In her debut memoir, Dionne Ford takes readers along for an emotional ride as she crisscrosses the country to find her enslaved ancestors—and herself.

The day Dionne Ford turned 38 years old, she came across an old “family” photo on the internet, a picture she’d never seen before. It shows her great-great-grandfather Colonel W. R. Stuart, a wealthy Louisiana cotton broker; his wife, Elizabeth; Ford’s great-great-grandmother Tempy Burton, who was given to the Stuarts by Elizabeth’s parents as a wedding present; and two biracial-looking young women, assumed to be Tempy and the Colonel’s children.

The discovery prompted Ford to embark on a yearslong journey from New Jersey to Louisiana to Virginia and back again, searching for clues into the life of Tempy and her six children, plus whoever else she could find to uncover (and understand) her roots. Last April, she published Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, a compact yet expansive look at her trek back in time to search for her family history. And a trek it was.

“If you are going to look for your enslaved ancestors,” Ford writes in the book’s prologue, “you will have to look for the people who enslaved them. … This is a study in contrasts. Shadow. Light. Black. White. Joy. Pain. Victim. Perpetrator. You will find ephemera—editorials, photographs, wedding announcements—and atrocities—lynched uncles, your people as property in someone’s will, deed, or mortgage guarantee. You will also find the living— third cousins once removed, fifth cousins straight up, and descendants of the family that forced your family into slavery.”

The book’s title refers to a kind of pilgrimage, called sankofa by the Akan people of Western Africa. “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” writes Ford, who earned a B.A. in communications and media studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1991 and an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University in 2016. As she digs deep into the 19th century, she also contends with personal trauma: the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a close relative and the alcoholism that helped her cope. And she evokes a riot of emotion for readers, perhaps particularly Black readers, as she grapples with the history of slavery and the ways in which its aftermath affects generation after generation.

At the beginning of the book, you talk a bit about wanting your older daughter, Desiree, to embrace her roots. Did she? How did your research affect her, your other daughter, Devany, and your husband, Dennis?
This definitely affected my family. I took my girls with me on research trips, so they were a part of this journey. I do think that they both had a certain pride in just knowing about this side of their family’s history, and particularly about the enslaved women.

My cousin made this game for the kids to play that had all the ancestors on cards, and everybody always wanted to be Tempy. I felt like they already were positively internalizing their female ancestors’ lives. I think it’s always grounding for people to know as full a story as possible.

Throughout the book, you write about how language can fall short when you’re doing this kind of research—and writing about it. What advice would you give to other Black people who want to investigate their own family history? How should they get started?
Talk to your elders. Find a respectful way to let them know that you’re interested in your shared history, and you’d like to set aside time to just ask them some questions about it. They’re gone before we know it, so it’s so important.

Then get yourself some kind of group because it’s painful and hard if you’re dealing with people who were enslaved or oppressed, so working with other people who are also in earnest, who can be a support to you and you can support them, is great. The group AfriGeneas is for people who are of African descent. And if you also can find a research partner in your family, that’s really wonderful. Don’t be in a hurry, and be open-minded because you’re probably going to find a lot of things that you didn’t expect—and maybe that you didn’t want to, either.

Beyond personal reasons, why did you write this book?
James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In my experience, not only can nothing be changed until it’s faced, but somehow the more I try to avoid a thing, the more power it has over me. Something fundamentally shifted in me through this process of confronting my family’s history and my own. So, by organizing my experience into a narrative, I hoped to offer that to readers: the possibility for some fundamental shift by facing whatever it is in their life they would rather avoid.

Is there a particular ancestor that you now feel most connected with as a result of your research?

How did you choose what research to cite and discuss?
I chose to include things, in the end, that were specific to my story—if they were specific to Louisiana slavery, women in slavery, or my own story—but it was hard.

For example, I kept From Slavery to Freedom, [John Hope Franklin’s classic history of African Americans], because it dealt with the Sterling family, who had enslaved some of my family. There were so many wonderful texts that did help me get a better understanding.

What would you say has been the most unexpected response to your memoir?
I have had a couple of strangers—and friends, too— say that they really appreciated me talking about the sexual abuse. One woman, in particular, said that had happened to her and that after she read my book, she actually sought out a survivors group and went for the first time in her life. That was very humbling and moving, and I felt so grateful that anything that I could write might actually help somebody find a bit more peace or serenity.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on adapting my book into a limited series. There are things you can do visually that you can’t do on the page—things that I didn’t feel comfortable doing because it was a memoir, and I really wanted to stick to as much of the truth that I was able to back up as possible. Now I’m having a little bit more fun and envisioning what it would’ve been like for them living at that time. I’m also going back to the novel that I was supposed to write as my MFA thesis at NYU but had ditched so I could work on my memoir.

I’m a member of the New Jersey Reparations Council, too. The state has been dragging its feet on passing a bill to just study reparations, so the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice just said, “You know what? We’re not waiting for you. You guys take too long. We’re convening our own council.” And they invited me to participate. I’m really excited.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sierra McCleary-Harris is an associate editor of this magazine.

“I don’t quite remember where I had learned about prejudice and discrimination for the first time, but I didn’t understand it and I kept asking my mom, ‘Why do people treat people differently because of the way they look?’” she said, “And she couldn’t give me the answers.”

