Changing American attitudes toward slavery, police reporting reconsidered, and reader reactions: newsletter, July 17, 2020

The world gets crazier and the pandemic, in America, gets worse. My heart is with those who have to make difficult decisions, from sending their kids to school to ordering businesses to shut down. I pray for their health and wisdom.

I have included in this newsletter the story of Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké, and their fight to abolish slavery in the first half of the 19th century. Their names have almost been forgotten, but that should not be so. They stood up for a moral cause when very few people were willing to stand with them. Weld, particularly, deserves more attention and will probably get it in the next few weeks.

The garden continues to grow and produce, and — believe it or not — I am still picking blackberries. Despite the controversies and confusion, I still look for the many good things about our lives (including, especially, good books). I hope that your weekend is filled with good things.

Under the newsletter’s hood: Last week’s newsletter was sent to 2,557 subscribers and had a 25.6 percent open rate; 2 persons unsubscribed.

Theodore Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké, and her sister Sarah Grimké were tired of the spin — although they didn’t use that term in 1838.

They were tired of people saying that black was white, up was down, and night was day. And they were tired of people believing the spin because that’s what they wanted to believe.

Americans needed a good, strong dose of reality, and those three abolitionists were determined to give it to them.

But Weld and the Grimké had a steep wall of lies and hardened attitudes to scale. Slavery was not so bad, Americans had been told. Slaveowners took good care of their charges. Instances of abuse were rare. Most slaves were very happy and would not accept their freedom if it was offered. Advocates of slavery and their apologists had spoken these lies so often and so loudly that people believed them.

Americans believed these people because they wanted to believe them. Slavery was so woven into the economic fabric of the nation that changing it would cause climatic disruption.

The abolitionists were determined to attack these lies with the truth, but the truth had to be irrefutable. It could not be dismissed. So, Weld and the Grimkés came up with a clever plan. Rather than railing against slavery (as they had done), they would gather eyewitness testimony — some of it from the slaveholders themselves.

The eyewitnesses began with the Grimkés themselves. The sisters had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina, in a family that owned slaves. But they did not stop with their own accounts. Weld then solicited descriptions of slavery from people who had lived in the South and could tell with credibility what they had seen. These descriptions came from ministers, businessmen, professors, and former slaves who were living then as freedmen.

Then the abolitionists took things a step farther. Living in Fort Lee, New Jersey, they traveled to New York City and collected all of the Southern newspapers they could as they were being discarded from the library. For many months, they scanned these newspapers (20,000 by their own count) and copied any descriptions that slaveowners themselves had offered to fellow Southerners about how they handled their slaves. These people had imagined that they were talking only to like-minded individuals; they never imagined that their words would have a wider audience.

The authors consulted many other sources as well: Congressional debates, court records, statements by foreign ambassadors, and legal documents — anything that they could claim offered credible, irrefutable evidence. Then they presented their “evidence” as they would in a court proceeding, labeling them as “testimony” and “statements.” They certainly sprinkled their own interpretations around liberally throughout the book, but the facts were there.

American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses was published in 1839. The authors were not named but a line on the title page asked that “additional testimonies” be sent to “Theodore Weld, 143 Nassau Street, New York.” The book is not easy reading. It describes the horrific treatment and conditions that slaves had to endure, and it shows that these conditions were commonplace. It showed that, indeed, as Abraham Lincoln would later put it, that slavery was a “monstrous evil.”

The book sold 100,000 copies during its first year in print — an enormous figure for a nation with a population of 17 million. It continued to sell at a substantial rate throughout the 1840s. One of the people who had a copy was Frederick Douglass, who was to become the most famous and respected freedman orator of his time.

Another customer was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was so affected by the book that she kept a copy “under her pillow.” Stowe used American Slavery As It Is as a sourcebook for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which would strike an even heavier blow against slavery. When it was published in 1851, Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s sales soared past those of the Weld-Grinké book with 300,000 sold in America in its first year.

The police reporter and the police: considering the case of Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan was a police reporter for the Miami Herald and turned that job into something close to literature for hundreds of thousands of fans of her novels, such as Nobody Lives Forever, Legally Dead, and Miami, It’s Murder, as well as non-fiction books such as The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America’s Hottest Beat.

Buchanan was a  Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter before any of the novels happened, and that success has been a dramatic and compelling backdrop for her writing ever since.

But with the current push to reevaluate the role that police have played in our society, Diana Moskovitz (@dianamoskovitz), herself a former police reporter for the Miami Herald, has written an interesting and thought-provoking article about Buchanan and her relationship with the police that she covered. Moskovitz centers her comments on Buchanan’s book The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, which was published in 1987 a few months before Buchanan won her Pulitzer.

The book, she says, “is in part a memoir of her life on the police beat for the Miami Herald, part victory lap, and part manifesto on what crime reporting should look like.”

Naturally, there’s a chapter called “Cops.” It’s here that the true tension of being a police reporter unfurls. Because to be a great police reporter—the kind editors champion, the kind that gets raises and promotions, the kind that wins a Pulitzer—you have to be friends with a lot of cops.

This sort of capture is true, to some extent, of almost every job in American journalism. To get promotions you need scoops, to get scoops you need sources, and to have sources you need to cultivate a certain camaraderie with people; they have to trust you, which might or might not translate to their belief that you are willing to tell the story their way, and not ask too many uncomfortable questions. But on the police beat, this tension is ratcheted way up. Here, police have already set the narrative.They are where the story starts, they have the official titles and the institutional authority, and also they have the guns. Source: Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart – Popula

From the archives: The writer’s responsibility

One of the great writers — a true craftsman — of the 20th century, E.B. White, had this to say on the responsibility that writers have:

“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”

—E.B. White (1899-1985), writer, interviewed by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther, The Paris Review, 1969

(Hat-tip to Ted Pease, Today’s Word on Journalism, at http://tedsword.blogspot.com/.)

Erasing history?

Dan C: (again) When the year started I was so looking forward to the end of the year when I could launch into the “Hindsight is 2020” jokes.

Robin K.: It has been “the worst of times and the best of times” (apologies to Charles Dickens?) for me work-wise. I’ve worked for Educational Testing Service for 10 years now, and it’s been my main job for 6 years. I score spoken responses for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Test of English for International Commerce (TOEIC). ETS has testing centers worldwide, many of which are in Asian countries. Testing centers got closed, which has meant a dearth of work for us. However, I also took on a second job last year with VIPKid, teaching English to Chinese children over the Internet.

 

It’s been slow going and terribly frustrating but in mid-February all of a sudden BOOM! I was in demand as a teacher. I had a great month in February, and an even better month in March, and still have been getting a decent amount of bookings through June.  It has more than made up for the lack of work at ETS. And, because hours at ETS have been dwindling for the past few years, I decided to apply for Social Security early, which has turned out to be a great move, because now I have at least ONE paycheck I can depend on. I LOVE my teaching job and hope eventually THAT will become my “main” job. I’m glad I hung in there for all of those really bad months! 

 

Finally . . .