All right, all right. Live on WHUT Howard University Television, a special broadcast of The Rock Newman Show. I'm supporting the decriminalization of marijuana. How many dead bodies have you removed? I'm like, we don't remove dead bodies from crime scenes.
I would like to introduce to you someone who is pivotal to the future of WHUT. The Rock Newman Show. Hi folks, welcome to today's special broadcast of The Rock Newman Show. I am very, very privileged to have Professor Dr. Craig Stephen Wilder. Dr. Wilder is the author of this book, Ebony and Ivy.
You'll see the sub-headline subtitled Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. Dr. Wilder, welcome to The Rock Newman Show. Thank you for having me. Okay.
I've described in my... social media outreach this book in any number of ways. I've said groundbreaking.
I've said blockbuster. In a word or two, how would you describe this book? I'd like for you to do that, and then we're going to find out more about Dr. Wild. You know, I think actually the historian in me would make me say thorough.
Thorough. Thorough. You know, I spent 11 years working on the book, and one of my goals with the book was to make sure I was being as comprehensive and careful as I could be.
Because Because I think the topic is important. And I think the audience needs to trust the author when you're dealing with a topic that's difficult. And, in fact, painful for a lot of people. You know, to that point, as I read a multitude of critiques of the book, that comes through consistently in the critique that it was a thoroughly researched piece of work.
Congratulations. I appreciate it. I think this is a...
As a book, perhaps as a host of a PBS show here, I'm not supposed to be doing this, but I'm going to say that everyone should pick this book up. It is so important to understand the impact. Of what you talk about here in American history and its universities, its academia, and its entire educational system.
Let me ask, you grew up in Bed-Stuy. Do or die Bed-Stuy. Do or die Bed-Stuy.
You know what? I think there are more famous people from Brooklyn than there is anywhere else in the world. Whether it is academia, whether it is politics, whether it is entertainment, whether it is sports, famous people come from Brooklyn.
The rumor has it that we produce the greatest rappers. We also produce some great boxers, some academics. Well, when you speak of boxers, you're kind of hitting home for me. Yes, I know. I'm inextricably tied for the rest of my life to a guy by the name of Big Daddy Bo.
And he came right out of Brownsville. That's right. Yeah, Riddick Bo right out of Brownsville.
My generation, actually. Yeah. Yeah, Brownsville, never run. never will never well everyone had a nickname yeah that's right yeah two blocks and he grew up two blocks mike tyson comes out of that that same uh that same area same generation absolutely and as you say same generation you were born right around the same time as those two heavyweight champions and you become a heavyweight champion in another field if you would please describe the bed stein that you experienced growing up you know we we grew up in a neighborhood that at in my earliest years was a real neighborhood it was a three-dimensional neighborhood it was a neighborhood with parents and children and neighbors and community organizations and sports and all sorts of activities.
By the time we were teenagers, that started to transform dramatically. How so? Well, I think the increase in the concentration of poverty in large black communities in the United States, and this is not just a Brooklyn story, this is an American story, the increase in the concentration of poverty, the arrival of the drug wars, and particularly the crack wars, which shaped for my sisters and I.
really our high school experience and some of our junior high school experience, transformed the world the kids were living in. You know, we were all of a sudden in a neighborhood that was dangerous, you know, that had lots of violence. Those families were still there.
And part of the story that's always forgotten is that the people living in those neighborhoods, the people, you know, low-income black folks living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, or right here in D.C., you know, were struggling against the tide to try and maintain those communities. They were sacrificing mightily but in fact the the social forces that were arrayed against them were really quite incredible. And now I can intellectualize it as a historian.
I can look back and think about the processes that were happening. At the time, what you're faced with are some really quite draconian choices that parents and kids had to make in that time period. Would you sort of take us there and personalize that? You know, you're living in a community that's, you know, In a word, through a child's eyes, somewhat Shangri-La.
You know, families, neighborhoods, parks, folks for the most part getting along. And then there's gunfire. Yeah, you know, when I was three years old, by the time I was three years old, my mother was pretty much raising us by herself. And she had three kids, my two older sisters and me.
We're all about, you know, one's a year older than the next. And so we're really close in age. You're born in 65. Yeah, I'm born in 65. And, you know, we were in elementary school. My mother was, you know, she started out on food stamps, trying to keep us fed and keep us, you know, in school.