“What she did was, she kept supplying me with books, so I was reading biographies of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, and all kinds of people who have experienced prejudice and oppression and fought to overcome it. That really stuck with me.”

In April, Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies chose Schmidt, a 2021 graduate of Loyola University, as the second winner of its New Scholars essay contest. For her paper “’Regulations for Our Black People’: Reconstructing the Experiences of Enslaved People in the United States through Jesuit Records” (International Symposium on Jesuit Studies, March 2021), Schmidt was awarded a $1,500 cash prize.

“It’s quite an honor for my work to be recognized in this way. It’s so important that this award is promoting new scholarship that focuses on underrepresented and marginalized groups in Catholic history,” said Schmidt, who is the research coordinator for the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, a joint initiative of the Society of Jesus and St. Louis University.

The research is in some ways the pinnacle of an academic career that began with the books her mother gave her. In high school, Schmidt worked as a volunteer and employee at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati and served as a community-engaged fellow at Xavier University as an undergraduate.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in history and classics, she knew she wanted to be a historian of slavery and African American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in public history. The Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, which was created in 2016 as a way to explore the Jesuits’ connections to slavery, was a natural fit, she said.

“Knowing how much the Jesuits had shaped me, I knew I needed to understand more. I had to understand what enslaved people’s lives were like with the Jesuits, and how the Jesuits justified holding people in slavery in their religious context and their mission,” she said.

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology at Fordham, said what made Schmidt’s work stand out was the way she expanded the scope of sources to tell the story of enslaved people.

“The great thing about this work is not only that it exposes a world that we’ve had a very difficult time seeing through the historical record,” he said. “But it’s also such a meticulous and creative way of reading records [bills of sale, sacramental records, correspondence between Jesuits]that ostensibly don’t really have anything to do with what she’s interested in exploring, which is the lives of enslaved Catholics people.”

Seitz noted that Schmidt’s research is in keeping with a broader national reckoning.

“With the rest of the country, Jesuit institutions more broadly are having a movement when more and more people are agreeing that it’s time to come to terms more honestly and in a more transparent way with painful histories, including Jesuit ownership of slaves. Kelly’s work is remarkable in helping this effort,” he said.

“She provides a foundation for the kinds of work that needs to be done for reconciliation, healing, and reparation, which is a long road.”

In addition, he said that Schmidt exhibited a spirit of generosity in the paper by laying out a roadmap for future scholars who might want to replicate the research.

“She’s been through all these many, many layers of papers that are scattered and diffuse. She doesn’t just hide that; she talks about the process in this essay, and in talking about the process, she provides a great gift to her fellow scholars in the future who may want to do something similar, to recreate this hidden world,” he said.

For Schmidt, the process of researching the lives of those enslaved by Jesuits in the South and Midwest was both challenging and inspiring.

“I felt challenged in my faith, seeing exploitation that happened to people through the church, but then, as I learned more and more about the enslaved people I was studying, I was just continuously blown away by how resilient they were in their faith, and how even their enslavement to Catholic slaveholders didn’t stop them,” she said.

“They were so committed to their faith and using it to uplift themselves and push for the way things ought to be.”

The larger lesson, she said, is that all history is interconnected, and one can’t simply go to the archives and find one box labeled “slavery” and learn the full story of the past.

“We have to look far and wide to piece together the story, and we have to look past different dioceses and religious orders. Slavery wasn’t isolated to one institution, so you have to look through state records, local records,” she said.

“Doing it, we pieced together the lived experiences of enslaved people whose stories haven’t been told.”

The grants, which are for $60,000 and will last for 12 months, will allow both of them to undertake ambitious new research projects.

Translated Texts of the Church Fathers

Bruce, a professor of history, will use his grant to launch The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition, a massive cataloging project that could take as long as a decade to complete.

His research revolves around monastic communities that thrived during the Middle Ages. To understand people who lived then, scholars rely on texts written in medieval Latin. Up until now, texts from that time that are translated from other languages into Latin have been overlooked, he said.

He’s identified over 90 authors who’ve been translated from Greek into Latin. Many were Christian authors who wrote mainly about theology, church doctrine, and heresy. These “patristics,” as they’re known, were considered “church fathers” at the time.

“While there have been studies on the Greek church fathers and the writing they’ve done in Greek, there’s been almost no study of how those works were translated into Latin, and how those Latin texts were read and understood in medieval Europe,” Bruce said.

“People just think ‘Oh well, it’s just a translation, and it can’t be that important. What can it really tell us?’ But the fact that people went to the pains of translating Greek into Latin and continued to read and copy these texts over the course of the Middle Ages is important.”

Since there is currently no centralized catalogue that researchers can use to access these texts, Bruce wants to create one from scratch. He’s already begun the work compiling and writing entries with help from Kasey Fausak, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate in Medieval History, who is supported by a professional development grant from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The N.E.H. has been really generous in providing funding for this. It’s basically ground work humanities—going into the manuscripts, finding texts, and presenting them in a way that’s legible and will foster future research,” he said.

Slavery in the Atlantic World

For Miki, an associate professor of history, the grant will give her time to write Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery, a book about illegal slavery in the 19th-century Atlantic World that she has been working on for several years. The project, which she described during a 2018 research seminar at the Rose Hill campus, is a narrative history of the slave trade of Brazil in the mid-1800s that punctures the idea that slavery was primarily a United States-based phenomenon that was abandoned by then, with the triumph of abolitionist movements.

