I’m in the throes of reading Mary Frances Berry’s biography of Callie House, a 19th century ex-slave and washerwoman from Nashville, Tennessee, who helped lead the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association.
I decided to pick the book up this week for two reasons: (1) My wife just finished going through it as part of a research project on contemporary Rastafarian calls for reparations vis-a-vis the Jamaican government. (2) The film I mentioned in my post last week, Traces of the Trade, ends with a pointed discussion of reparations in the United States.
Before Berry’s book, I had never heard of Callie House’s organized fight to procure “pensions” for newly-freed slaves, a fight predicated on an argument that asked for similar financial assistance to the kind that had already been provided to Union soldiers after the war.
House’s efforts were met with derision/dismissal by the Black middle class and concerted opposition (including concocted political witchhunts) by the United States government.
I don’t remember ever reading anything about House or the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in any of my history classes. That isn’t because my teachers were purposefully trying to hide this historical tidbit from us. Many of them probably didn’t know anything about it, either.
How many of you all did?
Textbooked history often gets told in short, bold headlines, but the details of the actual stories sometimes get silenced in the process.
The point of bringing House’s story up shouldn’t be about fanning the flames of “white guilt” some 100 or so years later. It is about trying to figure out exactly where we have all come from as we embark on the 21st century iteration of where we are going.
Callie House’s story doesn’t corner the market on under-told tales of American history. Neither do African Americans.
If you have a second, share a little-known piece of American history with us right here. We’ll all be the better for it.
