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Michael Dennis

A Community Affair:Luther P. Jackson and

Historical Consciousness

Lamenting the state of professional history, John

Lukacs maintains that the object of historical writing is “the re-

duction of untruth”1—a sufficiently compelling and obvious aim,

but one that historians in search of methodological marvels and

linguistic strategies often overlook. The tension between academic

professionalism and popular history has become a source of an-

guish for scholars who suffer from popularity envy and from the

demands of conservatives that they promote national unity, but it

had more immediate implications for African-American scholars of

the early civil rights era. Current debates about the teaching and

writing of history have profound consequences for the character of

our society and the quality of our political life; for scholars who con-

fronted assumptions of black inferiority in everything from school

textbooks to Hollywood films, this recognition carried a special

sense of urgency. Appeals to the public challenged the convictions

that sustained black political and social exclusion.

Few African-American historians of the early civil rights era ri-

valed Luther P. Jackson in the struggle to reconcile professional and

public concerns. A voting rights activist, a professor of history at

The Journal of The Historical Society III:2 Spring 2003 249

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Virginia State College, and a devoted adherent of Carter Woodson’s

Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Jackson was

also a popularizer. Here I would like to modify the lexicon, since

“popular” history carries a ring of vulgarity that suggests doubt-

ful intellectual respectability. Historians invoke “popular” to dis-

credit alleged amateurs and to ward off would-be academic imita-

tors. Luther Jackson was not a “popular” historian as some might

define it today, but rather a community historian. Today’s popu-

lar historians may not be community-conscious, but Jackson and a

good many of his contemporaries were.

If history is about discovering paths not taken, Jackson offers a

stunning example of an alternative to the bureaucratized academi-

cian of today. He sought to understand and explain the experiences

of people in his own community who belonged to a larger commu-

nity of southern blacks, who were divided by geographic and demo-

graphic variables but bound together by common cultural patterns

and the experience of racial oppression. His interests narrowed the

scope of his work, which primarily focused upon an examination

of the forebears of the black middle class of his own day. Jackson

thus engaged in a fairly self-conscious form of community build-

ing that included distinctive notions of class, history, and race.2 He

wrote about local communities, turning to them in his effort to re-

construct the lives of the free blacks and slaves to whom many were

related. A community historian intimately attuned to the people and

places that surrounded him, he also wrote as a leader responsible

to the political and spiritual yearnings of average people. Did his

sense of community responsibility distort his objectivity or warp

his academic detachment? He had little interest in overturning the

conventional landmarks of the nation’s history or dethroning the

American pantheon. Instead, he hoped to expand the framework

and “reduce the untruths” of his day.

In struggling to define a place for the academic in the commu-

nity, Jackson’s importance as an historian transcended the early

civil rights movement. Regrettably, he undertook this effort at a

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A Community Affair

time when historians, black and white, were abandoning commu-

nity history for the headier heights of academic obscurantism.

Jackson’s Career

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1892, Luther Porter Jackson was

the sixth boy in a family struggling to scratch an existence out of

dairy farming. He probably acquired his political sensibilities from

his newspaper-reading father, but he more than likely absorbed an

appreciation for learning from his mother, Delilah Culverson, who

insisted that each of her children attend school. He required little

encouragement—he was already evading chores by hiding under his

bed to read books. Culverson enrolled the children at the Chandler

Normal School, an American Missionary Society project founded

during Reconstruction. The children took odd jobs at the school to

support the family’s dwindling resources, but despite their contri-

butions, Jackson’s father Edward could not hold on to the farm. In

1908, Jackson’s senior year in high school, Edward lost the farm to

bankruptcy. He died the following year.3

The family’s implosion may have spurred Luther Jackson on to

higher education. In 1914, he graduated from Fisk University with

an A.B. A gifted coronet player with visions of a career in music,

Jackson found himself drawn back to the life of books and learning

by historian George Edmund Haynes, one-time executive director

of the National Urban League and original member of the NAACP.

Haynes stimulated Jackson’s historical curiosity and instilled the no-

tion that academics had an obligation to social service—“otherism,”

as Jackson described it.4 Deciding on a career in teaching, Jackson

attended Columbia Teachers College in New York City.5 He gradu-

ated in 1922 with a Master’s degree and joined his wife and fellow

Fisk graduate Johnella Frazer on the faculty at the Virginia Nor-

mal and Industrial Institute in Petersburg, where he took on a full

teaching load that included responsibilities at the college’s prepara-

tory school and extra-curricular activities. His new position left little

time for the scholarship Jackson wanted most to pursue.

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Association with Carter G. Woodson fostered Jackson’s enthu-

siasm for original research and a determination to acquire profes-

sional credentials. Jackson apparently met Woodson—the “father

of black history”—soon after settling in Petersburg, and he joined a

group of young black scholars who gravitated toward Woodson as a

source of intellectual leadership, financial support, and publication

through his Journal of Negro History. By 1927 he had published an

article in the Journal of Negro History, and by 1928 he was enrolled

in a PhD program at Chicago, where he received his degree in 1937.

