̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - race

Sight and sound

sc604 — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 14:13:35 +0000

How photoacoustics could transform cancer detection and monitoring

“We can’t put our trust in a system that doesn’t hear us”

fpjl2 — Mon, 24 May 2021 08:04:30 +0000

Major survey on Black British life launched by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� and ̽��ֱ��Voice newspaper.

Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies

amb206 — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000

In the mid-17th century, a French missionary called Pierre Pelleprat visited several Caribbean islands before travelling to French Guyana and the South American mainland. In an infamous account of his travels, he described the blacks of the Caribbean as “so hideous and misshapen that they fill you with horror”. Tellingly, however, he did not consider this ugliness to be beyond salvation: “I do not know whether my eyes were charmed, but I usually found [the negroes] better shaped and more pleasant after their baptism.”

Pelleprat was part of a generation of Europeans who began to travel widely, crossing oceans to encounter people whose cultures seemed alien and uncivilised. Arriving on the shores of the tropical islands of the Caribbean after a long and perilous sea voyage, Pelleprat and his compatriots would have met for the first time large native populations of Caribs as well as Amerindians and Africans. Many were enslaved to white settlers making fortunes in commodities such as sugar and tobacco.

̽��ֱ��missionary's words make shocking reading. But, says Dr Mélanie Lamotte (Faculty of History and Newnham College), it is worth exploring the beliefs that underpinned them. Lamotte is a researcher whose work focuses on colour prejudice and interethnic antagonism in the early modern French empire. A French national, educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Cambridge, Lamotte has a personal reason to be interested in the experiences of enslaved people. On her mother’s side, she is the descendant of a slave who, in the 18th century, was taken from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

A project to trace her own family ancestry took Lamotte on an often frustrating journey into archival materials. Accounts written by slaves are few; for generations, they were denied the opportunities afforded by education and literacy. She says: “I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies whose history has long been neglected or twisted by analysts – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.”

Research into the various ways in which race has been understood has generally taken the 18th century as its starting point. Encounters between people with different cultures have, of course, taken place for millennia – and it is hard to know how such differences were registered by those who experienced them. Lamotte suggests that records of 17th-century encounters between Europeans and inhabitants of distant lands reveal something remarkable. She says: “Rather than focusing on race as something inborn, early European travellers saw difference as something more fluid – and often as something that could be corrected by imposing ‘civilising’ influences.”

On the basis of her extensive work on underexplored archival material, Lamotte argues that before the 18th century, “race didn’t matter” in the same way that it came to matter when ideas of racial differences became more fixed, most famously by laws that prohibited marriages between different groups. Accounts from travellers in the French empire reveal that, although notions of blood and breeding were powerful in French society (for example in the preservation of the lineages of French nobility), the non-whites encountered by France’s empire-makers were initially not seen in the same terms.

Lamotte has looked in detail at records relating to the French empire in three contrasting locations: the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, Ile Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, and Louisiana in the former French colonies of north America. In making direct comparisons between these widespread colonies, her research extends existing scholarship to a global scale and also reflects the fact that many travellers sailed throughout the French empire. Their ideas circulated too – including the notion that non-Europeans could be schooled out of ‘backward’ customs.

In arguing that “race didn’t matter”, Lamotte does not suggest that prejudice did not exist (it most certainly did) but rather that it took forms dictated by the preoccupations of a society concerned with behaviour, dress and manners – and, of course, with religion. During an era in which the outward signs of politesse were paramount, newly-encountered people were judged, and categorised, in terms of their level of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ or (at the other end of the scale) ‘civilisation’.

A good measure of self-interest fuelled the initially cordial relations between the colonialists and the inhabitants of lands seen to be rich in possibilities. In some cases, by forging alliances with the local population, the incomers were able to tap into the local trade networks that were vital to securing goods for export – fur from North America and spices from the East Indies.

Many of the early French settlers were men, and marriageable women were in short supply. In 1690 only 16 white women were recorded on Île Bourbon (now La Réunion), an island located in the Southwest Indian Ocean. Most European men on Ile Bourbon married non-white women – despite an ordinance issued in 1674 which forbade “Frenchmen to marry negresses” and “blacks to marry whites” in the colony.

