William H. Wilson Cemetery Deed-purchased July 29, 1872 -lot B, number 446

By horse and buggy, or maybe even on foot, on July 29, 1872 William H. Wilson made the trek from East or West Baltimore, Maryland down to the city’s Southside to purchase land. Feeling the optimism of the time, Wilson must have been full of pride when he handed the full amount of $6.00 to John Smith for “1 Lot of Land.” See, it was the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), a time of promise and hope for Black folks. This period marked the end of the institution of slavery and the beginning of Black progress, most notably through newly minted suffrage rights, educational opportunities, and economic prospects. Via the second of the Reconstruction Amendments, African Americans gained citizenship and were thereby granted the rights to accumulate wealth, finally serve as their own religious leaders, and even obtain education. And by way of the third Reconstruction Amendment, Black males gained the right to vote and were elected to Congress. As a historian, I know it was short-lived and soon repealed in major ways (i.e. Black codes, the KKK, and namely the Plessy decision) but Wilson doesn’t know the future and in 1872 he is riding the wave of Black progress.

It was not even a decade since slavery had been abolished in Maryland (1864) or the nation (1865) and Wilson had become a landowner! According to some quick U.S. census work, Wilson was most likely 31 years old. And according to the John W. Woods Directory, (a modern-day phone book consisting of Baltimore residents and businesses that also listed one’s occupation), Wilson was employed as one of the following: drayman, shucker, brickmaker, victualler, coachman, laborer, or porter.[1] Either occupation would allow him a meager earning and enough to make the land purchase. The “1 Lot of Land” measured anywhere between 3 and 6 feet (not acres) but it was his allowing him all the privileges of any landowner: status and wealth, and for African Americans, cultural capital – set of skills needed to advance in society. Land, dating all the way back to the colonial period, equaled freedom and referenced status in this country.  In England, English royalty occupied vast acreage for living and sport. They literally owned hundreds of acres for castles and kingdoms and laid claim to large portions of forests specified for only their class to hunt for sport.[2] Therefore to own and occupy land was off limits to only the social elite thereby associating landownership with high social status.  Occupying English lands in this manner led to overcrowding and forced migrated to modern-day Maryland. The English colonials, then, came with these ideas and made a point to acquire land – and lots of it – in order to claim a high social status for themselves that they could have never claimed in England.

From the colonial period throughout the antebellum period, landownership was legalized as a right extended to a few of certain racial, sex, and ethnic backgrounds resulting in mainly white male landowners excluding the masses, namely African Americans.  As early as 1715, Maryland equated Negro with slave and denied slaves from owning land.  And if you were fortunate enough to keep your freedom or become manumitted, by law you must exit to the neighboring state or have your freedom (and land) forfeited. Therefore, not only were there very few African Americans with land but also there were limited opportunities for African Americans to even acquire land and just about all of them at the behest of Whites.

But here you have William H. Wilson, a proud landowner . . . of his burial plot.  Yep, that 3 to 6 feet of land was his burial plot in section B of Sharp Street Cemetery. Sharp Street Cemetery was the third phase of present-day Mount Auburn Cemetery, the oldest Black-owned and operated burial ground in Maryland. It is owned by (still active) Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church (hence the name) the oldest African Methodist Church in Baltimore, dating back to 1787. As a church who gained its initial autonomy by petitioning the Methodist Church, the people of Sharp Street Church saw itself as race leaders. From the Underground Railroad to settling Liberia, the trustees and members of the congregation were activists in the collective Black Diasporic community.

William H. Wilson was the second of 611 new landowners between the time of 1872 and 1885!  Called deeds, William H. Wilson and all the other 610 men and women were able to pass this piece of land to their “heirs and assigns”. They could will property to their children! In today’s time, it may not seem like much for our parents to will us a burial plot, but in 1872 when Black life was devalued, this was an important piece of land to own. Coupled with the idea that Potter’s Field[3] – an unprotected burial ground that numbered the burial lots instead of providing named headstones was the other recognized option for black burials, having a secured burial deed was a prized possession. And what’s more is that section B (the older section of the cemetery) was enhanced in 1907 by a monument that marked the spot of enslaved Africans who were reinterred when the previously owned burial grounds (phases 1 and 2) were filled to capacity.

