Ulysses S. Grant is only tangentially related to the story I tell in “You Need a Schoolhouse.”  In 1874 Grant was president — a national hero and, arguably, the most famous man in America – and he had come to Springfield, Illinois for the festivities surrounding the dedication of a memorial to Abraham Lincoln at his grave there.  Rosenwald was 12, growing up in a house across the street from the home that had been the Lincolns’, and he made $2.50 peddling a pamphlet about the monument in the crowd that day.  Years later he remembered seeing the president in his carriage and noticing that he wore yellow kid gloves.  In my book I say that young Julius was picking up “the eye of a clothier and the ways of a salesman.”

But a new book tells another, much more complex story that relates Grant to Jews.  Grant has often been charged with being an anti-semite for the executive order he issued in 1862 expelling Jews from the war zone under his jurisdiction.  Like the charge that he was a hopeless alcoholic, the claim has enough basis in fact to be believable. But in a new book Jonathan Sarna, a history professor at Brandeis Universitiy, tells the full story of the order — hastily given, almost immediately rescinded by Lincoln, and later sincerely and convincingly repudiated by Grant who became known as a friend to Jews both in this country and abroad.  A local detail I appreciated was that on June 9, 1876, Grant became the first American president to attend a synagogue dedication when he and his oldest son went to ceremonies at Adas Israel here in Washington and impressed their hosts by staying for the whole three hours.  I haven’t read the book (though I did get it for Christmas) but there is a good summary of it in this very interesting review by Jeff Jacoby.

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/11675/when-general-grant-expelled-the-jews

I’ve been thinking about Jews and the Civil War for the past few days after seeing “The Whipping Man,” a play by Matthew Lopez that — by coincidence — is being performed this spring at the Washington Jewish Community Center’s Theater J, where I saw it, and also at Baltimore’s Centerstage.  The action takes place at a ruined home in Richmond just a few days after the city fell to the Union army and Lee had surrendered. Caleb, the son of the family, returns from war, horribly injured, to find the place empty, everyone having fled elsewhere for safety except for Simon, the family’s elderly slave who is caring for the house despite the fact that, as he quickly reminds Caleb, he is now free.  They are soon joined by John, another slave, a cocky young man who years before had been Caleb’s childhood playmate.

 That the family is Jewish is established right from the start.  That the slaves, too , consider themselves Jews emerges as Simon realizes that it is Passover and decides they must have a Seder.  His preparations are interrupted by the shocking news of Lincoln’s assassination yet the seder takes place anyway.  Sitting in a ransacked house, with the future anything but clear, and despite the fact that he is not the traditional youngest but the oldest of them, Simon insists on asking the question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”  As the ceremony goes on and the story of the Exodus unfolds, he sings, not a Jewish song but the old spiritual about Moses in Egypt with the powerful refrain, “Let my people go.” By the end of the service the story has been retold and newly savored but devastating personal truths have also been revealed.  Simon has left the house and Caleb and John sit together yet separately, staring silently into space as if facing into the hard realities of the years to come.

The program notes stay that at the time of the Civil War there were about 25,000 Jews in the South and that about 40% of those families owned slaves.  3,000 Jewish soldiers fought for the Confederacy, 7,000 served on the Union side.  One of them, shortly before he was killed in battle, wrote a letter to his wife that is quoted in the program.   His post in Louisiana had allowed him to observe the way things were in the South.  “Slavery is gone up,” he wrote, “whether the War ends today or in a year and there is no use crying over it, it has been an awful institutuion…Now understand me when I saw I am a strong abolitionist I mean that I am not so for party purposes but for humanity sake only, out of my own conviction, for the best interest of the white man in the south and the black man anywheres.”

