[On August 28th, 1963
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous
speech to the March of Washington. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and
four other great American speeches!]
On the
contextual and the contemporary importance of a striking speech.
When I learned I
would have the chance to teach 19th Century African American
Literature (the first of our two-course Af Am survey sequence, and a class
cross-listed between our English
Studies and African
American Studies programs) for the first time this past spring, I knew I
would want to include a number of texts and voices on the syllabus that I have
never before taught. Of course folks like Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and
Charles
Chesnutt and Ida
B. Wells, favorites whom I’ve taught many times before, would occupy
prominent places. But for my own experience and benefit, and even more for the
goal of exposing the students to the widest range of texts and figures
possible, I wanted to balance such existing favs with ones with which I’m far
less familiar. Thanks to the great first volume of the Norton Anthology of African American
Literature, I had no shortage of such authors and works to choose from,
and included at least one text per week that I’ve never taught before. Today I
wanted to focus on one such work, Henry Highland Garnet’s
stirring and controversial 1843 speech “An
Address to the Slaves of the United States of America.”
Garnet
(1815-1882), a former slave (he escaped from slavery in Maryland with his
entire family when he was about 10 years old, moving to New York City) turned
Presbyterian minister and Abolitionist activist, delivered his “Address” at the
1843
National Negro Convention in Buffalo. An aggressive and impassioned call
for noncompliance and violent resistance—the final paragraph opens, “Let your
motto be resistance! resistance!
RESISTANCE!”—Garnet’s oration, which came to be known as the “Call for
Rebellion” speech, drew forth condemnations
from Douglass and other abolitionist leaders, although it also fell just
one vote short of approval as an official resolution of the convention. And
that duality—the speech’s controversy yet also its popularity—offers a vital
illustration of the spectrum of perspectives, voices, arguments, and goals
within the nascent Abolitionist movement, much less the broader social and
cultural debates over and narratives of slavery and race in America. I can’t
imagine a better course in which to engage with that breadth and depth of
voices and ideas than a survey of 19th century African American
literature, and I hope Garnet (among others, like David
Walker) will help us engage with those themes and threads fully and
successfully.
My goal for the
course was to focus on those historical topics and frames pretty consistently,
but there’s no way that this course—like any in the age of Teaching
under Trump, but also in specific and particularly salient ways—wouldn’t
engage with 21st century American issues and conversations as well. For
example I made sure to have a #BlackLivesMatter
thread throughout the semester, to think about what our different authors and
texts have to add to that concept and conversation. In the case of Garnet’s
speech, even his titular address to a slave audience—as well as the speech’s
opening clause, calling that audience his “Brethren and Fellow
Citizens”—reflects a humanizing and individualizing perspective on each and
every African American slave that wasn’t necessarily central to every
Abolitionist argument (at least some of which focused on slavery as a system,
on broader moral or economic questions, and so on). One of many interesting
contemporary echoes that it’s vital to draw out of this speech and all of the
course’s complex and crucial texts.
Last speech
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other speeches you’d highlight?
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