He became a devotee of the Association for the Study of Negro Life

and History (ASNLH) and a dedicated follower of the mercurial

Woodson. Alrutheus A. Taylor, Charles Wesley, Lorenzo Greene,

W. Sherman Savage, Rayford Logan, and James Hugo Johnston, to-

gether with Jackson, formed a loose-knit company of scholars com-

mitted to exploring African-American history free of the biases of

the dominant historical community but grounded in the methodolo-

gies that made their work professionally respectable. Each pursued

his craft in an intellectual atmosphere that subordinated or ignored

black history in the grand narrative of American national success.6

Molded by the racial assumptions that informed the profession

and the wider society, Greene, Woodson, and Jackson came to see

African-American history as an extension of the movement for black

equality. They, along with historian Benjamin Brawley and politi-

cal scientist Cedric Robinson, sought to rehabilitate peoples and

cultures of African descent from what Robin Kelley describes as

the effort to fashion “Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity

that was solely responsible for modernity.”7 These scholars in-

tended their history to stimulate social reform, not simply to as-

semble and record the data of the past.8 As Jackson explained

to the readers of his column in the Norfolk Journal and Guide,

“The observance of Negro History Week and the presentation of all

other forms of historical activity constitute one phase of our rights

and duties in a democracy.” Jackson’s writing a regular column

for the black community reflected his belief in the importance of

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A Community Affair

community history. He addressed the column on Negro History

Week to the state’s black teachers, in the conviction that students

exposed to a history that included African Americans as equal partic-

ipants would insist on a future in which black equality had become a

reality.9

Jackson’s work for the ASNLH was closely tied to his continuing

struggle for local political action. A dedicated voting rights activist

and NAACP supporter, Jackson believed that the ballot box and the

courts offered African Americans of the New Deal era the best hope

for eradicating racial inequalities—a conviction that echoed the

NAACP’s region-wide campaign to register voters and pursue edu-

cational equalization through litigation. In areas where the NAACP

was inactive or ineffective, local voters’ leagues sprang up during the

Second World War and accelerated after 1944, when the Supreme

Court struck down the white primary. In Virginia alone, black vot-

ers increased from roughly 15,000 in 1940 to 65,286 in 1950, the

year of Jackson’s death.10 Responding to the favorable ideological

atmosphere generated by the war, Jackson and others set out to mo-

bilize local groups in support of enfranchisement. He coordinated

his campaigns for the ASNLH program with the Virginia Voters

League, a federation of local voters’ clubs, which he led. His position

as Secretary of Civic Education for the Virginia Teachers Associa-

tion also helped. Historical consciousness, black voter registration,

and the equalization of African-American schools merged in Jack-

son’s work beyond the campus. Negro History Week activities and

public presentations for the ASNLH gave him the medium for trans-

mitting black history to teachers and average citizens, but they also

afforded him the opportunity to promote racial self-determination

in the community. He and others implicitly understood that they

were engaged in a struggle in the realm of ideas as well as

politics.

As state chairperson of the ASNLH, Jackson made the organi-

zation a visible presence in Virginia. A car accident had left him

with a permanent fear of driving, so he recruited drivers to take

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him to remote villages, where he promoted the Association and its

ideals. He contacted school supervisors, principals, social groups,

and teachers who were taking summer classes at Virginia State, to

expand Association membership and promote history as a vehicle

of racial self-determination. “I am going to sell the Association the

[sic] State Federation of Womens Clubs meeting at Franklin,” he re-

ported to Woodson, noting that it would offer an excellent chance

to “capitalize” on the “race consciousness of many of our peo-

ple.”11 While managing classroom responsibilities and juggling the

demands of academic publishing, he participated in ASNLH spon-

sored activities, most notably, Negro History Week exercises, across

the state. Organizers at Shaw University, Virginia Union, Payne

Divinity School, Jefferson High School in Charlottesville, and a

night class of WPA workers recruited Jackson to speak on black

history. Appearing before local groups such as the Astoria Benefi-

cial Club of Richmond, Jackson distributed his booklets, lectured

on African American history, and advocated black voting rights.12

Jackson’s campaign to expand Association membership and raise

the profile of black history achieved remarkable results. In January

1936, he reported to Woodson that Virginia had contributed a to-

tal of $338.43 for the annual ASNLH drive. In 1944, he collected

$1,052 for the organization and expected to produce $1500 annu-

ally in the years to come.13 The organization’s growth in the midst of

the Depression reflected the recognition that the African-American

past was inseparable from the contemporary movement for racial

justice. Teachers responded to the annual history drive, Jackson re-

ported, “because they realize that the inculcation of race pride and

loyalty in the Negro youth serves as one of the main solutions of

the so-called race problem.”14 History was anything but a neutral

chronicle of events. Its study by black and white children held out the

hope for racial amelioration, since the historical record confirmed

that “all races have risen from a low to a high state of development,

that all races have passed through the crucible of slavery and servi-

tude before they became free men.” Once children discover these

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A Community Affair

truths, they will “then decide that the Negro should be integrated

into all phases of American life.”15

Although wrapped in a language of racial uplift, which seemed to

endorse the notion that blacks had to approximate white cultural

ideals, Jackson’s point was compelling. History would broaden hu-

man consciousness and expand the range of possibilities that the past

offered to the present. The historian was not a propagandist but a

filter against ideological distortions and self-serving orthodoxies. In

his own work, Jackson scrupulously avoided inflammatory rhetoric,

hewing closely to the social-scientific tone encouraged by the pro-

fession at the time. Alrutheus A. Taylor, Dean of Fisk University,

noted as much, congratulating Jackson for winning “the confidence

and the support of the majority group which sees in your scholarly

works an effort merely to present truth in its proper setting, rather

than to foment propaganda for whatever reason.”16 The pose of ob-

jectivity was at least in part a strategic decision, since impartiality in

the discussion of a topic as politically charged as African-American

history would only alienate an audience that Jackson, Woodson,

and others wanted to reach. Restoring a sense of shared historical

experience among blacks was essential for galvanizing citizenship

at the local level, but establishing a common historical framework

for people across the racial spectrum was no less essential for bridg-

ing the racial divide in American society. The key to Jackson’s goals

lay in his conviction that historical awareness did not belong exclu-

sively to the institutionalized profession, but included people at the

local level—teachers and students, blacks and whites, northerners

and southerners, each entangled in a legacy of racial enmity.

The task of the historian was not simply to address his academic

counterparts but to “create” for the benefit of teachers and “the

educated class,” who then transmitted learning to “school children,

who eventually make such knowledge the common possession of

all the people.” However elitist Jackson’s conception of education

may sound today, he explicated an ideal at the center of the Progres-

sive vision of education, one that continues to inform universities

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today. For Jackson, the university expert was obliged to engage a

wider public in need of historical perspective. Although he accepted

the conventions of professional scholarship, he insisted that the re-

searcher move beyond the magic circle of academe and inform the

public in an effort to understand and resolve contemporary prob-

lems: “The enlightened classes also in meeting among themselves for

their mutual edification project themselves beyond their own group

and beyond schools into the masses.” Jackson imagined that the

Journal of Negro History and the Association’s more-popular Bul-

letin of Negro History helped to achieve these goals, but he also be-

lieved that these associations and the scholars who organized them

could not isolate themselves from community and local historical

organizations. He applauded the Association for operating through

“Negro history clubs” attached to community organizations such

as the schools, the churches, and social welfare agencies. The lo-

cal clubs were only marginally successful—several emerged in the

1920s but disappeared after operating for a few years. Yet Jackson

was encouraged that a “small band of tireless workers” sustained

the black history initiative in each state where the Association was

active. The local clubs benefited from the national group, but the

relationship was reciprocal. Local branches had “delved into the

research field by bringing out facts respecting Negro achievement

in their localities. They have aided also in collecting documents and

manuscripts for publication at Washington.”17

The collection of documents and manuscripts proved to be an ac-

tivity Jackson could directly encourage in conjunction with his own

research. Beginning with “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,”

