Vincent Brown Delivers “Black History’s Warning to the World”
Vincent Brown (pictured above), is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, as well as an author, film maker, and producer. Source for Photo: Harvard University Faculty Bio
February 2023 marked the 53rd celebration of Black History Month, a tradition since 1970 that has brought communities together and celebrated the rich and diverse history of not only Black people in the U.S. but worldwide as well. Unfortunately, it is not a holiday that all would like to see celebrated.
Many state legislatures around the country, and particularly in the South, have started to implement so-called “anti-woke” laws meant to limit the teachings of Black history, Hispanic history, gender studies, and a host of other disciplines in the state’s public schools. These developments have garnered national attention and outrage, most notably in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers passed the STOP W.O.K.E Act which prohibits any teachings of subjects such as Critical Race Theory and bans the College Board’s AP African-American Studies course. This act was ultimately stalled by Northern Florida District Judge, Mark E. Walker, who issued a preliminary injunction against the law, effectively stopping it from being enforced on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. However, DeSantis said that he would appeal the ruling. DeSantis aims to get a second look at the bill in an effort to push it through before he possibly launches a 2024 Presidential campaign. The bill received support from numerous Florida Republicans and passing the bill would be sure to boost Desantis’s already strong base.
Even in North Carolina, lawmakers passed a bill last year restricting the teaching of Critical Race Theory as well as how racism is taught in schools. Despite this, many people around UNC worked to continue the teaching of the Black experience.
This year marks UNC’s Inaugural Dr. Genna Rae McNeil Endowed Black History Month Lecture, the first in a series meant to inform and enlighten both UNC students and the public about the importance and significance of Black history. It’s even more fitting that this year's theme for Black History Month is “Black Resistance,” a theme needed now more than ever as limits on the teaching of the subject sweep the country.
Dr. McNeil was UNC’s first Black, a tenured professor in the history department, and battled adversity throughout much of her early career. Her first tenure with the University began in the 1970s only a few years after the Civil Rights Act and she ultimately ended up leaving shortly after her tenure began. She would eventually come back to the University in 1990 and be tenured until she retired last year. Apart from her exemplary work as a professor, she is also an award-winning author of books such as Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights and Witness: Two Centuries of African American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York.
For the speaker, Dr. McNeil chose her close friend and fellow historian Vincent Brown, a Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, as well as an author, filmmaker, and producer. Mr. Brown has also won numerous awards for his works such as Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which won four prizes from various American historical associations as well as a Best Book of 2020 nod from The Guardian and The Observer. After an evening of introductions, it finally became time for Mr. Brown to speak.
The lecture, titled “Black History’s Warning to the World,” captivated the attention of the audience the second Brown started. Brown began his lecture with a discussion of the history of Black History, claiming, “The effort to suppress and disdain Black history itself has a long history.” He went on to inform the audience, “It wasn’t until after decolonization that historians started to treat African African people not like subjects to be studied.” While that may be shocking, the claims are entirely true. There are numerous historical documents containing pseudoscience that perpetuated untrue and harmful stereotypes of Black people. One such form of pseudoscience argued that Black people were naturally less intelligent due to fissures and bumps on their skulls in certain places. Years later this was proved to be completely untrue and nonrelational. To add to this, historians throughout the 18th and 19th centuries didn’t even consider studying Black people or Black history because they believed there was no value in it. Instead, people of African descent were studied by anthropologists, sometimes enduring extreme and horrific treatment, particularly in America where the infamous Anthropology Days occurred at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. The anthropology days were a series of Olympic-style events, conducted as tests, that were meant to pit Indigenous Americans and Black People against white people to determine who was racially superior. The conditions of these events were unethical, and many of the forced participants were kept in cages on display. To add to the cruel and unfair nature of the games, most of the events were sports that the captives had never participated in, and many of them didn’t speak English and thus couldn’t understand the directions. Nonetheless, eventually, historians turned their eye to the storied continent of Africa and its descendants.
