THE BEST OF RECLAIMING KIN: HELPFUL TIPS ON RESEARCHING YOUR ROOTS

 CONTRIBUTED BY: ROBYN SMITH

I have been researching my family and other African American families for almost 18 years. Six years ago I decided to develop and author a genealogy “blog” based upon my research. While initially I imagined a forum to share my discoveries and document my research, the voice of the teacher in me became louder and transformed the blog into a platform to teach genealogical skills and best practices and to highlight various ways to use records to solve family puzzles.

My interest and experience in the ever-daunting research of slavery and enslaved people remains a key focus of Reclaiming Kin. Slave research is one of the most difficult kinds of genealogical research for obvious reasons. Contrary to popular belief, however, there are tens of thousands of original records that discuss the enslaved. Slaves were valuable property and slaveowners documented their property well. Because of slavery, most African-Americans have much longer histories in this country than they’d imagine, and depending upon time and place, it is not uncommon to be able to trace your enslaved roots to the 1800s and in some cases, the 1700s.

A good friend suggested that I take the content at Reclaiming Kin and transform it into book format. “You’ve got so much material on here over the years, so many strategies and research tips,” he said. Others shared a similar sentiment. Publishing the blog into book form would enable readers to have better access to the genealogical knowledge shared at Reclaiming Kin. New readers would probably not spend the many hours it would take to read the older entries which are spread across previous years. My excitement about the project grew with the possibility of sharing this with a wider audience. With that, I selected over 80 of the best posts on Reclaiming Kin and began the almost two-year odyssey to create the publication.

The 200+ page book is divided into five chapters, with entries categorized by subject matter: (1) Records and Resources, (2) Evidence Analysis, (3) Slave Research, (4) Research Tips and (5) Robyn’s Family History. There is something of value here for all genealogists, whether you consider yourself a beginner or advanced level researcher, no matter the time period or geographical location of your research and no matter your race or ethnicity. The book is unique in that I utilize my own research primarily as a way to teach methodology or introduce the use of various sources.

Another unique aspect of the book is the mixture of family history research with discussion of the impact of little known historical events like the story of Sears co-founder and executive Julius Rosenwald and his seed funding of almost 5,000 schools across the South for African-Americans. Other chapters discuss the thousands of documents created by the Southern Claims Commission, an entity set up to hear damage claims from loyal Southerners after the Civil War. Many of the claimants and their witnesses were former slaves. Readers will learn about the racial covenants found in land records to prevent access to homes for blacks in neighborhoods that did not want them.  Few people know that system actually began as a way to restrict Jews from certain residential areas. I also discuss the convict leasing system that developed in the South that entrapped and killed thousands of men for trumped up crimes like “vagrancy.”

A few select examples will best illustrate the content of the book:

Records and Resources discusses the value of little utilized records such as Historic Trust Inventories and Southern Claims Commission records, and new ways to use more common records such as estate inventories  and other probate records.

Evidence Analysis  discusses how we interpret the sources we find, arguably the most important skill and one that receives little discussion among new researchers. Examples include the importance of examining original records and the value of collateral research. Evaluating marriages and families is detailed in posts such as Is The Wife Really The Mother Of All Those Children? and Phillip Holt is Not Dead After All.

Slave Research is covered in numerous posts where I discuss things such as the origin of slave surnames and little known facts about slavery. Slaveowners are discussed in the Mind of the Slaveowner, and uncovering enslaved ancestors is demonstrated in Mason and Rachel Garrett: Their Enslaved Past.

Research Tips includes topics such as Ideas for Writing Up Your Family History and Using Charts in Genealogical Research. One of my most popular posts bears mentioning here as well: Do You Have an Artificial Brick Wall?

Robyn’s Family History uses my own research to demonstrate a methodology, sources or technique, such as Criminals In The Family: Joseph Harbour, Harriet and Martha: Sisters Reunited and Court Records Rock.

In many ways, genealogists are the keepers of histories in the same vein as professional historians. Although we are primarily interested in individuals while academics typically focus on larger groups of people and larger themes, I see us both as important sides of the same coin. There is nuance, there is context, there is texture that is added when both of those perspectives come into view. I didn’t realize how much the experience of each of our families makes history real and accessible and….well, interesting. It’s one thing to learn about slavery, quite another to see your ancestor’s name on a bill of sale. It’s one thing to learn about the Great Migration, and quite another to realize your grandparents move from Tennessee to Dayton, Ohio was exactly that. There’s a reason why most African-Americans don’t appear on the census until 1870- that little thing called the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of black soldiers fought in that war, maybe even one of your ancestors. I see the same light of revelation in others when they experience how their family’s past makes history tangible.

There are so many stories, especially in African-American history, that haven’t been told or if they have been told, need to be told from a different perspective. The stories include hope and pain, success and triumph, failure and suffering, innovation and endurance. We have to tell these stories. Those stories are much more than names and dates of birth, marriage and death. Their lives tell us something about ourselves. Our interpretation of our ancestor’s lives and what they experienced continues into our present day. Our country is still arguing about the meaning of citizenship, about rights and about the balance of power between the federal and local governments. We are still fighting battles about labor and wealth and the role of religion. I think William Faulkner was right when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Many of the popular genealogy shows necessarily use celebrities or research those whose families trace back to the extraordinary events in our history and those who are considered “great men.” But I’ve found it’s not the famous, but the everyday, regular people who worked as farmers and laborers, took care of their families, exercised their faith and built communities that impress most upon me. These are the people often left out of our history books and movies; these are the people left out of the popular narrative of who made this country what it is.

I find special joy in uncovering the lives of slaves. Treated as property, so much of their life story has been filtered through the words of their owners, silencing their own voice. But the exciting part is that we can find their names and tell some of their story. New research by groundbreaking historians starting in the modern civil rights era has overturned many of the old assumptions, such as those in the early 20th century by historian Ulrich B. Phillips. His studies were based on white supremacist notions and focused on the paternalist idea that slaveowners treated their slaves well and that slavery was largely beneficial and civilizing for the slaves. His research led popular belief on the subject for several decades.

Though most slaves could not read or write, we have hundreds of narratives written by slaves, thousands of pages of interviews with former slaves, and numerous other original documents (such as court and land records) that allow us a truer glimpse into this most horrid chapter of our history. New archeological studies along with new approaches to slave research have proven the impact of African-American slaves on American culture. We also now know that the African ancestors of American slaves passed down their own cultural practices, and there is a new understanding of these “African survivals” in areas like food, music, folklore, spirituality and mourning.