In New France (Acadia, Canada, the Great Lakes and the Illinois Country), miscegenation (the mixing of groups) was pursued as a deliberate policy to assist integration. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain, French explorer and founder of the Quebec settlement, reportedly assured local communities that “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people”. From the outset of French colonisation in the Caribbean, the need to maintain a buoyant slave population created a comparatively more prejudiced and segregated ‘plantation society’.

Father Mongin, a Jesuit missionary who spent time in the French Caribbean in the 1680s, wrote that “some [negroes] do not lack intelligence and are capable of all sorts of arts and sciences, should they receive the right education”. Thousands of miles across the world, a surgeon named Sieur Dellon, who had spent some time on Ile Bourbon 20 years earlier, wrote in a similar vein that “among [Malagasies], there are some with common sense, quick witted, and who would be fit for the arts and sciences, if they were educated”.

Education in this context involved imposing all-important French rules of politesse, conversion from idolatry to Christianity, and the stamping out of “absurd” beliefs and “ridiculous” ceremonies. Non-Europeans were described as “sluggish” and indolent. Outrage was expressed when some French settlers in North America, rather than ‘Frenchifying’ the natives, became ‘Indianised’ themselves. In the early 17th century a French administrator complained that, living among the native people, the French coureurs de bois (woodsmen) behaved “like the savages” and enjoyed “an animal life”, doing little more than hunting and fishing.

̽��ֱ��start of the 18th century witnessed a change in attitude on the part of the colonisers. French administrators in North America began to argue against interracial marriages which “would mix good [French] blood with bad [Native American] blood”. In 1723 the colonial Council of Louisiana issued an edict forbidding “all Frenchmen and any other subjects of the king who are white to marry savage women”. ̽��ֱ��number of mixed marriages dropped, and in 1738 one governor observed that “the Illinois Indians do not invite the French to marry their daughters any longer, and the French do not think about this anymore”.

Children of mixed European and indigenous heritage (métis) were, by the middle of the 18th century, frequently considered to be inferior. French colonialists complained that métis children were “extremely swarthy” and “naturally lazy”. Dark complexions were seen as indicators of ‘racial’ inferiority – and the alleged licentiousness and brutishness that had long been attributed to the natives were increasingly believed to be ‘fixed’. Official documents listed colonial populations under headings such as Nègre (negro), Mulâtre (mulato), Métis (mixed) and Sauvage (indigenous).

“Ultimately, ‘racial’ discourses developed partly because the French needed to justify discrimination and segregation towards people who were viewed as a threat to French socio-economic and imperialist ambitions. These people included slaves who could claim emancipation, free peoples of colour who presented as economic competitors, and the large Native American population, unreceptive to French policies of ‘Frenchification’ and evangelisation,” says Lamotte.

“People continue to use language and ideas inherited from colonial times, for example, by using the term ‘nègres’ to designate blacks, and maintaining the image of blacks as lazy or violent. As the result of centuries of prejudice, many blacks in the Antilles consider themselves inferior to whites. A creole phrase often heard in Guadeloupe when a baby is born is ‘ti-moun la bien soti’, meaning ‘your baby looks good as he or she doesn’t have too dark a skin’. Exposing the ways in which such views took hold over the centuries, and telling the tales of those who lived with prejudice, is a powerful way of shaping a more equal world.”

As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave, is researching a brief period when European notions of ethnicity were relatively fluid. Early French settlers believed that non-white inhabitants of the colonies could be ‘civilised’ and ‘improved’.

I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.

Mélanie Lamotte

Image from Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles

Mélanie Lamotte: my family history

I was born in France, and my mother comes from the island of Guadeloupe, an overseas department in the French Caribbean. ̽��ֱ��history of France’s colonial empire was, until recently, largely absent from my country’s school curriculum. But I wanted to know more about my family. When I was 20 years old, I reconstructed my family tree, tracing it back three centuries to a slave called Anne Rose. My research inspired me to become a historian. From 2006 to 2015, I received grants from the EU and the UK government to study history at the Sorbonne and Cambridge. Today I’m a historian of slavery, ethnic prejudice and early modern French colonialism.