“Not only do we mostly hear about the U.S. South instead of Brazil or Cuba, but the U.S. North is often considered the place of liberty, where fugitives traveling on the underground railroad fled to,” she said.

“But if you look at illegal slave trade records, it turns out that a lot of the financing for [the ships that carried slaves]  came from New York City and Boston.”

Dispelling myths about slavery is something Miki has a lot of experience with. Her last book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), tackled common perceptions of slavery in Brazil. Last year, the American Historical Association awarded it the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history.

“I’m interested in questioning these big stories that we take for granted,” she said.

The narrative of Brazilian Atlantic will center around the Mary E. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured in Brazil in 1856, she said. It will be a character-driven book modeled somewhat on Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, (Vintage, 1994). The challenge, she said, is figuring out a way to weave together stories of characters as disparate as the slave ship’s captain, the financiers, and the enslaved passengers, most of whom were never accurately identified in the manifest of the Mary E. Smith.

As a historian, she said, it is her responsibility to resist the desire to write a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

“We want a clean arc of a story that’s satisfying. But those of us who work in the history of slavery know we can’t get that. The archives are full of gaps, because the people who sold slaves saw them as merchandise,” she said.

“Rather than glossing over them to try to tell a story that goes from point A to point B in the end, I want to write something that also captures those questions. If you’re making a jacket or a dress, do you only see the outside of the beautiful clothes? What if you actually saw the craftsmanship, the seams and how things are made? Maybe making those things visible is part of the process. These processes are important to understanding slavery itself.”

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and the works resulting from the grants do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation

Dionne Ford was 12 years old in the 1980s when her grandfather revealed a surprising fact: Her great-great-grandfather was a white man, a pecan farmer named W.R. Stuart, and her great-great-grandmother Tempy was a black woman who “worked” on Stuart’s Mississippi plantation. Decades later, while researching her family history, Ford, a veteran journalist, met descendants of her great-great-grandmother’s enslavers.

The experience led her to join Coming to the Table, an organization that unites people seeking to “heal from … slavery and from the many forms of racism it spawned.” In Slavery’s Descendants, Ford and Jill Strauss present essays by Coming to the Table members—including descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved—that “uncover truths that challenge our understanding of history,” they write, and provide a bridge “to engage in the more thoughtful conversations these topics require.”

Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK, and Castro
by Thomas Maier, FCRH ’78 (Skyhorse)

Longtime Newsday investigative reporter Thomas Maier describes one of the most unsettling spy stories in U.S. history: In the early 1960s, the CIA enlisted Hollywood and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in an effort to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Using sources including recently declassified files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Maier provides a fresh account of this “unholy marriage of the CIA and the Mafia.” It’s a vivid, sometimes stranger-than-fiction tale that ensnares Kennedy, Cuban-exile commandos in Miami, and entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. And it’s a tale that resonates today, Maier writes, “when the difference between truth and lies is never so apparent,” and when “Americans fear their trusted institutions could again go astray.”

Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age
by John Sexton, Ph.D., FCRH ’63, GSAS ’65, ’78 (Yale University Press)

Growing up in the 1950s, John Sexton knew Catholicism as a set of simple rules that “guaranteed eventual eternal life in heaven,” he writes. This reductive view changed after the Second Vatican Council, which prompted greater understanding among Catholicism and other faiths. Civic discourse, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with a close-minded “secular dogmatism” taking hold—and posing a challenge for higher education, he argues.

In Standing for Reason, Sexton, president emeritus of New York University, describes how universities can lead the way back toward reasoned dialogue. “If even in the realm of religion, where division has run so deep for so long, a spirit of union can be forged,” he writes, “surely it must be possible to bring together citizens united by a common flag, and perhaps someday even by a common humanity.”

Freedomland U.S.A.: The Definitive History
by Michael R. Virgintino, FCRH ’79 (Theme Park Press)

“Mommy and Daddy, take my hand, take me out to Freedomland!” So went the promotional jingle for the “Disneyland of the East,” a theme park built in 1960 in the Baychester section of the Bronx. Conceived by C.V. Wood, an engineer who had helped build Disneyland, the park was shaped like a map of the United States and designed to tell the country’s mythic history. There was even a futuristic Satellite City, with its Moon Bowl, where Louis Armstrong and many other musicians performed. The park was ultimately doomed: Developers’ “overriding objective,” Michael Virgintino writes, was to use the site “to build Co-op City, the largest cooperative housing development in the world.”

New York moved forward with that plan after the park filed for bankruptcy in 1964. In Freedomland U.S.A., Virgintino offers a breezy look at this little-known piece of New York City history.

Those were just a few of the suggestions two Fordham history professors shared at a lunch seminar, where they shared preliminary findings from ongoing research projects.

The seminar, which featured Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., and Yuko Miki, Ph.D., both associate professors of history, was held on Dec. 4 in the Walsh Library’s O’Hare Special Collections room at Rose Hill. The informal lunchtime gathering of scholars and doctoral students was sponsored by the O’Connell Initiative for the Global History of Capitalism, which aims to broaden the ways in which capitalism is understood.

