On the impromptu
debate, between two of the most impressive Americans, that exemplifies one of
our most complex and crucial questions.
One of my most
common topics in this space, including in this
late August series, has been the challenges and yet the importance of
remembering our darkest American histories. As I wrote in that week’s third
post, no national histories are darker nor more important for us to better
remember than
those of slavery; that’s why, whatever its flaws or limitations, I’m on
board with Quentin
Tarantino’s project in his latest film, Django
Unchained. Yet in arguing for that importance, I can and should
recognize the fact that it’s significantly easier for me to say than it is for
African Americans, for those who own darkest histories and heritages are
directly tied to these national horrors. For that community, it’s fair to ask
whether remembering the histories of slavery is as important as trying to move
beyond them and into a more positive future; and indeed, in the decades after
emancipation and the Civil War many prominent African American voices argued precisely
for, if not forgetting slavery, at least not focusing on keeping its memories
alive.
Perhaps the
leader of that movement was Alexander Crummell,
the priest, philosopher, professor, and political activist whose impressive 19th
century life and career spanned abolitionism, black nationalism and the
development of the Liberian state, and many other causes. In the years after
the Civil War, Crummell came to feel that only by moving beyond the memories of
slavery could African Americans achieve success and equality; he developed that
theme with particularly clarity in “The
Need for New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era,” his 1885 commencement address at Storer
College, the newly founded freedmen’s
college in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the audience was none other
than Frederick Douglass, a trustee of the college and one of the few men who
could equal Crummell’s longstanding prominence in the African American
community, and Douglass apparently objected vocally to Crummell’s arguments.
Unfortunately no specific transcript of Douglass’s comments exists, but
throughout this era Douglass certainly argued the opposite of Crummell’s
critique of “fanatical anxieties upon the subject of slavery”; for Douglass,
instead, that dark history “could
be traced [in American identity] like that of a wounded man through a crowd by
the blood,” and so must be followed and engaged with.
If we approach
this debate from a scholarly perspective, as I did when I used the exchange to
open a chapter of my
first book, it seems clear enough that Douglass was right, that it’s vital
to remember even—perhaps especially—our darkest histories. But for those African
American college graduates in the audience, just as for all African Americans
in the era—and, in less immediate but still present ways, for all their
descendents—the question was and remains far from simply academic. Obviously
there is value, practical as well as philosophical, in remembering the worst
parts of our pasts, for individuals, for communities, and for the nation. But
as Crummell noted, to dwell upon such memories can make it significantly more
difficult to live in the present and move into an even stronger future. So the
key, perhaps, is to remember without getting lost, to engage without giving in
to the most limiting or damaging effects. Easier said than done, of course—but both
Crummell and Douglass, and many other inspiring and influential voices, give us
models for such work.
Next conversation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these figures and questinos? Other Black
History Month connections you’d share?
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