In the 18th century, Anne Rose was transported from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation in Guadeloupe. White planters were making fortunes in commodities such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and indigo. One of Anne Rose’s children, a man named Quidi, moved to Pointe Noire, Guadeloupe in 1794. My extended family still lives in that same town. Slavery was officially abolished in the 1790s, in the aftermath of the French revolution. Records suggest that Quidi was freed and, remarkably for a former slave, lived for nearly 100 years. He had a daughter, Demoiselle Anne Rose, in 1799. ̽��ֱ��title ‘Demoiselle” suggests that she may have been of relatively high status.

Slavery was permanently abolished in the French colonies in 1848, and blacks in the French Caribbean began to use the names of their slave ancestors as their family names. My family on my mother’s side is still called ‘Annerose’. ̽��ֱ��grandson of Demoiselle Anne Rose was my granddad’s grandfather. My granddad was told that his grandfather had been homeless, and lived on a beach called ‘Plage Caraïbe’ in Pointe-Noire.

Slavery is a significant part of French history. ̽��ֱ��four French overseas departments (former French colonies) are ranked among the poorest regions of the EU. Researchers have shown that this economic distress is in part a consequence of the slavery. ̽��ֱ��French government has been working to raise the profile of Atlantic slavery in French consciousness. ̽��ֱ��Law of May 2001 declared slavery and the slave trade to be ‘crimes against humanity’. May 10th is now an annual day of commemoration of Atlantic slavery in France.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

When beauty matters: the politics of how we look

amb206 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:31:16 +0000

We live in a world brimming with images. But the pictures that perhaps most powerfully evoke our individual life stories are seldom seen. Stored in personal albums or pushed to the back of drawers, these are not the images that we necessarily choose to share on social media. Taken on occasions that are both special and ordinary (the first day at school, that family trip to the beach), these photographs are imbued with feelings, many of them complex and complicated. Looked back on from a distance of time passed, they reveal our vulnerability: how we were and how we are, how we and others saw us and see us.

When sociologist Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa interviewed a group of Mexican women about their lives, she invited them to share their photo albums and reflect on their feelings about their bodies and the multiplicity of connections developing around them over time. Her objective was to explore women’s lived experiences and reveal the powerful role that ideas about beauty and race play in shaping individual lives. Moreno Figueroa sought a complex account from her interviewees, but the route those narratives took and the depth of their emotions surprised her. So much so, that she decided, on publishing her work, not to reproduce any of the women’s photographs.

Much has been written about women and beauty. Far less has been written about the ways in which notions of beauty, femininity, age and race intersect to create strongly perceived ‘differences’ which have profound and enduring effects. To be deemed beautiful confers immediate advantages – yet beauty is fleeting and fragile. A state of being beautiful is either displaced to the past or deferred to the future. As Moreno Figueroa has written, in a paper with her colleague Rebecca Coleman, “beauty is not a ‘thing’ which can be experienced in the present, but is that which is felt in different temporalities”.

Next week (30 August to 3 September 2016) Moreno Figueroa and colleagues (Dr Dominique Grisard from the ̽��ֱ�� of Basel & the Swiss Center for Social Research and Dr Margrit Vogt from the ̽��ֱ�� of Flensburg) will stage a ground-breaking summer school and conference titled ‘ ̽��ֱ��Politics of Beauty’. Participants will include academics and artists who will share professional and personal experiences to encourage wide-ranging debate on topics related to beauty.

As a sociologist concerned with understanding the ‘quality’ of inequality, the depth and feeling of racism and sexism, Moreno Figueroa argues that beauty should be understood as an “embodied affective process” – not so much a state of being as a feeling about being. “We’re inviting our participants to engage with the politics of beauty and its ramifications. How does beauty travel? What kinds of beauty discourses are created and transmitted in such journeys? How are the politics of beauty reconfigured both through its travels and its locatedness? When do they matter and to what effect and extent? These are important questions because they go to the heart of many human experiences,” Grisard, Vogt and Moreno Figueroa write in their invitation to this event.

Moreno Figueroa has written extensively on beauty and race – especially in the context of Latin America – and has helped to raise awareness of the ways in which they contribute to the reproduction of pervasive forms of racism and sexism and the reinforcement of structures of inequality. ̽��ֱ��Mexican women who shared their photographs were educated lower and middle-class professionals. They were also, like the majority of Mexico’s population, mestiza (racially mixed). ̽��ֱ��interviews revealed the strong concern with appearance, skin colour, physical features which are in turn deeply intertwined with notions of acceptable femininity and national belonging – and the words that cropped up again and again was morena (dark-skinned) and fea (ugly). One woman reported that, as a child, she used to ask her uncles, when they teased her about her looks, “Why am I so morena?”