The History of U.S. Energy Policy

Dietrich, the author of Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), spoke about a project he’s been working on about U.S. foreign oil policy and domestic culture in the 20th century.

Talking to students about his research on oil policy during that time period, he said the common thread of the era is policymakers’ feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.

He broke the century into three eras. From 1910-45, the United States rose as a global power. The years between 1945-1973, on the other hand, were a period in which temporary measures adopted during World War II became permanent.   

“That permanency of a total economy always being protected by an advanced military posture is something I’m concerned with,” he said.

From 1973 to the present day, he said American power in the Middle East has been less focused on infrastructure, and more focused on finance.

“Within that broad story, there are a million smaller stories, and part of what the O’Connell Initiative allowed me to do was dig in a bunch places for those smaller stories,” he said.

One of the archives he visited was the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. Although he was primarily interested in Bush’s thought process leading up to the 1990 war with Iraq, he also looked at the journal Bush kept when he was ambassador to the United Nations from 1971to 1973.

“I like to do personal history and intellectual and ideological work on the background of actors before they become principal movers in the story, and I was interested just to see if Bush said anything about third-world solidarity, sovereignty at the time,” he said.

The Unspoken Truths of Slavery

Miki, the author of Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), shared the ways she is expanding her research into slavery the Iberian Atlantic with visits to archives in Lisbon, Portugal, among other places.

Slavery that took place even after it was outlawed is a good place to center a critique of capitalism, because England and the United States, which were ascendant at the time, could not have made progress without it.

“So many of the narratives about slavery that we study are of the 19th century as the age of emancipation. It’s a very liberal triumphalist narrative where we all seem to be forming a western world where liberty triumphs over slavery,” she said, noting that in fact, a staggering amount of illegal slavery still took place at the time.

The Mary B. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured on January 20, 1865, is a perfect example, she said. Brazil had won its independence in 1822, but its legitimacy rested on England’s recognition that it had abolished slavery. The capture of the Mary B. Smith was celebrated in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as proof of this change.

To understand Brazilian slavery, one needs to include its former colonial master, Portugal. When Miki did research there, she found what purported to be a manifest from the Mary B. Smith, with the names, ages, and genders of the 500 slaves who were “liberated” when the ship was captured.

“At first you think, ‘I have a list of the people on the ship. Maybe there’s a potential to write a history of these people.’” she said.

“But then you look at when they died: the 3rd of February, the 4th of February. Every person is dead. What do you do with a list of people who are liberated, but are already dead?”

The list was beautifully crafted, even though it detailed horrific suffering. That was the first clue that there was more to the list than met the eye, she said. Then there was the issue of the timing of the list’s creation, shortly before the slaves all perished.

“If you’re dying, you don’t speak Portuguese, you’re terrified, you’re barely alive, how does someone create this list?” she said.

Miki determined that a Brazilian official made up names and ages for real people who had died on the ship. By doing so, she said, he hoped to demonstrate that the country was serious about ending slavery, even it meant acknowledging those who were already dead.

It shows why scholars of capitalism need be more skeptical of the way they rely on merchant ledgers as a resource, she said. Sometimes, an “archive of liberation,” such as the one she discovered, is merely a mask for unimaginable agony.

“You need to account for the suffering. You can’t just make it a footnote to the success of antislavery,” she said.

The O’Connell Initiative in the Global History of Capitalism, which is supported by a gift Robert J. O’Connell, FCRH ’65, brings together scholars of every aspect of capitalism, from its earliest medieval manifestations to its global reach today. In addition to groundbreaking research, it supports lectures, debates, and workshops.

Grace Yen Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of Chinese history and director of graduate studies in history, said the monthly O’Connell Initiative gatherings have the given members of her department a new way to connect with each other.

The word “global” is often used to reference phenomena such as global warming, she said, or it’s used as a code word for non-western countries. In contrast, the initiative has helped history scholars see how European or American subjects like the Crusades or the American Revolution are very much part of a larger, worldwide system of monetary exchange.

For students, there’s also real value in hearing faculty talk about how they work in archives, she said.

The rededication, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the site, which contains the remains of more than 419 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries in a portion of what was the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent, some free, most enslaved.

It will feature talks, tours, film screenings, dance, drum and vocal performances, and a street fair.

Laurie Lambert, Ph.D., assistant professor of African and African-American Studies, said the monument is a powerful reminder to New Yorkers that slavery was not exclusively the province of Southern states. Key parts of the Big Apple, in fact, owe their existence to the labor of Africans and their descendants.

“Many people know that enslaved Africans helped build the structure of the White House. In New York, there are cases of that, but we also have to pay attention to where the financing came to actually produce certain businesses and certain buildings,” she said.

“Even if they weren’t involved in the physical building of something, what kind of economic benefit did their labor produce that helped to produce some of these things? Part of what we miss out on is how that legacy of enslaved labor works in terms of building our economy.”

Sandra Arnold, PCS ’13, founder of the Periwinkle Humanities Initiative and the National Burial Database of Enslaved Americans, said the site, which is the first and so far only burial ground of enslaved people to be made into national monument, is a testament to what can be done when disparate partners, from the City and citizens of New York to Howard University, work together.

“Many times when people think of slavery, they only think of the African American experience, but what I love about the story of the African Burial Ground in downtown Manhattan is, people from all walks of life, all nationalities, all backgrounds, were involved in saving it, and they were all involved in making sure it was recognized as a national monument,” she said.

