“He was, undoubtedly, a wonderful character”: Black Teachers’ Representations of Nat Turner during Jim Crow

Abstract

This article explores Black teachers’ representation of Nat Turner in textbooks published between 1890 and 1922. While conventional readings of Black teachers during Jim Crow present them to be staunch enforcers of the politics of respectability, their representations of Turner disrupt such readings and imply that the racial discourse deployed in their classrooms was more complicated than common narratives suggest. These schoolteachers represented Turner as both an insurrectionist and respectable—characteristics deemed incongruent under traditional reading of the politics of respectability. Black teachers asserted the humanity of Turner to their students and presented him as an inspiring character, even if his violent revolt created dis-ease for White society. This case captures a central dilemma in the socio-historical fabric of Black life—namely, the persistent tension between Black accomodationism and Black Nationalism. More pointedly, while little is known about what happened in the intimate settings of Black teachers’ classrooms during the Jim Crow era, these examples present an opportunity to explore some of the socio-political dimensions of their pedagogy.

Keywords:

• Black teachers
• Jim Crow
• Nat Turner
• politics of respectability
• textbooks

Notes

Julie Walker, “Nate Parker’s the Birth of a Nation Sells for Record Price at Sundance,” The Root, January 26, 2016, http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/01/nate_parker_s_birth_of_a_nation_sells_for_record_price_at_sundance.html.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, Revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Hilton Kelly, “‘The Way We Found Them to Be’: Remembering E. Franklin Frazier and the Politics of Respectable Black Teachers,” Urban Education 45, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 142–65.

Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South, 1st ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Vanessa Siddle Walker and Ulysses Byas, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Michele Foster, “Educating for Competence in Community and Culture Exploring the Views of Exemplary African-American Teachers,” Urban Education 27, no. 4 (January 1, 1993): 370–94; Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, “Beyond Role Models: An Examination of Cultural Influences on the Pedagogical Perspectives of Black Teachers,” Peabody Journal of Education 66, no. 4 (1989): 51–63; Zoë Burkholder, “‘Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization’: Black Teachers and the Social Construction of Race, 1929–1954,” Journal of Social History 46, no. 2 (2012): 335–63.

Burkholder, “‘Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization,’” 354.

Carter Godwin Woodson, Negro Makers of History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1928).

For more on “bridge discourse” see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 197.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, A Vindication of the African Race: Being a Brief Examination of the Arguments in Favor of African Inferiority (Monrovia: Printed by G. Killian, 1857); St Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, vol. 2 (Los Angeles: University of California Center for Afro, 1991); V. P. Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Biography, Race Vindication, and African-American Intellectuals: Introductory Essay,” The Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1/4 (1996): 1–16.

Manning Marable, “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” Souls 2, no. 3 (January 2000): 17–36.

Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 136; Williams explores the content of textbooks provided for freedmen’s schools after the Civil War; in particular, she highlights their emphasis on casting Blacks as indebted to White patriots for their freedom. Northern Whites were positioned as “paternalistic caretakers” and Blacks as a “benighted people” in need of advice.

Reddick, “Racial Attitudes in American History Textbooks of the South,” 237.

John W. Cromwell, “The Aftermath of Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” The Journal of Negro History 5, no. 2 (1920): 208–34; Charles Burnett, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Documentary (2003).

Burnett, Nat Turner.

Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 102.

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 200.

William Lloyd Garrison, “The Insurrection,” The Liberator 1, no. 36 (September 3, 1831).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamps (Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856), 241.

Charles H. Wesley, “Creating and Maintaining an Historical Tradition,” The Journal of Negro History 49, no. 1 (1964): 13–33. doi:10.2307/2716474.

Henry H. Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States at the National Negro Convention,” 1843, http://www.blackpast.org/1843-henry-highland-garnet-address-slaves-united-states.

Michael Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 195–223; Drake, Black Folk Here and There.

Wesley, “Creating and Maintaining an Historical Tradition.”

William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).

