Education & Reconstruction in the Washington DC Region

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In September, 1894, Frederick Douglass was asked to speak at the dedication of a school for African American children in Manassas, Virginia. At the speech, less than six months before Douglass died, he noted the importance of founding a school for the children of a "once enslaved people," on the site of a battlefield where armies met, "in deadly conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the Negro." Douglass went on to expound, "Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted. And on the other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people than giving them, as we are here, earnestly this day, endeavoring to do, the means of an education." Back in 1831, the Virginia Assembly had passed anti-literacy laws to discourage the teaching of African Americans to read, not just enslaved African Americans, but free Black people as well, with the law stating,  "All meetings of free Negroes or mulattoes at any schoolhouse, church, meeting house or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be considered as an unlawful assembly." That law was enforced, as a white woman named Margaret Douglass found out in 1854, when a judge in Norfolk, Virginia sentenced her to a month in jail after two policemen raided the home where she and her daughter Rosa had been teaching 20 free Black children in a small private school based on friendship and religious beliefs. As slavery ended in the south, via the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, new state constitutions, such as in Maryland in 1864, and finally, via the 13th Amendment in 1865, one of the first things formerly enslaved people sought to do was to learn to read and write and to seek education for their children. Harriet Jacobs, who had escaped slavery in North Carolina and then wrote a well received memoir of her life, raised funds in the north and then moved to Alexandria, Virginia in 1862, where she worked with white abolitionist Julia Wilbur to help Black refugees who had escaped bondage. On January 11, 1864, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa opened school in the Grantville neighborhood of Alexandria. The school opened with 75 students, and within months, 225 students were enrolled. As mother and daughter wrote in the National Anti Slavery Standard, one of the most exciting things about the school was that it did not just educate African Americans, but was also run by African American teachers, by a vote of the freedmen who built the school for their children.  "These people, born and bred in slavery, had always been so accustomed to look upon the white race as their natural superiors and masters that we had some doubts whether they could easily throw off the habit, and the fact of their giving preference to colored teachers as managers of the establishment seemed to us to indicate that even their brief possession of freedom had begun to inspire them with respect for their race." Just months after the Jacobs opened their school in Alexandria, nearby Washington, DC became the first southern city to open a publicly funded school for Black students. The head teacher for this school, that originally opened inside The Little Ebenezer Church on Fourth Street Southeast, was a young African American woman named Emma V. Brown, who had studied with abolitionist Myrtilla Miner in Georgetown, and then attended Oberlin College. Brown was paid $400 a year by the city, and was assisted by a white woman named Frances W. Perkins, whose salary was paid by the New England Freedmen's Aid Society. In language similar to what Frederick Douglass would later use, Emma Brown wrote to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1858, "With education, we can no longer be oppressed." As their educational opportunities expanded, African Americans in the south wanted the chance to pursue higher education as well. And on March 2, 1867, the United States Congress chartered a university with a mandate to educate people, regardless of race or sex. The university was named for civil war hero Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who was commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Howard would later serve as president of his namesake University from 1869 to 1874. A year before the founding of Howard University, a formerly enslaved woman named Jennie Dean left her family in Manassas, Virginia, and moved to Washington, DC to work and to attend school. Seeing the additional educational opportunities available to Black children In DC, Dean worried about African American children in places like where she had grown up, in Manassas. It took years of fundraising and the assistance of wealthy patrons like white heiress Emily Howland of Sherwood, New York, but on October 7, 1893, the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth received its charter and opened the following fall. By the time Frederick Douglass gave his speech in Manassas, many of the more promising parts of reconstruction had already fallen. The federal government had withdrawn troops from the south after the compromise of 1877. In 1883 the Supreme Court found most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, ending the federal ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations. And in 1891, the US Senate voted down the Lodge Bill, which would have increased federal oversight of elections in the states. Still, there was progress that remained, exemplified by the opening of the school in Manassas. Douglass, for one, refused to give in to despair, saying, "I think the situation is serious, but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. I have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man's future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. The existence of this Industrial School of Manassas is a triumphant rebuke to the cry of despair now heard in some quarters. Nor does it stand alone. It is a type of such institutions in nearly all of the southern states. Schools and colleges for colored youth are multiplying all over the land. The light of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon the colored people of the south than it ever did in the case of any other emancipated people in the world. These efforts cannot fail, in the end, to bear fruit." My co-host in this episode is my son Teddy, and joining us is Dr. Kate Masur, Professor of History at Northwestern University, and author of, "Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, DC Region."