published in 1927, Jackson produced a string of articles, a disserta-

tion, and a book that illuminated the experience of free blacks in the

antebellum era. Influenced by Booker T. Washington’s racial uplift

ideology, Jackson emphasized the productivity and civic respectabil-

ity of Petersburg’s free African Americans: “In many instances, de-

spite the laws against them . . . they educated their children through

private instructors and provided for their spiritual needs in churches

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A Community Affair

of their own.” Slaves who had secured their own freedom and grav-

itated toward the economic opportunities available in the cities also

tended to own property and “gain the respect of Petersburg’s white

citizens.” Molded by the black middle-class struggle to eliminate

racial prejudice and increase social opportunity in his own time,

Jackson stressed the respectability and industriousness of Peters-

burg’s antebellum free blacks. When they obtained their freedom,

more often than not they entered into legal marriage. When they

moved to the cities, they found useful employment as skilled labor-

ers and merchants, which allowed them to accumulate property and

stability. As free people, they built and attended churches, cultivated

literacy, and supported those still in bondage. “In short,” Jackson

explained to readers of the Journal of Negro History, “many of the

free Negroes made a record for which their descendants may justly

feel proud.”18

Virginia’s free blacks may have exemplified Jackson’s vision of

middle-class rectitude, but they were anything but an abstraction.

His portrait was grounded in the lives of the distinguished “free

people of color” who built the African-American community in

Petersburg. Writing before his immersion in the rubrics of pro-

fessional historiography, Jackson highlighted the experiences of

Petersburg’s most prominent ancestors. Positioning his 1927 arti-

cle as a “biographical narrative,” he illuminated the buried histo-

ries of Richard Jarrat, “owner of a house and lot in Pocahontas

valued at $831.25” and operator of a boat that carted cargo be-

tween Petersburg and Norfolk. Jack McCrae was “a free Negro

citizen of prominence in Petersburg” and a caterer who “found lu-

crative employment among the white citizens of the city.” The Jarrats

proved particularly important to Jackson’s effort to locate contem-

porary African-American readers—many of whom would be within

Jackson’s immediate community and sphere of influence—in a his-

tory of cultural endurance and self-reliance: “This family, like some

others under discussion here, has a vital connection with the life of

Petersburg from the beginning of the town and extending on down

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to the present.” Charles Tinsley, Thomas Garnes, and Christopher

B. Stevens were only three of the “outstanding mechanics” of Pe-

tersburg. James Colson gave rise to a dynasty of entrepreneurs and

adventurers, and his son William immigrated to Liberia and es-

tablished an export/import operation with fellow Petersburg native

and first president of the colony, Joseph Jenkins Roberts. African-

Americans of Jackson’s community could identify with the past,

since James Major Colson, William’s youngest son, “comes eas-

ily within the memory of Petersburg citizens living today.” James

Major III achieved distinction not only by earning a degree from

Dartmouth College, but also by returning to Petersburg to provide

“efficient service in education and social uplift.” Just as the city’s

free blacks had demonstrated an “organized group spirit” through

churches and fraternal societies, Colson took up the burden of social

responsibility in the community, an ideal that Jackson sought to em-

ulate and promote: “Such are the persons who have been forgotten

and about whom we need to know more today.”19

Graduate school expanded Jackson’s methodological horizons

and his analytical rigor, but it did little to diminish his interest in the

local black community. Writing a dissertation under the direction

of Avery O. Craven, he covered an astonishing range of sources to

produce his “Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia,

1830–1860,” including land and personal property manuscripts in

eighty-one counties and ten cities. Traveling extensively to exam-

ine deeds, wills, and the Registers of Free Negroes and Mulattoes,

Jackson also explored the manuscript sources that belonged to the

descendants of free blacks throughout the state, which enabled him

to tap into the historical memory of the relatives of distinguished

“free people of color” as well as property-holding farmers and av-

erage people throughout Virginia. Turning to them for sources, he

sparked their interest in a history that seemed anything but irrele-

vant. They, in turn, gave Jackson a living thread to the past. “There

are many Negro families in Virginia today who are the descendants

of the free Negro group of the slavery period,” Jackson told readers

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A Community Affair

of the Virginia State College Gazette. While limited, their diaries,

letters, and wills “give an air of reality unobtainable in any of the

other sources.”

Moving beyond the libraries of Washington—an accomplishment

of which Jackson was particularly proud—he uncovered the lives

of free African Americans submerged by historians who consid-

ered blacks either minor players in the drama of the Civil War or

powerless victims (or beneficiaries, depending on the perspective)

of slavery. But beyond Jackson’s historiographical pioneering, for

which W.E.B. DuBois, Lorenzo Greene, and Carter G. Woodson may

also claim credit, he struggled to connect communities across time.

Through “interviews with descendants of the free Negro class,”

church records that shed light on “free Negroes as a group,” and

“bits of documentary source materials concerning their ancestors,”

Jackson brought history alive at the community level and through

the active participation of African-American citizens in his own

period.20

Of course, Jackson’s research reflected the limitations imposed

by his teaching responsibilities and his meager resources. Travel be-

yond Virginia was unlikely for a professor who normally taught

during the summer months and carried as many as five courses dur-

ing the regular year. Family responsibilities and political activities

also limited the scope of his research, which he often combined

with his work on behalf of the Virginia Teachers Association or the

ASNLH. Nevertheless, Jackson covered a remarkable amount of

territory in search of manuscript materials, county records, and per-

sonal accounts. When he conducted research in the county archives

in Goochland, he traveled by bus to visit Ruth L. Mealey, the de-

scendant of one of the many free African Americans whose lineage

he was trying to trace. The driver let the professor off at Little Creek

and directed him to Mealey’s home in Irwin, half a mile down a dirt

road. “I accordingly got out, plowed through the mud, and found

nothing there but a railroad station and a post office both of which

were deserted.” After catching a ride with a “strange white man,”

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Jackson made it to the intersection that led to Mealey’s home, only

to realize that he was late for the bus returning to Richmond. It is

not hard to believe that Jackson’s Herculean research efforts must

have impressed Mealey.

