Continuing my miniseries on African American intellectual history in the twenty-first century, briefly browsed the new book by Pero Dagbovie, Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the 21st Century. In reading this book, it becomes clear to me that any reckoning with African American intellectuals and their place in American society has to include how they view the past. In his newest book, Dagbovie devotes considerable attention to how Barack Obama approached memory of the African American past, along with how various African American cultural and intellectual figures did the same. It recalled how writers such as Lerone Bennett in the 1960s, and W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1930s, did the same thing. Above all, however, it’s clear that African American intellectuals today are upending much of what most Americans assume about the past of our country.
The essays of Ta-Nehisi Coates are an important part of the modern-day legacy of African American writers grappling with the past. I think his “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” is especially noteworthy in this pantheon. For him, understanding the Civil War should be the critical point of historical understanding of the American past for African Americans. As Coates points out, making the American Civil War more important to African Americans—and, by extension, changing its meaning for many white Americans from a mere “tragedy” to a seminal event of redefining American freedom—is at its core a political and cultural project. “The Civil War confers on us the most terrible burden of all—the burden of moving from protest to production, the burden of summoning our own departed hands, so that they, too, may leave a mark,” Coates wrote.
Other African American writes have chimed in on the idea of memory, the African American past, and wrestling with America’s present. Award-winning writer Jesmyn Ward, author of the novels Sing Unburied Sing, Salvage the Bones, and the memoir Men We Reaped, pointed to this in her essay from Time magazine that was part of an issue on the modern South. In framing why someone as successful as herself would move to Mississippi, a state associated with the worse of Southern racist excesses, Ward offered up a reminder:
“I remember that Mississippi is not only its ugliness, its treachery, its willful ignorance. It is also my nephew, hurling his body down a waterslide, rocketing to the bottom, joy running from shoulder to heel. It is my godmother boiling pots and pots of shrimp and pouring them into a children’s pool so we can eat the delicious spicy mess at our family gathering on the Fourth of July. It is my youngest sister smiling and dancing to Al Green in my godmother’s driveway while the night enfolds like a hand and the insects hiss with summer’s sibilant kiss. It is riding to a convenience store with my childhood friends with the windows down and the night wind caressing me on my cheekbones, UGK booming from the speakers in answer to the blooming Mississippi night. It is sitting on the porch with my 78-year-old grandmother, my children sandwiched between us on the swing, making idle talk and watching hummingbirds zip through the air beyond her screen as she tells us stories. Flush with joy.”
The mission of writers such as Coates and Ward—as was the case with Bennett, Du Bois, and so many others in the past—is to make clear the centrality of African Americans to the American experience. But within that mission is also the need to make sure Americans do not forget the sins of the past—nor that they push such sins onto a singular region of the nation, such as the South. On the birthday of Ella Baker, such ideas, we should remember, are intertwined and have often played a part in forming the intellectual backbone of African American-led social movements throughout American history.
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