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:25  
Hi Kate, thanks so much for joining us today.

Dr. Kate Masur  12:27  
Thanks for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:29  
Yes and listeners, I am here with one of my favorite co hosts, my son, Teddy, who you may have heard on our pinball episode. So welcome also Teddy.

Teddy  12:41  
Hi. Thanks for also having me. So this is the question we always ask at the beginning of these episodes. What got you into writing about the Reconstruction Era, like, what interested you in writing about this time and about the lives of Black Americans?

Dr. Kate Masur  12:59  
Well, I think there are a lot of ways for me to answer that question, but I'll go back to the beginning of my graduate career. I went to graduate school in the American Culture Program at the University of Michigan, and I thought at the beginning of graduate school I was really more interested in like the Progressive Era and reformers and African American history. But in the course of my coursework, I got really interested in Reconstruction and why it was such a pivotal moment in American history that was so hard to understand. And quite honestly, later, I realized that I had had a very good high school history teacher for American history when I was a junior in high school, and he was very committed to teaching Reconstruction. And yet I couldn't understand when I was in high school why it was so important, considering that, it seemed like by the end of the Reconstruction period, none of the things that people had tried to do to create a multiracial democracy and equality and things like that had really worked, and it was sort of back to square one in my thinking as a high school student. I don't actually think that now, and that's part of what I tried to represent in the book, but he was trying to convey my high school teacher, that this was a really critical period and I couldn't really understand it, because it seemed like nothing really had worked out, that people had wanted to try to make work. So I think I revisited that in graduate school and got really interested in just understanding it better. And I was also interested in urban history. And so from those interests, I ended up writing my dissertation and my first book on Reconstruction in Washington, DC. And at the time, I also was interested in writing an urban history of DC, because it seemed to me, again, this is very broad brushstrokes that DC could represent, both northern and southern kind of themes in American history. It was southern slavery was legal there until 1862, and had a very large Black population, and had all of the struggles that we consider to be sort of Reconstruction related struggles and arguments and and yet there were all of these northerners there, including in the federal government, as as Republicans in the federal government. And so it seemed to be a really rich place to study. And we can get to this later, but that book, which came out in 2010 was the reason that I got involved in this new book, "Freedom Was in Sight." So yeah, and then I just continued to really work on Reconstruction. I mean, I every time I come back to the history of Reconstruction, I kind of feel like there's no period in American history that's actually more interesting and more important to write about.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:48  
I want to hear about what the process is like to write a graphic history like this working with an artist. How do you figure out how to tell this really huge story and put it into graphic format, thinking about what the people of the time looked like, what they sounded like? Sometimes you have their actual words, but sometimes you don't. So how did you put this all together?

