The Revenge of Suppressed History:
Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and the
Historical Imperative

By The Rev. Dr. Oscar Cole-Arnal

Never for a moment would I suggest that I take critical skills and good taste to the movie theater. In fact, I put far too many of my good values shamelessly in abeyance when I sit down with popcorn in hand and revert to my naive American childhood. To prove my point I joined my son and granddaughter at the opening weekend for "Spider Man." Let me confess at the outset- it was terrible, filled with every stereotype and cliche imaginable. And I loved it! However, every now and then, even my abysmal sidelining of values and unredeemed cowboy childhood cannot bear the hype in some movies. I refer to that awful display of unredeemed chauvinism and historical fabrication called "The Patriot" starring Mel Gibson. Not enough to redeem Scotland, our "Braveheart", become unwilling American revolutionary, almost singlehandedly defeated the dastardly British, liberated the slaves and found the National Rifle Association for Kids.

I add parenthetically that my friend Ed, hardly a raving leftie, found that piece of myth-making a bit much. However, he hastened to add: "Boy, Oz, I'm glad we didn't see this together. There were a bunch of old people* sitting in front of me. When the picture was over one said to the agreement of all, "Isn't it nice to finally have a movie that truly shows our history?" Then, Ed mused, "I wouldn't have wanted to tackle you and hold you down on the floor to prevent a riot after a remark like that." My point in throwing in these personal stories is meant to underscore how history becomes manipulated in service to ruling elites and keeping them in power over against those sectors of our society marginalized from America's origins to the present.**

Objective history does not exist. It never has, nor should it be a goal. Honest history, history with integrity, Yes! Given the immediate relevance of the persistence of racism against the Afro-Americans and given the historical project currently underway by the East Liberty Lutheran Church, I would like to make observations of the importance of freeing popular history from the clutches of elitist history which so dominates the historical discipline.

1. The foundational principle: Objective history does not exist. It never has, nor should it be a goal. Honest history, history with integrity, Yes! The idol of objective history, No! All research and all disciplines have an agenda, and unless that agenda is out in the open or ferreted out by good, critical researchers then the end result produces a fundamental falsehood. A person called upon to research and write within my own discipline of history needs to discern the values that drive him or her in undertaking an historical project. I assume that those of you involved in the East Liberty Historic Preservation Drive take up your project under the impulse of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yes, I know that, as broken and flawed creatures, we bring to all our tasks mixed and contradictory motives, but at the same time, we seek to embody Jesus' radical ministry centered in his execution and resurrection. In light of this, our call as baptized Christians compels us to put heart, feet and life to this "Good News." One of the joys of seminary teaching, researching and writing involves no pressure to hide my overt Christian agenda. My professional vocation emanates naturally from my baptismal vocation of announcing that liberation Christ brings for those shoved to the margins as expendable and embarrassing.

History, according to the Gospel agenda, announces the death and resurrection of the destitute and rejected of the human story. In short, it means underscoring the oppression meted out to workers, natives, women and Afro-Americans throughout American history. This vicious history is no sideline relegated safely to an anomaly in the nation's past. Rather it survives as part-and-parcel of the American journey and remains the toxic underside of the American story. The crucifixion of all our minorities and marginalized needs to be told without gilding, as the brutal torture and execution it is and was. One could liken it to replacing our gold crucifixes with a cheap wooden crossbar containing a brutal and offensive sculpted image.

For the Christian, history also means resurrection. Afro-Americans, women, workers and aboriginal people would remain simply objects of brutality if crucifixion only drove Christian involvement in an historical project. In truth, these hammered sectors of American society have made and continue to make their own living history over against and in spite of the brutal and structural violence that continues to suppress their story. I can almost forgive the 1940s portrayal of John Brown by Raymond Massey who rescues all those ever so grateful, "yes, Massah" black folk. However, when in the 1990s Mel Gibson emerges to free Afro-American slaves, this portrayal is both an outright lie and a patronizing suggestion that the slave population needed a white savior to liberate it from bondage.

