“Reflections on Black History Month”
Mari N. Crabtree

I have made the study of African American history and culture the heart of my professional life. It was coming to the revelation that, as Ralph Ellison put it, “The nation could not survive being deprived of [the African American] presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom” that first drew me to Black Studies as an undergraduate. This revelation has been a guiding light for me ever since. And precisely because it has been a guiding light, I share the ambivalence about Black History Month articulated by the African American Studies Program’s motto: “Not Just in February.”

At the root of that motto is the sense that, although some attention to the black experience may be better than none, something so critical to the history and culture of the United States as the African American experience warrants attention well beyond the shortest month of the year. After all, the black experience cannot be safely compartmentalized away from the history of the United States or, for that matter, neatly disentangled from the rise of global white supremacy. We, as a nation, so often compartmentalize and disentangle. What Carter G. Woodson established as Negro History Week to recognize the significance of African American achievements in the face of unrelenting white supremacy has often been used as an excuse to ignore African American history for the rest of the year. We marginalize and erase to comfort ourselves, to deny reality, to shirk responsibility for our past and present, but we do so at our own peril. For deluding ourselves with such false comfort invites more than just distortion—as bad as that is—but, worse, mutual destruction.

My ambivalence towards Black History Month also stems from a tendency to celebrate heroes and “firsts” during February while removing these “heroes” from the movements they led and the broader social, cultural, and political contexts out of which they arose. On the one hand, this tendency reinforces the misperception that to study history one simply memorizes a series of events and studies the lives of “important” people—I assure you, that is not what I spent seven years in a PhD program doing. On the other hand, celebrating “firsts” often does not force a deeper engagement with ideas, with the question of justice, with the meaning of liberation. So often even the best-intentioned Black History Month celebrations oversimplify the past, reducing movements to milestones and martyrs, as though a speech or a law or a singular act or a chosen leader could resolve centuries-long struggles for justice, as though “progress,” whatever that means, is inevitable.

Ta-Nehisi Coates said as much in his memoir, Between the World and Me, when he wrote that his grandparents “rebell[ed] against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental ‘firsts’—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.” Celebrations of Black History Month often pull fragments from the black experience to create easily digested, pre-packaged trivia—shards of experience to commit to memory rather than understand in connection to broader historical debates. Denuded of context and therefore their connection to broader historical trajectories, these shards lose the full force of their meaning, or, worse, they become excuses for distorting their meaning.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that Black History Month has no place for celebration. (I am also not saying that the African American experience can or should be reduced to struggle and hardship—we must always remember joy and laughter, love and ingenuity.) I simply ask that we scrutinize what we are celebrating and we reflect upon the stakes of uncritically celebrating heroes and firsts.

We might take a page from Russell Rickford, whose article titled “King 2.0 and the Management of Dissent” exposes the Martin Luther King, Jr. we have come to know during Black History Month as an imposter. Rickford reminds us that the way we remember (and so often distort) historical icons tells us as much about the present and its politics as it does about the past. The imposter King, who so many Americans have embraced, serves to stifle the struggle for justice while reassuring the nation that the Civil Rights Movement resolved the “race issue.” This imposter King is defanged of his radicalism, stripped of his anti-war and anti-poverty stances. His confrontational and disruptive tactics are erased, as is the vitriol directed at him in life and death. The imposter, by design, urges us to abandon the struggle for justice because his ascent to the status of a “safe” national hero implies that the need to dissent and protest is over. But, as Rickford points out, in our times the urgency of taking up the mantle of the black freedom struggle is as pressing as ever, which is all the more reason to take a hard look at the tendency to uncritically celebrate. The struggle has not ended. And, if anything, Black History Month should inspire further action and harden our resolve to dismantle systems of oppression…not just in February either.

The late Conseula Francis (1973–2016), the former director of the African American Studies Program, was deeply committed to mentoring and supporting junior faculty, and one of the many ways in which she championed the work of junior scholars in the field of African American Studies was to establish the Emerging Scholar Lecture Series. We still feel the loss of Conseula every day, and to commemorate her unflagging commitment to our program and to the work of junior scholars, we have named this lecture series in her memory.