Dr. Kate Masur  16:15  
This is a huge question. Let me start by talking about Liz Clark, the artist, and how fantastic she is. So first of all, I had never done a graphic history before, and this project came out of a grant in the National Park Service. And so people in the Park Service approached me and said, "Would you be interested in being a historian on this graphic history?" And I it was really good timing for me. I was sort of between projects, and I was like, "This sounds amazing. Yes, I totally want to do this." And they were sort of like, great. Who could the artist be? I was like, I have no idea. And we started asking around, and one person's name kept coming up, and it was Liz Clark, who is a South Africa based artist who has actually done a lot of graphic histories in a series that's published by Oxford University Press. So she is very experienced working with historians and doing kind of high quality, serious graphic histories that are that have a lot of fidelity to the past, that are based in research, in which people, the historians, go out of their way to try to as much as possible get it right in terms of what people are wearing, you know, how their their their styles, what buildings look like, what landscapes look like. So there's a lot of visual research that goes into a book like this, as you can probably imagine. I could go on about this forever, but, you know, a couple of other things, Liz, so I was a total newbie to this, and I said to Liz, okay, once she, you know, fortunately for us, and to, you know, we're so honored that she agreed to do it. And I was like, "Okay, what do we do now?" And I had the mistaken idea that my role would be to do the research, figure out what the stories would be, and then kind of say, like, yeah, draw this kind of thing and and then I'll write the words, you know, whether it's the captions at the bottom or the words that are coming out of people's mouths, but just sort of draw these scenes, and then I'll provide the words, and that's it. But that was not how it works. And of course, because Liz was so experienced, she knew what to tell me. And what it was was we worked with these scripts. Some people have called it like storyboarding, where I would decide how many frames were on every page, and then I would tell her, describe every scene of every frame on the page, and then provide the words, right? So I had to visually imagine the action in the book, and then, kind of say, page by page, every chapter, there's six chapters. Every chapter is 12 pages. So also had to figure out how to fit every chapter into a pre ordained number of pages, and then kind of provide these scripts, chapter by chapter to Liz, who would then draw it in a draft form, kind of in a black and white form, and then send me the draft. And then we would have a sort of back and forth about, like, is it working? What should we do to modify it? Changes in the images, changes in the words. And then after that process, she would then put the color in, and we would see how it looked at that point. So I was a little daunted at first, when I first found out that I had to like design essentially every page and every image and but she was so encouraging. And kind of after chapter one, I said, "I have no idea if this is going to work, but here's my first effort." And you know, she said, "This is fine. This will work. You know, we can work with this." So it was a really, really interesting experience. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:44  
Yeah, must have taken forever,too.

Dr. Kate Masur  19:46  
We also, I mean, she is a busy person, and a, I think, more or less, a freelance illustrator. So she had said, "I have several months in the summer of 2021, and several months in the summer of 2022, and that's the time I have. And so actually that was another thing that was very structured and disciplined about doing this book in a collaboration, was I was the one with the more loosey, goosey schedule. And as you may know, in academia, we're not always on time with things, but this was kind of like, "Oh, if you don't get the scripts done in time for Liz to do them on her schedule it's not going to happen." And so it didn't take forever. It was a lot of work, but it really came together right on the schedule because of Liz's amazingness and professionalism.

Teddy  20:36  
What were some of the primary sources you used in making this book with Liz?

