Positive Power: Interview with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

It is rare for a historian to truly break new ground in their field; for their research to shift the wider social consciousness is almost unheard of. When Gwendolyn Midlo Hall published “Africans in Colonial Louisiana,” her meticulous archival work performed the miracle of retrieving the lost voices of the enslaved Africans who built Louisiana from the ground up, paving the way for slavery historians elsewhere to do the same. Now, pride of place has been restored to enslaved Africans in the history books, and Afro-Creole culture can never again be underestimated— at least, not without flying in the face of historical fact. 

Such a task could not be performed by just anyone, but her memoir, “Haunted By Slavery,” shows that Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has always been a revolutionary. Raised by Jewish immigrants in a New Orleans still gripped by Jim Crow, Hall fought against the racist narratives that surrounded her from a young age, thanks in part to her father, a prominent civil rights attorney. She organized with the Southern Negro Youth Conference, the New Orleans Youth Council (the only interracial youth movement in the South), and the Communist Party. She was tracked by the FBI while studying in postwar Paris, where she met the Black Communist public intellectual Harry Haywood at a May Day parade. When she moved to New York, they each left their marriages to live together. In 1956 they got married, and in 1959, with the FBI hot on their tail, they moved to Mexico. Later, as her scholarly career progressed, Hall never forgot her activist roots, and the fire within that kept her fighting for a better world found its way into the work. To read “Haunted By Slavery” is to bear witness to a life lived passionately for justice, and to talk with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall from her house in Guanajuato, Mexico is to be forever inspired to follow her example. 

Let’s start by talking a little about your childhood. I was struck while reading about the figure of your father, and the integrity he carried in the fight for justice in segregated New Orleans. How did white society react to his civil rights ethics?

He was very fortunate because he just radiated trust, and all kinds of people just trusted him, no matter how strongly they disagreed with him. He played a major role in improving the city, especially in his profession— lawyers and the legal profession in New Orleans— because he was absolutely admired. He set an example for other lawyers to defy the system. I grew up as a small child observing him as he was doing these things, and he made sure I was watching what he was doing.

One of the interesting threads in your book was the ripple effect of resisting the status quo, and how that can awaken a consciousness in other people. I’m wondering what you think this says about the nature of racism.

I think that a lot of Southern whites have felt uneasy about segregation and discrimination—not that they agreed to be that conscious about violence against Blacks— but everybody knew, more or less. What impresses me about reading history is that racism had to be enforced from above. It was nothing spontaneous from below, and the fact that the political system did not allow anybody to attack racism, or to even disagree with it. The South that I grew up in, there was no such thing as freedom of thought. You had to believe what the system taught you, and if you acknowledged that you believed anything else, you were putting yourself in severe danger. My father, for some reason, got away with it, and that made a difference in the community. He set an example for a lot of attorneys, and they followed his example— not as strongly as he set, but it was discussed among the legal profession that the system they operated in was extremely corrupt. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that one or two people can make a difference. 

I actually found that to be one of the lasting impressions from Africans in Colonial Louisiana, where you showed the magnified impact of the enslaved Senegambians, who may not have had overwhelming numbers from a global perspective, but nonetheless lay Louisiana’s strongest cultural foundations. The way you brought their contributions to life, in spite of the historical erasure of African influence, was a major turning point in the way I viewed history. It showed me that no matter how hard they try to bury a story, it has its own will to live. 

Yes, that’s very true. And burying the story is exactly what was done. My work has been to unbury the story and bring it to the surface. And what I found most encouraging was the reaction to the things that I did. When Africans in Colonial Louisiana first came out, it was reviewed over the radio and in the newspapers, and when I got on the St. Charles streetcar everyone was reading their copy.  It was a complicated book, and original, and made people think thoughts they hadn’t conceived of thinking. And it was long. So I was surprised that anyone was reading it. But people began calling into the radio stations about it, and the radio stations told me that [the book] got tremendous feedback from both Black and white readers. And it’s still being read— every generation finds it again.