Jackson used his professional and social connections in search-

ing out obscure primary sources. When, in his capacity as Secretary

of Civic Education for the Virginia Teachers Association, he was

not urging the teachers to vote, Jackson often contacted them for

research leads. In search of the descendants of the “old free Ne-

gro families of Battles, Barnett, Bowles, and Goings in Albermarle

County,” Jackson contacted Mary Carr Greer, a teacher in Char-

lottesville and a supporter of his voting rights initiative. Since he

was working on a study of black soldiers and sailors in the Revo-

lutionary War, he was particularly interested in contacting families

with ancestors who had actively participated in it. As he explained

to Carr Greer, he wanted pictures to accompany newspaper articles

for Negro History Week and for his planned booklet. He would

travel to Charlottesville, much as he had traveled to Goochland,

in search of material for public edification and community history.

His method, he believed, was scholarly, but his audience included

the communities he had canvassed, contacted, and visited in support

of black historical awareness.21

In his effort to track down family lineages and profile the free

black experience in Virginia, Jackson often went beyond his pro-

fessional associates. “For a number of years I have been wanting

to establish a personal contact with you because of my interest in

the history of your family and many others in Virginia,” he wrote

to Reverend John Lemon. Ages, occupations, personal estates, real

estate—each had occupied hours of Jackson’s time as he recon-

structed the lives of Revolutionary-era African Americans. Piecing

together the lives of forgotten black patriots, Jackson illuminated

the origins of more than one family: “You will be glad to know that

I have the names of members of your family at different periods

extending from the Revolution until the Civil War.” Just as he had

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A Community Affair

exposed the lineaments of Lemon’s family, he had also uncovered

the lives of “the Blufords, the Davenports, Drivers, Morrises, Red-

crosses, Alvises, Jarvises, and others of Gloucester and York.” More

than glorified genealogies, Jackson’s analyses exposed the complex-

ities and common themes of the free black experience in the Revo-

lution, in antebellum Virginia, and during Reconstruction and the

early New South. He consistently explored the experience of each

generation through the analytical categories of property ownership,

occupation, class distinctions, social status, physiological character-

istics, and religious practices.22

The combination of scientific detachment and biographical focus

signaled the two audiences Jackson sought to reach. First, he ap-

pealed to white opinion makers by adopting a tone of objectivity

that would compel them—because of their presumed susceptibility

to reason—to adjust social practices to reflect the fully human, fully

American portrait of blacks that Jackson and other historians had

drawn. Second, he reached out—and down, as he imagined it—to

African Americans molded by a world that minimized their accom-

plishments when it did not actively deny their humanity. Jackson’s

dual project unfolded through local newspapers, pamphlets aimed

at black and white readers, interviews conducted with the relatives

of historical actors, and documents collected from local archives as

well as local families. His goal to correct untruths began at the com-

munity level, largely because the damage inflicted by those untruths

was abundantly evident in the lives of average people in Peters-

burg, Goochland, Louisa County, and elsewhere throughout rural

Virginia.

While Jackson’s research gave him the chance to connect with av-

erage people, it gave them the chance to tell their stories and craft

their own history. Jackson’s request for information about free black

ancestors prompted Esther Bluford Lyas from Gloucester County to

write to her uncles John and Lucious Bluford about their ancestors.

John Bluford, recalling his grandfather, remembered as many sto-

ries of black resistance as of black oppression: “My mother used

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to tell me about the protrollers [sic] who would come to the house

and take his gun while he [Captain Tom Bluford] was away. But as

soon as he came home, he would get it back and ‘cuss’ the whites

out for taking it.” If political compromises, Supreme Court cases,

and partisan wrangling dominated the official histories of the sec-

tional crisis, they played little part in Bluford’s recollections. “This

was just before the civil war,” he explained in his account to his

niece. While one relative armed himself for defense, another voted

with his feet against “conditions in the South.” Jeff Bluford, after

leaving Gloucester for New York, where he failed to find “condi-

tions to his liking,” moved his family to Hamilton, Ontario, where

he took up work on the lake steamers and purchased some prop-

erty. He also enrolled his children in school, fulfilling his ambition

to find a place where young African Americans could be educated

relatively free of persecution. Two of John Bluford’s uncles’ sons re-

turned to the United States and “joined the army,” presumably the

Union Army. Their story echoed the larger black experience and the

national epic.23

John Bluford made it clear that history did not end with his itiner-

ant relatives. His father, John Weseley Bluford, struggled under the

economic difficulties that afflicted African-American landowners

and merchants in the post-war period. Operating a “club store,”

Bluford’s business became insolvent “because too much credit was

extended.” Reflecting the racial complexities of Virginia and the

South, the Bluford family featured “quite a bit of Indian blood.”

If his relatives had absorbed the ethic of education that prevailed

among the freedpeople after the Civil War, then Bluford carried

forward the tradition. Washingtonian industrial education held lit-

tle appeal for his father. The Senior Bluford encouraged his eight

children to “get at least a liberal education—Elementary and High

School, at least.” John Bluford was pleased to report that he had

fulfilled his father’s expectations, acquiring degrees from Howard

and Cornell, teaching for sixteen years at an agricultural college in

Pennsylvania, and serving as secretary of the North Carolina State

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A Community Affair

Teachers Association. The historical account that Jackson’s initial

inquiry stimulated disclosed a trajectory that many African Ameri-

cans had followed. As people like John Bluford reflected on a past

deeply rooted in the black community of Gloucester, they stressed

the search for economic autonomy, episodes of black defiance, the

strength of family ties, and the impulse for education. Bluford did

not try to envelop the past in the romantic haze of an incessant

struggle against oppression. Instead, he offered an alternative ver-

sion of a familiar story, one in which people tied by family, ethnicity,

and geography played an active role inside a narrative traditionally

governed by the decisions of distant and uniformly white power-

brokers.24

As Jackson gravitated toward average people—teachers and local

citizens—they responded in kind. After appearing in Culpepper

County for an address during Negro History Week, memberships

in the ASNLH there shot up. “You made a very fine impression,”