Tuesday, Oct. 3
11 a.m. Opening ceremony and spiritual blessings
2 p.m. Fusha dance performance

Wednesday, Oct. 4
11 a.m. Film screening: African Burial Ground: An American Discovery Living Historians 

Thursday, Oct. 5
10:30 a.m. Memorial talk and tour, African drumming, cultural lectures
7 p.m. Panel discussion

Friday, Oct. 6
11 a.m. Fusha dance performance
12 p.m. Redhawk Native American Council dance
12 p.m. Memorial talk and tour
1 p.m. Eclectic Butterfly performance

Saturday, Oct. 7
10:30 am Family day street fair
11:30 a.m. Universal Dance and Drum ensemble performance
12 p.m. Uptown Dance Academy performance
1 p.m. Cumbe Dance/Drum Storytelling workshop
2 p.m. Spoken work by Verbal Artisan
2:45 p.m. Ernest Johnson vocal performance
3 p.m. Fusha dance performance

For more information, visit www.nps.gov/afbg

Father Anderson believes himself to be a member of the last category.

“Within my family, I’m convinced that my maternal great-grandfather was a person of color,” he said, adding that two years ago he found out that his descendants owned slaves.

“That’s the story of the South. Black families know it and can see it, but white families pretend it never touched them.”

A Revelation Back Home

Father Anderson’s revelation occurred during a trip to his native New Orleans in 2015, when he took his parents to visit the nearby Whitney Plantation Museum. Unlike many plantation museums, the Whitney doesn’t celebrate the “genteel South,” but focuses on the history and experience of slavery, he said. While reading about the plantation’s founding family, he came across a familiar name: Haydel. It is the same name as his mother’s descendants. And the family members, it turned out, are his direct ancestors.

John Cummings, the museum’s owner, took Father Anderson and his family on a tour of the grounds, where the two began a discussion about the Catholic Church’s social justice values and its history with slavery. The discussion eventually evolved into a challenge via a question from Cummings to Anderson: What are the Jesuits and the Catholic Church doing to help right the past wrongs of slavery?

“Because I was the descendent of a slave-owning family, and because John Cummings challenged me and asked ‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to do an academic project that raised the questions he asked. I can’t change the world, but I can, in my own small way, raise the consciousness of Catholics regarding race relations.”

Father Anderson organized a symposium, Slavery on the Cross, held this past April at Fordham. He said that the speakers at the conference addressed the questions directly, but also took the issues of slavery, segregation, and bigotry beyond the local level and examined them as a national and international issue as well.

With the conference fresh in his mind, this past June Father Anderson went to South Africa to continue his research on the Catholic Church’s response to the nation’s apartheid in the post-World-War-II years. (He’s been doing research in South Africa every year since 2004.) There, Catholicism is a minority religion in what is primarily a Protestant country, a dynamic that Father Anderson could relate to, having grown up as a Catholic in the mostly Protestant city of Atlanta, Georgia.

South African Parallels 

He examined how South Africa’s governing National Party attempted to control the education of the black population through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. After the act was passed, black South Africans’ educational opportunities were restricted, he said. The government, in effect, only allowed blacks to receive an education that was comparable to, say, what would be the 4th or 5th-grade level in the United States. Very few black South Africans continued on to secondary or tertiary levels.

“The government did not want the Native peoples to get the idea that they would follow the same educational track as the Europeans, a track that prepared them for college,” he said. “There was no way they were going to be allowed to be equals.”

The ban was a seminal event for the Catholic Church because its mission in South Africa was anchored in “evangelization through education,” he said. The government forced missionaries operating schools (both Protestants and Catholics) to take a stand: Either give up control of their educational institutions or assume full financial responsibility for them. Up to this point in time, the faith-based schools had received government subsidies.

The Catholic Church would not relinquish control of its mission-based schools, said Father Anderson. It continued to support educating the black population until it became financially unsustainable in the mid-1960s.

The result of those educational restrictions, said Father Anderson, was the creation of a “permanent underclass” that will take several generations to undo.

Navigating Faith as a Minority

“What drew me to South Africa is that Catholics were a minority in a Protestant world. I’m interested in questions of how believers navigate in that world. What do you do when you know you’re not really welcome?” Furthermore, “how does a religious body practice what it preaches in an inhospitable environment? Does it follow its precepts and teachings, or does it compromise? And if it compromises, how does it justify doing so?”

He said his love of the Catholic Church, his Jesuit foundation, his experience living as a Catholic among Protestants in Atlanta,, and his recent discoveries about his own ancestry have allowed him to look more deeply at the race question and what it means to be an outsider. He continues to probe difficult questions as they relate to places and institutions he cares most about, particularly the Church and its role in matters of slavery, segregation, and apartheid.

“Racial identity is a construct, so regardless of one’s racial background, the one unifying factor is Catholicism,” he said. “One of the precepts of the Church is the unity of the human race, because we’re all children of God. If you accept that, then there’s no room for separation or segregation. That is the antithesis of Catholic thought.”

“Why? Because we kicked them under the bus in 1863,” Cummings said, noting the year slavery ended. “Do we have a moral responsibility? Jesus Christ says so. Don’t you think so?”

