The Book, "Twelve Years A Slave," By Solomon Northup

Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 [Auburn (NY): Derby and Miller, 1853.

Summary by Patrick E. Horn: Twelve Years a Slave:Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853  --   Solomon Northup was born a free man in Minerva, New York, in 1808. Little is known about his mother, whom his narrative does not identify by name. His father, Mintus, was originally enslaved to the Northup family from Rhode Island, but he was freed after the family moved to New York. As a young man, Northup helped his father with farming chores and worked as a raftsman on the waterways of upstate New York. He married Anne Hampton, a woman of mixed (black, white, and Native American) ancestry, on Christmas Day, 1829. They had three children together. During the 1830s, Northup became locally renowned as an excellent fiddle-player. In 1841, two men offered Northup generous wages to join a traveling musical show, but soon after he accepted, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. He was subsequently sold at auction in New Orleans. Northup served a number of masters—some brutally cruel and others whose humanity he praised. After years of bondage, he came into contact with an outspoken abolitionist from Canada, who sent letters to notify Northup's family of his whereabouts. An official state agent was sent to Louisiana to reclaim Northup, and he was successful through a number of coincidences. After he was freed, Northup filed kidnapping charges against the men who had defrauded him, but the lengthy trial that followed was ultimately dropped because of legal technicalities, and he received no remuneration. Little is known about Northup's life after the trial, but he is believed to have died in 1863.

SCENE IN THE SLAVE PEN AT WASHINGTON. (44a)

Twelve Years a Slave was recorded by David Wilson, a white lawyer and legislator from New York who claimed to have presented "a faithful history of Solomon Northup's life, as [I] received it from his lips" (p. xv). Dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe and introduced as "another Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," Northup's book was published in 1853, less than a year after his liberation. It sold over thirty thousand copies. It is therefore not only one of the longest North American slave narratives, but also one of the best-selling.

The first two chapters of Twelve Years a Slave relate the Northup family history, Solomon's marriage to Anne, his employment as a raftsman, a farmer, and a fiddle-player, and his abduction. Promised "one dollar for each day's services" and three dollars for every show that he played, Northup travels willingly with the two con artists to New York City and then to Washington, D.C. (p. 30). Their ruse is thorough: the men perform a vaudeville show of sorts in Albany, and they convince Northup to obtain "free papers" before leaving New York. However, once in Washington, the men offer him a drink that causes him to become "insensible," and when Northup awakens, he is "alone, in utter darkness, and in chains" (p. 38). The narrative expresses his amazement at discovering "a slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!" (p. 43).

Northup is sold to the notorious Washington-based slave trader James H. Burch, who brutally whips him for protesting that he is a free man. While in the slave pen, he makes the acquaintance of several other slaves, including Eliza, whose sad history he relates in detail (pp. 50-54). The slaves are handcuffed and transported together via cars and steamboats to Richmond and then to New Orleans. Their experience aboard the steamboat is a miserable one: "sea-sickness rendered the place of our confinement loathsome and disgusting" (p. 68). Northup plans a mutiny with two of his fellow slaves, but the plan is foiled when one of them contracts smallpox and dies (pp. 69-72). Northup and the rest of "Burch's gang" are delivered to Theophilus Freeman, a New Orleans slave trader who informs Northup that his new name is "Platt" (p. 75).

CHAPIN RESCUES SOLOMON FROM HANGING. (114a)

After surviving a bout of smallpox, Northup and Eliza are purchased by a Baptist preacher named William Ford. Touched by Eliza's pleas, Ford attempts to purchase her young daughter Emily as well, but Freeman refuses to sell her. Ford proves to be a kind master; Northup writes that "there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man" (p. 90). Ford's plantation is located several hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, in the Great Pine Woods along Louisiana's Red River. Northup is put to work stacking and chopping logs at Ford's lumber mill, and he decides to reward his master's kindness. Realizing that Ford ships his lumber by land at great expense, Northup devises a set of rafts to deliver them by canal, greatly increasing Ford's profits. "I was the Fulton of Indian Creek," he recalls (p. 99). He also builds a loom for the plantation that "worked so well, I was continued in the employment of making looms" (p. 103).

Despite (or perhaps because of) his value as a laborer and de facto engineer, Northup is sold in the winter of 1842 to John Tibeats, a "quick-tempered" carpenter to whom Ford had become indebted (p. 103). Unlike Ford, Tibeats is "never satisfied," though he works his slaves "from earliest dawn until late at night" (p. 107). When Tibeats attempts to whip Northup for a dubious offense, Northup fights back, and with his foot on the master's neck, he whips Tibeats "until my right arm ached" (p. 111). When Tibeats and two associates attempt to lynch Northup, a kindly overseer (armed with pistols) intervenes and saves his life. Because he had not yet paid Ford the full amount for Northup, Tibeats is compelled to spare him for a time. Later, when he attacks Northup with a hatchet, the slave again bests the master, and this time he flees from the plantation, chased by hounds. Northup escapes by running and swimming through the "Great Pacoudrie Swamp," evading water moccasins and alligators (p. 139). He makes his way back to Ford's plantation, where he is protected from harm.

