"Fellow citizens, pardon me,
and allow me to ask, why am
I called upon to speak here
today? What have I or those
I represent to do with your
national independence?
Are the great principles of
political freedom and
of natural justice,
embodied in that
Declaration of Independence,
extended to us?
And am I, therefore,
called upon to bring our
humble offering to the
national altar, and to
confess the benefits,
and express devout gratitude
for the blessings resulting
from your independence
to us? Would to God,
both for your
sakes and ours,
that an affirmative answer
could be truthfully returned
to these questions. But
such is not the state of the
case. I say it with a
sad sense of the disparity
between us. I am not
included within the pale of
this glorious anniversary!
Your high independence only
reveals the immeasurable
distance between us. The
blessings in which you this
day rejoice are not enjoyed
in common. The rich
inheritance of justice,
liberty, prosperity, and
independence bequeathed by
your fathers is
shared by you,
not by me. The sunlight that
brought life and healing to
you has brought stripes and
death to me. This Fourth of
July is yours, not
mine. You may rejoice,
I must mourn. To drag a man
in fetters into the grand
illuminated
temple of liberty,
and call upon him to
join you in joyous anthems,
were inhuman mockery and
sacrilegious irony. Do you
mean, citizens, to mock me,
by asking me to speak today?
What to the American slave
is your Fourth of July? I
answer, a day that reveals
to him more than all other
days of the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to
which he is the
constant victim. To him your
celebration is a sham; your
boasted liberty an unholy
license; your
national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds
of rejoicing are empty and
heartless; your
denunciations of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence;
your shouts of liberty and
equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns,
your sermons and
thanksgivings,
with all your religious
parade and solemnity,
are to him mere
bombast, fraud,
deception,
impiety, and hypocrisy,
a thin veil to cover up
crimes which would disgrace
a nation of savages. There
is not a nation of the earth
guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody than are
the people of these United
States at this very hour.
Go where you may,
search where you will,
roam through all the
monarchies and despotisms of
the Old World, travel
through South America,
search out every abuse
and when you have found the
last, lay your facts by
the side of the everyday
practices of this nation,
and you will say with me
that, for revolting
barbarity and shameless
hypocrisy, America reigns
without a rival." Welcome to
class. Many of you will
have recognized Frederick
Douglass's speech,
delivered in Rochester,
New York to abolitionist
friends on July 5th,
1852. Douglass is invited
by his friends to come to
Rochester on July 4th to
talk about the meaning of
freedom, the
meaning of liberty,
the meaning of this great
country. These were his
friends. He refused to come
on July 4th for the reasons
that you certainly heard in
this excerpt--and this is a
three hour long speech, I
spared you two hours and
fifty-eight minutes of.
It's a brilliant speech.
But he refused to
come on July 4th,
because to talk about
independence and liberty to
a person who emancipated
himself was unkind at best,
certainly blind. But he did
come. He came on July 5th,
the next day, and offered
and presented one of the
great speeches in American
letters. Now this course is
about the African
American experience after
emancipation, from
emancipation to the
present. Today, however,
I'm going to lay the
foundation for the course by
discussing events prior to
the emancipatory moment.
This class is about the
post-emancipation African
American experience. It is
about American history. And
I hope that point is frankly
very obvious, but one never
quite understands or can
anticipate all of these
things. It is about American
history fundamentally.
At its course,
at its core excuse me, the
course is about citizenship,
the most important keyword
for the entire class. The
course is about citizenship,
how one becomes a citizen,
what one does to preserve
that citizenship. At its
core then, the class asks
the question: what does it
mean to be American? Now
I will ask this question
explicitly a few
times in the class,
but it implicitly is woven
through so much of what I'm
going to be talking about.
What does it mean to be
American? Now we started
today talking about or
listening to an excerpt of
Douglass's famous oration
from 1852. Now I want to
move backward even further,
another eighty years or
so, going from a rather
well-known document and a
quite famous individual to a
rather unknown document
and to someone who is
essentially lost to
history. I want to talk
about events in the 1770s.