Moreover, Cummings wants to know “What are [we]going to do about it?”

Cummings will be the keynote speaker at an April 1 symposium to be held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus titled, “Slavery on the Cross: Catholics and the ‘Peculiar Institution,’ Praxis and Practice.” He said he will discuss the same question with academics and activists sitting on three separate panels.

Bentley Anderson, S.J., associate professor of history and associate chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, which is co-hosting the event, said that the keynote talk will be preceded by two morning panels that will contextualize the topic, and followed by an afternoon panel that will address its legacy.

“We’ve invited scholars who deal with questions of race and religion from the past and into the present,” he said. “And we’ll have folks from the New York region who are actually putting their faith into practice by addressing issues of systemic racism.”

For Cummings, addressing the legacy of racism has become the culmination of a life’s work. After earning a law degree from Loyola University New Orleans and practicing for several years, he purchased a sugar cane plantation near New Orleans as an investment. But as he began to delve into the plantation’s history, he said he was shocked by his own ignorance of the institution of slavery.

Today, the Whitney Plantation is the nation’s first museum fully dedicated to the history of slavery, said Cummings. The plantation now celebrates the strength of the men and women who toiled in its fields, and it displays a wide variety historic items relating to slavery.

An Irish Catholic who had a modest upbringing in New Orleans, Cummings said his own working class family has no direct lineage to slave owners. But he believes all Americans must contend with the legacy.

“We’re all recovering racists because we were raised in this place,” he said.

Father Anderson, who also grew up in New Orleans, said he met Cummings when he toured the plantation with his parents. The two began a discussion about the church’s history with slavery, in which Father Anderson said Cummings did indeed ask him “What are you going to do about it?”

The April 1 symposium evolved from that conversation, said Father Anderson.

“He challenged me on a faith level and academic level, and what I can do is bring people together to discuss, reflect, and act,” said Father Anderson.

Cummings said he struggles on a personal level with the moral conundrum of the church’s role in slavery. He hopes the symposium will raise consciousness among contemporary Americans that, although they may not bear the responsibility for slavery, they must take responsibility for its legacy.

“We have put slavery in the rearview mirror,” he said. “It was done on someone else’s watch—not so far back we can’t see it—but we have to look forward and find out what our obligation is to its descendants.”

The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Corrigan Conference Center.

Participants:
Thomas Murphy, S.J., Seattle University
M. Shawn Copeland, Ph.D., Boston College
Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., Fordham University
James O’Toole, Ph.D., Boston College
John Cummings, Whitney Plantation Museum
Albert Holtz, O.S.B., Newark Abbey – Newak, NJ
Gregory Chisholm, S.J., St. Charles Borromeo – Harlem, NY
Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R., Xavier University of Louisiana Institute
Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Ph.D., Fordham University

Co-sponsored by: Theology Dept., Political Science Dept., Philosophy Dept., Communication and Media Studies, Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, The Jesuits of Fordham University.

As a child, Wills looked up to her father and, although she didn’t know much about him, enjoyed her life with her family growing up in Rockaway Beach. When her father was killed in a motorcycle accident when she was thirteen, Wills began to wonder about the man she never knew and kept her curiosities with her until her adulthood, when she finally had the resources to learn about her family.

“My father was always a mystery to me, even though he was such a strong force in my youth,” said Wills. “I wanted to find out where he came from— and by learning about him, I wanted to learn more about myself.”

By using Ancestry.com and other resources, Wills found out that her great-great-great grandfather Sandy Wills was born a slave and fought for his freedom during the Civil War in the U.S Colored Troops. Discovering this connection, said Wills, was the validation she had been looking for as a child.

“To me, as a journalist, this was breaking news!” she said. “I had to find out more.”

After requesting more than 1,000 government records, she was able to piece together the life of her Grandpa Sandy and used it as an inspiration to write two books, Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale (Bascom Hill Publishing Group, 2011) and The Emancipation of Grandpa Sandy Wills (Lightswitch Learning, 2015), a children’s book.

“He did not let the world define him. He stood up and fought for what he wanted,” said Wills. “I want children to know that they can do the same in their own lives.”

Wills now travels to schools across the country speaking about her family’s history. She wants children to understand the fight that led to civil rights and free education for all people. She also wants to empower them to learn about their ancestors and become part of their own family narrative.

“Tracing your history and knowing who you are brings your life full circle. It completes you in a way that is hard to express,” said Wills. “It’s worth it.”

The evening was also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of GSE’s Center for Educational Partnerships and its director Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D.

Batisti was given the President’s Meritory Service Award for her dedication to improving the educational environment to over 100,000 children in New York. She has raised over $200 million for New York City schools.

The Center for Educational Partnerships is a “research-based, outcome-oriented” initiative that works to enable all children to achieve and succeed academically.

—Mary Awad

Although the collages are striking, the sites themselves seem unremarkable: A hair salon, a burger joint, street corners, churches, and other locales bear little to no trace of their fraught past. Some of the titles, however, underscore Ruble’s concern with the “ways we remember—and forget—the charged events of our country’s turbulent history of race relations,” she writes. A Jersey City sidewalk scene, for instance, is called Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible.

Ruble, who has taught in Fordham’s visual arts department since 2001, created the collages over the past few years. She first showed them last fall at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and again this past winter at the Foley Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She spoke with FORDHAM magazine via email in April.