I believe genealogy is not just a hobby—it is really a calling. Most people who start down this path really never finish. Others will be familiar with the pattern found in my own family: my parents and grandparents migrated away from places (largely in the South) where their roots had been deepest, usually because of work. Because of this, future generations are becoming more and more detached from any knowledge of their family’s past. Children and teens, especially, are fascinated with the tales of their family’s history and it’s a wonderful tool to promote self-esteem and pride in young people.

The Reclaiming Kin blog and book is my humble offering on how to rediscover your family’s past, tell their stories and pass on to future generations the memory of their forebears. The story of your family will be the best “reality” television you’ve ever known. I hope this book inspires you to uncover the mysteries of your family and the timeless wisdom of how these communities, through each generation, survived and thrived. The book can be purchased directly from the website linked below.

TRANS-ATLANTIC FOOD MIGRATION: THE AFRICAN CULINARY INFLUENCE ON THE CUISINE OF THE AMERICAS

CONTRIBUTED BY: DIANE SPIVEY

In the article below, culinary historian Diane M. Spivey describes the centuries-old diaspora of African foods and cooking traditions in North and South America.

Africa has been a major contributor to the cuisine of North and South America although this contribution has long been overlooked, trivialized, or denied.  The discourse contained in volumes on American cooking is usually consistent in its themes of celebrating what is considered the European influence.  When African American cuisine is recognized, as has increasingly been the case in the past few decades, credit is often given to a culinary heritage and legacy categorized and relegated to the culinary and cultural shackle known as “soul food” which specifically includes chitlins, corn bread, fatback, greens, and fried chicken.

The story of the African culinary past begins with “Lucy” and East Africa, the cradle of humankind and civilization.  Over thousands of years East African cuisine and culture slowly migrated to every other part of the African continent, diversifying and establishing new concepts, while retaining basic aspects and characteristics of the old.  Throughout the continent, prosperity arose out of superior agricultural environments and eventually the transcontinental trade and commerce in agricultural and other goods first to Asia and eventually to Europe and the Americas.

East coast cuisine and culture transplanted itself by means of explorers, merchants, travelers, and seamen bound for India, Indonesia, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan.  Spices sold and purchased at East African trading ports and in Indonesian and Southeast Asian markets would dominate the delicious flavors of creative cooks.  The Dravidians of southern India and the Khmers of Southeast Asia (modern Cambodia and Thailand), are two of numerous ancient Eastern civilizations that still bear many African culinary and cultural imprints.

Africa’s East and West Coast cultures made their indelible culinary marks through exploration, migration, and trade expeditions on the Olmecs and Mayans of Mexico, the Chavin of Peru, the Native American Mound Builders, the Caribs of St. Vincent, and other indigenous cultures in the Americas, and these marks were made long before the so-called discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.  Migration and trade between the Americas and Africa had made the exchange and transplanting of foodstuffs between the three continents quite common.  In other words, the African culinary influence on the Americas began long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The last stage of this culinary diaspora was the forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the slave trade, beginning in the 15th century, which brought numerous culinary artists and expert agriculturalists to the Atlantic coast stretching from Argentina to Nova Scotia.  The continual influx and steady increase of Africans into the Caribbean and South America at the height of the human bondage trade ironically constantly rejuvenated the African cultural input, and fostered a culinary revolution under the influence of Africans that would permeate every aspect of cooking and cuisine in rural and urban areas of every country in the Americas.  Africans who were shipped directly to areas such as Louisiana and South Carolina, as well as those who endured the “seasoning” process in the Caribbean islands and were then transferred to the American South, all positioned their culinary standards throughout the Southern states.

West African cooks made certain that all fish, meat, vegetable, and beans and rice dishes were heavily seasoned with hot peppers and spices, such as Guinea grains, or melegueta, spicy cedar (called atiokwo in the Ivory Coast—its seeds are roasted, ground and used in soups or with leafy vegetables), tea bush (known as an-gbontoin Sierra Leone, its fragrant leaves are used to flavor meat dishes, vegetable, egusi and palm nut soups), African locust bean (harvested, boiled and fermented to produce dawadawa, an indispensable condiment in Nigerian and Cameroonian cuisine), and West African black pepper (fukungen to the people of The Gambia and Senegal), to name just a few.  Several oils were used in preparing West African dishes, such as groundnut, or peanut (which is sometimes preferred in stews), melon seed, sesame seed (gingelly), coconut, corn, shea butter, and palm, which remains the favorite in West Africa due to the reddish-orange color it imparts to foods.

Both these specific foods and the preparation and cooking methods came with the enslaved people to North and South America.  The cooking methods included frying, boiling/simmering, roasting and steaming (foods are first wrapped in banana, plantain, miraculous berry, cocoyam leaves, or corn sheaths) and baking, or combinations of two or three methods. Broiling has been added in the modern era.

Suriname, wedged between Guyana and Guiana on the northern coast of South America, was mostly populated by enslaved people whose descendants remain the majority of the population to this day. Food and cultural historians believe Suriname, at least until the early 1980s, had the best preserved African cultural patterns in the Western Hemisphere.  Suriname is home to the descendants of the Saramaka, or Saramacca, who live along the banks of the Suriname River, and the Djuka Maroons communities, formed in the early eighteenth century.  The ancestors of the Saramaka were agricultural specialists from Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and Nigeria, who cultivated an enormous array of crops introduced directly from Africa, including moringa, which yields four edibles: pods, leaves, seeds, and roots; sorghum, known as guinea corn in West Africa which botanists confused with maize for a long time.  Other crops included tamarind, legumes such as marama, Bambara groundnut (African peanut), cowpeas (black eyed peas), locust and sword beans; as well as African eggplant.  Their descendants continued to produce those crops well into the 20th Century.

Rice was the principal crop cultivated by the early Saramakans, and is still produced today.  Known locally as alesi, the seventy cultivated varieties of rice comprise much of their current diet.  Rice production continues to incorporate African utensils and methods and the process is nearly identical to that of the Senegambia region, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers in West Africa, as well as South Carolina plantations cultivated mainly by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

A variety of game meat, fish, and birds, preserved primarily by smoking and salting, includes akusuwe, a kind of rabbit; mbata, a small deer; malole, which is armadillo; and awali, or opossum, which are eaten only when nothing else is available to accompany rice.  Rounding out their larder is the tree porcupine, known as adjindja, in addition to logoso (turtle), akomu (eel), peenya (piranha), and nyumaa, or pataka, spoken of as “the best fish in the country.”  Anamu (bush hen), maai (bush turkey), gbanini (eagle), patupatu (wild duck), soosoo (large parakeet), and pumba(blue and red parrot) are also consumed in abundance.  While not all of these foods were found in West Africa, the Saramakans learned quickly to prepare them just as their ancestors had done in what is now Guinea, Senegal, Gambia. Large quantities of meat and fish are shared through family networks, lessening the need for preservation.  Preparation of foods includes roasting, frying, boiling, or browning meats first in one or more of five varieties of palm oil, then simmering with vegetables and/ or root crops and one or more of ten cultivated varieties of hot peppers.  Fifteen different varieties of okra are cultivated, along with mboa and bokolele (mboa is amaranth, but both are called wild spinach).  Tonka (beans), seven varieties of yams, tania, cashews and peanuts, and wild limes, watermelon, lemons, oranges, and pineapples, and other fruits specifically of African origin are also grown.