One quick tangent though:
when I was about
four or five years old,
living near
Concord, Massachusetts,
my mother would take me on
field trips. She'd try them
out on me before taking her
first and second graders.
And one day she took me to
Minuteman Park. Has anybody
been to Minuteman
Park? It's beautiful,
right? It's
gorgeous. Anyway,
the site of the start of the
Revolutionary War. So I'm
with my four and five year
old attention span listening
to the tour guides walking
through these beautiful
fields and
meadows. Afterwards,
we were driving
around a country road,
and I point to these
stone walls and said,
"Mom, those are like the
walls the Minutemen hid
behind from those
stories." She said,
"Jonathan, those are the
walls." Four or five years
old, I mean, I was not
really thinking in grand,
historical terms. Life did
not exist beyond my four or
five years as far as I
understood it. But at that
moment, I sort of was
astonished that these
stories, these fun
little stories that I'd been
hearing for the
past hour or so,
whatever it
was, in the tour,
were actually true, that
something existed beyond my
own existence on the
planet. Looking backwards,
I like to think that that's
when I became a historian,
although I would try to be
an orthopedic surgeon and
then a lawyer.
That stopped after a couple
of weeks of college.
But I can look back and
think that I learned
something that day, that
there was something
about--something larger than
myself around me. Near the
Minuteman Park, there's
also a cemetery. At that
cemetery, there's a
headstone. My mother didn't
take me on this field trip;
went with other people,
and did charcoal rubbings
of headstones in Concord
cemeteries. The story
behind this headstone is
where I want to
start this course,
really. It's a story about
a man named John Jack. It's
a story about an individual
who certainly understood
very well about a sense,
the existence of forces much
larger than himself
determining his life. The
epitaph reads, excuse me:
"God wills us free. Man
wills us slave. I will
as God wills God's will be
done." That's the opening
lines. I know it's a little
bit tough to make out.
It's on the course website,
by the way, the first week.
"God wills us free. Man
wills us slave. I will
as God wills God's will be
done. Here lies the
body of John Jack,
native of Africa,
who died March 1773,
aged about 60 years. Though
born in the land of slavery,
he was born free. Though he
lived in a land of liberty,
he lived a slave, till by
his honest though stolen
labors, he acquired the
source of slavery which gave
him his freedom. Though
not long before Death,
the grand tyrant, gave him
his final emancipation and
set him on a footing with
kings. Though a slave to
vice, he practiced those
virtues without which kings
are but slaves." It's a
remarkable document. My
mother did this head
rubbing--this stone
rubbing--a charcoal
rubbing of the headstone,
had it framed. It hung in
my family's house. I walked
past this image for
about fifteen years before I
actually read it. I'm not
saying the guy was bright. I
look at the opening lines,
about nineteen or twenty
years old, and I'm floored.
"God wills us free. Man
wills us slave. I will as
God wills God's will be
done." It's astonishing.
Couple of years later,
I'm heading to grad school,
and I look at the headstone
again, and I'm thinking
grand thoughts about going
to study American history.
And I start reading the
epitaph all over again,
and I start seeing all these
connections, these
dualisms, God and man,
freedom and slavery. And
so I decided to acquire the
headstone. I took it from
my parents' house. I told
them about it once I had it
on my wall in my apartment
at grad school. And through
my mother's good graces,
I still have it. It hangs
above my computer. It's
always, it's always with
me. It is something of a
totem. Now the story about
John Jack I think is even
more interesting than the
headstone. So we know that
John Jack, certainly
not his birth name,
a black African, born in
the continent somewhere in
Africa, a continent with
thousands of years history
of slavery, still
present today of course. He
survives the Middle
Passage. He comes to--and
he's born free in Africa
but is enslaved somehow--he
comes over to what will
become the United States.
It's not quite the United
States. John Jack would
never see the United
States. He comes to
colonial New England. Now
this point's just important
on its surface. We're going
to hear a lot about the
South in this class. If you
think geographically about
so many of the
freedom struggles,
the post-emancipation
African American experience,
they are southern stories.
