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WORK TITLE: From Slave to Statesman
WORK NOTES: with Deborah Harding
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http://lsupress.org/authors/detail/robert-heinrich/ * https://networks.h-net.org/node/3119/reviews/150522/rothera-heinrich-and-harding-slave-statesman-life-educator-editor-and
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1979.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and historian. American National Biography project, American Council of Learned Societies, assistant editor; Oxford University Press, assistant editor; Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, nonresident fellow.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Heinrich is a writer, editor, and historian. He serves as the assistant editor of the American National Biography project of the American Council of Learned Societies. He also works as an assistant editor for Oxford University Press. He is a nonresident fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia, written with Deborah Harding, presents a detailed biography of Willis McGlascoe Carter, a former slave who overcame that background to become an educator, newspaper editor, and community leader in and around Staunton, Virginia. The book is based largely on Carter’s own autobiography, written in the 1890s, wherein he recounts his upbringing, his determination to succeed, and his later lifetime of service to the cause of civil rights.
Carter was born on September 3, 1852, to Samuel and Rhoda Carter. He was the first of eleven children born to the couple, and he was born enslaved under the codes of the time. He and his family lived on the Locust Dale plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. The Carters’ owner, Ann Goodloe and her family, treated them with kindness and respect, and even made it possible for Willis Carter to learn how to read and write, a rarity among slaves of the time, noted Lauranett L. Lee in the Journal of Southern History.
With the end of slavery after the Civil War, Carter pursued every opportunity for education and economic advancement that was open to him. He also became an activist for African American rights and worked to promote racial justice. He married Serena Bell Johnson, then became a teacher and eventually a principal in the Staunton school system. He became editor of the local newspaper, the Staunton Tribune. He became active in many national organizations and pursued his activism to the state level, including presentations to the Virginia constitutional convention in 1901. Carter died in 1902, but he left behind a legacy of tireless work performed for the benefit of improving the status of African Americans during a difficult transitional period of history. “Carter’s activism during a time of violent and virulent race relations is well documented by authors Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding,” Lee stated.
From Slave to Statesman “illuminates the life and times of an activist who stood firm in his convictions that black Americans were entitled to the same rights as white Americans,” commented Lee. “As an account of one man’s transition from slavery to freedom, his relentless pursuit of education, and his drive to better himself, this is a very useful source,” commented Evan Rothera, writing on the website H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. Rothera further remarked, “This volume is also useful because it would be an excellent book to hand students in a class on historical methods.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Lauranett L. Lee, review of Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia, p. 712.
News Leader (Staunton, VA), May 25, 2016, Monique Calello, “Journal Sheds Light on Ex-Slave, Staunton Resident,” review of From Slave to Statesman.
ONLINE
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (October 1, 2016), Evan Rothera, review of From Slave to Statesman.
Robert Heinrich is Assistant Editor of the American National Biography project for the American Council of Learned Societies and Oxford University Press as well as a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia
Lauranett L. Lee
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p712+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia. By Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xx, 160. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6265-1.)
Born enslaved on the Locust Dale plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. Willis McGlascoe Carter led a remarkable life. His twenty-one-page memoir, written in the 1890s, called A Sketch of My Life and Our Family Record, illuminates the life and times of an activist who stood firm in his convictions that black Americans were entitled to the same rights as white Americans. His story was exceptional because he had been afforded the opportunity to read and write when only about 5 percent of enslaved people were literate.
Carter claimed that his owner, Ann Goodloe and her family, treated the enslaved people at Locust Dale kindly and with respect, with families mostly kept together without the constant fear and threat of being sold. Carter was well aware of his ancestral roots, tracing his lineage back to his great-grandmother. He was the first of eleven children born to Rhoda and Samuel Carter. Throughout his life, Willis Carter pursued education and economic opportunity. Eventually he attended Wayland Seminary and completed his studies in 1881. When he married Serena Bell Johnson, he chose a mate who was also involved in racial uplift work. Both of them worked in the Staunton, Virginia, school system and endured economic ups and downs throughout their lives. Willis Carter taught in Staunton for twenty years, eventually becoming principal of a school. As editor of the Southern Tribune, later renamed the Staunton Tribune, he operated under the masthead motto "Justice to All." Carter's leadership extended beyond Staunton; his activism in various organizations ranged from president of the National Memorial Association, to commissioner for Staunton for the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, to head of the Negro Protective Association of Virginia. He was also active with the Virginia Conference of Colored Men in Charlottesville and the Negro Education and Industrial Association of Virginia.