This year, Vanessa Agard-Jones, an assistant professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, will deliver the Conseula Francis Emerging Scholar Lecture on February 20, 2017. Her current book project, Body Burdens: Toxic Endurance and Decolonial Desire in the French Atlantic, uses ethnographic research to explore pesticides, sexual politics, and postcoloniality in Martinique. She analyzes the physical toll of toxins on the body as well as the metaphorical toxicity of colonialism in a post-colonial political context. Her other publications include Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (2008) co-edited with Manning Marable and articles in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and the New West Indian Guide, among others. Prof. Agard-Jones’s lecture is titled “‘After the End of the World:’ A Black Feminist Analytic for the Anthropocene” and will be held at 6:00 pm in Alumni Memorial Hall (Randolph Hall). Please join us for her lecture as well as a seminar discussion of her work at 3:00 pm in 9 College Way, Room 201.

Professor Jon Hale wrote the article “The African American Roots of Betsy DeVos’s Education Platform” which was published in The Atlantic. The article looks at the long history of privatizing public schools in the African American community, which will only increase during the Trump presidency. The article discusses how black parents and educators have had to contend with privatization throughout American history out of necessity since the public has historically not invested in the education of African American students.

You can view the article here: theatlantic.com

“The sigh is a pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?”
–Claudia Rankine, Citizen

As I reflect back on the fall semester, which has already lost some of its sharpness in my memory, I find myself punctuating so many of my thoughts with deep sighs. I think back to the article I wrote about lynching in the American West and the public lecture I gave about James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates—those thoughts are punctuated with sighs of satisfaction tinged with exhaustion as much mental as physical. I also return to a few particularly heartening moments: the student who began a comment in class with the words, “well, as bell hooks would say…” followed by what bell hooks would say…the book club meeting when a student quite pointedly remarked that so much in her political theory class would have been clarified had they read the Charles Mills book we were discussing…the song a student wrote about weeks one through four of Introduction to African American Studies (and attached to a shy “if you have time…” email) with the Du Bois-Crabtree shoutout, “Crabtree says I may be double conscious.” But my thoughts settle the longest on a few heartwrenching moments I had in the classroom, and ruminating over those moments draws out the deepest of sighs, sighs that curl out of corners of my guts darkened by the shadows of too much to despair over in 2016. I think about all of the carefully prepared notes I penned on yellow legal pads that detailed which passages from which assigned reading I would use to shape discussions of texts with my students, and I start to count how many sets of notes I had to scrap or modify so we could collectively pause long enough to remember the lives of Terrence Crutcher, Tyre King, Keith Lamont Scott, Walter Scott, and others. Three, or was it four, or five?

In place of those discussions, we read poetry—Elizabeth Alexander’s “Smile,” Kamilah Aisha Moon’s “Perfect Form,” Langston Hughes’s “I, Too”—and studied paintings by Emma Amos and installations by Kara Walker, for, in my experience, art has a remarkable capacity to unlock what we otherwise can’t quite express. At its best, art leaves a residue on one’s consciousness and even on one’s face—a furrowed brow, a stunned look of realization, the awestruck expression that comes with a glimpse of the sublime, a devastating shudder, a mischievous smile—and that residue remains, clings to us most stubbornly, when the artist succeeds in illuminating something of human existence we may have seen before but not really understood. From years of writing about representations of lynching and, more recently, from reading Teju Cole’s “Death in a Browser Tab,” I knew better than to replay images of death for my students. I have no interest in joining ranks with CNN and feeding into the media’s sick fascination with turning violence against black bodies into a spectacle to be consumed on loop. Through art, through disentangling the difference between “obsequious” and “safe” as we did when we discussed Alexander’s “Smile,” the rawness of these deaths that touched too many of my students too close to home unleashed, for some, tears, for others, stories of sisters and brothers and cousins and friends whose experiences rhymed too closely with those of the deceased.

My students find few spaces on campus for these conversations, though I know such spaces exist, but I also know that having this discussion in a classroom during a class led by a professor—in place of, but also alongside, the material on the syllabus—mattered. The discussion provided recognition of these experiences, and although recognition remains important, recognition alone, especially if that recognition only occurs in small, marginal pockets of an institution, is insufficient. For, even though all of the students who take Introduction to African American Studies with me come away knowing how to distinguish between the “mere inclusion” of the African American experience and the transformation of master narratives (my everlasting gratitude to the inimitable Nathan Huggins for writing “The Deforming Mirror of Truth”), an institution can render courses and whole academic programs mere tokens when it fails to distinguish between the two. And the space in between is a space no sigh can breach.

