might be the fact that while Styron’s
book arose during the zenith of Black activism, these were also the most vital and
formative years of African-American history as a scholarly specialty. Fellowship-
awarding agencies were encouraging explorations into the Black past, and
universities were aggressively recruiting Black faculty and graduate students to
such an extent that by the early 1970s, as Meier and Rudwick have pointed out,
“the J SH (Journal of Southern History) was reading almost like a JNH (Journal of

”150 Whatever the merits of the arguments offered forth by Styron’s

Negro History).
defenders, the bulk of them were historians who had long held a sort of monopoly
over slave scholarship and may have even postured themselves as “gatekeepers”

‘5 1 In the wake of earlier controversies that had impinged upon

into the profession.
the reputations of Stanley Elkins and Daniel Patrick Moynihan for their analyses of
slavery and its effect upon Black Americans, it would not be diffith to imagine
that many white academicians might have suspected that certain Black Power
spokespersons sought to exercise a sort of tyranny over those who wished to speak
on the controversial issues of race, class, and identity.
I

While many of Styron’s contemporaries would insist upon viewing 1]]:
We: as a parable of the state of American race relations
during the latter half of the 1960’s, Styron had in fact conceived of the story long

before the advent of Black Power. As early as 1964 the New American Library had

 

"° Meier. August and Rudwick. Elliot W
(University of Illinois Press, 1986). PG. 178.

'5‘ I would like to thank Clayborne Carson for this insight, offered over the course of an informal
conversation at Stanford University, August 15, 1996.

61

paid over $100,000 for the paperback rights to the novel, and in April, 1965,
Harper ’s magazine had published an essay of Styron’s in which he reflected upon
his Virginia childhood and explored his motives for investigating the Nat Turner
slave rebellion of 1831. Yet as it would turn out, these were only the earliest
rumblings of the publicity machine that would accompany the publication of
Styron’s fourth novel. Later, Harper’s would run a 50,000 word excerpt, for
which it would pay $7,500 - the highest figure it had ever paid for a single piece of
writing in its 1 17-year history. Likewise, the Book-of-the-Month Club also set a
publishing record in offering Styron $150,000 for the light to feature it as a
selection, and there was immediate talk of a film version from 20th Century Fox.
In October, 1967, Life magazine also ran excerpts from the novel, accompanied by
photos and a story on Styron himself, while Newsweek would feature him on its
covet

With all of this hype, then, it is perhaps not surprising that Styron’s novel
was also embraced by the (largely white) critical establishment. Noted historian C.
Vann Woodward called the book “the most profound fictional treatment of slavery
in our literature,”'52 while Philip Rahv wrote in The New York Review of Books
that this was “A first-rate novel...the best by an American writer that has appeared

”153

in some years. Newsweek called it “one of those rare novels that is an act of

revelation to a whole society,”154
Yet in spite of these generally positive reviews, there were also early
indications that Styron’s experiment in historical fiction might become problematic.

James Baldwin, a close personal friend of Styron’s, never reviewed the novel but

he was among the first notable personalities to foresee that it would stir a heated

 

”2 Woodward, C.Vann. “Confessions of a Rebel: 1831,” The New Republic (October 16, 1967).
. 28.
Pg Rahv, Philip. “Throughout the Midst of Jerusalem," The New York Review of Books (October
26, 1967). pg. 10.
'5‘ Sokolov, Raymond A. “Into the Mind of Nat Turner,” Newsweek (October 26, 1967).

62

battle. Indeed, within a week of the book’s publication, Baldwin remarked to a
reporter that “Bill’s going to catch it from black and white...Styron is probing
something very dangerous, deep, and painful in the national psyche. I hope it starts
a tremendous fight, so that people will learn what they really think about each

”155 Yet perhaps even Baldwin, regarded by many as an Bldfil' statesman 0f

other.
Black militancy, underestimated the full force of the Black backlash. While he was
right to suggest that Styron’s novel would be called “effrontery” he apparently did
not predict the ways in which the novel would come to be seen by many Blacks as
such a clear symbol of insidious and deliberate racism.

By 1968, a year sometimes referred to as the “high tide of Black
resistance”, the atmosphere surrounding Styron’s novel was decidedly more
hostile. Noting that “No event in recent years has touched and stirred the black

intellectual community more than WWW John Henrik

Clarke served as editor of a widely-read collection of polemical essays called
WWW Purposely drawn from
a wide range of academic disciplines, some of the more notable contributors to the
anthology included Black Power theorist Charles Hamilton, Ebony magazine editor
and historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., psychologist Alvin Poussaint, historian Vincent
Harding, and writer John Oliver Killens. “Though some white critics and
reviewers referred, often derisively, to these black writers as unknown, radical, and
irresponsible,” Stone notes that it should be clear from their biographies that, as a
group, they were scarcely wild-eyed radicals. “Although they were articulate,
angry, and deeply disillusioned with white America...some were in the process of

assuming positions of status in the dominant culture’s intellectual cadre,” while

 

"5 Ibid.

"° Clarke. John Henrik, editor. WWW (Beacon
Press, 1968) pg. vii.

63

others were “just as derisively distancing themselves from white institutions.”157

Although it would be difficult for this paper to provide an adequate synopsis of
each of their critiques, some general comments can be made. First of all, each of
the writers in the anthology offer either explicit or implicit support for Clarke’s
contention that “The Nat Turner created by William Styron has little resemblance to
the Virginia slave insurrectionist who is a hero to his people” and also that “the

distortion of the true character of Nat Turner was deliberate.”158

As Harding meant
to suggest through the title of his essay “You’ve Taken My Nat and Gone,” the
bulk of Styron’s Black critics expressed outrage over the fact that Turner’s legacy
as a symbol of Black strength, manhood, heroism, and courage, had been greatly
diminished. Furthermore, in addition to their obvious objections to white racism in
general and Styron’s (perceived) racism in particular, many of the writers raised
questions surrounding the plausibility of a white writer speaking through the voice
of a Black slave, the tenuous relationship between literature and history, and the
lack of regard paid by the white critical establishment towards the Black grassroots.
As one of the Black respondents remarked, “Clearly we are in the presence of no
mere ‘fiction’ but a cultural and social document which is both ‘illuminating’ and
potentially definitive of contemporary attitudes.”159 Yet if one is to treat Clarke’s
W as something of a cultural artifact, then the tenor and
the tone of the criticism seems at least as notable as the books’ content. Largely

vituperative and ad homineum, Styron recalled (with more than a trace of bitterness)

the Black critics “all-out assault”:

It contained such pitiless indictments of my artistry, my historical
and social responsibility, my ethical stance, (“morally senile” was
the most memorable quote) and even my probable sexual

 

"7 Stone Albert. WWW
mwniversity of Georgia Press, 1992). pg. 129.

'5‘ Clarke, John Henrik, ed. pgs. vi vii.
"9 Ibid., pg. 29.

64

inclinations, that the savagery was at first truly impossible to
comprehend...Gradually, it sank in that I was being subjected not
even to discussible criticism but to the most intractable kind of
hysteria - understandable, perhaps, though no less ugly for being

part of the chaotic racial politics of 1968.160

In an effort to impose a degree of order on the broad range of the critiques
put forth in mm, Stone has essentially divided their
analyses into three distinct categories, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses as
historians, literary critics, and interpreters of psychology. Those critics with a
historical bend take issue with Styron’s claim in the novel’s preface that he had
“rarely departed from the known facts of the revolt”. Indeed, their precise point is
that in addition to failing to make adequate use of the available evidence, Styron
strayed dangerously far from the “facts” put forth by Turner in his original
testimony. While the real Nat Turner did not mention to T.R. Gray that he had a
wife, a Ph.D. dissertation written in 1861, which Styron was known to have read,
had reported that he had indeed been married. Yet Styron’s fictional protagonist
appears both single and celibate, save for an isolated homosexual episode in his
youth. In the eyes of his critics, this amounted to a deliberate attempt to
“emasculate” the historical Nat Turner. Moreover, where Turner noted to Gray that
his parents had taught him to read at an early age, in Styron’s fictional treatment he
acquires the gift of literacy through the help of a paternalistic owner. Additionally,
Styron’s Nat Turner makes no reference to his father anywhere in the novel, and
yet he is mentioned in the original confessions. From Bennett, Jr.’s, standpoint
this amounted to an overall “pattern of destruction in which the historical Nat
Turner is deracinated and made impotent and irrelevant,” the by-product of a
fictional “ADC slave family’ 1'61 He further claims that Styron had downplayed

Turner’s spirituality, which was evident enough in the original confessions, thereby

 

m Styron, William. “Nat Turner Revisited,” American Heritage (October, 1992). pg. 71.
'6' Clarke, John Henrik, editor. pg. 8.

65

depriving him “of the meaning of his mission”.162 Finally, many of Styron’s critics
charged him with ignoring evidence of a viable tradition of slave resistance, thereby
failing to point to a “universal motive” (i.e. a simple bedrock of desire for freedom)
that might have led any slave to lash out against his or her oppressor. As Clarke
observed, “it should not be necessary to search for motives, personal or otherwise,
for the Nat Turner revolt.”163
Apparently unintimidated by the forcefulness of these charges and the
emotional heat behind them, Styron and his defenders offered a multi—faceted
response. Whereas many commentators lamented the fact that so much about Nat
Turner’s life, career, and personal character had been irretrievably lost, Styron
claims to have seen a rich opportunity. “While it may be satisfying and
advantageous for historians to feast on rich archival material, the writer of historical
fiction is better off,” for a number of reasons, “when past events have left him with

”164 On several occasions, Styron cited the authority of Marxist critic

short rations.
Georg Lukacs’ writings on mm, which suggested that the
novelists should be allowed broad latitude in their efforts to deal with the past.
“What matters most,” Lukacs wrote, “is fidelity in the reproduction of the material
foundations of the life of a given period, its manners and the feelings and thoughts
derived from these...but this never means being tied to any historical facts. On the

”’65 It was for

contrary, the novelist must be at liberty to treat these as he likes...
this reason, then, that Styron chose to portray Turner as a plantation resident, when
in fact he was the property of families who owned only small farms. In his view,
plantation slavery simply needed to be dealt with in order to faithquy reproduce the
spirit of the age. This same inclination also led him to temper some of Turner’s

religious fanaticism, which was displayed in his original confessions to such a

 

"2 Ibid., pg. 15.

'63 Ibid., pg. x.

"‘ Styron, William. “Nat Turner Revisited,” American Heritage (October, 1992). pg. 71.
"5 cited in Stone, Albert. pg. 8.

66

degree as to convince many readers that the “r ” Nat Turner was a reckless and
delusional madman. And yet there remained some facts which Styron would not
have felt comfortable departing from. For example, had Styron believed that
Turner had really had a wife, she would have appeared in the novel. As it turns
out, he insisted that this evidence was thirty year-old “hearsay” that lacked
credibility.

Turner’s celibacy is defended on the grounds that Styron sees all
revolutionary movements as tending to be very “puritanical”. As he remarked to
George Plirnpton even before his critics charges came to print, “such
impulses...seem an authentic part of the revolutionary drive: Luther, Castro,
Danton, Mao - all of them are basically puritanical, repressive, and sublimated...Of
course I can’t prove that this is Nat’s psychological history, but I think something
like it was part of his psychic makeup.”166 Eugene Genovese, perhaps Styron’s
most able and eloquent defender, has supported this notion, arguing that in
employing this literary device, Styron has simply sought to link Turner with
“a great tradition of historical heroes.” Likewise, he points out that Turner’s single
homosexual episode in his childhood only serves to suggest that he had something
of a normal early life, as the Kinsey Report had presented evidence that a majority
of males had some form of homosexual experiences during pre- and early
adolescence. Finally, he sarcastically suggests that the Black critics think more
carefully through their implication that sexual abstinence relates to one’s
“manhood”.167

Styron also takes issue with the claim that he ignored evidence of “hundreds

of uprisings and conspiracies preceding the Southampton, Virginia uprising led by

 

'6‘ Plimpton, George. “William Styron: A Shared Ordeal,” The New York Review of Books
(September 12, 1968).

”7 Genovese, Eugene. “The Nat Turner Case,” The New York Review of Books (September 12,
1968).

67

”168 The single

Nat Turner,” and that “slaves were constantly resisting and rebelling.
authority the critics cite in support of this contention is the Marxist historian Herbert
Aptheker’s 1943 publication, American Negro Slave Revolts. While perhaps
something of a pioneering work, Styron was not alone amongst intellectuals who
have discredited this study, for a variety of reasons, as being ideologically biased
and politically expedient. As such, Styron maintained that the Nat Turner revolt
was exceptional for the fact that it was “the only effective, sustained revolt in the
annals of American Negro history.”

