When I speak to groups about Eddie Robinson, whose biography I wrote a few years after he died in 2007, I often request a show of hands from the audience in response to this sequence of questions:

How many of you were born sometime during the 1950s?

How about in the 1960s?

I ask the same of all who read this, for the answer helps to make an important, essential, point when considering the place in history of a man such as Grambling’s Eddie Robinson, who is known as the greatest black college football coach in history but who is so much more, a truly great American.

If you were born in the 1960s or later—that’s everyone 50 or younger—you are one of more than 111 million Americans who either were infants during the Civil Rights Movement, or were born after it.

For one-third of America’s current population of citizens born in this country, Martin Luther King was never a living, breathing person.  He’s only a famous American, revered by many, whose courageous contributions are recalled and honored every year.

And who, as of late last year, is memorialized in Washington, DC with a monument dedicated to him.

The ugliness of Little Rock Central High School . . . the tension of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott . . . the violence of the Freedom Rides in Alabama . . . the indignity of whites-only lunch counters and “colored” drinking fountains . . . and the vicious abuse of peaceful marchers in Birmingham and Selma . . .

ALL occurred BEFORE one-third of today’s Americans could have experienced them, or even known that they took place.

This is significant not only because later generations can’t possibly know what it was like at the time—to be black, or white—but also because it puts Eddie Robinson’s achievements as a coach and his contributions as a leader and role model into a context which today, a half century later, are too easily underestimated, if not totally disregarded.

Eddie Robinson was Grambling’s football coach for 57 years, from 1941 to 1997.  In historical terms, that spans the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, from World War II to Vietnam, and from Jim Crow to Brown Vs. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act, The Fair Housing Act and beyond.

Eddie Robinson’s 408 coaching victories, the more than 200 players he sent into pro football, and his four Pro Football Hall of Famers (Willie Davis, Charlie Joiner, Buck Buchanan and Willie Brown) and milestone players such as Tank Younger, James Harris and Doug Williams speak to his stature as a coach, and explain, at least in part, why he is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

But the bigger story of Eddie Robinson is his influence on generations of young people and his broader impact across the once-segregated South.

“Coach Rob,” as he is called still today by those who knew him, emphasized intensive conditioning, detailed preparation and incredibly repetitious practice to achieve flawless execution.

Eddie Robinson, the man, meanwhile, emphasized completing a college education, learning to be accountable, working hard, doing a good job . . . and believing in America.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Robinson discouraged everyone around him from becoming actively engaged in the marches, sit-ins and protests that became the public face of the unrelenting campaign for racial equality. It is natural to question his reluctance to join those who risked life and serious injury; he wrestled with it himself.

But in the end he felt a clear responsibility to steer his players and others away from potentially dangerous encounters—those mothers who trusted him to be a father figure and role model for their sons expected it—and to prepare them for the changes he was sure were coming in American society.

“He never told us that life was unfair and that we’d have to be ready for it,” said Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to win the Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Award.  “He always told us that this was America, and we could be anything we wanted to be.”

Said Charlie Joiner, who played for the Cincinnati Bengals during his Hall of Fame career:  “The thing he always wanted to stress, was to be a good citizen and a good American.  He believed in being a good citizen, because he was one.”

When Eddie Robinson died in 2007, a former player who became a member of the Louisiana state legislature, said:

“In the aftermath of his death, a lot of attention will be devoted to all the players he sent to the NFL. That’s not his legacy.  It’s the thousands of young men who went to Grambling with no hope of having a life in the NFL. His legacy is the thousands of men who are good fathers and good husbands, good businessmen, good employees and community leaders.”

DENNY DRESSMAN is the author of Eddie Robinson “ . . . he was the Martin Luther King of football.” The award-winning biography is available in the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center gift shop.

Is studying black history relevant in 2012?

One could presume that since African-American innovations are more visible and greater accepted into popular culture that there is no longer a need to engage in discourse on the topic of black history.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson, "Father" of Black History Month

However, had it not been for the vision of impassioned revolutionaries like Dr. Carter G. Woodson, African-American history might have gone undocumented another century.  This is a history that traces all the way back to the first Dutch and Spanish ships with Africans arriving to North America around 1624, but outside of propaganda publications that published hurtful ethnic stereotypes, black history wasn’t documented with regard until the 20^th century.

