Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Prof offers nuaned view of black history
POTTSTOWN » It’s not unusual during Black History Month to hear the names of icons like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass invoked with justifiable reverence.
Few would argue they are great Americans.
But Tonya Thames Taylor would have you know that black American history, all American history, in fact, is more than a few names on a plaque or in a glossy-covered biography.
It is also the other unnamed people — nearly all of them in the case of African-American history — that make up equally important parts of the American story and are, all too often, left out of our history books.
From 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, to 1836 when fully half the American economy depended on the unpaid labor of enslaved people in the cotton fields, African-Americans “despite being a small percentage of the population, had a huge impact on the building of America,” she said during a talk Saturday at Pottsgrove
Manor.
“Cotton? We built that. Railroads? We built that. The White House, the Capitol building? We built that,” Thames Taylor said.
Thames Taylor, founding director of the West Chester’s African American Studies program and member of the executive committee of the Frederick Douglass Institute there, said one of the traps of the study of American history is to focus on the famous names, like Douglass and Tubman.
“We look at the big names when we teach history, and it is used to objectify the narrative of African-American history, to say that they stand out as the exception, and not the rule,” Thames Taylor said.
She even noted that although Frederick Douglass is “the most photographed man in American in the 19th century,” and photos of Harriet Tubman abound, in both cases, “nearly all of them are of them being older. When someone is viewed as older, they are seen as less of a threat. Harriet Tubman ran away when she was 30 years old and died in 1913. There is a much longer narrative there,” Thames Taylor said.
“We have to take notice of the language that we use, and even the iconography,” Thames Taylor said.
She provided examples of that iconography in the form of abolition literature, nearly all of which showed enslaved peoples as mostly naked, on their knees, begging for “a savior” to free them.
“It provides a false narrative that enslaved peoples had no agency in their freedom. That they were the recipients of benevolence, and that freedom was bestowed upon them,” she said.
It paints a picture of a people who were “beneficiaries instead of architects. It tells a story of people who were given their freedom. They did not earn it.”
“We don’t know the names of the first enslaved people who sought their freedom, of the first African-American abolitionists, but they were there,” she said.
There are uncounted thousands of African-Americans who took charge of their destiny and escaped slavery on their own, as well as those who stayed and, at great danger to themselves, helped those who chose to
leave, she said.
“Did you know that 85 percent of those (African Americans) who could serve in the Union army did so? That does not sound passive to me,” Thames Taylor said.
The language used in history is equally important.
Take the word “slave” for example.
When someone is identified as a “slave it objectifies them. Calling them ‘enslaved people’ humanizes them,” she explained.
The fact that the names of most enslaved peoples are not recorded, except on balance sheets, made it easy to erase them from the written history of this country.
One such balance sheet was recorded on June 20, 1768, at Pottsgrove Manor.
On that date, said historic site director Neil Hobbins, the names of 13 enslaved men and women were recorded on an inventory of property.
“The individual lives of Margaret, Nancy, Flora, Andrew, Arch, Guinea, Cesar, Ishmael, Mulatto Peter, Cato, Cudgo, Black Peter and Adam were never recorded, but the exploited work these men and woman performed has transcended through time to shape the narrative that is being told here at Pottsgrove Manor,” Hobbins said.
In fact, it is the inclusion of servants quarters at Pottsgrove Manor that captured Thames Taylor’s imagination two years ago when she visited the site for a “Twelfth Night” celebration.
“I’m from Mississippi. We don’t do ‘Twelfth Night.’ But when I went up to the third floor and saw the recreation of the servants quarters, where the enslaved people lived, I was fascinated. We shut the place down that night,” she said with a laugh.
“So when they called as asked me if I wanted to come and give a talk I was like ‘oh yes,’” she said.
That’s because she wanted to talk about how “American history has been packaged. Things like how George Washington never told a lie,” she said.
Highlighting achievements of people like Douglass and Tubman, while worthwhile, doesn’t tell the whole story, Thames Taylor aid.
“When you highlight them as the exception. It makes them seem not real. It takes away intelligence and agency from the larger group,” she explained.
It’s important to remember that among that larger group, whether it was the Underground Railroad or the Great Migration north, the story most often told is of those who left.
Equally important are those who stayed, she said.
Those who stayed built their own churches, endured discrimination and lynching, housed, clothed and fed those escaping slavery and, later, those who came south to help with Reconstruction, to fight Jim Crow and to take a stand in the Civil Rights Movement.
“They had networks, they built communities, they had skills,” she said. It’s important to also remember that studying history creates the illusion of forward motion.