But don't let yourself be
fooled. Slavery was alive
and well in New England,
and a lot of the freedom
struggles that have happened
since emancipation certainly
happened up in New England
as well. Anyway, John
Jack winds up in Concord,
Massachusetts. He has, as
the saying would have been
at the time, "a kind master"
who teaches him a trade.
He's a cobbler,
works on shoes,
and allows him to keep a
little bit of every shoe he
cobbles. The amount of
money's immaterial. It
wouldn't have been
much. Over time,
through his stolen labors,
his "honest though stolen
labors" as the epitaph says,
he acquired the source of
slavery. He raised enough
money to buy himself. He
secured his own emancipation
through his hard work. He
acquires some land
on the edge of town,
a subsistence farm, nothing
much more than that.
And then we discover that he
drinks himself to death.
Between the time of
his emancipation--his
self-emancipation and his
death--he tries to become a
citizen of Concord. He
couldn't do it. He was
male, an important
criteria. Check that one
off. He owned property.
Those were usually the two
most important criteria.
But because he had been
enslaved, he couldn't become
a citizen. Let's think of
the moment. We are on the
cusp of the Revolutionary
War, in Concord,
Massachusetts,
the start of the
Revolutionary War. You have
the citizens of
Concord, the white,
male property
owners in Concord,
complaining to the British
crown about being treated as
slaves. This is
literally their language,
that they were being
treated as slaves,
and this wasn't
right. Somehow these people
questing for freedom ignored
those people they owned.
The black African
slaves in their midst,
they were blind to
their existence,
apparently.
John Jack, though,
understood the situation.
He saw what was happening
all around him. He
couldn't help but,
and who knows why he
became an alcoholic,
but that might be a
good reason. Anyway,
he's drinking himself
to death and knows it,
and he hires an attorney to
put his affairs in order.
It's his attorney who crafts
the epitaph here. Here's
where the story gets
even more interesting,
I think. The person
John Jack hires to put his
affairs in order is a
British sympathizer,
a Tory. John Jack got
it. He was going to
hire--almost like
he's thumbing his nose
postmortem. He wasn't
going to be allowed to be a
citizen,
despite his freedom,
in an area that's
fighting for freedom,
claiming that they
weren't citizens,
they were slaves in fact,
and they certainly didn't
know slavery like he knew
it. John Jack understood
something fundamental about
what would become the United
States of America,
pretty soon in fact. And the
fundamental thing he
understood is that you
cannot understand freedom,
that thing that is at the
bedrock of what
this country is about,
you cannot understand
it without understanding
slavery. Freedom and
slavery were intertwined,
intertwined for the
citizens on the ground,
intertwined for
people like John Jack,
Frederick
Douglass, of course,
and others after. You could
not separate the denial of
freedom from the quest of
freedom. That's why the
citizens of Concord knew it
was so important. They may
not have wanted to have
John Jack be a citizen,
but they didn't want to be
like him. Two hundred years
later, after John Jack's
attorney produces this
epitaph--not quite
two hundred years,
let's say one hundred and
eighty or so--Ralph Ellison,
one of the great writers
of the American past,
identifies much of the same
phenomenon that John Jack
must have identified and
that John Jack's attorney
certainly understood.
And he wrote this brilliant
passage. I'll probably
use it again later on in the
course. Ellison wrote,
"Southern whites cannot
talk, walk, sing,
conceive of laws or justice,
think of sex,
love, the family,
or freedom, without
responding to the presence
of Negroes." They
are intertwined,
linked fate, as it were.
Now this course is going to
spend a fair amount of time
examining this phenomenon,
the linkage between
freedom--not so much freedom
and slavery, but citizenship
and the denial of
citizenship. And
we're going to spend time
investigating how
this challenge,
this problem, this tension,
can be located in unexpected
places. We'll turn to
primary sources of all types
in order to examine this
story. One place is a great
example is just in currency,
stuff you're carrying--well,
we don't carry much in terms
of dollars and change any
more, it's on
credit cards, I suppose,
debit cards. But
back in the day,
a few years ago, when we all
carried cash--the story of a
nation's myth is embodied on
its currencies. These are
two examples of Confederate
scrip. I wish I could make
them bigger. They're
actually JPEG screen
captures. They really
aren't--they pixilate pretty
quickly. But you can see on
these dollar bills stories
that were important to
the Confederate States of
America. A one-dollar bill
and a ten-dollar bill. And
the stories that are
important are here,
going back one image.