She went to night school. She went to weekend school. She, you know, went to the municipal union, the employees union up in New York, ran a program for women on welfare. That gave them a chance to, you know, get the GED and get some job training. She took every opportunity that she could.
Ended up, you know, she finished the high school diploma, got a job with New York City as a clerk in the district attorney's office right in Manhattan, and then worked about 20 years, for 20 years, two jobs for the next 20 years to give us a shot at going to college. And as she's going through those struggles, as she's struggling to get off food stamps and public assistance, and get her education and make these changes and protect her kids. She's living in a neighborhood where the number of challenges are actually multiplying. And that for me is, I think it has informed my entire adult life. My sense of fairness and wrong, my sense of what we need to be doing and providing for low-income people across the United States.
And also my sense of the extraordinary dignity and the extraordinary work ethic of poor people. We're often disparaged in our society when in fact actually we should be celebrating the extraordinary effort that ordinary people put in every day to build a better life. Would you say that drugs were the number one contributor to that demise of the neighborhoods and the family during those times?
Yeah, I think it's drugs and drug-related violence. It's the... violence that associated with the drug trade, the arming of teenagers.
I mean, my generation, I went to Boys and Girls High School right in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and we're the generation that arrived there as the United Federation of Teachers was declaring it probably the worst school in urban America. You know, 5,000 kids in one building, warehoused, and basically just sort of with extraordinary, an absence of any expectation that we would succeed. We went through metal detectors. We were criminalized within the school and dehumanized in the very process of going to school. And so what these schools were really doing was warehousing kids until they aged out of the public school system.
And so, yes, the drug trade, the violence related to the drug trade, and a collapsing infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods, which included the school system, the after-school programs, parks, playgrounds, health care, all of those things were coming up absent all at once. You know, you describe an abyss. at that school.
Yet, you're who you are today coming through that abyss. How did that happen? Well, I had a mother who threatened me every time I left the house. So you think it's hell over there?
That's right, right. Yeah. So I had a mother who threatened me every time I left the house to keep me in line.
I had sisters who backed up those threats. But I also had at Boys and Girls High, let me say, you know, a handful of teachers who were deeply dedicated to helping us. us get ahead.
You know, this is a high school where I think a lot of people now forget what the 1980s were like in the New York City public school system, you know, but this is a high school where it was actually hard to get teachers to actually accept jobs. At one point in time, I forgot the statistic, but dozens of teachers were actually declining appointments to the school. And nonetheless, there was this group of very dedicated public school teachers who showed up every day with this extraordinary sense that they were going to actually help us.
survive all of these challenges in our lives. You know, I remember them to this day. I actually steal characteristics from some of them. You know, so I try to dress like Mr. who showed up for business every day.
He had gotten a physics, he was a physics instructor and had a master's in physics from, I believe, NYU and an undergraduate degree from, I think, Columbia. But I remember, one of the things I took away was not the physics. I did well in his class, but I just remembered the personality, the guy who showed up every day with these extraordinary expectations for us and this sense that we could go anywhere and do anything.
And actually, between he and my mother and teachers like that and my mother, they had me kind of... I'm kind of convinced that we might be able to go anywhere and do anything. You're certainly at the top of the food chain when it comes to the study of American history.
Thank you. What was your inspiration, and when did you decide that's where you wanted to go with your life? For me, it was a weird decision. I liked history as a kid, but I didn't think about it much.
I did well at it, but I didn't think about it. But I really think the origins of history are very important. of it are probably right in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I tell the story as a complaint now to my niece and nephews.
Whenever they complain, I like to complain back and tell them that they have it much easier than I do. But one of the things-This is serious. Can you top this?
Let me show you. Right. Because my mother was raising us pretty much alone by herself, my sisters and I always had to go everywhere together because they had to watch me, which meant I had to go to the beauty parlor every other weekend and sit there in this back room.
when they had hot combs with fires and a comb in the fire. And I would just sit there on these plastic covered chairs for hours because the younger girls had to wait while the older women went. So they always got delayed.
And I would sit there for hours just wanting to get out of this space and feeling tortured that I had to be there. But in fact, actually one of the things I learned there was the extraordinary diversity of black communities. You know, you had these black women from the south, from the Carolinas where my father was from. from D.C., from Virginia, from the Carolinas and Georgia.
You had these black women who, like my mother, had been in New York for generations. You had black women from the West Indies would arrive with the Barbadians and the Antiguans, the British West Indian accents and the Haitian women. And so I remember just sitting there and thinking about it at times, being fascinated with the diversity of black people. I smile.