“My cousin said the other day, talking about our grandmother, how she is glad she didn’t have to live in her time. And I said ‘do you know how to grow your own food?’ We talk about ‘food deserts’ in urban areas and we should remember that the people who came north had skills, knew how to survive and live off the land and in just two generations, we’ve lost that ability. We have to be careful about how we define progress,” Thames Taylor said.
Some of those who came to the greater Pottstown area, against their will or by choice, built lives for themselves against incredible odds.
Thames Taylor encouraged the study of local history because the study of individuals in your own backyard can allow us to break through the stereotypes that the national narrative can often create.
“As Michelle Obama once said: ‘it’s hard to hate up close.’ People may have objectified ‘slaves,’ but they often had warm feelings for people who lived in their household and they saw every day,” she said.
In fact, she cited a couple highlighted last year in The Mercury, as part of a feature on the Flickinger family, which is maintaining and improving a forgotten African-American cemetery in South Coventry.
Their story in America began with an American ship’s capture of three French slave ships in the waters off Cuba in 1800, a time that the U.S. was teetering on the brink of war with France.
In command of the American ship, the Ganges, was a man named John Mullowney, an abolitionist who brought the ships — the Prudent, the Dispatch and the Phebe, and the more than 100 captured Africans on board — back to a prize court in Philadelphia where he hoped a similarly abolitionist-minded federal judge would set the captives free.
They were set free but as Africans with no possessions, money or knowledge of the culture, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, to which they had been released, indentured them for a period of several years to people who would teach them a trade and help them adjust to life in America.
Among those so indentured were Joseph and Faltimir Ganges, so named by the court after the ship that had rescued them.
The pair were taken in by Francis Nichols, an Irish immigrant and Revolutionary War hero who served with George Washington during the siege of Boston; spent a famous winter at Valley Forge; survived Benedict Arnold’s failed attack on Quebec — where he was captured and nearly died of illness — and scouted the British position prior to the Battle of Monmouth.
Nichols came to Pottstown from Philadelphia in 1783, on the same day the Treaty of Paris was signed, officially ending the war with England.
“Nichols bought the home of John Potts Sr. — known today as Pottsgrove Manor — and 200 acres of the estate that included orchards and fields, farm buildings, a grist mill and a sawmill,” according to a 2014 Mercury article about his life.
Nichols was 67 when he took in Joseph and Faltimir, who took the name of Smith after completing their term of service, most likely in a house at the Southwest corner of High and Hanover Streets where the former Security Trust Bank building now stands.
Ironically, in 1819 Mullowney, the captain of the Ganges which rescued John and Faltimir from slavery in Cuba, later moved into that same house that Nichols had owned and in which Joseph and Faltimir Smith had lived.
After they completed their apprenticeship, Joseph and Faltimir married. They were eventually able to buy land in Douglass (Berks) Township, west of Pottstown, and turn it into a prosperous farm.
According to an 1880 remembrance in The Pottstown Ledger uncovered by Daniel Flickinger, Joseph Smith “drove team for Joseph Potts and his sons, the proprietors of Glasgow Forge.”
After the trees on Poole Hill above Pine Forge were cut to make charcoal for the forge, Smith purchased between 16 and 18 acres and founded a farm known for the sweetness of the fruit grown there, according to the Ledger article.
Joe and “Faltie,” as she was called, raised three sons and a daughter there.
The couple and their family were among those “members of the congregation who walked to the church from Pottstown every Sunday,” Bruce Flickinger last year.
“They chose their own name. Can you imagine the conversations they had, the agency required to chose your own name rather than keep one given to you by strangers?” Thames Taylor said Saturday.
“They had a successful farm, they helped built a church,” she said. “These people had networks, they built their own communities out of nothing.”
But despite these efforts and these successes, African-Americans, the descendants of those enslaved people, still struggle to achieve the American dream, largely because of the way things are stacked against them, said Thames Taylor.
For example, although African-Americans make up just 12 to 15 percent of the population of Alabama, they comprise fully 96 percent of its prison population, Thames Taylor said.
She pointed to the debate about Civil War statues as another example.
Those statues, including the Grand Army of the Republic statue that stands on High Street in Pottstown, were put up decades after the war when lynchings and Jim Crow laws and segregation were the reality of the day.
Whether of Union soldiers up north, or Confederate soldiers down south, most were cast from the same molds. Those in the south were most often put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of people intent on preserving the legacy of the antebellum south, and the memory of the slavery that made it possible.
“Up here, you guys call them ‘monuments’ and to me, that’s like a mountain. Something that’s there. But down south, they are called ‘memorials’ and a memorial is something you remember, something you honor,” Thames Taylor said.
“I often say the south lost the war militarily, but they won it socially,” she said.