Enslaved Africans buried on free land that they themselves bought from fellow African Americans is another layered component of the economic autonomy that burial deeds offered Blacks since the establishment of the cemetery in 1807.  This is most noticeable through the 1860’s benevolent societies that frequently met at Sharp Street Church and were affiliated with the cemetery.  African American Benevolent Societies – with names such as “Brickmaker’s Aid Society,” “Drayman Benevolent Society,” “1^st Sharp Street Union Benevolent Society” – were organizations that pooled their money together to make sure that all African Americans had a proper burial, inclusive to coffin and plot.  These organization were based on a communal idea of inclusivity and exemplified the idea of self-help that was emerging at the time – Blacks helped themselves and each other.

When William Wilson walked into the Sharp Street Cemetery office, the only building upon its grounds, he paid his money to John H. Smith, secretary of Sharp Street Church board of trustees – another Black man. I envision them shaking hands to signal and accept the transaction but the handshake still representing something more – recognizing each other as landowners by way of their own economic thrift.

[1] Drayman-a person who drives a strong cart or truck for carrying heavy loads; shucker-a person who shucked oysters (and possibly crabs); porter-an attendant in a railroad sleeping car; brickmaker-someone who not only made brings but who may also have constructed buildings from brick; victualler- a person who furnishes food supplies; coachman-driver.  These definitions are a combination of original research and dictionary.com

[2] For more information see the documentary “America Before Columbus”

[3] Potter’s Field are burial grounds established to control unclaimed bodies that were becoming health hazards around the city.  See: Kami Fletcher, “The City of the Dead for Colored People: Baltimore’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, 1807-2012” (Dissertation, Morgan State University, 2013), 49.

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Several months before its debut, Edward Baptist’s book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism made waves. The book garnered negative and controversial attention with an unnamed review published by The Economist back in September. The author’s comments went something like this:

“Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains…”

“[Baptist] is not being especially contentious when he says that America owed much of its early growth to the foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials and expanding markets provided by a slave-produced commodity. But he overstates his case when he dismisses ‘the traditional explanations’ for America’s success: its individualistic culture, Puritanism, the lure of open land and high wages, Yankee ingenuity and government policies.”

The responses on twitter sent off a firestorm of pushback. The responses were swift, fierce and even comical. I even joined in on the exchange. It was the first time I wrote a review about a review for a book that had not even been released! Now that the book is available, I feel it only appropriate that I use the forum of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIS) to write the review of the book that ignited such powerful and pointed conversations about Americans’ understanding of slavery and its inextricable ties to American capitalism.

Edward Baptist joins the cast of exceptional historians who have lead the charge on connecting the rise of America’s formidable economic wealth with the violent institution of slavery such as Walter Johnson, Robin Blackburn, Christopher Brown, and even Manning Marable’s iconic work on How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Baptist basic thesis does not stray far from the legendary work of Eric Williams who made similar arguments about slavery and the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Indeed, William’s work, Capitalism and Slavery written in 1940 as part of his dissertation from Oxford University continues to inspire the way scholars reimagine and reassess the lucrative empire of slavery to its European benefactors.

The book, broken up into eleven chapters, argues that the “dirty secret” of America’s national wealth and rise as an economic power spawned from the exploitation of enslaved labor. His work explains how the kingdom of cotton not only gave rise to America’s Industrial Revolution, but also evaluates the corollary losses the African American community suffered to insure the preservation of white supremacy. Baptist does not merely present an economic argument on the vitality of slavery, but illustrates to readers the insidious violence that fueled and enforced the enslaved’s indispensable productivity.

Baptist’ most provocative work stems from the vast amount of detailed information he is able to weave into his lucid and rather candid narrative. Some of the facts presented are astounding, particularly when one considers the cost. Baptist estimates that in present day terms an adult male slave would have cost about $230,000 in present day dollars. This kind of wealth would be the equivalent of one owning several homes today. He also makes the argument that cotton was so lucrative that large slave holding southerners were likely to be a part of the richest group of human beings in the world during 1860. The statistics and narratives are both sobering and saddening. He also reveals that the life expectancy of the enslaved went down as cotton prices went up. While much of Baptists’ information is not necessarily new to the field it is definitely written with a refreshing angle.

