Critical Conversations on Black History
Douglass College hosts President Holloway, Keisha Blain, Barbara Ransby in year long discussions on Black history in America
Everyday objects – a cemetery headstone, coins from a family collection, a page in a passport – can tell a story about America’s history overlooked by those who see them every day.
Consider the charcoal rubbing of a gravestone from Concord, Massachusetts, that hung in President Jonathan Holloway’s house while he was growing up. He shared the story of the etching Thursday during “The Dean's Lecture Series: Critical Conversations on Black History,” hosted by Douglass College at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. From the time he was 5 until age 21, he walked by the epitaph captured by his mother, an elementary school teacher, every day but never read it.
In the summer of 1990, as he was 22 and about to leave for graduate school at Yale University, he passed it again.
“I stopped and I read it for the first time,” he said. "Those first lines, ‘God wills us free, man wills us slaves. I will as God wills God’s will be done’…froze me in my tracks.” He took the frame off the wall and brought the epitaph with him to New Haven, where it began to inform his scholarship and has traveled with him on the journey that led him to the Rutgers president’s office.
In a lecture that drew from a draft chapter of a book he is working on, The History of Absence: Race and the Making of the Modern World, Holloway told John Jack’s story – a native of Africa who was born free, captured, and put on a slave ship that landed him in colonial New England. As a slave in Concord, over time he learned a trade, saved money and eventually bought land and his freedom. When he petitioned to become a citizen of Concord since he met the requirements – being male and a landowner – the citizens of Concord denied him the right because he had been a slave.
“He was seeking to become a citizen of Concord, talking to citizens who themselves were complaining to the British crown about their slavery while ignoring the slaves in their own midst,” Holloway said. “John Jack recognized a terrible, ugly irony about the citizens around him that he wanted to become.”
The famous epitaph following John Jack’s 1773 death was written by his attorney, Daniel Bliss, a British loyalist whose aim was to criticize the hypocrisy of the colonial revolutionaries. But the epitaph soon began to lose Bliss’s intent as it was widely shared by anti-slavery abolitionists of the early 19th century.
Bliss’s “words got lifted up and moved to a different place and they gained a value as one of the most important documents in abolitionist circles for decades,” Holloway said. “The headstone, the epitaph, had value that was taken some distance from the actual intent.”
Holloway’s talk was the latest in the Douglass Dean’s Lecture Series to engage the campus community in discussions about the state of today’s America by examining Black history.
“Douglass is undertaking new discussions about our history to ensure that a Douglass education meaningfully addresses the realities of our time,” said Jacquelyn Litt, dean of Douglass College, who is cosponsoring the series with Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Christopher Molloy. “This new series, through which we are honored to host some of the most innovative voices in the country, is just one of our initiatives to hold space for these critical conversations.”
Next month, Keisha Blain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, will deliver a lecture entitled “The Struggle for Black Lives: Global Visions and Historical Legacies" on Nov. 10. In the spring semester, the series will also feature Barbara Ransby, professor of history, gender and women's studies, and African American studies at University of Illinois, Chicago.
In September, two Douglass alumnae and active advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion launched the series. Dana Grant, a human resource professional, joined students, alumnae, and staff for a discussion on racial equity. Debra Joy Pérez, a senior philanthropic adviser and independent executive consultant to national foundations and federal grant making entities, also spoke to the Douglass community about the importance of allyship.
Find more information here about upcoming virtual sessions of “The Dean’s Lecture Series: Critical Conversations on Black History.”