Dr. Woodson helped us see that black history is American history, not a history only for African-Americans to study. We can look at his life and see the “American Dream” manifesting the way all of us hope it to manifest in our own lives. Who wouldn’t be inspired to know that Woodson’s parents were former slaves and he worked in a Kentucky coalmine for years before he enrolled into high school at age 20, then graduated two years later and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard?  As a student, Woodson observed that information written on people of African descent was either fallacious or intentionally less mentioned, which propagated the idea that blacks were an inferior race. To counter this racist ideology, Woodson began documenting facts himself, and established the Journal of Negro History. In 1926, Dr. Woodson began Negro History Week the second week in February as a way to call attention to the contributions being made by African-Americans.

Do you know these dates significant to Black History? (Courtesy of Infoplease.com)

• February 23, 1868:
  W. E. B. DuBois, important civil rights leader and co-founder of the NAACP, was born.
• February 3, 1870:
  The 15th Amendment was passed, granting blacks the right to vote.
• February 25, 1870:
  The first black U.S. senator, Hiram R. Revels (1822-1901), took his oath of office.
• February 12, 1909:
  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by a group of concerned black and white citizens in New York City.
• February 1, 1960:
  In what would become a civil-rights movement milestone, a group of black Greensboro, N.C., college students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.
• February 21, 1965:
  Malcolm X, the militant leader who promoted Black Nationalism, was shot to death by three Black Muslims.

In honor and celebration of Black History Month, The Freedom Center is hosting a debate regarding the value and impact of black history called Why Black History? on February 2.

This session’s panelists include Dr. Francille Rusan Wilson, Associate professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California and Dr. Prince Brown, retired Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northern Kentucky University.

For more details on this free event, which was made possible by PNC, visit the Freedom Center’s event page here:

There is a spark within each of us. Fan the Flame.

Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.

January 16^th, 1861 was the day that antebellum diplomacy between the Union and the Confederacy died. The Crittenden compromise, though proposed after four states had already seceded from the Union, was meant to prevent an all-out war between the Union and Confederacy. The proposed compromise would consist of a series of constitutional amendments that would extend the Mason-Dixon line at the 36 30’ parallel across the entire country, forbidding slavery north of this line. The desperation of the compromise is evident. Passing an amendment to the Constitution is no easy task. If the alternative had not been a split of the Union or Civil War, it would have seemed like an unreasonable course of action. Other amendments forbade federal interference with the slave trade, protected slavery in the District of Columbia, and compensated slave owners whose slaves escaped into northern free states.

It should not be difficult to see why this so-called “compromise” failed. The North alleviated every fear held by the South and the confederate States, and yet received nothing from them. A compromise does not exist unless both parties gain something from the exchange. It has been said that a good compromise leaves no one happy. This one was obviously not a good compromise, since the South would have loved it, and the North would not have benefitted whatsoever. This would have forced the Republican Party to abandon the most important issues that had led to the secession crisis.

The bill had no chance of passing. It was doomed from the start. It was a last-ditch effort to keep the Union together. It was voted down in the Senate twenty-five votes to twenty-three. When persuading someone to vote for a law, it is essential for them to see the benefit in voting for it, and if there is nothing to be gained, as was the case for the Republicans, they will not support the legislation. Many historians have argued that the country was past the point of no return. What do you think? Could the Union have gotten away without the Civil War? There is a spark within each of us, so Fan the Flame!

Senator John J Crittenden

Why Do You March?

On Dr. Martin Luther King Day, my friend, whom I’ll call “Bishop,” called me around 8:30 am, wanting to know if I had the day off and what I was doing. I told him our Public Allies class was celebrating a day in service—“a day on, not off,” and was participating in the Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition’s march from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Bishop groaned.