My criticisms of the book while minimal, fall along the same lines of Eric Foner’s New York Times review. Occasionally, I was distracted by Baptist’s conversational tone and language that sometimes felt more appropriate for a blog than a book. However, if writing in such a way will garner nontraditional readers outside of the academy to discuss the politics of capitalism and slavery then just as President Franklin Peirce’s embrace of the Kansas-Nebraska bill was described as being “all in,” so am I. What I expected was a traditional albeit bland economic historical narrative geared toward academics. What I read, was far more engaging, nuanced, and accessible to both Baptists’ choir and parishioners.

It did seem as though Baptists’ chapter titles were reaching in relation to the overall content of each chapter. He borrows the idea and imagery of the body from Ralph Ellison’s essay in Shadow and Act based on a quotation which reads, “I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of the a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within the action unfolds.” Perhaps more useful imagery would have been to reference the biblical scripture about the body and its parts in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 where it reads: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body….The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” I would like to think that Baptist could enlist the body as a representational image of the physical exploitation of enslaved people and the fact that no part of their labor could be separated from American capitalism and culture. Nevertheless, The Half Has Never Been Told is a deeply researched timely work and I am eager to use both parts of it as well as the whole to teach in my own classes and lectures. I believe it will remain a work of praise and continue provoke conversation for many years to come.

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In his 2010 CD Sophomore Slump, the Jackson, Mississippi-based artist Skipp Coon rapped in the opening track “James,” “From where I stand, freedom is more important than fame” and asked, “Who want to be James? I won’t stop until my project windows can see the flames.” A clear and creative reference to James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Skipp Coon again named the writer, activist, and playwright in his 2014 release, Miles Garvey. The second track, “Blacker,” begins with “Black fist to the sky, Black Power,” and ends by invoking Baldwin: “I read Jimmy, and I wonder where the fire went.” (Watch the video for “Blacker” here.) Skipp Coon’s references to Baldwin hint at the power of his art as a rapper, which like Baldwin’s work itself, presents a stiff challenge to racial and economic inequality while demanding a robust commitment to the dignity and humanity of Black people. It also speaks to the enduring gravity of Baldwin’s work, something a brand new journal is taking up with energy and verve.

James Baldwin Review is an open-access journal published by Manchester University Press. Edited by Justin A. Joyce, Douglas Field, and Dwight A. McBride, the journal seeks to assemble

a wide array of peer‐reviewed critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student essay. The James Baldwin Review publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin; catalyze explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin’s writing  and political activism; and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure. It is the aim of the James Baldwin Review to provide a vibrant and multidisciplinary forum for the international community of Baldwin scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

If the first volume of JBR is any indication, then the editors have indeed assembled a vibrant and lively collection of powerful scholarship that demonstrates the vitality of Baldwin’s ideas and the continuing resonance of his work today. From the opening editorial, “Baltimore is Still Burning: The Rising Relevance of James Baldwin,” to the illuminating “Dispatches” section which includes a piece by Baldwin friend and biographer David Leeming, to the exciting multi-media performance pieces, to the thoughtful coverage of recent conferences and scholarship on Baldwin, the JBR will remain crucial for anyone working in African American intellectual history and the many fields that the subject represents.

Congrats to the authors and editors of JBR! I think I speak for many when I say we are grateful for your work and thankful for you helping to keep James Baldwin alive. In the coming months here at the AAIHS blog look for more coverage of the JBR, as well as an interview with Douglas Field about his new book All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin.

AAIHS Bloggers Greg Childs, Chris Bonner, Chris Cameron, and Kami Fletcher at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History conference.

At the recent conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), a few of our bloggers had the opportunity to discuss AAIHS with several academic publishers. We were excited to learn that acquisitions editors read the blog regularly and even used it as a recruiting tool for potential authors. One of these editors read a guest post on the blog a few months ago, contacted the author of the piece, and just signed a contract to publish his monograph with an academic press.

Original members of the Concerned Student 1950 Movement hold a press conference after the resignation of UM System President Tim Wolfe (Source: The Columbia Missourian)

Recent events at the University of Missouri-Columbia have captured the attention of people across the country. They have certainly impacted me. As a black alumnus of a predominantly white institution, I marveled as students in Columbia shed light on the ways in which their PWI has struggled to transcend its past policy and culture of exclusion. As a former student-athlete from a family of student-athletes, I watched with amazement as black members of the Missouri football team along with their white teammates and coaches refused to play until the President of the University of Missouri System resigned. Finally, as an historian and professor of African American history, I was struck by what Ibram X. Kendi has identified as the “sheer power of Black students and their antiracist allies.”