But history involves much more than great, heroic individuals. Resurrection means the recovery of workers', Afro-American, women's and native history as voluminous, rich, inspiring and absolutely intrinsic to what is best about the American dream. When I was a boy and young man going through the U.S. educational system, from grade school until ordination (and that includes two Lutheran institutions, Thiel College and Philadelphia's Lutheran seminary) I learned almost nothing about women, workers, natives or Afro-Americans. From that period I remember only Booker T. Washington (creator of trade schools for blacks), George Washington Carver (inventor of the peanut) and Jackie Robinson (the first Afro-American to play major league ball in the twentieth century) as black role models. I bought the unspoken assumption that there were only a few of these folks who made any significant contribution to the American story. I was caught up with most white Americans who believed the oppressive myth that had it not been for the founding fathers' democratic values or white heroes like American Lincoln and Union generals, then our poor helpless Afro-Americans would never have been rescued from slavery. Had it not been for the groundswell of the Civil Rights Movement emerging from the black churches of the 1950s and 1960s, I would have never heard of the heroism and dignity of the Afro-Americans Crispus Attucks, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Dubois just to name a few. But history involves much more than great, heroic individuals. Indeed, intrinsic to the American power myth is the notion that justice, goodness and truth must await gigantic, bigger-than-life saints before anything of significance can happen. This Paul Bunyanesque view that history awaits superstars for redemption ends up serving the status quo and reducing masses of so-called "ordinary people" to passivity. Instead grass-roots people become the well-spring of social change and dreams of a new world of justice and peace. The very leaders we tend to exalt as our redeemers have emerged from the press of the people, and these very notable individuals become either the voice of the suppressed or their co-opters. Every now and then professional and amateur historians understand that and take up the challenge of resurrecting that "history from below." For Christians, who read, do and make history, that recovery of people's history becomes a Gospel mandate.

Not until I joined the Civil Rights Movement did I learn and face uncomfortable facts about standard U.S. white American heroes: Let me focus briefly on one example of what the Christian Sojourners' Community calls America's "original sin"-- racism. Recently our mainline media have covered the conflict between the white heirs of Founding Hero Thomas Jefferson and the heirs of his slave Sally Hemings with whom he conceived children. Well, as Malcolm X once said, "the chickens have come home to roost." The heirs of Sally Hemings are demanding full inclusion into the rarefied reality of the white elite who currently and proudly bear the legal bloodlines of this very real "father of our country." Indeed, the author of the Declaration of Independence was not the sole Founding Father who used female slaves as sexual property to father the enslaved sector of the republic. Not until I joined the Civil Rights Movement did I learn and face uncomfortable facts about standard U.S. white American heroes: that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other paragons of liberty maintained and defended slavery and used black women as willing or unwilling mistresses and that Jefferson, the most democratic of the well-known saints of the Revolution, helped work out that compromise with slave states for deciding political representation through defining a black man as three-fifths of a person. Of course, these slaves received no representation of their own. To be fair, Jefferson treated Sally Hemings with preference and even a modicum of dignity, freed his own children he conceived with her and, at least, recognized with embarrassment the contradiction between his beloved liberty and his slavery policy. As well, I learned in the 1960s that Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson were racists and that Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to pass powerful anti-lynching legislation for fear of losing the Southern Democratic vote. Lest any white folk feel inclined to suggest that all this encourages negativism about a sad past best left unremembered, let them look to the current dispute regarding the Hemings heirs to Jeffersonian recognition. It seems that most of Mr. Jefferson's white heirs continue the process of segregating these Afro-American relatives who challenge both the Jeffersonian myth as well as the current elite status it gives his white progeny.

Jefferson descendants slam door on slave's kin
By Leef Smith
The Washington Post
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - A group representing Thomas Jefferson's mainline descendants voted overwhelmingly yesterday to bar the kin of slave Sally Hemings from joining the family organization, ending years of rancorous and racially charged debate.
Members or the Monticello Association - a group of more than 700 lineal descendants of Jefferson and his wife, Martha - also rejected recent proposals that they form an organization to honor slaves and others who worked at Monticello.
"Our intent was to kill this forever so it doesn't keep coming up again," said John H. Works Jr., a former president of the Monticello Association and one of the key lobbyists against including the Hemmings. :This should do it."
The 74 to 6 vote marked a climax to a drama that has roiled since 1998, when DNA analysis showed a link between a male line of the Jefferson family and one of Hemings's children.
The genetic testing combined with historical evidence led many scholars, including those who run Jefferson's Monticello plantation, to conclude the nation's third president likely fathered one if not all of Hemings's offspring.
The Monticello Association resisted taking a formal position on Jefferson's alleged paternity until now, choosing to conduct it's own review.
Hemings's descendants said they were prepared for rejection. "We're not hurt by this," said Shay Banks-Young, a descendant of Hemings's son Madison. "This doesn't remove us from Thomas Jefferson's family. They can't do anything about that. It's a done deal.
Yesterday's gathering grew contentious as exchanges between blacks and whites devolved into shouting matches and accusations of racism, based in part on an e-mail Works sent to another member showing a black man with a zipper across his mouth.
As Hemings's descendants charged Works with racism, one woman, a defender of Works, ripped the photo to shreds before a TV camera.
Threatened with censure by his group, Works addressed the media and later apologized to the assembled Jefferson-Hemings contingent. Called the e-mail "regrettable," saying it was sent as a "joke" to family member Lucian K. Truscott IV, who had been talking "inappropriately" to the media and faced his own censure for it.
"Was it poor judgment? Yes." Works said. "Was it appropriate? No... I shouldn't have sent it, but it was not meant to be racist."
But Hemings's family took it that way. "I am personally offended and represent offense for all African Americans," Hemings descendant Michele Cooley-Quill said, standing face-to-face with Works. "This is offensive to the nation."
The tension heated up Saturday with the closed-door presentation of a committee report that was intended to convince the Monticello Association membership that the Hemings do not belong in the organization, whose members may be buried in the Monticello graveyard.
Hemings's descendants expressed outrage during the Saturday hearing, which had tight controls in place to keep the media from listening in.
What followed was described by participants as a two-hour verbal slugfest