Persuaded by William Ford that killing Northup will only bring him the condemnation of his peers as well as financial loss, Tibeats hires Northup out to cut sugarcane in the "Big Cane Break" farther down the Red River. Around this time, Northup learns that Eliza has died of malnourishment and grief at the loss of her daughter (pp. 159-160). Soon afterwards, Tibeats sells Northup to Edwin Epps, a "repulsive and coarse" cotton planter whom Northup describes as being devoid of any redeeming qualities.(p. 162).

SCENE IN THE COTTON FIELD, SOLOMON DELIVERED UP (Facing page 304)

The second half of Northup's narrative is chiefly devoted to describing life on a cotton plantation. He provides detailed descriptions of the processes of planting, cultivating, and picking cotton (pp. 163-168), character sketches of his fellow slaves (pp. 185-190), and gradations of punishment for various offenses (pp. 179-180). As he was periodically hired out to sugar plantations as well, Northup describes the methods of planting, harvesting, and processing the cane in similar detail (pp. 208-213). Though his account reveals the misery and despair of field slaves, like many other slave narratives, it also reflects the wry humor with which Northup endured his situation. For example, in describing the meager rations allotted for each week's subsistence, he quips that "no slave of [Edwin Epps's] is ever likely to suffer from the gout, superinduced by excessive high living" (p. 169). Likewise, he begins his description of slave huts by stating that "the softest couches in the world are not to be found in the log mansion of the slave" (p. 170). Ironic metaphors and understatements such as these render Northup's account all the more compelling, leavening the extent of his degradation with a wry and persistent sense of humor.

Twelve Years a Slave occasionally ventures into nature writing and ethnography, as Northup describes southern flora, fauna, and culture from the perspective of a northern traveler. Narrating his relocation to work as a cane-clearer after his fights with Tibeats, Northup writes, "we were now in the midst of trees of enormous growth, whose wide-spreading branches almost shut out the light of the sun . . . The bay and the sycamore, the oak and the cypress, reach a growth unparalleled, in those fertile lowlands" (pp. 154-155). Northup seems to find the talk and behavior of Southerners equally interesting; he frequently quotes and explains colloquialisms, such as the verbs "allowed" (p. 153) and "toted" (p. 167). Remarkably, he compliments some aspects of (white) southern life: "whatever their faults may be, it is certain the inhabitants [of] the interior of Louisiana are not wanting in hospitality" (p. 159). He also repeatedly notes the abilities of female slaves in a manner that suggests a sort of proto-feminist sensibility. Northup praises the "lumberwomen" with whom he clears cane as "excellent choppers" who were "equal to any man" at piling logs (p. 156). On the cotton plantation, he observes that women plow the fields and tend their animals "precisely as do the ploughboys of the North" (p. 164). When it comes to picking cotton, Patsey is "queen of the field," for her fingers possess a "lightning-quick motion"—the very dexterity that Northup lacks (p. 188). Whether his subject is the Southern landscape or the Southerners themselves, Northup frequently writes with the bemused curiosity of an intellectual tourist.

ARRIVAL HOME, AND FIRST MEETING WITH HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN (320)

Northup's first attempt to write a letter home—with a duck feather and ink that he produced from white maple bark—is thwarted when the white field-laborer in whom he confides exposes the plan to Edwin Epps. However, Northup had been savvy enough to request the favor without entrusting the letter, so he is able to deny the allegation and convince his master that it is spurious. Later, he meets a Canadian carpenter (and outspoken abolitionist) named Mr. Bass, who agrees to mail several letters for him. Both men realize the significance of the act: Northup notes that "my previous ill-fortune had taught me to be extremely cautious," and Bass advises him on "the great necessity of strict silence and secrecy" (p. 269, p. 271). Indeed, the letters that Bass writes for Northup inform the recipients that "he that is writing for me runs the risk of his life if detected" (p. 275). After a lengthy delay that causes Northup to despair of ever being rescued, he is found and liberated by Henry B. Northup, a member of the same white family that his father had served years before. Northup later learns the causes for the delay: first, his wife had to prove to the Governor of New York (Washington Hunt) that Solomon was a free man who had been abducted; next, Governor Hunt had appointed Henry Northup as an official state agent to rescue Solomon; Henry Northup had then negotiated with former Louisiana Senator Pierre Soulé, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson, and Charles M. Conrad, U.S. Secretary of War, to provide federal support for his mission (pp. 290-292). Even after all of these careful arrangements, Henry Northup still struggled to locate Solomon, because no one in Louisiana knew him by his real name. It was only a chance encounter with the carpenter Bass that revealed Solomon's location—and that he was now called "Platt" (p. 298). With this knowledge and the help of a sympathetic sheriff, Henry Northup was able to rescue Solomon Northup. The final chapter outlines the legal proceedings that followed—in New Orleans, where the men received a legal pass to leave the state; in Charleston, South Carolina, where Henry was challenged by customs officials for not "registering" Solomon as a servant; and in Washington, where the two filed charges against Solomon's former captors (pp. 310-319). The narrative concludes with Solomon's reunion with Anne, his daughters, and a grandson whom he had never met. The child's name was Solomon Northup Staunton (p. 320). Patrick E. Horn[source: Documenting The American South]

CLICK HERE TO READ Electronic Edition of "Twelve Years a Slave:Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853," AT the Documenting The American South website.

TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE by Solomon Northup -- Audiobook

Philadelphia Story: The Slaves At The President's House

Statue of President George Washington Outside of Independence Hall

From the New York Times, "Reopening a House That’s Still Divided," by Edward Rothsetin --  PHILADELPHIA — The convulsive currents that roil the telling of American history have become so familiar that they now seem an inseparable part of the story itself. Here is a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition of human equality, that, for much of its first century of life, countenanced slavery, institutionally supported it and economically profited from it. The years that followed have been marked by repair, reform and reversals; recompense, recrimination and reinterpretation. Extraordinary ideals and achievements have been countered by extraordinary failings and flaws, only to be countered yet again, each turn yielding another round of debates.

Constance the Constitution Cow, Philadelphia, PA

And here, in this city where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed; where a $300 million Independence National Historical Park has been created, leading from the National Constitution Center to Independence Hall; and where the Liberty Bell, as a symbol of the nation’s ideals, draws well over a million visitors a year, a great opportunity existed to explore these primal tensions more closely on a site adjacent to the Liberty Bell Center in Independence park. Unfortunately, those opportunities have been squandered in “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” which opens on Wednesday.

It is almost painful, given the importance of this site, to point out that the result is more a monument to these unresolved tensions than a commemoration of anything else. After $10.5 million and more than eight years; after tugs of war between the city and the National Park Service and black community organizations; after the establishment of a contentious oversight committee and street demonstrations, overturned conceptions and racial debates, it bears all the scars of its creation, lacking both intellectual coherence and emotional power. On Wednesday the Park Service takes over the site with its work cut out for it, since rangers will have to weave the competing strands together.

Public Restrooms on the site of the President's House in Philadelphia, PA

But consider what opportunities there were. The construction of a new $9 million exhibition space for the Liberty Bell drew attention to this adjacent site, where the nation’s first two presidents — George Washington and John Adams — had lived between 1790 and 1800, when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital.

The house had long ago been demolished — much of it in the 1830s — and in the 1950s the site, near Sixth and Market Streets, was the location of a public restroom. But the house was once one of the grandest mansions in Philadelphia. Its inhabitants included Richard Penn (grandson of the Pennsylvania colony’s founder); the British general William Howe (who occupied Philadelphia while Washington’s army licked its wounds in Valley Forge); Benedict Arnold (who may have begun his espionage here); and Robert Morris (a financier of the Revolution). All vanished history.

Then, in an illuminating 2002 article in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the historian Edward Lawler Jr. mapped out the house and its probable dimensions, and pointed out the irony that just steps from the new Liberty Bell Center was a site that had once sheltered Washington’s slaves.

George Washington's Statue, Outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Park Service contested some of his conclusions and refused to outline the footprint of the lost President’s House in its designs for the center. But the issue was soon taken up by scholars, including Gary B. Nash, author of the new book “The Liberty Bell,” as well as by political activists like the lawyer Michael Coard and his Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, who argued that the existence of slave quarters adjacent to the city’s paean to liberty demanded major commemoration.

There was a cascade of events, chronicled by The Philadelphia Inquirer, including Congressional legislation and financing, city oversight and funds, an expansion of the Liberty Bell exhibition, the establishment of an oversight committee and the solicitation of redesigns. In 2007 an archaeological dig began, revealing the foundation and the remains of a tunnel once used by servants and slaves. The dig, viewed by the public, ignited debate.

Washington ultimately took nine slaves to Philadelphia from Mount Vernon, where more than 200 slaves were held. And they were part of a household staff that may have numbered two dozen, including white indentured laborers and servants. Though the slaves were part of a population of nearly 4,000 others in Philadelphia, there were also more than 6,500 free blacks in the city in 1790, and Washington’s slaves were exposed to the experience of liberty.

George Washington's Statue, Outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

We know some astonishing details about the effects. Ona Judge (here called Oney), a servant to Martha Washington, and Hercules, the household cook, both escaped to freedom.

Some of Washington’s most unattractive characteristics also emerge. He and Martha Washington pursue Judge for years, though she later establishes herself with her own family in New Hampshire. And though Washington expressed his opposition to slavery, and freed his own slaves in his will, he went through bizarre machinations to ensure that the slaves he took to the nation’s capital would not be subject to local laws granting them freedom after six months. He exchanged them with others at Mount Vernon, issuing instructions: “I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public.”

So here we not only have the father of our country showing his darkest side, we also see the foundations of the nation at their darkest. Yet here is where Washington invented the executive branch, conducting affairs of state. Here is where it became clear that a democratic ruler was no king, had no claim on his dwelling place and was himself meant to serve the people.

How, then, should such a site be developed? A 2005 call for designs stressed that it would have to pay attention to many themes: the house, its workers, the executive branch, African-American Philadelphia, escapes to freedom. In addition, it noted that community discussions led to five “cultural values” that should be clear: identity, memory, agency, dignity, truth. There was also a requirement that the site be open 24/7 to visitors.

