The broadside is from New Orleans, 1859. It reads:
VALUABLE SLAVES AT AUCTION
AT THE CITY HOTEL COMMON ST.
The sale was to be held Feb. 3. From the auctioneer's list of human beings on offer:
1. ISAM, black, aged about 40 years, a superior engineer and blacksmith; has worked over 20 years with the late Wm. Chapman. Is well known for character through the Parish of St. James.
2. JOHN, griffe, aged 24 years, a No. 1 carpenter and ship caulker.
9. GEORGE, mulatto, aged 30 years, house and confidential servant.
11. MADORA, black, aged 18 years, extra likely.
13. PAULINE, black, aged 13 years, speaks French and English, good house girl and child's nurse.
"Griffe" means that John was three-quarters Black and one-quarter white. I'm not sure how to read "extra likely" as applied to Madora; the biblical "comely" comes to mind.
The broadside is one of two offered by the Smithsonian as part of its online collection "AP African American Studies: Teaching with Objects." The collection is meant as a supplement to the College Board's AP African American Studies course, which became a subject of controversy last winter in Florida and more recently in our state.
Each of the 34 objects in the collection is worth a look. The Smithsonian has prepared a set of standard questions to go with each, all about the object and its context; the exercises would be fine preparation for museum work. Those casually browsing the collection can click a button to reveal the fully completed museum card giving dates, materials, likely origin and use, and biographical information about the maker if known.
Several objects are documents, like the broadside quoted above, that deserve a close reading. Students who have reached the age of reason should study history by close reading of old documents; it's a better approach to the past than flopping around in a textbook, and it's what historians actually do. Students need a teacher to serve as a guide. A textbook can be helpful in the background, but the sooner we can provide that direct encounter with the past, the better.
The sooner students begin, under the guidance of a good teacher, to read actual historical sources, the sooner they naturally develop critical thinking skills. And the sooner they develop critical thinking skills, the better defended they will be against indoctrination. Of any kind.
It has taken me a long time to read the AP African American Studies curriculum framework because it is full of things that any educated American ought to know. Or that's the case as long as the curriculum is addressing any moment from 1500 BC to about 1968; thereafter the offerings appeal less to one's sense of obligation as an educated citizen in a free country.
The curriculum framework has been edited since it caught the attention of the governor of Florida. Its introductory matter explains that "AP (trademark) is opposed to indoctrination." The framework has been purged of its explanation that Black Queer Studies "explores the concept of queer color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies towards racial analysis." (That line is quoted by Rich Lowry in National Review.)
It will be a great day for the study of Black history and queer history when academics stop abusing the words "intersection" and "lens."
The first section of AP African American Studies is a survey of equatorial Africa from the dawn of man through the establishment of trade between West Africa and Portugal. That trade was so intense that during the 1500s, Black people were 10 percent of the population of Lisbon; many were drawn from the cultural elite of their home kingdoms or tribes.
The second section covers the trans-Atlantic slave trade, then settles in the Western hemisphere in the 18th and 19th centuries. This section is the most rigorous, full of challenging readings, including excerpts from Louisiana's Code Noir of 1724, which applied to slaves in colonial Arkansas. It treats the Stono Rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, Maroon wars, and the German Coast Uprising (or Louisiana Revolt) of 1811. This is capital-H History--political, economic, and military--with little to merit the designation "studies."
African American Studies itself is not well defined in the introduction to the curriculum framework, but in the third section of the course, which moves from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, the New Negro cultural movement, and the Great Migration, students begin to learn the history of Black history by reading "The Mis-Education of the Negro" by Carter G. Woodson (1933) and "The Negro Digs Up His History" by Arturo Alfonso Schomberg.
"Only one negro out of ten thousand," Woodson wrote, "is interested in the effort to set forth what his race has thought and felt and attempted and accomplished that it may not become a negligible factor in the thought of the world." That was an effect, in part, of the schools' indoctrination of Black children with the idea that Black people had contributed little or nothing to human history and culture--and part of the remedy would be to teach Black history and culture.
The fourth section contains a mix of essential 20th-century American history (the G.I. Bill, Redlining, and Housing Discrimination is one sub-section, and several are devoted to the civil rights movement) and some cultural-studies stuff that seems less than essential.
Little Rock is approached by way of a poem by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and "Faubus Fables" by Charles Mingus. Students who show up for class on balmy spring days will be treated to a study of Afrofuturism, an aesthetic movement that appears blessedly unrelated to the Futurism of Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti.
Afrofuturism includes artists such as Sun Ra featuring La Shaa Stallings and the Intergalactic Myth Science Solar Arkestra; we've moved from the core of the humanities (the struggle between bondage and freedom) to the fantastical and far-out.
In the fourth section, we learn that Black Studies became an academic field in the 1970s; in the 21st century it "continues to offer a lens for understanding contemporary Black freedom struggles within and beyond the academy" and that "African American Studies remains a primary means to examine the global influence of Black expression and racial inequities. The field establishes frameworks for analyses of Black history, literature, politics, and other subjects not previously included in more traditional disciplines."
"Lens," again. "Primary means to examine." "Establishes frameworks for analyses." Leftist indoctrination? More like using past and present injustices (which should be rigorously examined "through the lens" of "more traditional disciplines" like history and political science) to justify the creation of separate academic departments with their own budgets, administrative staffs, and standards.
The objectives of Black Studies are suspect, all right, but not for the reasons that the governors of Florida and Arkansas suggest. "Struggles within ... the academy" is the tell-tale phrase.
But Black history needs to be taught, and the AP African American Studies course contains enough Black history to justify its being offered in the high schools of Arkansas. Sign me up.