If the Saramakans managed to keep in place more African foods and cooking traditions than almost any other people in North and South America, the culinary culture of the African continent nonetheless influenced in various ways the cooking of the entire Atlantic seacoast from Canada to Argentina. From the rural country kitchens in Brazil or South Carolina to the steamboat floating palaces along the Mississippi River, to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance from Boston to Buenos Aires, Africans of North and South America have been a dominating presence in America’s kitchens, and have stood at the helm as creative head chefs of farms and plantations, restaurants, hotels, steamboats, lodges and private clubs, trains, and private homes of the elites.  From the 15th through the 19th centuries, Africans, as enslaved people, contributed their labor skills, religion, music, and culinary expertise to create societies and cultures in every country in the Americas, but especially in the United States.  The preservation and reinvention of culinary traditions and social patterns based on African heritage demonstrated strong cultural persistence and resistance within plantation, as well as Maroon, communities, which were established wherever slavery existed.

Similarities in African culinary heritage, shared especially throughout the Southern United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, have left enduring legacies.  Those legacies are filled with cooking and cuisine strongly reminiscent of, or identical to, those of their African forebears and therefore continue to transmit the values and enrich the culinary experiences of not only Africans in the Americas but most other cultures in the Americas as well.  Although these nations have adopted African culinary traditions as their own, in most cases there is little or no recognition of their roots.  Certain aspects of African American cuisine, such as “soul food,” are too often seen as backward and lacking in value.  In general, the African contribution is regularly subjected to racism and societal repression.

For Africans and their descendants in the Americas, however, food and its preparation are deeply infused with social and cultural meaning, rooted in African traditions, and have always held an intrinsic role in creating, preserving, and transmitting expressions of ethnic cohesion and continuity.  It is hoped that there will be an eventual appreciation of African culinary heritage not just in the United States, but throughout the world.

COLLECTING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE TO THE OBAMA ERA

CONTRIBUTED BY: PATRICIA BANKS

In the following article sociologist and African American Studies professor Patricia A. Banks describes the rise of private art collectors and collections among African Americans. Her article also shows the growing acceptance of African American art and artists in major museums and galleries across the nation.

On October 16, 1943 Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting Flight into Egypt (see illustration) was hanging in the entrance hall of a home located at 127 Randolph Place in Washington, D.C. The occasion was the opening of the Barnett-Aden Gallery which was founded by James Herring, an artist and art professor at Howard University along with Alonzo Aden, curator of the University’s Gallery of Art. Works such as Jacob Lawrence’s watercolor Trees, Aaron Douglas’s painting Alta Knitting, and Lois Mailou Jones’s painting Still Life with Green Apples, were also displayed in the inaugural exhibition. During the next two decades Aden and Herring held gallery shows in Aden’s Washington home and purchased works from each exhibition for the Barnett-Aden Collection. Herring and Aden were part of a long tradition of African Americans who individually, and in partnership with black and non-black family members, collected work by African American artists. They were also among a distinct group of collectors who acquired work by African American artists and shared it with the public. These publicly oriented collectors presented their chosen treasures to the community by opening their homes, loaning works for exhibitions, and making donations to museums. In doing so they played an important role in shaping the value of African American art.

While many observers believe that the value of art is determined by its intrinsic properties, in reality what separates great art from less valued art is partly influenced by societal arrangements. Rare and unusual talent is not enough to vault an artist from obscurity to the spotlight. For art to be recognized as worthy it must have champions, such as collectors, who nudge it forward to be granted entrance into the canon. For several decades, the public patronage of African American collectors has played a critical role in the valorization of art by African American artists. Their commitment to these artists took on added significance because race has often made the path to consecration especially challenging for artists of African descent.

Collectors such as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (aka Arthur Schomburg) helped to sustain and memorialize visual art from the Harlem Renaissance. During this period of cultural flowering and emergent racial consciousness in the 1920s, Schomburg amassed a large collection of artifacts and art. Like other collectors of this and future eras, Schomburg was determined to excavate and preserve the historical and cultural contributions of African Americans. Concerned about the financial prospects of black artists, Schomburg purchased prints by artists such as Albert Alexander Smith and William Ernest Braxton. Combining his passion for history with his interest in art, he commissioned Braxton to create etchings of historical figures like Frederick Douglass. Schomburg’s private collection became public patrimony in 1926 when the Carnegie Foundation agreed to purchase the collection for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The collection was housed in the Harlem library’s Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints. The Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints would in 1940 be renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature in honor of this early collector.  In subsequent decades the library was given its current name of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Other collectors such as poet Countee Cullen also helped to sustain the visual production of the Harlem Renaissance. A central literary figure in this cultural movement himself, Cullen collected the work of his friends such as Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, and Hale Woodruff.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, African American collectors continued to support African American artists. While the Federal Arts Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) was an important source of government patronage for African American artists during its run from 1935 to 1946, opportunities for African American artists continued to be restricted by racial barriers. Indeed, it was racial segregation in 1940s Washington, D.C. that partly led Aden and Herring to establish the Barnett-Aden Gallery. They hoped to redress racial segregation in the city’s art world by showing the work of African American artists alongside white artists and artists from other racial and ethnic groups.

In the 1960s and 1970s the political forces that were transforming all other sectors of American life also rocked the art world.  The African American museum movement was in its infancy and institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968, began to appear in major cities across the United States. Protesters also picketed outside major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art to publicly contest the lack of diversity in exhibitions and acquisitions. Black artists in groups such as Spiral created work that responded to shifts in the sociopolitical order. Detroit, Michigan gallerist George N’Namdi, who started his personal collection in the 1960s, describes how the political spirit of the day informed his collecting ethos: “One of the reasons I started collecting was that the rebellion of the 60s induced in me this strong desire to preserve the culture of African-American people and I began to wonder specifically how I could preserve the culture through supporting and preserving visual arts, theater, dance and so on.”