Just before writing this I took a walk with David and our dog, Nico, past the Capitol building, down to the Mall.  It is a gorgeous day here in Washington and we stopped to look at the ducklings on the reflecting pool, to snap pictures for a family celebrating with a graduate in cap and gown, and then to look at the statue at the base of the Capitol.  It’s my favorite of DC’s many equestrian males — General Grant, with a brimmed hat and a cloak that looks like it is being whipped by a cold wind, an angle to his head that is both weary and determined.  The statue is flanked by bronze horses and soldiers on caissons where, as little boys, my sons used to like to play.  It’s a powerful reminder not just of the excruciating pain of all war but of the particular agony of the war that divided our country and of the very long and painful road we have traveled since then.

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One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the last few months has been doing radio interviews about my book.  I liked the fact that I could be at home in my fuzzy red bathrobe with a cup of tea and the telephone as I was for one very early morning show, or sitting in a hotel room in New York, as I was for another.  But I also enjoyed going to the studio for a face to face interview as I did  in Atlanta.  David Lewis interviewed me for one of his “The Voice of the Arts” segments for WMLB there. He liked the book and our conversation about it turned out well.  David Deutsch shot this picture of us through the studio window. 

Here’s the interview.

http://1690wmlb.com/stephanie-deutsch-you-need-a-schoolhouse/

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It was great fun to spend an afternoon early in April outside the bookstore near the entrance to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.  I had a pile of my books beside me to sell but I could tell from some of the questions I got that people thought I was an information desk.

“My daughter has a headache.  Where can I get an aspirin?”

“”Where should we go for lunch?”

“Are Dorothy’s ruby slippers here?”

“Where is the Hope diamond?”

“Where is Archie Bunker’s chair?”

“We’ve come from Ohio to see them.  Where are the ruby slippers?”

It was the middle of spring break and there was a steady stream of visitors all afternoon — families with strollers, girls talking on cell phones, several extremely elegant women in headscarves and dark glasses, two women in wheelchairs with guide dogs, a group of Girl Scouts, an Amish couple, a boy in a t-shirt that said “Rise Above Hate.”  I did the best I could to answer questions about aspirin and lunch.  I knew the Hope Diamond was at the Natural History Museum.  I said I wasn’t sure about Archie Bunker’s chair and I only learned later that the much-loved ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz had been removed for curatorial reasons (according the a news report I found on line, they are not very well made and needed preservation work.)

There were, though, lots of people intrigued by my book and I had great conversations with some of them.  A U.S. history teacher from Georgia bought a copy and told me he planned to use it with his classes.  A woman from Montgomery, Alabama said she was familiar with the story of the Rosenwald schools.  “I lived it,” she said.  Another woman, also from Alabama, told me about the annual reunion of her school there and followed up with an e-mail giving me the details.  I chatted with one family that said they had come to DC especially to visit the new Martin Luther King memorial.  A mom confessed to me that she was having trouble explaining to her kids the significance of the lunch counter from Greensboro that is on display.  We agreed that for children today segregation is hard to understand and much about the civil rights movement has been forgotten. I met a white graduate of Hampton University (Booker T. Washington’s alma mater) and a graduate of Howard who had been a classmate there of Isabel Wilkerson (author of “The Warmth of Other Suns”).

“Where is the Metro? Where is the red line?”

“What time is it?”

When I had been there an hour someone dressed as (I think) Betsy Ross stepped into the museum’s enormous foyer and before I knew it she was leading the assembled crowd in singing the Star Spangled Banner.  Then I met a museum guard named Rose Williams who told me she had grown up not too far from where I live on Capitol Hill.  We had a great talk about the fun she had as a child exploring the Capitol building.  She said she climbed up onto a statue of a seated George Washington and sat in its lap. She said she knew all the special underground trains and passageways for congressmen.  Her tales reminded me of my friend Michael Kelly who also grew up on the Hill in the fun days before hyper-vigilant security.  He used to play ball all over the Capitol grounds and roam the halls of Congress.

By 5 pm I was pretty tired.  I had a nice talk with an African American family visiting from Greenville, North Carolina.  I told them about my visits to Walnut Cove and the school in Winston Salem.  As I was starting to pack away my books a woman came by with two young children, maybe eight and ten years old.  The girl was older and asked me several questions about the book.  I told her about Booker T. Washington as she thumbed through the pages and looked at the pictures.  She looked inquiringly towards her mom.  Could we get it?  Mom shook her head.  I got the feeling they had gotten other souvenirs of their visit.  Meanwhile the little boy, earnest and blond, looked hard at the book, then at me, thought for a moment and then asked feelingly, “Is it about freedom?”

