Celebrating Black Intellectual History–Then and Now
In “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” a video created for her high school history class that later went viral, Amandla Stenberg analyzes white appropriation of Black hip hop culture, concluding with the question raised by Black Lives Matter activists: “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” Halfway through Love is the Message, The Message is Death, artist Arthur Jafa samples this clip from Stenberg’s video, confronting audiences in American and European museums with the same question. Black Perspectives teaches readers to ask an equally powerful corollary question: What would America be like if it cultivated Black intelligence rather than exploiting Black labor?
Prior to encountering Black Perspectives, I thought of myself as a social historian. The intellectual history I was assigned in school (always authored by white Europeans) felt stodgy and dry, philosophical in a way that was divorced from people’s daily lives. But just as Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh demonstrates how economic history is relevant and vital to understanding the social worlds and emotional experiences of enslaved African Americans, so Black Perspectives proves how significant and compelling African American intellectual history is for understanding America’s past and its present, and for understanding the social worlds and emotional experiences of countless members of the Black diaspora.
Too often, Americans think of history as a simplistic record of what someone in the past did. Black Perspectives offers a conceptual framework for exploring why and how people came to do what they did. Yielding a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the past, this framework challenges the “great man” notion of history (embraced by conservatives and neoliberals alike), by shifting the object of history from a celebration of individualistic achievements to an interconnected catalog of activist networks and social movements that effected historical change. I deeply appreciate how Black Perspectives‘s framework has infused my own research.
When Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s groundbreaking book A Shining Thread of Hope was published more than twenty-five years ago, I was working on my dissertation, which examined how the design and occupation of American domestic space has served to enforce or challenge constructions of race and gender. In Shining Thread, Hine and Thompson describe how a woman they identified as Mary Elizabeth Bowser spied for the Union during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House. This account seemed to embody my thesis, and I included a brief discussion in my dissertation of this Black woman who played on white assumptions about race and gender to penetrate Jefferson Davis’s domestic sphere undetected.
Rather than turning my dissertation into an academic book, I wove its themes into the novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Choosing fiction allowed me to imagine an enslaved family, free Black friends, and mentors who might have guided and assisted this young woman. At the time, I believed such an invention was necessary because it seemed there was not enough information preserved in extant records to determine who the real woman’s family, friends, and mentors were. Drawing on extensive historical research, I crafted a novel that introduced fiction readers to many real Black historical figures and to key themes in African American history.
The novel brought research on African American history to audiences beyond academia. But it could not counter the misrepresentations that persist in most purportedly nonfiction accounts of “Mary Elizabeth Bowser.” These misrepresentations stem from a single source, one that presupposed the exploitation of Black labor and denied the centrality of Black intelligence. It is a 1911 article in Harper’s magazine lionizing Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy white Richmonder and committed Unionist whose family enslaved the younger Black woman. In the Harper’s article, the Black woman appears only briefly, characterized as a devoted and innately inferior servant in a passage that has become the basis, directly or indirectly, for nearly all subsequent accounts (including Hine and Thompson’s):
“[Van Lew’s] method of reaching President Davis in his least-guarded moments is evidence of her genius as a spy and a leader of spies. The Van Lews had owned a negro girl of unusual intelligence; several years before the war, she had been given her freedom, sent North, and educated at Miss Van Lew’s expense. This young woman, whose name was Mary Elizabeth Bowser, was now sent for; she came and for a time, was coached and trained for her mission; then, in consummation of Miss Van Lew’s scheming, she was installed as a waitress in the White House of the Confederacy. What she was able to learn, how long she remained behind Jefferson Davis’s dining chair, and what became of the girl when the war ended are questions to which Time has effaced the answers.”
The passage assumes that a Black girl (she was already in her early twenties) who has intelligence is “unusual,” while a white woman’s “genius as a spy and a leader of spies” is naturalized. The white woman is presumed to have no need to be “coached and trained” for military espionage, despite how different such acts were from her pampered antebellum existence, even as the Black woman’s efforts to undermine the Confederacy do not mark her as a historical actor in her own right. Instead, her activities are cast as “consummation” of her enslaver’s “scheming.” All that is “effaced” in this version regarding this Black figure serves to reinscribe the enshrining of the white woman as the hero to be admired.
Black Perspectives, and the larger scholarly turn it fosters and reflects, offers a counter to such effacement by centering Black experience and emphasizing the social worlds and political strategies thoughtfully constructed by enslaved and free Blacks.
But the very idea of a lone Black spy in the Confederate White House remains irresistible in neoliberal retellings that continue to promote distorted claims about “Mary Bowser” online, in print, and in podcasts. Although circulated as a celebration of Black women’s history, these accounts, riddled with errors, impede public understanding of America’s past. Scholars of African American history have increasingly documented how integral Black civilians, soldiers, and sailors were to the defeat of the Confederacy. Yet in a historiographical parallel to pop culture’s cash-cropped cornrows, the myth of Mary Bowser, devoted servant of “spymaster” Elizabeth Van Lew, obscures how Union victory depended on the strategies for resistance and resilience developed over generations by communities of free and enslaved Blacks.
More than seven years after the novel was published, I came across an 1870 letter to Elizabeth Van Lew from the woman inaccurately characterized in the 1911 Harper’s article. The letter contained enough details about her life to launch me on a new book project, the first scholarly biography of the real woman behind the “Mary Bowser” myth. It is a project I could not have conceived of without the foundation Black Perspectives provides.
This project interprets newfound evidence and re-evaluates long-known sources through the analytic frameworks Black Perspectives offers. Poring over tens of thousands of documents from archives across the US and beyond, I am piecing together my subject’s lifelong participation in networks of transatlantic Black activists and leaders, and her ongoing efforts to achieve racial justice and gender equality. Documenting what she did and also why and how she came to do it requires conscientiously excavating and honoring her thoughts and emotions as well as her actions.
Unlike a conventional biography, which promotes its subject’s exceptionalism, my project emphasizes her many Black mentors and allies in the nineteenth-century struggle for full citizenship. I am indebted to Black Perspectives for continually pushing me to probe—and, in my writing, to guide readers outside academia to understand—the intellectual and political influences, movements, and interconnections through which African Americans shaped (and continue to shape) history.
Given the diverse places where this fascinating figure lived, learned, and worked, the myriad of teachers, mentors, friends, lovers, and allies she interacted with, and the scattering of disparate sources across archives, museums, and libraries, this is a many-year-long project. Slow history may be a decolonizing and feminist practice, but it can also be a solitary one. By providing virtual community, camaraderie, and continuous learning, Black Perspectives sustains researchers wherever we may be in our work. Readers’ comments on Black Perspectives posts also remind us that there is a ready public audience for thoughtful history. As an online resource accessible to all, regardless of geographic location or academic affiliation, Black Perspectives cultivates and supports our collective effort to document and celebrate Black intellectual history and nurtures our collective historical struggle.
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