At first, Bishop seemed to feel sorry for me that I didn’t “get to stay home,” and told me how cold it was that morning when he left to go work. Then, with sarcasm, he told me some of his co-workers, who are a generation older than us, march every year. “I don’t get that,” he said. “Why are people still marching?”

We laughed at his cynical observation after he described how he is judged for not participating in the march with his co-workers,  like he’s a discredit to Dr. King’s legacy and the black race. For me, it was funny, largely because I know Bishop well enough to know that he was really asking, “What does marching do, in terms of service in 2012? And how does it help people after MLK day?”

I can bet that if Bishop asked his middle-aged African-American co-workers who attend the marches faithfully with their civic organizations why they march, and with the same sarcasm, to them, he might’ve sounded ungrateful for the legacy King’s work imparted on America.

But for Bishop’s and my generation, the generation born a decade after the Civil Rights Movement, this legacy came to us skewed, by talking heads tip-toeing the subject of Black History, and textbooks that summarized the Civil Rights Movement—which lasted two decades—into one or two dry paragraphs. By the time Bishop and I were born, the Black Power Movement looked more like Soul Train dancers; and grassroots leadership was becoming an ambiguous notion as corporate America and government became more involved than “the people.” By the 1970s, Americans were more divided by social and economic factions than ever before since slavery. In retrospect, the word “community” must’ve sounded like a misnomer to most people, who were turning inward and concentrating on self-preservation, or “getting ahead.”

In the mid to late 70s, racism wasn’t being denied access to institutions or service, but it was the fine print in government sanctioned regulations that still made us economically disparaged as a community. Growing up, I heard some of my neighborhood’s elders blame integration for the fall of the black community. I can’t say I don’t understand now what they meant, because as an adult thinking about what integration implies, it’s like the happy ending in a Disney film because it assumes what everyone wants to see after witnessing “moments” of peril. Elders who felt this way lived through the pages in history our textbooks couldn’t contextualize, remembering a time when they were happy living in their microcosmic neighborhood. And they observed,  in silent fear while the assets of living in a black community depleted, as drug dealers and gangs slowly pushed away the family-owned businesses that provided services and goods to them.

Urban sprawl that helped connect the city to the suburbs also made people spend time in their own neighborhoods less and less, and spending time outside of the neighborhood helped you learn what other neighborhoods offered, but sadly, it made many people I grew up around see their own neighborhoods as deficit based. Rightfully so, people wanted to move to where they felt they could have better opportunities, but that didn’t change the plight of the people who had no choice but to stay where they were. Madison Avenue and television marketed the image of an upper middle class that wasn’t reflective in many homes, and for some people, the bootstrap ideology was bunk. Over the sitcom’s laugh track, you could almost hear this overwhelming cry from poor people of all races: “Where is my piece of the pie? I’ve worked hard my whole life.”

Bishop and I come from similar life experiences and relate to each other so well that when he asked the question, “Why do people still march,” I knew he wasn’t being ungrateful to King’s legacy. As children, going beyond the grumblings of our elders who wished things were different, we always dreamed and planned how we would make a difference. Maybe to Bishop, marching on MLK Day in the 21st century placates people’s need to feel like we’re making a difference by remembering the one person we like to think of as the face of the Civil Rights Movement.

This MLK Day, I did march. Maybe on the surface to someone else, it just looked symbolic. But I wasn’t just marching out of compliance to my organization. I marched with reverence and with consciousness for the men and women of all ages and races who marched before me so that I can have the things I have today, which are choices. When I think of service, I want to continue reflecting on how the work I do will serve someone else in a way that reminds him or her that no matter what skin we’re in, someone fought—and still fights– for everyone’s right to choose where they spend their money, where they can live, worship, work and socialize. I march thinking of those mighty fighters who go unmentioned beside Dr. King.

And maybe next MLK Day, Bishop will march with me.

There’s a spark in each of us. Fan the Flame.

