Teaching History Matters

I have been thinking a lot lately about Solomon Northup and Twelve Years a Slave.

I always knew about him, as a kid I played and explored in the abandoned graveyard where his father is buried. He grew up on his family’s farm in Sandy Hill-today Hudson Falls- a couple stones throw’s away from my classroom, and roomed a few hundred feet in Fort Edward  from some of my greatest archaeological discoveries. All true. But until all the hype, can you believe that I had never read his book?

Fort Edward historian (and friend) Paul MCarty shows a damaged gravestone for Mintus Northup, father of Solomon Northup, who is buried in Fort Edward, on Monday, Oct. 14, 2013. The Northups lived in the Fort Edward area for many years. A new feature film portrays the freed slave’s story from free man to slave and back to a free man. (Derek Pruitt – dpruitt@poststar.com)

So I searched it up, and discovered that it was a twelve year old girl in the 1920s who rediscovered this man and devoted the rest of her life to him, publishing a major work at age 88. It was her efforts that led to Solomon being re-discovered. I was so inspired that I wrote a speech on scholarship for our new National Honor Society members, borrowing heavily from her website.

My observations. Man’s capacity for evil never ceases to amaze….But also his capacity for goodness.

Read the book-his autobiography is just 99 cents. Get this version. For an additional 2 bucks Louis Gossett Jr will read it to you.

I saw the film 2 weeks after I completed the book. Overall thumbs up. No spoilers here, but the book has been verified. The film stays fairly true, though Henry Northup’s intense role in Solomon’s freedom maybe could have been spelled out clearer. Whether mainstream America gives crap is a fair question, but I’m fairly jacked up about it. Which means some students will be, too.

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~Scholarship~

In the mid-1920s, a 12-year-old girl in central Louisiana reached upon the library shelf of a plantation home and discovered a dusty copy of the book that would determine her life’s path. The autobiography that the future historian Dr. Sue Eakin became fascinated with also reverberates with us today, thanks to her drive.
Most of you know by now the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who lived in this area and who was kidnapped in 1841 and spent twelve years in captivity in the Deep South. When he was rescued, his supporters urged him to write his narrative to help reveals the horrors of slavery in the United States. The book was an immediate sensation, and along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, probably did much to hasten the coming of the American Civil War and the end of slavery. You may also know that Solomon’s father is buried in the Baker Cemetery in Hudson Falls. But did you know that his compelling narrative Twelve Years a Slave was essentially lost to history by the time of the early twentieth century, when it could not be located by libraries, stores or catalogs?

Sandy Hill. Today, Hudson Falls.

Growing up near the Louisiana plantation that Solomon was held at, Professor Eakin went on to write her master’s thesis about his story, and after decades of research, produced the first authenticated edition of the book in 1968. In 2007, at the age of 88, she completed her final definitive edition. Dr. Eakin also authored over a dozen other acclaimed history books and became an award-winning history professor, Hall of Fame journalist, civil rights leader and internationally recognized authority on antebellum plantation life.
After her passing at age 90 in 2009, her priceless historical archive was donated by her family to Louisiana State University. The Smithsonian Institute is creating a permanent exhibit featuring her Twelve Years a Slave research materials, and her family carries on her work.

In a sense, a twelve year old girl’s curiosity brought Twelve Years a Slave back to life, just as the American Civil Rights movement was dawning. May you too have the passion of the scholar, and cherish the importance of your vision and your work, and realize the impact that your actions may have on others.

http://twelveyearsaslave.org/

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Also a great recent interview from New York Magazine, with Levar Burton, the kid who got his break in Roots, back when I was in high school. I highlighted part of what he said. I think it relates to my philosophy on the teaching of the Holocaust as well.

