Churches can supplement how history is taught ‘in a way that is honest and true and doesn’t skip over the uncomfortable parts’
Commentator Eugene Robinson speaks as part of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church’s McClendon Scholar program
LOUISVILLE — Eugene Robinson, who had a distinguished career at the Washington Post before leaving last year, was the most recent McClendon Scholar speaker sponsored by New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Robinson spoke Tuesday at the historic Metropolitan AME Church. Watch the 88-minute program here. Among the hosts were Dr. Dana A. Williams, Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. Williams interviewed Robinson following his remarks.
Earlier this month, Robinson published “Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America.” In 2009 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.
“We can’t have a democracy unless we have a common encyclopedia” of facts and events, Robinson said, noting that his late wife, Avis Collins Robinson, had long been a collector of African American artifacts. Among her collection was a document that recorded the sale of an enslaved woman and her son, Caesar, in Rhode Island in 1776.
The image of that document accompanied Robinson’s final column at the Post, which identified two important events that happened in 1776: the publication of the Declaration of Independence and the sale of those two human beings.
“I wrote that those are both foundational documents, in my view, of this country,” Robinson said. “If either document did not exist, then the United States of America as we know it would not exist.”
“I wrote the column in defiance, saying these facts are not going to change, no matter how the Trump administration tries to hide them or suppress them,” he said. “This document will be here long after they’re gone.”
Once he’d left the Washington Post, Robinson said he wandered around the house for a couple of weeks. “Then I came to my senses and realized this was the opportunity to finish the book I’d been working on for 4½ years,” he said. “I’d always known growing up that my family had an unusually well-documented history going back pretty far.”
Robinson, who’s 71, grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in a house built by his great-grandfather on his mother’s side. He begins his book with the story of his great-great-grandfather, who was sold to a plantation owner in 1829 and sold again in 1848. He managed to buy his own freedom in 1851, 10 years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
His great-great-grandfather survived the Civil War in Charleston and became a skilled blacksmith. His son, John Hammond Fordham, “was the perfect age to take advantage of Reconstruction,” Robinson said. He attended an accredited school and found someone to mentor him in the law, which enabled him to pass the South Carolina bar. He became an official in the state Republican party and worked in the customs house in Charleston before moving to Orangeburg and building the house Robinson grew up in.
“He was a packrat,” Robinson said of his great-grandfather, “and that’s what I used,” starting with the material he found in the house to “branch out and report the context of those times” and “what would have been important to my family.”
As he worked on the manuscript, “I started seeing a repeated pattern where African Americans — and I use my family as an example — through blood, sweat, toil and death, would win a greater measure of the freedom and opportunity” than the Declaration of Independence and the country promised them, “and then it would be snatched away again.”
The classic example was Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow, he said, but “there were other iterations in the cycle.”
“That helped me understand today — as if I didn’t already have a notion — why the election and re-election of the first African American president would be followed immediately by the election of Donald Trump. It’s not a coincidence,” he said. “It’s more than the price of eggs. It’s another turn of this wheel, in my estimation.”
The book follows “my family through the generations,” including a great uncle who fought on the Western Front during World War I and Robinson’s father and his father’s three brothers, who all served during World War II. It also examines important civil rights events and tragedies, including the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre.
“There were times when I would look at the next day’s writing and I was just frozen, almost in despair,” Robinson said. “That’s not where I ended up. I ended up on the other side, seeing that this cycle of three steps forward and however many steps back is unnecessary and unfair. It’s wrong, but over time, it is being overcome, and we continue to press forward.”
Through a review of many bank statements, Robinson learned how his ancestors would succeed for a few years and then fall back, owing to Jim Crow. At one point, Robinson found a speech his great-grandfather delivered in 1908 at the Opera House in Columbia, South Carolina. During the speech, Robinson’s ancestor delineated how far African Americans had come since the end of the Civil War. He then said, “we could do so much more,” asking the white people in the audience: “Would you please just leave us alone and let us succeed? It’s better for you and it’s better for us.”
“He was a very smart man and he knew this was falling on deaf ears, but he got up and he said it anyhow,” Robinson said. “I think he knew that in the end, we as a people would move forward and America would be wrenched forward.”
Robinson said he hopes his book “speaks not just to my family, but in a larger sense to the African American experience and to the American experience. All my family ever wanted throughout every generation was a chance to pursue the American dream. That’s all we ever wanted from the very beginning, and we will not ultimately be denied.”
After Robinson completed his remarks, Williams asked questions posed by those in attendance — both in person and online — and told Robinson he’d written “the book that I needed.” She asked him about the tolls and rewards that writing the book had brought.
“The part that was crushing to me was watching the rise and fall of my grandfather, the fall that was caused by Jim Crow,” he said. “He was talented and smart and accomplished. The ability to be even half of what he could be was taken away, and that broke me.”
“I saw in every generation at least some measure of over-achievement,” Robinson said. “I saw pushing against the barriers to say, no, we won’t be denied.”
He said among his current worries is the way public school history teachers are being made to teach their subject in a distorted way. “There is a role for institutions like churches to supplement the teaching of history,” he said, “in a way that is honest and true and doesn’t skip over the uncomfortable parts.”
“History is hard,” he said. “It’s much harder than that first rough draft of history, which journalism is often described as.” For 20 years, Robinson had been writing a twice-a-week column of no more than 800 words. “I learned to be very concise,” he said. “All of a sudden, I had this huge canvas to paint on, 100,000 words. It took me a while to easily and comfortably stretch out my legs and let a scene breathe.”
He said he remembered being on the set of then-MSNBC on the night Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s 44th president. “I thought, when [the network calls it] for Obama, they’re going to go to the Black guy, so I’d better think of something to say.”
During a break he called his mother and father to tell them that the network was about to call the election for Obama. “I kept thinking of the world they’d been born into,” Robinson said. “My father was born in 1916 in rural Georgia. My mother was born in 1921. To think of the world of Jim Crow they were born into, and the fact that they had lived to see the election of the first Black president of the United States, that gives me hope.”
“The path was not easy or direct. It was not always forward, but they got from that Point A to a very different Point B. I think Dr. King was right,” he said of King’s quote about the arc of the moral universe. “That’s how I remain long-term hopeful, even though I’m not so hopeful in the short term.”
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