The mix of African mud cloth and period military outfits made it clear this isn't your grandfather's Civil War anniversary commemoration.
As we observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, voices are asserting an African-American role in the conflict widely ignored during the centennial commemoration.
Those voices can be heard through Sunday at the Richmond Marriott, where the 96th annual convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History has drawn more than 1,000 people. The Washington-based ASALH is here as part of the sesquicentennial commemoration. The conference's theme is "African Americans and the Civil War."
John W. Franklin, son of the pre-eminent historian John Hope Franklin, said he is delighted that ASALH — founded by Buckingham County native Carter G. Woodson — is meeting in Richmond.
During the centennial commemoration, the African-American role in the war was submerged beneath such issues as states' rights. "The purpose of the war for us was freedom ," said Franklin, director of partnerships and international programs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open in 2015.
You cannot understand American history and culture without understanding the essential role African-Americans played, he said. And in few places was that role more crucial than Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy.
Franklin noted that Richmond and Liverpool, England, were points on the triangular slave trade along with Benin in West Africa. He noted the increased visibility of Richmond's Slave Trail, the excavation of Lumpkin's Slave Jail and our effort to build a slave history museum.
Down Interstate 64, efforts are under way to commemorate Fort Monroe, where the enslaved took refuge as "contraband" and helped sway Union attitudes about the role of emancipation in the war. Alan Spears, legislative representative for the National Parks Conservation Association, expects President Barack Obama to issue a proclamation this month declaring Fort Monroe a national monument.
Much of a Wednesday afternoon session focused on Harriet Tubman and the stalled effort to create two national parks in her honor. Senate Bill 247 would establish the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park around her home in Auburn, N.Y., and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park at her birthplace on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Tubman was much more than an Underground Railroad conductor. She was an invaluable Union spy, scout and nurse who, with Union Col. James Montgomery, led a South Carolina raid that liberated 800 slaves, and she never stopped fighting racism and sexism, said Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson.
Barbara Tagger of the National Park Service urged people to contact their congressional representatives to lobby for the Tubman historical sites.
"It is her time," Tagger said of Tubman, who died in 1913. "We have waited for almost 100 years to commemorate this woman, and she deserves it."
This is our time to get the Civil War right.
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