Woodson reported to Jackson, “because of the earnestness with

which you spoke to those people, and they responded beautifully

to your appeal.” The teachers themselves corroborated Woodson’s

observations. After Jackson’s appearance before the Accomac

County Teachers Association in 1942, Mary N. Smith wrote to

thank him for his “wonderful message in our Negro History pro-

gram. You gave us exceptional information and I feel that all of

us were highly inspired.” Moving beyond the confines of the cam-

pus, he found a public warmly responsive to the call for historical

consciousness.25

While the public provided Jackson with valuable research leads,

he in turn offered a vital resource in their search for historical

meaning. “Without any training in historical research and with a

great ignorance of historical facts,” Minna Cheves Wilkins wrote to

Jackson, “I have yet had the temerity to attempt to uncover the

historical background of a small group of negroes who settled

on Staten Island about a hundred years ago.” Cheves Wilkins, a

member of the Staten Island Historical Society, was in search of

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free blacks who had settled in New York after leaving Gloucester,

Virginia. She had read Jackson’s book, the scholarly treatment of free

blacks in antebellum Virginia, and wanted to know more about the

ancestors of the “very successful” Cooley family. She hoped Jackson

might be able to tell her more about the property-holding status

and occupation of Philip Cooler and his wife, Eliza Morris. Like

Jackson, she wanted to identify the ancestors of “great” men and

women, but she focused on local people of distinction, not the usual

pantheon of national African-American heroes: “A great grandson

of Philip Cooler is a successful dentist in Brooklyn and another de-

scendant, recently deceased, was a successful physician in Louisville,

Ky.” Cheves Wilkins and others volunteered their own lists of his-

torical heroes, which reflected the middle-class sensibilities at the

center of Jackson’s community-building project.26

A friend of Cheves Wilkins had suggested that Jackson would be

receptive, and her friend was right. Jackson, who was in the habit

of sending Photostat copies of documents to leading researchers,

including E. Franklin Frazier and Charles Johnson, sent a copy

of Cooler’s petition for manumission to Cheves Wilkins. He

elaborated on the laws governing the practice and sketched the

occupational patterns of free blacks in Gloucester. He also read an

article that Cheves Wilkins had written—“my first little article on

this subject,” as she described it—and assured her that he was “very

happy to establish contacts with you on this subject.” Jackson

wrote for communities well beyond rural Virginia, and local

researchers in both Virginia and the northeast turned to him for

historical perspective on their own experiences. Through the lines

of communication that linked them to experts such as Jackson, they

learned about themselves and built a sense of community—albeit a

community predicated on ideas of middle-class distinctiveness and

family solidarity. Although class delineations continued to mold

Jackson and his associates’ vision of a racially inclusive America,

they forged a wider sense of African-American community out of

the materials of the past.27

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Amateur historians found an outlet for their work in the Negro

History Bulletin, which served as a bridge between themselves and

the professional historians they admired. If anything, the Bulletin

provided an intellectual meeting place for middle-class African-

Americans in the Upper South and the Northeast. Connie Jones

of Hampton, Virginia turned to Jackson for data on the Reid family

for an article she was writing for the Bulletin. Jones had already

discussed the outline of her project with Woodson. She also invited

Jackson to a family reunion in order to give extended relatives an

opportunity to “learn something interesting about this very large

family group of which you are a part.” When Jackson became an

historical source for Jones in her effort to reconstruct family his-

tory, he also became a part of an extended family. He joined Jones,

her family, and others in a complex project to solidify a collective

identity in which historical consciousness, a sense of place, and an

awareness of class distinctions played a critical role.28

Jackson emphasized black contributions to American life over

intra-racial divisions, and few of his contemporaries seemed to ob-

ject. After reading Jackson’s Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen in

the American Revolution, five thousand copies of which the Associ-

ation mailed free of charge to Virginia’s teachers, Nellie Bragg wrote

to congratulate him: “There are so many names and faces in it, of

which I am familiar and it brings to me many pleasant thoughts of

days gone by.” Bragg circulated the publication among her friends

so they could read “what a great man the Negro man and Woman

is.” The book also appealed to Bragg on a personal level: “You may

know I read with pride of my dear father whose picture is in it.”29

Political history, family lineage, and local identity once again con-

verged in Jackson’s scholarship and in the links that he forged to a

literate public.

While some registered a personal response to Jackson’s research,

others reacted to its expressly political and ideological content. Ac-

cording to George W. Watkins of Quinton, Virginia, Jackson’s article

on black soldiers and sailors in the Revolution would “put to shame

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the Negroes of today who refuse to participate wholeheartedly in

every movement whose aim is to improve our citizenship.” Watkins

highlighted the nationalist theme that pervaded Jackson’s article. By

identifying African Americans with the Revolutionary struggle and

the republican tradition, he linked African Americans to the con-

temporary struggle for freedom against fascist totalitarianism. But

Watkins also underlined Jackson’s effort to fuse African-Americans

to the national democratic tradition. His article would advance the

interests of blacks in Virginia and throughout the nation, Watkins

suggested, but it would also align them with the war effort, a cru-

sade that Jackson and others hoped would expand the parameters of

American democracy to include African Americans: “Your reference

to the Negroes of New Kent and Charles City and their contribu-

tion to American freedom should fire the soul of every Negro of this

section with patriotic zeal.”30

Designed to raise black historical awareness in the classroom, Ne-

gro Soldiers and Seamen won the endorsement of Virginia’s black

teachers. Principal Margaret L. Gordon of the Douglas Park School

in Norfolk thanked Jackson for the book and requested additional

copies. As chair of the Classroom Teachers Research Committee,

Gordon considered Jackson’s book an ideal vehicle for incorpo-

rating the African-American experience into the curriculum. C.J.

Chesson of the Norfolk Teachers Association was more explicit

about the book’s potential impact: “It will do much to make the

Negro boys and girls feel that they are a real part of the American

body politic.” Chesson’s observations could not have been more per-

ceptive. Jackson may have subscribed to the objective tenets of the

profession, but following the publication of Negro Property Holders

in 1942, his research increasingly became a vehicle for inculcating

political consciousness. His articles in the Journal of Negro History

continued to bear the marks of scholarly detachment, but his news-

paper columns and historical booklets reflected his determination to

create an historical framework that would support political action.

His columns, according to one observer, read as “pronouncements

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from an oracle on high to us folk to awaken from our lethargy lest

a political and economic maelstrom find us anchored only in the

sands of non-voting.” The description was accurate: here was an

intellectual and a community leader mediating between the legacy

of the black experience in Virginia and the political aspirations of

his African-American contemporaries.31

Jackson’s growing popularity may not have troubled the readers

of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, but it certainly distressed his

mentor and colleague, Carter G. Woodson. Considering the teach-

ers’ solid support for the Association, Jackson wanted to offer them

a “token” in the form of two accessible publications—what would

become Negro Soldiers and Seamen and Negro Office-Holders in

Virginia. His intention was to publicize black historical accomplish-

ments among teachers and students: “I would make this a popular

description giving the absolute facts but told and arranged in such

a way that the simplest mind can appreciate.” Historical “facts”

would remain central, but pictures would “make the popular ap-

peal.” Woodson endorsed the project and congratulated Jackson on

producing something that would assist the membership drive.32

Woodson’s support for Jackson’s initiative, nonetheless, cooled

considerably when the latter’s study of black politicians appeared.