I smile as you say that because I see the general characterization of the black people. so often of the African-American community as being purported to be a monolithic community. Yeah, and anybody who's grown up in a black neighborhood knows that's not true. When my students, I teach a course on the history of the ghetto, the long history of the ghetto, and I often remind my students that there's a popular idea that people get ghettoized because they like living next to each other.
That's also a myth. Go to any of our neighborhoods and you'll know, in fact, that's not the thing. holding us together all the time. There are lots of other forces at work. But what happened to me is I think by the time I got to college, I was doing, you know, I was at Fordham University in the Bronx up in New York, and I was doing the mandatory sequences, all the required classes.
And one of the things that struck me as a student was the misrepresentation of the world that I had grown up in, the very thing that you're describing, this extraordinarily monolithic black community, this sense that of a kind of almost pathological culture within the inner city, which missed the fact that the vast majority of the people living in the South Bronx, right across the street from where my university was, you can look at it from the university campus, or the vast majority of people living in Bedford-Stuyvesant or in southeast here, the vast majority of them were struggling in fact to build better neighborhoods and better communities, and none of that was actually being captured in what I was reading. And so all of a sudden I had a professor in one of my classes. who called me out of class.
It was a class with like 100 people in it. Mark Nason, who worked on the history of the Communist Party in New York. And he walked into class with it.
He said, who's Craig Wilder? And I remember I raised my hand. I just sat there thinking, you know. And he said, I want to see you after class. Great.
What did I do? And I went through all the possibilities. And after class, he asked me if I ever thought about becoming a historian.
And one other professor, Ray Cunningham, had done the same. But this time it stuck. Yeah. And the possibility became real for me. Okay.
And so you moved through the collegiate ranks. You did your dissertation on a study of Brooklyn, New York, from the time of the Dutch settlers to the time when you actually did the dissertation. Why did you decide to do that?
I think it was that sense. When I arrived in graduate school, I went to Columbia for graduate school, for all of graduate school. And when I arrived in graduate school, at first I thought the whole world of possibility. was open to me as a historian.
I could study the Civil War, the American Revolution, and that was kind of true. But what was sort of pulling on me was the thing that brought me there. This sense that the way that we had described the world that I grew up in had been so misrepresented.
that it needed to be corrected. And so I made the decision to write about Brooklyn. And that was actually an interesting moment in my life, because when I went to Columbia, the last thing I wanted to write about was Brooklyn.
In many ways, that was my job. journey away from my childhood. But in fact, actually, as I went through graduate school, the responsibility, the obligation, a sense of connection, and a desire to keep the connection to Brooklyn matured in me and ultimately shaped the dissertation.
We've got a little time left in this segment. What would you say was your most surprising and impactful discovery on that research journey as you were studying Brooklyn from the time of the dust? settlers until the time you wrote.
What was the most surprising and impactful piece of information that came out of that journey? I think it's the things you learn in elementary school, junior high school, high school that are simply wrong. And one of the things we had learned in New York history, local history, in the New York public schools, was that slavery was a minor institution in the North, in New York in particular, and then in New York City, when in fact actually the North was a minor is central to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Atlantic slavery.
New York is the fifth largest slave-holding colony at the beginning of the American Revolution, and by the end of that century, one out of every three people in Brooklyn is enslaved. Folks, we'll be right back with Professor Dr. Craig Stephen Wilder, author of Ebony and Ivy, a fantastic book. See you in a moment.
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Oh no, what's that? And I need to clear it up. Okay.
I think I know the answer. Didn't sleep with the president. Well, here's what I'm going to ask you.
Okay, all right. How old were you when you first had your first real kiss? Oh my God, I don't know. Okay, let me be like I'm in a hearing on Capitol Hill.
I can't recall. Welcome back folks. Our guest this hour, professor from MIT, Dr. Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony and Ivy.
We were talking about the research that he did prior to starting this book here, he did his dissertation on the study of Brooklyn, New York from the time of the Dutch settlers until, and what was that? That was, what year did you actually do the dissertation? It went right up to the 1990s.
So I finished it in, I think, 95. Okay. So from the time of the Dutch settlers to 1995. You found out in that research, it exploded many of the myths that we all are taught in what is now our educational system, which continues to be taught, unfortunately, today. That was, I'm sure, illuminating and enlightening.