One of the main points Brown made throughout the lecture was that “Black history is not a subset of American History, nor is it a subset of global history.” He made the case that too often people try to group Black history as a partial history or only a small part of a larger story. Instead, he suggested that the public look at Black history through the same lens that they would look at any other history. History is intertwined by nature and while Black history doesn’t tell all the stories history has to offer, neither does white history, and neither does Asian, Hispanic, Arabic, nor any other type of group-specific history. All of these stories are connected and have brought people to the present. As Brown said, “Black history is all of our history.”
He began this section of the lecture by discussing the colonization period, specifically the British empire in the 1760s. At that time, Britain had been locked into the brutal Seven Years' War with European rival France. The war made it much more difficult to hold onto their colonies in all of the Americas, and eventually, they began to fear losing them. That fear came to life in the form of a revolt in British-held Jamaica. Jamaica was one of Britain’s wealthiest colonies and also had some of the most brutal conditions of any European colony.
Tacky’s Revolt, the namesake of Brown’s most recognized book, was a revolt in 1760 in Jamaica led by Tacky and his followers who garnered hundreds of slaves in an attempt to reclaim their freedom. Tacky was enslaved under British rule, and previously was a chief of the Fante ethnic group in what is now modern-day Ghana. It is supposed that he was sold into bondage after being captured by a different ethnic group and upon arriving in Britain’s Jamaica he began organizing a rebellion. Unfortunately, like most slave revolts, it was put down swiftly, and while the revolt didn’t lead to freedom for the Jamaican people, it sparked a chain of events that shaped the history of the world by igniting numerous other uprisings in the country that continued throughout the next decade.
The damage done to the British in Jamaica combined with the losses from the Seven-Years War led to sweeping legislation by the monarchy, impacting all their American colonies. This legislation became known as the Intolerable Acts in the thirteen colonies of North America and ended up being one of the driving causes of the American Revolution around six years later.
Circling back to Brown’s original point, history is interconnected, and Black history is all of our histories as well. While it is uncertain if Tacky’s Revolt and the damage it caused the crown was a contributing factor in the American revolution, there is certainly a correlation. Nearly every American in the country knows what the American Revolution is, but there’s not even data on how many people know of Tacky’s Revolt. History is typically determined by the victors and for a long time the Black experience was denied victory through oppression. It has only been recently that the public has become more informed about Black history and its significance. Yet, slowly, states such as Florida are trying to quiet it once again.
Brown’s lecture was, in essence, a reminder that we all share a common history, and everyone’s history is equally as important and should be celebrated equally. While most of the speech was about Black History’s significant impact on the world, it also served as a warning to the public. States and politicians around the country are trying to lessen Black History and its importance. If the public wants to continue to celebrate and uphold Black history, it must fight back. Losing the teachings of Black history could mean an entire generation of Black students that do not understand their history or their culture due to the negligence of their public schools. It would also mean an entire generation of white students, Hispanic students, Asian students, and others that don’t understand the significance of Black history, either.
The omission of Black History from public schools is not only an affront to humanity’s shared experience but also a violation of one of the principles that many of these Republican lawmakers are claiming they’re trying to protect. Many Republican politicians have recently hit out at the left for trying to censor free speech. Their answer to this problem has been to meet it with even more censorship, starting in the classroom. The First Amendment of the constitution promises all American citizens the right to freedom of speech, and these recent laws are a contradiction to that right. Teachers across the country have called out these laws, stating that they make it difficult to teach and that teachers should be able to inform their students about any type of history. By prohibiting the teaching of Black History in schools, these laws are only perpetuating the censorship their makers claim to hate so much. Freedom of speech is a right to be enjoyed by the many, not the few. Brown reminded his audience of this principle Wednesday night, and said “We will always be clear about the age of remaining ignorant, how Black will came into being, and how they tried to remake and revise our history, but our freedoms will offer us hope.”