Dark Sleeve of History No More
3 April 2011 | Share:
A statue to Octavius Catto will rise, at long last, on the northwest corner of Centre Square, in Philadelphia. From his vantage point across Arch Street, the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo can keep a careful eye on the statue of Catto, who was a civil rights hero of the late 19th century. The 32-year-old Catto was assassinated on Election Day, 1871 by Democratic party operatives working for boss William McMullen, who created the role of populist thug Rizzo would revise a century later.
As markers of history, of course, the role of statues is to simplify and idealize, rather than expose and complicate. And yet it is a mighty complex city that places these two men together—at the heart of the city, no less—a proximity, we might imagine, that should ignite a thousand silent conflagrations.
Catto is rising on newfound interest in uncovering the long and mostly lost story of Northern civil rights. In his monumental Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sugrue framed the 20th Century part of this story. Isabel Wilkerson’s much lauded The Warmth of Other Suns, on the people of the great migration from the South to Chicago, fills in Sugrue’s framework with the quiet, but no less heroic, rhythms of real people’s lives.
But the story didn’t begin in 1919, which is the very point of two new books, one centered in New York, the other in Philadelphia. One must pull the curtain back even as far back as the late 18th century. It was Richard Allen in the 1790s, after all, who innovated the sit-in, the boycott, and the walk-out. Catto himself is the central character of Murray Dubin and Dan Biddle’s Tasting Freedom, which came out last fall from Temple Press, and “The Floodgates Open,” a documentary film I co-wrote with Sam Katz and Mark Moskowitz as the pilot to a proposed multi-part series on the history of Philadelphia (to air on 6ABC in Philadelphia on May 26).
We can add Carla Perterson’s Black Gotham, just out from Yale University Press. Peterson, who is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, sought to uncover the lost history of her ancestors, members of New York City’s black 19th century elite, many of whom were so critical in divining the political strategies that challenged slavery in the South and the lack of voting and other civil rights in the North. In doing so, she takes us onto the streets of Five Points in lower Manhattan, a mixed Irish and black neighborhood, where “threats of white violence lurked at every street corner as students were insulted, and even beaten or stoned.”
At the center of the neighborhood was the Mulberry Street School, part of a network of free African schools set up by the NY Society for the Manumission of Slaves. It becomes the lynchpin in the hope for racial justice in the 1820s and 30s, producing stalwart leaders like Henry Highland Garnet, James McCune Smith, and Patrick and Charles Reason, and the author’s great-great-grandfather Peter Guignon.
One of the strengths of the book is that it isn’t an academic history, but instead a quest to understand her own roots, and as such it proceeds from questions, some of which are hers, and some of which she puts in the mind of Guignon and his son-in-law Phillip White, and the other protagonists in the story. This is lovely pedagogy—and indeed Peterson exposes her own process of archival research as a way to illuminate just how deeply buried all this history has been. This is pre-Harlem black New York, and one of the implicit questions Peterson asks is, how, ultimately, does New York become the center of black urban life in America?
By asking and searching, Peterson slowly tells the story, which gathers in layers, across Manhattan and Brooklyn. Inside the layers is each of the milestones of this period in New York civil rights: the competition with the Irish for status and jobs, restrictions on voting, education, and public transportation, the riot of 1834, the draft riots of 1863, the role of wealthy whites like the tobacco moguls the Lorillards, who employ Guignon’s father, and Horace Greeley, and national figures like Frederick Douglass.
Pair Black Gotham with Dubin and Biddle’s Tasting Freedom and you emerge with the power to see both New York and Philadelphia anew (and to anticipate the course of 20th century civil rights). Both books are grounded in the tumult of neighborhood life, in the schools, in the strategies and disappointments of civil rights visionaries. And the books share a considerable number of events and characters. Charles Reason graduates from the Mulberry Street School to become the first principal of the Institute for Colored Youth on Lombard Street in Philadelphia. The Institute becomes the center of a local and national fight for justice, producing Catto, Jacob White, Robert Adger, and Caroline Le Count—figures who end up standing “among giants.” But whereas Peterson ultimately becomes limited by the personal nature of her inquiry and the layers she accumulates become organizationally awkward, Dubin and Biddle weave a magisterial narrative. They took the same—or very similar—archival material and transformed it into a singular gripping drama, in which every detail is carefully placed to reward the reader.
Tasting Freedom puts Philadelphia at the center of a long story that begins in the racial twilight of turn of the 19th century Charleston, South Carolina. Here, Catto’s grandmother is sold in and out of slavery and her son, Catto’s father William, claims a place among the white Presbyterian ministry. The story moves to Philadelphia, not only with Catto and his family, but with the Grimke sisters, upper class Charleston whites who find the quiet brutality of slavery and racial oppression unbearable. But because this is a fully fleshed out narrative, as stunningly devised as a work of fiction, it finds credence in the hearts and hands of the Irish immigrants who pack the Fourth Ward. And here the conflagrations begin.