“This question sounds naïve but it’s not, as it comes from a context where racial mixture has given a sense that different physical features are possible. Some get ‘lucky’, some don’t,” says Moreno Figueroa. “Mexico is a highly racialised society in which issues of racism, and particularly prejudices about skin colour, are neither acknowledged nor addressed – but have remained hugely influential both in the intimate environment of the family and in the wider world outside it. Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.”

In interviewing contemporary mestiza women about their life stories, Moreno Figueroa was asking them to describe the form of racism that exists within the majority population and not the more familiar type of racism directed by a majority to a minority.

“In the context of everyday experience framed by the racial logics of mestizaje, there are no fixed racial positions and people are not engaged in processes of identity politics as found in other parts of the world. This is what is so striking about mestizaje: people are not white or black, but rather, they are whiter than or darker than others,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��category of mestizo which epitomises Mexican national identity is relative. As the historian Alan Knight has pointed out, mestizo represents an achieved and ascribed status underpinned by whitening practices and promises of whiteness as privilege.”

It is within this framework that the racialisation of understandings of beauty comes to the fore. ̽��ֱ��infamous Mexican Caste Paintings (Pinturas de Castas) give a sense of how during colonial times artists recreated highly composed scenes that represented the routes for racial and class improvement underlined by aspirations of beauty, refinement and leisure. A union between a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman would produce a mestiza child; one between a Spanish man and a mestiza woman, a castizo child; and between a Spanish man and a castizo woman a Spanish child. In this rationale, in three generations, with careful planning and no mixing with Indigenous or Black blood, people could whiten themselves by ascription and make sure their descendants would fare better in life.

While Moreno Figueroa is careful not to claim a direct line between the Colonial period (1521-1810) and contemporary Mexico, it cam as no surprise that one of her participants shared stories of unease when young whiter women were courted by darker men, or of exasperation when a relative decided to marry a woman as dark as him. ̽��ֱ��reported dialogues are revealing: “How come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like? And even nowadays he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s, they still ask him ‘If you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’. Why didn’t he think about ‘improving the race’.”

While the Mexican racial project is specific to its context, it shares some similar experiences of colonisation with other Latin American countries, as well as strong responses to 19th-century scientific racism, such as the trend to develop official ideologies of racial mixture (for example, Mexican Mestizaje or Brazil’s racial democracy) as part of nation-building strategies. As Moreno Figueroa explains: “These racial projects, and many others around the world, are tightly entangled with ideas about femininity where notions of beauty, its oppressiveness and fascination, play a central role in filtering privilege and crystalising paths of purity and belonging.”

Beauty might not be tangible, not a ‘thing’, but the promise of it underpins a global business worth many millions of dollars, generated by an industry that trades on vulnerability as well as pleasure. “It would be easy perhaps to dismiss the cosmetics and beauty treatment industries as somehow superficial and exploitative,” says Moreno Figueroa. “But beauty lies in a difficult terrain – it is also a question of hope and pleasure, pain and shame. These are profoundly felt human emotions for both women and men. They deserve our full attention.”

Participants in the summer school and conference include: Diane Negra ( ̽��ֱ�� College Dublin, Ireland); Francis Ray White ( ̽��ֱ�� of Westminster, UK); Jackie Sanchez Taylor ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester, UK); Joy Gregory (Slade School of Fine Art, UK); Marcia Ochoa (UC Santa Cruz, USA); Meeta Rani Jha, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Winchester, UK); Mimi Thi Nguyen ( ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA); Ng’endo Mukii (independent film maker, Nairobi, Kenya); Paula Villa (LMU Munich, Germany); Rosalind Gill (City ̽��ֱ��, London, UK); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory ̽��ֱ��, USA); Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC Annenberg, USA); and Shirley Tate, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds, UK).

For details of the Politics of Beauty summer school and conference go to https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/about/events/beauty-summer-school

Questions of beauty and its politics will be discussed at a summer school and conference next week (30 August to 3 September 2016). Participants will examine the ways in which perceptions and experiences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and colonialism converge to exert powerful influences on our lives.

Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.