As I tried to answer him I realized that while I had never particularly thought about it that way, yes, my book IS about freedom.  It is about how being free means you can seek education and how your education can open doors.  It is about the freedom to use your resources in the service of your ideals.  It is about fighting for freedom and believing it can be ours.  He and his sister listened to me very politely.  “Thank you,” they said and then turned to follow their mom out of the museum.

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The Washington Post obituary of the wonderful artist Elizabeth Catlett, who died this week at the age of 96, reported that a grant she recieved in 1946 made it possible for her to study in Mexico where she created a powerful series of prints, “The Negro Woman.” The article does not say that the grant was from the Rosenwald Fund, or that it was followed a year later by a second Rosenwald followship.  Catlett is one of the many African American artists whose careers were encouraged by the Rosenwald Fund.

From the obituary I learned that Catlett was born in Washington DC in 1915.  Three of her grandparents had been slaves.  Her father was a mathematics teachers and he made wood carvings but he died before she was born.  Her mother worked for the DC school system as a truant officer.  Catlett graduated from Dunbar High school here in Washington.  According to the obituary, she won a scholarship to what became Carnegie Mellon University but the school withdrew the offer when they realized that the person they had chosen was black. So Catlett to Howard, and then to the University of Iowa, which awarded her its first master’s degree in sculpture.  She taught at several schools including Hampton Institute in Virginia before moving to Mexico in 1946. Her second husband was Mexican artist Francisco Mora and they had three sons. Catlett was friends with Diego Rivera and other figures controversial for their political views.  She was questioned about her Communist connections at the U.S.embassy and, after she became a Mexican citizen in 1962, declared an “undesirable alien” by the U.S. government. In 2002 her citizenship was restored. 

During her Rosenwald fellowship, Catlett worked on a series of wood block prints depicting working women.  At Iowa, her teacher Grant Wood had advised her to let her art flow from what she knew best.  As she said in an NPR interview quoted in the Post, “The thing I knew most about was black women, because I am one and I lived with them all my life, so that’s what I started working with.” So the prints depict women scrubbing floors and hoeing crops, sitting at desks with books and talking with union organizers.  The pictures’ captions help tell the stories the pictures evoke.  “In Sojorner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes,” ‘In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom.”A picture of a woman sitting on a bus behind a “colored only” sign is entitled, “I have special reservations.”  Another shows a man on the ground with a rope around his neck.  “And a special fear for my loved ones,” says the caption.  The final image in the series is a powerful female face captioned, “My right is a future of equality with other Americans.” 

 Many of these images were displayed in 2009 and 2010 in the powerful exhibition, “A Force for Change, African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund” that began at the Spertus Museum in Chicago and then travelled to Allentown, Pennsylvania and Montclair, New Jersey where David and I saw it just  before it closed. Catlett was well represented in the show and she was in good company.  Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, Charles Alston, Gordon Parks, and Lamar Baker were there too along with many others. The Introduction to the catalog, by Daniel Schulman, calls the Rosenwald Fund ”the largest and most influential single patron of African American arts and letters in the twentieth century, perhaps ever.”

Elizabeth Catlett’s work, both her prints and her sculpture, is strong and straightforward which, I think, is the way she looks in this picture — strong and straightforward but also very warm. I would like to know more about her.  Next time I’m in Nashville, I’ll look up her files in the Rosenwald Fund papers that are in the Fisk University library.  In the meantime, wanting to look at her work gives me a reason to go explore the Howard University Gallery of Art and the Hampton University Museum where much of it is displayed.