With your background as an antiracist activist, you prove that someone doesn’t have to claim to be objective to write trustworthy history. So how would you say your background influenced the work?

I was taught all this god awful history, through elementary school, high school, Tulane University, just awful. And I realized how history was being used as a tool to support racism— that was clear to me even as a small child. That was something I was conscious of all my life. As I got older, I realized that as a historian, by writing the true history, I could make the world better. History is a tool for making the world better, but it has to be the truth. 

I will every now and then say what I think, but I never like to hit people over the head. I’ve never even taught that way. I would never get into a classroom and tell people, here’s the right answer. To me that’s not teaching. Teaching is about encouraging people to think their own thoughts, and do their own investigating and come to their own conclusion. To me that’s teaching. 

It seems to me that when you clear away the racist lens from the history of Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, we see a complex multicultural society gripped by the struggle between elites and those whose power they seek to suppress. I could see that element present in the French Quarter milieu you talk about early on in the book, where there is an obvious desire for people to come together interracially. 

That’s definitely true, and that was part of my experience with activism. When I was sixteen years old I played a major role in organizing the only interracial youth movement in the South, and I found that interracialism in New Orleans was a big item, that it was something that really attracted people — they really liked it. 

The energy you write about surrounding this movement makes it all the more painful to see how it destroyed by the white supremacist authorities, like when the police cracked down on the interracial party held in the French Quarter and arrested you and the other atendees. You can almost hear the bitterness in the voice of your friend, the great Black civil rights lawyer Alvin B. Jones, who talked  to you about the demise of interracialism in New Orleans right before he died. 

His life was a very painful thing to me, because he was an extraordinary young man. He was undoubtedly the most brilliant, or at least close, young man to come out of New Orleans. Alvin had a lot of integrity, and honesty, and brilliance, and he was devoted to making things better. And he was so persecuted by the FBI that he just fell apart. 

This persecution seems like a perfect example of the connection between the violence of white supremacy in the South and that perpetrated by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. 

It shows this delusion about American democracy, that I never could swallow because I didn’t experience that much of it. I know that there are regimes in the world that are much worse than the United States in terms of oppression, but there’s this illusion that we do have freedom and democracy in the United States, and I swear I didn’t see much of it. I was followed by the FBI for 40 years.

As evidenced by the letter from J. Edgar Hoover, where he alerted the officials that a “card-carrying Communist Party member” had arrived in Paris.  

Yes, I just found that out. I was reading my husband’s most recently declassified FBI files, and some of mine too, and I found that letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the CIA in France. I was honored.

It seems like moving to Mexico was a liberating moment for you in this sense. 

I didn’t realize it [at the time], but it was a big favor. I was part of a group of leftwing refugees from the United States in Mexico, and [Black artist] Elizabeth Catlett was pretty much the director of it. Mexico was a real revelation to me because it was so different— very Native American. A lot of historians of the colonies talked as if they were simply the reflection of the imperialist power, and that’s the culture they were good enough to teach to the indigenous people. But it wasn't like that at all. People in Mexico did not think like people in the United States, so it really opened up my mind to different ways of looking at the world. 

I think in Mexico the population was at least 40% Native American, but it's also African. During Spanish colonial times more Africans were brought to Mexico than Spaniards, and a lot of them were absorbed by the Mexican population, especially in mining regions and sugar producing areas, pearl diving, anywhere that was dangerous [to work], that’s where enslaved people were brought. There’s still about 3 million Afro-Mexicans, and they’re just getting some recognition now in Mexico. 

But I got the best of Spanish traditions too in Mexico, because I was taught by Spanish loyalist refugees from the Spanish Civil War. There were very hard working intellectuals, creative, open-minded, and really talented people. It turns out that they organized the Collegio de Mexico, and I used their library because it was the only good library I had access to. 