Dr. Kate Masur  20:42  
So the book is about the Reconstruction Era in the Washington, DC region, and that was, again, a kind of non negotiable part of the project, as it was created in this park service process. And so first thing to say is it's not only about it's not only an urban study of Washington, DC, which is actually kind of what my first book was. So I knew going into it that I needed to get up to speed on what was going on in the surrounding counties, which was also a really nice opportunity to think about rural history alongside urban history. And the truth is that for the social history of Reconstruction, it is a very rural story, primarily. So it was really nice to have the opportunity to think about how to represent rural lives and the unfolding of the kind of rural history of emancipation and the post Civil War period. And another thing I should say is this book conceptualizes Reconstruction as going all the way to the end of the 19th century, as opposed to stopping in like the mid 1870s, which is what usually how people usually think about Reconstruction. So between the fact that there is a broader geography than what my first book had been and a broader chronology than my first book, I had to do a lot of research. So this is all to say that I now I did a fair amount of research in secondary sources, because there are really good secondary sources out there, and I also revisited some primary sources that I already knew pretty well. I want to give a shout out to the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which is a long standing social history project at the University of Maryland, which has published many volumes of documents related to the history of emancipation during and immediately after the Civil War. And they have some of those documents on the website, but just incredibly extensive volumes of documents. So I turned to those. I also though, there are two parts of the two themes in the book that are particularly, that were not very well researched, where I did a lot more primary source research, and that was in there's a chapter that is devoted to white reactionary politics and kind of the ways that white Americans tried to shut down the democratic and kind of pro freedom experiments of Reconstruction. And one of the themes in that chapter is police violence in Washington, DC against African Americans. And I knew that that had existed, and I knew that there were protests by African Americans against police brutality, but that is an example of an area where there wasn't a great deal of secondary literature on that. So for that, I was helped from a research assistant kind of delved into the primary source history of these protests against police brutality in Washington in the 1870s and 1880s, and the other thing was, in that same chapter, a lot of people don't think about, some people actually don't even think that, like the DC region is part of the south. I think it certainly is. I don't think it's not, it's we don't need to split hairs about the definition of the south. But if you want to tell the history of Reconstruction through the lens of this region, you certainly can. Let's put it that way. So one of the things, particularly since this book went all the way to the 1890s that we really needed to deal with was lynching. And so there's a lynching represented in this book that also we began with somebody's study of several lynchings in a Frederick County, Maryland, and then did more primary source research into that as well. So I would say, you know, overall, it was a combination of looking into primary sources and using the really great secondary literature that's out there. And I should say that most of the work that I did on this book was during the pandemic, at when a lot of archives were closed. So I probably if it hadn't been that period of our collective history, I might have done more research in archives and things like that, but I was also kind of making do with the situation that we were in.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:44  
I've looked at Washington, DC a lot in the more recent times, so in political podcasts that I've done, I've talked to advocates for DC statehood, for instance. But I did not realize the important pieces of the governance of Washington, DC that change and evolve during the Reconstruction period that sort of sets up a lot of the lack of Home Rule going into the 20th century, really, up until, like the 1970s, and of course, there's still not total Home Rule, since they don't have representation in Congress. But wonder if you could talk some about the importance of this reconstruction era in DC politics and governance, what it's like for the residents of Washington, DC itself.

Dr. Kate Masur  25:33  
Sure. So what you're alluding to right in part, is that the Constitution and the US Constitution actually gives Congress ultimate kind of authority over the District of Columbia. It's in, I think, Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution, and it it means DC is not a state, right? And that's one of the arguments. And if and states have a kind of right to sovereignty and self governance, traditionally in US history, and there's sort of, you know, this complicated discussion about federalism and the relative weight of state versus federal government, that just doesn't apply to the District of Columbia. And so there always has been the possibility that Congress can kind of exert its will on DC regardless of what the residents of DC really want. So from the beginning, the early 19th century, DC did have, it had three separate municipalities within it, Washington City, Georgetown and the county, surrounding county of the District of Columbia, were three different separate municipalities, all kind of chartered by Congress, but operating with their own kind of local government, with white men allowed to vote, right? And so one of the things that happens during reconstruction as the larger question of whether Black men should have the right to vote comes up in national politics in relation to the south in particular, is separately because DC is not a state a movement for Black men's right to vote in the District of Columbia, and Congress discusses that and passes a statute, sort of saying that Black men need to be allowed to vote on the same terms of as white men in 1867 in DC. And President Andrew Johnson then vetoes that measure, and Congress passes it over the President's veto, so Black men begin to vote in DC in those three separate governments in 1867. So what the reaction against that looks like, so, but, so then, so, so then you have African American men serving on the city council. You have African American men serving as health inspectors. You have Black police officers. You have a kind of, actually a development of a biracial city government, because the Black population is about 30% of the population. So that is a substantial enough population that when Black men can vote if they want to elect Black people or white people who support you know the political priorities that African Americans tend to have, they can they have the power to do that on the local level. So what the reaction against that ends up looking like is a movement to consolidate the three governments into one single government, to kind of diminish the power of the local power of voters, and then increasingly, to put that consolidated government of the District of Columbia, so no longer would you have three separate ones, under the control of Congress, and then Congress, by 1874 puts it under a commission form of government. So there are literally no voters. So the result, to put it really bluntly, is, you know, these white people who mobilize against Black men's enfranchisement, and the implications of that in DC, they would rather have no one have the power to elect their local officials than share power with African Americans. And so that is the beginning, as you were suggesting, of no local government for the District of Columbia that only gets kind of revised and eroded when they begin to have a mayor, and this eventually a city council, starting 100 years later in the 1960s and 70s.

