MOBILE, Ala. — Some people cringe at the separatist subtext under some people’s use of “black history.” History is, after all, history, period. If we racialize history, it only Balkanizes society and diminishes the commonality of the human enterprise. The term “black history” might draw some people in, but it can also make nonblack readers or viewers shrug off a piece of history that they would actually find very interesting and relevant.
On the other hand, if the point of “black history” is to revivify elements of history that had been unwisely ignored in ages past, and to reintegrate the story of those of African lineage into common frames of reference and understanding, then I couldn’t agree more — the effect is salutary and the effort worthwhile.
In that light, the discovery of the remains of the last-ever American slave ship, the Clotilda, and the recent death of New Orleans’ greatest black chef, Leah Chase, are two items of black history that should not go unremarked.
By law, the U.S. banned the international slave trade in 1808. Still, 52 years later, some families in Mobile, Ala., defied the authorities, bringing in more than 100 captives from Benin, in West Africa, on a two-masted schooner. After delivering its human cargo, the ship the Clotilda was set afire and sunk in order to conceal the evidence of its journey.
For several years, local reporter Ben Raines had made it his mission to find the burned hull from 1860. He finally succeeded. As confirmed by a team of scientists and historians led by National Geographic, the Clotilda was found beneath the muddy, marshy river bottom of the Mobile-Tensaw delta.
The area just north of Mobile where the slave descendants settled, known as Africatown, long has been an enclave of poverty — but poverty amid an enduring community pride of a unique sort. It was a pride in knowing the history they had overcome, and also in the fact that some descendants of Africatown had become leaders in the broader Mobile polity.
“We are part of a human story, not a human tragedy,” said Africatown native Cleon Jones, star outfielder for the 1969 “miracle Mets” of Major League Baseball, as quoted in the Mobile Press-Register. Jones, now 76, an active community leader on multiple fronts, said he “jumped for joy” at news of the discovery.
Jones explained further to CBS: “They didn’t find an old ship. They found history. These were strong people. Strong-willed people. And that’s what came to America.”
Jones and many others hope the ship’s site can become a tourist attraction, or otherwise spur redevelopment in Africatown. The official announcement of verification of the Clotilda’s remains was the subject of a large and, yes, joyous ceremony, marked with speeches by office-holders black and white, all wanting to use the ship’s discovery as a launch point to emphasize how far coastal Alabama has come, not to wallow in shame for what once happened there.
Two hours west, in New Orleans, blacks and whites likewise are joining in paying homage to Leah Chase, proprietress of the famous Dooky Chase restaurant until just before her June 1 death at age 96. Through the years, Chase served almost everybody who was anybody (as the saying goes), especially if they were involved in the civil rights movement or in the music industry. (Her husband Dooky was a jazz trumpeter.)
Defying laws prohibiting race-mixing at restaurants, she served whites and blacks together in an upper room. Years later, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama both ate there, too, as did Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
To know the Chase family, even only in passing, was to like them — their graciousness, their unifying civic-spiritedness, their patronage of art, music, and of course great food.
If black history means celebrating the role black leaders such as Leah Chase played in the overall history of our times, and in recognizing the ability of the human spirit to transcend and transform a slave ship so that it becomes a community rallying point, then that’s a black history we all can embrace and applaud. Blacks, far more than whites, may feel with visceral recognition the importance of these stories. But they give everyone’s history a richer shade of true.
