Library of Congress's Blog, page 56

World War II: Voices of War

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Giles McCoy. Veterans History Project.

For Independence Day, we offer the lead piece from the Library of Congress Magazine July/August 2020 issue, “Voices of War.” Several other pieces from that issue will follow during the coming weeks.

War tests the limits of what a human can endure.

It asks those who serve to do unimaginable things — to leave loved ones behind for years at a time, to suffer extreme conditions and deprivations, to risk life and limb, to kill or be killed.

Giles McCoy lived that.

During World War II, McCoy fought with the 1st Marine Division at Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa — three of the most brutal battles in Corps history.

He got shot by a Japanese sniper on Iwo and survived a kamikaze attack at Okinawa. The worst came later. In July 1945, his ship, the Indianapolis, was torpedoed and quickly sank, taking 300 sailors and Marines down with it.

McCoy and about 800 others floated in the open Pacific for four days, most with only a life jacket, trying to stay alive. Some drowned. Some died of dehydration and exposure. Some, in a state of delirium, killed themselves. Some died a different death.

“We had sharks everywhere,” McCoy would recall. “The first couple of days there was probably a hundred sharks around us all the time. A couple of guys got hit by sharks and got taken down.”

Of the 1,196 men aboard the Indianapolis, only 316 survived — one of the worst disasters in U.S. Navy history. But McCoy lived, and his story today is part of the collections of the Veterans History Project (VHP), a program of the Library of Congress.

Congress created VHP in 2000 to gather, preserve and make accessible the firsthand remembrances of U.S. war veterans. Its collections chronicle the experiences of men and women who, like McCoy, fought World War II — years of hardship, heartbreak, courage and loss written down in letters and journals and in makeshift diaries cobbled together at prisoner-of-war camps across Europe and the Pacific.

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George Pearcy. Veterans History Project.

George Pearcy was serving in an Army artillery unit in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Philippines soon were overrun too, and Pearcy was captured and held in a succession of POW camps.

There, he kept a diary, now held by VHP, on whatever he could find: old maps, hospital forms, labels peeled off food cans. On those scraps, he chronicled all he saw — beatings, decapitations, escape attempts, the turning of prisoners against each other to survive.

In 1944, the Japanese began evacuating POWs, Pearcy among them, aboard “hell ships” — freighters known for their terrible conditions. Some were so packed that prisoners barely could lie down. Temperatures often hit 120 degrees, the hot, humid atmosphere fouled by the stench of human waste and unwashed bodies.

A U.S. submarine torpedoed Pearcy’s ship, and only nine prisoners survived. He wasn’t one of them. Pearcy’s story is known today only because, fearing the worst, he divided up his diary among comrades who remained behind. Half the diary made it back to his family in the care of a soldier from Utah — Robert Augur, whose own POW diary is held by VHP.

Such tragedies were deeply felt back home. The war separated loved ones for years at a time, and letters often were the only means of communication.

Robert Ware joined the Virginia National Guard in 1940 and was assigned to the Army’s 104th Medical Battalion. Two days before D-Day, his wife Martha wrote to him, pondering their lost years together and their uncertain future:

“Do you know the quotation that says, ‘Tho a man be dead, yet shall he live.’ I think I’ve come to know what that means these two years as I watched my 20s slip away and realized that we have never yet had our chance and have no hope of it for a long time.

“I am only living on the faith that God will give me a chance before it’s too late — a chance at a permanent home, children, a certain amount of financial security and above all a chance to live with the man I love so devotedly, so completely — my husband.”

Ware never saw her letter — he was killed going ashore with the first wave at Normandy.

VHP collections preserve countless such stories of survival and heartbreak.

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Army Air Forces Sgt. Kenje Ogata, picture set over a telegram informing family of his plane being shot down and a map he used to get back to Allied territory. Photo layout: Ashley Jones. Material: Veterans History Project.

Kenje Ogata, a Japanese American turret gunner in a B-24 bomber, got shot down over central Hungary, took refuge with a local family, reunited with his crewmates and traveled by foot, ox cart and train to Soviet-held Romania, then flew back to his base and the war.

Army Sgt. A. William Perry served in the segregated 92nd Infantry Division fighting in Europe. In an oral history, he recalled the difficulty of driving the Germans from mountainous Italy — an ideal place, he noted, to fight a defensive war.

The Germans would chop down trees and place them as obstacles in front of you, mine the fields next to the roads, aim machine guns and artillery down the roads at whoever moved up them. “If you came up the road,” Perry said, “you didn’t have a chance.” In its first action, his unit lost 24 men in 15 minutes.

Robert Harlan Horr piloted his glider to a landing in Normandy under heavy fire — he counted over 80 holes in his plane. In his pilot’s logbook, he described losing his close friend and comrade, Buck Jackson, that day.

After Jackson got hit, Horr gave him morphine and stayed by him in an open field to make him as comfortable as possible, all the while under fire from German mortars and machine guns. “Buck finally died. If I get decorated his mother is going to have that medal,” Horr wrote. “Got to move up now so that’s all for now.”

Except he was wrong: Buck, it turned out, survived. But Horr never knew it — he was killed in a glider accident back in England soon after.