The moment from the fall that I return to with the most frequency, however, is from three days after the election. The morning after, I didn’t know what to say to my students, but some wise words from a colleague at Brandeis, Chad Williams, provided the clarity I needed. Just before class started that Friday, I wrote a paraphrased version of his thoughts on the board: “We are on the verge of a Second Redemption. Beware of what you concede in the name of peace and reconciliation.” Placing the election in the broader context of the 150 years since the end of the Civil War, I retraced the political compromises and calls for (white) unity that led to Reconstruction’s demise, and I asked whether the rhetoric of the Confederate “Redeemers”—they were trying to “redeem” the Old South after emancipation and military defeat with terror and death—had a familiar ring in our times. Redemption slashed through that brief experiment in democracy, cutting the path that led directly to Jim Crow: lynching, disenfranchisement, segregation, chain gangs, the indignities of sidewalk etiquette and back doors, and the rest. All the rest.

After a long silence, a student asked, with an earnestness that both tore me up inside and made me feel the full weight of my limitations as a scholar, “What can we do?” The question came from a place so genuine that I faltered because I could hear in her voice the urgency with which she needed an answer. But how could I answer such a question when I had been struggling with the very same feelings of stunned confusion and something between grief and disgust for days? Not that I ever understand my role as a professor to be the source of “the answers”—I ask questions, challenge assumptions, draw connections between texts, shape discussions by fleshing out broader scholarly debates, clarify complex ideas, and help students hone arguments—but I found, as she and the rest of the class patiently waited for my reply and looked to me for clarity and guidance, that I was about to provide a disappointing answer. After a long pause, I looked up at her and told her, “That is a very difficult question to answer. I don’t know. I don’t know…except that we must fight.”

In the weeks since that class, I finished teaching my three courses, organized a teach-in on the United States post-election with some other faculty, and continued to work on my book manuscript, all of which, I hope, constitute a “fight” of a certain kind. But, for self-preservation, renewal, and, most importantly, inspiration, I have returned to art. I have immersed myself in beauty, in Claudia Rankine, James Baldwin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Toni Morrison, Paul Beatty, Billie Holiday, Akira Kurosawa, Kerry James Marshall, Teju Cole, Kara Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tanizaki Junichiro, Jesmyn Ward, and Marlon James. Artists like these don’t provide an escape or simple answers. (Teju Cole says that “[his] goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think,” and I am inclined to agree with his approach in novels, in teaching, and in life.) Artists provide a reprieve, though often a perplexing one, and maybe, just maybe, through the worlds they create, we can see a way forward in our own.

During this too-brief pause in teaching misleadingly referred to as “break,” I look back, but I also look forward. In the spring semester, I am offering a course, “Remembering and Forgetting: Race, Violence, and Memory in American History,” and I wonder, in this brave new political world—the Memory Studies scholar in me can’t help but ask, how “new” is “new” anyway?—, will the present let me catch my breath long enough to save me from revising my syllabus every couple weeks to accommodate new stories of racially motivated violence? As I teach “Mass Incarceration and Its Roots,” will I have to scrap my carefully crafted notes again and again as the criminalization of blackness grows unabated? Probably. I have already given up writing the epilogue to my book on lynching and memory until the rest of the manuscript has been completed because fresh bodies keep piling up and contemporary representations of lynching return too frequently for me to write cogently. My responsibility as a professor, however, cannot wait for the next iteration of my courses. I have preempted these probable disruptions with Rankine, Komunyakaa, Morrison, Beatty, Basho, Kurosawa, Cole, Walker, Ward, and others already scattered throughout my syllabi, but if my notes must be scrapped—and if the past has anything to tell us, then some will be scrapped—I may let out more deep sighs to open up “a pathway to breath” as Rankine says. And then, with airways freed of bad air, I will again turn to artists to sustain me and to sustain my students too.

Dr Kameelah Martin will be joining us in Fall 2017 from Savannah State University where she has been teaching in the Department of English, Language, and Cultures since 2013. Dr Martin’s academic pedigree includes a BA in English (with a minor in Africana Studies) from Georgia Southern University, followed by an MA in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and a PhD in English from Florida State University, where her dissertation won the 2006-7 J. Russell Reaver Award for Outstanding Dissertation in American Literature or Folklore. Dr Martin’s work on the performance of African spirituality by women of color in visual media and literature has already resulted in two published monographs (Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo [Palgrave, 2013], and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema [Lexington, 2016]) and multiple articles. With family roots that she has traced back to Kingstree, SC, Dr Martin is currently engaged in research that combines genealogy with more standard academic analyses of literary history and cultural studies.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Kameelah Martin to the College of Charleston as our new permanent Director of African American Studies.

