Class Readings

This document, either in whole or in part, may NOT be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in
any way, except that you may download one copy of it on any single computer for
your personal, non-commercial home use only, provided you keep intact this copyright notice.

Tangled Roots

By: Jessica Ludwig
Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/22/2001, Vol. 47, Issue 41

Frederick Douglass gave a lecture in Cork, Ireland, in October 1845. He found his audience sympathetic to the antislavery movement, and he went out of his way to praise an Irish nationalist who condemned slaveholding.

Such little-known cultural connections are the focus of Tangled Roots, a Web site developed at Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The project deals broadly with similarities in the experiences of Irish-Americans and African-Americans.

Two researchers affiliated with the center, MaryAnne Matthews and Thomas O'Brien, developed the site. A course that Ms. Matthews took on the Irish famine in the mid-19th century, along with her own experience as an instructor, led her to develop the project: "I taught Irish and black literature, and many of the voices were saying similar things."
http://www.yale.edu/glc/tangledroots

A sense of shared history continued through the 20th century, she says, pointing to the Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland. Many of them have identified their struggle with that of the American civil-rights movement.

People of both Irish and African descent suffered persecution in America -- the former for their religion and the latter for their race. Cartoons that appeared in such magazines as Punch and Harper's Weekly in the mid-1800's are featured on the site, illustrating how both groups were considered inferior. "What these cartoons demonstrate is that American society as a whole had a shared view of African- and Irish-Americans," Ms. Matthews says.

In addition to political cartoons, the site contains 200 primary documents, including advertisements, court decisions, speeches, and census reports. Four timelines -- tracking displacement, oppression, discrimination, and acceptance -- visually juxtapose Irish-American and African-American histories from the 17th century through the 1980's.

The site also includes oral-history interviews done in the last few years with professors, ministers, and writers of Irish and African descent, discussing race in America and how it has affected them.

Tangled Roots, as the name suggests, emphasizes intertwined histories, but it does not equate the Irish and African experiences. "None of the work we've done would suggest the experience of the Irish in Ireland and America was anywhere near the experience of Africans in America," says Ms. Matthews. What the site looks at, she says, is the groups' "shared history, which isn't to suggest they're the same."

She notes that the site's documents can be used to explore why the two groups never became allies. In addition to competition for jobs, she says, religion was one factor that kept Irish- and African-Americans divided. "Catholics were isolated in their parochialism. Protestants were most active in abolition."

Since the project's debut, in mid-March, the Gilder Lehrman center's Web site has received a 33-percent increase in visits, says Robert P. Forbes, associate director of the center. The site offers information for scholars, instructors, students, and the general public, he adds.

"It's a good start," says Kevin O'Neill, an associate professor of history who is director of the Irish-studies program at Boston College. In the early 1980's, he and another faculty member developed a course, "Black and Green in Boston," that looked at the history and conflict between the two groups on a local level.

"I'm so happy to see this. When we tried in the pre-Web days, it was difficult to get information, and there was some resistance from both communities," Mr. O'Neill says. Connections between the two cultures can be drawn in music, dance, and literature as well, and in a comparison of the Harlem and Irish literary renaissances, he says.

The site also could offer even more analysis of how Irish- and African-Americans saw both themselves and each another, he suggests. "By focusing on how outsiders view the groups, you move the focus away from how the groups view themselves. By definition, they were set up to be competitors for the very same space in society."