Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Proclaiming the Truth of Black Dignity with Jasmine Holmes

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

We’re joined today by returning guest, Jasmine Holmes, to dive into the state of Black history education in America, and to discuss her new book, Crowned with Glory: How Proclaiming the Truth of Black Dignity Has Shaped American History. Jasmine shares about Black abolitionists who fought for the dignity of their fellow mankind based on the principle that because people are created in God’s image, they have inherent dignity, worth, and human rights. When pockets of resistance throughout history are glossed over and forgotten about, and curricula are revised to be more palatable, how is one to broaden their perception of American history in a way that does not do it a disservice? Special thanks to our guest, Jasmine Holmes, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Jasmine Holmes Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. As always, so happy that you're here. I am chatting today with Jasmine Holmes. Jasmine has been a guest on the show before and you loved hearing from her. I know so many of you followed her on Instagram and now is your chance to read one of her brand new books, Crowned with Glory. And we are going to talk all about this new book about Black history and all about the state of history education in the United States. I think you're going to love this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to welcome Jasmine Holmes back to the show. Yay. Thank you for coming back. Thanks

for doing this. Thank you for having me again. I was so excited. It's fun to see you again. First of all, congratulations on your new book. I absolutely love your work so much. Your new book is called Crowned with Glory. And the subtitle is How Proclaiming the Truth of Black Dignity Has Shaped American History. And I just love it. I love it so much. So congratulations. Thank you so much. Tell us what this book is about for somebody who has not yet read your work, who is not currently following you on Instagram, who doesn't know about the incredible content you produce. What is Crowned with Glory about? It is all about Black abolitionists who fought for the dignity of their fellow man based

on the Christian principle called the imago Dei or the image of God. The fact that because people are created in God's image, they have inherent dignity, and they have inherent worth, and they have inherent rights. It sounds really similar to some of our founding documents. And these abolitionists were holding people accountable to the promises that they had made. I love the way that you phrase that, like the promises they had made, because in our founding documents, of course, are these ideas of like all men are created equal. But then that didn't actually come to fruition in public life. There was a huge disconnect between what people were saying and what people were doing.

And so tell us more about the Black abolitionist movement and the people that you are writing about. I think we tend to think about abolitionists being some Quaker ladies in Pennsylvania. And yes, they were involved. We tend to think of it being the Underground Railroad, but the movement was much bigger than just like a couple of famous people in the sidebars of our normal history books. So give us an overview. Condense it. Condense it all, Jasmine, into a very short, like neat and tidy, smush it down. For people who are new to learning about this, help us understand the scope of exactly what kind of activities people were involved in here. So the movement is unwieldy and there's all these

different tentacles coming off of it. You have everybody from William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the newspaper, The Liberator, and all the way to these other folks who founded the African American Colonization Society. So you have people way on this side who were like, we should free everybody immediately. And Black people should have citizenship rights in this country, and they should be equal to us. And then you have people on the other side of the abolitionist movement who were like, slavery is bad, but when we free the Black people, we should ship them off somewhere else because this country is fundamentally made for white people and their freedom. And so you have this really big spectrum.

And so in this book, the people that I focus on across that spectrum are Black. They are people who believe that Black folks should have equal citizenship in America. They are people whose belief is solidified by their belief in God and what God says about people and their dignity. And they are people who either are abolitionists in the North or enslaved people in the South who are resisting in whatever ways that they can. And so I like to describe it as kind of like a survey. Like it's the kind of book where if you read it, you would get an overview. It's not a doorstop, but it's going to give you a nice overview of Black abolitionists, thinking Black abolitionists movement.

And so it moves kind of through, it starts with Nat Turner and it ends with William Monroe Trotter. And so you have Nat Turner's rebellion in 1830 and you have William Monroe Trotter and his Black rights newspaper in the 1920s. And so it crosses that entire spectrum. It's like a highlight reel. Why is it important for Americans in general to learn about this topic, because I know that we share this common belief that Black history is American history and that Black history is not just for Black people to learn about. Because it is American history, it is for all of us to learn about. Can you help us understand a little bit better? Why is it important for the average

American to know about abolitionists throughout U.S. history? Well, there's so much discourse right now about American history and what should be taught and what shouldn't be taught, what will make people feel bad, what will make people feel empowered. And so much of that is based on the ethnicity of the people being discussed. We can't make white students feel bad when we talk about slavery because X, oh, that's really interesting. I just read that book. And he goes, yeah, we used to study it in my freshman class, but we had to take it off the shelf because it made the white students really uncomfortable. And I get it. There's parts of the autobiography of Malcolm X that are really uncomfortable. I mean, Blue-Eyed Devil is not something that anybody wants to be called.

