FREEDOM LOST, FREEDOM WON

The noted columnist and television commentator explores his family’s long-forgotten history.

Robinson once wrote a long piece in the Washington Post that examined his family’s history through the lens of their longtime home in South Carolina. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, like so many writers, he took the occasion of isolation to pull up a few documents he’d retrieved from that home and decided that, though he wasn’t sure why, “I needed to think about our past.” What that past taught him, in the end, was the central truth of African American history: that for every advance toward being seen as truly American, “in short order, that full citizenship would be revoked.” Robinson finds documentation about the lives of his enslaved ancestors, one of whom, though he was “sold like a piece of livestock in 1829 and then sold again in 1848,” managed to buy his freedom before the Civil War. His son, Robinson’s great-grandfather, became a lawyer prominent in the Reconstruction-era Republican Party, only to be sidelined by Jim Crow laws. Robinson’s excursus into the bitterly contested election that brought Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House is instructive in showing how power politics, then as now, so often relies on trading away the rights of marginalized peoples—in this case, by effectively disenfranchising Black voters in a process that Robinson rightly worries might be repeated in “another acquiescence in the theft of expanded freedoms” today. Robinson’s own experiences in journalism, dating to the 1960s, are similarly instructive in showing that, as he notes repeatedly, Black people so often need to be twice as good to approach parity with whites. For all that, Robinson writes, his family’s history proves that whiteness does not equate to accomplishment: As he says of those marginalized peoples, “Just to make it through the day and face another tomorrow, we have always had to be the most radical and resilient optimists on earth.”

A skillfully narrated journey into the past.