Yes. Oh, absolutely. Can you tell us what prominent blacks, the African Americans in that study, stood out?
Wow. Yeah, I think there are a lot of them. I think, you know, for me, the generation just before the Civil War is one of the most interesting groups that I've ever studied. Tell us about them.
These are the, you know, the black abolitionists of New York. These men and women who in the decades before the Civil War, in the 1830s and 1840s, make these absolutely extraordinary sacrifices to join the anti-slavery movement and to bring greater strength to the anti-slavery movement, to strengthen that movement. And I've been telling the story recently, if you just think about the challenge that was in front of them, attempting to overthrow a hemispheric economic system.
the backing of some of the greatest military and political powers on earth. And here you have these struggling free black communities that are having trouble just sustaining themselves economically because they're so marginalized within the society. Making Herculean sacrifices to support this struggle. And let's think about it in real terms. You speaking now, what year spans?
The 1830s, the 1840s, 1850s. There's a group of young black men in New York City. Henry Highland Gurnett, who ends up major transatlantic abolitionists and a missionary in Jamaica, Alexander Crummell.
Garnett's 19 years old when this journey begins. Alexander Crummell is 16, and he ends up a major missionary in Africa, one of the founders of the College in Liberia, and a major abolitionist. And Thomas Sidney, a young man who's 17. These young men in 1835, January, take a journey of some 300 or 400 miles from New York City across Long Island. Sound on a ferry where they're forced to ride outside in the middle of winter because of the color of their skin and then by stagecoach from southern New England to Providence from Providence to Providence Rhode Island from Providence to Boston Massachusetts from Boston up to Concord New Hampshire from Concord up to Hanover New Hampshire and then over to Canaan New Hampshire to attend a school that had but when that was willing to accept black students and it's about three and on the stagecoaches because they're black, they're not allowed to ride inside.
And so they have to sit up top with the baggage in the middle of winter. And at the stagecoach stops, which are usually pubs or hotels, these sort of boarding houses, they won't sell them food and water. They arrive ill.
And then that school is eventually attacked by a mob of 300 people and destroyed. Another young woman who was there, Julia Williams, had come basically by herself. That school was attacked as a result of...
Of the arrival of black students on the campus, then brought a mob of 300 people descended on the town with 90 yoked oxen and horses. They dressed the entire school building in chains and ropes and took two days rotating teams of men and oxen to pull the school off of its foundation, drag it a half mile through town, and then fired cannons at the houses of the abolitionists who had dared to board black students. There's a young black woman, Julia Williams, who's also a teenager, who arrives by herself to that mob.
and she had already Already been attacked while, by a mob, while attending a school in Canterbury, Connecticut. And so for me, one of the things that I've always been fascinated with is the sort of Herculean sacrifices of black communities in the decade before the war. But in fact, actually, these are the sacrifices and struggles that have defined African-American history.
You, when you were doing this research, you were in academia. That was not at a historically black college. You were doing this in academia that was with majority white people that you interacted with all the time.
You do that research, you come up with these horrifying stories of just untold abuse, denial, oppression, and struggle. When I watch 12 Years a Slave, it's difficult for me to unball my fist when I came out. When I read your book, your well-researched and well-documented book, about some of those struggles, I get angry.
I'm not mature enough or grown enough to just read this on balance. I was angry as hell. How did you feel when you were coming upon this information? I think, you know, your reaction is a perfectly natural reaction. It's the right reaction.
The guilt, you know, I have white friends and non-black friends. who will read that book or watch that movie and feel a sense of shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are natural human reactions. That's the reaction you're supposed to have to a horrific human event, to a horrifying event. moment in the past.
But as a historian, my job is to not leave us at that moment. We've got to move that somehow. And so I often had the same reaction as you did when I was a teenager entering college and in my early years of college, studying history on the New York City subway trains, reading my history books, and going back and forth between Brooklyn and then the Bronx.
I did most of my homework on the subway. And I learned the extraordinary power of a 19-year-old black teenage boy reading on the train because everybody watched me. Everybody kind of looked at me.
And the books like Rumor of Revolt, which is a study of the New York slave conspiracy in 1741, I'd be reading this book and I'd look up and a lot of people were looking at me afraid. And it was interesting to see because it's about what is that reaction about? Right. It's not about education. It's about what's being exchanged, the kind of information that's being exchanged.