But of course, the book has an arc. That's not where he ends, right? So I'm sitting there and I was like, that's really interesting. Because I remember when I was in elementary school, and we would read sections of like Huckleberry Finn, or sections of Tom Sawyer, or fill in the blank. And there would be all kinds of conversation about the inferiority of Black folks. You're in elementary school, so we're not even dealing with the N-word in all of this literature. We're just dealing with the social themes. And I was like, nobody ever stopped and asked me if I was comfortable or if I was okay. It was like, that's history. That's just, we're just learning it. And so I think the first thing that I would

say is that we have to be made of a little bit stronger stuff if we're going to learn American history. But then the second thing that I would say is that it's really important not to see American heritage as just falling across these color lines. So much of what we say and believe about America, that it is a land of opportunity, that it is a land of equality, that it is a land of equity, has not been true for so many people. And we really learn about the metal of our nation when we focus on these marginalized groups and how they overcame these inequalities. It shows us a lot about America. I think too often when we think about America, we think about white, middle class, upwardly mobile. We don't think about the people who resisted from marginalized places, but that's American history too. And that says a lot about the character of our nation.

You're absolutely right. Because of course, the so-called victors of history are the people who get to be featured in all of the like, wow, he financed the Titanic, you know, like, and yes, those are interesting stories. Of course they are. Nobody is saying don't learn about those things. Nobody is saying don't learn about Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie libraries. And nobody's saying don't do that. But I love your perspective that there is a deeper, richer story for all of us to learn about and uncover. It is to all of our benefit to know the true depth and breadth of history, not just these sort of narrow swaths of like, oh, he did this cool thing and he was super rich and she flew an airplane. There's so much more to it. And we are missing the richness of history if we are only focusing on the achievements of people who are wealthy and

prominent and largely Caucasian. Absolutely. Tell me how you went about conceptualizing this book and how you chose who to include? Because you're right that this book could have been a doorstop. It could have been 900 pages. There's a lot of information to include. How did you choose who to include in this book? I've always loved stories. I've always loved storytelling. And so even approaching history, one of the reasons why it's so captivating to me is because it's just a bunch of stories of people. And so part of my interest is always unearthing the stories that we've heard a little bit less about. And so this book is a book of comparisons, contrasts, and groupings. And what I mean by that is every chapter has a theme.

contrasts and groupings. And what I mean by that is every chapter has a theme. And so instead of just being centered around one person, it's centered around a theme. So we have a chapter that the theme is Black pastors and resistance. And so that way I can talk about all of these different Black pastors and all of these different denominations who were using their pulpits as platforms of resistance. And then I have another chapter that's about Black women and their resistance. And so I can talk about all kinds of Black women alive during this period who resisted. Another cool thing was the connection between the civil rights movement that we know about, that we talk about. So I would start with something like, hey, I really want to talk about Rosa Parks.

And I want to talk about Claud Parks, and I want to talk about Claudette Colvin and the Montgomery West boycott. Okay, but what were the roots of that? Where did we see that before in the 1800s? And we see that Black women had been refusing to give up their seats on public transportation for a really long time. Ida B. Wells refused to give up her seat on a train. Harriet Tubman refused to give up her seat. Frances Ellen Wat. Wells refused to give up her seat on a train. Harriet Tubman refused to give up her seat. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper refused to give up her seat. And so it's just kind of connecting the stories of the past to the more quote unquote modern civil rights stories that we know was one of my biggest priorities. And then again, unearthing stories that maybe we haven't heard as much about.

It was also cool because in my last book, Cards in Ebony, it was a book about women. And so this book was like, oh, I can talk about the guys a little bit. We can broaden our perspective and get into a lot more things. One of my favorite things was talking about Birth of a Nation, which I watched. No.

In preparation. I did. No. I did. You subjected yourself to that? I did. I did. I don't recommend it. That's up to you? I did. I did. I don't recommend it.