Paul Jones of Atlanta, Georgia first started acquiring art in 1967. He made a commitment to focus on African American artists after noticing that they were rarely represented by galleries and their work had scant representation in museum exhibitions and collections. Among Jones’s first acquisitions were works that he selected from the Atlanta University Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists. The Atlanta Annuals, which ended soon after Jones started collecting, was one of the few juried art shows for African American artists during the course of its run from 1942 to 1970. In the 1970s The Barnett-Aden Collection, which was then under the care of Adolphus Ealey, was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Collection was also exhibited at two institutions that were part of the first wave of the black museum movement—the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

By the 1980s and 1990s multicultural values, though still contested, infused all sectors of the art world. Museums presented exhibitions that highlighted racial and ethnic minority themes. Acquisitions at non-ethnically specific museums also became more diverse as support groups like the African American Art Alliance at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin and the African American Art Advisory Association at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston were established. African American collectors both influenced and were influenced by this newfound level of institutional diversity.  In 1986/1987, Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800-1950 showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. After seeing the show, Harriet and Harmon Kelley were inspired to begin collecting African American art in their home city of San Antonio. Almost a decade later their collection was presented in a touring exhibition, The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, that showed at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 1994. In the 1990s the acquisitions of other major collectors of African American art also toured the United States. The collection of David Driskell, an artist, curator, and art historian who was then a professor at the University of Maryland, was presented in the exhibition Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection. The exhibition showed at museums such as the University of Maryland Art Gallery and the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine.

The increasingly growing field of African American museums was also bolstered through private collections in the 1980s and 1990s. As part of the growing yet still stalled effort to establish a national African American museum in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution renewed efforts to exhibit African American culture and history in existing buildings. In 1995, an exhibition of the Kelley’s collection—The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art—was shown as part of the National African American Museum Project in the Arts and Industries Building. African American museums also acquired major private collections of African American art. In 1986 the Hampton University Museum purchased the Countee Cullen Art Collection. At that time the collection not only included works selected by Countee Cullen before his death but also those by his wife, Ida Cullen Cooper, who further developed the collection.

In the late 1990s John and Vivian Hewitt sold their collection of African American art to NationsBank (which in 1998 merged with Bank of America). The bank pledged the collection to the Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture) in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the years prior to the cultural center’s re-opening the Hewitt collection toured nationally. The Barnett-Aden collection was also the leading collection for a newly founded African American museum. In 1989 the Florida Education Fund purchased the collection for the Museum of African-American Art in Tampa, Florida. After the museum closed, Washington D.C. entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), bought the collection in 1998.

Significant public patronage by collectors of African American art continued into the 21st century. For over a decade the African American art and artifacts collection of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey of Los Angeles, California has toured nationally. The Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection in San Francisco will embark on a national tour in Fall 2017. This collection is distinguished by its focus on abstract work by artists from the African Diaspora such as Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Bradford.

Major private collections of African American art have also been gifted to museums by African Americans in the first decades of the 21st century. The University of Alabama and the University Museums at the University of Delaware acquired work from Paul Jones’s collection; Walter O. Evans of Detroit bequeathed works from his collection of African American art to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD); and Larry and Brenda Thompson of Atlanta gave works from their collection to the Georgia Museum of Art. The donations are part of broader efforts to institutionalize African American art at these institutions. The Paul Jones Initiative, which supports teaching and research about African American art, was launched at the University of Delaware. SCAD opened The Walter O. Evans Center for African-American Studies and the Thompsons funded an endowed curatorial position focused on art from the African Diaspora at the Georgia Museum of Art. In 2001, The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora opened at the University of Maryland. The Center houses The David C. Driskell Archive of African American Art.

On September 24, 2016 efforts to establish a national African American museum were realized when President Barack Obama presided over the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. A year earlier, Robert L. Johnson, a member of the museum’s council, donated works from the Barnett-Aden Collection to the museum. Among the works finding a new home at NMAAHC was Tanner’s Flight into Egyptwhich was hanging in the entrance hall when the Barnett-Aden gallery opened almost a quarter-century prior.

FIGHTING JIM CROW IN THE 19TH CENTURY SOUTH: THE UNTOLD STORY

CONTRIBUTED BY: MELISSA MILEWSKI

Most historians have considered the period between 1877, the end of Reconstruction, and 1900 to be “The Nadir” or the low point in terms of African American political rights.  Some have even described it as the worst period for blacks since emancipation.  Historian Melissa Milewski does not challenge that assessment.  She does, however, find a surprising number of court cases where blacks won their lawsuits despite white power and the then dominant ideology of white supremacy. This has been an untold story until now as she explains in her new book, Litigating Across the Color Line Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to Civil Rights.

As a young doctorate student digging through various archives to find a topic for my dissertation, I struck up a conversation with a curator at the Georgia Archives. I explained that I was interested in studying race in the US South but hadn’t found the right angle yet to approach the topic. The curator suggested that I take a look at the state supreme court cases involving African Americans in the archive’s collections, noting that the cases were rarely examined by historians but were a very rich source. I took him up on his suggestion and requested a few file boxes that the curator mentioned included cases involving African American litigants.

I was immediately fascinated by the case files that I found. As the cases had made it to the state’s highest court, the case files were surprisingly well preserved. Often the file for each case was hundreds of pages long and contained detailed records of the testimony in the trial as well as petitions, accounts of proceedings, and appeals. Some cases were still tightly tied in their original faded ribbon, seemingly untouched for over a century.

One of the first cases I encountered involved a man named William Walker, the son of a wealthy white slaveholder and an enslaved mother. When his father died, he emancipated his seven enslaved children and their four mothers and directed that all of his property be used to settle them in the African country of Liberia. The emancipated African Americans, with 17-year-old William Walker in their midst, moved to Liberia in 1859, just two years before the beginning of the US Civil War. Almost two decades later, in 1878, a 38-year-old Walker returned to the United States to initiate a court case against his former master’s relatives, claiming that they had never sent over the vast bulk of the bequest left for settlement in Liberia.

Several aspects of this case shed interesting insights on black litigants’ experiences in the courts in the US South. I was particularly interested in the way in which Walker marshaled white support for his claim, including hiring a white lawyer and seemingly working with his lawyer to gain witnesses who testified on his behalf.  Walker’s own testimony was also fascinating, shedding light on his experiences as a slave, his life in Liberia, and his interactions with whites in the South upon his return. In addition, Walker seemed to be shaping his testimony to strengthen the claims of his case and persuade white southern jurors to decide in his favor. He testified, for instance, that he had no intention of staying in the US South after the trial, thus removing any concerns that white jury members might have about a newly wealthy black man joining their community if they awarded him his claim.