“I have your Negro Office Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895,”

Woodson wrote. “It is the unfinished product of a race leader.”

Woodson lacerated Jackson for tabulating an incomplete survey of

black office-holders, a transgression he had allegedly committed in

preparing Virginia Soldiers and Seamen. Jackson’s desire to recip-

rocate the teachers’ generosity could not be used as an excuse for

a lack of “thoroughness.” Woodson was particularly miffed that

Jackson had overlooked Woodson’s two uncles, both public servants

in the period that he had covered. Beyond these personal quibbles,

Woodson called into question Jackson’s professionalism. The book

failed to meet the “standard of the work of an historian,” he wrote

condescendingly. The data he had collected was “inadequate” but

marginally “valuable.” Woodson saved the rapier thrust for last.

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Jackson might have improved the work by examining the relation

between the Grant administration and the Conservatives in Virginia,

but “such a treatment, of course, would be scientific whereas yours

assumes the form of a compilation.” The tempestuous Woodson

had excoriated Jackson before, but now he went to the core of his

credentials as an academic.33

Jackson, wounded by the mentor he continued to respect, re-

sponded with a terse accounting of expenditures on the booklet,

suspecting no doubt that Woodson’s animosity was motivated in

part by his resentment that funds had been diverted from the As-

sociation’s coffers to Jackson’s pet project. Exercising restraint, he

notified Woodson that he would allow for a “cooling off period”

before responding. The response amounted to a blazing rebuttal of

Woodson’s snobbery and a defense of community history. To ac-

complish the task that Woodson set before him would “require the

labor of ransacking vast collections of loose unbound papers in the

clerks’ office of 124 counties and cities” as well as years of work and

mounds of foundation money. Considering that he taught fifteen

course hours for eleven months of the year, managed large classes,

wrote for a weekly newspaper, and served on the Governor’s World

War II History Commission while earning a meager salary, “you

should wonder how I get any Historical research done whatever.”

An independent scholar without a family, Woodson bore none of the

institutional and familial responsibilities that burdened Jackson.34

But Jackson was not about to slink out from under Woodson’s

criticisms by weaving a tale of excuses. Woodson took him to task

for an incomplete list of officeholders. Jackson responded that he

had made no attempt to provide a comprehensive account, having

provided appropriate caveats in three different places. Woodson

execrated him for failing to “consult those who know very much

about the state”—such as himself. On the contrary, Jackson in-

sisted, he had consulted people who knew the history of Virginia,

but these people were not academics. “Emphasizing as I did the fam-

ily background, occupation, education, and property ownership of

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state legislators, I received biographical sketches from forty-three

descendants of forty-three office-holders” as well as “sketches and

bits of information” relating to their careers along with interviews

with county clerks about members of the General Assembly. Jackson

also conducted interviews with the descendants of local officehold-

ers, current legislators, as well as research in the clerks’ offices and

the state archives. In other words, he had waded out into the commu-

nity in an effort to connect the history of Reconstruction in Virginia

to the people still living under its legacy. “My booklet was addressed

not primarily to scholars” but to the 4,200 African-American teach-

ers of Virginia. Instead of a detailed tome on Reconstruction politics,

Jackson wanted to provide an accessible and human portal to the

past: “The idea was to portray [sic] some officeholders from the

county or city in which the pupils now live—give a sketch of his life

and show his picture.” Jackson wanted to bring the past alive for

students who had every reason to question the merits of historical

analysis.35

At stake in this dispute was the very definition of an historian.

Woodson, the self-employed scholar, stressed “scientific” history

even while he promoted the Association as a vehicle for dissemi-

nating black history to a broad audience. Jackson, the institutional

historian and vigorous social activist, sought to combine solid schol-

arship with a mode of presentation that “even the simplest mind

could appreciate.” But the issues went beyond literary style. At the

heart of their dispute was the function of the historian in the wider

community.

When Woodson had criticized Jackson’s participation in the

Durham Conference, an initiative that brought leading southern

blacks together to devise an interracial reform strategy, Jackson had

defended his combination of scholarship and activism: “Though es-

saying the scholar in writing I have been motivated by the idea of

trying to advance the Negro race.” As he explained to Woodson, his

commitment to reform led him to “advance our cause” by writing

for a broader audience through the pages of the Norfolk Journal and

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Guide.36 But the issue in 1946 was less about the tension between

activism and scholarship than about the meaning of the historical

enterprise. Jackson’s booklet had won the praise of scholars, in-

cluding John Hope Franklin, and the public alike. It reflected the

value he placed on engaging the public in an historical dialogue.

“You frequently cast aspersions upon my not staying in a cloister

and mingling with the people instead,” Jackson wrote to Woodson.

“Yes I am affiliated with a large number of welfare organizations

and I lead some of them. And out of my wide association with peo-

ple I have learned more about the past and the people have learned

me.” Jackson attributed his success with the booklet to his “long

association with people. They must think I have done something

for them, for almost without exception every person I asked to do

something toward gathering data responded and responded gladly.”

Thus Jackson described the compromise he had struck between

conventional notions of scholarship and public intellectual respon-

sibility. Yes, Association membership would grow from the distribu-

tion of his booklet. More important, he hoped, the black historical

consciousness of students and average citizens would increase. “You

stabbed me more than once,” Jackson concluded, “yet I am trying

to recover and do for you and the race all that my training pro-

vided for me to do.” He had no intention of abandoning research

for social advocacy, but he would not restrict himself to the rarefied

company of scholars either. “I shall be both the scholar and a worker

among the people”—a balance Jackson struggled to maintain until

his death four years later in 1950.37

Luther Jackson’s Compromise

What can we make of Luther P. Jackson’s compromise? First, it

would be useful to clarify Jackson’s contribution to the profession.