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I’ve done so many things since I last wrote that I hardly know where to start.  I’ve had a book party in New York (thank you, Alice Rosenwald!), spoken at three Rosenwald schools in North Carolina (thank you Angelo Franceschina and others), had a trip to Clifton Forge, Virginia for a black history month presentation at Dabney Lancaster Community College there — and I’ve been interviewed on NPR! I enjoyed the visit to Ridgeley Rosenwald school in Prince George’s County, Maryland with Guy Roz, Weekend Edition host, and with Mildred Ridgeley Gray, who is over ninety and went to school there.  And a week ago, in Atlanta, I was able to peronally hand a copy of my book to John Lewis!  I sat with him at the first dinner of the civil rights field trip, sponsored by the University of Virginia and led by Julian Bond that David and I took again this year.  Congressman Lewis, a major leader of the movement, started his education at a Rosenwald school in Alabama.

The trip was wonderful.  Our traveling companions were a dynamic group – an eleven year old boy traveling with his father, several grandmothers, a couple of Edmondite sisters, some teachers, some psychiatrists, a college professor, a jazz festival impressario and a radio talk show host.  We shared a desire to learn more about the civil rights movement.  One young woman works for the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation created by descendants of the key figures in the case that legalized “separate but equal” seeking to address social inequities. One of our traveling companions had grown up in the South and remembered, as a child, asking her mother, “Why can’t I have colored water?” Another saw a cross burned near her home when she was ten years old and confessed to carrying a burden of bitterness in her heart ever since. Julian Bond and his wife, Pamela Horowitz, were the trip leaders and at every stop we benefited from their extensive connections to people who had been involved in the events we talked about.  At that first dinner Julian interviewed John Lewis about his experience on the Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965 when Alabama police turned back 600 marchers.  In the crush of bodies and billy clubs and police on horseback Lewis was beaten and fell to the ground.  He still has no idea how he made it back to Brown Chapel AME church in Selma. The day became known as ”bloody Sunday.” 

A week later President Lyndon Johnson convened a joint session of Congress and made what Lewis later called “the finest speech of his career…probably the strongest speech any American president has ever made on the subject of voting rights.”  Johnson began by evoking the turning points “in man’s unending search for freedom” that had occured at Lexington and  Concord, at Appomattox, and he equated them with Selma.  “What happened in Selma,” the president said, “is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who much overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”  And then the president said words that caused Martin Luther King, watching the speech on television, to wipe away a tear.  “And we shall overcome.”

Two weeks later, under federal protection, 25,000 marchers, many of whom had walked the fifty miles from Selma, led by Lewis, Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Reverend and Mrs. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Dick Gregory and a rabbi, Abraham Heschel, reached the state capital in Montgomery.  Five months later, on August 6, 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed the voting rights act which suspended literacy tests and poll taxes and gave the federal government a mandate to ensure voting rights for everyone. It was a high point for the civil rights movement.

Walking across the Pettus bridge was certainly a high point of our trip.  A few days later, visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi was an emotional low.  That was the small town where one year before the Selma march three young men, two whites from the north and an African American from neighboring Meridian, dissappeared one June night.

The day after we got back from our trip, our good friend Bart Barnes was with us for Sunday night dinner and told us a fascinating story.  In 1964 as a young reporter for the Washington Post he was sent to Georgia to cover the fatal shooting there of Lemuel Penn, a D.C. assistant school superintendent.  I’ll quote from the e-mail Bart sent me about it the next day.  “Penn was in the Army Reserve and was driving back from a two-week Army reserve summer training assignment at Fort Benning, Georgia when he was ambushed near Athens by some Klansmen who blasted his car with shotguns.  His only offense, as you observed last night — was ‘driving while black.’  It was my first big out-of-town assignment.  In Georgia I met several members of the print and electronic media who had been in Mississippi three weeks earlier to cover the disappearance of the three civil rights workers and I clearly remember at least one reporter, and maybe more, saying he was convinced the sherrif in Mississippi had something to do with the disappearance.  Turns out he was right.”