Finally, Styron and his critics make much of the aforementioned fact that
Nat Turner’s “confessions” as reported by TR. Gray are notoriously flawed as
source material. Turner, of course, does not speak to us directly, but rather
through the pen of another white southemer who did not happen to possess the
strong liberal credentials of Styron. There is certainly reasonable doubt as to
whether or not Turner’s testimony was “willfully, fully, and freely offered”, as
Gray maintained, and even less reason to believe that the confessions were
“faithfully recorded”. Shortly after Turner’s execution, as many as 50,000 copies
of Gray’s pamphlet were sold throughout the South and beyond, leading to
speculation that the document may have been deliberately sensationalized. Certainly
Styron was of the view that the “entire pedantic, impossibly elevated and formal
tone of the ‘Confessions’” suggests that Gray tampered with Turner’s words,
twisting them to serve his purposes. “How much during that tense encounter was
subtly bent and twisted by the interrogator?” Styron asks. “Gray was a man of his
time, a Southern racist, and as a functionary of the Commonwealth it may well have
been to his advantage...to distort many things that the helpless prisoner told him, to

. .169
leave things out’

 

'6' Clarke, John Henrik, ed. pgs. x and 87.
“’9 Styron, William. “Truth and Nat Turner: An Exchange,” The Nation (April 22 1968).

68

A second point of reference of many of the critics had less to do with the
specific historical circumstances of Turner’s revolt. Rather, they took issue with
his very decision to write the book. In an era in which African-Americans were
encouraged and inspired to fashion their own understandings of their identities and
their past, Ernest Kaiser spoke of “the unspeakable arrogance of this young
southern writer daring to set down his own personal view of Nat’s life as from

,,170 Likewise, Loyle Hairston suggested that the “basic

inside Nat Turner in slavery.
weakness” of the novel related to Styron’s inability as a white writer to “portray
black characters as human types...” and the tendency of all white writers to “look
upon the black man’s condition of social degradation as being natural to his
‘infelior’ character, rather than resulting from the racial oppression of the American
system.””’

Though Styron, perhaps rather charitably, felt that these were “civilized
sentiments” which he had to take seriously, he would also insist that they were
guided by fallacious reasoning. The logical counter-position, he pointed out,
would serve to deny the right of African-American artists such as Baldwin and
Ralph Ellison to write from a white perspective, as they had both done to much
acclaim. Yet perhaps the most eloquent and comprehensive articulation of his
artistic creed was put forth in May, 1970, as he accepted the prestigious Howell’s
Medal, awarded twice each decade for the most distinguished work of fiction

published during the preceding five years. Seemingly in response to much of the

seperatist rhetoric of many Black militants of the era, Styron suggested that:

this award...implies an understanding that a novel can possess a
significance apart from its subject matter and that a story of a
nineteenth-century black slave may try to say at least as much about
longing, loneliness, personal betrayal, madness, and the quest for
God as it does about Negroes or the institution of slavery...By

 

"° Clarke, John Henrik, editor. pg. 56.
”' Ibid., pgs. 68-69.

69

recognizing Nat Turner this award really honors all of those of my
contemporaries who have steadfastly refused to write propaganda or
indulge in myth-making but have been impelled to search instead for
those insights which,however raggedly and imperfectly, attempt to
demonstrate the variety, the quirkiness, the fragility, the courage,
the good humor, desperation, corruption, and morality of all men.
And finally it ratifies my own conviction that a writer jeopardizes his
freedom by insisting that he be bound or defined by his race, or by
almost anything else. For one of the enduring marvels of art is its
ability to soar through any barrier, to explore any territory of
experience, and I say that only by venturing from time to time into
strange territory shall artists, of whatever commitment, risk

discovering and illuminating the human spirit we all share.172

Perhaps the strongest lines of objection, however, have come from Black
critics who were concerned with issues of psychology, with Alvin Poussaint,
Vincent Harding, and Mike Thelwell foremost amongst them. In Ernest Kaiser’s
terms, the novel is “a witches brew of Freudian psychology, Elkins ‘Sambo’ thesis

9,173

on slavery and Styron’s vile racist imagination. Thelwell, in more moderated

prose, makes a similar claim in arguing that Winner is an
important book only for the manner in which it demonstrates the persistence of

174 .
” for Poussaint,

white Southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary cliches...
the only one of the anthologized critics with any formalized training in psychology,
the novel “seems to reveal some obvious and some subtle manifestations of white

””5 In addition to these general charges of racism. however. are

racist attitudes.
specific attacks from the Black critics who took issue with the emotional fixation
that Styron imagines Turner might have had over a young woman named Margaret
Whitehead - the only person Turner is known to have personally killed during the

48-hour insurrection. Though she is only mentioned in passing in the 1831

confessions, in Styron’s novel she appears as a major character - a condescending

 

”2 Styron, William, cited in Casciato, Arthur D. and West, James. W
Styron. (G.K. Hall & Co., 1982). pgs. 226227.

‘7’ Clarke, John Henrik, editor. pg. 57.

. ”‘ Ibid., pg. 91.

'7’ Ibid., pg. 18.

70

but also somewhat sympathetic “adolescent tease” with whom Turner discusses
poetry and the Bible. Beyond these somewhat tender encounters, however, are
other moments where Turner alternately lusts for and despises “the belle of the
county”, whom he naturally recognizes as “unattainable”. Thus, while there were
no reports that any of the slaves who took part in the Southampton Rebellion ever
raped or attempted to rape any of their victims, in Styron’s novel Turner has a
graphically rendered masturbatory fantasy of committing precisely such a crime.
Towards the end of the book, after Turner has murdered Whitehead with a blow to
the head from a nearby fence post, he finds that he must repent for the hatred that
led him to do this in order that he can re-unite with God.

Poussaint’s claim is that in inventing such circumstances, unknown to the
historical record, Styron had capitulated to the “hackneyed racist belief that Negroes
who are strong, successful, and masculine must also want to possess a White
woman in order to give final sanction to their manhood.”176 Harding echoes this
sentiment, noting the conspicuous absence of a strong or beautiful Black woman in
the novel, and wondering aloud what useful purpose Styron might have had in
mind in creating Turner’s “overwhelming erotic fantasies” and his “strange love

affair with a teenage white girl."177

In response, Styron argued that the plausibility of such a relationship
justified the artistic decisions he made in this regard. Thus, when a pugnacious
questioner appeared at a 1968 conference organized by the Southern Historical
Association, demanding to know why Turner is portrayed as “completely
obsessed” with Whitehead, Styron’s response was simple and direct: “Margaret
..ns

Whitehead is a part of my fictional imagination. I have no apologies for her.

Yet in other, less hostile forums, he has elaborated. For example, in the pages of

 

"° Ibid., pg. 21.
”7 Ibid., pg. 28.
”‘ Stone, Albert. pg. 11.

71

The Nation he remarked that the stereotype of “the black man’s hang-up on white
females” was treated in his novel in order to illustrate What may very well have been
a historical truth, and furthermore, that such a suggestion is not implicitly racist.
“Nat’s fateful impulse,” he argued, was “valid then as now...Nat Turner was hung
up on Margaret Whitehead, bashing her brains out because of the same hatred and
love and despair that make Americans today as well as then all hopelessly hung up -
black and white - one with the other, wedded inseparably by the error and madness

”79 As evidence, Styron asked his critics to take a look at Calvin C.

of history.’
Hemton’s well-researched W, as well as Eldridge
Cleaver’s 5.9111211192- Additionally, he defended his handling of this inter-racial
sexual dynamic by alluding to his earlier stated conviction that Turner’s
revolutionary drive was largely “puritanical” and “ascetic”. As a result, it was
doubtful that Turner would have known a “fecund sexuality”, but he might well
have had “fantasies and fantastic, probably unspeakable drives and hang-ups and
desires,” and so Styron “felt it was necessary to give this to Nat in order to fill out

”'80 Genovese bravely echoes Styron on several

his revolutionary characterization.
of these points, suggesting that “American life throws whites and blacks together
under circumstances in which they constantly affect one another and yet they remain
apart. As one result, the sexual fantasies common to both sexes tend to be
translated into racial terms.” Whitehead’s importance to Styron’s story, in this
view, hinges on the fact that she is a character whom Turner sees “as a human
being, rather than as a social type.” Accordingly, Genovese suggests that this
would explain Turner’s appeal for God’s forgiveness. “In repenting, he does not

repudiate his revolt, he repudiates that hatred which led him to deny the love he felt

for a human being who was as trapped as he. This may or may not be convincing

 

”9 ”Styron, William. “Truth and Nat Turner: An Exchange,” The Nation (April 22, 1968) pg. 547.

I”West. James L W., editor meersanonsflrthflrlhamfimn (University Press of
Mississippi, 1985). pg. 106.

72

artistically, but the charge that this stamps Styron as racist is outrageous.”181 If
anything, Whitehead’s inclusion in the novel only suggests to Genovese that Styron
“had the courage to confront the depths of America’s racial tragedy.”182
Throughout the remainder of the 1960’s and into the early years of the
1970’s, debates along these lines would continue in several prominent, left-leaning
intellectual journal, including The New York Review of Books and The Nation.
Although the major participants in these post-1968 debates included Aptheker,
Harding, Genovese, and Styron, many lesser known students and scholars joined
the fray, typically arguing with considerable amounts of verve, passion, and
truculence. Yet as has been suggested above, much of the fury which plagued
Styron and his novel can only narrowly be considered “historical” or “literary” in
the sense that much of the discussion was streched across disciplines, and many of
those involved were only marginally preoccupied with the sorts of issues we
typically ascribe to the realms of history and literary criticism. While questions
surrounding the availability and the utility of certain historical sources do indeed
come up from time to time, they are most often of a very esoteric nature, discussed
solely amongst professional academicians and rarely put forth for consideration by
the general, reading public. The very fact that in this instance, these questions were
Widely considered and debated suggests that much of the controversy was deeply
rooted in cultural gaps or misunderstandings between Black and white America.
The remainder of this chapter will attempt to locate more precisely the source of
much of this dissonance from the Black intelligentsia. Although “Black Power” has
always been a politically charged term that has meant many different things to many
people, the focus here will be upon its cultural dynamic - that is, the ways in which

Black Power “encouraged Afro-Americans to seize control of their own self-image

 

m Genovese, Eugene. "The Nat Turner Case,” The New York Review of Books (September 12,
1968). pg. 34.
"2 Stone, Albert. pg. 162.

73

"183 Upon

and to validate that image via a wide array of cultural productions.
reaching an understanding of the assumptions and motivations that served as the
driving forces behind this process, it becomes rather clear Why Styron’s delineation
of Turner and the slave south was widely seen as an obstacle to Black self-

actualization.

[I

Implicit throughout William Van DeBurg’s pioneering work W
Babflgm is the notion that recent scholarship which has tended to marginalize the
Black Power movement over its failure to realize many of its stated objectives has,
to a large degree, overlooked the significance of the era’s broad contributions to
American culture. While it’s certainly true that Black revolutionaries of the 1960’s
were unable to achieve their dreams of territorial separatism, community control,
and perhaps even an armed rebellion, it is also clear that many African-Americans
of the age were educated, inspired, and politicized by the movement. Prior to the
first cries of “Black Power!” in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1966, many African-
Americans were clearly in the process of becoming disillusioned with the slow
progress of the civil rights movement. As Doug McAdam, Clayborne Carson, and
others have remarked, the 1964 Summer Project of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was in many ways a watershed event in this
regard. Veteran activists who had been bravely struggling for years in the deep
South in order to make only incremental progress had come to realize that they
could only coerce federal intervention through the involvement of wealthy, white
college students from the North. While this may have led to some moderate
success, many of the northern volunteers brought with them a good dose of

paternalism and self-righteousness that had become counter-productive.

 

"3 Van DeBurg. William. W
W. (University of Chicago Press, 1992). pg. 31.

74

Furthermore, in the wake of widespread non—compliance with the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the refusal of Democratic Party leaders to seat more than two token
delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at that year’s
National Convention, dissatisfaction with so-called white “moderates” had reached
a high point. Meanwhile, it was also becoming clear that Martin Luther King’s
program of emphasizing civil disobedience and non-violent direct-action was doing
little to remedy the harsh realities of Black ghetto life. The notion of a “Beloved
Community” had come to be regarded in many circles as little more than an
intellectual exercise, irnprobably idealistic if not altogether foolish. Likewise,
“integration” had become synonymous with a sort of cultural assimilation that many
feared would only serve to diminish and stigmatize Black cultural activities. In
short, increasingly large numbers of Black Americans began to see themselves as
oppressed members of an internal colony within the United States, in desperate
need of liberation.

