Smiley leads cross-cultural look at Jamestown
Date: Feb 15, 2007
More than 1,000 people gathered to hear the panelists. By Stephen Salpukas.
“Four hundred years is a long time,” Tavis Smiley reminded a packed house at the College of William and Mary, “and a lot of history.” Nearly a thousand people came to Phi Beta Kappa Hall last week at the invitation of the well-known author and broadcaster to listen to scholars address a cross-cultural look at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. It was a conversation, Smiley said, that was a long time in the making.
Smiley charged audience members to ask themselves, Would America be the nation she is today without her Negro people or people of color?
William and Mary President Gene R. Nichol welcomed the crowd of academics, students and notables, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and encouraged them “to explore and renew the unique claims of our history.”
“These sessions are stronger examples of those efforts than I could easily have anticipated,” he said.
The program, co-sponsored by Jamestown 2007 and hosted by the College, brought together nationally recognized scholars, including historians Cornel West, Ira Berlin and Darlene Clark Hine as well as noted William and Mary alumni Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Ph.D. ’92) and Rex Ellis (’85), vice president of the historic area of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Nationally acclaimed trial lawyer Raymond Brown moderated the event.
To truly understand the state of the Black Union today, America needs only to understand its past, the panel agreed. “The problem of beginnings is the beginning of the problem,” said Eddie Glaude, another panelist who is an associate professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University.Regardless of how it began, Smiley told the crowd, “We all want the same thing: to live in a nation as good as its promise.”
Hine, professor of history at Northwestern University and director of the comparative black history doctoral program at Michigan State University, noted that the Jamestown story was a complicated one. “[You] don’t do a justice by telling one strand of the story. History is a contest of power. Those who own the past, own the future.”
The history of African America is not a different history; it is American history. It’s all part of the same story, Hine noted. “Racism has always been with us,” said fellow panelist Karenne Wood, a member of the Monacan Indian Nation.
“The place where the narratives converge is on the concept of freedom,” continued Hine.
West, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of the bestseller, Race Matters, reminded the audience to review history and look at what motivated the colonists to come to the New World in the first place. English America was a corporation first, he said. It was entrepreneurial. “So when we get to 2007 and talk about corporate greed,” West noted, “we are going to start seeing some continuities.”
It is those continuities of history that most Americans do not wish to see, the panelists agreed. “We’re talking about the same things now that they were talking about 400 years ago. What have we learned?” added Wood, a noted tribal speaker and author. “It’s time to stop commemorating things and start taking action.”
Action, the panelists agreed, was overdue. “Awareness needs to be turned into public action,” said Ernesto Cortés, southwest regional director and founder of the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation.
“America has always been very good at selling a past that it wants to see, not a past that we really had,” said Newby-Alexander, author and associate professor of history at Norfolk State University.
As the panel concluded, Smiley took some questions from the audience. One 11-year-old asked, “Can we become slaves again?”
“Of course,” answered Glaude, “[but] if you know you can go back into slavery, … you will always work to make not only yourself better but the world better for everyone.”
Though the panelists agreed that the nation’s 400-year history did not show enough progress in terms of racism and oppression, they also agreed they still saw room for hope. “We can make the future different than the past,” said Berlin, founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and a history professor at the University of Maryland.
Reflecting on the day’s discussion, Smiley concluded, “This is how you right the wrongs of history.”
© 2009 The College of William & Mary