In August an informant tipped off the FBI and the bodies of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were found on land owned by a man known to be a KKK member. The two white men had been shot once; the black man had been tortured before being killed.  When state and local authorities took no action to indict anyone the federal government stepped in.  Eighteen local men were tried on federal charges of conspiracy and seven were found guilty and sent to prison for periods of up to ten years (though none served more than six).  Sheriff Laurence Rainey was among those acquitted.  It was only in 2005, thanks in part to the relentless pursuit of the story by journalist Jerry Mitchell, that Edgar Ray Killen, a pastor and known klansman then 80 years old, was tried for the murders.  New evidence revealed the extent of the complicity of the sheriff, the police department and Killen, who was one of the organizers of the crime.  He was convicted of manslaughter and is now in prison.

All of which would be pretty demoralizing were it not for Leroy Clemons and the effort he has been leading among local people to talk about the events of a half century ago and what they mean today.  Philadelphia is a town of 7,500 people, many of whom have been there for generations.  Feelings and fears and long suppressed suspicions among both blacks and whites were revived by Mr. Nixon’s trial.  A group of citizens came together as the Philadelphia Coalition that met once a week for two years.  According to Mr. Clemons it was an emotional but “transformative” experience.  Each year there is a memorial service  to honor the memory of they men who were killed in Mississippi’s Philadelphia and to celebrate a newly united community there. It has not always been a city of brotherly love but Mr. Clemons and many others there are embracing the hope of at least coming closer to that ideal.

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Yesterday was the groundbreaking for the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture which is expected to open its doors in 2015.  It is on the Mall, between the National Museum of American History and the Washington  Monument.  A crowd was already gathering at the site yesterday morning when a friend went by on her walk.  They weren’t disapointed — President Obama was one of the speakers at the groundbreaking saying, among other things, that he wants his daughters to see “the shackles that bound slaves on their voyage across the ocean and the shards of glass that flew from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and understand theat injustice and evil exist in the world.”  The museum will be, though, “not just a record of tragedy but a celebration of life.”  Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a sponsor of the legislation that established the museum spoke of the “cleansing effect” that it would have on the “psyche of Americans.”  “There is still a lot of pain in America,” he said, “and this will lead to reconciliation.”

I have written about the museum before and have said how thrilled I am that among the artifacts that will be displayed there are desks from Rosenwald schools.  I’m all for anything that excites interest in the study of history.  I recieved an e-mail this week from a thirteen year old in Illinois who is doing a project about the Rosenwald schools for National History Day.  She read my book and wants to talk to me about it as she prepares her presentation.  I love the idea of a competition like a science fair where students do historical research and find imaginative ways of presenting their findings.  I don’t watch it often, but I think the History Channel is a great idea.  I have fond memories of school field trips to historical sites like Mount Vernon and Gunston Hall and of taking my daughter to see the reconstructed Mayflower.  I couldn’t believe how small the quarters below decks were.  It was hard to imagaine how cramped and smelly that must have became and then to think aobut how much worse the Middle Passage from Africa to America must have been.

I was interested to see last week an article in the paper about a man who has made a documentary that was shown on PBS examining the premise of Black History Month.  Shukree Hassan Tilghman asks if February is “really a celebration of black history or a way to say, ‘You black people don’t really matter outside of February and you’re not really American’?” His question reminded me of the time a few years ago when I was at a neighborhood bookstore looking for a copy of John Lewis’s wonderful book, Walking with the Wind, a Memoir of the Movement.    I looked in the history section and didn’t find it so I went over to biography and memoir.  When I couldn’t find it there either I asked the clerk.  “Oh, it’s over in the African American section,” I was told.  He said publishers actually stipulate which section books should be displayed in.  Black history, African American history is, of course, part of the larger story of American history.  You could certainly make arguments on both sides of the question of whether or not it should be considered separately.  But separating it out did not make it easier for me to find.  It was not the way I had been thinking.