Cadets from the Citadel fire upon the Star of the West

January 9^th, 1861 is a date that should be known well by any American. That day, an artillery battery operated by Cadets from the Citadel fired upon the Star of the West, a merchant ship sent to resupply the garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The withdrawal of the Federal garrison had been demanded by the government of South Carolina, which had seceded from the Union President Buchanan refused, sending the Star of the West to resupply the fort, though the fort’s commander had sent messages saying that he required no assistance for some time, and not to send anyone to resupply Fort Sumter. This forced the Confederates’ hand, and they fired upon the ship, nearly starting the Civil War. As it was, it resulted in both sides blustering until the Confederates actually fired upon the fort itself in April.

At this point, both sides knew that war was likely. It was a question of when and how it would start. The issue of who started the war was important to both sides, because being considered the “right side” or the “good guys” was important not only for simple PR and foreign relations, but also for recruitment. Everyone wanted to fight for the side that they believed to be right, the more honorable one. The incident of the firing upon the Star of the West could have started the Civil War right then and there. One more action on either side, such as Major Anderson going to the ship’s aid, or the Charleston authorities stopping the ship and boarding it, could have started the Civil War right then and there.

This might have had some interesting ramifications for the war. Since South Carolina had not seceded long previously, had Federal troops been sent South, it could have radically changed the course of the war. Crushing South Carolina and the Confederacy before it became strong could have radically shortened the war. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the troops that the government sent down would have been defeated and started the Union off with an embarrassing loss. (Not that the First Battle of Bull Run was much better).What do you think? Should the war have started sooner? What would have happened if it had? This is what makes history wonderful. We can speculate all that we please.

There is a spark within each of us, so Fan the Flame!

Anytime something negative happens in Cincinnati, it seems that people can never treat it as an incident and isolate it away from our city’s image.

Statue of Oscar Robertson at U.C.

After the fight that broke out at the Crosstown Shootout game between Xavier University and University of Cincinnati became the most trended national news story, the footage coupled with quotes from Xavier’s players fashioned a narrative that these colleges were recruiting and awarding scholarships to “gangstas and thugs.” Less than a week later, this imagery lingers because Xavier guard, Tu Holloway, referred to his teammates as gangstas in a media statement to justify the actions carried out by his team after responding to remarks from U.C., who lost the game.

But to Holloway and peers who use the word infrequently in colloquial conversation, “gangsta” doesn’t carry the same mainstream connotation. For example, I’ve heard a person describe someone they think is extraordinary, or ironically, someone who’s a “straight-shooter” as “gangsta” because aren’t easy to underestimate. Holloway later apologized and said he used the wrong choice of words to express himself, but  the damage was done. Our image was yet again, going to be tarnished in the media.

The day the fight was televised was the day I stopped counting the number of friends and family outside of the city that sent me texts to inquire, “What’s wrong with Cincinnati?” Minutes after I saw the news, I received a missed call message, followed by a text message from my father, who lives in Los Angeles. It didn’t say “Hi, Mildred; how are you?” No, he skipped the niceties altogether: “What up with CU and Xavier acting out like Crips & Bloods on the court?”  I wrote back that I didn’t know what to make of what I just saw, and he proceeded to explain it to me that it was a fight—but I got that much. I could’ve pointed out that we don’t have a school here called “Cincinnati University,” but I was still shell-shocked by the fact I just watched a critical beat down between college students on national television.

“Stupidity and basic roughneck mentality led to a brawl,” Dad said. He had a point about the “roughneck thing.” After I had more time to let the incident marinate on my mind, I did some introspection wondering how Cincinnati would’ve been viewed 50 years ago–similar scenario– if a NCAA fist-fight happened because of 1960s’discrimination, unfair draft practices, Jim Crow laws, and not some locker room pre-game mouthing off. A Cincinnati.com opinion editorial written about local former NBA legend and MVP, Oscar Robertson, called Players Could Take a Lesson from Big O gave me this insight:

“Oscar Robertson’s book, “The Big O,” should be required reading for all college basketball players (and maybe for all athletes). Compared to the slurs, racial epithets, and threats, etc., he had to endure, and rise above, just to play the game makes the “King of the Hill” mentality displayed by some of today’s college players petty and trivial.”