A cultural revolution, however, was a necessary pre-condition for such a
movement. In spite of a formidable tradition of Black Nationalist and Pan-
Africanist thought within the United States, the response of Black America towards
the empowering rhetoric of Malcolm X and others tends to suggest that in the early
years of the 1960’s, this process was only beginning to come to fruition. Indeed,
as Malcolm would repeatedly remark, it was widely held that much of the history
and culture of Black Americans was “completely destroyed when (blacks) were
forcibly brought to America in chains.” Furthermore, he told his audiences that:

...it is important for us to know that our history did not begin with

slavery’s scars...We must recapture our heritage and our identity if

we are able to liberate ourselves from the bonds of white

supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an

entire people...Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with
confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an

75

indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold
of it and forge it with the pastm

As such, many of Styron’s critics who also had affinities with the Black
Power Movement may be seen as fulfilling something of a mandate. As Van
DeBurg has remarked “It was Malcolm X who had asserted that the basic need of
black Americans was not to reevaluate whites (whom they knew all too well), but
to seek a re-evaluation of self. By changing their minds about themselves - by
formulating a positive racial identity through self-definition and self-assertion -
individual blacks could speed the process of acquiring material manifestations of
group-based Black Power.”185

Of course Malcolm X was not alone in challenging African-Americans to
make use of culture as a tool toward an eventual liberation. Floyd B. McKissick, in
his prescriptive essay “Programs For Black Power,” defined the movement as a
struggle “to secure power for Black Americans in six specific areas,

”186

(including)...the improvement of the self-image of Black people. Moreover,

Black Power’s foremost theorists, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton,

(one of Styron’s anthologized critics), also argued in this direction. For example,

their influential primer WWW suggests
that “Black people must re-define themselves, and only they can do that.” By

1966, they acknowledged that throughout the nation:

...vast segments of the black community are beginning to assert
their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture; to create
their own sense of community and togetherness. When we begin to
define our image, the stereotypes - that is, the lies - that our
oppressor has developed will begin in the white community and end
there. The black community will have a positive image of itself that

 

m Goldman, Peter. “Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution,” in Franklin and Meier, mm
W. (University of Illinois Press, 1982).

"’5 Van DeBurg, pg. 53.

"‘ Barbour, Floyd 8., editor. pg. 17.

 

 

76

it has created. This means we will no longer call ourselves lazy,
apathetic, dumb, good-timers, shiftless, etc. Only when black
people develop fully this sense of community, of themselves, can
they begin to deal effectively with the problems of racism in this
country. This is what we mean by a new consciousness; this is the

vital first step.187

Along with these rhetorical suggestions that Black Americans must strive to
create their own positive racial identities came many clear indications that
Carmichael and Hamilton were on to something - a revolution of culture and
consciousness was indeed running through Black America. As Van DeBurg has
duly noted, nobody in the Black liberation movement seriously suggested that
cultural changes in the African-American community would single-handedly lead to
the collapse of the entire system of Euro-American oppression. However, new
trends in fashion, such as the wearing of afros and dashikis, a reaction against the
word “Negro” as a white-imposed label that had become synonymous with
inferiority, and a re-emergence of the concept of a unique Black “soul” all helped to
play a role in promoting racial pride and group solidarity - common elements shared
by all nationalism’s. Meanwhile, many African Americans began circulating
Malcolm X’s Autobiography and Frantz Fanon’s W throughout
their communities, both of which undoubtedly heightened their collective political
consciousness. Certainly creative artists within the militant Black community
resonated with Fanon’s urging to “use the past with the intention of opening the
future,” for in his analysis, “culture was at the very heart of our freedom

”188 Yet there were also specific movements within the context of Black

struggle.
Power which were designed to encourage further development along these lines,

including the Black Arts Movement and the closely related drive for Black Studies

 

"’ Carmichael. Stokely. and Hamilton. Charles v. Blachaomnmeorimmheratimin
America (1967) pgs. 37-38.
'“ cited in Van DeBurg, William. pg. 173.

77

Programs on college campuses across the nation. Again, one sees a close link
between the ideological underpinnings which motivated these efforts and those
which served as a sort of bedrock for many of Styron’s Black critics. Yet at the
same time, I do not mean to suggest that there is a rigid or causal connection
between these trends and the Styron/Tumer controversy. Just as it would be
disingenuous and perhaps even condescending to charge, say, a Marxist historian
with drawing all of his or her ideology from an association he or she might have
with the American Socialist Party (or some such), I would not wish to argue
anything more than the fact that many of Styron’s critics drew from and tended to
embrace certain cultural attitudes and ideas that were characteristic of the age in
which they lived. In the absence of these ideologies, it would be difficult if not
impossible to imagine the emergence of such a high level of discord in response to
Styron’s “meditation on history”.

According to the participants of the Black Arts Movement, (which Van
DeBurg has labeled as the “spiritual sister” of Black Power), art which sought to
speak in terms of “universal human truths” which transcended both race and
nationality - the very goal Styron had ascribed to his work - was no longer thought
to serve a useful purpose for Black Americans in the midst of a revolution. Rather,
they clung tightly to the notion that Black artists must use their creative powers with
the expressed aim of furthering the movement’s agenda. In an important anthology
of critical essays called W, leading Black Arts advocate Ron
Karenga further expressed this view, arguing that art must become “functional” -
that is, it must “expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution.”
Any notions of “art for art’s sake” are, to Karenga, irrelevant, since “All art
reflect’s the value system from which it comes.” By way of illustration, he offers
an example of how a planter might have his work validated in Black cultural

nationalist circles:

78

We do not need pictures of oranges in a bowl or trees standing
innocently in the midst of a waste—land. If we must paint oranges
and trees, let our guerrillas be eating those oranges for strength and
using those trees for cover. We need images, and oranges in a bowl
or fat women smiling lewdly cannot be those images. All material is
mute until the artist gives it a message, and that message must be a
message of revolution. Then we will have destroyed “Art for Art’s
sake” and developed “Art for our sake”...In short, the real function

. . . . . 8
of art is to make revolution, usrng rts own medrum.l 9

Implicit in this argument, of course, is the belief that work along these lines
would have no message whatsoever for white people. Additionally, it was taken
for granted that western aesthetics - that is, standards of truth and beauty and
notions concerning the role of writers and the social function of art - all needed to
be re-evaluated. According to Larry Neal, “The motive behind the Black Aesthetic
is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of White ideals, and white ways
of looking at the world...Euro-American cultural sensibility, anti-human in its
nature, has, until recently, dominated the psyches of most Black artists and
intellectuals; it must be destroyed before the Black creative artist can have a
meaningful role in the transformation of a society.”190

Finally, the Black Arts Movement operated from a nationalist frame of
reference that looked upon the cultures of Black and white America as not only
separate and distinct, but also incompatible. As such, Karenga and Amiri Baraka
and other proponents of Black Arts offered rhetoric similar to that which was
presented by Malcolm X, Carmichael, Hamilton, and others. In addition to notions
of “nationhood” and the construction of institutions that would be culturally and
financially independent of white domination, they also spoke in favor of self-

definition and identity. As Van DeBurg remarks, “According to Karenga and his

 

"'9 Gayle, Addison. Went; (Doubleday and Co., 1971 ). pg. 33-34.
'°° bid., pg. 16.

79

followers, black liberation was impossible, by definition unthinkable, without
breaking the white cultural domination of black minds. It was imperative that
African-Americans ‘overturn’ themselves, rejecting the values of the dominant
society while beginning to ‘redefine and reshape reality’ in their own image,
according to their own needs...”191

Although these advocates of the Black Arts philosophy were generally
speaking to fellow Black artists, with the hope of shaping their artistic visions, they
offered intellectual cues which were clearly embraced by many of Styron’s
antagonists. Aware that a very positive image of Nat Turner had been carefully
cultivated over the years through the Black oral tradition and in poetry and drama,
Turner had already begun to serve a useful political purpose for the movement’s
founders. For example, a 1968 edited anthology of militant Black writings called
W included a lengthy excerpt from Turner’s original
“Confessions”. Put another way, the “Myth of Nat Turner” that had emerged and
endured over the years was a precise example of the sort of “redefinition” and
“reshaping” of reality that Black radicals were coming to advocate. As an early
practitioner of the present-day Black Power ethic, Turner had come to serve as a
model of inspiration for Black activists. When Styron’s portrayal of Turner and his
rebellion seemed to undermine these conceptions, his critics relied on the rhetoric
and ideology of the Black Arts Movement as fuel for much of their analysis. Thus,
Lerone Bennett’s aforementioned declaration that “We are objecting to the deliberate
attempt to steal the meaning of a man’s life.”

Like many other of Styron’s detractors, Bennett had explicit ties to the
Black Arts Movement. His 1972 work, W clearly

promotes cultural nationalism along similar lines as Karenga and Baraka. In 1969,

Vincent Harding founded the Institute of the Black World, which, among other

 

'9' Van DeBurg, William. pg. 173.

 

80

things, sought to nourish “the development of a Black Aesthetic in the creative
arts.” Moreover, the prose of John Oliver Killens and John Williams, both of
whom had harsh words for Styron’s novel, largely seems to have been in harmony
with these ideals. Killens, for example, often wrote in a style that mimicked urban
slang dialogue in order to emphasize the distinctiveness of the expressive style
within African-American culture. In this view, the proper rules of English grammar
(i.e. “talking white”) were simply “tools, symptoms of the honkies ORDER.”192
Furthermore, many of his novels and plays sought to promote racial unity and pride
and to emphasize the oppressive power of the majority culture. In his novel :Sippi,
for example, a Black child asks his Grandfather who won the Civil War. “The
elderly man replied as if the answer was all to obvious. ‘White folks won it,’ he
said without hesitation. ‘That’s how come you ain’t free yet’”.193 Other characters,
such as the Black female protagonist of the novel Slam, forthrightly rejected white
supremacist ideologies, proclaiming herself to be “pure black ain’t been messed
with and damn proud of it.”‘“ Finally, in a 1971 essay entitled “The Black Writer
Vis a’ Vis I-Iis Country,” Killens offers a clear formulation of his artistic creed:
“The French,” he argues, “needed legendary figures like Joan of Arc in order to
develop a national consciousness, without which any revolution is impossible. So
we black folk...must build a literature of heroes, myths, and legends. The lives of
Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, and Sojumer Truth...(are
examples). We need our myths and legends to regain our lost self—esteem, our
regard for each other as a people capable of working together to move the mountain
that stands before us.’”95 Similarly, William’s most acclaimed book, W
W, is an eloquently rendered piece of non-fiction which sought to reveal

 

'9’ Killens. John 0. W (Trident. 1971) pg. 6.
“’3 cited in Van DeBurg, William. pg. 273.

'9‘ Ibid., pg. 276.

“’5 Killens, John 0. “The Black Writer Vis A’ Vis His Country,” cited in Who,
pgs. 390-391.

81

the psychological toll that white oppression was exercising over so many Black
Americans, thereby foreshadowing some of the “grim anarchy” that would later
come to characterize the urban riots of the 1960’s. Writings such as these were not
meant to induce self-pity, but rather to “help their people reconstruct and re-
experience the terrors of the past, awakening them to the necessity for unified action
in the present...By enumerating black misfortunes, the writers transcended them,
Opening the way for a new appreciation of their ancestors’ capacity for survival.
They focused on cruelty only long enough to make a point: Afro-American history
was a study in adversity. But it also was an ennobling account of the many heroic

”’96 The dissonance that emerged in the wake of Styron’s novel.

struggles against it.
then, had clear antecedents in the Black Arts Movement. In the eyes of these
writers, Styron’s sketch of one man’s struggle against slavery was hardly
“ennobling” or “heroic”.

Closely related to the Black Arts Movement was a somewhat chaotic push
for the development of Black Studies Programs at some of the very finest
universities in the nation - a development that will be more fully explore in Chapter
Four. What seems of crucial importance here, however, is that although
proponents of Black Studies often had very different conceptions of what this term
meant and how it ought to be applied, they were unanimous in rejecting many of the
ideals of white-defmed society. Essentially, Black Students and activists of this

persuasion sought to create a visible power-base from which they could articulate

“cultural values specific to Afro-America”:

As a radical assertion of black peoplehood, Black Studies was
thought to be capable of striking a telling blow at the intellectual and
cultural under-pinnings of American racism...Whites no longer
would control the context of black intellectual expression by
defining the activities and experiences of white westerners as the
universal yardstick of human experience. This mind control would

 

'96 Van DeBurg, William. pg. 273.