These were not only remarkable but historic events. In recognition of that fact and in the hopes of historicizing public discourse about the events at Missouri, Dr. Leah Wright Rigueur has conceived of a #Mizzousyllabus. Birthed in the same spirit as the #Charlestonsyllabus, this resource, curated by the African American Intellectual History Society in collaboration with Dr. Rigueur, is meant to help educators broach conversations about an ongoing and seminal event in United States and African American History. It contains valuable readings about black student movements in the United States, the history of race relations and racial inequality in Missouri and other topics of relevance.

This syllabus is meant to be a start, not an ending. We hope that educators will not only use it as a resource in their classes and scholarship but also build on it in subsequent weeks and months. Indeed, ongoing attention is critical. If the current demonstrations occurring at college campuses across the United States in solidarity with the Missouri activists are any indication, this is much more of a sustained movement than a fleeting moment.

The upcoming year promises to be an exciting one for the African American Intellectual History Society. Not only is the organization undergoing a period of tremendous growth, it is also hosting its first conference, New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. A two-day event taking place on March 10^th and 11^th, 2016, the conference will feature sessions on all aspects of the black intellectual tradition. The program includes panels foregrounding new perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and civil rights, as well as new directions for intellectual history in the age of social media.

The conference will kick off on Thursday March 10th with a session on “Performance, Space, and Movement in Africa and the Diaspora” featuring bloggers Greg Childs and Jessica Marie Johnson and another panel on nineteenth century black political and social thought. Those who have been following the latest campus demonstrations and the #Mizzousyllabus will find the session on black youth and campus activism informative. Later that day, participants will hear from AAIHS bloggers, and new and established scholars, on several central themes including racial identity, historical preservation, and black intellectual leadership. Other panels will include papers on transnational blackness, Pan-Africanism, and liberated spaces.

Participants interested in black feminism and black internationalism will enjoy the Thursday afternoon screening of Audre Lorde- The Berlin Years, 1984-1992. Chronicling an untold chapter of Lorde’s life, the film reveals her influence on local culture and politics and highlights her influence on German ideas of racism, homophobia, and classism.

Mark Anthony Neal

The day will end with a keynote address from Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. The Executive Committee welcomes conference participants to attend a reception immediately following Dr. Neal’s talk.

On Friday March 11^th, participants will hear from new and emerging scholars on secularism and black intellectual life and African Americans and print culture in the Civil War era. AAIHS blogger Keisha Blain will join Adam Ewing, Robert Trent Vinson, and Frances Peace Sullivan on a panel about Global Garveyism and the black intellectual tradition. In the afternoon, presenters will speak about the theory and praxis of African American education, black women and internationalism, and race, performance, and cultural production. Conference participants will also have an opportunity to attend a roundtable on #Blktwitterstorians, an online community of historians, students, and fans of African and African American history. This panel will feature the creators of the hashtag–Joshua Crutchfield and Aleia Brown–as well as historians Stephen G. Hall and Robert Greene II–two scholars who have been active in the monthly #Blktwitterstorians’ chat. The panel will also offer the opportunity to speak about the relationship between black intellectual history and social media.

Regardless of whether or not you are a historian, or the period of history in which you work, the AAIHS conference offers valuable opportunities to make new connections and learn more about novel digital and archival approaches to studying black intellectual history. Since it began 2014, AAIHS has quickly become a leader in the field of intellectual history and is one of the most widely read academic blogs. Our conference, “New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition,” promises to be the first of many gatherings of scholars devoted to cutting-edge and innovative scholarship in the black intellectual tradition. The Executive Committee looks forward to meeting you in Chapel Hill in March.

*Click here to download the full conference program.

*Click here to become a member of AAIHS.

*Click here to register for the conference.

Walter Greason

This is a guest post by Walter Greason, a professor of History at Monmouth University. Dr. Greason writes about world, economic, and intellectual history. He serves as the Treasurer for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. His most recent book, Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey, documents forgotten chapters in the northern Civil Rights Movement, while explaining the failure of racial integration to address economic inequality. In 2011, Dr. Greason won a grant from the Mellon Foundation for his innovative pedagogy, earning him recognition as an International Master Teacher. You can follow him on Twitter @WorldProfessor

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Since 1886, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adapted to apply to corporations, economics as a field was racialized. Whiteness became equivalent with profit and property. Blackness became synonymous with poverty and debt. As Cheryl I. Harris’s study reveals, whiteness held a concrete economic value that originated in the earliest days of the republic.¹ Similarly, blackness as debt predates the formal creation of the United States. The creation and consolidation of institutional wealth in the global economy relies on financial practices rooted in slavery and segregation.

