> From: James McCall > Article on "artistic license" in Spielberg's "Lincoln" Thanks for that link. Here's something related, and please forgive me if I already reported it in this forum (which I don't think I did): In the New York Times op-ed "In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters," the historian Kate Masur charged that “it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them,” even though for “some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation.” The movie, she says, “reinforces, even if inadvertently, the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history.” The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html . And here's one more paragraph about it from me for anyone willing to hear in yet another way what I keep saying about Fort Monroe: “Inadvertently.” Key word from the historian. She never mentioned Fort Monroe, but she obviously could have. This same kind of inadvertent, unintentional presumption of Black passive fecklessness still pervades public understanding of the freedom movement that began there shortly after Fort Sumter and spread throughout the South. The presumption tends to grant the dignity of being named only to the white general who reacted on May 24 to actions decisively taken on May 23 by the Black self-emancipators Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend. You can see the presumption’s pervasiveness in Virginia’s insistence on celebrating May 24 as that freedom story’s anniversary, rather than May 23, the day when Black people actually began it. In other words, this historian’s complaint about the movie’s gross underestimation of Black contributions is precisely congruent with complaints about underestimation of the reasons why historian Edward L. Ayers calls May 23, 1861, the start of the greatest moment in American history. ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html