82

end as a new frame of reference was offered to black youth. With
this new orientation, blacks themselves could determine both the
ends and the ultimate beneficiaries of their college education.
Strengthened by these initial victories, they would pursue their
intellectual offensive against white myth-making until all Americans
recognized the unique contributions of black people to American

society.19

Again, evidence suggests that many of Styron’s most visible critics were
also proponents of Black Studies departments which would be uniquely positioned
to promote Black Power principles. Harding’s aforementioned Institute of the
Black World, for example, was conceived in Atlanta, Georgia with the expressed
purpose of bringing together Black scholars, artists, teachers, and organizers who
all shared a “determination to set (their) skills to a new understanding of the

3’198 Although many scholars admired Harding’s attempt to create an

past
organizational model for other Black Studies programs, thereby lending the
fragmented movement a sense of order, rationale, and direction, others who were
more wary of his politically charged agenda referred to the Institute more derisively
as a “Black Studies Vatican”.

One of the Institute’s first fellows was Lerone Bennett, discussed above.
Larnenting a “regrettable tendency on the part of some men to underestimate the
importance of history in the formulations of social ideologies and the social

”‘99 he argued that African-Americans should both read and

character of a people,
write histories with one eye cocked towards the political present. Thus, although
history is “a scaffold upon which personal group identities are constructed,” in his
view the “meaning” of the past is also quite malleable. Activists of the 1960’s faced

the unique opportunity to impose new understandings of the past upon society at

 

”7 lbid pg 74

'9' Harding, Vincent. “Institute of the Black World: Basic Program Elements," Negro Digest.
(March, 1970). pg. 20.

'99 Bennett, Lerone Jr. W. (Johnson Publishing Co., 1972). pg.
193.

 

 

83

large. In Bennett’s view, “We do not, as commonly supposed, receive a past. We
make it by resuming the past in a contemporary project based on a projection into
the future. In other words, we give meaning to the strivings of Nat Turner,
Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey by what they do today.”200 Likewise,
Alvin Poussaint has also demonstrated a close affinity to Black Studies. For
example, at a 1967 symposium at Yale University that aimed to facilitate programs
of this nature, he made specific mention of Styron’s Nat Turner. Arguing that
“unconscious racism” within the novel was symptomatic of the racism that
permeated so much of the majority culture, Poussaint saw a clear need for the
“Black Power and black consciousness movements” of the day to serve as
“launching pads for attacks upon the system and on society.”201 Although the news
media of the 1960’s often focused upon the more sensational aspects of student
activism, Van DeBurg has documented the ways in which the drive for Black
Studies in higher education “was an important step toward black self-defmition and
empowerment.” Indeed, much of the political language used to justify Black Power
in the academy seems strikingly similar to the rhetoric the “T en Black Writers”
aimed at William Styron.
III

Given Genovese’s Marxist credentials and his clear identification with those
who, historically, have been marginalized or oppressed, it may at first seem
surprising that he would have put forth such a thorough and merciless critique of
the points raised in mm. A careful reading of his review,
however, reveals that much of his frustration arose from what he perceived to be

tactical blunders by the Black Power radicals, rather than a quarrel with their

ultimate aims and objectives. “No matter how absurd most of the contributions

 

:olbid" pg. 202.

20'Poussaint, Alvin. “The Role of Education in Providing A Basis for Honest Self-Identification,"
in Why, Robinson, Foster and Ogilvie, editors. (Yale University Press,
1969) P8 200.

84

are,” he nonetheless argued that the book demanded serious attention for what it
revealed “about the thinking of intellectuals in the movement.” In his view, the
Black intelligentsia had been over-run by a Black Power ideology “which
increasingly demands conformity, myth-making, and historical fabrication.” Thus,

Genovese closed his essay with a word of warning:

...If they proceed, in a hysterical way, to demand new myths in
order to serve current ends, they will find the same moral, political,
and intellectual debacle at the end as did most of the Marxists (of the
late 1930’s and 1940’s). Their political movement, being a genuine
popular force, can only be served by the truth. The history of every
people exhibits glory and shame, heroism and cowardice, wisdom
and foolishness, certainty and doubt, and more often than not these
same antagonistic qualities appear at the same moment and in the
same men. The revolutionary task of intellectuals is, accordingly,
not to invent myths, but to teach each people its own particular
contradictory truth. This historian has never been sure which
lessons can be drawn from the past to serve the future. Except
perhaps one: Until a people can and will face its past, it has no

future.

Yet a counter-perspective might suggest that the “hysteria” which Genovese
decried was, for the political intelligentsia of Black America, an essential
component of their message. What Albert Stone has identified as the “rage” and
“intemperate discourse” of many of Styron’s critics has strong antecedents within
our own political tradition, going all the way back to the era of the American
Revolution. “Since the Black critic’s common contentions are that Nat Turner
represents in black culture...an emotional symbol of mythic manhood, heroism,
and martyrdom, and that this figure’s potency as a political weapon has been
diminished by a distorted white retelling...it is appropriate to find their attacks on
Styron’s version, an on the author himself, as a symbolic white southemer,

expressed with emotional passion and intensity.”203

 

”2 Genovese, Eugene. pg. 39.
203 Stone, Albert. pg. 173.

85

Likewise, Genovese would have to be among the first to agree that
throughout American history, educators, political leaders, and the media have all
resorted to successful myth-making and historical fabrication with the goal of
imposing an element of cultural hegemony over our citizenry. At a most basic
level, young students are encouraged to believe that George Washington confessed
to chopping down a cherry tree because he “could not tell a lie”, that Abraham
Lincoln walked ten miles in order to give someone a penny, and that Daniel Boone
and Davey Crockett conquered a “wild frontier”.

This said, there can be little doubt that the Nat Turner who had been
perpetuated as a folk hero in the African-American community was indeed a
“myth”, at least so far as we apply the dictionary definition of the word. Whether
one chooses to believe Margaret Walker’s claim that Turner represents to Blacks a
preacher “who was fighting against all the tyranny and hatred and dominance”204 of
southern slavery, or Addison Gayle’s assertion that Turner’s life can be most
usefully seen as a negation of “the absurd and nonsensical philosophy of Martin
Luther King,” he has most certainly been used as a character type in order to appeal
to the consciousness and the ideals of Black America. But beyond a few facts of
Turner’s life that are presented in a dated document of questionable validity, we
really know next to nothing about him or his psychology. As Gross and Bender
have persuasively argued in their essay “History, Politics, and Literature: The Myth
of Nat Turner,” those of Styron’s critics who claim that he has “distorted”,
“manipulated”, “rejected”, and “emasculated” the “real” and “true” “historical” Nat
Turner have no rational basis whatsoever for such charges. Over the course of 32-
pages of their densely packed and well-documented treatise, these scholars survey
both the ways in which Turner has been portrayed in the American imagination and

also the shaky foundations upon which this portrayal has always rested. Their

 

2‘” Rowell, Charles H. “Poetry, History, and Humanism: An Interview with Margaret Walker,”
Black World, (December, 1975) pg. 11.

86

somewhat ironic conclusion is that the charge “that Styron is guilty of distorting
‘the facts’ is itself not supported by facts.” Rather, they find the bulk of these
assertions to be “politically motivated” and “propaganda...masquerading as
history.”205
Regardless of whether Styron’s 1967 novel was a noble attempt to bring life
to the truths of slavery, or as a racist tract inspired by “sick and bigoted fantasies”,
it seems clear that his portrayal of Nat Turner and the Southampton Rebellion of
1831 was no more less “imagined” or “mythical” than the Nat Turner that was
endlessly promoted and lionized by some Black activists of the 1960’s. Yet as this
paper has also demonstrated, the charges that the Black critics leveled at Styron
were clearly colored by the era from which they came - an era of “nation building”
within the African-American community, whereupon millions of people were
embarked upon an unprecedented cultural revolution. While the aims of these
activists often varied, they certainly shared the twin objectives of opening up new
avenues of understanding issues of race in America, and of creating their own
positive racial identities. A stale joke in many bookish circles which asks “why are
academic battles so fierce?” hinges upon the answer that this is because “the stakes
are so low”. In this instance, however, I would turn the quip on its head. Black
intellectuals vigorously challenged the legitimacy of white-authored interpretations

of the Black past because, in 1968, the stakes loomed so terribly, terribly large.

 

205 Gross, Seymour Land Bender, Eileen. “History, Politics, and Literature: The Myth of Nat
Turner," American Quarterly (October, 1971). pg 517.

SLAVERY, BLACK STUDIES, AND
THE PERILS OF SCHOLARSHIP

Writing in 1970, a white instructor of African-American history at Ohio
State University suggested that the “furious hostility” generated by Styron’s novel
should “serve to warn others who also would venture to write or teach about the
Afro-American past of the reception that may await their efforts.” Yet even more
“immediately instructive,” he felt, was the angry misunderstandings which
surrounded the drive for Black Studies departments at so many major American
universities.206 Accordingly, this chapter will focus primarily upon the ethic behind
Black Studies, and the ways in which this impacted upon the work of historians of
slavery. By way of illustration, much of the discussion to follow will center upon
the career of Robert Starobin. Upon earning a Ph.D. at Berkeley under the tutelage
of Kenneth Starnpp, and then quickly publishing a book and landing a tenure-track
position at the University of Wisconsin, it seemed likely that a promising career lay
ahead. Yet as a white scholar of slavery who was well known for his leftist
political views, his work was often laden with controversy. When he committed
suicide in 1971, many of his peers clung to the view that this decision was closely
linked to the personal and professional demands that the revolutionary politics of
the era had thrust upon him. A case study of his remarkable and tragically short
career, then, goes along way towards illustrating the ways in which Black Power
not only shaped our present understanding of slavery, but also took a huge personal
toll on many politically committed scholars of the era.

I

Without doubt, the call for Black Studies struck many journalists,
educators, and administrators as something of a bolt from the blue. Indeed, even
some supporters of the movement allowed that in many instances, various

campaigns to radically reconstruct the relationship between the university and its

 

2°“ Dillon, Merton L., “White Faces and Black Studies," Commonweal (January 30, 1970) 476.

87

88

Black students was unceremonious and poorly planned. The eminent historian
John Blassingame, for example, wrote about the Black Studies crusade in 1970
with a clear sense of befuddled amusement at how “It has all happened so fast."
Whereas in about 1967 “the notion that a university student could earn a degree in
Black Studies was almost unimaginable,” over the course of only three years,
“scores of colleges have answered insistent Negro demands by establishing a wide
variety of Black Studies programs - often with precipitous speed.”207 Another
professor remarked that “From its beginning in 1960 until well past the middle
years of the decade, the black youth movement did not have much to do with what
is commonly thought of as education.”208
This seems, however, a somewhat myopic perspective. Thankfully, other
writers have correctly pointed to the linkage between the campus politics of this era,
and the earliest stirrings of student activists in the 1950’s. Roger Fischer, for
example, has remarked that “unlike most academic programs, black studies was not
born in a faculty senate chamber or in a dean’s conference room, or even on a
college campus.” Rather, “It all began...at those Southern lunch counters and
deserted bus stOps where black people finally rose in rebellion against nearly three-
and-one-half years centuries of second-class citizenship.”209 Others have discussed
Black Studies in the context of “a long and rich intellectual tradition within the black
American community,” beginning in large measure with the work of DuBois at
Atlanta University, and extending to the Race Relations Institute of Fisk University,
led by sociologist Charles S. Johnson.210

This movement was also fueled by the increasing professional

embarrassment over several generations of the sort of racist scholarship discussed

 

”7 Blassingame, John W., “Soul or Scholarship: Choices Ahead for Black Strrdies,” Smithsonian
(April, 1970) 58.

2°" Redding, Saunders, “The Black Youth Movement,” Dissent (Autumn, 1969) 584.

’09 Frscher, Roger A., Currrent History (November, 1969) 290.

2'0 Marable, Manning, “From the Director,” Race and Reason: Journal of the Institute for Research
in African-American Studiesat Columbia University (Autumn, 1994) 3.