So what would “Big O” have done? In Robertson’s day, his generation fought to overcome negative labels without using street posturing. In his autobiography, Robertson talks about traveling to segregated cities with the Cincinnati Royals where he had to sleep in cramped college dormitories when his white teammates slept in hotel rooms. Later in his career, he was able to fight against injustice in NBA by leading a reform against strict free agency and draft rules.  His leverage paved the way for point guards like Magic Johnson, and his career, inside and outside of basketball, reflects a man that younger players can look at as inspiration.

And he would tell Xavier and U.C. that street behavior doesn’t belong on the court. He’d remind the students that they  their college careers and scholarships are at risk and that those are two things that weren’t readily granted to African-American males in his day.

Stay classy Cincinnati. There is a spark in each of us.

Fan the Flame.

Cincinnati’s role in the American Civil War was significant on many levels. Guns were manufactured here. Several training camps were established around the city to prepare Union troops for battle. And, for one month in 1862, Cincinnati was threatened by invasion from the South, which would have made it the first Norhtern city to fall under Confederate control. The Siege of Cincinnati was perhaps the most significant event regarding Cincinnati’s role in the war. And, within that story is the story of the Black Brigade of Cincinnati; a story of courage, cooperation, and perseverance. You can learn more about this story by watching the video below:

There is a spark within each of us, Fan the Flame!

Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.

As we celebrate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – we must, in the words of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, “acknowledge its enduring relevance for our own times.” To read his entire statement, click here.

As you watch the video below think about the rights you have and the rights of others that are restricted. How will you Fan the Flame?

There is a spark within each of us, Fan the Flame!

Author David Blight will lecture at the Freedom Center on December 8 at 6:30 pm on two of his books, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. Blight is a professor of American History at Yale University, is Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and is working on a full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published in 2013.

Last week, Mildred Fallen, Public Ally for Marketing & Web Communications, had the opportunity to interview Dr. Blight over the phone. Below is the transcript of the interview.

FC: I was reading a little bit of Fredrick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee; that seems really fascinating. There was a chapter I was drawn to, Chapter 5, Frederick Douglass and the Apocalypse, that has a quote from W.E.B. DuBois describing Emancipation as the Apocalypse for the newly freed slave. Can you talk a bit about what this implicated about the transition from slavery to freedom, especially for a modern reader who might think freedom meant African-Americans immediately shared the same rights as whites?

Well, that’s unfortunately a hopelessly simplified view of the whole thing, although, it’s hard to carve that out of our imaginations, isn’t it? That somehow, when freedom came, everything changed—but of course, it didn’t. In fact, we now have a much deeper understanding of the whole Emancipation process than we did even when I was in college and graduate school. There’s an enormous and growing good historical literature now on the whole story of Emancipation, and the Emancipation, though a wonderfully important and terrific transition in American History, it didn’t come easy, it took an all-out civil war, it meant that people had to flee from plantations and farms to try to reach Union lines against tremendous odds.

We now know that roughly, only about 600,000 of the 4 million slaves were actually free within Union lines when the war ended, that meant that more than ¾ did not become free during the war; they became free afterward or toward the end of the war. But even then of course, it began another whole story. Freedom often meant freedom to be tenant farmers, (or) if they were lucky, free to be sharecroppers. They were still mired in the South which was a cash-poor economy, had no credit, and no money, and therefore, the share-cropping system involved—the idea of working on halves—half the crop you keep, half the crop goes to the landowner.  Blacks were given civil and political rights to a great extent through the 13, 14, and 15^th Amendments and Reconstruction Acts; that is an amazing and hugely important revolution.