He, along with Woodson, pioneered in the exploration of the his-

tory of free African Americans in antebellum Virginia. He discovered

manuscript sources that had been neglected for years, incorporating

them into his own research and making them available to leading

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scholars, including E. Franklin Frazier and Charles Johnson.38 He

also pioneered in local history, community studies, and what we

would commonly describe as public history. He was a vigilant pro-

ponent and practitioner of a social history that would examine the

lives and experiences of those neglected by the histories of governing

elites, political leaders, and military conquests.

Jackson also deployed history in community-building and po-

litical mobilization, a process circumscribed by class boundaries

that separated property-owning, educated African Americans of al-

legedly impeccable moral rectitude from others. A useful history

required the fashioning of a particular vision of the past as much as

the establishment of some objective historical record. In Jackson’s

vision, free black lineage conferred social and political status. Even

so, in the context of a civil rights struggle that depended on the

elimination of degrading racial stereotypes, Jackson’s historical per-

spective offered a necessary corrective. Informed by middle-class

sensitivities, his appeal for the recognition of black accomplishments

nevertheless transcended class interests. While national elites may

have wanted to project the image of an homogenous society pulled

together by the collective experience of liberal capitalist progress,

Jackson and others recalled a past marred by racial divisions and

broken promises. Recognizing black “contributions” in the past

meant recognizing black entitlements—and not just those of the

cultured middle class—in the present. As historians Joyce Appleby,

Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob explain, “Having a history enables

groups to get power, whether they use a past reality to affirm their

rights or wrest recognition from those powerful groups that monop-

olize public debate.” Jackson was not in the business of distorting the

past to serve the present, but he did expand the historical interroga-

tion to include black accomplishments, failures, and injustices.39 He

sought, more successfully than Woodson would admit, to repudiate

the historical untruths that sustained the injustices of the present.

Jackson’s line of argument should be fairly familiar to observers of

the “culture wars” and contemporary skirmishes over the function

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of history in preserving a sense of national identity. Less familiar

is the conflict between the community historian and the public his-

torian. One article cannot hope to resolve this conflict, although it

could help to break down the barriers between academic and pop-

ular historians. Jackson, an historical actor in his own right but

also an academic who aspired to communicate historical insights

to people who lived amidst the evidence of the past’s grip on the

present, provides a likely starting point. Quite apart from the trajec-

tory of African-American historiography and its relation to the civil

rights movement, the professionalization and “bureaucratization”

of history after the Second World War, as Theodore S. Hamerow

described it in a forum for the American Historical Review, left

little room for historians of Jackson’s persuasion. It also left little

room for the community historian, the public intellectual commit-

ted to social responsibility—if not necessarily social activism, as in

Jackson’s case—in the analysis of the past. “History has become

more detached, more aloof from the interests of the community

that had once looked to it for direction and guidance,” Hamerow

writes. Historians have “ceased to be bards and oracles and become

schoolmasters,” an observation that echoes the compliment Mau-

rice Collette once paid to Luther P. Jackson.

Hamerow’s remarks juxtapose the amateur historian, immersed in

public affairs and interested in communicating with a non-academic

public, to the professional historian, preoccupied with arcane spe-

cializations and the intricacies of university politics. Jackson oper-

ated between these two spheres as he struggled to reconcile com-

munity engagement and solid research. He strove to maintain what

Hamerow describes as the “close connection . . . between theoretical

investigation and practical experience, between research and com-

munity, between study and life.”40 Earl Lewis concurs with Thomas

Holt in applauding the “shift from a history of contribution to a

history of analysis” in African-American historiography.41 Leaving

aside the objection that Jackson was quite capable of combining

both, one is left to wonder whether this shift was accomplished at

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the expense of community history, a cost measured not only in terms

of African-American history but the profession at large.

Should the community historian be an activist? Certainly, one

could argue that any interpretation of the past implies judgments

about the present distribution of power, the practice of public

decision-making, and the actions that should be taken to effect

change. Community accountability does not necessarily imply direct

participation in movements for social change, although few would

challenge the assertion that an understanding of past inequities gen-

erates a degree of civic consciousness that molds one’s behavior in

the present. Historical scholarship should, however, do more than

reaffirm comforting dogmas about historical consensus and homo-

geneity. As Allan Megill suggests, history should not “be a matter

of showing continuity between past and present but rather of show-

ing how the past provides a reservoir of alternative possibilities, of

paths not taken, of difference.”42 Reflecting on a world in which

war drowns out the voices of critics, historian Robin D.G. Kelley

resolves to offer the next generation “some alternatives to liberalism

and its attendant consumer culture, alternatives to racism, sexism,

nationalism [and] a shallow life where self-worth is measured by

wealth and beauty.”43 While Luther Jackson presented the American

democratic creed as an “alternative possibility” to racial exclusion

and inequality, he was also drawn toward an uncritical celebration

of national institutions and traditional elites that many of us see

as time-bound and even intrinsically questionable.44 But Jackson

did understand, much as anti-globalization activists do today, that

democracy begins at the community level through direct participa-

tion in the issues that confront people in their daily lives. Democracy

and historical awareness—concepts that Jackson believed should be

coupled—radiate out from the experiences of people in communities

where citizenship implies active debate and discussion, not indiffer-

ence and conformity.

Jackson did more than uncover obscure sources and examine

the lives of free African-American property holders in slaveholding

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Virginia. By exploring African-American history through the kin-

ship connections of local people, he knit together the past and the

present, investing history with a sense of meaning for average peo-

ple and connecting the distant past to the living memories of those

who read and admired his work and struggled daily with the issues

that he explored. By incorporating average people into his research

and by directing his writings to them, he bridged the chasm between

professional and “popular” history. Unfortunately, Jackson did so

at precisely the time when historians, even those exploring the com-

plex world of the voiceless and inarticulate working classes, were

abandoning public dialogue for the narrow confines of academe,

which the learned and the wise found comforting but which the

wider public found impenetrable. Jackson, a community historian,

was one of a dying breed.

