Learning Black History From Scratch

Last week, the New York City Tenement Museum hosted an event with actress Denée Benton, “The Gilded Age: Peggy Scott’s New York, From The Tenement Museum and WNYC.” In the TV show The Gilded Age, Ms. Benton plays a journalist writing for the Black newspaper the New York Globe.

The discussion explored what characters like Peggy may have experienced in New York City during the late 19th century, and also real Black women who lived in New York City during that time.

But how many of us were taught about families like Peggy’s that lived a middle-class life in Brooklyn, owned businesses, and lived full and productive lives despite rampant racism and sexism?

I know some of the history since I’ve done research about the Black elite in New York and Rhode Island for my unpublished manuscript A Killing in Black Newport. But there’s a whole lot I never learned about Black history that wasn’t related only to Black trauma.

For example, how many of us knew about Katherine Johnson and the other Black women who worked at NASA and were key to Americans reaching the moon before the movie Hidden Figures? I didn’t. How many of us knew that Alexander Dumas’ father was a part-Haitian Black man, and the inspiration for Dumas’ classic, The Count of Monte Cristo? I didn’t know until I read the Pulitzer Prize winning biography The Black Count by Tom Reiss.

It makes me angry to know that history was deliberately eradicated from my early education. That same history which, after years of progress, is once again trying to be eradicated.

I own a few tintypes and daguerreotypes of Black people from the 19th and early 20th century.

The tintype above is the first one I ever bought. It’s of a Black woman in a pork pie-style hat, sporting a large cross around her neck, what looks like her finest bracelets and rings, and wearing a skirt with nautical anchors on it. I call her my Nautical Lady.

I’ve spent many hours imagining who this woman may have been and what her life was like. If her family were in the navy or if those anchors on her skirt were a fashion fad of the time. Wondered what level of education she had, where she lived, and what her everyday life was like.

We, as Americans, especially Black Americans don’t know nearly enough about women like her.

A free and educated society is not afraid of learning that history. A free and educated society would understand that learning that history is essential. We owe it to the real Peggy Scotts, and to my Nautical Lady.

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