In the wake of the mistrial declaration on Monday in the murder case against former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, we reprint below a letter that African American Studies-affiliated faculty at the College of Charleston sent to the editor of the Charleston Post and Courier expressing our concern that local newspaper coverage of the trial stirred too many echoes of prior narratives in which murderous violence against African Americans went unpunished.

Here is the text of our letter, published on November 15th under the heading “Looking back at racial injustice,” followed by some additional remarks on the trial and our letter’s reception. The letter can also be found at http://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letters-looking-back-at-racial-injustice/article_ae4b918e-aa85-11e6-916a-e77d2a787060.html

* * * * *

Eighteen months after his arrest, former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager is now on trial for the murder of Walter Scott, a black man shot to death after a routine traffic-stop. Although the police department and SLED initially concluded the shooting was justified, a bystander’s video of the shooting led to Mr. Slager’s arrest for murder. We all have become witnesses to Mr Slager firing repeatedly into the back of the fleeing Mr Scott.

As Mr. Slager’s trial unfolds, we watch with concern and sadness, knowing that the North Charleston shooting is one in a horrific series of recent police killings of unarmed African Americans. The recent P&C headline, “Was Slager justified or overreacting?” stirs echoes of too many prior narratives that blame the victim—who should not have run, should not have talked back, should not have somehow looked threatening.

As professional scholars in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences with expertise in American and Southern cultures, we are equipped to comment on the assumptions, stereotypes, and historical and cultural circumstances that have contributed to systemic problems in our policing and criminal justice systems. We wish to remind readers that Walter Scott’s killing is not a new outrage. Our state and our nation have a long and well-documented history of wrongdoing against people of color by police and government officials who have not been brought to justice. Sadly, many whites have seen these acts as justified. Years after having participated in the murder of African Americans (the 1876 Hamburg Massacre), Ben Tillman continued to boast about the killings on the floor of the U. S. Senate. During the century after the Civil War, of the thousands of lynchings recorded, many occurred publicly while government officials stood idle or even participated. In 1955, the murderers of 14-year-old Emmett Till were acquitted by an all-white jury after lawyers told them, “Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.”

These historical facts are a few of many examples we might cite. More recently, statistics collected by our own law enforcement agencies have shown that a much higher percentage of our citizens of color are being stopped by police, just as Mr. Scott was, for traffic violations. Mr. Slager’s attorney has noted the police department’s quota of three traffic stops per shift. A local interracial organization, the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, has collected accounts of many of its members of color who have been stopped, and has joined the NAACP and the ACLU in calling for a public and independent audit of police practices in Charleston County, North Charleston, and Charleston. Even the North Charleston City Council has now voted to create a “Citizen’s Advisory Commission on Community-Police Relations.” However, many in our community are concerned that this gesture will not guarantee greater transparency or accountability in the city’s police practices.

Our academic expertise compels us to conclude that concerns about the Slager trial are thoroughly and sadly justified, and that the systemic problems this case has exposed will not be solved when the trial is over. We urge our fellow citizens and our elected officials to listen to the concerns being voiced and to take actions that will contribute to greater justice and safety for all residents of our communities.

Julia Eichelberger,PhD, Director of Southern Studies, CofC
Simon Lewis,PhD, Director of African American Studies, CofC
Vivian Appler, PhD, Theatre Studies
Mary Battle, PhD, History
Richard Bodek, PhD, History
Kristi Brian, PhD, Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies
Mari Crabtree, PhD, African American Studies
Matthew Cressler, PhD, Religious Studies
Adam Domby, PhD, History
Mike Duvall, PhD, English
Hollis France, PhD, Political Science
Valerie Frazier, PhD, English
Anthony Greene, PhD, African American Studies
Jon Hale, PhD, Teacher Education
George Hopkins, PhD, History
Gary Jackson, MFA, Poetry
Bernard Powers, PhD, History
Steven Profit, MLS, Research Librarian
Shari Rabin, PhD, Jewish Studies
Rebecca Shumway, PhD, History
Vincent Spicer, PhD, Psychology
Joy Vandervort-Cobb, Theatre Studies
John White, PhD, History
Patricia Williams Lessane, PhD, Anthropology

At moments over the last week, it looked as if the pattern of prior narratives of impunity might finally—historically—be disrupted, but with the news on Monday afternoon that the jury was deadlocked and that a mistrial had therefore been declared, we have once more seen a deferral of justice. Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson has said that she will retry the case, and there is still a federal case open against Mr Slager for depriving Mr Scott of his civil rights, but the failure of this jury to reach a consensus verdict is, as Ms Wilson commented, profoundly disappointing. We in the African American Studies program will continue to watch as this case unfolds further.