More than 400,000 Americans, like Horr, were killed in the war, and wartime experiences exacted a terrible toll on many who survived.

On 28 pages of loose paper now in VHP collections, Marine Corps Pvt. Leon Jenkins chronicled the months he spent fighting on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in 1942 — events that haunted him for decades to come.

“Dawn. Everything looks so peaceful down here, but we’re sitting three miles away from hell itself,” Jenkins wrote on Aug. 8 while aboard a ship stationed just offshore.

Over the next six weeks, Jenkins found himself on the ground, in hell — day after day of air raids, snipers, assaults, shelling and hand-to-hand fighting, broken up only by rain and hunger.

On one page of his diary, Jenkins observes that he never really expected to have to kill anybody with his rifle. By the end of the next page, he’d shot and killed three Japanese soldiers, bayonetted a fourth and killed a fifth with his knife during an assault on a machine gun nest — and suffered a knife wound in the back.

On Aug. 19, flying shrapnel cut the legs off his cot while he slept. Ten days later, a bomb concussion blew the watch off his wrist and, the next day, a piece of shrapnel sliced off the tip of his index finger and killed two comrades standing nearby.

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Leon Jenkins’ diary entry detailing the death of two fellow soldiers and the loss of part of his finger. Veterans History Project.

On Sept. 2, he waited out an air raid in a small hollow, writing notes as Japanese planes approached — notes that stopped in mid-sentence when a bomb struck his position:

“I see the planes. 18 of them coming in same as yesterday. Just a little to my right. The wind’s from that way, too. This is going to be close. AA opened up + first bomb landed about 100 yds + next bomb right in line with my-”

The diary picks up two weeks later with an entry shakily scrawled from a hospital bed on an island some 600 miles away; Jenkins had a terrible headache, a worse case of nerves and no idea what had happened.

He soon was discharged, physically safe, but forever haunted. Jenkins suffered badly from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggled to make jobs and relationships work for the rest of his life.

His experiences, chronicled on humble pages that say so much, today are preserved at the Library so that future generations may better understand what Jenkins, and thousands like him, endured.

“I would go back into a burning building to save this diary. It is that important,” wrote Jenkins’ nephew, Kerry D. Ames, in donating the pages to VHP. “It speaks for one man, but it also speaks for so many men.”

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“The Most Mysterious Woman…” Identified!

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The photo that stumped readers for years. She looked so familiar, yet no one could identify her.

Cary O’Dell at the Library’s National Recording Registry is the maestro of our ever-popular Mystery Photo Contest. He’s back with big news.

It was a mystery that I was beginning to think would never be solved.

You’ll remember, dear readers of our Mystery Photo Contest, the dark-haired actress in the striped shirt. The pensive gaze off camera. The dark eyes. Her identity had flummoxed us for so long I eventually nicknamed her “” last December.

Half a year later, kids, we announce this mystery is SOLVED!

Our heroine in alive and well and still working in the film and television industry. She was identified by James Owen, the only reader to match the face to the name in a couple of years of online guesses. He was nearly as excited as I was when I let him know the news: “Very cool! Happy to help!”

And our mystery woman’s name is – wait, don’t you want to hear the story first?

Most of you know of my ongoing search to put names with some of the unidentified movie, TV and music photos we found within a very large collection of press stills acquired by the Library a few years ago. We posted many of these unidentified faces in our Mystery Photo Contest and you guys have been terrific at tracking them down. Among others, there was Cynthia Lynn, she of “Hogan’s Heroes,” and Esther Anderson, the Jamaican actress and film producer.

But one of the most puzzling of all was that soft-focus photo of the young actress coolly looking off to her right, posed before a blurry background. Guesses poured in. Her secret to anonymity seemed to be that she so resembled so many other actresses of the late ’60s and early ’70s that she looked like everyone and no one. When I sent the photo to Tina Sinatra — a popular guess — she said, “Yes, we all looked alike at that time with our Marlo Thomas hair.”

Some of the other guesses that readers ventured: Marlo Thomas herself, Paula Prentiss, Celeste Yarnall, Dana Delany, Sherry Jackson, Kim Darby, Lucie Arnaz, Stephanie Zimbalist, Susan Saint James, Barbara Parkins, Bonnie Bedelia, Diana Canova, Lynn Loring, Katharine Ross and Linda Harrison.

I reached out to all of these women over the past couple of years. One by one, they all said some variation of, “Nope. Not me.”

But after our December “most mysterious woman” post, new guesses flooded in. I went back to work. Some of the very gracious actresses I contacted after reader suggestions: Mary McDonnell, Gail Hire, Anne Archer, Katherine Justice, Sabrina Scharf, Jody Miller, Maureen McGovern, Samantha Eggar, Jennifer Salt, Pamela Tiffin and Lesley Ann Warren.

You guessed it: Zilch. De nada. Nothing.

Then there was that guess from James Owen. I had dutifully fired off an email to the actress he suggested. And, on a recent day, I got a response. I clicked it open.

“That’s a very nice photo of me,” wrote Wendy Phillips. “Thanks. I hadn’t seen it before.”

Yes, in fact, I did almost fall out of my chair.

After I read that line several times over, I immediately replied:  “ARE YOU KIDDING?  That’s you?!  Could you call me?”

