In Retrospect: George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies

Abstract

George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies Alex Lichtenstein (bio) In 1964, on leave from Wayne State University’s Monteith College, George Rawick traveled to London to acquaint himself with the West Indian Marxist and author of The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James. At the time, James was the mentor-in-exile for a small nucleus of Detroit ex-Trotskyites who called themselves the “Facing Reality” committee. Rawick, having gravitated toward this sect when he moved to the Motor City, sought out the man who remained its theoretical and political inspiration a decade after his deportation from the United States. In London, James asked Rawick to give an impromptu lecture on American history to a small audience in his living room. When Rawick finished speaking, James simply asked “What do you know about the slaves’ reaction to slavery.” “Not a hell of a lot,” Rawick admitted, feebly citing Benjamin Botkin’s collection of Federal Writers Project (FWP) interviews done with ex-slaves during the late 1930s, Lay My Burden Down (1945). “Why don’t you look at those,” James suggested. 1 Out of this encounter grew Rawick’s monumental documentary project, for which he is justly celebrated, the forty-one-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (1972–1979, published in three installments), which eventually made all the FWP interviews with former slaves readily available to scholars and students. The historical profession’s belated willingness to take the testimony of former slaves as seriously as the documentary record left by the slaveholders helped revolutionize the study of slavery during the 1970s. Both the great insights afforded by the interviews themselves, as well as their well-documented flaws, are worthy of a separate essay and will not receive consideration here. Instead, I want to direct attention to the significance of Rawick’s own neglected monographic contribution to the historiographic transformations in the study of race and slavery, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, which appeared as volume 1 of The American Slave in 1972. 2 Intended both as “a substantive essay on slavery” (p. 163) and an introductory companion to the published FWP interviews, From Sundown to [End Page 712] Sunup sketched in eight brief chapters a sweeping history of American slavery and racism. In Part 1 of the book, “The Sociology of Slavery in the United States,” Rawick focused on the African background of the slaves, slave religion, the slave family, the treatment of slaves by their masters, and slave resistance. In a very brief second part of the book, “The Sociology of European and American Racism,” he shifted somewhat incongruously to a complex discussion of the historical relationship between slavery and racism in the New World. For a number of reasons, professional historians dismissed or ignored Rawick’s book even while they applauded the publication of the FWP material. Although he had a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, where he had worked with Merle Curti, Rawick remained on the margins of the historical profession, in part because of his commitment to radical politics. He tended to publish in sectarian journals and pamphlets of the Left; he deliberately taught at places like Wayne State University’s Monteith College and New York’s Empire State College, where he could focus on workers’ education and engage working-class students; and his interest in sociology, dating back to his work with Hans Gerth at Madison, led him to take a job in Washington University’s sociology department (which he later resigned in protest). 3 Indeed, in his review of The American Slave in the American Historical Review, distinguished southern historian C. Vann Woodward mistook Rawick for a sociologist (a confusion engendered, in part, by Rawick’s substitution of the term “sociology” for “history” in the book). Furthermore, while Rawick was a historian, his 1957 dissertation (never published) had been on the experiences of young people during the New Deal in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the American Youth Congress. As a historian of slavery he was essentially an autodidact, which perhaps explains why some reviewers found his book unoriginal. Finally, published rather...