As ultimately designed by Kelly/Maiello, the site is a space bounded by a low wall roughly outlining the footprint of the house (but often departing from it), marked by protruding rectangular slabs into which are inserted mock fireplaces and video screens. In the house’s heart, a transparent wall allows visitors to view the archaeological work in progress. And attached to the walls are either long panels surveying historical themes — the executive branch, slavery in the President’s House — or rudimentary illustrations. A few show the escape of Judge, a few give some glimpse of foreign policy in the house (protests over the Jay Treaty with England), and more give some sense of slavery (including Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act, which put all escaped slaves in danger).

“History is not neat,” we read. “It is complicated and messy. It is about people, places and events that are both admirable and deplorable.” And the President’s House, we are told, “exposes the core contradiction at the founding of this nation: enshrinement of liberty and the institution of slavery.”

But what precisely is being exposed? A few yards away, the Liberty Bell Center discusses abolition and slavery; the park’s visitor center has an exhibition about the Underground Railroad; the nearby African American History Museum has a powerful audio and video history of blacks in Philadelphia. Accounts of slavery are even found at Mount Vernon.

Here, though, we get neither a sense of the place, nor a sense of the issues (and much of the year, the open air will be inhospitable). We don’t learn about the differences between Washington and Adams. We don’t learn much about the pictured events. There is no real narrative. Illustrations can also be melodramatically contentious: we see a seemingly disdainful Washington dangling a “peace medal” before a suspicious Seneca Indian leader

As for slave life, it is also difficult to piece together. The video screens that come to life above the fake mantels give the impression of a half-finished 21st-century home. The videos themselves (with scripts by Lorene Cary), in which slaves and servants provide first-person accounts of experiences, at least provide some sense of life. But how do we put these experiences in context? What was Philadelphia’s free black community like? How did white workers and black slaves live together here?

We are told that the President’s House “offers an opportunity to draw lessons from the past.” But what lessons? That Washington was flawed? That slavery was an abomination? Are these revelations? A memorial to the practice of slavery is mounted here, inscribed with the names of African tribes from which slaves derived, but it has no particular relationship to Philadelphia or this site. The need for some such memorial is keen, but here it seems thumped down as an intrusion.

So what is learned? Not what makes this site special, but what makes it ordinary; not the foundations of what led to the overcoming of slavery, but a sense of its enduring presence. Would this display be any different if presidents had not lived here? And would our understanding be any different without it?

“The President’s House” opens on Wednesday in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia; phila.gov/presidentshouse. [source: New York Times]

RON'S RANT:  Here is a presentation that exposes the disjointedly amateurishness of the Slaves at the President's House in Philadelphia.  Everything about this presentation is painful to watch, the lighting is bad, the audio is bad, the powerpoint is bad and preparation is a big WTF didn't ANYBODY prepare their remarks!

I visited this site a couple of weeks ago with my family (Middle of May in 2012).    The above New York Times article, expresses my disappointment in the execution and presentation of the narration.  George and Martha Washington's slaves follow the trajectory of American History.  They are like the "Forrest Gump" of slaves.  They served George Washington's family before the Revolution, his body servant was like his sidekick in all of the battles that George Washington fought.  They show-up in Martha Washington's correspondence with Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison.  George Washington kept impeccable records regarding his slave property.  Martha Washington's dowry slaves became the slaves of General Robert E. Lee in Arlington, Virginia.

The group that did the President's House Project needed to do more research at Mount Vernon and Arlington National Cemetery -- I'll bet that the remains of the dead slaves are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.    The slaves of George and Martha Washington are some of the most documented enslaved people in the USA.  How and Why the committee didn't do their research baffles me for sure.

The slaves of George and Martha Washington tell a great story of American History from the French and Indian Wars through the Civil War (remember Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania, too).  Why was this group chosen to tell their story so poorly?  Nobody can say it was about money.  I'm a nobody from nowhere, flat broke and I don't earn a freaken dime from this site, but it's a labor of love.  I do my homework and research to try to add heat as well as light to the story of slavery.  I do this for NOTHING, yet these clowns waste millions upon millions of dollars to produce a disappointing mishmash of history.  -- Ron Edwards, US Slave Blog

 History as Cultural Work: The President's House Project in Philadelphia

W.E.B. Du Bois and the 1900 Paris Exhibition

Horse-drawn carriage in front of corner drugstore. Georgia, ca. 1900

Included in an award-winning exhibit at the Paris Exposition, this photograph--one of 500--was part of the evidence collected under the direction of W. E. B. DuBois to illustrate the condition, education, and literature of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, only thirty-five years after the abolition of slavery. In his own description of the exhibit, DuBois noted that by 1900 African Americans owned one million acres of land and paid taxes on twelve million dollars worth of property. In addition to photographs about black-owned businesses like this one in Georgia, the exhibit included a number of images related to successful black businesses elsewhere. The related display in the foyer of the Library's John Adams Building features additional photographs of black businesses assembled for the Paris Exposition. [http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/aopart6.html]

An African American-owned drugstore in Georgia--CREDIT: "Interior view of Dr. McDougald's Drug Store." 1899 or 1900. W.E.B. Du Bois Albums of Photographs of African Americans in Georgia Exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Materials Compiled by W.E.B. Du Bois

At the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois compiled a series of photographs for the "American Negro" exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. He organized the 363 images into albums, entitled Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A..