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Wendy Phillips today. Photo: Courtesy Wendy Phillips.

Brooklyn native Wendy Phillips began her career in 1975 at the age of 23, starring in the critically-acclaimed TV adaptation of “Death Be Not Proud” (opposite Robby Benson). She’s been working ever since. The Internet Movie Database counts 89 credits over the past 45 years, including the big screen’s “Bugsy,” “I Am Sam” and “Airplane II.”  On TV, she has starred in “Promised Land,” “A Year in the Life,” “Falcon Crest,” “Home Front” and “Big Love.” Her most recent role was appearing in two episodes of CBS’s “Seal Team” in 2018.

In our conversation, she said she thinks our mystery photo was taken on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot. “It wasn’t unusual to be pulled off a soundstage by a photographer or the press department and be made to quickly pose and get a picture, kind of on the run,” she said. “The funny part is I remember the outfit because I hated the sleeves.”

She continued: “I am pretty sure it was from a pilot I did called ‘Love Tapes.’ The original script was called ‘They’re Playing Our Tapes’– ugh!  It was made by MGM and then got tied up in legal battles between the executive producer and the studio.  It finally aired in 1980 as a TV movie.”

The pilot never took off, but it wasn’t from the lack of talent. It featured several female TV stars of the era — Loretta Swit (better known as Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan from “M*A*S*H”), Mariette Hartley (lots of westerns and those great Polaroid commercials with James Garner) and Jan Smithers (Bailey on “WKRP in Cincinnati”).

Of our epic search for her, I said, “We tried to make you Barbara Parkins and Dana Delaney….”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Dana and I had a similar look, were a similar type; she and I and Erin Gray were always auditioning against each other.”

She was quite amused by our lengthy search and cheerfully noted the photo was far from the best likeness of her. I would like to thank her not only for solving this mystery but also for her good humor that went along with it.  And I would like to thank James Owen, the one (and only one) who suggested “Wendy Phillips” in the first place.

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How Will We Remember COVID-19?

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Life during the pandemic. Photo: Camilo Vergara. Prints and Photographs Division.

People chatting in the sun beside a taco truck in Oakland, California. A woman peering warily over a surgical mask in a Newark, New Jersey, bus line. Cheerful-looking mannequins sporting face coverings for sale in the Bronx. A sign reading “no gloves, no mask, no service” taped on the entrance to a Royal Chicken and Biscuit restaurant in Newark.

What do these images have in common? They’re all by Camilo José Vergara, noted for photographing urban communities where life is often hard. They are also among the very first items the Library acquired documenting the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. And they will be far from the last: The Library anticipates a collecting effort that exceeds its coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — which was huge.

“That touched certain aspects of our society,” said Joe Puccio, the Library’s collection development officer, of Sept. 11. “But this thing is touching everything — from science and health care to business to entertainment to education — it’s everything.”

The job of the Library, he said, is to “determine what’s the most important material to acquire and what a researcher in a hundred years will need to see from what is being produced today.”

The Prints and Photographs Division is adding new pandemic images by Vergara to the website every week — since 2013, the Library has been the permanent archival home for the MacArthur Award-winning photographer’s work.

Known for portraying changes in the same locations over time, Vergara is capturing over and over again busy intersections, mostly in New York City, to show the evolving response of all kinds of people to the pandemic: street vendors, shoppers, school children, people on their way to work or coming home, police officers. A National Building Museum online exhibition from earlier this year, “Documenting Crossroads: The Coronavirus in Poor, Minority Communities,” highlights Vergara’s project.

His pandemic photos are among the first Library collection items to be publicly accessible. A fast-growing list of pandemic-related content in other subject areas — science, education, economics, psychology — is also available online to those who have access to the Library’s subscription databases, consisting now mostly of staff, however, since the Library is closed to the public.

Researchers will have to wait a while to sift through most of the Library’s pandemic content, including newly acquired websites, to allow for processing and adherence to Library policies. “All of our content is embargoed for one year,” said Abbie Grotke, head of the web archiving team in the Digital Services Directorate of Library Services.

Gathering the Ephemeral

Already, though, web content is an enormous focus of collecting. Teleworking recommending officers from across the Library — the staff who propose materials for the Library to collect — are nominating a steady stream of sites and pages within sites to add to existing thematic collections as well as a catch-all space for content that falls outside the themes.

“At this point, our focus is on collecting and making sure we’re preserving,” Grotke said. “How we present it to the public may evolve.”

State and federal government websites are major sources of nominations, said Rashi Joshi of the Collection Development Office, who supports recommending officers in acquiring digital collections. The sites are important, she said, because they reflect governmental responses to the pandemic and public guidance.

Other collecting emphases include sites documenting the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and sites related to business, community and individual responses to the pandemic. Culture is also a big focus.

Melissa Wertheimer, a recommending officer in the Music Division, is leading a team researching performing arts sites. “We’re scouring the web for content related to all the division’s collecting areas,” she said.

Examples so far out of 200-plus nominations include videos of distance performances by dance companies, original musical compositions inspired by quarantine, blogs contemplating the future of public performance and online projects like the Social Distancing Festival, which promotes virtual shows whose live editions were canceled because of the pandemic.

