By Robert Heinrich
& Deborah Harding
In the 1980s, Willis McGlascoe Carter's handwritten memoir
turned up unexpectedly in the hands of a midwestern antiques dealer. Its
twenty-two pages told a fascinating story of a man born into slavery in
Virginia who, at the onset of freedom, gained an education, became a teacher,
started a family, and edited a newspaper. Even his life as a slave seemed
exceptional: he described how his owners treated him and his family with
respect, and he learned to read and write. Tucked into its back pages, the
memoir included a handwritten tribute to Carter, written by his fellow teachers
upon his death. Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding's From Slave to
Statesman tells the extraordinary story of Willis M. Carter's life. Using
Carter's brief memoir--one of the few extant narratives penned by a former
slave--as a starting point, Heinrich and Harding fill in the abundant gaps in
his life, providing unique insight into many of the most important events and
transformations in this period of southern history.
Carter was born a slave in 1852. Upon gaining freedom after
the Civil War, Carter, like many former slaves, traveled in search of
employment and education. He journeyed as far as Rhode Island and then moved to
Washington, DC, where he attended night school before entering and graduating
from Wayland Seminary. He continued on to Staunton, Virginia, where he became a
teacher and principal in the city's African American schools, the editor of the
Staunton Tribune, a leader in community and state civil rights
organizations, and an activist in the Republican Party. Carter served as an
alternate delegate to the 1896 Republican National Convention, and later he
helped lead the battle against Virginia's new state constitution, which white
supremacists sought to use as a means to disenfranchise blacks. As part of that
campaign, Carter traveled to Richmond to address delegates at the
constitutional convention, serving as chairman of a committee that advocated
voting rights and equal public education for African Americans. Although Carter
did not live to see Virginia adopt its new Jim Crow constitution, he died
knowing that he had done all in his power to stop it. From Slave to
Statesman fittingly resurrects Carter's all-but-forgotten story, adding
immeasurably to our understanding of the journey that he and men like him took
out of slavery into a world of incredible promise and powerful disappointment.
ISBN 978-0807162651, LSU Press, © 2016, Hardcover, 162 pages,
Photographs, End Notes, Bibliography &Index. $35.00. To purchase
this book click HERE.
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