My job as a historian is really to allow people to have that emotional reaction. Because to not allow it is dishonest. To not allow it requires that we be dishonest about the facts, that we hide them, that we descend into a kind of euphemistic language. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I'm colorblind. Yeah, right, exactly.
Please don't say that. Yeah, yeah. Because then that denies the history.
No you're not. It's the description of slavery in the North that was popular through most of the 20th century and much of the 19th century, that there was slavery in the North, and if we allowed the possibility that there was slavery, that it was different. It was milder, and the enslaved people were treated like family.
I mean, these are sort of very euphemistic ways of misrepresenting, in fact, a violent institution. And so my job as a historian is to... to let people confront the very real details of that horrifying past and then to help them move past the immediate emotional reaction because anger and guilt are not opposite reactions. They're actually black people, white people, brown people responding to a horrifying story in the way that human beings should.
And then we need to move beyond that and figure out what do we make of this past because now we're all responsible for it. We own it at that point. You are articulating it. now sort of an experience from when you were on this journey.
When you were in the throes of that journey and coming upon this information, did you not ever have a reaction where you went to work the next morning and were looking at people and had your fist balled up? Not my fist balled up. I think I have the reaction of, you know, just seeing something that's truly horrifying.
And then as an academic, part of the problem is what do you do with that? How am I going to explain this to people and help them make sense of it? And the first step is I have to make sense of it myself.
I have to figure it out so that I can then tell it. And so I think I have emotional reactions. Because I think those are natural.
When you hear about, you know, children being traded as slaves and the horrifying conditions under which they're traded, you know, no reasonable human being isn't going to have an emotional reaction to that. You know, I find, I find today across all spectrums What's a desire to... why are you talking about slavery? Why you bring up slavery? Why you keep bringing that about?
Why is that? Well because I think, you know, I believe in... I started my career as a community organizer in the South Bronx.
When I was in college, I spent my last two years volunteering in the South Bronx doing community projects with the Latino Students Association. Actually, I joined the Latino Students Association because they had El Grito up at Forum because they had an active community. service program that I wanted to be involved in.
And fortunately all the students let me join and we've all become great friends and state friends and have stayed friends. But when I was doing community organizing, you know, part of the reason I wanted to do that kind of work was that New York was deeply divided by the late 1980s. You know, the police brutality cases, the physical segregation of the neighborhoods, the crime and violence in the neighborhoods.
The South Bronx to me looked so much like Brooklyn. neighborhood in Brooklyn, that I wanted to do something with my college education that actually mattered to me personally and morally. And so that's where I went.
The reason I say that is that I think there's, or tell that story, is that I... I believe in truth and reconciliation. I believe that we can actually wrestle with our past and get to a better place.
But we can't jump to the reconciliation. And I think a lot of people want to jump to the reconciliation. because the truth-telling part is too hard.
But you have to put in the hard work first. You've got to do the work of community organizing. You have to do the organizing before you can have the better community. You can't just jump to the good part. And what you've just described represents is a call for reconciliation while we continue to deny the truth.
Yeah, yeah. The truth in this case.... As it is in all cases, is the truth.
However, I think those who have been victimized truly want the truth acknowledged. Those whose ancestors... perpetrated the atrocities don't want to deal with the truth so how are we ever going to get to that point of reconciliation I think the people whose ancestors were enslaved us, the people whose ancestors were enslaved.
You know, I think we all, on all sides of this, and I don't really like to talk about sides in history because I think it encourages this perception that history is a story. history is about either them or us. You can't tell the history of white people in America without the history of slavery.
And so we will never have an honest portrait of the history of European Christians in the Americas until we wrestle with brutal honesty about slavery. And the path that we have to take therefore is that we all have to make ourselves vulnerable to get there. African Americans have to make ourselves vulnerable in the way that we have to appreciate the fact and understand the fact.
that there's a legitimate emotional response for white people in this past. You know, they're actually having feelings, too. And I think white Americans need to understand and be willing to make themselves vulnerable to hear the reality of that past and to wrestle with it.
I think we're moving toward that. I actually think if you look at, for instance, the rather extraordinary museum exhibits that were done in England to celebrate the end of the slave trade. Trade just several years ago in New York City, the New York Historical Society's exhibit Slavery in New York, the audiences for those exhibits were actually some of the most diverse and the largest audiences that you've ever seen for any such subject. I don't think my publisher, 20 years ago, would they be interested in this topic.