The story I tell in You Need a Schoolhouse is black history and it’s Jewish history but I think of it as American history.  No part of it can exist without the other parts.   If the new museum it excites people and makes them feel proud in their heritage, if it encourages classes to take field trips and parents to talk to their children, then it is of value.  History feels real and important when one can sense a connection to it.  The best museums make that happen. Places help foster that sense.  So do conversations with people about their lives and reading memoirs of folks long gone. One of my friends, a journalist, told me I should write down everything I remember about September 11, 2001.  That’s history, he said, and you’ll forget some of the details.  I am so glad I have a letter my long dead uncle wrote to his brother, my father, asking, “Have you heard any of those fireside chats that Roosevelt is doing?”  I have as well the letters my father wrote home to my mother from France and Belgium duringWorld War II.  I haven’t had the heart or the stretch of uninterrupted time to read them yet but I will.  They’re powerful family records, of course.  But they are also history not because they give the date of the Battle of the Bulge but because through them I may get a glimpse of what it was like for a young man from west Texas to be at that climactic moment of a climactic war. Knowing I have them makes everything I read about the war more meaningful. So does having been to the Normandy beaches.

Yesterday was also Ash Wednesday and my church’s liturgy deaprted from traditional to include a poem by Langston Hughes who I wrote about last time.  It seems appropriate, somehow, so I thought I would close with this:

To sit and dream, to sit and read,

to sit and learn about the world

outside our world of here and now –

our problem world –

To dream of vast horizons of the soul

Through dreams made whole,

Unfettered, free – help  me!

All you who are dreamers, too,

help me to make our world anew.

I reach out my dreams to you.

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When my children were in elementary school, many years ago, they had to memorize short poems which they recited before lunch. One of the first they learned was unfamiliar to me at the time but has been with me ever since then. I say it often to myself as I walk the dog or do the dishes or work in the garden.

    Hold fast to dreams
    For if dreams die
    Life is a broken-winged bird
    That cannot fly.

    Hold fast to dreams
    For when dreams go  
    Life is a barren field
    Frozen with snow.

This lovely poem is by Langston Hughes and I just realized that his birthday is February first.  Yesterday was a very spring-like day to be thinking of anything frozen with snow but I love these simple lines and many others Hughes wrote.  And I appreciate knowing that this giant in twentieth century American literature was encouraged by two fellowships from the Rosenwald Fund, in 1931 and 1941.

If my own dreams hold up and I have the time and energy to undertake another writing project I would like to focus on the Rosenwald fellowships and the remarkable group of men and women who benefitted from them — a true who’s who of African American intelligentsia and artists as well as some white Americans of note.  I mean who wouldn’t love a project that brings together James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Primus, Augusta Savage, Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence (and many, many others) with Julius Rosenwald and Woodie Guthrie!

For now, though, I’m taking a little time off to celebrate another birthday — my husband David’s 69th.  We’re going to Philadelphia where we’ll see the big show of paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  I am not familiar with work of this pioneering African-American painter who grew up in Philadelphia after the Civil War and then moved to France where he was very successful and led an artists colony. I believe Booker T. Washington visited his studio on one of his trips to Paris.  I am looking forward to getting to know Tanner through this show of his work which is called “Modern Spirit.”

This painting of Tanner is by his friend and mentor, a fellow Philadelphian, Thomas Eakins.

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My grandson was born ten days ago.  I am so happy and thankful that he has joined us at last, healthy and strong. And I am thrilled that his parents chose to name him Julius which they did, in part, to honor the baby’s great-great-great-grandfather, Julius Rosenwald.  There was another less obvious reason they were attracted to the name.  They met in Tanzania and they love the place where Julius Nyerere is revered as “mwalimu,” teacher, and the father of the country created in 1964 when the former British colony, Tanganyika, and the island of Zanzibar combined.  It is quite an unusual heritage for our little guy – Rosenwald, successful capitalist dedicated to using his wealth to benefit African Americans; Nyerere, an African Catholic socialist, a self-made man who aspired to build a new country around the concept of “ujamma,” or familyhood.  When I get a minute I look forward to learning more about Nyerere.

