Happy anniversary plus the coward Alice Moore
Banned Histories of Race in America
First of all, thank you! Thank you so much! I literally can’t thank you enough! As of this post, Banned Histories of Race in America is officially one entire year old and it couldn’t have happened without you. Personally, library closures, book bans and the general erasure of our history all deeply worry me and knowing that I’m not the only one is comforting. Maybe writing a research paper every week isn’t the easiest way to find that comfort, but I’m very glad you’re here for it.
So, secondly, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You’ve heard it before. It’s a cliché, but it’s not an abstraction. It’s true and clear and immediate. For example, if I were to tell you that a racist school board member attempted to ban “multicultural” textbooks from a school system, you’d be like, “I’m sure I remember something like this happening last week or maybe last month. Or last year…?”
But if I were to tell you the forgotten-but-true story of Alice Moore, the racist Kanawha County, West Virginia school board member who failed an attempted book ban, but then successfully campaigned for a school boycott resulting 20% of the county’s elementary school students being kept home and that this situation eventually escalated to school busses being shot up, an elementary school being bombed and that this all happened from 1970-1975?
At that point you might naturally wonder why you’ve never heard about this. After a while, you might start to wonder why our political systems are so frequently unable to account for white supremacy. It even might occur to you that repeating this history really does actually feel like a condemnation.
There is a cost to not knowing.
There is a cost to not knowing that abolition laws existed in this country nearly a decade before George Washington was elected president. There is a cost to not knowing that Washington wrote about evading those abolition laws as well as keeping these evasions secret from voters. There is a cost to not knowing that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was sworn into office on Washington’s birthday and that Washington was on the official seal of the Confederacy as well as Confederate currency well before he was on the US dollar.
There is a cost to not knowing about the hundreds of rebellions by enslaved Black people in this country. There is a cost to not knowing that Black Americans invented the doorknob and the egg beater and the curtain rod and the bottle cap and the bicycle frame and the ice cream scoop and the dustpan and the golf tee and stand-up comedy and this country’s first clock as well as this country’s first public ambulance service providing emergency medical treatment.
There’s a cost to not knowing about the Colored Hockey League that predated the NHL by more than 20 years. Or that there were roughly 500 “race films” made between 1915 and 1952 that have mostly been destroyed. There is a cost to not knowing about Robert Smalls and Tunis Campbell and Mary Fields and Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer and Fred Hampton and Madame CJ Walker and Nat Turner and Ona Judge and Forest Joe.
There is a cost and it is exponential.
What goes unsaid in “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is that there are people like Alice Moore who will destroy our collective memory in order to condemn us into repeating the worst parts of our past. The only way out of that condemnation is to take charge of our memory ourselves and keep the Alice Moores as far away as possible.
So, one more time, thank you so much for subscribing to this newsletter! It really does mean the world to me. Happy anniversary to us!