Teddy  28:53  
So we were talking about rights here. In the Reconstruction Era, what did black rights look like, generally? What kind of rights did they have?

Dr. Kate Masur  29:02  
Well, there's a huge conversation going on about this very question at that time, and I think there are a lot of ways to think about answering that question. I mean, one way, and this comes up in the book, as you probably saw, the United States passes three new constitutional amendments in this period, and they're all really about rights. And so they're the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The 13th abolishes slavery. The 14th provides for civil rights of various kinds and birthright citizenship. And the 15th basically is saying you cannot deny people the right to vote based on race. And all of these amendments, importantly, provide that if people's the rights promised in those amendments are being violated, the federal government, Congress has the power to step in. So it's not just the promise of new rights. It's also the promise that the federal government will stand behind people's rights, and back them up if local officials don't protect their rights. And so those amendments kind of represent the idea that one of the ways that Americans came to grips with the end of slavery and the challenges associated with the end of a system that had really been a system of race based oppression was to try to guarantee to Black Americans, the people had been oppressed and subordinated by that system, the same rights in a variety of areas that white people had. Now, as you probably know, those promises were not kept right. So the promises are in the Constitution. The promises are all over congressional debates. You know, they're right in front of us when we look at the history. But Americans, white Americans, did not keep those promises right for they the amendments were undermined, and for many, many decades, you know, the promises were sort of subordinated, went underground. People acted like it never happened, until sort of the civil rights era, in the 1950s and 60s, brought those Reconstruction amendments back to the surface. But I want to say one other thing, which is sort of like a different way of answering the question. One of the things I tried to do in this book is really think about and try to represent the unfolding of freedom as it happened in the everyday lives of African Americans. And the reality is in people's lives, I think today, as in the past, we're not always thinking about rights, right, where people are also just trying to live their lives. And I think sometimes I mean the dramatic transition transformation of that period is the transition from slavery to freedom, and even if the freedom is circumscribed, even if people aren't able to live as freely as they wanted to live, it's still a huge change. And so part of what I wanted to represent was to put those claims to rights which African Americans were certainly making in the broader context of what was it like to live at that time, you know. Well, what did people do for to make a living? Or what were, you know, families trying to do? What were the roles of men and women within families? What were children doing? What did it mean to try to get an education? What did it mean to try to form a church or an organization? And so I feel like I wanted to, we often think about rights in that period, and I think rightly so. But I wanted to try to cast a broader net and think about the kind of broader expanse of people's lives.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:31  
Back at the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about the way you were taught about Reconstruction in high school and in the essay at the end of the graphic history, you talk some about the historiography of Reconstruction. I don't think you actually use that word, but essentially the historiography, and I was reflecting all I remember being taught about Reconstruction, essentially is northern carpetbaggers like that, that. And, you know, I went to school in the north like that. This perhaps should not have been what I was taught. But I wonder if you could talk some about the the way that Reconstruction was originally or not originally, but like shortly after, was starting to be framed, the white supremacist take on it, how that sort of took hold, and then the more recent efforts to to really tear that story apart. Look at the actual like what you're doing in this book. Look at what actually happened. Listen to the voices of Black Americans at the time to really tell this story.