89

in chapter one, as well as the circumscription of African-Americans from most
universities. Certainly the inquiries of Starnpp and Elkins had helped to inaugurate
a tradition in which the African-American experience has moved from the periphery
of historical scholarship, to somewhere near its center. Moreover, in their
responses to the work of each of these scholars, historians of slavery proved to be
at the forefront of a movement towards “Social History” that often served as a focal
point of many Black Studies programs?” Of course, the underlying preoccupation
of social history, or “history from the bottom—up,” was to give voice to those
populations that had been largely ignored in previous narratives. Under this rubric,
new attention was paid to the experiences of workers, ethnics, women, and of
course, African-Americans. Historian Alice Kessler—Harris has effectively captured
the spirit of this movement. In addition to pressures from within the profession,
she notes that “the ascendancy of social history was also inspired by “the visible

tensions of the 1960’ 5”:

With society rent asunder by the civil rights movement, anti-war
protests, and feminist demands, a new generation of historians had
difficulty reconciling myths of national progress and consensus with
the tensions around them. Rejecting assumptions of unity, they
argued that a history rooted in ideas of an unrepresentative
Protestant elite of ministers, lawyers, and political leaders could
hardly speak for all of American society. Instead, they sought to
explore the dynamic interaction of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic
population; to understand how interest groups and classes competed
for power; and to develop a sense of how race, sex, and ethnicity
served to mold and inhibit conceptions of common national purpose.
The resurgent populist impulse of the 1960’s also brought into
question the assumption that a study of leaders could adequately
reflect the political process, and it heightened interest in the agency
of ordinary people. Beginning, then, with the challenge of a divided
society, rather than with the assumptions of a unified one, social
historians took the poor, the black, and the excluded as a special

domain and set out to rewrite the history of the United States.212

 

2” Banner-Haley, Charles, “Searching for the Proper Place: The Revising of Afro-American
History," Afro- Americans in New York Life and History 87.

2” Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Social History" in Foner, ed., Wm, (Temple
University Press, 1992).

90

It is the perception of many observers, however, that Black Studies was
above all a means of addressing the psychological and political necessities of many
African-Americans. On this first point, I.A. Newby wrote in 1969, “It is my
surmise that black youth are in need of nothing as much as a secure sense of

213 . .
” This same year, Alvrn

personal identity, self-confidence, and racial pride.
Poussaint told an audience of educators that Black Studies must be understood as a
response to the wide array of ways in which racism can inflict psychological harm.
While there remains much debate as to whether or not African-Americans are ever
led to internalize racist presumptions of their “inferiority,” it was his view that
tendencies towards a negative self-image and low self-esteem were common.
African-Americans, he said, “are not just seeking equality, full rights, and freedom.
What’s going on now is also a search and a fight for an inner emancipation from the
effects of white racism - to become somehow internally purged. It’s also a question
of legitimizing blackness.” An Atlantic Monthly writer opined that “It seems clear
that the advocates of black studies programs see it as a remedy for “white studies”
programs...and as a way to bring pride, dignity, and community to black

”214

people, while a New York Times journalist commented upon “the almost

desperate desire of young blacks to foster racial pride,” which , “can be nurtured,
and asserted, through black studies programs.”2‘5

Yet in addition to fostering psychological identity and strength, many Black
Studies proponents hoped to create cadres of young and talented African-Americans
who, upon graduation, would prove to be of tangible use to the Black masses.

There was much debate, however, as to precisely what this meant. Some educators

doubtless imagined that Black Studies graduates would likely spend their time

 

213

Newby, I.A., “Historians and Negroes,”Journal of Negro History (January, 1969) 32-33.

2" Penthony, Devere E., “The Case for Black Studies,” Atlantic Monthly (April, 1969) 82.

2" Roberts, Steven v., “Black Studies: More Than ‘Soul' Courses.” Commonweal (January 30.
1970) 479.

91

trying to build community support programs, modifying urban planning policies,
and increasing voter turnout amongst ghetto residents. In other instances, the goal
of Black Studies was to train militant (and sometimes even revolutionary) African
Americans, who would focus on nation-building. A proper educational agenda,
therefore, would include courses in self-defense, and would offer a stirring
indictment of white American militarism, imperialism, and racism. According to
many Black Power spokespersons, anything other than this would be “profoundly
irrelevant”.

Still others saw Black Studies less as a training ground for Black liberation,
and more as a practical means of addressing the dramatic failure rates of many
Black college students. This was a particularly pressing problem, since during the
very same years that Black Studies were beginning to flourish, African-American
students began to enter college at even faster rates than those projected by the
Census Bureau, and so by 1969, over 400,000 Black undergrads represented about
6 percent of the college population.216 The impact of this change was felt by
predominately white universities in general, and the Ivy Leagues in particular. In
1969, for example, they granted admission to 86 percent more Blacks than in any
previous year.217 As a result of the insensitivity and negligence of many white
administrators, it was sometimes argued that the campus was a hostile environment
for most Black students, who tended to come from disadvantaged backgrounds to
begin with. Jack Cardoso, for example, held that “college society and all it infers is
irrelevant” to African-Americans, while Fischer wrote that, “Stripped of their
identities as black people and forced into a curriculum that denied their heritage by
an unconscious conspiracy of silence, black students found themselves completely,

irreconcilably alienated within the ivy-covered confines of the white

 

216

Hill, Norman, “Integration or Segregation,” Dissent (March-April, 1969) 43.
2" Dillon, 476.

 

92

. . . , 213
umversrtres. ’

By way of elaboration, Blassingame noted that Black students felt
unusually “heavy pressures”. “Accepting the myth that education liberalizes, in
race as in other matters,” he noted that the typical Black student was likely to find,
instead, “all of the degrading assumptions and usages of the larger society
enshrined in white academia. Treated as an untouchable by his white classmates,
expected blindly to imitate everything white, fearful that he may follow the path of
other educated blacks and abandon his people, and thrown into brutal academic
competition with students who frequently are better prepared for it, the black
student’s life is understandably trying.“219

In many instances, this sort of analysis led to the view that Black Studies
should be exclusively controlled by Blacks, and that Black and white students
should either be segregated or else whites should be excluded altogether.
In large measure, this demand was simply a reflection of general trends within the
civil rights movement. Many organizations, such as CORE, the NAACP and the
Urban League, had taken more militant approaches towards America’s tragic racial
condition, and SNCC had for many years been Openly espousing African-American
separatism. Though the text above has already suggested a number of reasons for
which Black students might have wanted to direct their own course of study, and to
live and dine in their own, separate facilities, sociologist Robert Merton has
explained that this desire is best understood as a matter of social epistemology
known as the “Insider Doctrine”. Over the course of several centuries, white
American hegemony and overt racist bias had created a huge potential for
“counterethnocentrism” - a rather common phenomenon whenever “a largely

powerless collectivity acquires a socially validated sense of growing power.” In the

case of Black intellectuals, Merton argues that an “intensified need for self-

 

2" Fischer, Roger A., “Ghetto and Gown: The Birth of Black Studies,” in Blassingame, John, ed.,
W (University of Illinois Press, 1971) 18.
2'9 Blassingame. Magnetism. xii.

93

affirmation,” led to the precept that “only black historians can understand black
history, only black ethnologists can understand black culture, only black

sociologists can understand the social life of blacks, and so on.” Put another way:

What the insider doctrine of most militant blacks proposes on the
level of social structure is to adopt the salience of racial identity in
every sort of role and situation, a pattern so long imposed upon the
American Negro, and to make that identity a total commitment
issuing form within the group rather than one imposed on it from
without. By thus affirming the universal saliency of race and by
redefining raceas an abiding source of pride rather than stigma, the
insider doctrine in effect models itself after a doctrine long

maintained by white racists.“o

In less esoteric prose, Blassingame has added that the idea of an
autonomous, Black-controlled cuniculum was indicative of a “deep-seated distrust
of white institutions by American blacks.” In other words, African-Americans
realized “they have been sold out so often by whites that they are no longer willing
to entrust their destiny to any white man.” In many cases, it was observed that
those whites who wanted to enroll in Black Studies programs were so bent upon
relieving their own guilt that if they weren’t at least quietly paternalistic, they were
likely to be found fawning over the Black students. To avoid being bothered by

these sorts of distractions, African-American campus leaders argued that:

separate dormitories, classrooms, and social facilities will permit
blacks to work on common problems, to find psychological support
in their fight against white racism, and to perfect the plans needed to
save the black community. These objectives are not so foreign to
white students, and their lifestyles, dreams, behavior, and
understanding of society are so diffrent from Negroes that they
would either be bewildered in classes with blacks or would slow the
pace of the more advanced blacks. Separate, autonomous programs
are a recognition of the uniqueness of black culture. Integration has
failed. Negroes must withdraw into their own communities,
strengthen them, and then obtain an equitable slice of the American

 

2” Merton, Robert K., “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,”
Journal of American Sociology, (July, 1972) 18, 13, 20.

94

pie. On the campus, the black students must withdraw into separate
classrooms and social centers to rebuild their psyches and rejoin

pluralistic society.

Given this general thrust, it should hardly be surprising that many white
academicians resisted Black Studies, at least in its most extreme forms. Genovese,
for example, feared that universities had begun to “cowardly surrender to all Black
demands, no matter how destructive to the university as an institution of higher
learning or to American and Afro-American society in general.” Demands for all—
Black students and faculties, he argued, represented an “ideologically fascist
position,” and that no meaningful history of any people could be written solely
“from within”. While it was certainly desirable to train and recruit more African-
American graduate students and professors, further measures, involving
“monopoly and exclusion” would “sacrifice principle” and “compromise the

” 222 C. Vann Woodward echoed this concern, fearing “a

integrity of the university.
new separatism, an inverted segregation, a black apartheid.” Though American
historiography “could profit from an infusion of ‘soul’ as a sort of corrective
influence,” for several centuries of biased scholarship, “To disqualify historians
from writing Negro history on the grounds of race is to subscribe to an extreme
brand of racism.”223
There were also African-American critics of segregated Black Studies

programs, including Bayard Rustin, Martin Kilson, Thomas Sowell, and John
Blassingame. When Antioch College established a program that excluded white
students, social psychologist Kenneth Clark promptly resigned from their Board of

Directors, contending in a public letter that the college had evaded its “moral and

 

mBlassingame.ltlrdiLIZrirsnirrttillr:s221 xv
mGe,novese Eugene, “Black Studies: Trouble Ahead,” in W

SnuthemandAfrmAmerimrLflism (Pantheon Books. 1971) 224
«Woodward C. Vann, “Clio With Soul,’ ’Journal of American History (June, 1969) 16.

95

educational responsibilities.” The administration, he held, had “made a mockery of
its concern for the protection and development of human dignity.”224
Yet in addition‘to simply challenging the “Insider Doctrine” as “the final step
on the road to apartheid,” critics of Black Studies were armed with a number of
other reservations, most of which were phrased in intellectual terms. For example.
while many scholars professed support for serious inquiries into the African-
American experience, the idea that these programs could serve as forums for
political and ideological indoctrination was characterized as “misguided” and
“fanciful”. Likewise, it was wondered whether Black Studies was the proper
rubric under which to prepare students for social work in impoverished ghettos. or
whether or not such programs should try and strengthen the psychological identities
of African-Americans. The whole point of higher education, it was argued, was
strictly to impart knowledge and technical skills. Genovese, for example, came
close to ridiculing “the alleged ‘psychological need’ of black people to do this or
that or to be this or that in order to maintain their manhood, reestablish their
ostensibly lost dignity, and God knows what else.” While these questions held
relevance, there was no place for them “in the formulation of university policy.”le
Closely related to these arguments was the fact that white critics often
invoked the specter of “standar ” as the ultimate arbiter of the relevance of Black
Studies programs. Though most university communities had been consistently
negligent in meeting the educational needs of African-Americans, and in treating the
subject of Black History with the intellectual rigor it deserved, there seemed to be a
sudden panic that Black students might graduate with a meager background in so-

called “soul courses,” without proficiency in an established discipline. One can be

sure there was a good deal of behind-the-scenes mockery of such imagined courses

 

22” Clarke, Kenneth B. W (A. Phillip Randolph Educational Fund,
1969) 34.
2” Genovese. W. 224-25.

96

as “Chitlins 101” or “The Ghetto Politics of Basketweaving”. As Arrnstead
Robinson had pointed out, much of this hesitancy amongst educators arose from
their general ignorance of the African-American experience, and from an
unwillingness to grant the “possibility that there are things worth teaching of which

”226 At the opening session of a 1969 Yale

even (they) may be unaware.
symposium on “Black Studies in the University,” one professor raised eyebrows
when he posed for discussion a remarkably naive set of questions that most
audience members and participant knew had long been settled. “Is the special study
of the black experience,” he queried, “intellectually valid? Is it educationally
responsible? And, is it socially constructive for both blacks and whites?"227 There
was also a very poor understanding of the urgency with which many Black students
felt their concerns needed to be addressed. Henry Rosovsky, a member of
Harvard’s Committee on African and Afro-American Studies, typified the
nonchalance of many liberals who failed to fully grasp many of the compelling
arguments for Black Studies. In reflecting upon the subject, he seemed to think that
the movement was driven merely because throughout the ages, the social sciences
and humanities had “treated the Negro in rather offlland fashion...To put it another
way, the traditional disciplines have not provided an atmosphere in which the
subject matter directly related to black Americans has flourished.”228
Then again, some white educators may have been correct to point out that
such proposed courses as “The Selection and Preparation of Soul Food” and
“Relevant Recreation in the Ghetto” were not likely to produce skills or knowledge

that would can'y much social currency outside of the classroom. In other instances,

African-American students insisted on “open admissions” policies which would

 

2” Robinson, Armstead, ed., WWW (Yale University
Press, 1969) viii.