At the moment, though, I am pretty busy not just with playing with Julius but with events promoting my book (as one of my nieces said, my “brainchild” and my grandchild have arrived together).  Last Saturday I had a wonderful evening at Washington’s premiere bookstore, Politics and Prose.  This is a very desirable place for an author to be invited to speak so  I was glad that the sleet and snow had almost melted from sidewalks and streets by 6 pm.  I was delighted to see many familiar faces among the folks that gathered to hear me.

I had been given some good advice which was to not read long passages from the book and not to feel that I had to completely retell the story of the book.  I did read a brief passage from the Prologue but I also talked about some of the ways that my research and writing had broadened my interest in and understanding of a whole variety of things.  As an example, I cited an article from the front page of that day’s Washington Post which talked about the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture which will open on the Mall in 2015 and the dream of its founding director, Lonnie Bunch III, to find and display clothing that had been worn by slaves.   It is a dream Bunch thinks likely to remain unfulfilled. Clothing is so perishable and slave clothing in particular unlikely to be carefully preserved.

Reading the article I found myself remembering a vivid passage from Up From Slavery in which Booker T. Washington described what he wore as a child.  His first shoes “had leather on the top but the bottoms, which were about an inch thick, were of wood.  When I walked they  made a fearful noise, and besides this they were very inconvenient, since there was no yielding to the natural pressure of the foot.  In wearing them one presented an exceedingly awkward appearance.” I can just imagine the little boy clattering around in his uncomfortable and awkward shoes.

That was nothing, though, compared to the discomfort of the flax shirt that was his only clothing.  That garment was “the most trying ordeal that I was forced to endure as a slave boy.” So strong is his memory of this misery that Washington devotes almost a whole page to it.

In the portion of Virginia where I lived it was common to use flax as part of the clothing for the slaves.  That part of the flax from which our clothing was made was largely the refuse, which of course was the cheapest and roughest part.  I can scarcely imagine any torture, except, perhaps, the pulling of a tooth, that is equal to that caused by putting on a new flax shirt for the first time.  It is almost equal to the feeling that one would experience if he had a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh. Even to this day I can recall accurately the tortures that I underwent when putting on one of these garments.  The fact that my flesh was soft and tender added to the pain.  But I had no choice.  I had to wear the flax shirt or none; and had it been left to me to choose, I should have chosen to wear no covering.

In connection with the flax shirt, my brother John, who is several years older than I am, performed one of the most generous acts that I ever heard of one slave relative doing for another.  One several occasions when I was being forced to wear a new flax shirt, he generously agreed to put it on in my stead and wear it for several days, till it was “broken in.” Until I had grown to be quite a youth this single garment was all that I wore.

Up From Slavery is dedicated to ”my wife, Mrs. Margaret James Washington,” and also, rather more effusively, to “my Brother, Mr. John H. Washington, whose patience, fidelity and hard work have gone far to make the work at Tuskegee successful.” The two brothers helped each other.  Booker made sure John graduated from Hampton, as he had.  John worked for five years for the Army Corps of Engineers, and then came down to Tuskegee where he took an a variety of administrative tasks. In this photo of the faculty in 1902 Booker T. Washington is in the middle of the front row and his brother, John is at the far right.  Just behind him is George Washington Carver, who had been hired in 1896 to teach agricultural chemistry. At the far left in the back row is Robert R. Taylor, the first black graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first professionally trained African American architect of note.  He went to work at Tuskegee in 1892 and designed many of the school’s impressive red brick buildings including the school’s original chapel.    

There is a new book out about Taylor, Robert R Taylor and Tuskegee, An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington, by Ellen Weiss.  It was just reviewed very positively in the New York Times.  Among Taylor’s descendants are Valerie Jarrett, advisor to President Obama, and Ann Dibble Jordan, an educator and former trustee of the University of Chicago, now married to Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan.  It was my great pleasure to see them both, briefly, on Saturday at Politics and Prose.

Ok, now I’m going to check on Julius.  Here he is with his dad checking out the State of the Union.

