The 1619 Project makes the case… Tulane owes African Americans an apology
26th August 2019 · 0 Comments
The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project commemorates the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, tells the straight up truth about the legacy of slavery and its negative impact on today’s African-American communities and celebrates the triumphs and victories made by Black Americans, despite overwhelming odds.
The 1619 Project, conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, includes 17 original literary works that bring to life key moments in African-American history; captured in essays, poems, short fiction, and a photo essay.
The 1619 Project is historic, both literally and factually. It is a seminal anthology that tells our history through the lens of truth. On full display are the systemic, delusional beliefs of white authoritarians, who concocted preposterous theories that enslaved Africans were inferior beings to justify 250 years of slavery (free labor via death threats to enrich themselves), anti-Black racism and wage slavery to promulgate 150 years of Jim Crow, and the institutionalized racism to continue the economic, political, and social disenfranchisement of today’s Black Americans.
But despite the horrific acts perpetrated against people of color, The 1619 Project is a glowing testament, our own Declaration of Independence, of the strength, courage, persistence and resistance, and remarkable accomplishments of Black Americans.
Any unbiased reader of the 1619 Project can only conclude that reparations and formal public apologies are way overdue, nationally and locally.
Several of the literary works in the 1619 Project involve New Orleans. Considering the number of streets and statutes named for Confederate leaders and that the “First and Only President of the Confederate States of America,” Jefferson Davis, lived and died at 1134 First St. (where a granite column celebrates him as a “Christian chieftain” and “truly great American” and a 2008 plaque from the United Daughters of the Confederacy celebrates the bicentennial of his birth), New Orleans historians fully expected to see New Orleans in the midst of the chronicle.
But what is surprising is the role a Tulane University doctor played in perpetrating the myth of Black inferiority that became normative in the field of medicine and that Paul Tulane, for which the university is named, was an avid racist and Confederate supporter.
In “False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today,” writer Linda Villarosa documents experiments on Blacks by white surgeons and ludicrous theories of white men, including Thomas Jefferson, who believed that Blacks had a lower lung capacity that could be strengthened by hard work, and that there were physical differences between Blacks and whites that made Blacks inferior.
The two most persistent physiological myths — that Black people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs… wormed their way into scientific consensus and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and practice, Villarosa wrote. The most acclaimed creator of these fictional theories was Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright.
Cartwright, a native of Fairfax County, Virginia, began his practice in Huntsville, Ala., before moving to Natchez, Miss., and settling in New Orleans in 1848. In 1849, Cartwright was appointed professor of “diseases of the Negro” at the University of Louisiana, now Tulane University. His “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in the May 1851 issue of The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal bolstered Jefferson’s claim that Black people had lower lung capacity. In the report, Cartwright speculated that forced labor was a way to “vitalize” the blood and correct the problem.
Cartwright made up medical conditions he thought afflicted Blacks, including, drapetomania (the “disease causing negroes to run away”), which Cartwright said could be cured by “whipping the devil out of them,” and dysaesthesia Aethiopis (a condition causing rascality). His position at the university legitimized his theories, which became the accepted norm regarding Black physiology. Carter’s extreme racial views led to his involvement in state and national politics, and he became a widely known slavery advocate.
In 1862, he advised his old friend and patient, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, that the Confederacy should utilize slaves as soldiers in place of “our tenderly bred gentlemen.” On December 31, 1862, Davis asked Cartwright to serve as surgeon general of the Confederacy’s Department of the West.
Clearly, Paul Tulane, Tulane’s namesake, was a diehard Confederate. The owner of a prospering dry goods and clothing business, During the American Civil War, Tulane was the largest donor in New Orleans to the Confederate States of America, He donated $300 (1874 value) to erect a confederate monument in the Greenwood Cemetery, New Orleans. And Tulane has been described as one of the most generous contributors to the Ladies’ Benevolent Association of Louisiana; an institution dedicated to producing confederate monuments.
Tulane also donated extensive real estate within New Orleans for the support of education. According to Wikipedia, Tulane’s donation led to the establishment of a Tulane Educational Fund (TEF), and former Confederate general Randall Lee Gibson’s lobbying of the Louisiana State Legislature to transfer control of the University of Louisiana, a public university, to the administrators of the TEF in 1884. This act created the Tulane University of Louisiana, a private university.
Paul Tulane’s endowment to the school specified that the institution could only admit white students, and the Louisiana law that passed in 1884 creating Tulane University reiterated this condition. Incorporating confederate roots into Tulane University, Tulane installed William Preston Johnston, a lawyer, Confederate soldier and son and biographer of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, as the first president of Tulane University 1884–1899.
It was not until 1963, during the turbulent Civil Rights Movement, that Tulane University admitted its first five Black students. In the 2017-2018 school year, out of a total enrollment of 12,384 students, there were 7,684 white students and 1,018 Black students. In a city with a population that is 60 percent African American, those numbers speak volumes about the enduring legacy of Paul Tulane’s racism.
This article originally published in the August 26, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