At the time, Du Bois was a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, committed to combating racism with empirical evidence of the economic, social, and cultural conditions of African Americans. He believed that a clear revelation of the facts of African American life and culture would challenge the claims of biological race scientists influential at the time, which proposed that African Americans were inherently inferior to Anglo-Americans. The photographs of affluent young African American men and women challenged the scientific "evidence" and popular racist caricatures of the day that ridiculed and sought to diminish African American social and economic success. Further, the wide range of hair styles and skin tones represented in the photographs demonstrated that the so-called "Negro type" was in fact a diverse group of distinct individuals. The one public statement Du Bois made concerning these photographs was that visitors to the American Negro exhibit would find "several volumes of photographs of typical Negro faces, which hardly square with conventional American ideas."

Du Bois's work for the American Negro exhibit was extensive and much praised. In the Spring of 1900, Paris Exposition judges awarded him a gold medal for his role as "collaborator" and "compiler" of materials for the exhibit. [http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/anedub/dubois.html]

NPR reported on 2 December 2003, "W.E.B. Du Bois' African-American Portraits: Collection Depicts Life for Blacks 35 Years After Civil War," by Michele Norris -- "Some foreigners will think we have nothing for the Negro but the bludgeon and revolver; we shall convince them otherwise." These are the words of B.D. Woodward, the assistant commissioner-general for the U.S.'s delegation to the 1900 Paris Exposition. He was referring to the "American Negro Exhibit," pulled together for the Paris Exposition by the young sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois.

Du Bois put on exhibit 500 photographs that symbolized black life in America 35 years after the end of slavery. And he chose with care. The photos, many of them portraits, show the trappings of middle- and upper-class life: ornate clothing, fancy hats, jewelry, confident poses. Du Bois intended the photographs to counteract stereotypes of blacks as poor, uneducated, or the victims of American racism.

Those photographs are now collected in a book, A Small Nation of People, published by the Library of Congress. Co-author and historian of photography Deborah Willis first heard about the photos during college. She didn't discover they still existed for years later. She says even today — in her 50s — she's still amazed by the stories the photos tell. NPR's Michele Norris, host of All Things Considered, talks with Willis about the collection. (source: NPR)

African-American Education in West Virginia

Anderson Elementary. One-room African-American school, circa 1939.

From the West Virginia Encyclopedia, an article discussing African-American Education in West Virginia by Ancella R. Bickley, on 19 October 2010 -- Early black education in West Virginia developed through a combination of forces: self-help efforts; the aid and support of benevolent white people; support from the U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau and missionary associations; and the activities of public school officials. By the middle of the 20th century, on the eve of desegregation, the state’s African-American schools had become a well-functioning, effective system.

When the first West Virginia legislature met in 1863, it agreed to educate ‘‘free colored children,’’ but the proposition was left unfunded. With the condition that white and black children should not be taught in the same schools, West Virginia’s second constitution in 1872 affirmed the state’s commitment to the education of African-American children. Although most school boards cooperated, court action sometimes had to be undertaken or threatened to force some to provide the needed support for black education.

Maben Grade School. African-American school, Widen.

Sumner School, the first school for black children in West Virginia, a self-help effort, opened in Parkersburg in 1862. After 1865, education for West Virginia’s black citizens was undertaken wherever there were enough students. Schools were under way in 18 communities by 1868, including Parkersburg, Wheeling, Clarksburg, Charleston, Lewisburg, Martinsburg, Charles Town, and Malden. These early schools were held wherever space could be found, sometimes in homes and churches. In some instances the schools were private and served both adults and children.

Among the major difficulties was the dearth of teachers. In the beginning, whites served, as did black teachers from neighboring states, particularly Ohio. The first formal effort to train black teachers in West Virginia came at Storer College in Harpers Ferry. The college was begun in 1865 by the Freewill Baptist Church. In 1881 the state agreed to contract with Storer to train African-American teachers. Until the state’s black land grant college, West Virginia Colored Institute (now West Virginia State University), was founded in 1891, Storer College was the only institution in the state preparing blacks for the teaching profession. Later, Bluefield Colored Institute (now Bluefield State College), established in 1895, joined the other two in this mission. These institutions also provided secondary education.

Widen School. African-American students outside school,

As the railroads and mines drew more black people into West Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the need for public education increased. Initially, the school law permitted the establishment of a black school wherever there were 30 black students between the ages of six and 21. Over the years, this number was reduced until a school could be started with 10 students of school age. With this reduction in the number required, elementary schools sprang up in many areas. One of the earliest was the Clarksburg School, for which a construction bid was accepted in 1868. Statewide, there were 207 black schools and 278 teachers serving 7,886 students in 1902. By 1924, there were 453 elementary and junior high schools.

Black high school education began slowly. The first institution to offer such instruction was the Sumner School in Parkersburg, which added high school courses to its curriculum in 1885. This was followed by high schools in Clarksburg, Charleston, and Huntington. By 1923, the number of black high schools had increased to 21. In some cases, cooperative arrangements allowed African- American students to cross county lines to attend high school; for example Preston County students attended in Monongalia County. In other instances students either ended their education at the eighth grade, boarded with families in areas where there were high schools, or daily traveled long distances by train, bus, or streetcar.

