It's been months, but I've finally gotten the chance to breathe and think about writing again. And before I head out for my Avon Walk, and get inspired to write about that, I wanted to write about something that inspired me a few weeks ago, Free State of Jones. Since it is History related, my boss asked me to blog for work, so I am pasting here the blog that will appear on my center's website.
Warning: it is not as radically, provocatively liberal as you may be expecting. It is my attempt at academia over polemics.
Happy reading.
Free State of Jones is a Lesson for US History
Right after finals in June this year, The Free State of
Jones came out in movie theaters. It
stars Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Mahershala Ali, and tells the
story of a white man, Newton Knight, who leads a counterrevolution during the
Civil War. He argues that he will not
fight for something, slavery, he does not believe in, and he defects from the confederate
army into which he has been drafted and takes refuge with runaway slaves. As the war rages on, an increasing number of
men also defect and join Knight in the swamplands of Mississippi, where it is very
difficult to pursue them. Ultimately,
Knight and his fellow defectors, along with a handful of runaway slaves, found
the Free State of Jones County in Mississippi, a small, slave free, rebellious
state in the south in the middle of the Civil War, a war the south was fighting
to preserve the institution of slavery.
I am a history tutor here at The Bay Area Tutoring Centers,
mostly because I am in sheer awe of history.
In college I studied literature from around the world, but my favorite reading
was always grounded in truth. Of course,
stories are always grounded in someone’s version of some truth, no matter how
abstract, but the best stories for me have always had some relationship to
actual events, even if the relationship is a loose one. As a result, I was instantly attracted to
this movie. When I found out that this
movie was not only based on a true story, but was actually heavily researched
and that great pains were taken to portray the struggle of Newton Knight
accurately, I was determined not only to see this movie as soon as it came out,
but to write about it here.
Why? You ask.
Why is it important for a tutoring center to cover a story
that no history book bothers with?
The answer is precisely because no history book bothers with
it.
Presumably, we learn history to see ourselves, to understand
where we’ve been, who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be. Few would argue that it is unimportant for students
in the US to understand US History.
Fewer still would argue that the Civil War, its causes and consequences,
is an unimportant piece of US History to understand. As such, how can we tell a story of the Civil
War, how can we teach it in classrooms or in tutoring sessions, without
teaching about the creation of a slave free state in the south? Put simply, we should not. I have been studying history for over a decade
and I have never come across this story.
We teach and write about Nat Turner’s Rebellion, about John Brown’s
Raid, about Sherman’s March to the Sea, about the Battle of Gettysburg, about
Reconstruction, about Post-Reconstruction, but nothing about a southern white
man who founded a slave free state in the middle of the south.
Knight went on to spend the rest of his life with a runaway
slave, with whom he had children, and the couple then even took in Knight’s
estranged wife, who had left him when he defected, when she returned after the
war penniless and desperate. During
Reconstruction, the Reconstruction government put Knight in charge of defending
Blacks’ rights in the south, a south that was violently hostile to them. Knight’s children then went on to further his
legacy, and people in the Mississippi today either revere him or revile him for
that legacy.
It is important for all students who learn about the Civil
War to learn about men like Newton Knight, and the many, many men who joined
him. There is a legacy in this country that
teaches us that white people are slaveholders, that we are the devil, that even
if we didn’t own slaves, we supported the institution, or at the very least,
and in some ways the worst, turned a blind eye to it.
“Not our problem.”
It is important for our students to know that they do not
have to see themselves, their ancestors that way. That they can look back and say, “I would
have been Newton Knight.”
As Joseph Hosey, a forester in Jones County, Mississippi today
says, “When you grow
up in the South, you hear all the time about your ‘heritage,’ like it’s the greatest
thing there is…When I hear that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but
mostly I think about slavery and racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me
something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about.
We didn’t all go along with it.” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/?no-ist)
In
this country so fraught with racial tension, when teachers and textbooks are
teaching about slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr.,
Lyndon B Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and Rosa Parks, we should also be teaching
about Newton Knight. He was a hero, and
he stands as a role model of courage as much as redemption and
reconstruction. As the Smithsonian
article notes, reconstruction is a verb; we are always reconstructing our big,
diverse, complex country, and we know that our children are the future
reconstructors. We better equip them to
do that reconstructing by allowing them to hear from a wide variety of voices
from the past and by showing them complexity and contrast in what is often told
as a one sided story. In US History,
Newton Knight’s voice is one our kids should hear.