Dr. Kate Masur  33:31  
Sure. So there's that sort of narrative, which is true, that you know even the policies, well, first of all, slavery was abolished in the course of a civil war, the people who fought for the Confederacy were fighting to preserve slavery. So so the abolition of slavery itself was not something that white Americans had a consensus about, right? It was forced on white southerners. And so from that time forward, there's sort of not just a battle over what's going to happen next on the ground, but how to tell the story of what happened. And so the narratives coming from white southerners, particularly elite white southerners, from kind of the beginning of the aftermath of the Civil War, were narratives about the federal government forcing Black equality on them, the federal government coercing white southerners to do things that they really didn't want to do, which was just large extent true. And but the it wasn't that narrative was not just confined to white southerners, and most famously at Columbia University, a historian named William Dunning, who was a historian of Reconstruction and advised a lot of graduate students who wrote PhD dissertations on different states' experiences with Reconstruction really kind of drank the Kool Aid of that era among white Americans that the policies of trying to create a multiracial democracy in this period, the policies of trying to enforce the abolition of slavery had been a northern imposition on white southerners that Black Americans just weren't ready for freedom, or Black men were not ready to have the right to vote. And so this had been, in many ways, a tragic mistake, and at the most sort of sympathetic, and I use that in quotes, it was sort of like African Americans were also taken advantage of in this period, right? They shouldn't, we feel sorry for them that they were put in this position. And there's all kinds of insulting sort of implications of that scholarship, as I hope I'm making clear and so. But that was the prevailing scholarship that went along with the imposition of Jim Crow in the south, right, a system of racial segregation and subordination that was kind of backed or rationalized by this history that Reconstruction had been a terrible failure. There were always people who thought that history was a grave misrepresentation motivated by white supremacy, particularly Black historians. I recently was reading Ida B. Wells' memoir, which her granddaughter published in the 20th century, and Wells herself writes about how she wants to put her story on the record to get the history of reconstruction right. And so she's an example of many African Americans before WEB DuBois famously wrote "Black Reconstruction" in 1935, kind of putting forth that that that prevailing academic narrative that's also represented in various parts of popular culture was wrong and dangerous. Anyway, so that view doesn't really start seeping into academic history writing more broadly beyond people knowing about Du Bois's work until the 1960s and with the civil rights movement, people begin to revisit reconstruction in a more systematic way. So one of the things that's interesting to me is that even though history professors have been revising and rewriting the history of reconstruction since at least the 1960s, and trying to kind of peel back these layers of white supremacist interpretation and bring in sources that were previously ignored about the history of African Americans, from the perspective of African Americans and things like that, still in textbooks, in popular culture, in people's consciousness, that aspects of that earlier narrative prevailed. So when you learned about carpetbaggers, you know, your main thing you remember is carp these horrible northern carpetbaggers who came to the south to exploit the south, that's sort of a relic of that, right? And and I think in some ways, I mean my history teacher in high school was trying to give us the updated version of Reconstruction, but it was so hard to teach because it was this kind of flux of like, how do you really teach it when you're rejecting, sort of the Dunning school but, but, you know, trying to come up with a new narrative. So I think one of the things that's happened in the last 20 years, or even 15 years, is an increasing move to bring the updated version of Reconstruction, which again, has been being updated since, like, the 1960s so it's been going on for quite a while, into more more concerted effort to bring it to the public. And so that is this graphic history really fits into that, because I first got involved with the National Park Service around 2013, kind of talking with people in the park service about trying to interpret reconstruction, which they never had done before. Even though the Park Service manages most of civil war battlefields, they really had no interpretive framework for talking about Reconstruction. And so working with a colleague named Greg Downs, who's at UC Davis, he and I kind of got involved with the Park Service and with other historians and trying to kind of push forward the idea that Reconstruction is entitled to a history and an interpretation, and thinking about how to do that, and that's how I got to know some of the folks in the Park Service, which yielded a bunch of different outcomes, including the creation of the first ever Reconstruction National Park Service site dedicated to Reconstruction, which is in Beaufort, South Carolina, and also, a little bit indirectly, this this book. So there's a broader effort, you know, documentary by Henry Louis Gates exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Other efforts to kind of bring an updated history of Reconstruction to the broader public.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:30  
I think this speech by Frederick Douglass that you write about in the graphic history, and then you know the text of the speech itself is in your primary source resources at the end of the book, I think that speech is going to stick with me for a long time. I think it's incredibly moving and really helps me think some about the present moment as well. So I wonder if you could talk some about the context, when and where and how Frederick Douglass is giving this speech, and you mentioned earlier that you no longer have this view that things were like back to zero at the end of Reconstruction, which is really what I think Frederick Douglass is saying, that progress is still happening, even in the sort of bleak moments where it's clear that the federal government is not going to keep ensuring that civil rights for Black Americans are upheld.