I was surprised as well at Walker’s initial legal success.  A case between a black man from Liberia and wealthy white landowners in Georgia seemed in many ways as if it would be an open-and-shut case for a white or largely all-white jury in post-Reconstruction Georgia. Yet I found that the jury in the county court found that the former slaves were entitled to recover almost $40,000. It was only when the white heirs appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia in 1880 that the higher court overturned the earlier decision.

After that research trip to the Georgia Archives, I began to wonder if there might be more cases involving black litigants in other states and additional cases at the Georgia Archives.  Certainly, very few other scholars seemed to have discussed such cases, largely assuming that few such suits existed. But my husband, who was in law school at the time, suggested I search the legal database LexisNexis using some keyword searches to see if I could find additional cases in southern courts with black litigants. It took time to figure out the right keywords to search for but soon I had produced lists of thousands of cases in eight southern state courts that mentioned one of my keywords. I realized that my search was only bringing up cases in which the court explicitly labeled the race of litigants in the official court reporter summary or opinion. However, I pressed on and built up a list of well over a thousand cases that seemed to involve black litigants in various southern archives.

I then began traveling to archives in eight states around the South to try to unearth the archival case files of these cases that I had discovered. To my relief, the vast majority of the case files still survived, and—like the cases that I had discovered in the Georgia Archives—the records were often extensive, numbering hundreds of pages. Here I found more fascinating stories. Perhaps my favorite case was that of Mary Ray, a young black woman from North Carolina who brought a civil suit in 1889 against the local county commissioners, the most powerful white men in the county where she lived. Her suit pointed to a deed to her father to claim the land upon which the local courthouse and jail were located. Clearly well aware of just what she was up against, Ray testified that a change of venue was needed as she “cannot obtain justice in this Cause in said county” because of the interested nature of local leaders and judges.  She explained: “That besides being gentlemen of marked personal influence and magnetism in said county, around which many interests are drawn and adhered, they as such Commissioners have under the law the control & supervision of the Jury system as well as all other official matters appertaining to the affairs of the County.” In the end, Ray experienced a number of delays and difficulties in obtaining witnesses to appear, and eventually lost the suit. However, her boldness in taking on these powerful white men in the post-Reconstruction South riveted me.

In a remarkable number of cases, the black litigants did win their suits. I turned to quantitative analysis to determine how many suits black litigants won against white litigants and found that they won 59 percent of the 980 such suits I located across eight state supreme courts. There was the case of Henry Buie who litigated a case against his former master in 1868 North Carolina over a mule that Buie had found during the Civil War. Buie not only won the suit but discarded his former master’s last name in the process of the legal action. Then there was the case in Kentucky in 1910 where a black laundress named Rebecca Sallee fell into a large open hole on the street as she made her way to a church service. Sallee sued the city to recover damages and obtained the value of a year’s worth of wages and her lawyer’s fees from the city. In addition, there was the suit in 1935 of Mary Jackson who refused to give up her 10-acre plot of land in Mississippiwhen a white neighbor sought to lay claim to it, only leaving when an anonymous group of white men came “during the darkest hours of the night” and brutally beat her. Jackson then initiated a civil case against the white neighbor to confirm her claim to the property and the highest court in Mississippi upheld her ownership of the land.

In the end, as I sifted through these suits the central question for me was how black litigants managed to both litigate—and often win—these civil suits at a time in which they faced increasing disfranchisement and segregation and experienced vast inequality in the criminal justice system. From the very beginning, I saw the actions of black litigants in these suits as a key part of the answer to this question. Over time, I became increasingly interested as well in the roles of white southerners in these suits and their attitudes towards these cases. In the end, the answer that I came to about why these cases occurred factored in the actions and perspectives of both black and white southerners.

I argue in my book that these cases took place in large part because of a disjuncture in how many black and white litigants viewed them. Black litigants often saw their participation in these civil cases as having life-altering economic consequences and so usually did all they could to win their suits. This included hiring white lawyers and using their knowledge of the law and of local race relations to shape their testimonies in ways that would be viewed most favorably by judges and juries. In contrast, white judges and jury members typically did not see the civil cases that black litigants were especially successful at litigating as dangerous or as having the power to upset the status quo. To them, some of these cases even seemed to support white supremacy. For instance, in their view, cases over white men’s bequests like the suit of William Walker upheld white men’s property rights. By carefully calibrating their testimony and arguments, black litigants and their white lawyers played an important part in perpetuating this disjuncture.

I contend, too, that the black litigants who held onto hope that the courts might change their lives for the better and the white judges and jury members who saw the courts as upholding the system of white supremacy both had valid points. On the one hand, white southerners were all too accurate in their realization that these civil cases had enormous limitations. To litigate and win these cases black litigants had to operate within a white-dominated legal system, using white lawyers and making arguments that largely white jury members and judges would find acceptable. Yet black southerners also had valid reasons to turn to the courts in civil actions, even after losing the vote and seeing segregation written into law. After 1890, the courts were often more accessible to African Americans than other branches of government. In part this was because whites saw the courts as less threatening than the black vote, and so did much less to try to block black southerners from operating in the courts.

In the end, while these civil suits between black and white southerners have tremendous limitations, they are more radical, and more important, than they might first appear. At a time of tremendous racial terror and segregation, some individual black southerners defended their rights against the actions of white members of their communities. The successful outcomes of many of the cases had immensely important economic effects in the lives of individual African Americans. Just as importantly, after having largely lost their ability to operate within any other government institutions, some black southerners were able to negotiate—and win within—the last remaining southern political institution they had access to. Finally, these cases illuminate a history in which black southerners continuously exercised their rights of citizenship through some of the most difficult years of southern history by pragmatically shaping and shifting their cases as the societal and political landscape changed. They show, then, the ways in which everyday individuals could take on a biased system, and at times win.

UPTOWN RECORDS (1986-1999)

                                                     CONTRIBUTED BY: SAMUEL MOMODU

Uptown Records, one of the earliest hip-hop labels, was founded in 1986. It signed artists such as Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Heavy D and the Boyz, and Father M.C. Uptown Records was founded by Andre Harrell, a former member of the group Dr. Jackell and Mr. Hyde. It quickly set up a distribution deal with MCA records. The name of the label, Uptown, was the term New Yorkers used to describe the boroughs Manhattan and The Bronx, as well as the northern suburbs, Yonkers, New Rochelle, and Mt. Vernon.