Use my mouse here. Here,
then down here. What
you see is labor and white
womanhood, and the laborer
you see is a slave. And I
know it doesn't show it
very clearly in this JPEG,
but the laborer is happy.
The slave carrying the
cotton is smiling.
On the other bill,
you have white womanhood.
You're going to see this is
quite a fascinating
trope in American history,
southern American history:
the exalted white woman,
especially as it
pertains to black men,
with tropes of
violence, and danger,
and sexual predation woven
throughout that dynamic. So
on the money that
Confederates were handing to
one another to
exchange goods,
you have happy labor,
you have exalted white
womanhood.
Notions of who belongs,
the myths that form
our nation states,
are all around us. They're
on the money that we carry.
We're going to look for
stories like this in all
manner of places, and
through looking at these
stories, we're going to see
that the post-emancipation
African American experience
is several different types
of histories. It's a
history of political
struggle, no doubt. An
image here of black woman
voting, the 1950s I believe,
from the same night--and the
history behind an image
like that is filled with all
kinds of political struggle
that you certainly have at
least a slim awareness of,
a glimmer of awareness of.
But on the same night,
in the same district,
that struggle is embodied by
this. The risk she took in
voting were risks that
involved her life. It's a
history of political
struggle in this country.
Certainly a history of
social protest as well. You
have here an image of women
from a group called the
National Association
of Colored Women,
the "upstanding
women of the race,
 and I use that in quotation
marks for reasons we'll
understand in a few weeks.
Not that they weren't
upstanding, but it's a very
loaded phrase on purpose.
Marching at the White House
in this case to protest the
lack of an anti lynching
law. "Protect life and
liberty!" they're
exclaiming. It's a history
of social
struggle. It's a history,
certainly, of social
control. There are some
images that don't need much
in the way of narration. I
will point out though--I
mean actually I don't know
the history of the image,
but if you look closely,
you'll see Spanish language
up here in the archways. I
think this actually
happens in Laredo,
Texas, this Klan rally.
It is also a history of
cultural celebration. We'll
spend a few lectures doing
occasional close
readings of important icons,
images, sound clips,
movie clips in fact,
from the post-emancipation
African American
experience. This is
one image of a series of
paintings by the artist
Aaron Douglas. I'm not
going to go into it now,
because I will go into it in
about a month and a half, I
think. But I will tell you
that in this history of
cultural celebration,
the images that we'll be
seeing are complicated,
deeply loaded with many
different stories in the
same spirit of John Jack's
epitaph. The stories are in
this image here, and I'll
explain it in more detail as
we get to it. It's
also a history of powerful
relevance today. We
are being trained,
people are
trying to train us,
to talk about this moment as
being a post-racial moment.
I actually think it couldn't
be anything further from the
truth. The election of
Barack Obama--now excuse me,
I got ahead of my notes one
section here. History of
powerful relevance today for
many of its political and
cultural symbols. Prior
to the election of Barack
Obama, you have
battles over flags,
state flags. This is
the state flag of Georgia,
had been the state
flag of Georgia,
flying above the
Capitol, on license plates,
you name it. The
Confederate battle flag,
as many of you know,
is a powerful symbol
of--depending on
your perspective,
tradition and heritage or
violence and degradation.
There's not much gray area
when it comes to the battle
flag. As NAACP organized
protests about flying
something with the
Confederate flag on state
property, and southern
legislatures refused to back
down--Interestingly
enough, the NFL,
National Football League,
has done incredible work in
getting rid of the symbols
and markers of a segregated
past, for fear of
threatening boycotts,
removing the Super
Bowl from say Atlanta,
because of the Confederate
battle flag. And,
in fact, doing something
like this in Arizona over
the fact that Arizona did
not recognize Martin Luther
King Day as a state holiday.