There is now, in fact, an audience for this topic. There's an audience for this conversation. If we are... leading toward in that direction towards reconciliation our leaders here In Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from here on Capitol Hill, are not leading us there.
No, no. It appears that they are being obstructionist. And that there is a body of philosophy that is so much trying to block and turn the truth on its head. staying in a position of denial.
Now, if our elected leadership is doing that, what does that mean? Well, you know, this is the community organizer in me. I think the people are always ahead of the politicians.
Mm-hmm. You know, the people are always ahead of the politicians. The people knew how to cure the social ills of the inner city long before the politicians, and they could have done it better without violating constitutional rights and all the other challenges and struggles that we're having today.
And so I actually think that that description is quite perfect. I actually have a lot of trust in ordinary people's ability to really wrestle with difficult topics and their willingness to, and I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this, I don't think this is easy. Yeah.
Truth and reconciliation aren't easy. Truth and something else, some conclusion, aren't easy. Truth-telling isn't easy. And accepting truths aren't easy.
But we have to ask ourselves, and I think there's a portion of the population that's starting to, are we better off evading the past? And my answer is, of course, no, I'm a historian. But I think, in fact, actually, that most people get that at some level.
You know... What I've considered in my time, as I sort of was reinventing myself in a whole other world as a talk show host, as to whether or not I would do a show weekly, daily, whatever it might have been, entirely based on race and racial issues, from A to Z, whether that's athletics and agriculture, to geography, zoology. whatever it might have been, I think that there is a richness to this subject that we keep skimming the surface on.
And I think my appreciation is that we are never going to get to that place of a, quote, unquote, colorblind society. First of all, I think that's just a falsehood in itself. I'm not interested in that destination.
Absolutely. Absolutely. But so take that out, that point of reconciliation. Again, if we're not able to have this honest dialogue, I just don't see how we'll get there.
When I say to my viewing audience that I want them to see this book, it is because of this book right here, I think whether you're white, black, or otherwise, will help you understand the incredible importance in this matter of dealing with the problem. with the truth, releasing, and that's from all sides, as you say, you know, releasing sort of the barriers that prevent us from being candid with each other so that we can get to some point of reconciliation. I agree with you.
And I think, you know, look, I don't think people get led. You know, people don't get led to a better place. They grab a better place.
They struggle for a better place. They fight for it. You know, we grew up in Barbers. listening to, you know, black men from all over the East Coast talk politics and talk about race.
You know, the people are having race conversations at their dinner tables. It's the American people who have actually brought the conversation about poverty and economic inequality to Washington, D.C. Washington wouldn't raise it. And the great questions that confront us today are questions that the American people are going to have to solve.
And this book here is a step in the right direction. Ebonian ivy in solving the issues that we're talking about right now. Folks, we're going to come back with our next segment in just a few moments with MIT professor and author of Ebonian Ivory, Dr. Craig Steven Wilder. Hello, I'm Congressman Elijah Cummings.
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Become a member of WHUT Howard University Television today. Please call 1-866-900-WHUT right now. We announced the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress. The District of Columbia was number one. Explain your position, the name of the football team that comes after Washington.
I think people recognize that, first of all, change is inevitable, and it's time for a change with this name. Folks, welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony and Ivy, is our guest. And we're going to talk about his incredible work here. This book, which I think...
is fair to say is groundbreaking, is a bombshell that explodes so many myths that have been just shrouded in fantasy for so very long. If you like what we do. Let me please say to you, obviously this is a PBS station, WHUT, part of the Howard University system.
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Ebony and Ivory, Craig Stephen Wilder. What inspired you to do this? In the last segment, we were talking about the black abolitionists, these sort of fascinating people and these incredible sacrifices. I was actually writing an article about them back in 2000. 2002. And I became much more interested in the fact, or in the question, of why they were excluded from America's colleges and universities.
The abolitionists. Yeah. These black abolitionists, these extraordinary journeys that these kids were taking were journeys that they were taking. taking in part because they were excluded from American colleges and universities. And so they had to find other ways to gain an education.
And so my interest in the abolitionists actually shifted toward an interest in the schools themselves, the colleges, and the role of these colleges in American society. And ultimately I came to the decision to really commit to a much bigger project, which attempted to show the ways in which colleges actually shaped history, rather than what's often called the American dream. often our impression of them, these institutions fairly benevolent that sit in the backdrop of history and simply observe. In fact, colleges were actively participating in that past, and often in ways that are really quite ugly and divisive.
