'Black Athena' and the American dilemma

In the civil trial which followed, where the prosecution did not have to prove Simpson's guilt beyond reasonable doubt but only to show a preponderance of evidence against him, a predominantly white jury repudiated the acquittal and awarded $8.5 million compensatory damages to the families of the two victims, Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, and the following week added $25 million punitive damages. Goldman's father, who emerged sadder but wealthier, had a book ready for release as soon as the verdict was announced. But there were two jurors who voted against the huge punitive damage award. One of them felt the sum was too high, but the other, who was the only black juryman, born in Jamaica, and part Asian perhaps had mixed motives, but among them was probably the feeling that no black victim would have had a similar dollar value put upon his life. At the University of Maryland, black students hung signs reading 'For Whites Only' and 'For Coloured Only' on doors, water fountains and rest rooms in the Student Union Building. The stunt was intended to preface 'Black History' Month, but the media drew the connection with the Simpson trial verdict.

In recent years, the schism between the two American 'melting pots' has rarely been so sharply revealed: the one generally white, although it accepts Japanese, Chinese, Hispanics and East Indians into the mix, and the other generally black, although native Indians are a significant ingredient, and there is a large infusion of Caucasian genes. The product of the black pot is not so much a lower class as an inferior caste, and until the Civil Rights Movement got under way in the United States in the 1950s, blacks in the South, regularly encountered signs in public buildings reading 'For Whites Only', like the specimens which the University of Maryland students hung in the Student Union building to call attention to 'Black History' month. There is now a black middle class that buys old signs like those as collector's items. The second half of this century has changed the equation between blacks and whites enormously but not entirely in ways that the early Civil Rights activists imagined. The 'American Dilemma' to borrow the title of the classic work by Gunnar Myrdal which appeared during World War II, is still a dilemma, and the O.J.Simpson case put it under the spotlight.

'Black History' Month underlined another development: the new black middle class has produced its own intelligentsia that is taking control of its own history, not merely of matters like the slave trade, but the so-called 'Western Tradition' which goes back to ancient Greece. Mainstream American history is still the product of a succession of national historians beginning with George Bancroft in the last century: the history of the United States was the epic of liberty, the American Revolution was a united struggle against tyranny, and the Loyalists were unremembered; triumph in the War of 1812 confirmed the Revolution's verdict. Thomas Jefferson's magnificent assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal laid the cornerstone of freedom, which the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was later to confirm.

Once upon a time, black histories such as John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom (1947) attempted to integrate the Negro record into the mainstream: they noted with pride the Negro role in the American Revolution and passed quickly over the more numerous black Loyalists, ignored the contribution of former slaves to the defence of Canada in the War of 1812 but accented the Negro participation in the victorious battle of New Orleans in 1815. Yet during 'Black History' Month in 1997, Charlie James, publisher of the African American Business and Employment Journal remarked in a Seattle newspaper column that the Revolutionary War deserved a second look. It started when it did, he wrote, because Benjamin Franklin returned from Europe and reported that Britain was about to abolish slavery in her colonies, whereupon the Thirteen Colonies declared independence. Slavery was, in fact, declared, illegal in England itself in 1772, on the eve of the Revolution, but only now have black writers produced a challenge to the mainstream version. Nor has Thomas Jefferson escaped with his reputation unspotted. 'How is it', asked Samuel Johnson, who observed the Revolution without sympathy, 'that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?' and Conor Cruise O'Brien in his recent The Long Affair has restated Johnson's question less succinctly but to more telling effect. Inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is his assertion about blacks: 'Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free***;' but Jefferson's following sentence in the quotation is omitted: 'Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.' Jefferson, for all he believed that men are born equal, never freed his own slaves. Black historians are using the modern disapprobation of slavery as the yardstick for reassessing the icons of western culture in much the same way as icons of literature such as T.S. Eliot are being tested on the touchstone of Anti-Semitism. There is a new 'ism' which describes this process: 'presentism', that is, assigning a slot on the 'reputation scale' to the great figures of the past according to the criteria of the present day, rather than those of their own times. Unfair, perhaps. But understandable.