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RECKONING WITH MY FAMILY’S PAST
RECKONING WITH MY FAMILY’S PAST MARTI TIPPENS MURPHY
As a leader in an educational organization, I think a lot about how we prepare young people to be civically engaged. I believe there are two types of education: formal, what we learn in school, and informal, basically everything else--our families, our experiences, where we grow up, and our culture, to name a few.
My grandparents played a huge role in shaping who I am today. They lived in Nashville, and I got to spend summers and Christmas visiting them. They doted on me and my sisters, and we adored them.
My grandfather was a fantastic storyteller. He told stories from his childhood, including that time he and his cousin hitchhiked out west in the 1930s to pan for gold. He knew so much about our family history, about the ancestors who first came to the U.S. generations ago, and those who first came to Tennessee. Both he and my grandmother could tell you why someone was a third cousin twice removed and not a second cousin thrice removed--without batting an eye.
But most of all, both my grandparents talked about our ancestor Adelicia Hayes Acklen. Adelicia was my great-great-great-great-aunt. Her sister Corinne was my grandfather’s great-grandmother. Adelicia was born in 1817 and was a belle of the antebellum South. She was beautiful and savvy and threw fabulous parties. They said she was at one time the wealthiest woman in the South. In my tenyear-old mind, this was so romantic--visions of Scarlett O’Hara and Gone with the Wind!
Adelicia’s home in Nashville was called Belmont--now the site of Belmont College. The home was occupied by the Union during the Civil War, as was her sister Corinne’s house next door. My grandparents spoke with pride about the family’s survival during the war and also with pain about what they endured and lost.
I never wondered about how Adelicia became wealthy, except I knew it was through marriage. She was married three times, and they said that one of her husbands also had plantations in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas.
As I got older, of course, I realized that plantations meant slavery. I didn’t learn much about slavery in school, either. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started researching Adelicia’s story wondering what might be true--what was embellished? In fact, she was considered one of the wealthiest women of her time. How? Through her marriage to her first husband Isaac Franklin. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, which became the largest slave trading firm in the United States. It was then I learned that at one time Adelicia and Isaac Franklin enslaved over 750 people. Their largest plantation was called Angola--now the site of the current Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum security prison in the United States.
I was stunned at my own ignorance and at the silence surrounding this part of our family story. How could we know so much about ancestors and descendants but nothing about the over 750 enslaved people and their descendants whose lives are still connected to mine in this world we are living in now? For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge and my feelings about our family history. Why bring up such a painful past? To what end?
And then, a few years ago, a relative gave me a book that had been passed down in our family for generations. It had been sitting in storage for many years.
Entitled Religion and Slavery: A Vindication of Southern Churches, the book’s author was James McNeilly, a Presbyterian minister and Confederate veteran from Nashville. Inside the front cover is an inscription from the author to my great-great-great-great-grandmother.
“To Corinne Lawrence: A tried and true friend of many years—and a devoted lover of the Old South, which I have tried to vindicate.” Published in 1911, the book defends slavery as “benevolent and appropriate for an inferior race.”
McNeilly wrote that he endeavored to prove that, in the old system, slaveholders did discharge their “religious responsibilities for the souls of their slaves.” He goes on to explain that the evils of slavery the abolitionists fought were “misrepresentations and misunderstandings” told by people with prejudice against southerners.
Those same passages echoed some of the sentiments I heard from my grandparents--perhaps one of them would say it, but the other wouldn’t challenge it. It wasn’t said with malice but matter-of-factly, not something one would question.
This book became for me a tangible example of how our knowledge of the past gets passed on. Do we learn it in school or in our families? We were just another family passing on the myths and misinformation that was the narrative in our world. The stories that we told.
How do we break out of that pattern? I wish that I had asked my grandparents if they had ever questioned those stories or beliefs. Or had experiences that challenged their beliefs. Were there times when they spoke out, or wished they had? What would have happened if we had those uncomfortable conversations about the prejudices that get passed on and the devastating impact that white supremacy has had on our society. I loved my grandparents who were such an important part of my sense of family, and yet we were part of a dominant culture that passed on a false narrative about history and race, generation to generation.
Since that realization in my early twenties, I committed to learning about the truth of our past. I learned so much, especially from the history of Black women who stood up for justice: Charlotta Bass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Elizabeth Eckford, among many others. Watching them raise their voices in often very dangerous circumstances made me realize what courage really means. That was how I realized that I have the responsibility and a duty to use my voice to speak up. That the duty, to talk about my family’s experience, is an act of speaking up and reckoning with the past in order to let us heal from it and address those legacies with honesty, humility, and commitment.
That conversation with relatives has run the gamut of responses from “You shouldn’t talk about family like this,” to the same shock I felt, to “How can we make amends?” The best conversations--even though they have been difficult-- have been with family members who have been willing to put in the effort to have those hard conversations, because we are at least being honest and struggling together to face our past and our present. I’m especially glad I can model that honesty, humility, and commitment for my nieces and nephews.
We have the power to shape educational experiences for young people--both in school and in “what gets passed on” in families. When we do, if we provide them with the tools of empathy, knowledge of history, and how to use their voice, they will be equipped to create a more just, informed, and compassionate world.
Marti Tippens Murphy is the Executive Director of Facing History and Ourselves for the Memphis region. Facing History and Ourselves uses the lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. In Chicago, Facing History is partnering with the Chicago Public Schools to bring our resources and teacher training to all the schools in the district.