Some websites the Library has collected for years are also now capturing virus-related content, Joshi noted. These include sites devoted to web comics and emerging cultural traditions. One such site, Urban Dictionary, an online compilation of slang, has added “coronabrain” to its inventory of terms.

Helena Zinkham, chief Prints and Photographs, believes social media — which in the Sept. 11 era was just getting started — will turn out to be an especially rich source of pandemic collecting. While the web archiving team acquires sites, Zinkham’s division is researching images presented in venues such as Flickr.

“We’re able to see the kinds of photographs being made by everyday people,” she said. “We’re not planning to vacuum them up, but selectively we can reach out.”

Documenting Culture, Data

In other collecting areas, Asian Division recommending officers last month selected 142 Chinese-language print titles on COVID-19 in China. Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate librarians are facilitating their delivery, and cataloging librarians are prioritizing their processing so they can quickly be made available.

Since March, John Hessler of the Geography and Map Division has been involved in mapping the pandemic and searching for geospatial data and cartographic visualizations to add to the Library’s vast map collections.

And the Copyright Office has already registered dozens of pandemic-related titles, including “Cornavirus Gas Mask Skull,” a visual arts work, and a sound recording called “COVID #19 Baby!” Recommending officers will review associated deposits to determine which to add to the Library’s collections.

The American Folklife Center (AFC) plans a “multipronged and multiyear approach” to pandemic collecting, said its director, Betsy Peterson. In April, Rep. Ami Bera of California introduced a bill in the House of Representatives charging AFC with directing a COVID-19 oral history project to document the experiences and stories of people across the U.S.

Should the bill become law, Peterson envisions establishing a fellowship program to interview first responders, essential workers, COVID-19 survivors and others, including planners of emergency and civic responses to the pandemic.

AFC is also the archival home of StoryCorps, which in March launched StoryCorps Connect, a platform enabling people to interview loved ones remotely, and it is cooperating with other organizations to document the pandemic.

“I think the Library can join and learn from these efforts and, I hope, help amplify them through development of a national COVID-19 oral history collection,” Peterson said.

“Our problem,” said Puccio of the Library wide collecting effort, “is that there is just so much content about this situation. But I think in the end – like in 10 years – we’re going to look back and say, wow, we did a heck of a job collecting back then.”

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2020 Kluge Prize Winner: Harvard Professor Danielle Allen

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The Office of Communications and the Multi-Media Group produced the above video. Brett Zongker in the Office of Communications wrote this article.

Danielle Allen, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, will receive the 2020 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, the Librarian of Congress has announced.

Allen will collaborate with the Library on an initiative she has designed, titled “Our Common Purpose—A Campaign for Civic Strength at the Library of Congress.” It will include programs to engage schools, universities, political leaders, and the American public in efforts to promote civic engagement. As Allen has said, “Civic education is our common purpose.”

“We are proud to honor Danielle Allen, a leading expert on justice, citizenship and democracy, with the Kluge Prize as she helps to lead a timely national conversation on how we find our common purpose,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian. “Now is an important moment to discuss ways we can all promote civic strength and engagement, which is at the core of our national culture.”

On July 2, at 7 p.m., join Allen and Kluge Center Director John Haskell for a virtual event: “Danielle Allen Takes on the Hard Questions about Democracy and Public Life.” Free tickets are available.

Allen is the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a K-16 educational platform designed to identify and disseminate the knowledge and capacities required for democratic citizenship. She is also co-chair of a bipartisan commission, convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which on June 11 recommended 31 steps to strengthen American institutions and civic culture to help a nation in crisis emerge with a more resilient democracy.

Allen is the author of “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality,” an analysis that reinvigorates public understanding of the founding document of the United States.

Her 2017 memoir, “Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.,” examines the way that racism in the justice system and mass incarceration impacted her own family. In it, she made a call for equality before the law and civic participation that animates all of her work.

Allen was a 2001 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient for her ability to combine “the classicist’s careful attention to texts and language with the political theorist’s sophisticated and informed engagement.”

As a frequent public lecturer, contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and regular guest on public radio, she discusses issues of citizenship and policy. In her role as director of the E.J. Safra Center, Allen has spearheaded an initiative helping to guide the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I am deeply honored to be Dr. Hayden’s selection for the Kluge Prize and to be among the prestigious company of past winners,” Allen said. “I look forward to working with the Library of Congress in the coming months on Our Common Purpose – to promote civic education and engagement among Americans of all ages.”

The Kluge Prize recognizes individuals whose outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society. The international prize highlights the value of researchers who communicate beyond the scholarly community and have had a major impact on social and political issues. The prize comes with a $500,000 award. Additional funds from the Library’s Kluge endowment, which funds the award, are being invested in Kluge Center programming.

Hayden selected Allen from a short list of finalists following a request for nominations from scholars and leaders all over the world and a three-stage review process by experts inside and outside the Library.

Allen was born in Takoma Park, Maryland. She studied classics at Princeton, graduating summa cum laude. She earned M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees in classics from King’s College, University of Cambridge and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in government from Harvard University.