Harrell quickly signed the group Heavy D and the Boyz and Marley Marl along with other acts and then created a compilation album called Uptown Is Kickin’ It, which was released in 1987. That same year, Heavy D and Boyz released their debut studio album Living Large which went gold which sold over 300,000 copies. Al B. Sure released his debut studio album on Uptown Records in 1988 called In Effect Mode, which was the first label album to go platinum, selling 3,000,000 copies. In 1989 Teddy Riley who was credited with creating the New Jack Swing, formed a group called Guy alongside Aaron Hall and Damion Hall. They signed with Uptown Records and released their self-titled debut album Guy in 1989. Uptown Records continued its success with Heavy and the Boyz’ second album, Big Time (1989).

In 1990 future rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs became an intern at Uptown Records. During his time with the label he worked with Jodeci, Father M.C., and Mary J. Blige. These artists all released successful albums. Father M.C.’s albums included Father’s Day (1990), Close to You(1992), and Sex is Law (1993). Jodeci released Forever My Lady (1991), Diary of a Mad Band(1993), and The Show, the After Party, and the Hotel (1995). Mary J. Blige released two successful albums with Uptown Records, What’s the 411? (1992) and My Life (1994), which were both successful albums. Uptown Records also was involved in film and television when it supplied the soundtrack for the Fox television show New York Undercover.

Despite the record label’s initial success, its decline began when Combs was fired from Uptown Records after his conflict with Harrell. Combs left the label and took with him up-and-coming rapper The Notorious B.I.G. to help establish his label, Bad Boy Records. Tension at Uptown Records also led Mary J. Blige and Jodeci to sign with Suge Knight’s Death Row. In 1995, Harrell moved to Motown records. Heavy D replaced Harrell as CEO but that did not stop the decline. In 1999 Uptown Records closed its operations. Nonetheless Uptown Records left a powerful legacy in the music industry as the first major hip-hop label.

THE INNOCENCE PROJECT: A SHORT HISTORY SINCE 1983

CONTRIBUTED BY: RORY O'SULLIVAN

For more than 25 years the Innocence Project has been shedding light on systemic failures of the United States criminal justice system. The authors of the Bill of Rights in the 1780s and 1790s enumerated more than a dozen specific protections for criminal defendants including the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, the right to confront witnesses, and right to assistance of counsel. And yet, despite all these protections, more than 2,100 people have been exonerated in the US since 1989 after being wrongly convicted. Advocates at Innocence Projects around the country have been working to right these wrongs.

The story of the Innocence Project starts with Marion Coakley. Born in Beaufort, South Carolina in 1955, Coakley moved to New York in 1979. He earned a living as a manual laborer, unloading fruit and vegetable crates and working in a stone-cutting shop. As an adult he read at a second grade level and his IQ was in the seventies.

On Saturday October 15, 1983, two detectives in the Bronx arrested Marion Coakley for the rape of Irma Lopez (Irma Lopez is a pseudonym used to protect the name of a victim of sexual assault). Lopez was raped two nights earlier on October 13th at the Bronx Park Motel. After the rape she was admitted to a hospital where she was treated for wounds resulting from the attack and hospital staff collected evidence as part of a rape kit. The evening of the rape, according to multiple eyewitnesses, Coakley was at a bible-study meeting in his sister’s apartment, not at the Bronx Park Motel. At trial, the Reverend Samuel Manigault, who led the bible-study meeting, testified on Coakley’s behalf as an alibi witness; but the prosecutor was able to make the reverend sound uncertain about his testimony.

Also in 1983, Kary Mullis was developing a process for duplicating and matching DNA, a process called polymerase chain reaction or PCR. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work. The process was adapted for use in criminal investigations in which only tiny fragments of genetic material are available for testing.

Coakley was represented by the Bronx office of the Legal Aid Society, an organization that was founded in 1876 to protect the rights of German immigrants who could not afford a lawyer. Over the years the mission and the clientele of the organization expanded and in 1965 the Legal Aid Society became the primary public defender agency in New York. Coakley’s lawyer, Donald duBoulay, was a successful trial attorney but his repeated requests for more time were denied by Judge David Levy. The case had been worked up by a different defense attorney who had since moved on to another job, and duBoulay was just coming off another trial. Three eyewitnesses who saw the rapist, including Irma Lopez, testified with certainty that Marion Coakley was the rapist and the jury quickly issued a guilty verdict.

The Legal Aid Society, however, was convinced of Coakley’s innocence, but they understood that one of Coakley’s defenses on appeal might be ineffective assistance of counsel—a claim that the Legal Aid Society itself would be conflicted in raising—so they referred the case to Barry Scheck, who worked at a law clinic at Cardozo School of Law and to Peter Neufeld, who had a private practice nearby. Scheck and Neufeld each had more than ten years of experience as practicing attorneys, they had both worked previously at the Legal Aid Society, and they often partnered together on cases.

In 1987, when Scheck and Neufeld were working to overturn Coakley’s conviction, they did not have access to DNA testing based on PCR. Instead they used basic detective work to reveal problems with the eyewitness testimony and they used a test based on the blood type of the semen donor that showed Coakley could not have been the rapist. Eventually, they had enough evidence to convince not only the court, but even the Bronx District Attorney’s Office concluded that they had convicted the wrong man. In December of 1987 based on the evidence presented by Scheck and Neufeld, Chief Administrative Judge Burton Roberts, who took on the case when he heard about the possible exoneration, overturned Coakley’s conviction.  This was the first victory for what would become the Innocence Project.

Two years later Gary Dotson became the first person exonerated based on DNA evidence. In 1992, Scheck and Neufeld founded the Innocence Project so that they could work on wrongful convictions in a more systematic manner. Initially, the Innocence Project was a clinic at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City. In 2004, after 12 years and approximately 150 exonerations, the Innocence Project became an independent nonprofit although it remains affiliated with Cardozo School of Law.

Other innocence projects have sprung up around the country and around the world. In 1997, Professor Jacqueline McMurtrie founded the Innocence Project Northwest at the University of Washington School of Law which has been responsible for the exoneration of 14 wrongly convicted individuals in Washington State. The Innocence Project Northwest is a member of the Innocence Network, an organization that connects the nearly 70 innocence project organizations worldwide.

