Results for race

Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter

August 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post--concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking, "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter."

Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s.

Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005):

One of the most striking things about the young C. Vann Woodward was his affinity with dissent. It was not just his authorship of Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, the book that launched his academic career in 1938, nor the fact that he approached W. E. B. DuBois earlier with hopes of writing about him, nor his toying with the notion of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene Debs. Those are important indicators, but it is even more interesting that in every situation he found himself in during his early years, he gravitated toward the most progressive people and places–exploring Harlem when he was a Masters student at Columbia in 1931-32, getting involved in the Angelo Herndon Defense Committee when he was back in Atlanta teaching at Georgia Tech, hanging out at that den of left-wing conspirators, Ab's Book Store in Chapel Hill, when he was working on his Ph.D. and the Watson biography. He was sympathetic to the union organizing movement among cotton mill workers in North Carolina and met Glenn McLeod, who became his wife, because of those pro-union activities. As a young man, he made two trips to Europe, visiting the Soviet Union on both of them, revealing at least a curiosity about communism. When he was teaching at Scripps College, 1940-43, he helped defend a faculty colleague who was under attack for suspected fascist sympathies, an early indication of his devotion to free speech on campus. He was always where the political action was. . . .

As chairman of the program committee of the Southern Historical Association in 1949, he enlisted John Hope Franklin in a successful plot to integrate the program of the Southern Historical Association meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. Then, in 1952, when Woodward was the president of the SHA, he went to great lengths to integrate the meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. Franklin reports that Woodward did not seem worried or nervous about these radical departures from past practices; he handled all questions and challenges with humor. He seemed to enjoy it. (John Hope Franklin interview with Sheldon Hackney, August 27, 2006. Audiotape in author's possession.)

Shortly after those signal events, Woodward and Franklin were enlisted to provide historical advice and tutoring for Thurgood Marshall and his team of lawyers who were bringing the school desegregation cases to the Supreme Court. The revolutionary result, the Brown decision, was announced May 17, 1954. That fall, Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia, which in 1955 became the book,
The Selma to Montgomery march,
Life magazine, March 19, 1965.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow. With Professor Woodward standing prominently in the audience at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., from the steps of the Alabama Capitol, described The Strange Career of Jim Crow as "the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement." (C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History [Louisiana State University Press, 1986], 92.) This was hyperbole, to be sure, but Woodward was there, where every good radical belonged.

That was the apogee of the civil rights movement, and of New Deal liberalism in general. The next year, Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and then announced the new slogan of "Black Power" on the continuation of James Meredith's "March Against Fear" through Mississippi in 1966. The antiwar movement soon shifted from "protest to resistance." The New Left dreamed aloud of revolution. All of these leftward lurches were met with disapproval among the public, easing the way for the rise of the New Right, whose organizational and intellectual infrastructure had been growing for more than a decade. Everything changed.

We see this shift dramatically in the life of C. Vann Woodward. When SNCC approached him in August 1966 to join a distinguished group of intellectuals in sponsoring the SNCC Faculty Fund, he demurred:

If I sponsor the SNCC Faculty Fund, I shall be sponsoring a split in the Civil Rights Movement, a split not only between organizations and leaders, but between races within the movement. You force me to choose between Stokely Carmichael on the one hand and A. Philip Randolph and Martin King on the other. By taking one side I oppose the other. I cannot consistently support both. If I let you use my name in this drive, I should have to resign a board of Randolph's and one of King's on which I serve. I cannot do that. I respect both men and their work too much and would not do anything to embarrass or discredit their leadership. If you compel me to choose, I will have to choose their way instead of Carmichael's. I would prefer not to turn my back on any part of the movement, but you leave me no choice. (C. Vann Woodward to Miss Linda Moses of SNCC, August 10, 1966. C. Vann Woodward Papers, Box 52, Folder 623, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. Hereafter cited as CVW Papers.)

When Staughton Lynd accused Yale of firing him because of his antiwar activities and his trip in December 1965 and January 1966 to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, a trip organized through the good offices of the American communist, Herbert Aptheker, Woodward defended Yale. . . . (Read more at Project Muse.)
Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 28, 2013 Rating: 5

The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington

August 25, 2013
Randall Stephens

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.
Across the US and around the globe people are marking the 50th anniversary of the "Jobs and Freedom" march on Washington, D.C.  Roughly 200,000 men and women, young and old, black and white gathered to demand justice and equality on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. 

Among the throng who came together around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial were a collection of historians. (How interesting to think how this event so shaped the writing of those in attendance and many more who witnessed it from afar or learned of it years later.)  Some were soon-to-be historians or historians-in-training from the University of Maryland, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, UVA, George Washington, and others. Among the many in attendance were Clayborne Carson, Dorothy Drinkard-Hawkshawe, and Robert Zieger. 

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.
Zieger, who passed away this year, was Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Florida. He was a remarkable historian, mentor, and all-around mensch.  (Read Paul Ortiz's commemoration here on the blog.)  One of Zieger's last works was For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007). Zieger wrote an essay about his experience of researching and writing the book in Historically Speaking. Here he also reflected on that day in August 1963 in D.C. Here's a brief excerpt from "Jobs and Freedom," Historically Speaking (May/June 2008):

Shortly after I had begun active work on [For Jobs and Freedom], historian John Bracey visited [the University of Florida] campus and gave a fascinating talk to students about the state of black history at the time he began graduate school at Northwestern in the early 1960s. It soon became apparent that Bracey and I were of a similar age. He recounted that in the initial syllabus for his 19th-century U.S. history seminar, there were no works by black scholars or, apart from works that dealt with slavery as a political problem, about the black experience in antebellum America. Bracey and a colleague, with the complete support of an abashed seminar director, soon rectified the omission. Bracey told this story as a way of indicating to his undergraduate student audience how far black history and race history had traveled in the four decades since.

Bracey’s experience resonated with mine, though in a different key. My advisor, Horace Samuel Merrill, and his wife, Marion Galbraith Merrill, were in those days civil rights activists in the suburban Washington, D.C., area where the University of Maryland is located. Even so, however, we read little if any black history or race history in our 20th century seminar. To be sure, some of Sam’s students, notably Thomas Cripps, were beginning to explore themes in black history. And it was certainly true that as the civil rights movement hit its high-water mark in those years, I joined my graduate student colleagues in supporting, and sometimes even in participating in it. Still, it took me far too long to understand the centrality of race to the American historical experience and to begin to incorporate the theme of race and labor into my own work.

I like to think, though, that in some subterranean precincts of my young historian’s mind the seeds of the book I would write in my late sixties were beginning to germinate. At any rate, that’s the way it appeared to me when it came time to write the introduction to For Jobs and Freedom. I chose as my starting point the fact that while I was at the August 1963 march on Washington, I left during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech:

"I still have a hard time confessing that I didn’t stay for Dr. King’s speech. As far as I was concerned, civil rights was a matter of politics and morality, not one of religion. Anyway, I had parked a long way off, it was getting late, and I had to pick up my wife at the Prince Georges County bank where she worked. So I threaded my way back through the throng lining the reflecting pool, across the Washington Monument grounds, up along Pennsylvania Avenue, the speakers’ voices growing fainter. Since I had parked on one of the side streets off East Capitol St. behind the Library of Congress (my normal haunts in those dissertation writing days), I made my way through the Capitol grounds.
From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.

It did occur to me that I should find some souvenir of the March; something to prove to my progeny and to the students to whom I planned one day to teach U.S. History that I Was There. The discarded bright orange-and-black placard lying behind a low hedge would do the trick, even if it did have a slight tear. “The UAW Says Jobs and Freedom for Every American,” it read. Since my ambition was to be a labor historian, it seemed to fill the bill perfectly.

But I will confess that I hadn’t really thought much about the “Jobs” part. Civil rights was about public accommodations, voting rights, and schools. Yes, certainly, demonstrators in southern towns and cities had demanded employment in the stores and shops. But it was the classrooms, the voting booths, and the hotels and restaurants that made the biggest headlines. Of course, an instant’s reflection affirmed, the placard was dead right: without jobs, freedom was a coin of limited value. Jobs were the modern equivalent of the Reconstruction Era’s forty acres and a mule—and we all know what happened when the freedmen were denied title to the land they and their forebears had worked for generations. Yes, it was true: all this was indeed about jobs and freedom."
The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 25, 2013 Rating: 5

A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013

July 07, 2013
Randall Stephens

In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking.  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers. 

The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.  

Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treaties of 1713 and 1763, family life in colonial New England, and a critique of hagiographical popular history. To round it out, Sean McMeekin speaks with Don Yerxa about the significance of July 1914 and the coming of World War I.

In "It’s Complicated: Rethinking Family Life in Early New England" Allegra di Bonaventura writes of the private lives of colonial Americans, teasing out a fascinating tale from the existing evidence.  "[W]riting about the early African-American family in New England," she notes, "depends unavoidably on the histories of the literate English who often owned and worked their African neighbors and bedfellows. Less evident, however, is that any mainstream history of the New England family faces a similar reckoning with the ethnic, logistical, and emotional complexities of real households."

She begins her piece with a harrowing story:

When his pregnant wife Joan and son Jack were taken from him by law and forced into slavery, a penniless former slave named John Jackson refused to submit to the prevailing powers or to society’s conception of him. Instead, he bided his time and planned a most audacious rescue of his family. After many months of preparation, he pulled it off—traveling across land and rough waters in the middle of the night to break into the house where they were held and “steal” them home. The year in which John Jackson staged this daring rescue was 1711, and the place he ran back home to was New London, Connecticut.


John and Joan Jackson belonged to New England’s first generations of enslaved people, men and women dispersed across English households and found especially along the region’s long coastline and in its port cities. John had arrived in Connecticut in 1686 as a young man of eighteen, emerging as freight and human property from the hold of a West Indian trade ship. At first, he probably worked the wharves at New London Harbor, then went on to receive training in husbandry, the stock and trade of the vast majority of New England men. His wife Joan was a different sort of New Englander. Hers was already an “old” New England family by colonial standards, one that could trace itself at least to the 1650s and the early years of settlement in New London. Joan herself was a native Connecticut girl. Arriving enslaved in a new land, John Jackson would nevertheless make a place for himself in its cold, unwelcoming clime. In time, he would unabashedly assert a life and family of his own—in freedom. 

Around 1700 John Jackson became free and married Joan. Still, whatever happiness the couple felt at uniting in marriage was dimmed by the reality that they had to live apart. Joan was an enslaved woman living in another man’s house entirely under another man’s control. Their first two children, a boy and girl, were born into this grim and uncertain reality—mother and father separated against their will and by miles. Within just a few years, however, Joan Jackson received a highly unusual grant of freedom from her master and mistress, acknowledging in part her dutiful service. Once free, Joan was able to join her husband, but even that reunion was cruelly shortchanged. Because their children, toddler Adam and baby Miriam, had been born while Joan was in bondage, they inherited their bonded status from her as well. By law, Adam and Miriam would be perpetual slaves, the property of their mother’s former owner. When she left to join her husband, Joan was forced to leave the children behind. She and John could visit them, but they would never live together as a family. Yet the Jacksons added a succession of additional children to their family, spending nearly a decade together in relatively peaceful domesticity. John was a farmer who owned no land but who could nevertheless hire himself out in support of his family. Joan was skilled at housewifery, an occupation that she, too, performed for others, as necessary. Any tranquility was abruptly halted in 1710, however, when a powerful local landowner claimed ownership of Joan in court, calling her freedom into question and eventually winning her as his property at trial. The sheriff came and seized a then pregnant Joan, along with their youngest child, two-year-old Jack. Joan and little Jack were taken to live in slavery across the Sound on Long Island, and it was from there that their husband and father would rescue them.

When John Jackson did act, he was not alone. With him that night in 1711 when he retrieved Joan and two of his children (a baby, Rachel, was born in slavery on Long Island) was an aging merchant by the name of John Rogers. The merchant, too, was an ardent family man, and one who had also found it necessary to fight for his family when the law took his wife and children away. For Rogers, it had not been slavery but religious difference that led him to suffer that deeply personal loss repeatedly. A religious radical, Rogers founded his own Baptist Sabbatarian sect, diverging from the prevailing Congregational way. Rogers was rich; Jackson, poor. Rogers was English; Jackson, African. Rogers had bought and owned Jackson after he arrived in Connecticut, and freed him more than a decade later.

The bond between Jackson and Rogers had unusual characteristics, formed first in the injustice of slavery, but also steeped in the new ideas and common purpose of a shared insurgent faith. . . .
Read more by subscribing to Historically Speaking.  Or, access the June issue on Project Muse through your library's account.
A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013 A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 07, 2013 Rating: 5

Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian

May 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.  He's also the
author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995).

Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this past weekend at Karlstad University in Sweden. Jacobson's talk dealt with a fascinating website cum archive he and others have developed called the Historian's Eye. This expansive visual and oral history project is described on the site:

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the "Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 3000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide and the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

I caught up with Jacobson in Karlstad to discuss his work and how he became a historian.  In the interview above he speaks about his interest in cultural history, his early understanding of the possibilities of historical study, and describes how he chose to work in the field.

For other interviews in this ongoing series, click here.
Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 28, 2013 Rating: 5

The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy

May 08, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act. This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength.
An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT.
Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must
draw the line somewhere, you know."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush. Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese miners and then tried to prevent Chinese immigrants from testifying in court.

The attempts to create a legal caste system bothered budding Republicans like William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln. The idea that men were not equal in America, but rather could be divided by legal status, echoed the beliefs of the southern Democrats that Republicans opposed. When Republicans took over the national government, they stood firm against that theory. They not only ended slavery, but also promoted immigration. Immigrants, their 1864 platform declared: had “added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations,” that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Immigrants worked hard, made products that created value, and helped to fuel a rising spiral of economic prosperity. Republicans believed that the more immigrants a country attracted, the more its economy would expand.

The Republican government fostered and encouraged Chinese immigration through the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which opened both China and America to immigrants from the opposite country. While migrants to China tended to be missionaries and engineers, migrants to America tended to be laborers. The Panic of 1873 and the depression that followed it turned native-born Americans against those same Chinese laborers, and calls to exclude the Chinese from access to America grew loud.

The result of their hostility was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which kept Chinese laborers—but not businessmen, scholars, or diplomats—0ut of America. Over the vehement protests of older Republicans, Americans insisted that America had no place for immigrants who might take jobs from native-born workers. No longer did the nation adhere to the belief that all workers fed a growing economy. Instead, a majority of Americans subscribed to the idea that workers competed with each other, and that certain workers were not welcome to be part of that competition.

The Chinese Exclusion Act marked a major shift in immigration policy, to be sure. But it also marked a seismic shift in the national understanding of the mechanics of economic growth.
The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 08, 2013 Rating: 5

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42

April 22, 2013
Chris Beneke

In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.*

Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ: “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century. 

There’s no getting around the fact that the latest retelling of Robinson’s epic first season, Brian Helgeland’s film 42, succumbs to Hollywood sentimentality. It’s certainly not a great film, arguably not a good film, and definitely not a subtle one. It aims at a high-level of verisimilitude and mostly achieves it, but too often at the expense of dramatic effect and historical significance. The awkward conflation of events (Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth appears to apparate, Harry Potter-style, into a Missouri gas station where Robinson has just negotiated his way into a segregated bathroom) and a syrupy musical backdrop (including an Olympian trumpet fanfare to accompany one of Robinson’s exultant trots to home plate) will surely disappoint viewers who were lured by the gritty, thumping Jay-Z-scored trailer.
Yet critics like the perpetually outraged Dave Zirin who see here nothing more here than a pious melodrama that idolizes a cigar-chomping, penurious white man (played with gruff, endearing self-righteousness by Harrison Ford) and an overly deferential, assimilating black man (played arrestingly by a stoic Chadwick Boseman), will miss something themselves.

Among other things, they will miss the fact that the script for the enterprise of baseball integration was originally conceived by Rickey and originally dramatized by Robinson. The plan this pair executed was both conspicuously Lincolnian and unapologetically Christian. It required Rickey’s pragmatic liberal management, which proceeded in measured strides, and the transcendent suffering of Robinson, who sacrificed for the larger good of racial redemption. Rickey tempered expectations while moving ahead resolutely, shaping an environment that allowed Robinson enough space to develop as a player without depriving white fans and players of the time they needed to adapt as human beings. Robinson endured uncomplainingly and then succeeded spectacularly in a heroic combination of personal restraint and athletic brilliance.

These unmistakable Lincolnian and Christian themes may elude progressive critics who desperately want to see broad-based social movements in action against institutionalized racism. Eric Foner’s influential critique of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln—that it ignores the work done “at all levels of society, including the efforts of social movements to change public sentiment and of [African Americans] themselves to acquire freedom”—has already been leveled against 42. It is demonstrably true that baseball integration was the product of larger forces which Rickey capitalized upon. And 42 does elide the political pressures that were mounting in Harlem and Washington D.C., while slighting the work of civil rights activists such as Wendell Smith.**

But 42’s protagonists, Robinson and Rickey, really did matter. The defining historical role they played may be gauged by remembering that Rickey originally considered signing a number of other exceptional African-American ball players, several of whom possessed baseball potential surpassing Robinson’s. But Rickey saw something else in Robinson that exceeded his ability to play baseball, something intimately related to Robinson’s Methodist faith. Helgelend briefly evokes that other thing when he has Ford utter one of the film’s better lines, expressed with Lincolnesque economy and wit: “Robinson’s a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. God’s a Methodist! We can’t go wrong.” A teetotaler who neither smoked nor womanized, with a well-established commitment to racial justice and Christianity, Robinson was precisely the person Rickey wanted for the job. The fact that he had Hall-of-Fame baseball talent also helped. After all, Rickey, the dogged pragmatist, intended to win on the ball diamond as well as in the contemporary moral universe.
Poster from the 1950 Jackie Robinson Story. See full film here.

Robinson repaid Rickey’s faith with humble Christian expressions and herculean acts of self-control. The things Robinson refrained from saying during his witheringly difficult rookie season often made the difference. He would eventually have plenty to say about his experiences and about civil rights, but in these early years he deployed his words carefully, sticking to Rickey’s script and gaining tens of thousands of admirers in the process. After his first, harrowing game in the majors, Robinson told an inquiring reporter that he’d thanked God the night before, adding that he belonged to a Methodist church in Pasadena and had taught Sunday school. “[T]hey gave me the bad little boys,” Robinson recalled, “and I liked it.” Robinson also repaid Rickey’s Lincolnian aspirations by suggesting in his autobiography that while Rickey’s hero, “Mr. Lincoln,” had ended the institution of slavery, that institution had survived into the twentieth century in the form of segregation and discrimination. With Robinson’s entry into major league baseball, the second emancipation commenced.

Like Lincoln in the nineteenth century, Rickey and Robinson drew on untapped reservoirs of decency and inchoate conceptions of fair play among their fellow Americans. They demonstrated, more than a decade before Martin Luther King, Jr., that the perpetrators of injustice in a democracy may be worn down by dignified and well-publicized suffering. 

If 42 neglects the bigger picture, if it privileges a couple of extraordinary individuals at the expense of the collective movements that enabled them to do their work, it also reminds us of the good that morally grounded pragmatists can accomplish.

___________________

* The signing took place on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. In another staged photo, only Lincoln’s portrait hangs above Rickey, the picture of Rickey’s daughters and manager Leo Durocher having been removed, though you can still see the nail that may have held Durocher’s photo. Rickey, who claimed to have read every biography of Lincoln, was sometimes called the “Second Great Emancipator.” 
 
** Smith, played by Andre Holland has a large supporting role in the film, but we don’t see the behind-the-scenes campaign for desegregation in which he had been engaged for several years. 

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 22, 2013 Rating: 5
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