She is an internationally-regarded political theorist with an extensive record of scholarship on justice, citizenship, and democracy in ancient Athens and modern America. From 1997 to 2007 she served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, rising through the academic ranks to become a professor of both classics and political science, as well as a member of the Committee on Social Thought. She spent the next eight years as the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, before joining the Harvard faculty as the James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics in 2015.

The Kluge Center’s mission, as established in 2000, is to “reinvigorate the interconnection between thought and action,” bridging the gap between scholarship and policy making. To that end, the  Center brings some of the world’s great thinkers to the Library to make use of the Library collections and engage in conversations addressing the challenges facing democracy in the 21st century.

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The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved

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On Saturday, June 19, 1865, in Limestone County, Texas, plantation owner Logan Stroud stood on the front porch of this house to tell more than 150 of his enslaved workers that they were free. Photo: Historic American Building Survey. Prints and Photographs Division.

On June 19, 1865, Logan Stroud, one of the largest slave-owners in east Texas, walked to the front porch of his plantation home, which he called Pleasant Retreat. More than 150 of his enslaved workers gathered around to listen.

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Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger. Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Prints and Photographs Division.

He pulled out a dispatch from U.S. Maj. Gen  Gorden Granger — General Order Number 3 — issued that very morning in Galveston from the Union Army’s Texas headquarters. The Confederacy had officially surrendered in April, but the last holdouts in Texas had fought on until they, too, were defeated. Now that the war was settled, President Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation would become the law of the land, even in the Lone Star State.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free,’ ” Stroud began, reading the opening line of Granger’s order. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”

Stroud’s family had come to Texas when he was just a boy. They built an empire of more than 11,000 acres — cotton, cattle, corn, wheat, pigs, sheep — and grew wealthy on slave labor. Now he was 51 and all that was over.

Stroud began to weep.

One of his daughters had to take over the reading. “…the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor….”

The details of the day were partly recorded by the Limestone County Historical Commission. And so it was that the Stroud front porch became one of the birthplaces of Juneteenth — when the final group of enslaved people in the United States were informed of the end of the Civil War, of slavery and of the brutal bondage that had defined their lives.

The Library has a photograph and architectural drawings of the house, both made in 1942 by the Historic American Buildings Survey. It’s antebellum prosperity long gone, the one-story, wood-frame house looms up out of the flat landscape like an abandoned, Greek-Revival testament to Southern Gothic, a Faulknerian mansion brought to life.

It’s one of  the thousands of documents, recordings and photographs in the Library’s collections that document Juneteenth and the aftermath of slavery by the people who endured it. The Historic Buildings survey also documents the origins of Emancipation Park in Houston, where some of the first and largest Juneteenth celebrations were held. From the survey: “The first description of the park grounds comes from elderly former residents, who describe the park at the turn of the century as being enclosed by a six-foot-high privacy fence and encircled by a racetrack, with the remainder of the property containing two dance floors, a stable, and a beer tavern.”

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A portion of a handwritten copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, with the famous phrase “shall be then, thence forward, and forever free.” Rare Book And Special Collections Division.

The most extensive collection of stories is in ”Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938.” It contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts and more than 500 black-and-white portraits of formerly enslaved people.

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Billy McCrae grew up in slavery in Texas. Photo: Ruby T. Lomax. Prints and Photographs Division.

Some of the most haunting aspects of the stories are the matter-of-fact nature in which they’re related, both in interview transcripts and in recordings. Through the crackles and hisses of a 1940 recording in Jasper, Texas, the voice of Billy McCrea shines through, narrating his youth “way back in slavery time.”

“Right at the creek there, they take them (runaways) and put them on…a log, lay them down and fasten the and whup them,” McCrea tells interviewer Ruby Lomax. “You hear them (runaways) hollering and praying on them logs….Now I see all of that when I was a boy.”

McCrae’s memories are in “Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories,” a collection in the American Folklife Center. These 23 interviews were recorded between 1932 and 1975, and offer fascinating glimpses into a world gone by. (Note before listening: Speakers often recount racial epithets used to describe black people. Also, in an inadvertent window into racial attitudes during the time of the recordings, the interviewers often address their subjects as “uncle.”)

Baltimore’s Fountain Hughes was a remarkably clear-voiced 101-year-old when he was interviewed in 1949. He was a teenager when the Civil War ended. He remembered it well.

“We were slaves,” he says of his youth in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that. Have a auction bench, and they’d put you on, up on the bench and bid on you just same as you bidding on cattle, you know…selling women, selling men.”

After the war ended, he said, “We was just turned out like a lot of cattle. You know how they turn cattle out in a pasture? Well, after freedom, you know, colored people didn’t have nothing.”

This, then, is what was coming to an end on June 19, 1865, on that front porch in Limestone County, Texas. The end of an era and the beginning of the celebrations of Juneteenth.

The new era, though, was not a clean break from the past, not even more than a century later. In 1981, a few black teenagers were celebrating Juneteenth on a small boat in a Limestone County lake. Police came out to arrest them on charges of having a small amount of marijuana. While trying to ferry them to shore, the boat capsized. Three teens drowned. The New York Times reported the results of the subsequent trial on page 30 of the A section, under a roundup of of news items headed, “Around the Nation.”

