Academic

In My Bookbag: Present at Creation

By Charlton Copeland

Under normal circumstances I would never think to write about a book that I had not completed.  But given the fact that I will likely be long gone from blackprof by the time I complete historian Richard S. Newman’s recent book, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church and the Black Founding Fathers, I thought I’d write a bit about it now.

First, let me say how excited I was to find Newman’s biography of Allen.  I am a fan of Newman’s work, as he has been a keen observer of the abolitionist movement in America.  Newman has been central in placing black actors and black thought at the center of the antebellum protest movements from the Founding era.  He is doing some of the most interesting work in the recovery of an early African American intellectual and protest tradition.  Given Newman’s perspective, and my interest in both black religious institutions and black anti-slavery thought and politics, this Freedom’s Prophet was a welcome purchase.

Freedom’s Prophet joins the ranks of a few relatively recent additions to the canon of historical literature on blacks, including Gary Nash’s The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution, Julie Winch’s A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten, and John Saillant’s Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Hayes, which strive to place black actors closer to the center of ideas and events that have fundamentally shaped American history and society.  This practice represents the ideal of telling “integrated history,” trumpeted most recently by Nell Painter.  To be sure, the search for “integrated history” follows in the tradition of work by giants like Benjamin Quarles, but it has surely become more available in recent years.

I write to raise a concern with the perspective from which Newman writes in Freedom’s Prophet.  In the book’s introduction, Newman talks about the ways in which Allen engaged in a discourse about race and the future of American democracy alongside other, for example, Benjamin Franklin.  Newman depicts a “virtual dialogue” between black Founding Fathers and white Founding Fathers on the subject of race and American democracy.  Although Newman admits that Franklin and Allen “never actually corresponded with each other,” he goes on to speak of the “public dialogue in which these two founding fathers engaged.”  (pp.23-26).

As a young scholar interested in black intellectual thought on the American Constitution, I am heartened by Newman’s imaginative reconstruction–expanding the conception of founding fathers to include black actors.  But I am troubled by that claim that black actors were “present at creation” obscures the fact that they are ignored by the people that matter.  That is, as a legal scholar, I am sure that Justice Scalia’s pantheon of the founding generation does not include Allen or Hayes.  Their opinions of the matters at issue simply do not matter.  Do we risk losing site of the fact that much of American history simply means the silencing of black voices and the voiding of black presence?  (I think about this when, in an effort to make Federal Jurisdiction inclusive of a black intellectual traditon, I read Martin King’s statements about the federal courts versus the state courts for black litigants to my class.  The question, then as now, was did anybody care what King said about the federal courts.  And how do we remember the fact that nobody cared? And how do we not lose heart and declare with honesty that nobody cared?)

Another concern is that by inserting black presence in these spaces, so we not simply reify a conception of founders as the first, and most important, word– an assertion worthy of critical reevaluation.  At this historic moment, is it time to ask whether it is enough for historians of black political and intellectual life to place black faces in spaces where only white ones existed.  This comes up when commentators complain against Justice Thomas‘ bastardization of Frederick Douglass in a few Supreme Court opinions.  Might a better question be, why should we feel especially bound by whatever Douglass or Jefferson, or Thaddeus Stevens has to say about our Constitution?  By engaging in the imaginative construction of dialogue across the lines of race, do we delay that question?

But these are just my thoughts spurred by the Introduction of a book I have not yet completed, so who cares what I have to say?

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Full post as published by BlackProf on September 20, 2008 (boomark / email).