I don't want to watch it. But I was very into William Monroe Trotter. They called them race men, race men, race women, which is basically somebody who was really interested in civil rights and activism. And so I was like, well, I want to watch Birth of a Nation, and I want to find out more about it. And found out that when Birth of a Nation came out in the 19-teens, there was all kinds of outrage. There were boycotts. There were people who were outspoken. And I'm like, I never,

I never learned that. I always just learned Birth of a Nation came out and everybody loved it. It was at the White House. Right. Yeah. And then all of a sudden we changed our minds and we got woke. And we started, no, from the beginning, people were speaking no. From the beginning, people were speaking out. From the beginning, people were advocating for themselves. And I love that. And so the stories of advocacy that have been glossed over, the personal stories that have been glossed over,

those are the ones that I was after. If somebody is not familiar with Birth of a Nation, tell them what it is. Oh, yeah. So it's based on a novel called the claimsman it's actually a trilogy and is written by a southern pastor and the point of it was to kind of paint reconstruction the period after the civil war as this terrible period where white Southerners were being subjected to Black and Northern rule. And so one of the famous scenes in Birth of a Nation is this scene on the Senate floor.

During Reconstruction, there were over 1,500 Black office holders. There were Black representatives, there were Black men in the Senate. And in Birth of a Nation, they have a scene where these Black office holders are eating fried chicken, clipping their toenails. Oh, my. Nope. Nope. Oh, yeah. Clipping their toenails? Oh, yeah.

No. It's intense. And just this menstrual ridiculousness. But at the time, it's this epic three-hour film. Big budget. Oh, my goodness. It was, for the time, it was breathtaking. Like, the work that was put into it and the artistry that was put into it.

And so it comes onto the scene, and it's this runaway success, but it also accomplishes this goal of painting reconstruction as a terrible time for white Southerners, painting the Black people in the movie as having been better off in slavery. It was a huge cultural moment. You know, if you think about movies today that have influenced American culture, movies like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Titanic, things that have had ongoing significant cultural influence. Birth of a Nation was that. Absolutely. Like Woodrow Wilson watched it in the White House.

Like Woodrow Wilson watched it in the White House, even if he didn't come right out and say, you know, oh, I absolutely love this movie. Two thumbs up from me. The implication is that I went out of my way to make sure that I could screen this here and then to let everybody know that it had been screened at the White House lent it additional credibility, made it seem like, wow, I mean, like, if it's the president wanted to watch it, yeah, I mean, historian. So yeah, it's like, I mean, if he thinks it's good, check it, we should check it out. We should check it out. But I love that you uncovered this idea that it was not universally praised. It was not universally like two thumbs up. In fact, there were people who organized boycotts of theaters and boycotts of events where it was being shown. It was not, it did not go without resistance. Absolutely. And so often that resistance is what is glossed over and forgotten about.

Yeah. And that's one of the major themes of the book is finding those pockets and those moments of resistance, interrogating our perception of American history. I remember one time I was teaching a high school class about slavery and they were saying things like,

well, but like nobody knew it was wrong. Like everybody thought it was okay and everybody thought it was right. And it's like, you know, interrogating that assumption of like, well, actually there have always been people who were speaking up. There have always been people who were advocating for what was right. And I think that it's really, really important to point out those people as we learn history, to point them

out along the way, or our students and we get the perception that the story of America is just this one-sided story of victors who will step on anybody's neck in order to be successful. And it's okay because everybody else is doing it. That's not true. There have always been people who are saying, hey, we should do this differently. This is how we should approach human rights. This is how we should approach equality. This is how we should approach equity. And those voices don't make the American story a neat and tidy story. It makes it a lot more complex. But I think that we do ourselves a disservice when we discount that complexity. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched

every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free

Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. There's such a resistance right now to talk about race in schools, such a resistance to talk about the complexities and difficulties of history. There's this strangely pervasive notion, especially amongst some in some states, that history exists for our comfort. That history is a subject that is supposed to feel like drinking a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy Christmas Eve, that that's its purpose. And if we deviate from the purpose of, you know, the stated purpose of feeling good about our heroes, then somehow it's absolutely not worth learning about. And we've perverted the meaning of history if it is something other than deifying the greats of history.

And I know that we both strongly disagree with that characterization of what the purpose of history is. But nevertheless, you know exactly what I'm saying. Oh, yeah. You're very familiar with this movement to make history a feel-good topic. Mm-hmm. To make history a feel-good topic. Mm-hmm.

