Vintage engraving of African Americans harvesting and packing of cotton in Louisiana / Image credit: Ferdinand Hirts Geographische Bildertafeln,1886, iStock

Gail Lumet Buckley’s ‘The Black Calhouns’

A look at long suppressed link between our white founding fathers and slave families who carried their names

VIA From The New York Times

SOURCE Patricia J. Williams

Mar 21, 2016

In “The Black Calhouns,” Gail Lumet Buckley paints a sweeping view of black American society from Reconstruction onwards. Buckley is the daughter of the legendary Lena Horne and a descendant of our secessionist seventh vice president, John C. Calhoun. His nephew, Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun, was a wealthy doctor and slave owner whose descendants include Buckley’s and Horne’s maternal line, notes Patricia J. Williams.

Vice President John C. Calhoun / Image credit: iStock

Written in the style of an historical novel, Williams writes:

“The Black Calhouns” deals with broad themes of property and politics, duty and determination; it follows the family’s profound engagements with the founding of ‘missionary’ schools that educated a few but not nearly enough of the new black citizens recently freed from slavery; the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau; the rise of lynching and Jim Crow; battles to vote, work, buy homes and serve in the military; the daily confinements of ‘blood,’ color and phenotype.

And Buckley, Williams notes, does not fail to draw attention to striking similarities between “21st-century Republicans,” and “19th-century Democrats,” who fought so strenuously to constrain voting rights, citizenship and undo the protections of the 14th Amendment.

Read more at The New York Times