Dr. Kate Masur  40:28  
Yeah, I was so amazed to to find this speech. I mean, I didn't find like discover it. But what happened was I was one of the more central storylines in the book. Is about a woman named Jennie Dean, who was born enslaved in the 1850s near Manassas battlefield. And she ended up, her parents were, you know, agricultural workers, and she ended up going to Washington, DC for some of her education. She was a Baptist sort of believer, and she went back to the more rural area around Manassas too and founded Sunday schools, and then got more and more involved in education, and decided that she wanted to found a school for kids who had finished elementary school. And it was sort of it was called Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, and it would be a kind of industrial junior high, high school because Black children in that area didn't have access to education beyond elementary school. And she did all of this fundraising for the school locally. She went north to fundraise. She went to women's rights convention to fundraise, and eventually, the school opened on Labor Day weekend of 1894, and I read that Frederick Douglass gave the opening address, and I was kind of like, "Oh, I wonder what he said. And also how amazing." I mean, it is very cool. By then he was pretty elderly. He was definitely, like, the kind of most famous, most prominent Black American of his era. So I the speech itself was published in the newspapers. And it I found it. I mean, it's in a couple different places, but for example, in the digitized papers of Frederick Douglass at the Library of Congress. And it is truly a remarkable speech. And he is, again, he's sort of an older man reflecting on what it means that a school for Black children is being opened in Manassas, right near the battlefield where the First and Second Battles of Bull Run were fought. And he begins by talking about having been born enslaved, escaping from slavery, what his life was like earlier in his life. And then he talks about, I mean, he talks about all kinds of things, but he talks about the importance of education, and he he talks about the significance of the fact that this school is being built in Virginia, on the site of battles where Virginians were fighting to preserve his people in bondage, and now, with the approval of prominent white Virginians from that community, a Black woman is opening a school. Jennie Dean is opening her school for Black children and and then he says, like, "I know you young people want to know, like, should we be really worried? Should we feel hopeless in this time?" And this is 1894 it's after the failure of the Lodge Bill that's kind of last gasp of an effort to try to enforce Black voting rights in the south. It's after the beginning the Mississippi State Constitution that disenfranchises Black men, that other states will follow suit and do the same. And so there's a lot of reasons to be very pessimistic about the future for Black Americans at that time. And he says, "You know, I know things look really bleak in a lot of ways, but also, there's no other time that I would rather be alive than right now," and and he's, I think part of why I really liked it, I really wanted to use this speech, is because he's talking to young people, and I think it also captures some of the generational differences that like are so were obviously prevalent then and are now, right where, like younger people are saying, we're screwed, you know, like, this is horrible and, and they may be right. And older people are saying, I've lived a long time. Like we've seen bad things. We've seen good things. Like, have hope, you got to keep, you know, kind of moving forward and living in the situation that you're living in. So, yeah. So anyway, it's, it was really I, as you could see, I used it in a scene in the graphic history. I talked about it in the intro, and I put most of the speech, it's a very long speech, but most of it is published as one of the eight documents at the end.

