History Just Bit Me in the Ass

“Destruction of Noyes Academy,” a 1999 painting by Mikel Wells


Stephen Colbert announced on last night’s show that he would be dedicating the rest of the month to black history…it was a joke of course since it was his last show of the month. This is my last post of the month, and I, too, will be dedicating it to black history, but this is no joke. It’s not that I set out to squeeze mention of black history into the closing hours of the month. I did have some compelling non black issues to post about this month--the Super Bowl, the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arrival in the US…my own glorious birthday. So giving short shrift to black history was not at all racially motivated.
Nonetheless, in the closing hours of this month designated to celebrate the long-buried contributions of black men and women to America, black history roared up and took a quite sizable bite of my delicate white ass. Yesterday Daughter Meagan sent me this link, and asked me if I knew about the destruction of Noyes Academy that’s pictured in the painting above and if the building portrayed on the right in the painting is the hotel that once stood on the land where our old house in Canaan, New Hampshire, now stands. The answer to her first question is a very shameful no; I did not know the story of Noyes Academy. The answer to the second question is yes; that is the Grand Hotel, which burned down about a hundred years ago and was replaced by the house we lived in on Canaan Street for a decade.
Noyes Academy was a school established in Canaan by abolitionists for the expressed purpose of racially integrating American schooling. It would be only the second school in the entire country where white and black students would be taught together. But on August 10, 1835, a crowd of 500 angry residents gathered at the schoolhouse and... 

Protected from the law by a vote passed at an official town meeting a few days before, the men hooked 95 yokes of cattle to the building, slid skids underneath and ripped the school from the ground, dragging it about a mile down Canaan Street and leaving a shattered shell on the lawn of the town meeting house.

The town meeting house adjoins our old house, which means if our house had been standing there rather than the Grand Hotel in 1835, the collateral damage of Noyes Academy would virtually have been sitting on our front lawn. I cannot convey how embarrassing it is to me that I had no previous knowledge of this incident. I like to pride myself on being historically literate. But it’s not just the hole this exposes in my knowledge that bothers me; it’s also the disorienting impact it has on my perception of a place I once lovingly called home. Canaan Street is certifiably historic, populated with homes dating back to the Revolutionary War era. It sits on a pristine lake, and on crisp fall days a stroll down the street can seem like a walk back in time to a period when a lot of good men (and women) were diligently doing good. One of the stations in the Underground Railroad that helped runaway slaves escape was located on Canaan Street (and still stands as a private residence today). 
So to have this truly ugly incident brought home to me now is eye opening, though not in the good way. Not only do I have to re-process my memories of Canaan Street to now account for this brutish display of civic intolerance, but I also have to re-examine one of my own current prejudices. As happened, Noyes Academy was a project of what would’ve been at the time Canaan’s 1%, with considerable support from Dartmouth College (which has had its own bouts with institutional racism since). Those folks uprooting that school and carting it off to history’s dustbin were what we would today call the 99%.
What we learn (again, it seems) is that history is not black and white (no pun intended). And what I’ve learned personally is that there’s a very good reason to have a black history month because even for a smarty-pants like me, there’s always something you didn't know.
Finally, there’s this. There’s an ongoing debate as to which mountain of history mankind is climbing.  Is it Martin Luther King’s mountain where we all reach the top together and enlightened one day? Or is it Sisyphus’s where the rock we’ve pushed up it rolls down the other side every time we get near the top? The story of Noyes Academy, as depressing as I find it, also gives me hope.  Today’s bigots, given the fallout over Arizona’s recent attempt to codify discrimination, seem more inclined to exercise their intolerance through legislation. We seem mercifully beyond the time when trashing schoolhouses and holding public lynchings are acceptable behavior. So how about a hearty hooray for us?