The history of Manalapan Township, a township in Monmouth Country, New Jersey, exemplifies the racialized aspects of economics in the United States. Manalapan Township is a booming exurb, housing more than 60,000 people connected to both the Philadelphia and New York metropolitan areas. It is the archetype of the twenty-first century vision of suburban affluence. In 1960, it was a small, farming community that included a village of 1,000 African American migrant laborers who lived in an area called Pergolaville. According to Lila Stevenson, mother of the local Pentecostal church, the residents of Pergolaville lived in one and two room shacks with no electricity or running water. The conditions resembled the sharecropping area of Alabama and Mississippi of the same era. If anywhere deserved the designation of “The Georgia of the North,” it was the rural corridor of New Jersey that contained dozens of communities like Pergolaville.² By 1970, the entire village had disappeared from every local and state map. Systematically, all of the surviving working-class black communities in the region disappeared by 1995. McMansions and strip malls replaced these families’ homes by the start of the twenty-first century.

One of the more modest mansions built in Manalapan, NJ

Gentrification is insufficient to describe the process of destroying whole communities and actively erasing them from the historical record. As much as these areas were segregated racially across the United States, the consequence of this separation was the economic devastation that sustains intergenerational poverty.

Discrimination and re-segregation have been the focus of scholarly research and criticism in the processes of gentrification, displacement, and erasure since 1965. The inability of black working-class families to accumulate any of the financial assets also played a role. This point does not affirm black pseudo-conservative critiques of the Civil Rights Movement as seen in the works of Thomas Sowell, Tony Brown, and Earl Graves. In fact, this analysis is a pointed rejection of the fraudulence of “black capitalism” as it was formulated in response to the civil rights and black power movements.³

In a society that prioritizes the accumulation of property as comparably sacred to human life and liberty, African Americans must understand the details of capital accumulation– on both the individual and institutional levels.⁴ The constant misunderstanding of American economic policy has eroded the value of every asset held by any black institution. Savings, investment, and entrepreneurship are the only ways to generate socially just policies that redefine the institutions of government from the local through the federal.

Two of the smaller, subsidized units built on the Pergolaville site as part of the New Beginnings low-income housing project.

The only way to preserve assets beyond peak earning years is through knowledgeable investment in real estate and equities. Families must use limited personal wealth to create institutions that grow local and regional economies for future generations. Even in the rare cases of personal economic success, there is little effective creation of institutional wealth– endowments and annuities exceeding $500 million – to support schools, vocational training, employment, and new enterprise. The dire, current situation was not always the truth. Between 1870 and 1930, with virtually no real income or wealth, African Americans built schools, churches, and local civil rights organizations to increase the opportunities for young families and new communities across the United States.

Red Bank, New Jersey, another borough in Monmouth, is one case where the rise of the black elite in Florida, Virginia, and Alabama leveraged the emergence of black working-class communities in Philadelphia and New York to create newspapers, magazines, women’s literary clubs, political organizations, and investment groups. As a result, a resort such as Red Bank became the hub of a suburban, black, middle class before the Great Migration occurred. By 1910, the black churches and schools in Red Bank organized political action campaigns, media outlets, and dozens of black-owned businesses along the Jersey shore. Over the next forty years, their successes transformed local forms of racial segregation and broke down barriers of inequality by 1948.

Migration remains one of the best solutions to the problem of segregation. Every year, more than 230 million people struggle to find safety, security, and stability. Duke University’s Global Institute on Race and Inequality has established a tradition of exploring transnational solutions to the most resilient problems facing humanity. In the specific case of African Americans and the African diaspora, the capacity to build global structures for cooperative economic power is available. The only question is, ‘which local and regional leaders will have the courage to organize it?’ What institutions can we build to be worthy of future histories? It is not enough to write. It is not enough to vote. It is not enough to serve. Only the creation of sustained, systemic, economic justice for all people will suffice.