.
It seems that most of Mr. Jefferson's white heirs continue the process of segregating these Afro-American relatives who challenge both the Jeffersonian myth as well as the current elite status it gives his white progeny. To his credit, the pesky descendent of Mr. Jefferson Lucian Truscott IV invited the Hemings side of the family to the Monticello gathering of the Jefferson Society. Almost immediately, embarrassment, excuses, obfuscation and division characterized the all-white establishment, and scenes of "blacks stay back" brought back memories of the Rosa Parks incident in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama. No sooner did the Hemings family get its foot in the door than the exclusive residents of the metaphorical and real mansion hastened to reroute them to the slave quarters, both metaphorical and real. One heard arguments of "we can't act until we have proof of heritage" (in spite of DNA evidence); well "they" can be observers but not full members of the Monticello Association; and sure "they" can be buried here but only in their own cemetery. Do I hear the old "separate but (relatively) equal" clause yet again? And, of course, once more we hear the standard, we're good, fair people, and we're not racist, BUT..., and last but not least, the old argument of, we must be careful, more slowly. Wait! Be patient! Same old, same old! History has recorded these elements of slavery, segregation and racism from colonial Virginia to the present in spite of the golden, even idolatrous pap we are fed about U.S. history in our schools and the media.

2. Some Practical Points: So what next? What final words can I offer to my believing sisters and brothers who embrace the Gospel call to undertake a local history project in East Liberty? Beyond my above convictions about the agenda of Christian historians I add three comments about the gritty practice of the historian's trade for this specific task of history with a crucifixion-resurrection motif.

1). Try to read some good alternative American histories. I cite three. Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the United States (1991) remains a fun and useful read even though it takes only a cautious revisionary approach. More critical and more challenging are James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1995).
2). One of the exciting and challenging facets of doing genuinely people's history includes the detective-like digging one must do to liberate suppressed materials, the valuable richness of bringing to life oral testimony and the fun-filled necessity of team and collective research.
3). Finally, I underscore the blessed fortune existing already within your own history, that well-known Denominational Ministry Strategy and Confessing Synod story that not only remains crucial to your own history but also generated high-class research and research training during those years. So I celebrate both the journey your history has taken and the journey you undertake to liberate your community's story from the chains of the entrepreneurial classes who seek to continue their corporate family's myth as shadow over the peoples who came to your community and still represent its most wholesome dreams.

* Given that both Ed and I were in our latter 50s when this movie came out, I cite Justice Brandeis' definition of the elderly as those "ten to twenty years older than myself."

** I could develop a similar theme(s) for the Canadian experience but choose exclusively U.S. examples because of the readership of this paper and the historical project you undertake now.

The Rev.Dr. Oscar Cole Arnal,
Waterloo Theological Seminary, Waterloo Ontario Canada

Frederick Douglass, disheartened by Lincoln's first inaugural compromise on slavery, approached the second warily.

April 2002
S M I T H S O N I A N

In the crowd, Lincoln recognized Frederick Douglass, the articulate African-American abolitionist leader, reformer, and newspaper editor. Lincoln's First Inaugural Address had dismayed Douglass. He had found Lincoln's words much too conciliatory toward the South. Douglass visited Lincoln in the White House in 1863 and again in 1864 to speak with the president about a variety of issues concerning African Americans. Douglass's attitudes about the president during the Civil War had whipsawed back and forth from disgust to respect, and from despair to hope.

Hemings' kin want place at Monticello

PITTSBURGH
POST-GAZETE
SUNDAY,
April 28, 2002
Robert J. Pavuchak
Post Gazette

Clara Fisher of Washington, PA., stands beside pencil drawings of people she says are her great-great-great grandparents - Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Following a review of the scientific and circumstantial evidence, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation - operator of Monticello - concluded in 2000 that Jefferson fathered one and perhaps all of Hemings' known children. The foundation noted Hemings conceived only during times Jefferson was at Monticello and that Jefferson bestowed special treatment on Hemings' children, finally letting them go free.

"These words will all be eaten. Maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually."
-Clara Fisher, Hemings descendant

Thomas Jefferson