Carter's activism during a time of violent and virulent race relations is well documented by authors Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding. This slim volume weaves together Carter's life and the political and legal obstacles by conservative white Democrats that confronted African Americans at every turn. The 1894 Walton Act, for example, provides a glimpse into the lengths that racists would go to nullify black voting rights and the efforts by African Americans to resist disenfranchisement. The three appendixes round out the volume, including Carter's "sketch" transcribed by Harding; the tribute from colleagues that attested to the admiration and respect he commanded; and a paper entitled "Colored Men to Protest" that was presented to the 1901 Virginia constitutional convention. All exemplified Carter's character. The authors' clear and concise notes mirror Carter's "sketch," while the bibliography explores the wide terrain of southern race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia is a jaunt through one man's extraordinary life.
Lauranett L. Lee
University of Richmond
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lee, Lauranett L. "From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 712+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af069acf. Accessed 12 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078160
Rothera on Heinrich and Harding, 'From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia'
Author:
Robert Heinrich, Deborah Harding
Reviewer:
Evan Rothera
Robert Heinrich, Deborah Harding. From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 162 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6265-1.
Reviewed by Evan Rothera (Penn State University)
Published on H-Florida (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Jeanine A. Clark Bremer
Cuesta Benberry of St. Louis acquired Willis M. Carter’s three-thousand-word handwritten memoir describing his life as a slave, his educational endeavors, and his career as a teacher and newspaper editor, from a Midwestern antiques dealer in the 1980s. Benberry realized the journal’s potential and understood that Carter’s fascinating story deserved to be told. However, she was never able to investigate Carter’s life because she already had a full research agenda. However, she showed the manuscript to her friend Deborah Harding. Harding spent more than half a decade researching Carter’s life and, in so doing, consulted an impressive array of sources. Harding’s research uncovered “a man whose life could hardly be contained in a three thousand-word journal” (p. 2). When Harding shared the journal and her research materials with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Robert Heinrich joined the research team and wrote the book.
Over the course of four chapters and a conclusion, Heinrich employs Harding’s extensive research to flesh out the bare-bones story in Carter’s memoir and illuminate many important elements of Carter’s life. At the beginning of the first chapter, for instance, the authors observe that while Carter condemned slavery, he spoke of his owner, Ann Goodloe, in a very complimentary manner. Carter wrote the memoir for himself and his family and, thus, the authors hypothesize that he was “grateful for the limited opportunities the Goodloes granted him within the bounds of slavery” (p. 5). Carter’s story illustrates some of the contradictions of slavery because Goodloe taught him to read and write. Given that he was born in 1852, and was barely a teenager at the end of the Civil War, Carter likely had a very different memory of slavery than other members of his family. Here the authors might have compared Carter’s journal with the writings of Booker T. Washington, particularly Up from Slavery (1901), to provide a comparative perspective.
Throughout his life, Carter strove to better himself. After the end of the Civil War, he pursued both education and employment. In 1874 he decided to leave Virginia and move to Washington, DC, to pursue educational endeavors. Carter did not enroll in school right away but spent the next two years working in Washington and, during the summer of 1876, in Newport, Rhode Island. On his return to Washington, after leaving Newport, Carter stopped in Philadelphia to see the Centennial Exhibition. Sadly, he did not leave many comments about the Centennial--certainly the lack of detail in Carter’s memoir is one of the limits of this source--and one can only guess as to what he saw and did. Although Heinrich and Harding do an excellent job offering a more detailed and complete picture of Carter, there is still some guesswork and supposition because of the way he wrote his memoir. When he returned to Washington, Carter enrolled in a private school, sampled cultural offerings, and attended Wayland Seminary.