Weston Colored School.

In addition to black public education, several private educational efforts were attempted. Storer College continued in Harpers Ferry until 1956; St. Phillips Academy was operated for a time by St. Phillips Episcopal Church in Charles Town; the Baptist State Association operated a school at Hilltop in Fayette County; and Catholics operated St. Peter Claver in Huntington.

In 1919 the state created the position of state supervisor of Negro schools and appointed a Negro Board of Education. In 1933 assistant superintendents of Negro education were appointed in counties having 50 or more black teachers. In addition to the push for more voice in the operation of their schools, blacks also struggled for adequate buildings and materials, for equal salaries for teachers, and for a full nine-month school year.

Weston Colored School.

By 1950, the West Virginia public school system provided separate education for more than 19,000 of the state’s black youth, grades 1–12. Included were schools for black students in institutional settings, including the deaf and blind. Higher education through the baccalaureate level was available at Bluefield State College and West Virginia State. Academics were enriched by strong extracurricular offerings such as dramatics, music, art, various clubs, and athletics. Statewide competitions, tournaments, and exhibitions helped to knit together black communities across West Virginia. The black colleges, elementary and junior and senior high schools, and their administrators and teachers are remembered and honored by their alumni for helping them to develop a strong educational background, basic values, community spirit, and lifelong friendships.

When the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ended segregated schools in the United States, West Virginia began dismantling its system of black education. By the mid-1960s, the process was essentially complete, with African-American students and teachers participating in integrated public schools. [source: West Virginia Encyclopedia by Ancella R. Bickley.  on October 19, 2010]

African American Railroad Workers: Gandy Dancers

From Appalachia History, "Gandy Dancers" by Dave Tabler (7 January 2008) -- Before railroad work was completely mechanized in the 1950s, railroad calls were an everyday part of the track worker’s ritual. Most of these gandy dancers—the label applied to railway line workers who maintained railroad tracks and kept the rails straight—were African Americans who adapted the work call to railroad work. The term is said to be from the dance-like movements of the spikedriver, plus the name of Chicago-based Gandy Manufacturing Company, who supplied tracklining tools.

The physical movements of these railroad crew members were synchronized by a caller who sang the chants, ensuring safety and pacing while spiritually uplifting the men at their toil. Teams of eight to 14 men worked together to lay or care for the tracks. They had a rich repertoire of songs used for the many tasks required of them. Called lining track songs, these hollers are closely related to shanties. In the poetic words of folklorist Alan Lomax, the songs “sounded so wild and sweet that the mockingbirds in the nearby bushes stopped to listen, [as the] railroad moved into the Southern wilderness.”

Apparently women worked at track lining as well as men. There is a verse in one of the lining track songs that goes “Y’oughta been on the Brazos, 19-and-10, Buddy Russell drove the women like he drove the men.”

Gandy Dancers (railroad workers). Warren County, MS, August 1976.

Since the caller was never sure when the call had to stop, there was generally no narrative logic to the sequence of his calls. This transcribed lining track song verse, for example, recalls a biblical figure and is followed by several about present day women:

If I could I surely would,
Stand on the rock where Moses stood.
If I could (rap it, rap it!)
I surely would, Stand on the rock,
Where Moses stood.

I don’t know but I’ve been told,
Susie had a jelly roll.
I don’t know
But I’ve been told,
That Susie had,
A jelly roll.

Ida Red and Ida Blue,
got a gal named Ida too.
Oh boys over yonder (6 x)

Bluegrass legend Jimmie Rodgers picked up guitar, yodeling and much of the Negro country blues style from gandy dancers.

Sometimes Aaron Rodgers took his son with him out to the tracks and put him to work bringing water to the black work crews who repaired worn ties and damaged rails, cleared brush, and shoveled gravel ballast.

Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music

The foreman sent along a command to a “caller,” who configured this order into cadences similar to what you might hear from a drillmaster. “If you really wanted to move that track, you made a sexy call,” a former gandy dancer named Cornelius Wright told the cultural researcher Maggie Holtzberg-Call. “And they had the language for it. Some callers would talk about the lingerie that a woman wore. Now that caused the crew to really shift that track.” —”In the Country of Country:People and Places in American Music” (source: http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2008/01/gandy-dancers.html)

Edward Jenkins Roye: Liberia's Fifth President

Liberia's Fifth President, President Edward Jenkins Roye. Edward Roye was born into a prosperous family in Newark, Ohio. He emigrated to Liberia in 1846 and set up business as a merchant. In 1849, Roye became active in Liberian politics, rising to the position of President of the Republic in 1870. Roye took office in the midst of a fiscal crisis and was ultimately ousted by his opponents in 1871

More than 160 years ago, two members of the board of trustees of the town of Newark, Ohio met and issued an order that all Negroes should leave within twenty-four hours. A constable was sent out to the black community to inform them of the order of banishment. A young black boy ran to the home of the third member of the board of trustees, A.E. Elliot, begging him to use his influence to circumvent the order. Elliot, his son, and Eddie Roye, went along to the Square where a large crowd had gathered, both blacks and whites. The entire Negro population was pleading that they should not be driven from their homes. Elliot did use his influence, he protested that such hasty action would create hardship on the people involved. His arguments proved effective and the order was postponed until it could be given more consideration. The postponement became indefinite and was never brought up again.