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I am so distracted by waiting for my first grandchild to be born that I have not written anything for the blog.  As I continue to wait, maybe I’ll do a bit of recylcing.  Here’s what my friend Ellen Frost wrote me this week:  ”I would have read your book anyway out of friendship, loyalty, and interest in education, but once I started I found it to be a real page-turner. The depth of your research is amazing — fully up to the standard of David McCullough and others. You write in such a clear and lively way that the book is easy to read. And the chapters are short! I could see plainly how you wrestled with BTW’s compromises and the traces of JR’s contemporary prejudices without diminishing the men in any way.  The result is not a hagiography but rather a tremendously vital portrait of two remarkable people.  Multiple bravos!”  Needless to say, this made me feel great and was much appreciated. 

Karen Lyon, a neighbor, wrote a very thoughtful review for our neighborhood newspaper, the Hill Rag.

http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/archive/2011-11/#You-Need-a-Schoolhouse-by-Stephanie-Deutsch

And here’s what I wrote in response to an invitation from Marshal Zernigue to contribute to his blog, “My Book, the Movie.” He will be posting this soon.

When my friend Tony Rizzoli asked me what Julius Rosenwald looked like I gave a rather flip response.  I said, “kind of nebbishy.”   But even as these words were leaving my mouth I realized they were incorrect.  In his later years Rosenwald actually looked like Tony – thin, not much hair, angular face, friendly, open expression.  Twenty five years ago, Tony’s performance in Larry Shue’s play The Foreigner was one of funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage.  The sense of humor that lurks behind Tony’s own intelligent eyes was, I realized, a feature in Rosenwald as well.  The millionaire president of Sears, Roebuck turned race conscious philanthropist could seem a rather wooden figure on the printed page.  But Tony would save him from such a fate by showing his more energetic, playful, humorous side. I had long since decided that Booker T. Washington’s role would go to a rather more prominent actor — either Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington. Both have the gravitas, not to mention the acting skills, to play the man who, one hundred years ago, was by far the most well-known black in America.  Freeman’s physical resemblance is closer and his wonderful voice would provide the screen Washington with an asset he, in fact, lacked; his own voice was not particularly distinguished.  But Denzel Washington — younger, darker, fiercer – could give the role an intriguing intensity.  The calm reasonableness that made Booker T. Washington such an appealing and acceptable figure at the time surely masked growing alarm as, his optimism notwithstanding, Jim Crow tightened its grip on the country in the early years of the twentieth century.  The man who played the angry Civil War recruit in Glory and the unyielding coach in The Great Debators might endow Washington with a complexity of feeling that many of his contemporaries, both white and black, assumed he did not have.

The intriguing relationship between the two men is not the only screenworthy aspect of my story.  Rosenwald’s first visit to Tuskegee would surely light up the screen.  In October of 1911 he travelled south with a trainload of friends and family members from Chicago.  His visit to the hilly campus culminated in an evening service in the school’s elegant red brick chapel where he and Washington spoke.  Then, as they often did for visitors, the students sang spirituals.  Rosenwald, who had never before heard this music, was moved to tears.   The same song could be reprised for the scene, just a year or two later, when the two men visited one of the small rural schoolhouses built as a result of their collaboration, encouragement and financial assistance.   Then parents, teachers, children, community members lined the rutted country road to the school, dressed in their best and waving pine boughs in greeting, singing what one member of the party called “plantation songs.” 

And there would have to be a scene where Washington reads a telegram from Rosenwald apologizing for missing a meeting of the Tuskegee Board of Trustees.  He explained his absence using the words of his favorite of the spirituals the students sang.  He said he could not come because he was “walking in Jerusalem, just like John.”  Cue the music.

Check out Marshal’s website, http://mybookthemovie.blogspot.com/ It’s fun!

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This fall, at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference in Buffalo, I met Carol Shields who was bubbling over with enthusiasm for the work she has been doing transforming the run down, abandoned Hamilton Colored School building into the Rosenwald River Center.  Here’s her post for the Trust website about her work.

http://blog.preservationnation.org/2012/01/04/a-reflection-on-heritage-and-the-hamilton-colored-school/

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