You know, if you think about other times in history, like think about World War II and what was happening in Europe, what was happening to Jews in Europe. Americans have a strong desire to study the heroes of World War II, the people who resisted the Nazis. We have made zillions of movies about that. We have written tens of thousands of books about that. And well, we should, well, we should talk about the people who resisted the Nazis, about the people who hid Jews in their floors and in their back rooms and smuggled them out in car trunks and made fake papers. And the resistance to the Nazis is a topic that Americans wholeheartedly embrace, right? Like we love it. We love to study it. We do not extend that same concept of studying resistance to the enslavement of Africans in the United States. That's woke. That's woke. We're not allowed to talk about that.

We can talk about resistance to the Nazis, but we're not allowed to talk about resistance to enslavement because that would make people uncomfortable. Do you have any thoughts on that? Why is it okay to study resistance to evil in one context, but not in another? to evil in one context, but not in another. It says a lot about who we think of as Americans. It says a lot about who we think of as, and when I say we, I mean, you know, the powers that be, the people that are heading this conversation about wokeness and CRT and all the above. It says a lot about whose legacy we want to protect and who we see as being part of the American legacy. And so if Thomas Jefferson is worthy of protection and part of the American legacy, and I'm going to be controversial, Nat Turner is not, why is that? I think that it's really

important to even be willing to ask that question. Is resistance only acceptable when it benefits people who look like us? Is resistance only acceptable when it benefits people in seats of power? Is resistance only acceptable when it benefits the wealthy landowning white elite who founded America? Those are really important questions that I think it's really scary to ask. And it gets really complex. When I told my editor that I was opening up the book with Nat Turner, she was like, oh, okay. So he's like a good guy or he's, and I'm like, you know what?

He is a complicated guy. And I think that that's what I want the tone to be. This is the tone that I'm setting. This man who resisted slavery in ways that were both heroic and gruesome. This man who resisted slavery in ways that I can celebrate and also ways that I'm like, oof, nah, too far, man. I'm not comfortable with that. Because I think that it's really important to be able to interrogate our heroes. And I think that when it comes to history and when it comes to the majority in our country learning history, we are so used to making allowances for certain

people. We are so used to being like, Thomas Jefferson is the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, slavery is not great. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Sally Hemings, questionable. But when it comes to minorities who have the same level of complexity, it's like, oh, it's just better just to not talk about them because we're not able to handle the complexity of this discussion. And again, I think that that says a lot about who we look at as a picture of what it means to be American. That's such a great point that we are willing to tolerate the complexity of some of the giants of american history like george washington and thomas jefferson james madison we're willing to tolerate the

complexity of like he wrote this enduring constitution we're willing to tolerate the fact that he enslaved people and that his wife continued to enslave people even after his death we're willing to tolerate that not we don't necessarily prove. We might be like, yeah, that wasn't right. But he did these other things that we do approve of and we do appreciate. We're willing to tolerate that complexity amongst some Americans. But when it comes to people like Nat Turner, the complexity cancels out his contribution far too often if they do not have a perfect story. If they are not upright and righteous every moment of every waking day, they can't be a hero because we feel uncomfortable with some of the actions of Nat Turner. But we are willing to tolerate the discomfort when it comes to other people. And it's one of the reasons why I think it's chapter seven in the

book. It's called Fratter Feeling. And it's about how even amongst these Black abolitionists, there was some disagreement. So many Black male abolitionists had very traditional, quote unquote, ideas about women and their places in the home and their places in the movement, to the extent where some of the women of the movement were like, this is insanely problematic and I need y'all to like tighten up. Henry Highland Garnett wrote a scathing letter to Frederick Douglass and was like, I don't know why he doesn't like me that much. Maybe it's the green-eyed monster of jealousy. Like there's all of this, I don't want to say infighting, but there's disagreement that goes on, right? There's complexity. There's difference. Even after slavery, William Monroe Trotter stood up in the middle of a speech that Booker T.

Washington was giving and was like, I don't like it. I don't like it. Not approved by me. Not approved. I just want everybody to know right now that I'm heckling this. And that's all an important part of the story as well. It's not this pristine, like, we're all on the same page and we're all singing Kumbaya and we're all just... No, it's this hard-fought resistance to oppression that comes in a bunch of different stripes. To put it in language that a lot of us are more familiar with,

MLK, Malcolm X, we think about those as like two opposing figures instead of two sides of maybe the same coin in more ways than not. There's so much overlap in those two towards the end of both of their lives, but there's also a lot of difference. And we should be able to hold the complexity of those differences. And I remember the last time we talked, even like holding the complexity of MLK as like, yeah, he did some really amazing things. And yeah, also, ew.