22’ Ibid., 3.

2” Rosovsky, Henry, “Black Studies at Harvard: Personal Reflections Concerning Recent Events,”
Dissent (Autumn, 1969) 564.

97

inevitably have led to even more abysmal rates of retention. Ironically enough,
those administrators who resisted some of the student demands may have also been
those who were most sincere in their desire to fulfill their obligation to see that
Black students were well-trained in a field that required careful investigation and
analysis. In many cases, at universities where students seemed most intemperate
and confrontational, frightened campus officials were quick to approve hastily
constructed and poorly planned programs. Often, these departments received little
in the way of university funding, and rather were built upon shaky support from
outside foundations. In so quickly capitulating to student demands that were
possibly unreasonable and destructive, administrators seemed to betray the same
tendencies towards racism or benevolent paternalism that students were reacting
against in the first place. As Blassingame said at the time, “It is clear that in many
cases predominately white schools have deliberately organized ill-conceived
programs because they are intended solely for Negro students...Some professors at
one of the leading universities in the country will approve, without question, any
proposal for black studies because they say ‘It’ s only for the niggers’. ..229
Likewise, Sowell claimed that “When Black Studies are a pay-off to prevent
campus disruption, however it may be disguised by liberal rhetoric, it is not going
to be an honest effort to seek out the whole truth at all costs.”230
Insofar as one can treat the drive for Black Studies as an adjunct to the
Black Power Movement, it should not be surprising that many Black and white
scholars and activists spent much time talking past one another, rather than
communicating in a meaningful dialogue. Simply put, race relations in this era

were so fluid, fraught with tension, and highly visible, that one British historian

who had just returned from a tour of American universities reported that his trip had

 

:Blassiugame. Whites 153
23°Rustin Bayard. ed. Wiles (A. Phillip Randolph Educational
Fund. 1969) 35.

98

a “curiously benumbing” effect upon his psyche. “Every spokesman was indulgent
in spokesmanship, every apologist in apologias, every militant in
militance...Visually, one feels the same strain: white facial muscles ache with
nervous smiling, black ones with intimidating scowls.”231
Such campus turmoil, widely reported in the media and in learned journals
alike, effected not only students and campus officials, but also historians of
American and Afro-American history. As Woodward would write, by the late
1960’s, professors in these fields could not have helped but been aware “of the
demand for more attention to the part that Negro people have played. It may come
quietly from a distressed college dean, or it may come peremptorily and noisily
from militant student protest. In any case, the demand is insistent that we move
over and make room.” Though this adjustment was “often awkward and
sometimes frantic,” Woodward further noted that “American institutions are
responding, each in its own fashion.”232
Scholars of slavery, of course, played a particularly important role in re-
fashioning the relationship between the American historical profession, and its
treatment of African-Americans in various monographs and textbooks. As one
historian remarked, in seeking “to understand the origins of racial inequality in the
United States, (scholars) inevitably turned back to the era when inequality was most

”233 Much of this work was further driven

blatantly institutionalized and oppressive.
by a large demand for African-American and slave scholarship. According to a
February, 1969 article in the New York Times, “Virtually every title remotely

connected with aspects of Afro-American culture soared in sales last year. The

appearance of the word ‘Black’ on the cover appeared to have assured some

success, and even those books using outmoded terms such as Negro , remained

 

2" Cunliffe, Marcus, “Black Culture and White America,” Encounter (January, 1970) 99.
2” Woodward, C. Vann, “Clio With Soul,” 5.
233 Dew, Charles,"l‘he Slavery Experience,” 121.

99

curiously in the, ah, black.”234 Another scholar remarked that over the course of
the 1960’s, it had become clear that the African-American experience was the
hottest field within all of American historiography. “The proliferation of published
works in Negro history and thought,” he wrote, “is nothing less than
phenomenal.”235

As a result of the heightened visibility of slave scholarship, as well as the
fact that this body of work held rather obvious ramifications for the political
present, one can imagine that a number of major players within the profession
beginning to scrutinize - for the very first time - the work of Black historians. At
the same time, African-American scholars, responding to Black Power’s demand
for a cultural heritage upon which a Black revolution could be built, began to
seriously challenge (as we have seen in chapter three) the legitimacy of white
authored interpretations of their past. Stuckey, speaking for a number of Black
nationalists of the era, was quite candid in his admission that “white historians as a
group are about as unpopular amongst black people as white policemen.”236

II

The collision between the scholar’s inclination to allow for expressions of
politics and ideology on one hand, and the necessity of retaining a large degree of
objectivity on the other, has always been a sort of leitmotif in American history.237
Conversations along these lines, however, carried even greater weight during the
1960’s, particularly with regard to the field of African-American history. Like

many historians, Bob Starobin wrestled with what David Brion Davis once

 

23‘ “Black rs Marketable, " New York Times (February 3, 1969) 3.
2’ Goldman, Martin S., “Black Arrival in American History: A Historiographical Look at the
Sixties,” Social Studies (October, 1971) 209.
23° Stuckey, Sterling, “Twilight of the Past: Reflections of the Origins of Black History," in
Autism (1971) 291

237This point has been raised by Peter Novick. W
W (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and, more explicitly, by
Linda Rennie Forcey WWW (Pll. D. dissertation.
State University of New York at Bingharnpton, 1978). Forcey’ 5 work, which' rs something of a
biography of Robert Starobin, provides the great bulk of the background information to follow.

l ()(l

described as a seemingly endless struggle “to retain the essential quality of ivory
towerism, the sense of detachment necessary for true critical thought, while living
with an obsessive feeling of social responsibility.”238 However, given his rigorous
academic training, his radical background, and the salience of his commitment
towards the Black liberation movement, Starobin seems to have had an especially
difficult time managing the horns of this dilemma. Certame the complex interplay
between his scholarship and the cultural politics of the age in which he lived is a
prominent theme in Linda Rennie Forcey’s unpublished biography of Starobin,
“Personality in Politics: The Commitment of a Suicide” (197 8).

Born in New York in 1940, Starobin had the somewhat unusual childhood
experience of being a “red diaper baby”. His father, Joseph Starobin, had been on
the editorial staff of the Daily Worker, and both his parents maintained an
association with the American Communist Party until 1954. As Forcey describes,
he had always had mixed feelings over his young involvement with the Old Left,
and at the time of his death in February, 1971, he had already received an advance
for a book he was going to write on the subsequent social and political activities of
the so-called “Kommie Kids” who grew up in the US. during the heyday of the
American Communist Party, between about 1930 and 1950. On one hand, this
made for a particularly stressful childhood experience. During the years 1951-
1954, his father had to live abroad, and yet the rest of the Starobin family were
denied the passports they needed in order to join him. He was also a young
teenager during the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, and one of his uncles had a
close personal association with the Rosenberg’s. Yet Starobin also held fond
memories of the comaraderie and the intellectually rich milieu in which he spent his

formative years. In Greenwich Village and Manhattan he attended excellent schools

 

3" Davis. David Bn'on. in Blacksludiesmtheilnirtersitr 222.

101

as well as progressive summer camps and retreats, rallies, marches, and folk music
concerts.

Graduating near the top of his high school class, Starobin began attending
Cornell as an undergraduate in 1958. helping to edit the student newspaper and
continuing to explore various leftist traditions in the United States. One particular
editorial from September, 1960, seems to reveal a good deal about the general
optimism he shared with many other students from this era who would later play
important roles in the development of the New Left. The prospects for meaningful

social change in the decade ahead, he argued, were profound. As Forcey describes:

the Southem sit-in movement had barely begun, but (Starobin) saw
that it was clearly mushrooming into a strategic, tactical, massive
passive movement for equal rights for American blacks. He felt
confident that other sorts of political activity were developing too.
In New York and California, thousands were demonstrating for
peace and a sane nuclear policy. Pacifrsts and scientists were
leading picket lines at missile bases and atomic radiation
laboratories. Several states were forming anti-capital punishment
committees. There were forward strides in the areas of academic
freedom. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the
Senate Internal Committee had suffered major setbacks. “And wait

‘lil next year.” Bob exclaimed. Clearly, good times (were) ahead.239

Beyond a bit of leafleting and several more cogent analyses in the Cornell
Sun-Bulletin on what he impishly referred to as the burgeoning student “motion” Of
the era, Starobin had little organizing experience. At age twenty-one, however, he
trrrned down a chance to enroll in Cornell’s history department with funding in
order to attend Berkeley - the so-called “Mother of the New left” - without frnancial

support Though Starobin participated in peace demonstrations and was an active

 

”’ Forcey. Wetlands-a 84.

102

member of the campus chapter of Friends of SNCC, he was said to have “cut his
political teeth in the Free Speech movement.”240

There was, of course, a great deal of vigorous political activity in Berkeley
during Starobin’s graduate student years. It has often been contended, however,
that the Free Speech Movement was of particular importance as a symbolic or
prophetic turning point in the development of 1960’s student activism. Moreover,
Nathan Glazer, Mario Savio, and Doug McAdam have all drawn connections
between this event and the Black liberation movement.241 According to one of
Starobin’s peers, “Bob was on the inside,” of the student revolt at Berkeley,
participating “behind the scenes,” in countless strategy meetings, and “thinking and
doing politics practically full time. ”‘

Starobin’s main accomplishments involved helping to coordinate a campus-
wide strike amongst teaching assistants, mobilizing graduate students, and
persuading faculty members in the History department to support the movement.
At the same time, however, he took seriously his responsibilities as a student. So
much so, in fact, that his graduate advisor, Kenneth Starnpp, was unaware of the
full depth of Starobin’s political activity and never once felt that it hampered his
academic performance. In the seminar, Starobin was said to have been “a dead
earnest professional historian.” Others have made similar remarks, tending to
suggest that very early in his graduate career Starobin had made a sharp distinction
between his commitments towards political activity and scholarship.

Indeed, as Alex Lichtenstein has remarked, Starobin’s Ph.D. dissertation,

later published in book form in 1970 as W.

demonstrates an “astonishing breadth of research.” Aided by a generous traveling

 

2”Lichtenstein,Alex,‘‘Im11.|s,|1iaLS,1mL:l:y and the Tragedy of Robert Starobin,” Reviews in
American History (December, 1991) 604.

Wami'u'uo‘rrt " ' '
Books, 1970); Savio, Mario, “The Free speech Movement and the Negro Revolution,” News and
Letters (1965); McAdam, Doug, WSW (Oxford University Press, 1988).

“2 Forcey. Eersonalrtflmlloliries 92

 

103

fellowship, Starobin temporarily relocated in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, visiting
38 archives and consulting “nearly every significant holding in the South.”
Moreover, “His bibliography lists almost 300 manuscript collections. Even
reviewers doubtful about some of his cruder calculations, or who quibbled with his

h ”243

conclusions expressed admiration for his formidable researc Other historians

have praised the book as “a calm and thorough investigation,” which was “almost
universally well-received as ‘an excellent study’ 3’244
Though it is well known that Starobin had a strained intellectual and
personal relationship with Starnpp throughout his graduate career, he had a great
deal of respect for his mentors scholarship, and Stampp’s influence is easily
identifiable in the pages of Mom. In fact, the very task of the book
seems to have been to document support for Stampp’s assertion in W
Institution that “it is doubtful...that slavery in any decisive way retarded the
industrialization of the South.”245 Starobin’s work also closely mirrored the
theoretical framework Starnpp had used, investigating in sequence the slaves labor,
their living conditions, the means by which they were “disciplined”, their twin
responses of accommodation and resistance, and finally, the ways in which
industrial slavery shaped political developments leading to the Civil War. “In
short,” Lichtenstein notes, Starobin’s contention was that “slavery provided a
viable, profitable, and above all, flexible labor force for Southern industry,
particularly when compared to the available options.” Though the long term effect
of industrial slavery upon the southern economy and labor market was positive, his

Marxian analysis led him to conclude that “slavery and full industrialization were

 

243 Lichtenstein, 606.

2“ See, for example, Parish, Peter, Wm (Harper and Row, 1989) 180;
Boney, F.N., review in American Historical Review (December, 1970) 2117-19; Friedel, Frank,
Radical America 5 (1970) 92; Lichtenstein, 610.