But that of course, led to a counter-revolution by the white south, and in a period of eight to 12 years, all of the Confederate and southern states were taken back by the white southern Democratic, partly through the work of the Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators, and partly through the work of mob violence. The rights and liberties created by the war were to an extent, eroded or eradicated by the 1890s, although not entirely. By the 1890s, about 20 percent of southern blacks owned their own land. Blacks voted in huge numbers with very important results and elected all sorts of black politicians during that short window of Reconstruction. There were still black politicians getting elected as late as the 1880s in the south. That was mostly crushed by the Jim Crow legal system, which began to take hold by the 1890s, so yes, Emancipation is a huge moment, turning point, pivot in American History—it’s really the pivot of the 19^th century. But the freeing of 4 million slaves has implications and consequences, like almost nothing else ever happened in the 19th century in America. And yet, as everyone knows, it took another reconstruction–it took the Civil Rights’ revolution of the ‘50s and ‘60s to ever really make those results work, and we’re still dealing with that change from the Civil Rights Movement, which caused a counter revolution movement too, didn’t it?  And the conservative movement has been moving against it ever since. If we have our eyes open and our ears open we know that. It’s like everything in history; nothing is ever a perfect change. Look at the way so many of us felt the night Barack Obama was elected. It’s hard to believe—it probably was a moment of hope for at least 52% of the voters, like no other, but look where we are now. Great change brings great reaction, that’s one thing we can be certain of.

FC: I’ve been seeing some things on line where you’ve drawn some similarities between 1861 in terms of America’s views on racial segregation and power and privilege and today, in 2011. Do you care to talk about that?

Well sure, I’ll talk a little about it; and I’ll also talk a little about it in my lecture. One of the things I want to talk about in that talk is the kinds of legacies of the Civil War era that we can still see around us today. And one of the most obvious is this rolling, brutal debate we’re having about the role of the Federal Government in relation to the states, the Conservative Movement, the Republican Party and the Tea Party at its root, have been trying to take back power from the Federal Government and return it to the states. The Conservative Movement has been trying to blunt many, many of the changes brought by federal power over these many decades now. They’re trying to erase the New Deal in some ways, Social Security, collective bargaining; all sorts of things that really were given a huge boost by the New Deal and the Great Society, like Medicare and Medicaid, which was created then.

That debate stems directly from the great transitions of the Civil War, because it was in the Civil War that a much stronger, highly centralized Federal state, federal government came into being, and it was created by the first Republicans. It was created by the party of Lincoln. And all of this talk we have in our politics, all of this debate we have about the role of so-called, “big government,” or the problems of big government, the first big government was created by the Lincoln Administration. It was created by the Republican Party that fought and won the Civil War; that passed the first Income Tax. It passed the Homestead Act. It passed the Transcontinental Railroad Act.

They passed the Morrow Act, which was the creation of land grant colleges to train farmers into mechanics and better. And above all, it passed Emancipation, which was the longest single concentration of property in American history.  And all of that was done in the service of winning the Civil War, so those people who don’t like big government, in my view, should go back and ask themselves, would they prefer the Union lose the Civil War? Would they have preferred we lose the war against Japan and Germany? It took big government to win the big wars, and it took big government to create national health insurance of any kind, which is Medicare. It took big government to create Social Security, which is old-age pensions.

It took big government to try to guarantee collective bargaining for workers, and it took big government to help secure women’s rights. I guess my suggestion is that whenever you hear anybody complaining about big government or complaining about federal government or arguing for state’s rights or arguing for limited government, (I ask,) what do they want the limited government in the service of? Why do they want to blunt the powers of the Federal government? In the interest of what? Why do they hate the E.P.A.? Why do they hate the endangered species act?  Anyway, I talk more about this in the lecture.

For more information about Dr. David Blight’s lecture, contact Jackie Wallace at jwallace@nurfc.org or 513.333.7586. To RSVP online click here.

Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.

Author David Blight will lecture at the Freedom Center on December 8 at 6:30 pm on two of his books, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. Blight is a professor of American History at Yale University, is Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and is working on a full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published in 2013.

Last week, Mildred Fallen, Public Ally for Marketing & Web Communications, had the opportunity to interview Dr. Blight over the phone. Below is the transcript of the interview.

FC: [In your book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era,] there was a piece where you wrote, “We do though, still face a public memory that often demands a story of the blue and gray rather than a story about a racial reckoning and transformation born of the Civil War and emancipation.”  Can you elaborate a little more on this?

