Jonathan Zimmerman: What John Hope Franklin could teach Ward Churchill
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University.]
Should the University of Colorado have fired Ward Churchill, the fiery ethnic-studies professor and Native American advocate who is suing to get his job back?
I really don't know. But here's what I do know: By playing fast and loose with historical truth, Churchill harms the same racial minorities he claims to defend. To see why, take a quick look at the long career of John Hope Franklin.
Franklin, who died Wednesday at the age of 94, was the preeminent African American historian of the postwar United States. He was a warrior for civil rights, too, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and assisting Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
But Franklin understood that social justice demanded rigorous attention to historical fact, detail, and logic. To fight American racism, which was built upon fantasy and deception, minorities needed to keep a steady grip on their only real weapon: the truth. That's the lesson that seems to have eluded Ward Churchill.
Last week, as Churchill's tragicomic case unfolded in a Denver courtroom, most of the attention focused on his admission that he ghost-wrote a book for another scholar and then cited it in support of his own work. That's unusual and probably unethical, but it's not nearly as bad as Churchill's real sin: pawning off rumors as facts.
Most notoriously, Churchill wrote that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among the Mandan tribe of Native Americans by distributing infected blankets from a St. Louis infirmary. The truth of the account was "self-evident," Churchill blithely told a university investigative committee. "Such stories have been integral to native oral histories for centuries," he explained. "I've heard them all my life."
So that makes them true? Consider the steady stream of lies that have plagued racial minorities, all of them equally "self-evident" to the people who repeat them. When John Hope Franklin started graduate school at Harvard in the 1930s, most American history books described blacks as ignorant savages, and slavery as a benign institution for civilizing them. Blacks looted Southern coffers in the wake of the Civil War and raped white women, who were saved by the noble knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And the rest, as they say, was history.
It wasn't, of course; it was deceit and folk wisdom dressed up as fact. So Franklin and his generation painstakingly dismantled it, uncovering millions of new documents - including letters, diaries, and interviews - that gave us a more accurate account of our past.
As any historian can tell you, this process is never easy. But it was that much harder for Franklin, who was denied access to whites-only archives or forced to sit in segregated sections of them.
While conducting research at the Library of Congress, Franklin couldn't find a nearby restaurant that would serve him. But he pressed on. "For a Negro scholar searching for truth," he later recalled, "the search for food in the city of Washington was one of the minor inconveniences."
To Ward Churchill, by contrast, the search for truth is itself an inconvenience. Why try to document your hunches with archival material when you can pass them off as fact? Indeed, why visit an archive at all?
Churchill says he was fired because of an essay he wrote after the 9/11 attacks describing the victims as "little Eichmanns." Maybe he's right about that being the reason for his dismissal. But he's wrong about the Mandan Indians and about history itself, which shouldn't be fabricated to fit present-day political whims. Such practices echo the worst excesses of white supremacists, who distorted the past to prop up their own power.
By replacing those falsehoods with a new set of myths, we injure America's ongoing struggle for racial equality. If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, to quote Gandhi, a lie for a lie makes us all cynics. You can't speak truth to power if nothing is true.
No matter what happens to Ward Churchill, then, let's make sure we set the historical record straight. And let's tip our hats to John Hope Franklin, who reminded us why it matters. For America's least fortunate citizens, the truth is often all they have.
Should the University of Colorado have fired Ward Churchill, the fiery ethnic-studies professor and Native American advocate who is suing to get his job back?
I really don't know. But here's what I do know: By playing fast and loose with historical truth, Churchill harms the same racial minorities he claims to defend. To see why, take a quick look at the long career of John Hope Franklin.
Franklin, who died Wednesday at the age of 94, was the preeminent African American historian of the postwar United States. He was a warrior for civil rights, too, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and assisting Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.
But Franklin understood that social justice demanded rigorous attention to historical fact, detail, and logic. To fight American racism, which was built upon fantasy and deception, minorities needed to keep a steady grip on their only real weapon: the truth. That's the lesson that seems to have eluded Ward Churchill.
Last week, as Churchill's tragicomic case unfolded in a Denver courtroom, most of the attention focused on his admission that he ghost-wrote a book for another scholar and then cited it in support of his own work. That's unusual and probably unethical, but it's not nearly as bad as Churchill's real sin: pawning off rumors as facts.
Most notoriously, Churchill wrote that the U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among the Mandan tribe of Native Americans by distributing infected blankets from a St. Louis infirmary. The truth of the account was "self-evident," Churchill blithely told a university investigative committee. "Such stories have been integral to native oral histories for centuries," he explained. "I've heard them all my life."
So that makes them true? Consider the steady stream of lies that have plagued racial minorities, all of them equally "self-evident" to the people who repeat them. When John Hope Franklin started graduate school at Harvard in the 1930s, most American history books described blacks as ignorant savages, and slavery as a benign institution for civilizing them. Blacks looted Southern coffers in the wake of the Civil War and raped white women, who were saved by the noble knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And the rest, as they say, was history.
It wasn't, of course; it was deceit and folk wisdom dressed up as fact. So Franklin and his generation painstakingly dismantled it, uncovering millions of new documents - including letters, diaries, and interviews - that gave us a more accurate account of our past.
As any historian can tell you, this process is never easy. But it was that much harder for Franklin, who was denied access to whites-only archives or forced to sit in segregated sections of them.
While conducting research at the Library of Congress, Franklin couldn't find a nearby restaurant that would serve him. But he pressed on. "For a Negro scholar searching for truth," he later recalled, "the search for food in the city of Washington was one of the minor inconveniences."
To Ward Churchill, by contrast, the search for truth is itself an inconvenience. Why try to document your hunches with archival material when you can pass them off as fact? Indeed, why visit an archive at all?
Churchill says he was fired because of an essay he wrote after the 9/11 attacks describing the victims as "little Eichmanns." Maybe he's right about that being the reason for his dismissal. But he's wrong about the Mandan Indians and about history itself, which shouldn't be fabricated to fit present-day political whims. Such practices echo the worst excesses of white supremacists, who distorted the past to prop up their own power.
By replacing those falsehoods with a new set of myths, we injure America's ongoing struggle for racial equality. If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, to quote Gandhi, a lie for a lie makes us all cynics. You can't speak truth to power if nothing is true.
No matter what happens to Ward Churchill, then, let's make sure we set the historical record straight. And let's tip our hats to John Hope Franklin, who reminded us why it matters. For America's least fortunate citizens, the truth is often all they have.