As you researched these sites, did you learn anything that surprised you or ran counter to your sense of New Jersey’s place in U.S. history?

Oh my gosh, yes! I’d always known that the North’s relationship to slavery was a complicated one, but one thing that really surprised me was that New Jersey was known as the “slave state of the North.” In 1846, it enacted an abolition law that freed all black children born after its passage but designated the state’s remaining slaves as “apprentices for life.” Eighteen of these “apprentices” still remained in 1860, making New Jersey the last Northern state to enslave people. I was also surprised by just how few white Northerners supported the Underground Railroad.

Did you have a hard time finding and getting access to safe-house locations?

It’s ironic—in its day, the Underground Railroad was a highly unpopular movement among Northern whites, and also highly illegal, of course. Participants had to operate in secrecy. Today, on the other hand, it’s held up as evidence of our country’s inherent morality, and everyone with a trap door or passageway in the basement likes to speculate that their home was part of the effort to help fugitives escape. I didn’t have a hard time finding or getting access to the safe-house locations—what was harder was actually confirming that they were genuine. 

Which riot locations did you depict in the series?

The state had five major race riots—in Jersey City, Paterson, Newark, Plainfield, and Asbury Park. They all happened in the 1960s, except for Asbury Park, which took place on Independence Day, 1970. When I first began this series, I’d planned to depict the place where the riots “started.” But that quickly grew complicated as I got further into my research. Was the “start” of the riot the street corner where the first brick or Molotov cocktail was thrown? Or was it where the precipitating event occurred—for instance, where the Newark police arrested and brutally beat a black cab driver who’d done nothing more than pass a double-parked squad car? Identifying where something supposedly began is freighted with judgments about guilt and responsibility. Looking at the longer arc of history, you can easily make the case that all of the riots actually began with the original violence of slavery—there’s a direct line from slavery to Jim Crow to the uprisings of the civil rights era, which were a response to centuries of horrific brutality.

Tell me about Everyone here is aware of what has happened but they also want to forget as quickly as possible. Why did you choose that title for the piece?

All of the pieces that depict riot sites are titled with sentences taken from contemporaneous newspaper reports of the incidents. That particular sentence struck me not only as having an obvious connection to the feelings of the time but also as symbolizing how many have come to view the uprisings of the 1960s, 50 years later—as shameful events better left out of the history books because they threaten the dominant narrative of our country as a land of opportunity and freedom. 

Why are the safe-house locations called Untitled with the name of the town in parentheses?

I left the Underground Railroad sites untitled to allude to the secrecy that shrouded them in their day. I thought a lot about the idea of silence while making this series, and how silence has many different connotations. In the context of the Underground Railroad, silence was used as a tool of protection. But there’s also silence—or more accurately, silencing—that occurs in the context of oppression. Martin Luther King referred to the riots of the civil rights era as “the language of the unheard.” And finally there’s the silence of the landscape itself, which swallows the secrets of its past with every big-box store and parking lot that’s laid down on historically significant ground.

You took the title of your series from the 1965 Flannery O’Connor short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Why did you use those words to unite the collages you created?

These places, both the Underground Railroad sites and the race riot sites, were about rising—rising up, rising against—and about convergence, in both cooperation and conflict. [O’Connor’s story is] about an altercation between a white woman and black woman riding a bus in the South shortly after the desegregation of the transportation system. The fact that the story is about race relations—and about the complicated relationship between forward and backward movement—just underscored the fact that it was the right title for my series. 

The title isn’t original to O’Connor. She took it from the Jesuit scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote about spiritual evolution. Do you feel you’ve transformed the title in some way with your work?

I haven’t studied Teilhard in as much depth as I’d like to, but my understanding is that he believed that creation was not a singular event but rather an ongoing development—that evolution was a spiritual and moral progression toward a point associated with Christ. I think O’Connor recognized that we are only partway through that progression toward convergence with Christ, and I think her story is about the messiness of that trajectory. My adopting of her title 50 years later is not so much a transformation of its meaning as it is an accounting of our progress. How much closer are we to Teilhard’s convergence? Perhaps not as close as we should be. But I don’t see this strictly as a condemning fact. I see it as a call to rise to everything we as a nation have claimed to believe in. As a call to keep struggling toward grace.

You’ve written that the collages depict a “present that’s unmoored from its past but never perfectly free from it.” Is that a good thing? Should we be free from the past? Or have you tried to bring about a kind of artistic convergence of past and present?

I’m tempted to say, yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. But actually I think the collages do just the opposite—they talk about our disconnect from the past. Or maybe they do both. In the course of making this series, I’ve thought a lot about remembering and forgetting, and when each is “better.” Let’s for a second assume that the entire nation could completely forget our history. That we all woke up tomorrow with amnesia. We would presumably recognize difference in skin tone, but what would we make of it? It would be an interesting experiment—maybe we’d all get along better, maybe not.

As a white woman, I’ve also thought a lot about the implications of looking so closely at white-initiated violence against black communities and individuals. Does this focus just ossify modes of oppression and perception that still exist? Does it suppress stories about black achievement and triumph? Or is it a critically needed acknowledgment of the white community’s wrongdoing? An attempt to take responsibility for the past and move forward, in whatever way that may mean?