The battle ensues over these
flags in Georgia, and one
option is going to be this
flag that incorporates all
the different flags from
Georgia's past, and this is
the final cleaning up as it
were of southern history.
Now it's a history of
powerful relevance today.
This is a handful of years
ago. Moving to more
local events in history,
we can think now about the
election of Barack Obama.
Two years ago when I
was teaching this class,
Obama and Clinton were
heading into the Democratic
primaries, and I'll confess,
I thought Hillary Clinton
had this thing locked up.
And then this young senator
from Illinois goes on a
historic tear. And as I'm
giving the lecture
course, I'm like,
"Wow, I've got to rewrite
the end of my class." And
then during that
election campaign,
there was the
Reverend Wright scandal,
and Barack Obama's famous
speech in Philadelphia
during spring break, which
is when I really had to
rewrite the end of my
class. After the class is
over, he goes and gets
elected. Some of you were
here from that moment. This
is a screen capture from the
Yale Daily the next
day, after Obama wins the
election. There's a moment
here of the student carrying
one of the iconic images
in the Obama campaign about
hope, and a suggestion of
a new day. Then again,
the suggestion of a
post-racial day. Now I
don't want to deny the fact
that this is an historical
election for all
manner of reasons,
whether it was Hillary
Clinton who won or Barack
Obama who won, if a
Democrat was to win,
it was going to be
historic. I don't want to
minimize that. But I also
don't want to buy into the
fact that simply because
the nation has elected a
President who is
ostensibly black,
and I say that very
purposefully--if you think
about racial coding, as we
get later on in this course,
you'll understand better why
I say "ostensibly black." I
don't put any political
meaning in that phrase,
by the way. I'm not trying
to either prop up or push
down Barack Obama's racial
affiliations. But electing
a President who's
ostensibly black,
the nation healed itself.
It found a way to get past
its ugly histories and
its scars. It was a better
place. It was a more
perfect union. It was
post-racial. But really,
was it? Let's think more
locally. Let's go back to
Confederate scrip. As it
happens, I've been showing
the other Confederate scrip
for years. And
about a year ago,
I discovered that, somewhere
in the last couple of years,
Yale bought a huge
collection of Confederate
scrip. It now has the
largest collection in the
world of Confederate scrip.
Just one of these things.
[Professor
laughs.] Actually,
they are
beautiful documents,
I mean, beautifully
constructed. So I went up
to the
numismatic--numsistatic--it'
s one of the words
you don't want to flub,
but I just did--collection
at Sterling Library and
looked at the Confederate
scrip. And I was floored
when I saw this
image. I'm like,
"Can you scan this
for my purposes,
please?" You have
happy labor. You have Lady
Liberty. This is happy
labor. And you have this
man. Those of you who
know the residential college
system at Yale,
which is all of you,
will know that one of them
is named Calhoun College.
You will know I'm the
Master of Calhoun College,
which I think is humorous
in just its nomenclature,
certainly. This
is John C. Calhoun,
one of the great men of
Eli, as the Yale Corporation
thought through the naming
of the residential colleges,
the first seven back in 1931
and '32. They wanted to
name the colleges after
the great--the great sons of
Eli, excuse me.
And they wanted,
you know, the greatest Yale
alum in the world of arts,
in the world of letters,
in the world of politics,
and so on. And they decided
that John C. Calhoun,
an important person,
there's no doubt about it:
vice-president of
the United States,
powerful senator from South
Carolina--Still revered in
that state as one of its
great heroes. They decided
that John C. Calhoun was
their greatest alum. There
is no financial connection
from the name or the family
to the college, but this
was the logic of 1932,
'33, Yale Corporation.
