Rachel L. Swarns

Eight years ago, in April 2016, New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns received a forwarded email from an alum of Georgetown University, the first college established by the Catholic Jesuit order in America. The author of the email had discovered that not only had the order owned five Maryland plantations where enslaved people toiled, but in 1838, 272 of them had been sold to keep the university from becoming insolvent.

The astounding product of seven years of research, Rachel’s history book, The 272, is the subject of the April Book Stew episode, hosted by Eileen MacDougall.

The interview covers the rationalizations used by the Jesuit fathers, who strove to fulfill the spiritual needs of the plantation workers, while ignoring the impact of slavery on their bodies and the horrifying act of splitting up their families.

Links: YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/bookstew124-yt
Soundcloud podcast: http://tinyurl.com/bookstew124-sc… (altro)

The 272 recounts the story of the Mahoneys, an extended family of enslaved and later free Black Americans whose forced labour and eventual sale south to Louisiana were used to fund the construction and expansion of Georgetown University. Rachel Swarns' account of how the Jesuit Order abused generations of people, and justified that abuse to themselves through a kind of pious, racialising paternalism, is an engrossing if often queasy and infuriating read. It's the rare book where you feel like the author didn't need to call out church hypocrisy as much as she did, just because it's so evident on the page.

There were a couple of places where I thought that Swarns' analysis could have dived deeper—either through following the lives of the post-Reconstruction descendants of the Mahoneys, or through contextualising the religious history of these events more—and a couple of points where there are minor historical errors. (Admittedly I'm far more familiar with European forms of Catholicism, but e.g. unless the reforms of Vatican II were anticipated in 19th-century America, Mass was celebrated in Latin, not in the vernacular.)

However, these are reservations which ultimately do not detract from the power and importance of this work, and anyway no one book could be expected to encompass every aspect of this history: of the 272 enslaved people sold by the Jesuits, there are at least 6,000 known living descendants today. Highly recommended.… (altro)

This is a beautiful coffee table book full of great photographs and fascinating back stories. In 2016, New York Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh tumbled onto the fact that there were tens of thousands of photographs and negatives languishing, usually unseen for decades, in the Times photo archives. In many cases, Times photographers or freelancers would have shot several rolls of film (remember film?) while on assignment, and either only one of the photos would have been chosen for printing in the paper, or the editors would have ended up running the story without any photos, or the stories might never have been run at all. Because of the prejudices of the day (impossible to confirm of course but highly likely) or for other journalistic reasons, many of the most expressive photographs were of black New Yorkers. Eveleigh and the three colleagues listed as authors here began a months-long process of deep diving into the archives to assemble a collection that could then be published. They began with an online project whereby they would post photos they wanted more information about (the names of the people in the photos when the subjects were not famous, primarily), asking folks who could help identify any of the portrayed people to contact them They also did their research into the photographs they'd chosen, in many cases interviewing the figures still alive to find out what those people remembered about the day and the circumstances of the photographs there were in. But the authors also gleaned a lot of information, and valuable starting points, from the notes included in the archives written by the editors of the day and/or the photographers themselves.

In many cases the photographs provided scenes of triumph and accomplishment, such as a photograph taken backstage at Carnegie Hall in 1982 depicting opera singers Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry embracing Marian Anderson after an evening of music celebrating Anderson's art and career. That 1982 photo is in fact one of the most recent. Most are from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many portray moments from the Civil Rights Movement and the uprisings of the 1960s. There are several searing photographs depicting the fierce Detroit riots of 1968 and the aftermath of destruction and anger.

Sometimes the juxtapositions the editors have chosen are interesting. A series of "you are there" photos showing the daily life of Resurrection City, the settlement that arose on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign is followed immediately by a photograph of Arthur Mitchell, "the legendary African-American dancer, choreographer and co-founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem" in a posed setting during a rehearsal for the Dance Theater's upcoming production of Creole Giselle.

Sometimes the reasons for particular photographs remaining unpublished are essentially prosaic, reinforcing the Times' reputation as the staid "Gray Lady." Expressive, movement filled photos set aside in favor of more static photos: headshots or posed portraits and the like. Other times, prejudice seems certainly to have played a part. For example, there's a photograph of President Truman shaking hands with William H. Lastie, who had just been named the first black governor of the Virgin Islands. In the photograph in the book, they are standing next to each other shaking hands. The photo that the paper actually ran was identical, but with no handshake ongoing.

There are heartbreaking and horrifying historical photographs: Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral, inside Malcolm X's house in Queens just after it was firebombed. No one was injured, but soon we see the photograph of Malcolm X's funeral after he was assassinated by rifle fire just eight days later. There is a photograph of Fred Hampton's bullet-ridden apartment immediately after his murder by Chicago policemen, and a series of photos of black soldiers in Vietnam.

Given that many of these photographs are of black people in New York City during the 60s and 70s, it's not surprising that most of the street scenes depict areas of Harlem, where my wife and I are staying for a year, through May 2024. In fact, I bought the book in a gift shop on Lennox Avenue (a.k.a. Malcolm X Boulevard) just a few blocks from our apartment on W. 117th.

Each of the photographs/photo series is accompanied by a short essay describing the photograph, the circumstances behind its creation and information about what photo was chosen to run in its place (or whether a photo was used at all or whether a story about the incident or scene was ever run). When possible, followup information and/or relatively contemporary interviews with the subjects are included, and a few times those essays are even written by the original photographer. This is simply a wonderful book that you'll want to take your time paging through and studying.… (altro)

A fairly exhaustive genealogy of Michelle Obama's family, backed by some good research. There is sometimes a little too much "Oh, gee!" -- as in "Oh, gee! I didn't know that white slaveowners sometimes impregnated their slaves, did you?" "Oh, gee, I didn't know there were free black people before the Civil War, did you?" And, the constant jumping back and forth in chronology and between different parts of the family could become confusing. Since I read it on Kindle, it was hard to see the family trees (I've found this on other Kindle books, charts are difficult to see clearly), which would have helped track the various branches. Still, I enjoyed reading this.… (altro)