The lead sentence:

“An all-white jury today acquitted three former Limestone County officers in the drownings of three black teenagers who were in custody when a boat capsized on a Texas lake.”

That, too, is a story from Limestone County that resonates on Juneteenth 2020.

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Hearing Frederick Douglass: His Speech on John Brown

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Frederick Douglass, 1870, about age 52. Photo: George F. Schreiber. Prints and Photographs Division.

One of the most compelling stories in American history — and in the Library’s collections — is that of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland (the Eastern Shore), around 1818, he escaped at the age of 20, wrote a timeless autobiography and became a towering figure — orator, activist, newspaper publisher, consultant to presidents — who worked for the freedom of millions of enslaved African Americans and campaigned for equal rights for women. At his death in 1895, he was one of the most influential Americans of the 19th century.

Today, we only know Douglass through his writings — there are no known recordings of him — but during his lifetime his primary fame was as a speaker. In the last generation before electronic mass entertainment, he was a star of the speaking circuit, holding audiences spellbound.

But what if we could hear him speak?

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“Lessons of the Hour,” an 1895 speech printed as a pamphlet. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

What if we could get a gist of how the man sounded, of how his speeches rolled? How would he have delivered this blistering but eloquent line from “Lessons of the Hour” in 1895: “Not a breeze comes to us now from the late rebellious States that is not tainted and freighted with negro blood”?

We can – in a way — by close reading of one of his speeches and by taking a few clues into consideration.

First, we know that he sounded so polished and sophisticated that many listeners were skeptical that he’d grown up in slavery. Yet one of his owners had taught him to read and provided him with books, including one of classic speeches. Douglass read these speeches over and over, he wrote in his autobiography, and sought to emulate them. So his talks would have had a classic structure.

Second, we know that he was deeply moved by black spirituals as a youth and that he was licensed as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church shortly after his escape. He spent years soaking up the black gospel tradition of flowing cadences and an emotional, propulsive narrative that sought to save a listener’s soul.

Last, we know that his voice was pleasing to the ear. From the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1850: “His voice is full and rich, and his enunciation remarkably distinct and musical. He speaks in a low conversational tone most of the time, but occasionally his tones roll out full and deep as those of an organ. The effect is electrical.”

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The cover sheet of Douglass’s speech.

So let’s look at the highlights of a typewritten copy of a passionate speech he often gave about his close friend John Brown, the fiery abolitionist who led the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, to see the man’s magic at work.

Right away, Douglass states his theme: that Brown’s raid was one of the great moments of the American narrative. “Aside from the late tremendous war, I know of no event in all the thirty years of conflict with slavery which will be remembered longer, or make a more thrilling chapter in American History than the Harper’s Ferry raid,” he said. “… reason teaches us to contemplate the John Brown raid in the light of eternity and eternal justice.”

From this lofty height, he drops into the narrative. The 59-year-old Brown led a party of fewer than two dozen men to attack the federal garrison in Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859, in an attempt to steal weapons with which to spur slave revolts. But nearly half of his force was killed (including two of his sons) and Brown, badly wounded, was captured. He and five others were given a short trial and hanged. Many people, Douglass included, regarded the raid as the first shot of the Civil War, which began less than two years later.

Douglass then draws his subject close to the heart. You can almost hear the tone drop from the lofty to the intimate. He allows that the people of Harper’s Ferry had every right to be outraged, as the raid was “cold-blooded and dastardly” on the surface. Innocent men, including the town’s mayor, were killed.

But, he says, this reading is incomplete. The raid carried a high moral purpose. He knows this, he says, drawing them in with personal detail, because he knew Brown for more than a decade. The pair spent weeks in each other’s company, often staying in one another’s homes. In fact, Brown had invited him to a secret meeting along a Pennsylvania riverbank a few weeks before the raid, imploring him to join. Douglass declined, seeing the raid as a “steel trap” of failure.

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Stereograph of Brown and Douglass, showing how strongly they were linked in the national imagination. Littleton View Co. 1891. Prints and Photographs Division.

He was such a close confidante of Brown, he tells the crowd, that prosecutors had sought to arrest him as an accomplice after the raid.

Now that listeners know that Douglass is an authority on the raid — he narrowly avoided hanging himself! — he turns his attention back to its place in history. Listen for the rolling waves of imagery, of how his voice must have risen and fallen, coming to a furious conclusion:

“It was planted with the first cargo of slaves, landed at Jamestown Va., and ripened by the heat and moisture of more than two hundred years of cruel slavery. … It was but the echo of alarm and terror of peaceful villages in Africa, startled from their slumbers at midnight a hundred years before by rapacious traders, to supply the markets of this Christian country, with slaves. If three perished at Harper’s Ferry for liberty, millions have been murdered on land and sea by this accursed traffic in human souls.”

You can hear the irony — if not contempt — in the phrase, “this Christian country.” (Also, for the record: A total of 16 men were killed in the raid, including 10 of Brown’s raiders.)

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Frederick Douglass and his grandson, Joseph, who became a concert violinist. Family photo. Prints and Photographs Division.