There was one point during this part of the book where you talked about a shift in your consciousness. You wrote, “everyone seemed to be wearing a cold, unemotional mask, and they were telling themselves and each other lies. There was, at the same time, an intense, emotional, nonverbal communication among them, which I was perceiving directly.” I wonder if you can talk more about that shift, and how it impacted your work.

It helped me enormously with my work because it gave me confidence that I could write, and that I had something important to say. I could see my own interaction with people on an emotional level, and I was completely unaware of it until this happened. I felt like people weren’t dealing with reality, they were dealing with what they were telling each other. I realized that if I talked about it people would think I was crazy, and so I made the decision to say nothing, to act based upon this new perception I had of the world, and see what happens. 

That fits really well with the question of historical narrative that you explore as a historian, and how people react to the story they’re told. 

Well there we go again about the role of the individual. A good historian is going to sneak out the truth, and actually [the truth] makes me an optimist. History can be a really depressing subject, because so many terrible things have happened. But even in the Holocaust— the last few years I’ve been reading quite a bit about the Holocaust— and there was the idea during WWII and even afterwards for quite a while, there were ideas passed around that Jews didn’t resist the Holocaust, that they went quietly to their deaths without struggling. Not true at all. No. 

As a woman, and a woman writer, I was struck by the way you described spending your early career in your husband’s shadow, such as the moment where, after you wrote the majority of your husband's manuscript, he insisted that you take your name off of it. So it was exciting through the memoir to watch you come into your own as a historian, with a work as monumental as Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Can you describe how your experience as a female writer and activist influenced the writing process?

Well, I must admit that it was a lifetime struggle to overcome the stereotyped role that women were put in, that I have to admit I largely accepted when I was young. I didn’t think I could accomplish anything on my own, that I could only do it by standing behind my man, and my only choice was to find the right man to stand behind. I could have an impact. It took me a decade of marriage to realize this is not true, this is not me. I have to assert myself. 

What was it like living so steeped in the archives while writing Africans in Colonial Louisiana? Did it feel like you were inhabiting multiple historical periods at once? 

I think it was just a wonderful adventure for me. I was finding new things that I just had no idea existed. They were important things that would change people’s consciousness, and make them more aware of what they owed to each other, instead of thinking of these groups that were separate. I think one of the greatest things about Louisiana culture is that there were so many people, different kinds of people, who worked together, lived together, helped each other, learned from each other. And that’s a tradition that hasn’t died entirely. I think it’s still there.

That’s something you also seemed to learn from experience during your time as an organizer in working class New Orleans.

When I would go door-to-door in the Irish Channel, I would run into some white working class people, and they would start off by talking about how terrible Black people were as like a ritual of greeting. It was like, this is what you are supposed to say. I just let them say it, but then I’d start talking about class, and they would drop all of the racism. 

You talk about your efforts to get outside your “protected middle-class world” in New Orleans, writing, “I started sitting alone on a bench in Jackson Square talking to strangers, something I was forbidden to do,” a quintessential New Orleans activity. And then you took the time to integrate yourself in the world of the New Orleans Waterfront. What was it like to see the port city existing within the segregated city? 

It was just very impressive. For one thing the dockworkers, who were mostly Black, were very sophisticated, cosmopolitan. They traveled all over the world, they knew all kinds of places. The people I dealt with wouldn’t tolerate racism, it wasn’t even a question. When we would go into a hotel or a bar, no matter where they were, if they tried to segregate [the group] or exclude their Black friends, they would trash the place. That’s it, that settled it. 

Yet another example of this pervasive theme in Haunted By Slavery, where knowing more about the world makes it easier to change it. So for my final question, what would you say is the power of historical consciousness in social struggle? 

I have a very hard time explaining how powerful it is. And that’s really what motivates me more than anything in my work, because I know that true history has enormous power for good. Positive power. And you can’t find anything easily to give that to the world. 

(Cover Image Cutting sugar cane Baton Rouge, La., ca. 1900 and 1920, Library of Congress)