There will be alumni, there will be students today, there will be professors today at many of these institutions, whether it is Harvard or Yale or Princeton, Dartmouth, who will cringe. Hearing what you're saying, it gets worse in the sense that not only were these colleges obviously accepted that slave labor and the dollars from the slave trade built them. There came a time when they were a very active part of perpetuating the insane myth of white supremacy.
Can you talk to us about that? The book is divided into two parts. I think you described it nicely. The first part is really the story of the relationship between colleges, slavery, and the slave trade.
My interest in sort of just showing the extraordinary depth of the American colleges'involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Americas. The second part of the book really looks at the intellectual and institutional consequences of that relationship. The way in which colleges got drawn in.
into the project of defending slavery, of constructing and providing a kind of intellectual legitimacy for some of the most pernicious and dangerous ideas in Western history, including the racial mythologies of American history. Give us some examples of how that was done. Well, one of the ways was, you know, we begin to establish in the second half of the 18th century, 1760s in particular, the first medical schools in North America are established.
And the first one is established at the College of Philadelphia, which is now the University of Pennsylvania. And. And the second is established at King's College in New York, which is now Columbia University. Both of them begin with access to, with the faculty of the new medical schools, getting access to bodies, the bodies of a Negro. Actually, the body of a Negro is actually used in Philadelphia to show the power of the new medical sciences and the importance of medical instruction.
They actually... basically dissect and do a public dissection to show in fact the talents of the new medical artists who've arrived in Philadelphia. That relationship, the relationship between the rise of science and American slavery is quite intimate thereafter. You know I use in the book just an example from Dartmouth College where the doctor, the physician who's the personal doctor to the founder of Dartmouth, the Reverend Eliezer Wheelock.
Takes the corpse of an enslaved black man named Cato and removes the entire skin from it. He then boils Cato's body in a pot to separate the flesh from the bone. And he wires up the bones for instructional purposes. He takes the skin that he removed and he brings it to the tanner who served the college and has it tanned like leather so he can use it to dress his medical instrument case.
That's not the only time that happens. And when Harvard Library, I'm sorry, when Harvard Hall burns in 1763, among the inventory of the things lost are the jaw, the jawbone of probably King Philip. ...of a metacomet, a Native American who led King Philip's War. The English called him King Philip. And the entire skin of a Negro tanned for instructional purposes.
And so part of what I attempt to really point out in the book is that the rise of the modern college, the college as we know it with the academic departments that we know, feeds upon. Praise upon enslaved and marginalized people, African Americans, Native Americans, and at times groups like the Irish. Yeah, my next point was going to be in this discussion and in your research and in your book, you talk about sort of the demolition of Native Americans.
Yeah, I think you have to. I wrestled with this, and my publishers did too. We went back and forth quite a bit.
But for me as a historian, one of the challenges of writing this kind of book is you arrive at this moment where at Brown University, than the College of Rhode Island has more slave traders on its board than any other colonial college. Columbia King's College probably has more sons of slave traders and merchants than any other colonial college. Dartmouth, Eliezer Wheelock actually arrives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with eight enslaved black people to build his college.
He's got more slaves than faculty, he's got more slaves than trustees, and he probably has more slaves than students. At Princeton, the first eight presidents are slave owners, and there's a slave auction right from the president's house when Samuel Finley dies. His slaves are actually auctioned out of the president's house at Princeton. There's something that raises for me, besides the sort of question of the role of slavery on campus, and the relationship between colleges and slavery. Part of what I wrestled with was trying to figure out why these small colleges needed so much money.
They're relatively small institutions, but they were constantly fundraising. And there, the real answer becomes the contest between European colonists and Native American nations. Colleges were actually part of the instruments that were deployed against Native people to wage continually. continual cultural warfare.
Saving the heathen. In Indian land, yeah. And so, for instance, actually a good way of seeing this is Harvard is established in 1636, right? The Puritans arrive in 1630. Six years later they're building a college. The Virginians arrive in 1670, and within a decade they've got a charter for their first college.
The land has been laid out, and they're actually sending tenants to work the land, and the rents from the tenants are going to be used to support the college. That college never gets built because there's an Indian war. But one of the questions I was asking myself, why would the English in Virginia, before they can even handle the problem of feeding themselves and securing their colony, start building a college? Why would the Puritans, within six years of their arrival, start building a college in a colony with very few young people or children? And the answer is, in fact, actually that they're producing missionaries and bringing in Native American children to be Christianized.