NOTES

1. John Lukacs, “Popular and Professional History,” Historically Speaking 3 (April2002): 2.

2. Earl Lewis has recently pointed out that historians have “spent considerably moreenergy delineating the processes of racial construction than they have the com-plexities of identity formation.” Race, as Lewis suggests, is one dimension ofself-definition; others, including religion, class, color, and location, are equallyimportant. So too, I would suggest, is the interpretation of history. Jackson’s no-tion of a struggling, self-reliant class of free blacks pulling others up from slaveryand carving out a sphere of independent action molded his understanding of civilrights leadership. The “process of ‘othering’ so critical to community-building” isone that Jackson and some of his historical contemporaries embraced. In definingthemselves according to middle-class norms of behavior, and in establishing his-torical links between the antebellum free black community and themselves, theyseparated themselves from ‘others,’ including working-class African Americans.Yet Jackson consistently tried to reach beyond these boundaries to create a widersense of community that privileged middle-class interests but included broaderyearnings for racial justice and political empowerment. See “To Turn as on a Pivot:Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” AmericanHistorical Review 100 (June 1995): 782–83, 786.

3. Author cited as ‘T.D.P.,” “Jackson, Luther Porter: Educator, Historian, VirginiaCivic Leader,” box 1, folder 1, Jackson Papers, Special Collections, JohnstonMemorial Library, Virginia State University; Luther P. Jackson Jr., “Lute and MissJohnny: A Memorial Tribute to Luther Porter Jackson,” 1–2, in author’s possessioncourtesy of Edward Jackson.

4. Jackson, “The Call for the Highly Educated,” Virginia State College Gazette XLIV(December 1939): 39.

5. Jackson, “Lute and Miss Johnny,” 3–6.6. Jacqueline Goggin, “Countering White Racist Scholarship: Carter G. Woodson and

the Journal of Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 68 (Autumn 1983): 356,360.

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7. Robin D.G. Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s GlobalVision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): para 2,available at http://.historycooperative.org/journals.

8. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 83; Janette Hoston Harris, “Woodson andWesley: A Partnership in Building the Association for the Study of Afro-AmericanLife and History,” Journal of Negro History 83 (Spring 1998): 110–11.

9. Jackson, “Negro History Week,” Norfolk Journal and Guide January 13, 1943,folder 1602, box 64, Jackson Papers.

10. Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1976), 124–34.

11. Jackson to Woodson, June 26, 1944, folder 990, box 35, Jackson Papers.12. Jackson to Woodson, April 16, 1946, box 35, Jackson Papers. (Unless otherwise

noted, letters relating to the Association appear in folders titled “ASNLH Woodson-Jackson Correspondence.”)

13. Jackson to Woodson, January 6, 1936; Woodson to Jackson, May 17, 1937; Jack-son to Woodson, September 30, 1944; ibid., September 1, 1944, all in box 35,Jackson Papers.

14. Jackson, “The Annual Negro History Drive in Va.,” Virginia Teachers Bulletin 16(April 1939): 13.

15. Jackson, “Negro History Week,” January 13, folder 1602, box 64, Jackson Papers.16. A.A. Taylor to Jackson, June 14, 1949, box 12, folder 247.17. Jackson, “The Work of the Association and the People,” Journal of Negro History

20 (October 1935): 386–87.18. Jackson, “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,” Journal of Negro History 12 (July

1927): 368.19. Jackson, “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,” 369–78, quotes on 369, 378 and

388.20. Jackson, “Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia,” Virginia State

College Gazette XLIII (March 1938): 43–45, quotes on 45.21. Jackson to Mary Carr Greer, January 27, 1944, folder 170, box 7, Jackson Papers.22. Jackson to John Lemon, September 20, 1941, folder 137, box 6, Jackson Papers.23. Insert from John Bluford of Kansas City, Missouri, in Esther Bluford Lyas to

Jackson, September 3, 1941, folder 139, box 6, Jackson Papers.24. Ibid.25. Woodson to Jackson, February 18, 1937, box 35; Mary N. Smith to Jackson, folder

732, box 29, Jackson Papers.26. Minna Cheves Wilkins to Jackson, June 9, 1943; Jackson to Cheves Wilkins, folder

162, box 7, Jackson Papers.27. Cheves Wilkins to Jackson, June 9, 1943; Jackson to Cheves Wilkins, folder 162,

box 7, Jackson Papers. For correspondence with other academics, see Jackson toCharles Johnson, September 3, 1943, folder 164, box 7; Jackson to E. FranklinFrazier, folder 164, box 7; Jackson to Clyde Minor (Lincoln University), December13, 1943, folder 167, box 7, Jackson Papers.

28. Connie Jones to Jackson, June 25, 1948, folder 236, box 12; Jackson to Jones, June24, 1948 Jackson Papers. For another request for assistance on family research,and for the importance of the Negro History Bulletin in building an intellectualcommunity between scholars and non-professional historians, see C.S. Worshamto Jackson, June 26, 1948, folder 236, box 12, Jackson Papers.

29. Nellie Bragg to Jackson, February 22, 1944, folder 172, box 7, Jackson Papers.30. George Watkins to Jackson, August 30, 1942, folder 148, box 6, Jackson Papers.31. Margaret Gordon to Jackson, February 19, 1944; P.J. Chesson to Jackson, February

20, 1944, folder 172, box 172; Maurice E. Collette to Jackson, September 27, 1949,folder 249, box 12, Jackson Papers.

32. Jackson to Woodson, October 9, 1943, folder 989, box 35; Woodson to Jackson,March 6, 1944, box 35, Jackson Papers.

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33. Woodson to Jackson, February 23, 1946, folder 994, box 35, Jackson Papers.34. Jackson to Woodson, March 31, 1946, folder 994, box 335, Jackson Papers.35. Jackson to Woodson, March 31, 1946, folder 994, box 335, Jackson Papers.36. Jackson to Woodson, May 20, 1944, folder 990, box 35, Jackson Papers.37. Jackson to Woodson, March 31, 1946, folder 994, box 35, Jackson Papers.38. See, for example, Jackson to Frazier, March 1, 1940, folder 136, box 6, Jackson

Papers.39. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History

(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 289.40. Theodore S. Hamerow, “The Bureaucratization of History,” American Historical

Review 94 (June 1989): 654–660.41. Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot,” 781.42. Allan Megill, “Are We Asking Too Much of History?” Historically Speaking 3

(April 2002): 11.43. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Reflections on September 11: Freedom Dreams Deferred,”

The Crisis 109 (September/October 2002), 15.44. As Jonathan Zimmerman points out, the struggle waged by ethnic groups in the

1920s for an inclusive, pluralistic version of the American past often did little todislodge traditional assumptions about elite leadership, the virtue of the Americannational mission, and the class harmony of the early Republic. “Each ‘race’ couldhave its heroes sung’: Ethnicity and the history wars in the 1920s,” The Journal ofAmerican History 87 (June 2000): 92–111.

276