Dr. Blight:  Well, sure. What happened to the memory of the Civil War over the years, down to the 50^th anniversary, down to the 100^th anniversary, which is what the book’s about, is that the great story of Emancipation and the participation of black soldiers and the aftermath of the Civil War, which is rooted in the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments of the Constitution, got lost, or suppressed or evaded in the service of or interest of a national reconciliation built around the story of ‘the blue and the grey, which means the soldiers on both sides and the glory of military sacrifice. That’s what that statement means. By the time of the 1950s and 1960s when the Civil War Centennial was coming about—of course, it’s also the time of the Civil Rights Movement—but in terms of the official commemoration of the Civil War, the story of Emancipation, the story of the end of slavery and its aftermath was almost nowhere to be found, officially. What youhad in the ‘50s and ‘60s was a massive, superficial celebration of a kind of great adventure of war on both sides. So that’s what that statement is getting to. Now in this book, the book is really about four major writers I think are wonderful windows in their own different ways into an alternative view of that, and that’s what the book tries to show.

FC: I really liked how you pointed out Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin, and what they had to say about the sentimentalism that occurred after this period, and that leads me into my next question. I can see how popular culture has done a great deal to blur the reality of the Civil War era by romanticizing aspects or passing down notions like how ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves,’ but without any contextual frames of reference. How much would you estimate that today’s American actually understands about this era?

DB: Well, that’s a great question. I’ve been travelling some part of almost every week for about 10 weeks in a row talking about this book and I did something similar last spring with the 150^th Anniversary of The Succession of Ft. Sumter, so I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of public audiences. It obviously depends on the level of education, to some degree, what region you’re in, it could depend on ideology, and sometimes, a person’s politics. But the average American today knows a great deal more about the Civil War and its meaning and its causes and consequences that they would’ve 50 years ago. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us anything. For example, there were two sets of polls done last spring, one from the Harris polling company, and the other by CNN.  Both of those polls had one question that asked people what they believed the principle causes of the Civil War were. Both showed that about—slightly more than 50%, 52% roughly—still believed slavery was not the principle cause of the Civil War and that it must be something else, which means about 48% roughly do believe that it was the principle cause—which you have to decide, is that good news or bad news, it probably is a great improvement over where this may have been 40 or 50 years ago.  It also depends on how the question was asked, but the truth is, we still have vast segments—whatever the numbers actually are—we have vast segments in American society that either have not learn, refuses to learn, has managed to avoid the basic facts of how this war came about. There’s been deep and abiding consensus that slavery is at the root of the coming of the Civil War. There’s been a vast consensus about that for two or three generations. You still can’t convince large segments of the population that America would’ve fought such a God-awful bloody conflict over slavery. What the average American really knows is always a subject of great interest but I would venture to say that historians would probably say that historical education in this country and historical literacy, historical knowledge generally is in some trouble. And that’s in part because of the erosion of real history in school curriculums. It doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in it. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to read about history; they do. But so often, history is taught as some kind of hodge-podge of social studies that can mean a lot of different things. Now, the kids who all take advanced placement American History and end up at a place like Yale here where I teach by and large have pretty good backgrounds in this, but not always, but the kids that get to go to Yale, of course, are a teeny percentage, a fraction of one-percent of college students from this country. And I didn’t go to places like Yale. I was a high school teacher for the first seven years of my career in Flint, MI, and I used to teach kids that weren’t even going to be going to college. So that “average American” is an elusive thing.

Due to limited seating we ask that you RSVP for Dr. Blight’s lecture by calling 513.333.7586 or via our online RSVP form.

Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.

Women of Faith, Women of Courage invite you for a tour, luncheon & engaging conversation on Wednesday, December 14 at 10:00 am at the Freedom Center. The program will include a docent guided tour, Liberty on the Border: A Civil War Exhibit special exhibition and interpretation, lunch and candid conversation around “Women at Times of War.”

Gather with diverse women of faith and courage from throughout the region!

The program is $8 for Freedom Center members and $18 for non-members (cost includes discounted admission to the Freedom Center and lunch).

RSVPs required. For more information or to RSVP please email shakila3k@cinci.rr.com by Monday, December 12.

There is a spark within each of us, Fan the Flame.