Monica Moreno Figueroa

Pinturas de Castas

Mexican Caste Paintings from the 18th century

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Skulls in print: scientific racism in the transatlantic world

sjr81 — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:41:06 +0000

A mummified corpse. An embalmed head. A neat bullet hole in the side of a skull. These are just some of the 78 disturbing illustrations which make up Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana, undoubtedly the most important work in the history of scientific racism.

Published in Philadelphia in 1839, Morton divided mankind into five races before linking the character of each race to skull configuration. In a claim typical of the developing racial sciences, Morton wrote of Native Americans that “the structure of his mind appears to be different from that of the white man”.

Within a few years Crania Americana had been read in Britain, France, Germany, Russia and India. James Cowles Prichard, the founding father of British anthropology, described it as “exemplary” whilst Charles Darwin considered Morton an “authority” on the subject of race. Later in the nineteenth century, other European scholars produced imitations with titles including Crania Britannica and Crania Germanica.

James Poskett, from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, is working to uncover how Crania Americana became so influential, not only in the United States, but in Europe and beyond. He has also curated a new exhibition for readers at the Whipple Library charting this history. ̽��ֱ��showpiece is undoubtedly a copy of Crania Americana itself. ̽��ֱ��book is extremely rare. Only 500 copies were ever printed with no more than 60 being sent outside of the United States.

“This research is crucial for understanding how racist theories gain credibility,” said Poskett. “Particularly in the early nineteenth century, European scholars tended to treat American science with suspicion. Morton had to work hard to convince his peers across the Atlantic that Crania Americana should be taken seriously.”

̽��ֱ��illustrations, now on display at the Whipple Library helped Morton establish his reputation in Europe. Reviewers in Britain were astounded by the eerie, life-like quality of the skulls. To create such an effect, Morton’s artist, John Collins, used a new technique called lithography. He first drew each image onto a limestone block in wax before fixing, inking and printing. ̽��ֱ��limestone allowed Collins to create fine-grained textures, reproducing the subtle contours of each skull in Morton’s collection.

Previously, such impressive images could only be found in European scientific metropolises such as Paris and Edinburgh. “Crania Americana was the first example of American scientific lithography to gain widespread acclaim in Europe,” said Poskett. “ ̽��ֱ��textured effect also allowed men like Prichard to make the perverse claim that Native American skulls were actually of a different consistency to Europeans.”

̽��ֱ��Whipple Library exhibition also features a series of recently-discovered loose plates, printed to promote Crania Americana in Britain. “These images are unique,” added Poskett. “I was amazed when I discovered them, just tucked into the back of the book.”

Morton sent early copies of his illustrations to men of science in Europe. This allowed him to garner support prior to the arrival of the finished volume. Prichard himself first displayed Morton’s cranial illustrations to a European audience in Birmingham in 1839. Darwin was there in the crowd. “I had read about Prichard’s use of these plates in letters, but never imagined I would find copies,” said Poskett. By putting these images on display for the first time, visitors can get a sense of how European scholars must have felt on initially seeing Morton’s work.

Whilst men like Prichard and Darwin found it easy to access Crania Americana, not everyone was so fortunate. ̽��ֱ��book was expensive, costing Morton $2175 to print. That’s at least $50,000 in today’s money. And to buy a copy, you’d need $20, equivalent to about two months’ wages for an average farm labourer. Particularly in Europe, where import duties inflated the price even further, Crania Americana could only be found in the most prestigious institutions. ̽��ֱ��Royal Society owned a copy, whereas the London Mechanics’ Institute did not.

Despite these limits to access, Morton’s ideas and images did penetrate beyond the scientific elite with working-class readers certainly aware of Morton and his skulls according to Poskett. In Britain, phrenologists such as George Combe promoted Crania Americana in cheap periodicals, some of which were available for just a couple of pence. A full page notice of the work appeared in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1840, a magazine with a circulation of at least 60,000 at the time. Copies of Morton’s illustrations were also reproduced in cheap formats. ̽��ֱ��Phrenological Journal in Edinburgh, on display at the Whipple Library, features small woodcut copies of “Ancient Peruvian” skulls from Crania Americana.