Has the Black Lives Matter movement influenced your work or your thinking about this project?

I started this series a year before the events in Ferguson, well before the Black Lives Matter movement. Although I came to the series through my earlier interest in conflict in general, the project obviously immediately became one about past and contemporary race relations. It was a subject that wasn’t dominating the national conversation in the same way it is now, and the series was my own small attempt to open up that conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement has moved the conversation forward in much more effective, widespread ways, of course. Last year I participated in a march in New York City for Eric Garner. Along with about a hundred other people, I laid down in a street near Penn Station. After two years of visiting past riot sites on my own, in a very solitary way, it was an incredibly moving experience to be among hundreds with a collective voice strong enough to bring the city to a screeching halt. It felt like stopping the heart of the city and pushing the blood in a new direction, toward extremities that hadn’t been receiving enough of it. 

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson described your collages as being “deadpan cool” but conceptually “loaded” and “painfully hot.” Is that hot and cool combo something you wanted to convey?

Definitely. Conceptually, this is a very loaded topic to address. And I’m an artist, not a scholar, on these subjects—it’s not my place to offer any kind of “authoritative” statement. The only way I personally feel comfortable addressing race relations is by looking in a very objective, “deadpan cool” way at how these sites of historical significance have changed over the years. What gets lost? What gets remembered? To what end? The answers to these questions help give us a sense of where we are today and what we need to work toward.  

What would you like viewers to take away from the project?

I’d love for viewers to come away from it looking more closely at everything that surrounds them—being curious about hidden narratives. Areas that are economically depressed are rendered anonymous—or worse, as “dangerous” or “blighted.” Disconnecting communities from their history in this way is a powerful means of perpetuating their oppression. Regardless of where you live, that place has a history. Maybe a Walmart sits on it. Maybe it’s just an empty lot. The present often obliterates the past. But knowing the past may give you a sense of agency you might not have had otherwise. 

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history, wants to vastly expand that understanding of the system—particularly its role in the South American nation of Brazil, which had the distinction of being the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery in 1888.

An expert in Iberian Atlantic history, Miki has looked at Brazil’s connection to slave trading firms in the United States, to slave traders in West Central Africa, and to British abolitionists.

The picture of slavery as a national institution has been too small, she said. “It’s very exciting to be able to look at the history of slavery in a more transnational way.”

Though she’s originally from Tokyo, Miki became fascinated in college with the performing arts of the African diaspora, and later took classes at the Ailey School. A former practitioner of the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira, Miki went to Brazil and found the country to be ideal for her research.

When she began researching 19th-century slave resistance in Rio in 2006, however, she stumbled upon numerous stories of indigenous rebellions. This was puzzling, she said, because there’s a very strong narrative in Latin American nations with large black populations that indigenous people were wiped out in the 16th and 17th centuries by Columbus, the Conquistadors, disease, and famine.

“I began to realize that in fact, the history of indigenous people in Brazil is very much a missing piece of history,” she said. “They were enslaved and lived and worked alongside slaves of African descent until the eve of the 20th century. For too long we had presumed that African slavery had expanded into ‘empty’ lands, which in fact were indigenous territories.” These histories, long separated, are in fact deeply connected.

Bringing these stories to light now is important, she said, because they challenge enduring popular narratives in Brazil. In The Masters and the Slaves (1946), for instance, sociologist/anthropologist Gilberto Freyre argued that the country is a “racial democracy”—composed of the race mixture between black, Portuguese, and indigenous people—and because of that, there is no racial tension in Brazil.

But just because people are of mixed race doesn’t mean there was or is no conflict, Miki said.

“It’s still important to look at the actual history of Brazil’s black and indigenous peoples. You don’t want to just look at the end result of a mixed society and celebrate it; but also look at how such race mixture might have occurred,” she said.

Her current project, which she worked on during a spring fellowship at Yale University, focuses on the overlapping geographies of the Atlantic World.

“I’m really interested in geography, not just in the physical sense of space or terrain, but also in the ways people conceptualize space and how they give meaning to space,” she said.

One of those geographies—the Middle Passage—can also be defined through narratives, such as that of two West African men whose stories Miki found in crumbling, barely legible scripts written in 19th-century Portuguese. Their stories about their journey from Lagos, Nigeria to Bahia, Brazil, and another set of documents pertaining to a slave ship from Angola bound for Rio de Janeiro, offer a rare glimpse into that horrific experience.

Further complicating their story is the fact that one of the ships was in fact illegal, and its interception before it arrived in Rio caused a diplomatic uproar at the time.

“I want to look at the Atlantic world as a place of overlapping geographies of personal narratives of capture, of slave ships, as well as capital, and this political movement of abolitionism.”

This challenge to think about slavery in new ways extends to Miki’s teaching too, in courses like Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America and the Atlantic World, and Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World. For example, she wants students to understand that the abolition of slavery was not an inevitable outcome; many places, from Cuba and Haiti to Puerto Rico and Brazil, wanted to preserve slavery while speaking of equality. It was the enslaved people themselves who challenged slaveholders’ hypocrisy and fought for their own emancipation.

“History is not about just facts. It’s all about competing narratives, and is very much about the present. If we think about what’s been happening in the United States recently with #blacklivesmatter, it’s very hard to separate it from the past,” she said.