Teddy  44:32  
Okay, so we're nearing the end of the episode, so we'd like to know how the listeners can get your book.

Dr. Kate Masur  44:41  
Oh, well, the book is available at wherever you like to buy your books. You can order it through UNC Press. You can order it through bookshop.org, your favorite independent bookstore, and it's just yeah, on sale at a bookseller near you.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:56  
And I would strongly recommend that people buy copies for their kids' classrooms.

Dr. Kate Masur  45:01  
So Teddy, I think the original idea in the park service definition of the project was the book was geared toward people ages like 15 to 35, but I noticed on the other places are saying it's sort of like age 12 and up. I mean, I think part of what they're trying to convey is it's not for like, six year olds, right? It's not a kind of pow, pow, bam, you know, or, you know, there are a lot of words in this book, but I'm wondering how you, as someone who is almost 13, read this book, what you thought of it as a person of your generation and age?

Teddy  45:34  
Well, I think it was quite well constructed. I think it was, like, really easy to follow. I think it's really nice how you put the sections together, like there's, it's clear cut, which what you're reading about right then. And it, you know, being a graphical novel, it provides a nice way to sort of visualize what is happening then, without having to read a bunch of words, which people of my age might not want to do. 

Dr. Kate Masur  46:00  
Could you say more? I'm just curious. Could you say more about how the illustrations like, what, what is it? How would you describe what it feels like to see illustrations of a period in the past in American history?

Teddy  46:14  
Well, I mean, like I said, it really helps to visualize what was going on there, what what it looked like to be in that era, what people wore, what people dress like, what people looked like in general, for example, what people dressed like when they were going, when they were writing speeches. Ida B. Wells is in like a dress of the time. So instead of thinking about someone in maybe a view that is not historically accurate that you have in your mind, you kind of get to think more about what they would would have actually looked like. And I'm sure you researched what they actually looked like to be more accurate. 

Dr. Kate Masur  46:51  
Yeah, that's interesting. So in a way, it emphasizes like how the past is different from the present. They don't really look the same. They don't dress the same as we do. They don't wear their hair the same as we do things like that.  One more question for you. Do you, could you imagine this in being assigned or being part of a like history class at school? 

Teddy  47:12  
Definitely, yeah. I think this would be a great thing for history class.

Dr. Kate Masur  47:16  
Well, that's cool. Here's hoping. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and we envisioned it as for general readers of kind, of all ages, but also with the possibility that it could be used in in teaching. And by the way, there's in the book, there's a QR code toward the end where you, if you scan that QR code, it will take you to a UNC Press website, where there are curricular materials designed for teachers. So we're really, I'm really excited to have that as part of the book. I worked with two teachers from Homewood Flossmoor High School in the south suburbs of Chicago to create those materials.

Kelly Therese Pollock  47:50  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Kate Masur  47:53  
I guess the one thing that I really like to talk about about this book that didn't come up is how I feel like the graphic history format allowed a lot of opportunities to talk about women and women's history. And so, you know, you mentioned, Teddy, Ida B Wells. I mean, she's certainly in it. She's a very prominent figure. But also some of the ways that focusing on representing people's everyday lives after slavery allowed in ways that I didn't anticipate before I started working on the book, really allowed us to delve into the lives of women, whether it was women as mothers, women creating organizations like a burial society or Women's Club organizations. And so I just really appreciated, in the end, it felt like something that was a little bit like writing itself. But the ways that women's lives really came to the fore alongside men, it because, I think it was partly because of the genre of the graphic history that kind of allowed that to happen.

Kelly Therese Pollock  48:59  
Kate, thank you so much for joining us. This has just been great, and I really love the book.

Dr. Kate Masur  49:04  
Thank you so much. It's been really fun talking with you guys.

Teddy  50:01  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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