To send back to their own nations, to accelerate the process of cultural transformation, religious transformation, the intergenerational divisions and splits, to in fact wage culture wars. George Washington, his son, and many sons of plantation owners. would bring slaves to the colleges. This is a fact that's easy to document in the southern colleges. So at William and Mary, for instance, We know in Virginia, at the time that Thomas Jefferson is there, which is 1760 to 1762, about 10% of the students make the choice of bringing their slaves to campus with them and pay an additional fee to have their slaves housed on campus and fed on campus.
It's harder to document in the North this practice, but we do in fact have a few sort of prominent examples of it. And George Washington's son, Jackie Custis, his stepson, stepson is a perfect example. Washington actually escorts his son personally up to New York City to enroll him in King's College, which is now Columbia. And with them comes Jackie Slave Joe, the president of Columbia, King's College at the time, the Reverend Miles Cooper, outfits Jackie with a suite of rooms, which Jackie has painted and papered to his liking.
And one of the interior windowless rooms becomes Joe's bedroom. And for the two-year period where Jackie's on campus, Joe, his slave, is on campus with him. When you come to Washington, D.C., which you do often, we want you to move to Washington, D.C. Sort of in the center, it's a tall obelisk, the Washington Monument named after George Washington. And then to what I think is the South is an incredible tribute to Thomas Jefferson. Doing the research that you've done, do you have any feelings about seeing those monuments?
Not really. I think what changed for me along the way as a historian, from the very first project, my dissertation, the book on Brooklyn, to this one, what shocked me with the book on Brooklyn personally was that I had grown up in a Brooklyn that I never fully understood until I became a historian. And the streets that I played on in Bedford-Stuyvesant were often named after slave owners and slave traders.
And that, as a graduate student, was kind of stunning to me because I never realized just how little I knew about the history of Brooklyn. the history of the place I grew up in. And that's the same transformation that's happened more broadly as my work has expanded to look at American colleges.
The buildings that I sat in as a student at Columbia are named after people who show up in the book. Halls that I've spoken in, I taught at Dartmouth and I taught at Williams. Buildings that I taught in and lived in and places where I worked on a daily basis are named after, in fact, slave owners and slave traders. And that history was hidden. hidden to me.
I don't have a negative reaction to that. What I actually have instead is a more historical understanding of it. An appreciation for the fact, for the extraordinary sacrifices and the place of black people in the histories of these institutions where their very presence has been denied for far too long.
And that's part of the project of understanding slavery. Part of the project of understanding slavery is we have to as a nation... stop denying the presence of black and brown people in our past.
Two things, we got two minutes left. Is this book a argument for reparations? One.
I'll get to the second one. Look, I think the question of reparations is going to come up inevitably. When Brown did its report in 2006, the Slavery and Justice Report that Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown, commissioned, one of the things that she did, which was just brilliant, is she also told the committee to come back with recommendations for a sort of compensatory justice, a response to this history. I think institutions have an obligation to look at their past honestly and openly, no matter what the consequences are.
And the idea that there might be political, legal, or other consequences, invoking that is simply cowardly. And it's particularly cowardly for academic institutions that have a commitment to the truth, a commitment to honesty, and that are engaged in the project of producing knowledge every hour of every day. You are an academician. You are a historian, but you're also a revolutionary. What impact did you want this book to have?
Honestly, I just, you know, I hope that there are students, white, black, brown, on campuses now who read the book and then look around their institution with a greater appreciation for the journey that people who don't look like them or who do took to get there. You know, that's, I think that's actually my job as an academic. My job is to make history visible to people.
And then they can do with it as they please. please. I have my own politics, too. I'm going to go out and fight for some stuff.
But my job as an academic is really to make history visible. And part of making it visible is actually allowing people to see themselves in the past in the most extraordinary ways and in the ugliest ways. Making history visible is something that you've done by coming on the Rock Newman Show today here at WHUT.
We want to thank you, and we want to stay in touch. We really want to continue with you on this journey. Thank you very much.
so much folks that's our show for today um thank you so much for joining for looking and thank you so much for what i know will be your continued support god bless today's rock newman show is brought to you by the pohanka automotive group and the mgm grand national harbor The star of the world, this town in your heart