It is worth remarking that our letter prompted at least two responses published subsequently in the Post and Courier, taking us to task for being a “group of liberal professors” making armchair decisions. We had in fact deliberately drawn attention to our status as people with academic expertise in African American and Southern studies and had deliberately limited the number of people invited to co-sign the letter to professors with such expertise in order to offset just such a knee-jerk response. Racial injustice is not—or should not be—a partisan concern. The fact that it might have been so in the 1870s, 1920s, or 1950s when white supremacy was sometimes explicitly, always tacitly backed by law is part of the historical record. Our fervent hope was—and remains—that one day it will be only a part of that historical record, not a factor in contemporary life, and that one day, finally, this nation will live up to its ideals of providing liberty and justice for all.

In addition to the two published counter-letters in the Post and Courier, Julia and I received a couple of e-mails from an irate member of the public whose rationale for critique was perhaps even more disturbing than the entirely predictable critique that we were merely liberal academics. This correspondent had obviously gone to the trouble of Googling Julia and me and in a very telling phrase wondered why we were even concerned with the case since, as he said, “you have no skin in the game—you’re white.” I suspect the author was unconscious of the implicit denial of fellow-citizenship in his statement. Ava DuVernay’s film 13^th has rightly been getting a lot of attention in recent months, but it seems as if the Fourteenth Amendment also needs to be re-emphasized:

Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Finally, we would like to reassert that as academics who study African American and Southern cultures, it is our business to tell the truth about our shared history and to point out links between the past and the present. We will continue to do so. As human beings we have “skin in the game.”

*****

Simon Lewis

Two courts in the city of Charleston are currently overseeing high-profile, racially charged murder trials–that of Michael Slager and Dylann Roof–and although the cases differ in their particulars, both of these crimes speak to the pervasiveness of white supremacy locally and nationally. In an interview with Brandon Patterson, a reporter with the nonprofit news organization Mother Jones, Professor Mari N. Crabtree discusses the meaning and significance of the Slager and Roof trials. She also cautions against complacency in the wake of the verdicts, for the best memorial that Charlestonians could erect for the victims is not carved into granite but forged out of a serious confrontation with the systemic issues that produced these heinous acts of racial violence in the first place.

“But from past conversations I’ve had, I don’t think many black people here believed Slager’s trial was going to be a fair one. They weren’t surprised by the fact that the jury is nearly all white. It reaffirmed for them that the justice system is racist. But I don’t know what they anticipate the outcome to be. There’s a desire for Dylann Roof to be held accountable. But for many black people there’s also a trepidation that when his trial is complete, that will end any conversation about race. Or that if Slager is convicted, that people here will get the feeling that they are absolved of dealing with the issues that many black people believe produced Slager’s behavior.” – Professor Mari N. Crabtree

View the full interview here.

On Friday, December 2nd at 12pm on South Carolina Public Radio Prof. Jon N. Hale, author of “The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement” will be discussing with Dr. Edgar the history of the Freedom Schools and their modern legacy. They will be joined in the conversation by Barbara Kelley-Duncan, CEO of the Carolina Youth Development Center and a board member for The Children’s Defense Fund.

More information on the organization and the airing can be found here.

We are proud to announce the two following publications by Dr. Anthony D. Greene, an assistant professor in the African American Studies Program.

The first publication is “You Must Learn: How Racial and Ethnic Socialization Affirms Black Identity among Black Americans and West Indians“, a chapter Dr. Greene wrote in the upcoming book “Contemporary African American Families: Achievements, Challenges, and Empowerment Strategies in the Twenty-First Century” (Eds.). Routledge.

The second publication “Aligned or Misaligned? Similarities and Differences between African Americans and Black Caribbeans’ Opinions on Affirmative Action” an article that will appear in the Fall/Winter 2017 edition of The Journal of Race and Policy. Dr. Greene co-authored the article along with three others:
Dr. Maruice Mangum
Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice
North Carolina A&T State University

Dr. LaTasha Y. Chaffin
Department of Political Science
College of Charleston

Dr. Jason E. Shelton
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Texas-Arlington

Dr. Bernard Powers spent time with Pharrell Williams earlier this month during Williams trip to Charleston. Check out the ABC 4 News article here http://abcnews4.com/archive/during-tour-of-charleston-pharrell-realizes-ancestors-probably-came-through-harbor-during-slave-trade

Pharrell meets with Dr. Bernard Powers at Aquarium Wharf. (Source A&E)