Remembering Louis R. Harlan

by Raymond W. Smock

Louis R. Harlan, Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, died on January 22, 2010, in Lexington, Virginia, where he and his wife Sadie had lived in retirement since 2003. He ranks among the leading historians of his generation whose body of work on Booker T. Washington and his study Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901–1915 (1958) leave an enduring legacy. He will also be remembered for his many contributions to the historical profession, holding the distinction of being the only person to serve concurrent terms as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association.

Harlan was born in West Point, Mississippi, in 1922 and was reared in Decatur, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The house he grew up in was made from granite from nearby Stone Mountain, the site of Ku Klux Klan rebirth in 1915 and sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s unfinished paean to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Harlan wrote eloquently about his encounter with Stone Mountain in his essay for William Leuchtenburg’s edited volume American Places: Encounters with History (2000).

The Harlan family was southern, but mostly Unionist during the Civil War. He had two relatives, other than his immediate family, of whom he was particularly proud. One was James Harlan, who was the president of Iowa Wesleyan College, a U.S. senator, and secretary of the interior under Abraham Lincoln. The story about James Harlan that Louis liked to tell was that in his desire for efficiency in the Department of the Interior, James fired dozens of clerks, including Walt Whitman for writing poetry at his desk. H. L. Mencken later wrote about that incident: “One day in 1865 brought together the greatest poet America had produced and the world’s damndest ass.” Louis was also proud of his ancestor John Marshall Harlan, a Union army officer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Harlan wrote dissenting opinions in the 1883 civil rights cases that championed the rights guaranteed to blacks by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. Louis spoke to a large gathering of the extended Harlan family a few years ago and reminded them that “John Marshall Harlan had been a slave owner, as his father was before him. History is full of such contradictions.”

Harlan’s college education was interrupted by World War II. He enlisted in the navy in 1942 but managed to complete a BA degree at Emory University before entering midshipman school in 1943. He completed a master’s degree in 1948 from Vanderbilt University and did his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University in 1955, where he was a student of C. Vann Woodward. At a Johns Hopkins seminar Harlan met John Hope Franklin. Harlan was so impressed with Franklin that it inspired Louis’s decision to devote his career to studying race relations and African American history. Harlan spent the 1950s as an instructor, rising to the rank of associate professor, at East Texas State College and then taught six years at the University of Cincinnati, beginning in 1959. In 1965 he made his final academic move to the University of Maryland, where he spent the next twenty-seven years, earning the rank of University Distinguished Professor—one of only six faculty members in all departments of the university with that rank at the time of his retirement in 1992.

It was at Maryland that Louis Harlan launched his career as the leading scholar of the black educator and race leader Booker T. Washington. The voluminous collection of Washington’s papers at the Library of Congress would become the place where Harlan would spend the next two decades mining this mother lode of African American history. Harlan’s earlier study, Separate and Unequal, covered the same period that saw Washington rise to power as the leading spokesman for black Americans. But it was Louis’s good friend, the late August Meier, who first saw the potential of the Booker T. Washington Papers and used them to great advantage in his seminal study, Negro Thought in American 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (1963).

Harlan planned to write a biography of Washington, but when he first began his work, he did not know it would consume the bulk of his career and result in a two-volume biography, numerous scholarly articles, and a fourteen-volume edition of Washington’s writings and selected correspondence. The mid-1960s, of course, was the height of the civil rights movement and the beginning of a major sea change in the attention and prominence given to African American history, yet at this same time, Washington’s image in the pantheon of significant black figures in American history was rapidly waning. Washington, who accommodated to Jim Crow strictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hardly seemed the stuff of heroes to a new generation of activists, both black and white. Louis participated in the civil rights movement, marching in Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and later marching and protesting against the Vietnam War, all the while studying the life of the conservative Republican Booker T. Washington, who had rejected protest as a means to achieve social and political equality.

In 1983, when Louis received the Bancroft Prize for volume two of his biography of Washington, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, shortly before he was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for biography for the same volume, he spoke at Columbia University: “If my remarks had a title, it would probably be, ‘why twenty years with the wrong man?’ Why biography in a period when the whole trend of historical research is toward the demographic, the computerized, the anonymous? The only answer I have found to stop that line of questioning is, ‘Why a duck?’” “Instead of the grand sweep of history as my subject,” Harlan continued, “I have tried to take William Blake’s advice, ‘to see the whole world in a grain of sand.’”

The Booker T. Washington Papers project, which Harlan launched with the backing of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, represented the first effort to treat the papers of an African American with the same documentary thoroughness as those of the Founding Fathers, presidents, and military leaders. Harlan maintained that being immersed in this vast collection over many years made his biography better, even though it slowed down the final product. The Booker T. Washington project was completed before the commonplace use of desktop computers. Only the final index benefited from computer use. But the series was among the first documentary editions to appear in its entirety online, thanks to the University of Illinois Press and the History Cooperative.

Harlan’s last book was a memoir of his service in the navy during World War ll. He was a junior officer on an infantry landing craft that ferried troops ashore at Normandy Beach on D-Day. Later in the war his ship sailed to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Louis would regale those of us working with him on the Booker T. Washington papers with hilarious stories of his military misadventures, and we encouraged him to write the book. He was reluctant because he was not sure his memory alone was sufficient evidence. Only after he reviewed the official log of his ship in the National Archives and after a shipmate sent him a copy of a diary kept against naval regulations, did Louis feel he could do justice to the story.

Louis was a shy man not prone to revealing private feelings in a public setting, but he set personal apprehensions aside and told an honest, frank story of his coming of age in wartime, complete with sexual adventures and the many foibles of war. Like so many of his generation who fought in World War II, he was filled with relief that a new atomic weapon had ended the war. But he would later say that he never learned to love the bomb. By November 1946 he was back in civilian life, attending his first historical convention of the Southern Historical Association in Birmingham, attended by about 100 persons, with the highlight being a wild drinking party of graduate students. Shortly thereafter he married his sweetheart Sadie Morton, and they moved to Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins University had offered him a job as a teaching assistant.

Raymond W. Smock, one of Louis Harlan’s Ph.D. students at the University of Maryland, is director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University. He is the former historian of the U.S. House of Representatives and was co-editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers, editor of a book of Harlan’s essays: Booker T. Washington in Perspective: The Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1988), and the author of Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009).