After graduating from Wayland, Carter became a teacher and, later, the principal of a school. He “embraced a broad definition of education, working outside the classroom to train black teachers” (p. 44). Carter devotes very little time in the journal to his life during the last decades of the nineteenth century, but Heinrich and Harding offer analysis of life in post-Reconstruction to paint a picture of the man and his times. Carter’s life was not always easy. As an African American he was paid less than white teachers, for instance and Carter knew about episodes of racist violence by white Virginians against African Americans. This knowledge did not, however, dampen Carter’s fighting spirit and his success as a teacher, and a principal thrust him into politics. Carter “took on leadership roles at the community and state levels” (p. 59), edited a newspaper, won election as an alternate delegate to the 1896 Republican National Convention, and protested efforts by white Democrats to disfranchise African Americans. Although Carter had little or nothing to say about many of these events and this important period of his life in the pages of his memoir, “a detailed reconstruction of his life places him in the forefront of many critical events in the history of African Americans, the state of Virginia, and the nation” (p. 59). As a newspaper editor, Carter gained a platform to air his thoughts, and his Tribune resembled many other black newspapers. Carter died 1902 and thus did not live to see disfranchisement of African Americans written into Virginia’s constitution.
As an account of one man’s transition from slavery to freedom, his relentless pursuit of education, and his drive to better himself, this is a very useful source. That Cuesta Benberry had the foresight to preserve Carter’s journal is extremely fortunate. However, this volume is also useful because it would be an excellent book to hand students in a class on historical methods. The book includes three transcribed documents: Carter’s journal, a tribute to Carter by the teachers of Public School No. 2 in Staunton, Virginia, and a protest signed by Carter and other African Americans to be presented to the Virginia Constitutional Convention. Students should begin by reading the journal and then reading the text to see how research allows historians to accumulate information and to render a more complete picture of one man’s extraordinary life. This book could be read in conjunction with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990). This would allow students to analyze how sources, in this case the diary of a midwife and the memoir of an ex-slave, that many people either ignored or overlooked, provide compelling windows into the lives of individuals and their societies. In sum, this valuable book is appropriate for both an academic and a general audience and will prove useful in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47104
Citation: Evan Rothera. Review of Heinrich, Robert; Harding, Deborah, From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia. H-Florida, H-Net Reviews. October, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47104
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Journal sheds light on ex-slave, Staunton resident
Monique Calello, mcalello@newsleader.com Published 11:08 a.m. ET May 25, 2016 | Updated 8:53 p.m. ET May 25, 2016
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(Photo: Courtesy of Deborah Harding and Robert Heinrich)
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STAUNTON – In the 1890s Willis McGlascoe Carter sat in his home at 414 N. Augusta St. and wrote reflections of his life in a little composition book.
“I was born at Locust Dale Virginia in the county of Albemarle the 3rd of September in the year 1852—the first of eleven children of Rhoda Carter the wife of Samuel Carter. My lot being that of a slave.”
Carter’s journal will be the subject of a talk by an expert in Staunton on May 27.
Robert Heinrich, of the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard University, will share how a handwritten journal helped unravel the life story of Carter, a slave turned statesman who also was an educator, civil rights activist and newspaper editor (of the Staunton Tribune).
Heinrich will discuss the research from the book he co-authored with Deborah Harding, “From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia.” He will speak to students at Bessie Weller Elementary School and Lee High School during the day.
Carter explained his motivation to write the journal: “My own inclination would naturally lead me to say as little as possible about myself and our family: but as some record is necessary for the satisfaction of every well regulated family, I will here venture to record the most—particular incidents and other subject-matter relative to our family...”
Co-author Deborah Harding explains that when Carter died in 1902, his son, Roscoe Carter, took the journal with him first to St. Louis and then to Chicago. Roscoe Carter died in 1974, and his stepson cleared out his home and, in the process, some of the contents ended up in the hands of a Midwestern dealer.
The dealer made an appointment with noted African American historian Cuesta Benberry to authenticate an African-American quilt for a museum, said Harding.
After their meeting, Benberry walked him back to his truck, where the dealer mentioned the journal. She asked to see it and purchased it on the spot. She tucked the little journal away for almost 30 years.
Today, Carter’s achievements are recognized by scholars, including Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has written the foreword of the book.
For a man who devoted his life to education and civil rights at a time when African Americans were not welcome in the majority of public libraries in the South, it seems fitting that his journal will have a permanent place at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, remarks Harding.
“This book would not have been possible without the participation of so many good people in Staunton and beyond,” said Harding. “On my first night in Staunton, 10 years ago, Amy Tillerson Brown picked me up and took me to Louisa Dixon’s for dinner. That was the beginning of a long and rewarding journey of discovery.”