Women too were excluded from most of the libraries in which Morton’s work was held. Still, periodicals aimed at female readers once again ensured his ideas reached a wider audience. In 1840 the Ladies’ Repository, a magazine for Methodist women in Ohio, quoted Morton in an article entitled “Man”. ̽��ֱ��author described Native Americans as “adverse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge.” For white settlers living to the west, this was exactly what they wanted to hear. Crania Americana was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea that Native Americans could not integrate into modern industrial society was central to both Morton’s argument and Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal,” said Poskett.

People often associate Crania Americana with slavery. But, according to Poskett, this is a mistake. It wasn’t until later in the century that southern slave owners really started to take up Morton’s ideas in earnest. And in Europe, the majority of readers were abolitionists. ̽��ֱ��phrenologist Combe was an antislavery man, as was Prichard. It was an odd logic: according to these men, if non-European races were inferior, that meant they deserved protection, not enslavement.

“Anti-slavery and scientific racism were not mutually exclusive in the nineteenth century,” explained Poskett. In Quentin Tarantino’s recent film, Django Unchained, it is the slave owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio who takes up phrenology. In real life it was just as likely to be an abolitionist.

“This research shows just how alert we must be to the variety of places in which racist theories can take hold,” added Poskett. “It can seem counterintuitive at first but, in the course of advocating for the freedom of African slaves, men like Prichard and Combe allowed scientific racism to flourish. ̽��ֱ��Crania Americana exhibition at the Whipple is a stark reminder of this unsettling history.”

A PhD student’s research at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science has revealed how racist ideas and images circulated between the United States and Europe in the 19th century.

In the course of advocating for the freedom of African slaves, men like Prichard and Combe allowed scientific racism to flourish.

James Poskett

Crania Americana

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Yes

̽��ֱ��remarkable story of Alexander Crummell

amb206 — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:00:57 +0000

No-one knows when the first black student studied at Cambridge but it is thought that black undergraduates may have studied at or on the fringes of the university as far back as the early 18^th century. A Jamaican named Francis Williams is said to have been educated in Cambridge in the early 1700s. A mixed race violinist called George Augustus Bridgetower was awarded a degree for music he composed in 1812.

However, the first black student at Cambridge for whom official university records exist is Alexander Crummell. An Episcopal preacher and son of an American slave, he studied at Queens’ College in the mid-18^th century. There is copious evidence of his time in Cambridge - and his name appears in Alumni Cantabrigiensis, a list of all known Cambridge students, published in 1922.

Dr Sarah Meer, university lecturer in English, will give a talk about Crummell tonight (Thursday, 20 October) as part of the Festival of Ideas and to coincide with Black History Month.

She became fascinated by Crummell when she encountered references to his life and career in the course of her research into 19^th century American writers. She was quickly intrigued by the way in which his story intersected with developments in literature and politics, especially British involvement in campaigns against American slavery.

“Crummell was one of many African-American travellers to Britain in the 1840s, and like more famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, he attempted to enlist British support for the abolition of slavery. But Crummell was unusual in choosing to stay to read for a degree,” said Meer.

Crummell was born in New York. His father was a freed slave, reputedly an African prince brought from Africa to work for wealthy merchant in the city, and his mother was a free-born woman from Long Island. It is not known where in Africa their families originated. Although Crummell’s father was illiterate, his parents had aspirations for their five children and in the 1820s the young Alexander attended one of the African Free Schools, primary schools set up by New York abolitionists to educate the children of freed slaves. There he was encouraged by an Englishman called Charles Andrews, a stern disciplinarian.

Many black children left formal education at about 14 to begin work in lowly paid trades, though Crummell’s classmates were a gifted generation: one became a teacher, one a doctor, and several became ministers. Against all the odds, Crummell and two black friends were awarded places at a secondary school in New Hampshire. ̽��ֱ��local community was outraged; the school was attacked, the school house was dragged into a swamp and its three black students were driven out of town.

“Although slavery had been abolished in the Northern states of the US, prejudice and discrimination had not, and antislavery opinions were often unpopular. Crummell and his friend Henry Highland Garnet had spoken at a public antislavery meeting, and this may have inflamed the tensions in the town. ̽��ֱ��experience was deeply shocking, but Crummell and his friends persevered, moving on to a more productive experience at a school in New York,” said Meer.