The Liberian Senate. Robert K. Griffin. ca. 1856. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZC4-4908

Trustee Elliot went about his affairs as usual, but young Eddie Roye must have walked away from the Square with a determination to find a land with freedom for "men of color."

The history of Edwards J. Roye and the history of Newark begin at about the same time. In 1810, just eight years after Newark was founded and surveyed, John Roye is recorded as having purchased a lot on the south side of the Square. Roye, said to have been born in slavery in Kentucky, came north with his wife Nancy and became a prosperous land owner. Their son, Edward J. Roye was born in a little house on what is now Mount Vernon Road on Feb. 3, 1815. He was educated in Newark schools, but nothing much is known of his early years. In 1822, his father sold his Newark property and went to Illinois, leaving Edward and his mother behind. A letter dated April 14, 1829, from John Edward Roye, is in the Vandalia Illinois courthouse. The letter beginning, "Dear Son," leaves all the property John Roye had acquired in Illinois to his son Edward.

Newark, Ohio

Several biographers say Edward Roye became a barber, which was acceptable occupation for a black at that time. Newark did not have a white barber until 1856. By the year 1832, Edward Roye had left his hometown and was enrolled in Ohio University in Athens. He went on to teach school at Chillicothe in 1836 and after that he moved to Terre Houte, Ind., where he opened that city's first bathhouse/barbershop next door to the best hotel.

By the time Nancy Roye died and was buried in the Sixth Street cemetery in 1840, the mood of the country was changing. Colonizationists wanted to remove all blacks and send them to Africa. Whether due to changing in climate of the 1840's or to the scene around the Square that day in his childhood, Edward Roye decided to leave the United States for an African country, Liberia. On May 1, 1846, Roye sailed from New York and one month later landed in Monrovia.

1850 photo Portrait of Edward James Roye

His energy and intelligence soon made him a leading merchant and after acquiring great wealth, he returned to the U.S. on his own ship. It is said he visited Newark where he was entertained at a banquet for an event for Thomas Ewin, adoptive father of William Tecumseh Sherman.

Years later Roye became chief justice, speaker of the House, and finally, president of Liberia in 1871. He began a program of reconstruction for his nation intending to build new roads and schools.

For these purposes he needed money. Roye sailed for England where he began negotiations with London banks. The results proved ruinous, the terms of the loans were severe, among other things carrying an interest of 7 percent. Roye hastily agreed without consulting the legislature. Liberia actually received about $90,000, while bonds were issued for $400,000.

The whole affair caused great resentment against him, and when he returned home he was accused of embezzlement. He then tried to extend his two-year term of president by edict, after the people rose up against him.

In October 1871, Edward J. Roye was deposed from office., He was brought to trial, but escaped in the night . His is believed to have drowned while trying to reach a English ship in Monrovia harbor, on Feb. 12, 1872.

After many years the nation of Liberia has taken another look at their fifth president. A building housing what was the True Wig Party headquarters is named in his honor, as well as a ship, a town, and several schools.

Edward J. Roye

Was he a villain or a victim of political planning? Did he seek his own prosperity of that or the common man?

The Ohio Historical Society refers to Edward James Roye as the "ninth and forgotten president from Ohio." While in a land far away from the "land of Legend" he is known by some as the "Lincoln of Liberia." (source: http://personal.denison.edu/~waite/liberia/history/roye.htm)

Loving v. Virginia

Brent Staples of the New York Times writes on 14 May 2008, "Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race" --Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.

The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and self-effacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in love, not to fight a civil rights battle.

The particulars of the case — which featured a stereotypical Southern sheriff and a medieval system of laws — turned Caroline County into an emblem of blunt-force segregation. But the story was more complicated.

Like many rural areas in the Jim Crow South, Caroline County was governed by two competing racial ideologies. The impulse toward segregation was of course etched in law. But Central Point, which had been a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century, was home to a secret but paradoxically open interracialism. The community’s story goes a long way toward explaining how the Lovings thought about race and why they behaved as they did.

Virginia slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, were notorious for fathering children with their slaves. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”

Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen’s Baptist, was, as one historian noted, “the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored.” People in the congregation and community were “as a whole, very nearly white,” the historian wrote, “and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people.”

Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied. But when they ventured beyond Caroline County — where no one knew them — many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to “pass” as white. They visited white-only movie houses and restaurants. They also served in all-white units of the segregated Army during World War II.

The community developed a system for protecting the racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families. When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.

The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what Central Point’s residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state “corrected” birth certificates to note the “real” race of the bearer. It didn't change things much in Central Point.

By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.

Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other interracial unions — both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and used the law as an excuse not to marry.