Every speech needs a sense of urgency. Douglass builds it here. The nation was dying, caught in the cancerous web of slavery: “Every hour saw the evil spreading and deepening. Church, State, politics, and religion, were like defiled, and dying as by this moral pestilence. The nation was sinking into a sleep of moral death, and needed some such thunder clap as John Brown’s raid upon Harper’s Ferry, to startle it into a sense of danger.”

Enter our hero. Douglass describes Brown’s modest living circumstances, his devotion to his wife, children and the destruction of slavery. He compares him favorably to Patrick Henry, he of the “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. “Henry loved liberty for the rich and the great. Brown loved liberty for the poor and the weak.”

Now, after more than an hour – the speech runs 35 typewritten pages – he builds to his dazzling finale. Brown becomes a majestic, terrible figure astride the American landscape. The last lines:

“But when John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. There was and (sic) end to the argument. The time for compromises was gone, and to the armed hosts of freedom, standing above the chasm of a broken Union, was committed the decision of the sword. The South at once staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing in that, she drew the sword of rebellion, and thus made her own, and not John Brown’s, the lost cause.”

Like the journalist he was, Douglass knew the value of a good kicker. The last words unveil a brilliant twist. He skewers the South’s “lost cause” — the myth that the antebellum South was a wondrous land of charm and principle — and turns Brown’s failure into a great victory. He lost the battle but won the war.

It’s difficult to imagine those lines not bringing a crowd who had lived through the Civil War to its feet. And that’s what made Douglass brilliant. He married the eloquence of his rhetoric to the tragic, terrible cause of his day, and defined it for the ages.

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Protests That Changed America: The March on Washington

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The March on Washington gets underway. Photo: Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was one of the most significant protests in American history, bringing more than 250,000 marchers from across the nation to state an unforgettable claim for racial and economic equality. With its written-in-lightning keystone moment — Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech — it helped galvanize a generation to fight for an end to nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation.

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The march in full progress, including a man in a wheelchair. Photo: Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library holds thousands of items related to this historic moment — including the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — including those that document the march itself. Many were featured in the A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington exhibit in 2014 and can be seen online in our Changemakers project. You can find more in the Civil Rights History Project.

The march took place on Aug. 28, a little more than two months after NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi and three months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Texas. After years of racist violence across the country, it brought together a multi-racial coalition of races, faiths and professions that, by its sheer weight and cross-section of society, made it the most significant protest for social justice in the nation’s history.

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Show business legends Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. Photo: Roosevelt Carter. Prints and Photographs Division.

More than a thousand groups chartered buses. Nearly two dozen special trains brought protesters. People hitchhiked. The civil rights era leadership — King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks and John Lewis helped plan the day. The list of celebrities was endless. Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Josephine Baker, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson and Charlton Heston were only a few of the above-the-title names who attended.

The Kennedy administration, though supportive of the civil rights cause, was unnerved by the prospect of so many black protesters coming to the city. Violence was widely expected by the city and federal government. Thousands of National Guard troops were brought in to assist police in case of rioting (there was none). Several flights that day were canceled because of bomb threats. The speech of a young John Lewis was toned down for being too inflammatory. Author James Baldwin was barred from speaking entirely for the same concerns. Malcolm X, who did not attend, derided all the compromises made by organizers, dubbing the day as the “farce on Washington.”

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Author James Baldwin attended the march but was not allowed to speak for fears he would be too inflammatory. Photo: Roosevelt Carter. Prints and Photographs Division.

Still, the comprehensive civil rights bill called for by protesters demanded the government put an “end to segregation in public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education and the right to vote” among other things. In 1963, with Jim Crow segregation, poll taxes, red-lined neighborhoods, miscegenation laws and blatant black voter disenfranchisement ruling life in the Deep South — and in many other places across the rest of the nation — these were heady goals, not realities. 

The day began with a group of organizers meeting with members of Congress to officially present these demands. It ended with King, Randolph, Lewis, and other leaders meeting with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. In between was the march and the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial that are now so much part of the national memory. The march itself was from the Washington Monument west primarily along Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial for the mass assembly. There, Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson sang gospel hymns. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang protest songs. Speeches flowed. The day was sunny, with the temperatures in the low 80s — not bad for Washington in August — but the vast crowds made it feel much hotter. 

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” King told the crowd, beginning his defining speech.

Despite the worries of government officials about violence, only three arrests were made on the day, the Associated Press reported. Police Chief Robert V. Murray told reporters it had been a “very orderly demonstration.” By 11 p.m., the A.P. reported, Union Station and the city’s two bus stations were all but empty, and the areas around the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were “virtually deserted.”

The photographs in the Library’s collections portray the entire day of the march from multiple viewpoints as experienced by independent photographers and photojournalists.

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The March concluded at the Lincoln Memorial. Photo: Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division.

The work of these photographers reveals memorable faces and singular moments, including images selected for publication long after the event to represent the purpose, spirit, and impact of the march. Press photographs provide a chronological overview of the story from the initial organizing efforts in New York City in July until the demonstrators disbursed after the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. 

It was a emotional day for a turbulent decade ahead. Less than three weeks later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four schoolgirls. Kennedy would not survive the year; King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and many civil rights workers would not survive the decade. Things that hadn’t happened yet: Freedom Summer, Selma, the passages of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and a Supreme Court case that finally enforced the Brown v Board of Education desegregation decision.