Wrongful convictions happen for many reasons. As Scheck and Neufeld note in Actual Innocence, “[s]ometimes eyewitnesses make mistakes. Snitches tell lies. Confessions are coerced or fabricated. Racism trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defense lawyers sleep. Prosecutors lie.” Of all the reasons for wrongful convictions, eyewitness misidentification testimony was a factor in more than 70 percent of DNA post-conviction exoneration cases. Since the early 1900s, criminologists have conducted experiments demonstrating the unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. Even the best eyewitnesses make errors and many eyewitnesses reports are filled with more errors than correct statements. Continued analysis and experimentation has demonstrated that memories are changed and embellished over time and that cross-racial identification is subject to an even greater error rate than other aspects of eyewitness testimony.

In the last ten years, popular culture has become captivated by stories of wrongful convictions. In December 2015, Netflix released the first season of Making a Murderer, a documentary viewed by more than 19 million people in the first 35 days after its release. The documentary explored the history of Steven Avery, a man who was convicted of sexual assault and attempted murder in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin and then exonerated in 2003 after serving 18 years in prison. The show picks up after his release from prison and documents charges leveled against Avery for a murder in 2005. The premise of the documentary is that the prosecutors framed Avery for the 2005 murder in retaliation for his 2003 exoneration. Avery remains in prison today, although his case is on appeal. In another example, the first season of the podcast Serial questions the conviction of Adnan Syed in Baltimore, Maryland for the murder of Hae Min Lee. Serial has been downloaded by more than 100 million listeners.

Both the Innocence Project in New York and the Innocence Project Northwest have advocated for policy changes. The exonerations of Rolando Cruz and Ronald Jones, inmates who served time on Illinois’ death row, led then-Illinois Governor George Ryan to issue a moratorium on death sentences in 1999. That same year, Illinois State Senator Barack Obamasponsored a bill requiring that interrogations be recorded. Mandatory recording of interrogations help defense attorneys and innocence project organizations obtain evidence of coerced confessions. Other policy measures advocated by innocence projects include amending eyewitness identification procedures, preserving and testing DNA evidence, and compensation funds for exonerees. In February of 2014 Governor Jay Inslee issued a moratorium on the death penalty in Washington State and the state legislature is currently considering legislation to abolish the death penalty.

Because of their success, innocence projects have been inundated with requests for representation from prisoners claiming to be wrongfully convicted. The projects have developed screening criteria that include a claim of actual innocence (as opposed to mere “legal” innocence) that can be corroborated through DNA testing or other newly discovered evidence. Innocence project organizations review the evidence they receive and, in some cases, the tested DNA evidence confirms that the right person is in prison. But in far too many cases, the criminal justice system has convicted the wrong person.

Innocence Projects around the country have demonstrated that the scope of the problem of wrongful conviction is massive. Living up to the values enshrined in the Bill of Rights would require systemic evaluation and reform. This is an issue that requires public attention. Voters need to educate themselves and their elected officials about the need for criminal justice reform. In many places, voters may also be able to hold their prosecutors accountable at the ballot box. In Washington State, as in many states, the county prosecuting attorney is an elected position. Voters should investigate the extent to which wrongful convictions have taken place in their county and how the prosecuting attorney has responded when someone their office prosecuted has been exonerated. The American justice system was designed to protect against convicting the innocent, but we are not living up to the values enshrined in our founding documents. Voters, lawmakers, and prosecutors need to review and reform the criminal justice system in order to protect the innocent from wrongful conviction.

MENTAL ILLNESS IN BLACK COMMUNITY, 1700-2019: A SHORT HISTORY

                                               CONTRIBUTED BY: UCHENNA UMEH

In the article below, Dr. Uchenna Umeh, a former San Antonio, Texas physician, briefly describes how mental health among African Americans was viewed and treated by the American medical community from the antebellum period until today. In the process she describes how those attitudes have impacted black views of mental health into the contemporary era.

In 1848 John Galt, a physician and medical director of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia, offered that “blacks are immune to mental illness.” Galt hypothesized that enslaved Africans could not develop mental illness because as enslaved people, they did not own property, engage in commerce, or participate in civic affairs such as voting or holding office. This immunity hypothesis assumed according to Galt and others at that time that the risk of “lunacy” would be highest in those populations who were emotionally exposed to the stress of profit making, principally wealthy white men.

If indeed this statement were true, then I, a woman of Nigerian ancestry living in the United States—as well as some of my family members, friends and acquaintances, my patients, their parents and grandparents, all black—should never have struggles with mental health issues. Yet we all have. Unfortunately, we of African ancestry have subconsciously embraced and propagated this narrative much to our detriment believing as if this problem does not exist in our race.

In September of 2018, I quit my job as a physician to focus on public speaking, with the sole purpose of increasing awareness about mental illness among people of African ancestry in the United States. I had become aware of a substantial increase in depression and suicidal ideation in my patients. The more I researched this topic, the more I noticed that the problem is increasingly prevalent in the contemporary community. Today suicide rates in African American children aged 5-11 years have increased steadily since the 1980s and are now double those of their Caucasian counterparts. Black men made up 80% of attempted suicides among African Americans in 2015, and in the US, black males are three times more likely to complete suicide than black women. These numbers are on the rise.

Mental illness has been in existence as long as humans have inhabited the earth, but for people of African descent, little or no references are available about this condition before the 1700s. Dr. Benjamin Rush, the leading medical authority in the nation during the years immediately following the American Revolution, was also the most prominent medical practitioner to disagree with John Galt’s ideas about the absence of mental illness among black slaves, when he wrote that many of the enslaved suffered from “abnormal behaviors” including “negritude,” which he described as the irrational desire by blacks to become white. Since becoming white could only be accomplished by miscegenation, Rush argued against intermarriage between races to ensure that negritude would not spread beyond the black population. While there was no indication that he ever treated anyone for this disease, he noted in one of his writings that “the Africans become insane… soon after they enter upon the toils of perpetual slavery in the West Indies.”

Other antebellum medical researchers promoted conditions such as Drapetomania, a disease that caused enslaved blacks to flee their plantations, or Dysaethesia Aethiopia, a disease that purportedly caused a state of dullness and lethargy, which would now be considered depression. Modern historians of slavery have described both conditions as understandable responses to enslavement, but white medical practitioners at the time assumed they were manifestations of mental illness.

Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a pro-slavery physician who worked with enslaved people in Louisiana, argued that severe whipping was the typically the best “treatment” for both conditions. Cartwright and others often reported that Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopia were often accompanied by skin lesions, which historians now argue were most likely scars from the whippings. In other words, these physicians failed to recognize the connection between the emotional states of the enslaved and the treatment they recommended for their condition.

