At Law & Liberty, Lucas E. Morel (Washington & Lee University – Politics): Black Americans’ Indispensable Contribution to the Founding (reviewing Black Writers of the Founding Era, by James G. Basker (Library of America, 2023)). From the introduction:
Omission of the political opinions and literary creations of black Americans during the Founding era has produced an incomplete history of the birth and growth of the American republic that has distorted Americans’ self-understanding of who they are as a diverse but whole people. The most pernicious effect has been to reinforce the white supremacy that debilitated early and longstanding efforts to rid the nation of racial slavery and secure the equal protection of the law to all Americans regardless of race, color, or nation of origin. In Black Writers of the Founding Era, James G. Basker has compiled an anthology of 200 texts from more than 120 black writers that offers a much overdue public service announcement regarding the contribution that blacks have made to America.
The volume’s raison d’etre, according to the foreword by historian Annette Gordon-Reed, is “recovering marginalized voices.” To borrow from Carter G. Woodson, the creator of Negro History Week (now African American History Month), such a volume presents “not Negro History, but the Negro in history.” He added, “The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has influenced the development of civilization.” For far too long, few American history textbooks contained references to blacks in American history that extended beyond being either victims of white injustice or beneficiaries of white largesse. Their contributions to their liberation on American soil are largely missing, a liberation that also helped white Americans live up to their noblest professions.
The need for this volume is apparent when we consider the hue and cry raised last year by Florida’s revision of state standards of African American history for K-12 when they referred to the ability of enslaved blacks to express their humanity, talents, and skills despite their enslavement. Had the letters, stories, sermons, petitions, and literature contained in this volume been more widely known, the proposed standards would have been less susceptible to caricature and misrepresentation. Some had even condemned the new standards as teaching, along the lines of John C. Calhoun’s “positive good” thesis, that American slavery was a benefit to the slaves. Basker rightly declares that “the myth of Black passivity—if it ever had any truth to it—is finished.”
Posted at 6:36 AM