Abstract
In 1883, George Washington Williams published his monumental History of the Negro Race in America (1619–1880), arguably the first scholarly race history depicting African descendants in the United States.1 The times in which Williams wrote were charged with racialized discourse, a discourse that also appealed to the Bible to demean and denigrate African Americans. This chapter seeks to track the times of Williams’s study, to study the response of Williams and other black his-torians to nineteenth-century pseudoscience and racist popular history, and to highlight Williams’s reclamation of the biblical figure Nimrod in the service of black dignity and pride. For our own times, moreover, Williams’s reclamation of Nimrod provides a deconstructive model for African Americans engaged in the transformation of biblical characters previously used to support the demeaning of black subjectivity.2 That is, without necessarily conceding to the logic of positing Ham as the biblical ancestor exclusively of black people, Williams’s depiction of the creative agency of Nimrod, one of Ham’s descendants, deconstructed the logic of those who averred that Ham’s posterity was cursed wholly and perpetually.
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Notes
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883–1915,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 685.
George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America: 1619–1880 (orig. published in 1883; New York: Arno, 1968).
On the possibility of transforming traditional interpretations, see Anthony Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6.
Bruce, “Ancient Africa,” 686. Also, see Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., “The Ironic Conception of American History: The Early Black Historians, 1883–1915,” Journal of Negro History 69 (1984): 54. For a biography of Williams, see
John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, with a new introduction by Eric Foner (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 11.
Between 1884 and 1900, “more than 2500 blacks were lynched.” See Jan N. Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven CT: Yale University Press. 1992) 176.
On this convergence, see Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000), 347.
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 74.
Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19.
Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 188, 277. Payne’s crude pre-Adamite theory posited the Negro as a beast made by God before the formation of Adam and Eve. See Ariel [Buckner Payne], The Negro, What Is His Ethnological Status? (Cincinnati, OH: Buckner Payne, 1867), 22. Payne (30–31) also averred that God’s grief in Genesis 6:6, a grief that led God to send a flood on the earth, was miscegenation, i.e., the mixing of the sons of God with the daughters of men (namely, Negroes). For another example of a pre-Adamite thesis, see
Alexander Winchell, Preadamites (Chicago: Griggs, 1890).
The word was not actually coined until the twentieth century, though the traits were present in the nineteenth century. See Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998), 121.
For example, for the corporate magnates, bank financiers, and railroad kings, Social Darwinism supported a laissez faire economy. That is, it offered a critique against the state’s interference with the latest and most evolved and, therefore, complex form of production, namely, the corporation. See Foner, Story of American Freedom, 121. For the expansionists, Social Darwinism gave the West a mission, namely, to bring the “white man’s” civilization to the socalled barbarian nations. Thus, America’s new imperialists could justify the annexation of Hawaii (1898) and claim expansion into the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) and the Pacific (the Philippines and Guam) as a part of the “white man’s burden” though the securing of American business interests (e.g., in Hawaii and Cuba) were the clear catalysts for the interventions. Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 69–70;
Norman F. Cantor, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 20;
Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001), 190–196. The term “new imperialism” is used to indicate the ongoing role of expansion in the history of the United States. As MacCann states (146), the imperialist tradition in the United States can be seen in the near-extermination of American Indians, the appropriation of Mexican territory in the Southwest, and the proclamation of American hegemony in the Western hemisphere (the declaration embodied in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823). By the end of the nineteenth century, of course, the Monroe Doctrine was being stretched to encompass the Pacific Ocean as well as the land masses of the continent. The term “white man’s burden” is a pro-Western imperialist expression coined by Rudyard Kipling when the United States invaded the Philippines. See Pieterse, White on Black, 77. In truth, moreover, the United States, like the European nations that were engaged in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was also, in part, seeking to secure abroad a wider economic market for its goods and a cheaper labor supply to curb the strength of the growing workers’ movement in the United States and Europe. Bush, We Are Not What We Seem, 86; Pieterse, White on Black, 77, 85;
Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 10. This “scramble for Africa” included the Belgians’ horrific slaughter of the Congolese, the Germans’ atrocities in East Africa, and the British war against the Boers (or Afrikaners) who themselves had taken most of the southern most part of Africa from the Zulus. On the scramble, see
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 17.
Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (New York: Praeger, 1991), 18.
Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Plantation as a Civilizing Factor,” Sewanee Review 12 (July 1904): 257–267.
On this list, see Robert Allen Dunne, “A Protestant Backlash: The American Dream Myth and Marginalized Groups, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 1992), 191, note 5.