Most pre-Civil War mental health facilities in the South usually barred the enslaved for treatment. Apparently mental health experts believed that housing blacks and whites in the same facilities would detrimentally affect the healing of the whites. Housing conditions in Southern asylums for the few that accepted the enslaved were bad enough for white patients, but the blacks were often housed outdoors near these institutions or in local jails. There were accounts of some child-slaves being cared for in the yards of the asylums. Most of these facilities were run without government funding or oversight, and inmates, as the children were called, were regularly misdiagnosed and wrongly accused of crimes, extending their stay in these institutions and exposing them to additional mistreatment by authorities. Many of these children were subjected to hard manual labor on farms owned by or near these institutions, foreshadowing the notorious convict leasing systems that sprang up across the Reconstruction-era South.

Often the labor of these children was praised by asylum authorities, further raising questions about the correctness of their diagnoses of mental illness. Here, we catch a glimpse of the possible origin of contemporary black distrust of the healthcare system. In essence, if these slaves were truly “out of their senses,” how were they able to carry out sustained hard labor that required special skills, while white patients were often “too feeble-minded” to work?

The Civil War freed nearly four million enslaved people across the South. It did not, however, lead to more enlightened attitudes about the treatment of African Americans with mental illness. In 1895, Dr. T.O. Powell, the superintendent of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum observed an alarming increase in insanity and consumption (tuberculosis) among blacks in his state which he attributed to three decades of freedom. Powell argued that when the former slaves got their freedom, it caused them to have little or no control over their appetites and passions and thus led to excesses and vices which in turn generated a rise in insanity. Like medical experts before him, Powell did not factor in socioeconomic conditions including poverty, racial discrimination, and the ever-looming specter of violence (lynchings reached a high point in the 1890-1920 period) as playing any role in the mental state of these freedpeople.

At the beginning of the 20th century African Americans who were said to have mental deficiencies faced a new, more dangerous threat to their well-being, the eugenics movement. Starting in Great Britain, the movement quickly spread to the United States by the 1920s. Eugenics was based on two parallel principles, the encouragement of births among people who were considered “good” genetic stock, and the sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction including individuals with mental illness, those who were poor, and those accused of sexual promiscuity and sexual criminality.

Sterilization in the US quickly focused on African Americans. In California alone in the 1930s African Americans who comprised 1% of the population, made up 4% of the victims of legal sterilization. Eventually eighteen states eventually passed laws allowing for the widespread sterilization of the institutionalized including many who were black, misdiagnosed, and falsely accused of crimes. Although sterilization lost some of its appeal when it was discovered Nazi Germany embraced the practice on a wide scale, by the 1970s some states in the South, including notably North Carolina and Alabama, still sterilized disproportionate numbers of black women who were declared by courts to be mentally defective. In North Carolina in the 1960s, for example, more than 85% of those legally sterilized were black women.

African Americans were also victimized by psychosurgery from the 1930s to the 1960s, a process of surgically removing parts of the brain (lobotomy) to treat mental illnesses. Started in Europe, it quickly gained acceptance in the US for reasons that were finally ruled as sociopolitical rather than medical by the late 1970s. Psychosurgery was promoted as a treatment for “brain dysfunction,” a diagnosis claimed to have led to widespread urban violence and inner-city uprisings. While most historians and social scientists viewed urban violence and the uprisings of the 1960s and a reaction to systematic oppression, poverty, discrimination, and state-sponsored physical violence (police brutality), Dr. Frank Ervin, a psychiatrist, and two neurosurgeons, Drs. Vernon Mark and William Sweet argued into the 1960s that this violence was the result of a surgically-treatable brain disorder and promoted their agenda as a specific contribution to ending the political unrest of the period. While never widely accepted and practiced, some lobotomies were performed on black children as young as five years old who exhibited aggressive or hyperactive behaviors.

Postpartum depression (PPD), aka Baby Blues, characterized by feelings of sadness, crying, and hormonal mood swings that happen after birth, also can sometimes be severe and result in anxiety, depression, or rarely, psychosis. The extreme form affects 20% of all races but more than 40% of African American women have been afflicted by it. The reasons vary including lower socioeconomic status, emotional and financial distress, domestic violence, poor access to healthcare, single parenthood, and poor or inadequate childcare. Although rarely mentioned in the mainstream news, PPD is another manifestation of mental illness in African American women.

Sadly, the story of African American mental illness cannot be told without recognizing ever-present sociopolitical agendas, and their particularly pernicious effects on black children. Extreme, concentrated poverty, for example, continues to impact the availability of mental health treatment. In 1983, one in two black children lived in poverty compared to one in seven white children. Today the ratio for black children is still one in three and for white children it is an average of one in ten; Latinos have an average of one in four. Since we now know the mental health of any child is intricately connected to the social, political and economic policies and conditions of their immediate and extended environment, it is little wonder that we continue to see high suicide rates among black children. Racism, systematic oppression and discrimination, police brutality, low socioeconomic status, untreated parental psychopathology, and disruptive family dynamics all influence mental illness in children. With inequality of care, these numbers for black children will only continue to grow.

If medical racism affected the mental treatment of African Americans well into the 20th century, by the end of the century medical practitioners were beginning to recognize the various socioeconomic factors that impact black mental health. Yet cultural beliefs among African Americans also impact attitudes toward and treatment of mental health in black communities. Myths like “it does not happen to us,” “we are strong and therefore do not get depressed,” “our God is able,” “it is not our portion,” and “we can pray it away” are not simply misleading beliefs, they often create unnecessary barriers and stigmas to recognizing and treating mental illness among African Americans.

Though the African American church has been a formidable force for the survival of blacks in a United States still grappling with the residual effects of white supremacy, one must not underestimate the mental toll that can result when, on one hand, the church teaches forgiveness, and on the other hand, victims and their families often have been called upon to repress justifiable feelings of anger and outrage in order to forgive. This becomes a particular challenge when no support infrastructure exists to acknowledge wrongdoing or set a proper stage for reconciliation and justification of the forgiveness.

The crimes of oppression, terrorism, and racism continue against black people even into the 21st century. These factors cannot be overlooked as underlying causes for the rising number of African American suicides. Black women and men who commit suicide may seemingly prefer an afterlife better that the current one with minimally-attractive and viable options. While low socioeconomic status can fuel the prevalence of mental illness, even amongst the more affluent African Americans, stigma remains a strong deterrent to the acknowledgement and acceptance of its presence. Additionally, we are often not treated equally by medical practitioners even when we do seek care and have the resources to pay for that care.

I hope this article will initiate the much-needed conversation among and about blacks on the need for the silence and stigma about mental illness to end. We must engage in the accurate narratives, so we can gain access to appropriate funding, and get on the proper path to healing ourselves, our children, and sustaining our future.