Crummell and his family embraced the Episcopal Church. This was significant because it opened connections with Anglicans in Britain, and particularly because the church had strong roots in 19^th-century Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Episcopal connection would later smooth Crummell’s own path to Cambridge. If he had been a Methodist or a Presbyterian, like many of his classmates, he would not have been able to take a Cambridge degree. He also had a brilliant intellect and formidable determination. But these qualities alone would not have been enough to propel him to university and provide him with the resources he needed to complete a degree. Crummell would win powerful mentors and sponsors in Britain who arranged preparatory tuition and secured the offer of a place at Queens’ College.

Despite his intelligence, steely determination and connections, Crummell’s path to becoming a minister was far from easy: he was denied admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York and given only unofficial access to classes at Yale Theological Seminar. Eventually he was ordained, and in 1848 came to Britain to raise funds for his New York church. A group of British evangelicals arranged to sponsor him at Cambridge, organising preparatory training and an interview at Queens’ College, where he joined much younger students as a 30-year-old man, with a wife and three children.

Crummell’s time at Cambridge came at a low point in terms of what the university offered its students. Like others, Crummell would have had scant teaching and would have supplemented lectures with private coaching. Students (men only until 1869) were presumed to be Anglicans and were ranked by the strata of society they came from. Noblemen, fellow commoners, pensioners and sizars wore different gowns, paid different fees and had different rights. Crummell was a pensioner – one rank up from the sizars who waited on richer students.

Cambridge was, however, an important centre for the anti-slavery movement. Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce both studied at Cambridge – they were influenced among others by the abolitionist Master of Magdalene, Peter Peckard. Their legacy made Cambridge a receptive environment and Crummell held the university in high regard, writing in 1847 that “perhaps no seat of learning in the world… has done more for human liberty and human well-being than this institution”.

Many African-American travellers to Britain at the time commented that there was less overt prejudice in Britain than in the US, and certainly it must have been a relief to get away from the overt segregation of facilities Americans called ‘Jim Crow laws’. But there were also examples of patronising, thoughtless, and even hostile reactions.

Archives of church records and correspondence portray Crummell as a complex, and tricky, character, and his story embodies many contradictions. Despite his passionate championship of black potential, he could see no virtues in traditional African cultures. He made sure that his two daughters received higher education – yet he seems to have treated his first wife with cruel disdain.

“Crummell may have been influenced by the distant and authoritarian teacher and patron figures he encountered as a child, and he was certainly embittered by repeated rejection, as a student, as a priest in training, and later in the posts he applied for. He was touchy with colleagues and dictatorial with his family and congregations. And yet, by the end of his life, the younger writer WEB Du Bois was holding up Crummell as an example of grace and forgiveness,” said Meer.

In Cambridge, Crummell seems to have been a minor celebrity. He met prejudice, but also affection, and deep sympathy when his four-year old son died in an accident. He also remained active outside his studies, working as a curate in Ipswich, and giving antislavery lectures all over the country. On leaving Cambridge he spent nearly 20 years in Liberia as churchman and teacher. He was one of the first professors at Liberia College, which is now the ̽��ֱ�� of Liberia. On a trip back to New York in 1861, Crummell was greeted by the black paper, the Anglo-African, with the headline ‘A Hearty Welcome Home’, and the paper carefully noted that he was ‘BA of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, England’. For a black man, and one of humble origins, to have studied at Cambridge was remarkable and sent a signal to others that top institutions like Cambridge were not utterly beyond reach.

Meer said: “Crummell’s significance, politically and historically, lies in his championship of education, his commitment to freedom and his opposition to materialism. His writing on the value of higher education would not look out of place in today’s debates about whether a degree benefits just an individual or a whole society. In today’s environment his views on Christianising Africa would appear Eurocentric and colonialist – yet he made a significant contribution to the development of Liberia, and what he would have called ‘the elevation of his race’.”

Dr Sarah Meer will be talking about Alexander Crummell, the abolitionist tonight (Thursday, 20 October) 6.30-7.30pm at the Faculty of English, Sidgwick Site, Cambridge. No charge. Pre-book 01223 335070 or email English@hermes.cam.ac.uk.

A talk at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas this evening will focus on the extraordinary life of Alexander Crummell – the son of a slave – who was one of the first black students to study at Cambridge.

... perhaps no seat of learning in the world… has done more for human liberty and human well-being than this institution.

Alexander Crummell, 1847

̽��ֱ��remarkable story of Alexander Crummell

New York Public Library

Alexander Crummell 1866

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