3" Lichtenstein, 606.

104

ultimately incompatible.” In other words, “the point of contradiction had not been
reached during the antebellum period.”246

Starobin successfully defended his dissertation in 1968, and the following
year it was accepted for publication by the highly regarded Oxford University
Press. Since 1966, however, he had been teaching at the University of Wisconsin,
which was widely held at the time to be one of the premier history departments in
the nation. Again, his peers noticed that he very much aspired to be the
quintessential, professional historian in the classroom. Forcey, who knew him
briefly before his suicide, described him as “ambitious” - in addition to fashioning
himself as a “detached, reputable scholar,” she added that he also wanted to “make
it” in the profession, “and ‘making it’ meant becoming a full professor at some
prestigious university.” In several departmental memos, Starobin spoke eloquently
on behalf of the craft of the historian, demanding that his students strive to
approach their inquiries “in a scientific manner by understanding their own biases
and framing their questions accordingly.” There was “still something to be said for
history-as-truth,” he once wrote, “as opposed to history-as-propaganda.” When
one student turned in a poorly reasoned paper meant to express his leftist political
commitments, Starobin responded that “Your historical radicalism is no substitute
for coherence, and your explosive methods of presentation are perhaps fit for a
rally, but not for a paper, at least one read by me - even though I might agree with
your historical analysis.”247

This is all notable for the fact that by the late 1960’s, New left historians
found themselves very much in the same position as Black scholars of slavery.
Such radicals as Jesse Lemisch, Staughton Lynd, and Christopher Lasch argued
that so-called “mainstream” historians had long been producing historical

interpretations that clearly expressed their political beliefs, and yet if New Left

 

3“ Ibid., 610-611.
“7 Forcey, 121-22.

105

historians ever revealed a bias or hoped that their work might inspire social change,
they were denounced as “strident, shrill, excessive, and even hysterical.” As one
scholar protested, there seemed to be a clear double standard at work: “That which
reflects acceptable values is spirited, while that which offends is rabid, emotional,
or off the wall.”248 Meanwhile, they argued amongst themselves over their own
roles in the academy, leading one writer to a complain in the New Republic that it
wasn’t clear Whether certain radicals found the historical profession “wanting by
standards of neutrality,” or if they meant to repudiate the standard altogether.249
Others wondered aloud how they could ever reconcile their politics with their
scholarship. Genovese bluntly declared that one must make a choice: “The great
problem” facing many young, radical professors was to decide “whether to commit
themselves to full-time study and engage in politics as time and circumstances will
allow, or to commit themselves to full-time political work and to study history as
time and circumstances will allow.” Those who try to devote equal energy to both
tasks “invariably fail”.250 Jesse Lemisch captured this dilemma even more
succinctly with the title of a paper he wrote in 1969: “Who Will Write A left
History Of Art While We Are All Putting Our Balls on the Line?””‘ Starobin’s
answer had much in common with Lemisch’s. He rejected calls for work that held
immediate political relevance, and instead placed a premium on notions of objective
validity in history, in “trying to come a little closer to finding out how things
actually were?252

This is not to suggest, however, that Starobin ever made the choice between

scholarship and activism that Genovese felt was necessary. Rather, at Wisconsin,

 

2" Schofield, Thomas, Introduction to Lemisch, Jesse, We]: (New
Hogtown Press, 1969, 1975) 7.

249 Featherstone, Joseph, “Scholars and Society,” New Republic (January 17, 1970) 78

25° Genovese, Eugene, Wank 7.

25' Lemisch, Jesse, “Who Will Write a Left History of Art While We Are All Putting Our Balls on
the Line?" (New England Free Press, 1969); later re-published in the Journal of American History
(September. 1989) 485-86.

2” Lemisch, Jesse, Wang: 117.

106

and later at the State University of New York at Binghampton, he simply
maintained his belief that a bright line should separate the two. He attended civil
rights and anti-Vietnam rallies, counseled student radicals, lobbied for a Black
Studies Program, and actively supported a 1969 strike amongst African-American
students against the university. In a short eulogy for Starobin that was printed in
the Journal Radical America, an editor there wrote that “He identified with students
rather than with the university administration or his more-conservative colleagues,
and it was that identification, and the various questions it raised about his
‘departmental citizenship,’ that lay behind his failure to obtain tenure."253

Yet Starobin’s foremost political affiliation was with the Black Panther
Party, whom he felt had raised the American revolutionary struggle to a new and
higher level. He seemed especially enamored with Huey Newton, one of the
party’s founding leaders, and was one of several hundred spirited supporters to
greet him upon his release from jail in August, 1970. To Julius Iester, a prominent
Black nationalist, Starobin wrote that though he had once been somewhat
suspicious over Newton’s reported genius, the way he’d conducted himself upon
his release was “better than the mythical image”.254 Robert Abzug, a history

professor who knew Starobin in the years before his death, offered a revealing

anecdote:

One night, a bunch of us, (including ) Ieon Litwack and his
wife...were waiting for Bob at Leon’s. We were going to go to San
Francisco for dinner. About an hour and a half late, Bob finally
showed up in a manic madness and proudly announced that he had
just Shaken the hand of Huey Newton (or was it Bobby Seale?),
held up his hand, and also announced that he was never going to
wash it again. Clearly, he was as capable of being as depressive in
the deep winter of Binghampton as he was manic on the occasion in

Berkeley.”5

 

2” RadicalAmerica 5, (March-April, 1971) 92.
2“ Starobin to Julius Lester, 8/21/70; cited in Forcey, 137.
2’5 Abzug, Robert. E-mail correspondence with author, January 10, 1997.

107

Starobin was also active in a local chapter of the Committee to Defend the
Black Panthers, and in 1970, he attended a Black Panther Constitutional
Convention that was to be held in Washington, DC. When Howard University
decided at the last minute to withdraw their offer of the use of their facilities, the
convention quickly fell into disarray. As Forcey describes, “Bob was clearly badly
shaken,” by this, wandering aimlessly about the city streets and generally refusing
to communicate with anyone.”6

Perhaps more immediately instructive for the purposes of this study,
however, are those of Starobin’s experiences which relate directly to his role as a
white scholar of southern slavery. As has been suggested above, Starobin was
only one of a large number of liberal, white scholars who had great difficulty
coming to terms with the fact that rapidly changing social developments had led
toward their becoming “blacklisted” by certain segments of the African-American
intellectual community.

According to Forcey, the courses Starobin taught at Wisconsin -
“Sectionalism and the Civil War’ ’, “Reconstruction and the Origins of the Civil
Rights Movement,” and “Black History” - all sought to expatiate on his belief that
only until very recently had the historical profession begun to recognize the

importance of the Black experience in American history.

“Racist historians,” Starobin once wrote:

held in brief that blacks were of little consequence to the American
experience, as they were basically unequal to whites. Liberal
historians, on the other hand, held that Negroes have made many
important contributions to the American heritage and should be
included in the study of the “great melting pot”. Within the last
decade, however, a group of younger scholars has challenged both
these views, so that the study of black history and of white racism
has now begun to undergo a radical re-interpretation. For the newer

 

2“ Forcey, 14142.

108

studies stress the persistence of racism and the centrality of
institutions like slavery to long periods of American history; they
view the oppression ofsblacks as a key to the meaning of the

American experience.

The Black History course did not come to fruition until the fall of 1968, in
the wake of heightened student demands, both in Madison and across the country,
which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Before teaching it in a
lecture hall, however, he followed the advice of his department chairperson and
taught it for one semester as a colloquium. Despite Starobin’s enthusiasm and a
great deal of effort he put into organizing the class, there were early indications that
things would not run smoothly. As Forcey explains, the very first weeks of the

course “brought increasing tension.”

The black students felt that the assigned readings were either

inadequate or irrelevant. They felt they were not receiving from Bob

what they had hoped for...(and) that they were being “ripped off,”

taken again. These feelings were expressed in terms of hostility

toward the white students...The white students were, from the

beginning, overly eager to show off their intellectual ability to Bob

and the black students.

In addition, several vocal Black students, who also happened to be active in
campus politics, held that “they could not accept any research or interpretation by a
white.” When Starobin and many other whites in the classroom tried to resist this
notion, the situation became even more strained, leading to “overt personal
hostilities”. Just before the situation reached its boiling point, he began to hold
what he called “sensitivity sessions,” in which both he and his students temporarily
put their books aside and tried to talk earnestly about their backgrounds and beliefs.

Though most of the Black students refused to discuss their political programs on

the grounds that whites could not be trusted with such information, the sessions

 

2” Starobin, Robert S., “Racism and the American Experience," Radical America 5, (March-April,
1971) 93.

l 09

proved helpful, and the course progressed much smoother from this point

258
forward.

The Black History lecture course the following spring was, in one sense, “a
blockbuster,” as over seven hundred students had signed up. Early in the course,
Starobin must have felt a sense of validation as Black students across the campus
went on strike, demanding an Afro-American culture center and more regularly
offered Black History classes. Given his knowledge in the field and his organizing
experience in the Free Speech Movement, Starobin was asked to chair at least one
student meeting, and during the week of the strike he was said to have spoken
eloquently “at sit-ins, teach-ins, stand-ins, and faculty-ins,” and he refused to hold
classes, pinning a note on his door that read “I cannot hold this class so long as

legitimate Black student proposals are being ignored and the campus remains an

. 259
armed gamson.”

And yet on the other hand, Forcey is well on the mark with her
characterization of “The black struggle in the universities across the country” as a

power confrontation that “quickly became a no-mans land for white radicals.”

Bob was able to maintain a respectable academic stance in the
classroom that semester, his last at Wisconsin, but at a price. The
tensions he had felt in the small black history colloquium were
magnified tenfold in the lecture course. Many black students
resented him, felt that the color of his skin disqualified him from
teaching the course. They often heckled, jeered, or walked out
while Bob lectured. There were days when he felt the pressure was
ahnost unbearable, when he was tempted to yell “fuck it - I can’t
stand the hassle another minute.” Aloud, he never did. A friend
noted that Bob, more than anyone else he knew in black studies,
seemed to take the insults personally. Bob, never thick skinned,
was in a rough business. After that Egring of 1969, Bob never

wanted to teach Black history again.

 

2" Forcey, 127-129.
2” Ibid., 131.
2‘” Ibid., 133.

 

 

110

Starobin encountered more significant pitfalls as he tried to present his work
to some of his African-American peers within the academy. Of particular interest to
scholars of slavery was his analysis of slave resistance. As we have seen, since at
least the early part of the 1960’s, questions along these lines had proved to be
highly volatile, as they held immediate political ramifications. As opposed to the
widespread dehumanization in slave life that Elkins had posited, Black scholars
began to offer a polar interpretation, focusing upon evidence suggesting that slaves
led rich cultural lives, and that they found ingenious means of refusing to
accommodate to the wills of their owners. Thus, in reflecting upon, and in drawing
inspiration from their past, Black scholars sought to highlight examples of a viable
tradition of slave resistance (or, as Elkins would later argue, “upon culture itself as
a form of resistance”). One’s position on this issue, then, tended to betray a fair
amount about his or her political affiliations.261 as Forcey argues, “The more
resistant white historians found slaves to be, the more acceptable black nationalists
found white historians to be.” Significantly, “It was on this question of the impact
of slavery upon the personality of the slaves as defined in terms of accommodating
to versus resisting owners’ authority that Bob’s historical scholarship collided with
his political commitment.”262

Starobin shared with many Black scholars the belief that his colleagues in
African-American history needed to pay more attention to history’s protagonists - in

this case, the voice of Black slaves. Accordingly, he began to give careful

 

26' As Meier and Rudwick point out, Genovese made few friends at a 1966 Socialist Scholars
Conference when he dismissed the nature of slave resistance in the United States as little more than
“individual and essentially nihilistic thrashing about." Dialogues with Geroge Rawick and
Sterling Stuckey, however, led him to explore more deeply the ways in which slave culture
“enabled the bondsmen to resist the system.” Such an analysis would become much more fully
developed in Genovese's magnum opus, RolLLoLdnnfion - a work that was widely acclaimed, and
yet also criticized by some whites as “shamelessly beholden to the dream of Black Power.” In any
case, it seems worthy of remark that whereas Genovese had “raised hackles among Black Power
rrrilitants,” early in his career, his work became much more well received by Black scholars once
be shifted his position on this issue.

