Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C. (Paperback)by Jesse J. Holland (Author)
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Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Millions of people visit the National Mall, the White House, and the U.S.
Capitol each year. If they only hear the standard story, a big question remains:
“Where’s the black history?”
Packed with new information and archival photos, Black Men Built the Capitol
answers this question. In this thoroughly researched yet completely accessible volume, Washington insider and political journalist Jesse J. Holland shines a light
on the region’s African-American achievements, recounting little-known stories
and verifying rumors, such as:
• Enslaved black men built the Capitol, White House, and other important
Washington structures.
• Philip Reid, a thirty-nine-year-old slave from South Carolina, cast and helped
save the model of the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol Dome.
• The National Mall sits on the former site of the city’s most bustling slave market.
• The grounds that are now Arlington National Cemetery were, from 1863 to
1888, a self-sustaining village for former slaves called the Freedman’s Village.
Included are hundreds of places in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and
Virginia that illuminate “the rest of the story” for Washington residents and visitors
alike.
About the Author
Jesse Holland is an Associated Press reporter covering Congress and is extraordinarly well placed among Washington's black power elite--the political, legal, academic, and media communities. He took a year's sabbatical from the AP to conduct never-before-done research into the topics covered in this book.
Washington Post editorial!
3:41 PM PST, January 16, 2009
Words for This Journey
By Michael Gerson
Friday, January 16, 2009; A19
Along the Mall, off Independence Avenue near Seventh Street, there once stood a building known as the Yellow House. According to Jesse Holland's book "Black Men Built the Capitol," it appeared from the outside like other dwellings. In the basement, with iron bars on the windows and rings in the floor for chains, and in a yard enclosed by a 12-foot wall, enslaved human beings were kept and sold.
One of them was Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who was kidnapped, sold into slavery and imprisoned there. He later wrote, "Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave's chains, almost commingled."
In a few days, President Barack Obama's voice will mingle with those ghostly sounds and be added to others. Marian Anderson singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," though the Daughters of the American Revolution had mocked that hymn's premise. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where a small plaque now marks a holy place of American rhetoric.
If Obama and his talented speechwriter, Jon Favreau, cannot find poetry in this place, they will never find it.
No doubt they will. But there are enemies of poetry and ambition in every speechwriting process. The political advisers who chant, "It's the economy, stupid." The focus group disciples who explain that the dial groups don't like the words "slavery" or "injustice"; they prefer words such as "buttercup" and "marshmallow." The communication consultants who use "rhetorical" as a pejorative because formality doesn't play well "around the kitchen table." Especially in producing an inaugural address, all of them must be ignored. It is appropriate to mention current events, but the State of the Union allows for specificity soon enough. An inaugural presents different tests for a new president: Can he stop talking like a candidate, and speak for the country and its purposes? Can he place his barely started chapter in the context of the American story?
That story has many themes, but one major challenge: a desperate, sometimes bloody, search for unity. The consequential inaugurals confront the issue directly. Presidents before Lincoln attempted to maintain a political union of fractious states. Once shattered, warned Franklin Pierce, "no earthly power or wisdom could ever reunite its broken fragments." Lincoln set out the ideal of a spiritual union -- a union of idealism and of shared suffering -- that transcended race and took a century to even partially achieve. Presidents in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt asserted a national unity founded on democratic idealism, in a world gone mad from imperialism, racism and ideology. "The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history," FDR said in his third inaugural. "It is human history."
In an earlier inaugural speech, Roosevelt observed, "In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together." Those forces remain at work. Through the tumults of the '60s and '70s, America experienced divisions that turned generation against generation. Today our cultural and political differences seem mainly expressed by derision, in a kind of spiritual secession from one another.
It is the primary purpose of presidential leadership to be a force that draws us together -- to declare, as Jefferson did, that we are "brethren of the same principle," to state and plead, as Lincoln did, that "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies." The origin of this unity for Americans is not an accident of blood or birth, but certain shared moral affirmations about the rights and dignity of all men and women -- assertions contained in the Declaration of Independence, and uncontained in their global influence. The existence of those rights imposes duties on government -- and creates obligations of citizens to each other.
In an inaugural address equal to his moment, Obama will summarize a historical achievement he already symbolizes -- and explain how this flawed, grand, God-shaken story moves forward to include everyone. This hope of unity is stronger than all the hypocrisy of our past and louder than the clank of chains. It led men and women to travel on immigrant ships and the Underground Railroad -- and it explains the amazing journey from the Yellow House to a white one just down the street.
michaelgerson@cfr.org
This is syndicated from Jesse's blog.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating Read--Both as Guidebook and as American History, February 29, 2008By R. Morris "Rob & Matt Morris" (Idaho Falls, ID USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I enjoyed this book and learned a lot about Washington, DC that I had never known before. Mr. Holland writes with a light, easy-to-read style but his content is anything but light. Holland moved to DC only to discover that histories made little mention of the African-American contributions to our nation's capital. So he set out to change that, and this book is the result.
Each page uncovers new facts about how 'black men built the capitol', as well as the 'capital'. What makes this an indispensable guidebook is that Holland starts each section with the standard history of an area or landmark and then gives the reader the 'rest of the story', adding the African-American perspective. If you are looking for a book to teach you about DC, a fascinating city by any standard, this is a good one. If you are looking for a book to learn about DC from an African-American perspective, this is a great one.
I lived in DC for nine years, and thought I knew it well. Jesse Holland showed me, a white American who has a degree in history, just how little I actually knew.
Valuable, entertaining, and should be in every history classroom in the DC area.
Illustrated with maps and photos, including a section of color photos.
Rob Morris, author of Untold Valor: Forgotten Stories of American Bomber Crewmen Over Europe in World War Two.
Learned Something New on Every Page, October 15, 2007By Caroline B. (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
As a resident of Washington, DC, and one who has visited many of the attractions highlighted in Black Men Built the Capitol, I was amazed by all the new information I gleaned from this book. I learned something new on every page! I am a children's book author who loves history and a former journalist. I found it nothing but pure joy to read this book and discover so much more about black contributions to American and world history. Jesse Holland did his homework, and he did it well. Every American home and every American classroom, from elementary school to college, ought to have this book.
