오늘의 선교 연감
Mission Yearbook: Eugene Robinson explores America’s complicated history of freedom
Eugene Robinson, who had a distinguished career at the Washington Post before leaving last year, was a recent McClendon Scholar speaker sponsored by New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Robinson spoke at the historic Metropolitan AME Church. Watch the 88-minute program here. Among the hosts were Dr. Dana A. Williams, Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. Williams interviewed Robinson following his remarks.
Robinson recently published “Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America.” In 2009 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.
“We can’t have a democracy unless we have a common encyclopedia” of facts and events, Robinson said, noting that his late wife, Avis Collins Robinson, had long been a collector of African American artifacts. Among her collection was a document that recorded the sale of an enslaved woman and her son, Caesar, in Rhode Island in 1776.
The image of that document accompanied Robinson’s final column at the Post, which identified two important events that happened in 1776: the publication of the Declaration of Independence and the sale of those two human beings.
“I wrote that those are both foundational documents, in my view, of this country,” Robinson said. “If either document did not exist, then the United States of America as we know it would not exist.”
“I wrote the column in defiance, saying these facts are not going to change, no matter how the Trump administration tries to hide them or suppress them,” he said. “This document will be here long after they’re gone.”
Once he’d left the Washington Post, Robinson said he wandered around the house for a couple of weeks. “Then I came to my senses and realized this was the opportunity to finish the book I’d been working on for 4½ years,” he said. “I’d always known growing up that my family had an unusually well-documented history going back pretty far.”
Robinson, who’s 71, grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in a house built by his great-grandfather on his mother’s side. He begins his book with the story of his great-great-grandfather, who was sold to a plantation owner in 1829 and sold again in 1848. He managed to buy his own freedom in 1851, 10 years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
His great-great-grandfather survived the Civil War in Charleston and became a skilled blacksmith. His son, John Hammond Fordham, “was the perfect age to take advantage of Reconstruction,” Robinson said. He attended an accredited school and found someone to mentor him in the law, which enabled him to pass the South Carolina bar. He became an official in the state Republican party and worked in the customs house in Charleston before moving to Orangeburg and building the house Robinson grew up in.
“He was a packrat,” Robinson said of his great-grandfather, “and that’s what I used,” starting with the material he found in the house to “branch out and report the context of those times” and “what would have been important to my family.”
As he worked on the manuscript, “I started seeing a repeated pattern where African Americans — and I use my family as an example — through blood, sweat, toil and death, would win a greater measure of the freedom and opportunity” than the Declaration of Independence and the country promised them, “and then it would be snatched away again.”
The classic example was Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow, he said, but “there were other iterations in the cycle.”
“That helped me understand today — as if I didn’t already have a notion — why the election and re-election of the first African American president would be followed immediately by the election of Donald Trump. It’s not a coincidence,” he said. “It’s more than the price of eggs. It’s another turn of this wheel, in my estimation.”
The book follows “my family through the generations,” including a great uncle who fought on the Western Front during World War I and Robinson’s father and his father’s three brothers, who all served during World War II. It also examines important civil rights events and tragedies, including the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Miatta Wilson, Leader Development, Christian Formation & Cohort Ministries, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Dianna Wright, Ecumenical & Interreligious Relations, Presbyterian Life & Witness
Let us pray:
O God, we are bound to each other, as much in the needs we express as in the work we do. We are your people in vulnerability and in strength; in receiving as well as in giving. Help us to bring our whole selves to all that we do in service to you, and also to the community we share. Amen.