The Supreme Court ruling underscored the stupidity and unfairness of segregation. And the case drew back the curtain on the secret history of race in the South. But for Mildred and Richard this struggle was not about changing the world. It was about fighting for the right to be married to one another and then returning to the community that was their home. (source: The New York Times, 14 May 2008)

The Black History Month Story

From The Black Collegian: The ongoing discussion of the necessity to study Black History has persisted for more than 100 years. The early initiatives were defensive in nature and sought to prove the worthiness of Black people to be a part of the body politic of this nation and in fact, members of the human race. From the 1660s, when Virginia and Maryland institutionalized slavery, Black people felt it necessary to justify their existence. The young nation issued a fugitive slave law, extended the slave trade for 20 years, and the U.S. Constitution spelled out the less-than-human status of the children of Africa by designating them three-fifths of a person. After the government laid the foundation for white supremacy, various individuals joined the chorus touting the inferiority of Black folk. (source: The Black Collegian)

A college professor, a noted governor and the president of the United States supported white supremacy. Dr. Thomas Dew of William and Mary attempted to justify the institution of slavery by saying that Africans "[differ] from us [whites] in color and habits and [are] vastly inferior in the scale of civilization." George McDuffie, the Governor of South Carolina, added that African slavery was "destined by providence, evidenced by the color of their skin and intellectual inferiority and natural improvidence of this race." (source: The Black Collegian)

And Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, suggested that he would assign the superior status to whites, and supported Black colonization because he doubted the ability of free Black people to live successfully among whites.

Enter historians of the African/ African-American experiences to debunk the myths and escalate the struggle for freedom, justice and equality. The first years of the 20th century witnessed the pioneers and the first professionally trained historians of African descent. In 1897, W.E.B. DuBois' Harvard University doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, was published as the first volume of the prestigious Harvard Historical Classics. DuBois published many other books including The Philadelphia Negro and Black Reconstruction. In addition, he was a founding member of the NAACP, an the first editor of the organization's The Crisis magazine. In 1939 he founded Phylon, Atlanta University's "Review of Race and Culture." Of his studies about the African and African- American experience, DuBois said, "My attention from the first was focused on democracy and democratic development and upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy."1 (source: The Black Collegian)

In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, another Harvard graduate, organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The following year he published the first issue of The Journal of Negro History. According to Woodson, The Journal was created for "the collection of sociological and historical data on the Negro, the study of peoples of African blood, the publishing of books in this field, and the promotion of harmony between the races by acquainting the one with the other."2 The Journal of Negro History has been the most enduring of scholarly works on Black people. In 1926 Woodson developed the concept for the celebration of "Negro History Week," which has evolved into African American History Month, observed in February each year. Earl E. Thorpe author of Black Historians – A Critique, wrote of DuBois and Woodson, "Both were far more prolific than any Negro historian before or since, and both felt it necessary to adhere rigidly to the canons of objectivity and scientific procedure. Together with their admirers and disciples, these two men "made" modern Negro historiography." 3 (source: The Black Collegian)

Of the early historians, DuBois and Woodson are the most noted. Though there are those contributors of note before and after these two giants, the most noted pre-20th century historian is George Washington Williams, who some call the father of Black history. He had been a soldier, a Baptist minister, a lawyer and an Ohio legislator when he became interested in Black history while preparing for a lecture on services rendered to America by descendents of Africa. He found such an abundance of sources that he felt it necessary to write a general history of the "Negro." He retired from public life and worked for seven years researching and writing his monumental A History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Although Williams is the most noted, others included Robert Benjamin Lewis, James W.C. Pennington, William Wells Brown, William Stills, and Benjamin Brawley, among others. (source: The Black Collegian)

There is a large group of 20th century lay scholars who were not professionally trained as historians or social scientists, but who have made considerable contributions to the research, writing, and preservation of Black history. Of these, Thorpe writes, "The lay Negro historians of this period represent that group of non-professional persons, in all periods, who have a fondness for the discipline of history, feeling that their life experiences peculiarly fit them for chronicling some historical events."4 These include such notables as Arthur Schomburg, John Wesley Cromwell, Kelly Miller, J.A. Rogers, John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Ben Jochannon, John Jackson, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, among others. (source: The Black Collegian)

One would be remiss if the names of Charles H. Wesley, Monroe Nathan Work, Merl R. Eppse, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and George G.M. James were not mentioned in such an account. And of course the professional ranks of Black historians would be incomplete without the giants Rayford W. Logan, William Sherman Savage, Lorenzo Greene, Luther P. Jackson, Benjamin Quarles, Lawrence Reddick, William Brewer, Clinton E. Knox, Eric Williams and John Hope Franklin. (source: The Black Collegian)

These scholars and many others laid the foundation and kept the flame burning for our history. Even when it was not popular, and in spite of loud denunciations by some, and almost a deafness of silence by others, they dedicated their lives to guarantee that Black history would not remain "Lost, Stolen or Strayed." (source: The Black Collegian)

Carter G. Woodson Tribute

Negro History Week Poster, February 13, 1944

February 13, 1944. Broadside 1944 .A8 FF, Special Collections, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Negro History Week Began

This poster announcing Negro History Week was published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. This organization, founded in 1915 by Virginia native Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950), and now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, organized the first Negro Achievement Week in 1924 and the first Black History Month in 1976. The image on this poster is from a portion of a famous painting Battle at Bunker's Hill by John Trumbull (1756–1843). An enslaved African American, Peter Salem, who is credited with having killed British major John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill, is depicted standing behind an American officer. (source: The Library of Virginia)