On the lingering effects of the hypothesis, see Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 22. In truth, Genesis 9:18–27 was likely initially deployed—most unfortunately—in the biblical text as justification for the despoliation of the Canaanites. As Cain Felder argues, the extant version of the story was “motivated by political developments in ancient Palestine [that] attempts to justify the subjugation of Canaanites by Shem’s descendants (Israel) and those of Japheth (Philistines).”
Cain Hope Felder, “Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Tradition, ed. Can Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 131. On the Americanization of this myth, see
Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Until recently, many scholars assumed that the connection between Ham, blackness, and slavery was first made in the rabbinic material and that sixteenth-century interpreters were influenced both by this type of Jewish interpretation and (subsequently) by proslavery antebellum writers on this score. In recent years, however, several scholars (e.g., Braude and Goldenberg) have averred that the blame for the thesis that Ham was black cannot be placed on rabbinic literature because the association (although present) was not widespread in rabbinic literature and because there is no evidence of a direct link between the rabbinic material and later racist uses of Genesis 9:18–27. On the ambiguity of the Jewish sources, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103–142. According to Goldenberg, we “first see this kind of explicit link between skin color and slavery [in effect, a ‘dual curse against Ham’] in Near Eastern sources beginning in the seventh century.”
David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 170.
H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But …: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972), 130.
Ibid., 276. For more on the genesis traditions, see Mason Stokes, “Someone’s in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall,” American Quarterly 50 (1998): 718–744.
See, e.g., Robert Benjamin Lewis, Light and Truth Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History (Boston, MA: A Committee of Colored Gentlemen, 1844), 280–302;
William Wells Brown, The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (orig. published, 1874; Miami, FL, Mnemosyne, 1969), 36–48.
Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19. Walker’s quote emanates from Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 74.
Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995), 42.
Ibid., 45. The equation of the word “Ethiopian” with people of African descent can be seen as early as the writings of enslaved intellectuals such as Philiss Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Olaudah Equiano. They adopted this lexical designation from their slaveholding English masters who, in the tradition of European geographers, used the expression “Ethiopian” as a generic term for all people from the “African interior.” William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 13.
On the mention of Ethiopia in these works, see Clarence Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 88–90. Cf. Lewis, Light and Truth, 25.
James W. C. Pennington, A Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People (Hartford, CT: L. Skinner, 1841; Detroit, IL: Negro History, 1969), 46.
The P (Priestly) redactor furnishes both an antediluvian set of generations (5:1–32) and a postdiluvian set (10:1–32). See Theodore Hiebert, “Genesis,” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, ed. Walter Harrelson, New Revised Standard Version (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), 23. According to Cain Hope Felder, “The Priestly tradition (P) may be dated 550–450 BCE, beginning in the exilic period (Babylonian captivity) but extending into the postexilic period where the redaction evidently continued.” See
Cain Hope Felder, “Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 130. The Yahwist tradition (J) was “presumably written during the United Monarchy [950 BCE]”; and it “prefers to use the divine name Yahweh (sometimes spelled Jahweh).” See
Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 21.
Ibid., 23–24. The use of the Hebrew bnêy (for the “sons” of Ham and the “sons” Cush, 10:6–7) would likely make 10:6–7 also a part of the P tradition. See Randall C. Bailey, “Beyond Identification: The Use of Africans in Old Testament Poetry and Narratives,” in Stony The Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 171. Beyond these basic conclusions, scholarship on Nimrod has found the story intriguing. First, Nimrod is associated with two parts of ancient Mesopotamia (either southern Mesopotamia [Babylonia], Genesis 10:10; or northern Mesopotamia [Assyria], Genesis 10:11). On this matter, scholars generally believe that the trajectory of Nimrod’s rule—first in Babylonia and from there his rule over Assyria—suggests “the long-standing cultural superiority of Babylonia over Assyria.” s.v. “Nimrod,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1117. Second, through Nimrod and Cush, Ham is associated with Asshur (or Assyria, 10:11), though later (as aforementioned) Asshur is connected to territory related to Shem (10:22). See Hiebert, “Genesis,” 23–24. And just how the latter matter is resolved varies in scholarship. Some scholars aver that P and J had different impressions about Cush’s location. J viewed Cush as modern-day Sudan, while P viewed Cush in association with the Kassites (Kaššu in Akkadian), a tribal federation that ruled Babylon for 450 years from the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries. Hiebert, “Genesis,” 23–24. Also, see
David M. Goldenberg, The Curse ofHam: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20. The Kassites were “from the Babylonian-Arab desert (the Kasshu of the Assyrian inscriptions), a people whose home was across the Tigris, northwest of Babylonia.” See
Yaacov Shavit, History in Blacks: African-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 174. Other scholars hold that the association of Cush and Nimrod with ancient (southern and northern) Mesopotamia bespeaks Cush’s influence over the Mesopotamian territory [through Nimrod], not his actual presence in it, thus maintaining Cush’s presence in Africa. See Bailey, “Beyond Identification,” 170, n. 22.