Lawrence D. Reddick, “Racial Attitudes in American History Textbooks of the South,” The Journal of Negro History 19, no. 3 (1934): 225–65; LaGarrett J. King, Christopher Davis, and Anthony L. Brown, “African American History, Race and Textbooks: An Examination of the Works of Harold O. Rugg and Carter G. Woodson,” Journal of Social Studies Research 36, no. 4 (January 2012): 359–86.

Frank Lincoln Mather, Who’s Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (Chicago: Frank Mather, 1915), 155.

Ibid., 242; Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of African American History 89, no. 3 (2004): 241–61; LaGarrett J. King, “‘A Narrative to the Colored Children in America’: Lelia Amos Pendleton, African American History Textbooks, and Challenging Personhood,” The Journal of Negro Education 84, no. 4 (2015): 519–33.

Mather, Who’s Who of the Colored Race, 81.

Patricia W Romero, Carter G. Woodson: A Biography (Ohio State University, 1971); Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History, Reprint edition (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997).

E. A. Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890: With a Short Introduction as to the Origin of the Race: Also a Short Sketch of Liberia (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printers, 1890), 90.

Leila Amos Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro (Washington, DC: Press of R. L. Pendleton, 1912), 117.

John Wesley Cromwell, The Negro in American History; Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent (Washington, DC: The American Negro Academy, 1914), 13.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 90.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “‘Among the Vitalizing Tools of the Radical Intelligentsia, of Course the Most Crucial was Words’: Carter G. Woodson’s ‘The Case of the Negro’ (1921),” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3, no. 2 (2009): 81–112.

Carter Godwin Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1922), 94.

Carter Godwin Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War (New York: Putnam, 1915), 162–63.

Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History, 31.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 90.

Ibid., 92.

Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 116.

Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 14.

Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 92–93.

Carter Godwin Woodson, Negro Makers of History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1928), iii.

“Dr. Woodson Lists 15 Most Outstanding Events in Negro History,” referencing February 1950 issue of Ebony Magazine, Claude A. Barnett papers (Chicago History Museum), box 370, folder 1.

Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 116.

Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 93.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 93.

Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 92.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 90–91.

Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 13.

Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 116.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 91.

Cromwell, The Negro in American History; Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent, 14.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 91.

Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 116.

Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 92.

Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 115–16.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890, 92.

Cromwell, The Negro in American History, 14.

Woodson, The Negro in Our History, 93.

William Wells Brown and William L. Andrews, From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 166.

Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America, 1st ed. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2008), 188.

Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 77.

Septima Clark, for example, was fired in 1956 by the Charleston Board of Education for refusing to conceal her membership in the NAACP; see Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark, Reprint edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 2.

Burkholder, “Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization,” 342.

Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, 1st ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Vanessa Siddle Walker, “Original Intent: Black Educators in an Elusive Quest for Justice” (AERA 2012 Brown Lecture, October 25, 2012), http://mp125118.cdn.mediaplatform.com/125118/wc/mp/4000/5592/5599/20007/Lobby/default.htm.

Hidden Provocateurs is the title of Vanessa Siddle Walker’s forthcoming book in which she explores the silent partnerships between Black teachers and the NAACP leading up to the legal victory of Brown vs. Board of Education.

Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

Wesley, “Creating and Maintaining an Historical Tradition.”

Cromwell, “The Aftermath of Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” 223.

Reddick, “Racial Attitudes in American History Textbooks of the South,” 237.

Ibid., 242.

Michael J. Dumas and Kihana Miraya Ross, “‘Be Real Black for Me’: Imagining BlackCrit in Education,” Urban Education 51, no. 4 (2016): 431.

Woodson, Negro Makers of History.

Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1890.

Na’ilah Nasir, Racialized Identities: Race and Achievement among African American Youth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 95 and 103.

Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 91.

Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination, 1st ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50.

Ibid., 87–88.

Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History, 1st ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1969), 89.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 1903.)

Rickford, We Are an African People, 7.

Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jarvis R. Givens

Jarvis R. Givens is a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and earned his Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His current book project analyzes the relationship between Black education, freedom, and affect through Carter G. Woodson’s philosophy and influence on schools during Jim Crow. Givens’s research has been supported by two Ford Foundation Fellowships, and published in journals such as: Race Ethnicity and Education, Harvard Educational Review, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly.