Well, I'm back from a terrific conference in Raleigh, the 95th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It's the first time I've been to ASALH (not to be confused with ASLH, aka "legal history") but I'll be a regular here from now on. ASALH has a distinguished lineage; it was the association that African American historians joined when they weren't welcome at the mainstream historical organizations. (The Southern Historical Association, which met first in the 1930s, was segregated at the outset. Things have changed dramatically, of course, over the last seventy years. The SHA now has a huge number of panels on race, slavery, and Jim Crow.)
One of the things that really interested me was the ways that ASALH maintains the identity and sense of mission borne of the era of Jim Crow -- there were nearly two hundred panels and they focused on issues of African American history and literature, obviously. For me there were more panels here that I wanted to attend and that were in areas of central concern to my work than any conference I've been to in years. But it was not just the sense of mission; the conference also has a much friendlier feel than most professional conferences -- I'm not sure exactly why that is, though again this may be a shadow effect of the era of Jim Crow when the community of African American historians were supportive of each other; it may also relate to the sense of common purpose of the participants. And what I found of particular interest is how much people were speaking a common language about scholars and ideas they were studying. Where at the OAH or ASLH there are at most a few panels on African American intellectual history, here there were concurrent panels on these topics throughout the conference. Even though people were speaking about many of the same ideas, there was a huge diversity of views -- especially in the discussion at the plenary panel on reparations.
For legal academics who're seriously interested in race, this is a conference to attend. Eric Muller in particular will love this -- a speaker from the White House of the Confederacy talked about how he integrated stories of the enslaved people at the White House with his tours. And there was a fabulous panel on the mechanics of book publishing, which I'll have to talk about sometime soon. There was a ton of really useful advice.
Next year the conference is in Richmond -- one of my favorite destinations, so I'll certainly be back.
Enough for the time being on this conference, though -- now something about the photographs that I took while in Raleigh. You may recall that I've posted photographs of the South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia state capitol grounds. Now it's time for some of the monuments at the North Carolina capitol. There are three statutes to the Confederacy and a bunch of cannons and also a granite monument, so more than I think I've seen at any other capitol grounds.
First, there's the monument to Confederate soldiers, which is it at the upper right. It's a little hard to get a good picture of this one, because it's so darn tall. The inscription is "First at Bethel -- Last at Appomattox." What interests me in particular are the cannons that adorn the Confederate soldiers' monument (a picture of one of them is at right) -- they started out the war owned by the United States, then they were captured by Confederacy at the start of the war, and -- of course -- recaptured later at the end of the war. Then the US Navy donated them around 1902 to North Carolina, or so it seems from the plaque on the cannon.
The George Washington statue at left (which looks like a smaller version of the Washington statue at the South Carolina capitol) has two cannon from the Revolutionary War era (1778), which were redeployed in 1861 and shortly thereafter captured by the US. I wasn't aware that any cannon from the Revolutionary war were anywhere near good enough for use during the Civil War. Sometime I'd like to learn a little more about this, because I'm mightily interested in how Southerners during the Civil War spoke about themselves as heirs to the Revolutionary generation -- and how they tried to appropriate the mantle of the Revolutionary war.
Then there's the United Daughters of the Confederacy monument to the women of the Confederacy (at right). Put up around 1904. Then there's a statute to Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first Confederate soldier killed during the war (in battle on June 10, 1861), at Bethel in Virginia. I don't have a picture of him because the sun was at his back and, thus, I couldn't get a good shot. My photograph of the Samuel A'Court Ashe monument (to the last surviving Confederate officer -- he died in 1938) didn't come out well, either.
Next up will be discussion of the monument to the three North Carolinians who were US Presidents. Some mighty interesting text appears on their monument. I wish I had some decent pictures of the World War II / Korean War monument; alas, the lighting didn't permit a decent photograph. Next time I'm over in Raleigh I'll give it another try.
Comments