2“ Forcy, 158.

lll

consideration to a number of letters he had uncovered that slave drivers, managers,
and domestic servants had written to their owners, as well as correspondence
between slaves. Though he was aware of the inherent difficulties that such
materials presented to the historian, he nevertheless held that, when treated with
care, once could surmise from the letters that privileged slaves often identified with
their masters’ interests, and that owners were sometimes successful in making use
of a variety of clever means by which they created accommodating slaves. “Some
house slaves,” he argued, “acquiesced in their master’s religious precepts and were

”263 At another point, he contended that while

dependent on whites for direction.
some slave drivers may have tried to curry favor with their owners by posturing
themselves as content in their bondage, the evidence he found “seems to point more
in the direction of loyalty by drivers to their masters than toward deception.”
Altogether, “there was great diversity in the slave response. Recalcitrance need not
surprise us, nor should accommodation.”264

Starobin presented his findings at a convocation on The Black Man in
America, 350 Years: 1619-1969, at Wayne State University on May 5, 1969. His
paper, “Privileged Bondsmen and the Process of Accommodation: The Role of
House Servants and Drivers as Seen in Their Own letters,” was presented on a
panel that also seated Genovese, Stuckey, and a second prominent Black
nationalist, Julius Lester. As Novick has remarked, the events of this day rank as
“amongst the most dramatic” of a number of occasions, at various professional
conferences, where white involvement in the history of slavery came under sharp
attack.

Vincent Harding, well known at the time as a spokesperson for Black

Studies, offered the first signal that this particular meeting would be intense when

 

”3 Starobin, Robert, “Privleged Bondsmen and the Process of Accomodation: The Role of House
Servants and Drivers as Seen in Their Own letters,” Journal of Social History (Fall, 1971) 57.
2“ Ibid., 67 and 70.

112

he got up from his seat in the audience and “ostentatiously” left the room in the
middle of Starobin’s presentation. Genovese would later remark that he found it
highly unlikely that Starobin didn’t notice Harding’s abrupt departure.
Genovese was the first to respond to Starobin’s paper, and though he
criticized it at some length for its simple understanding of the processes of
acculturation and accommodation, by Forcey’s account, his comments were also
“serious, useful, (and) within the bounds of conventional criticism.” Stuckey
generally agreed with Genovese, but seems to have been rather unsparing in his
critique. “Bob’s approach,” he is said to have remarked, “is nothing less than a
new version of the Sambo thesis.” He then ridiculed Starobin’s understanding of
the letters by reading them aloud again, except in a Black dialect To many
members of the audience, they became very different letters as a result. In

9’ 6‘

Genovese’s recollection, Stuckey’s analysis was “devastating, a brilliant
execution,” and among the most damaging attacks upon another scholars work that
he had witnessed.

[ester was the third to comment, and by his own admission, he had little to
say about the paper’s methodology, evidence, or analysis. Rather, without the aid
of any notes, he launched into a full-blown, ad homenium assault on Starobin’s
lack of intellectual authority to even explore the subject of slavery. In other words,
his message was simply that Starobin “could never be of any use to the Black
Liberation movement”. When he was finished, both he and Smokey walked out of
the room to loud applause, effectively denying Starobin his scheduled opportunity

to offer a rebuttal. In a poignant eulogy that Lester wrote only a few months after

Starobin’s suicide, he explained himself:

It was one of those situations that are unavoidable when blacks and
whites come together in post-Black Power America, a situation in
which people are not individuals, but historical entities, playing out
a drama whose beginnings are now so submerged that we will never

113

find them. And, in these days, any white man who devotes himself
to teaching and writing about black history must have the fortitude
and strength of a bull elephant, because blacks will let him know
that his presence is unwanted and undesirable. Whether this attitude
is just or unjust is scarcely a question. In absolute terms, it is
obviously unjust. Historically, it is the present reality, and, that day
at Wayne State University my heart ached for Bob, though I didn’t
know him, but I knew what I had to do to him. He had to be
attacked and sol did so, employing every forensic skill which two
generations of ministers in my family had bequeathed to me. I
bowed to the demands of history that day and will loathe myself
forever for having done so. History makes its demands, but one
does not have to accede to them....History demanded that day that I
treat another human being as a category and I, not without hurting

. . 265
rnsrde, acceded.

By all accounts, Starobin was personally devastated. While he had taken
detailed notes in response to the comments from Genovese and Stuckey, during
lester’s stormy response, he simply doodled, drawing small boxes within small
boxes on a pad of paper in front of him. “One psychologist, shown the doodles
without any additional information, commented that they were those of an
extremely intense, controlled, angry person expressing boxed-in feelings, no way

3’266 Later, Starobin wrote the organizer of the conference, remarking that he

out
“loathed intellectual criticism which resorted to personal vilification,” and which
“smacked of Old left tactics and dogmatism” that was “crippling to a movement.”
Genovese later remarked that while at the time he felt Starobin had put on a “gutsy
performance,” over the course of subsequent conversations, he began to believe

that he was actually very thin-skinned, especially in response to Lester’s comments.

He was also somewhat concerned. "This was a period,” he explained:

in which any white working in black history had to take a lot of
crap. Now, we all felt it, but my attitude was “I’m not going to take

 

2“ Lester, Julius, “Suicide of a Revolutionary,” Liberation (Spring, 1971) 64. Also re-printed in
Lester, Julius, Alllsflell (Wiliarn Morrow and Company, 1976) 279-280.
3“ Forcey, 162.

114

the crap.”267 After a while I didn’t get very much because I quickly

developed a reputation for being quite savage. One of these guys
would get up and run at the mouth about who are you to write about
black people and I’d look him straight in the eye and say, “You’re
an idiot,” and proceed from there. I didn’t enjoy it but the point was
I didn’t know how else to handle this. Either you do that or you
retreat. There was no way to deal with it with dignity. I didn’t
expect Bob to respond the way I did necessarily but I was amazed at
how...(he was) deeply personally hurt. I mean that was the death

formula. You could get slaughtered in that period?”8

It is an open question, however, as to how Starobin’s professional
encounters with militant Black separatism might have effected his subsequent
scholarship, for he produced little between the Wayne State convocation and his
death on February 15, 1971. An uncle of Starobin’s, however, was surprised
when he later came across a paper that Bob had been preparing for publication. It
was a marked departure from his previous work, he said, in that it was filled with

“an enormous amount of pseudo-revolutionary bullshit.”269

 

”7 Merton Dillon has echoed Genovese here, arguing in 1970 that regerdless of ones knowledge, or
their sympathies “toward the grievances and aspirations” of African-Americans, “he probably will
still encounter so much skepticism and thinly veiled hostility as to make his task unpleasant and
difficult, if not impossible.” (Dillon, 476) Another scholar remembers a 1969 ASNLH
(Association fm the Study of Negro Life and History) convention where both he and Herbert
Gutman had been shouted down. “I remember how shattered he was,” pleading “I’m honest and I
am extremely supportive of the black liberation movement - if people would forget that I am white
and hear what I am saying. Actually, what I am saying would lend support to the black liberation
movement.” (in Meier and Rudwick, 292-93)
2" Ibid., 165-166. It is not my intention, in this paper, to directly link the harsh treatment meted
out to Starobin with his decision to commit suicide, though these events did seem to loom large
in his psychology and ought not be discounted, either. Forcey’s analysis, from which this chapter
has drawn a great amount of information, holds that a confluence of factors beared upon this fateful
act, and that there was a “complicated interplay” between his personality and his “socio-political
environment”. Near the time of his death, he was indeed feeling politically isolated. Yet many
friends and family members had long suspected that Starobin might have suffered from mild
schizophrenia, bi-polar depression, or some other clinical disorder. Robert Abzug, a friend during
Starobin’s last years, suspects that “much of the suicidal energy had to do with an extremely angry
relation with his father, (which) expressed itself through New Left/Old Left sorts of battles.” Other
facotors that he thinks may have been at work include the facts that Starobin had suffered through a
divorce, was lonely for his child, and was bothered “by the unremitting bleakness of the
Binghampton winters.” (E-mail correspondence, January 10,1997). These are points that Forcey
also touches upon. For a good deal of insight into the process by which ones psychological pain
might drive them to commit suicide, 1 suggest William Styron’ s memoir, W.
2“Ibid., 233.

 

115

As Lichtenstein has remarked, the tragedy of Robert Starobin will continue
to reverberate “As historians begin the process of evaluating the sixties, and the
impact of the era on US. history, the historical profession,” and the personal lives
of those who were involved. “Certainly historians still struggle,” he continued,
“with the unresolved issues of scholarship and race raised by Starobin’s antagonists
at Wayne State...But as the renewed and more mature debates about identity,
intellectual authority, and difference illustrate, it is well worth asking how personal
experience shapes historical writing, and how selfhood shapes historical
consciousness. Essays in a recently published anthology, BMW
WW. lends support to these remarks. As
editors Cirnbala and Hirnmelberg suggest, in collecting a series of intellectual
biographies from such major scholars as Darlene Clark Hine, Eric Foner, and leon
Litwack, they were specifically interested in “how their personal experiences might
have influenced their approach to scholarship. The contributors were delighted to
have an opportunity to address our questions, especially those who candidly
admitted that they had never thought much about why they did what they did or
what purpose their work might have beyond the usual scholarly ends. As David
Levering lewis notes in his essay, “A curious deficit of introspection is common
amongst professional historians.”270

As has been noted, academics have expressed reservations over the quality
of much of the “overtly political” and “propagandistic” scholarship that seemed to
arise out of the exigencies of Black Power. Yet in a historiographical essay, one
professor pointedly argued that this does not mean that students of history are free

from an obligation to try and come to an understanding of how this sort of work

came about Writing in 1971, he remarked:

 

27° Cimbala and Himmelbdrg. eds. W
(University of Indiana Press) xii.

116

It has become apparent within the last decade that as the fabric of our
society has been disrupted, the demand placed upon scholarship has
clearly undergone a drastic change. Black history is no longer used
to show whites that black men are merely “white men with black
skins,” as Kenneth M. Starnpp asserted in 1955 (sic). Just as in the
1950‘s liberal historians wrote their history as an honest response to
the times in which they lived, scholars of the 1960’s have reacted in
a like manner...as more and more black scholars search for a usable

past in order to improve their people’s present and future.271

Though there’s some insight in these remarks, one wonders if, with the advantage
of hindsight, the author might not be so quick to disparage the historiographical
legacy of this era. As was noted early in this study, the work on slavery during this
period, by Black and white scholars alike, was so incredibly dense, rich, and subtly
brilliant as to transform completely the way we presently understand the subject.
Whereas social history was once slighted by respected professors as “pots and
pans” history, slave scholars proved to be at the very forefront of a movement
which John Hingham has compared to an earthquake that “split the dam and
released a flood of waters across the entire terrain of scholarship.” In the early
1970’s, university presses put out a remarkable body of slave scholarship that

clearly bore the imprint of the 1960’s. A list of some of the more prominent

examples might include George Frederickson, WW
WWO”; John W.
Blassingame. WM
(1972); George P. Rawick. WWW
Commun'mr (1972); Eugene Genovese. WW
Mano (1974); Winthrop Jordan, WBurden (An abridged version of
his 1968 work WM
1312.); Leslie H. Owens. WWW

 

2" Goldman, Martin, 217.

 

117

9115211111 (1976); Herbert Gutman. WW
1159:1225 (1976); Lawrence W. Levine, WW
AftpeAmedeolkIhaughLEmtnflaxemoEteedum (1976); and Leon Litwack.
WW (1979).

Certainly there is much in these works that is flawed. Peter Kolchin argued
in 1983, for example, that in their emphasis on “slave culture and community,” a
large number of the revisionist works from the 1970’s may have tended to argue
beyond their evidence. Though scholars “performed an extremely valuable service

in destroying the myth that slaves were depersonalized Samboes and in focusing on

:n r .. t- 5.":37'1-‘1

slaves as actors who helped shape their own world,” Kolchin contends that “there
are grounds for believing that some of the recent studies of antebellum slavery
present an exaggerated picture of the strength and cohesion of the slave

”272 Moreover, even in spite of this massive effort to reconstruct the

community.
slaves world, form a variety of perspectives and angles, the historical profession
has always run in cycles. Just as Thomas Kuhn has reflected upon shifting
paradigms that occasionally throw the scientific community into upheaval, one can
be sure that, in the years ahead, new evidence will be uncovered, and new histories
will be written , out of new schools of thought. And one can be equally sure that
changes that lay ahead in the social and political fabric of our society, however

inevitable or arbitrary they may seem, will have a great deal to do with how we

understand the past.

 

272 Kolchin, Peter, “Reevaluationg the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative
Perspective,” Journal of American History (December, 1983) 581.

 

 

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