Don't approve of the cheating. Right. Definitely approve of the March on Washington. Why can't we say that? Why is it that he is either a cheater or he is, you know, 100% perfect all the time? Why can't he be both? We make that allowance for literally everybody else. We do.

I've seen it happen. And we should be willing and able to have those discussions and hold our heroes with a more open hand. I just want to hear very quickly, what kind of research process do you use to write books like this? Because we all know that there has been a systematic exclusion of people of color from history. For other obvious reasons, it was difficult to record the history of African Americans because many of them could not read and it was illegal to record the history of African Americans because many of them could not read and it was illegal to teach them how to read. So there has been both a systematic and an accidental exclusion from the stories. How does one go about researching these things, given the lack of source material in some cases? It always starts with a question for me. I'll read

a story that on its face looks like it has very little to do with Black folks and their perspectives. And I say, I wonder where they are. I wonder what they were doing. So much of my work I owe to other Black women historians who have already done the work. other Black women historians who have already done the work. Martha S. Jones is one of them. Stephanie Camp is another. But I prioritize the work of Black female historians because I love to follow people who have already done the work. And then I read their work, and then I read their footnotes, and then I go find where they took their footnotes from. And then I read that work. And then I look at those footnotes. A lot of it is just searching online for primary sources. I use DocSouth so much.

It's documenting the American South. And I use them all the time. They have like an entire repository of slave narratives that I spent so much time in. I also just read a lot of biographies. There's a William Monroe Trotter biography by Carrie K Greenidge, which is outstanding. And she also just released a biography about the Grimkis. So I'm just always reading books, reading footnotes, and just on the wild goose chases, there's an episode of Ted Lasso where Trent Krim realizes what his book is going to be about, like how he's going to write about Ted and his team. And he comes into the locker room and he has this like wild-eyed, like, oh my gosh, I've got it, look on his face.

And we're watching it together. And my husband looked at me and he was like, it's you. That's you. You're Trent Krim. He's like, you are Trent Krim. That That is you all day. She's like, oh, I've got it. And that's constantly me trying to make connections. That gif of that guy who has the board with all the stuff on it and he's turned around looking mad eyed at everybody, that is me all day. As far as organizing that information, girl. It's in your brain. It's in my brain. And that's not a good

place for it to be. It should be somewhere else, but it stays in my brain. I get it. People are always like, people ask me that all the time. How do you remember all this stuff? How do you know all this stuff? I'm like, I just store it in my brain. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. If I need to check a date, I will, I know where to find it, but it's just like, that's my filing system. It seems like more work to transfer it out of here. Yes. And then to organize it. That's a lot of work that I don't have time for because I'm only motivated by panic. And so transferring it from here to there, there's no panic. If they, if the assignment was transfer the information by tomorrow at four,

then I would have a reason to do it. Oh, you would get done. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I'm not going to just do that for fun. One of my professors asked me for some of my research that I used to make one of my posts last week. She was like, oh my gosh, this post is great. I would love to see your research for that and use it in a paper that I'm writing. And I was like, yeah, because I have it written down outside of that post. I absolutely do. Let me send you that file. For sure. Later next week. Going to take a week, but when I get to it, I will send it to you.

Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. Jasmine, I always love reading what you have to say. I love following you on Instagram. Tell everybody where they can find you online. I'm on Instagram at Jasmine L. Holmes. And I can't, I tried Threads. It's the same name, but I'm not, I'm not really, I'm going to get it. I'm going to, I'm going to get it. But right now it's just Instagram. Threads has no DMs. Threads has no DMs. Did you know that? No one can DM you mean things on Threads because there's no DMs. They have to be willing to say it out loud. Okay. You know what? I may get into Threads just because of that. Well, I'll follow you if you're there. I am. I am on there, but Instagram, I post a lot of carousels. Yes. And I love them. I love

them. And I like them every time I see them and I like them every time I see them. And I read them every time I see them. And I'm just grateful for your time today. I'm grateful for your work. I can't wait to see what you do next. Jasmine, come back again. All right. Thank you so much. You can buy Jasmine's book, Crowned with Glory, wherever you get your books and check out bookshop.org, which allows you to support independent bookstores. Thanks for being here. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you could leave us a

review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.