John C. Calhoun was the
architect--although he did
not live to see the Civil
War--he was the intellectual
architect for secession. He
believed in states' rights,
an important theme of this
course that we'll be talking
much more in detail about
later on. And he certainly
did not believe that slaves
were fully equipped to
handle the rigors of
civilization. It may
sound like kind of a strange
sentence construction. They
weren't ready to handle the
rigors of being civilized,
but this is the language of
the day. I wonder, as I
look up in the Master's
house living room,
or in my office,
or in the courtyard--and
there's images of Calhoun
all over the dang
place in the college,
I have to wonder what he
thinks. History's rather
humorous sometimes, and
the ironies can be rather
beautiful. But the
phenomenon of thinking about
race, or not
thinking about race,
not talking about race, is
with us today. It is all
around us. Now thinking
about Confederate scrip from
quite some time ago, you
know we aren't carrying that
around in our pockets after
all. How's that a reminder
of today, thinking about a
decision that some people
made in 1933? That's not
today's thinking. You know,
how is this with us today?
Thinking about race is with
us today in the astonishing
ways that people make their
decisions and maintain their
blindnesses. Two years ago,
the freshman class at
Yale--some of you might be
in this room who were in
that decision process. I'm
not going to call you
out--decided to have for
their freshman ball the
theme called Gone with the
Wind. Student: That
was last year. Professor
Jonathan Holloway: Was that
last year? Student: Last
year. Professor Jonathan
Holloway: Last year. Well,
let's just say when I
heard word of this decision,
I thought it was a
very curious decision. I
discovered the more
sort of immature,
sexually prurient reasons
for calling it "Gone with
the Wind." I won't get into
those now. But I also know
that people thought it would
be nice. They're aware that
the movie Gone with the
Wind is complicated. They
thought it would be nice to
get dressed up in ball gowns
and the cotillion style
and go to Commons and have a
wonderful time. The
blindness though astonished
me. Getting dressed up
for a cotillion might sound
lovely. People can--Yalies
can make amazing costumes,
but was that really Southern
history? Was that really
what happened? Was that what
it was all about? You need
to understand, as I was
telling the students when I
was raising my
concerns about this,
that in many places where
you had this plantation
society, people
dressed up for cotillions,
occupying
buildings built by slaves,
in many of these places,
most of the people were
black. Gone with the Wind
kind of erases this history,
doesn't talk about it. And
the notion that some of the
most educated people in
the world would fail to
understand the connection,
or the lack of connection,
with Gone with the Wind
to our lived experience,
is rather breathtaking and
rather depressing. So I
decided, in my next lecture,
that as a teaching moment,
I'd read a poem called
"Southern History" by the
great poet
Natasha Trethewey,
who was here last semester
actually. Professor
Trethewey says
this: "Before the war,
they were happy," he
said. quoting our textbook.
(This was senior-year
history class.)
"The slaves
were clothed, fed,
and better off under a
master's care." I watched
the words blur on the
page. No one raised a hand,
disagreed. Not even
me.nIt was late.
we still had
Reconstruction to cover
before the test, and -
luckily - three hours of
watching Gone with the
Wind. "History,
the teacher said, "of the old
South - a true account
of how things were back
then." On screen a slave
stood big as
life: big mouth,
bucked eyes, our textbook's
grinning proof - a lie my
teacher guarded. Silent, so
did I." Now the purpose of
my class is not
to stand silent,
and I hope you will
take with you that same
determination. This
is a local history,
after all. You live in it,
whether you live in Calhoun,
or whether you happen to
live in Davenport or Pierson
Colleges who, or
where, two years ago,
this was spray painted on
the walls outside the dining
hall: "nigger school." Now
I don't think anybody from
Yale spray painted this, or
"drama fags" across the way
at the school of drama. I
don't think for a second
anybody at Yale spray
painted this. But even
though we are at Yale does
not mean that we are not in
New Haven. Even though we
are at Yale does not mean
that we are being fed by a
population that comes from a
dramatically different set
of resources than we do,
in a highly segregated,
de facto to be sure,
desegregated,
workforce. It is around us,
we are subsumed in it,
and it is our obligation to
learn this history, lest we
repeat it. Thank you very
much, and I'll see
you on Wednesday.