Whatever one makes of the source history, many scholars would see the figure of Nimrod as legendary, a composite at that and an eponym. See Yigal Levin, “Nimrod the Mighty, King of Kish, King of Sumer and Akkad,” Vetus Testamentum 52 (2002): 366.
According to Genesis 10:9, Nimrod was “a mighty (gibbôr) hunter before (lipnê) the Lord.” In the Septuagint (LXX), “mighty,” gibbôr, becomes gigas, “giant.” Reading the LXX, which translates the Hebrew prepositional phrase lipnê with the Greek preposition enantion, Philo (Questions in Genesis, 2.81–82) understood enantion to mean “against.” Other commentators (e.g., the targumim or Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, and Augustine in Book XVI of City of God) follow in this tradition. See K. van der Toorn and P. W. van der Horst, “Nimrod before and after the Bible,” Harvard Theological Review 83 (January 1900): 18–19. Cf.
Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 46.
In the Middle Ages, along with established features of the Nimrod mythological tradition (Nimrod as a giant, a tyrant, a symbol of pride, and as one associated with the confusion of speech at Babel), two additional elements were added to Nimrod’s resumé: astronomy and imperial “rulership.” Dante’s Divine Comedy includes all of the established features. In Inferno, 31.42, Nimrod is one of several legendary giants (known from classical or biblical literature) in Hell. On this and the links between Dante and Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, see Roger O. Iredale, “Giants and Tyrants in Book Five of The Fairie Queene,” Review of English Studies 17 (1966): 373–381. In the same section, Virgil (Dante’s guide) says of Nimrod “This is Nimrod, through whose wicked device the world is not of one sole speech.” See Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 50. On Nimrod and the tower, see Purgatory 12.34–36. On Nimrod as a symbol of pride in Inferno 31.61, Christopher Kleinhenz avers “Just as Adam and Eve’s transgression resulted in banishment from the Garden of Eden, a punishment charged with both individual and universal consequences, the effect of Nimrod’s insubordination in building the Tower of Babel was the confusion of his own speech and of the world’s languages.” See
Christopher Kleinhenz, “Intertextual Approaches to the Divine Comedy,” Italica 63 (1986): 228. On Nimrod and astronomy, see, e.g., The Book of the Caves of Treasures and The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius ( Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 48). Though both works were composed in Syriac, the extant form of the former is explicitly Christian, with its goal of providing an explanation for “the story of the Magi and the Star of Bethlehem,” while the latter lacks a “link to the gospel nativity account.” See
Stephen Gero, “The Legend of the Fourth Son of Noah,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 327. On Nimrod and imperial rulership, see Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 49.
As noted earlier (see f.n. 24), scholars now know that the so-called Curse of Canaan depicts Canaan (the ancestor of the Canaanites) as depraved to justify the later despoiliation of Canaan. That is, scholars believe that Genesis 9:18–27 “most likely reflects conditions in the tenth century BCE, specifically the enslavement and debasement of ‘Canaanites’ by the Israehte monarchy” (Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 6). And as Isaac Ephraim avers, “as people who shared the same land or held contiguous territories, and as neighbours and relatives, the Israehtes and the Canaanites, like most other states, peoples, and societies must have continually been at cross-purposes, quarreling, disputing, fighting wars with each other, and becoming perpetual political enemies and antagonists. There is little doubt that the story of the curse of Canaan was invented to explain the feeling of the Israelites toward the Canaanites and the reason for their struggle with the people with whom they were perpetually at odds.” See Ephraim Isaac, “Genesis, Judaism, and the ‘Sons of Ham,’” in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim America (Vol. 1 of Islam and the Ideology of Slavery), ed. John Ralph Willis (London, Frank Cass, 1985), 78.
See Josiah Priest, Bible Defence of Slavery (Glasgow, KY: W. S. Brown, 1851), 83. For other examples, see the list provided by Thomas Virgil Peterson, Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1978), 62–63, n. 61.
See Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1990), 125.
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Smith, A. (2008). More than a Mighty Hunter: George Washington Williams, Nineteenth-Century Racialized Discourse and the Reclamation of Nimrod. In: Pinn, A.B., Callahan, A.D. (eds) African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610507_6
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