You got your big break when you were cast in Roots as Kunta Kinte, a West African man who is captured and brought to America as a slave. During production, was there a sense that Roots was more than just a television mini-series?
You have to remember we’re looking back through the lens of a 19-year-old. I had never faced any of the challenges the veterans—the Cicely Tysons, the Lou ­Gossetts—had in terms of finding work. But what I was aware of was that all of the veterans thought that this material was special. All of them were very clear that telling the story of slavery in America through the eyes of the African had never been done before. It wasn’t Gone With the Wind. It wasn’t just glossing over the human costs. Roots wasn’t just art for art’s sake. It was art as a way of moving the ­culture forward.

And do you think Roots did that?
I like to think so. Roots became a part of the fabric of American culture. After Roots, we all had a similar frame of reference and context for what we talk about when we talk about slavery in America. You have to acknowledge that there’s a wound before it can even begin to get better.

You’ve spoken of a “post-Roots disappointment,” that the series didn’t actually change Holly­wood and that this galvanizing cultural moment didn’t fully pan out. After all, if most Americans watched parts of Roots, it meant that civil-rights leaders were tuning in alongside avowed ­racists—
Who were watching Roots and having a profound human experience of identification and compassion that was probably new. And then you have the rubber-band effect of those record numbers of viewership snapping back to red and blue, right? That has been ultimately the path of least resistance to retrench and go back to old ways of thinking rather than to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work.

And you see us as retrenched now?
Look at the rubber-band effect from the night of the inauguration of Barack Obama to today. There was this enormous sense of finally. Well, finally what? Finally, we have a black man in the White House who at least on some level has an understanding of the black experience in America. But that in no way makes this a post-racial society.

And now we have 12 Years a Slave. Critics have called it a breakthrough for showing the brutality of slavery and for finally vanquishing the myth of Gone With the Wind. But Roots was supposed to have done that. What have we been doing for the past 36 years?
That’s a very good question, and I wish I had an answer for you. But I don’t. We would love to forget, I think. We would love to go back to the fairy tale, to the fantasy of Tara. But it’s too easy to try and erase the sins of the past and claim, “That wasn’t me.” We are all capable of unspeakable horror. We are all capable of unthinkable brutality. We have to be ever vigilant and continue to remind ourselves of our propensity for monstrosity. And there’s a lot of resistance to revisiting this issue. I’ve heard disquieting chatter on both sides of the color line. Why do we have to revisit this again? Well, we have to revisit this again because all of us have forgotten!

12 Years will never have the viewership of Roots. Do you think it’ll still have some impact?
Steve McQueen is a brilliant storyteller, and he’s taken a very difficult subject and told it in a very accessible, however difficult, way. Now, I wish more people were going to see it. It’s going to play really well in New York and L.A. and some other cities, and I hope that it plays incredibly well overseas as well. It’ll be interesting if anybody is bothered to book a theater in certain locales—certain territories, as they say.

What did you think of the last slavery film to have a big cultural footprint, Django Unchained? Quentin Tarantino argued it was one of the few slave movies about black empowerment.
[Chuckles] Yeah, well …

Do I sense skepticism in your voice?
[More chuckles] Yes. Django Unchained is a fantasy, let’s be clear. And when Quentin Tarantino says that Django is more real than Roots, I call bullshit. I got nothing against him, but don’t go there, okay? Don’t go there, Quentin. Too many people who look like me bled and died for you to have the opportunity to satirize the slave narrative. There’s a place for satire in culture. Taken at face value, as a piece of satire, I went and enjoyed it. It was fun. Let’s just not get it twisted. Django was not real.

In another 36 years, are we going to be discussing another brutal slavery film that critics hail as finally vanquishing the myth of Gone With the Wind?
At the screening of 12 Years a Slave, no less a personage than Russell Simmons told me that Roots was being remade. And my initial reaction was, Why? But, look, the bottom line for me is if one soul is moved irrevocably toward the side of humanity, then it’s worth it. Human beings are the laziest creatures in the history of creation. We would rather not do anything if we could avoid it. But social justice requires rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. And I think moments like Roots and 12 Years a Slave are opportunities for art as a cultural force to step forward and lead the way. What we do with it is up to us.

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/roots-levar-burton-2013-11/