Still, to this day, as new protests for some of the same issues fill the nation’s streets, it is difficult to imagine the nation’s history without the March on Washington.

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After the March: King has just given his “I Have a Dream” speech. Leaders meeting with Kennedy: (left to right): Mathew Ahmann (National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice); Whitney Young (National Urban Leage); Martin Luther King, Jr.(SCLC); John Lewis (SNCC); Rabbi Joachim Prinz (American Jewish Congress); Reverend Eugene Carson Blake (United Presbyterian Church); A. Philip Randolph; President John F. Kennedy; Walter Reuther (labor leader), with Vice President Lyndon Johnson partially visible behind him; and Roy Wilkins (NAACP)

Portions of this story first appeared in the Library’s 2014 exhibit,  A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. 

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Jason Reynolds: Inventing Synonyms

Ready, writers?

Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, has a new writing exercise that involves more thinking than actual writing. There’s no story to tell in this one. Instead, it’s about thinking up new synonyms for words we already use. One example he uses: turn “jump,” which everyone knows, into “updown.”

It’s a way of making you think of slightly new ways to approach the world all know — and, like all of his exercises, that’s just what writers and artists do. You can check out all of his exercises on our Engage and Families pages.

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A Protester Who Changed America: Rosa Parks

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Some portions of this story were published in an earlier post.

Protests over police brutality targeting African Americans have swept the country since the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of officers in Minneapolis. It’s a subject that Rosa Parks knew well. Her lifelong campaign against police brutality and other forms of discrimination eventually made her one of the most revered Americans of  the 20th century.

Her life and papers are chronicled at the Library and featured in the current exhibit, “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” You can explore it online, even while the Library is currently closed due to COVID-19. It is, particularly during these turbulent weeks, an inspiration.

The Parks papers and exhibit are part of the Library’s role in preserving and presenting the lives of any number of American revolutionary changemakers. Another current exhibit, “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote,” chronicles the role of suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell and thousands of others who organized, marched and protested for the right of women to vote — something we take as a matter of course today.

The online Changemakers series showcases other social justice collections. These include “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom,” “A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington,” and “Art in Action: Herblock and Fellow Artists Respond to the Their Times.” among other projects documenting work by Ansel Adams, Margaret Mead and Arthur Szyk.

Parks was born on Feb. 4, 1913, under bitter Jim Crow segregation in Tuskegee, Alabama. She endured the threat of Klan violence as a child, helped her husband, Raymond, with his work defending the Scottsboro Boys, then joined the NAACP as a secretary and activist. By the 1940s, she was helping the NAACP document false arrests, beatings and sham trials that led to at least one state-sanctioned executions. Her papers reveal an eloquent, bitter recognition of the humiliations that white supremacy imposed.

“Treading the tight-rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought, from the cradle to the grave is a major mental acrobatic feat,” she writes in one undated note. “To me, it seems that we are puppets on strings in the white man’s hands. They say we must be segregated from them by the color line, yet they pull the strings and we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequence if we get out of line.”

Her unplanned bus protest on Dec. 1, 1955 — she refused to give up her seat to a white man — cost Parks and her husband their jobs, subjected them to a decade of poverty, death threats and stress-related illnesses that never fully abated. She never wavered. She moved to Detroit, eventually finding steady work in U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ office. For the rest of her life, she worked with causes such as labor unions, radical black nationalist groups and anti-poverty agencies.

In 1990, when she was in her late 70s, Nelson Mandela stopped in Detroit after being released from prison in South Africa. As historian Douglas Brinkley described it in “Rosa Parks: A Life,” Mandela spotted her in the receiving line as soon as he stepped off the plane: “Tears filled his eyes … in a low, melodious tone, Nelson Mandela began to chant, ‘Ro-sa Parks. Ro-sa Parks. Ro-sa Parks,’ until his voice crescendoed into a rapturous shout: ‘Ro-sa Parks!’ ’’

In 1999, she was given the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow. Schools, libraries and streets were named for her. There’s now a statue of her in the Capitol Building. In 2010, Time Magazine named her as one of the world’s “25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century.”

It was an amazing life and is told by her with unfiltered honesty — in her own hand — in the Library’s collection.

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Parks at the March on Washington, Aug., 1963. Photo: Bob Adelman. Prints and Photographs Division .

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National Book Festival Presents: Carla Hayden and Lonnie Bunch

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Museums and libraries are societal cornerstones and the role they play in seismic events of the world around them is not relegated to a rear-view mirror of times long past. They put current events in historical context so that people can better understand the times they’re living through.

In a National Book Festival Presents conversation that will premiere tonight, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch discuss the national protests that have roiled the nation after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

In the conversation, they discuss how cultural institutions are the glue that holds human cultures together. But they also talk about the institutional racism in the United States that Floyd’s death laid bare and their own experiences as African Americans dealing with both subtle and violent racism. Hayden tells the story of an uncle who was shot to death by a white shop owner — because the man’s daughter found him attractive.

The discussion goes live tonight, June 5, at 7 p.m. on the Library’s Facebook page and YouTube channel and will be available after that at any time.

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