(Posted 3-15-00)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News Service Contact: Laurie Gengenbach, 336-334-5371
 

RESEARCH BY UNCG PROFESSOR ALTERS
INTERPRETATION OF NATIONAL MONUMENT

GREENSBORO — Compelling evidence discovered by Dr. Willie Baber, professor of anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has prompted the National Park Service to change the way it interprets the Booker T. Washington Monument in Virginia.

Washington, founder of The Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and author of  "Up From Slavery," lived as a slave on the small Virginia plantation until the Emancipation Proclamation freed him at age nine. The site became a national park in 1957. Baber was hired by the park service in 1998 to perform an ethnographic overview and assessment of the monument, and has worked closely with Rebecca Harriett, superintendent of  the monument, and Dr. Amber Moncure, an archaeologist working at the site.

Due to his research, park guides now tell visitors about two possible locations for the "big house" in which Washington's owners, the Burroughs family, lived.

One, the traditional interpretation, shows the Burroughs living in close proximity to slave quarters, and in similar conditions.
The new interpretation draws from Baber's findings in an 1847 deed and other documents to show the big house could have been located in a more reasonable spot, closer to the main road, and on a higher elevation. The area cited in the deed would have afforded owners a larger house in keeping with their middle-class status, better access, and a commanding view of their property.

Prior to Baber's research, the park service had believed the plot was not owned by the Burroughs. Unfortunately, the spot has been disturbed by road projects in the intervening years, making it difficult to prove by archaeological means that a house was there.

In addition to location, the size of the house thought to be the Burroughs residence is also problematic, Baber says. The outline of a foundation is all that remains, and encompasses just 850 square feet - much too small to accommodate a parlor, dining room, kitchen and sleeping quarters for a family of at least 14 people in 1850,  Baber believes.

"They would have had to sleep standing up," he says, laughingly.

The new interpretation, when considered in light of what is known about plantation organization in general, presents a more reasonable picture of pre-Civil War life in which owners in Hales Ford, Va., typically lived separate from slaves in handsomer homes, though not in homes rivaling the grandeur of those on very large plantations, Baber says.

The park service agrees with his interpretation to a point, but isn't ready to throw away the old interpretation. "They've been burned too many times," he says.

Instead, it offers visitors both versions while Baber continues to seek more evidence in census data and the papers of Booker T. Washington that would confirm his theory.

The traditional interpretation was bolstered in part by Washington's own description of his boyhood home during a speech he gave at the site in 1908 when he was 52 years old.

"I'm afraid I wouldn't know the place," he is quoted as saying. "Everything is changed. After all, the most remarkable changes that I notice," he continued laughingly, "is the size of things. It seems incredible to me that the Ferguson place (a neighboring farm), where I used to go, as a boy, is now only just across the road. The old dining room too, is not near as large now as it used to be, or at least as it seemed to, once."

The words traditionally have been understood to mean Washington was confessing to an unreliable childhood memory.
Baber believes the words should instead be interpreted within the broader social context in which they were spoken. Washington was speaking to a mixed audience of races and classes at a period of time when lynchings were commonplace. Washington was nonetheless, forgiving to the descendents of those who had enslaved him, and the Burroughs in particular. Baber believes that Washington, as was his custom on similar occasions, used irony in an effort to be both truthful and non-threatening.

Baber hopes his findings open the way for new insights into how African-American history has been interpreted since Reconstruction, and into Booker T. Washington's adept use of language to simultaneously disarm his enemies while galvanizing supporters.

Baber joined the UNCG faculty in 1989, and served as department head 1993-97. His fields of interest include economic anthropology, culture theory, and the Caribbean as a socio- cultural area. He has engaged in several additional applied projects locally, including a field school of cultural anthropology in Tillery, and an after school program for at-risk children at St. Matthews United Methodist Church in Greensboro. He is co-author of the book "Expressively Black: The Cultural Basis of Ethnic Identity."  He serves on the editorial board Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, an affiliate of the American Anthropological Association and is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. He served as program chair of SFAA in 1999, and was recently elected secretary. Baber is a former Fulbright-Hays scholar, and Kellogg National Leadership Program Fellow. He earned his Ph.D at Stanford University.

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