Eugene Robinson’s family story reflects radical American optimism
When the Union Army seized Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 18, 1865, Black troops led the way. The 21st U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, composed of formerly enslaved men, was the largest contingent of liberators, while the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments triumphantly marched through the town in the days that followed. In the city where the U.S. Civil War had started nearly four years earlier, Black people cheered as the troops sang “John Brown’s Body” and “Battle Cry of Freedom.” “The glory and the triumph of this hour may be imagined, but can never be described,” stated the official record of the 55th’s war service.
In “Freedom Lost, Freedom Won,” Eugene Robinson writes that his great-grandfather John Hammond Fordham was probably among the crowd on Feb. 18 and watched in awe as history unfolded before his 11-year-old eyes. “Everything I know about him,” Robinson writes, “tells me that he watched those Black victors march into town and saw a bright and limitless future.”
Robinson, who worked at The Washington Post for more than three decades and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his opinion columns, has written a deeply personal and moving book that explores American history through his family’s story.
Robinson, who has roots in Charleston and was born and raised in Orangeburg, 75 miles northwest of there, wrestles with what it means to be surrounded by the past. Land, houses, pictures and family lore all carried inspiration and warnings. “Our history was beneath our feet and above our heads; it crammed every cabinet, rested on every surface, and hung from every wall,” he writes. “We were raised in a world of legacy.”
The story starts with a boy named Harry, Robinson’s great-great-grandfather, who was purchased by Richard Fordham, a wealthy white planter and entrepreneur, in 1829. Harry, whose proper name was Henry, lived for 19 years as Fordham’s property. He mastered the art of blacksmithing at a Charleston forge and was sold in 1848 to Otis Mills, a wealthy grain wholesaler. Henry eventually earned enough money to buy his own freedom in 1851.
When Confederate troops opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Henry, his wife, Maria, and their son, John, were sleeping in their small wooden house on the peninsula across Charleston Harbor. At the time, Robinson writes, South Carolina was “the most African state in the nation.” At the start of the war, 57% of the state’s population was Black and enslaved, while another 1.4% were Black and free, like Robinson’s ancestors.
After the war, John Hammond Fordham enrolled at Avery Normal Institute, Charleston’s first fully accredited secondary school for Black children. His academic success drew the attention of the Rev. Joseph Baynard Seabrook, a lawyer and former enslaver, who, as the city’s White superintendent of schools, kept an eye out for Avery’s brightest pupils. Seabrook agreed to tutor John in the law, and the young man was admitted to the state bar in 1874, becoming one of the first Black attorneys in the state.
That same year, John moved to Orangeburg, establishing himself as a young political and civic leader. He was elected the town’s coroner and co-founded a Black militia, the Carolina Light Infantry, that vowed to defend their freedom with force, if necessary. His militia rank, major, became the name by which Robinson knew his great-grandfather when he learned his story growing up.
Major Fordham ascended in politics, regularly attending the Republican National Convention. His rise abruptly ended in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction and the expanded freedoms it had promised. Fordham lost his job as coroner and never held office again. A Confederate monument was erected in the center of Orangeburg in 1893, one of hundreds that went up during the era.
By the time Robinson attended Orangeburg High School in the late 1960s, the “Lost Cause” mythology that romanticized the Confederacy and downplayed slavery was firmly established. “It was being taught to white children as an inspirational fairy tale and to Black children as a warning,” he writes. One of a small number of Black students at the recently and grudgingly integrated school, he felt he had “not just to excel … but to dominate” academically.
Beyond the classroom, Robinson faced the petty indignities of Jim Crow segregation. Black people could not eat at Piggie Park, a local barbecue restaurant, or go to the All Star Bowling Lane.
In February 1968, nearly 50 Black students from South Carolina State University and Claflin University went to the bowling alley and confronted the owner, demanding an end to the segregation policy. After 15 students were arrested, several hundred others gathered outside. Police used billy clubs to disperse the crowd. After two tense days of protests, students started a bonfire on the South Carolina State campus as police and National Guard troops, with bayonets affixed to their weapons, looked on. When one student threw something into the fire, a state trooper fired warning shots into the air. Not knowing where the shots were coming from, several police officers fired into the crowd. More than two-dozen students were wounded, and three — 18-year-old freshmen Samuel Hammond and Henry Smith, and 17-year-old high school student Delano Middleton — were killed.
Robinson, then a high school sophomore, lived blocks away. As a freshman at the University of Michigan, he wrote an essay about the Orangeburg Massacre that “impelled me to become a journalist,” he writes.
When the presidential election results of 2008 came in, Robinson was in a television studio doing commentary for MSNBC. During a commercial break, he called his parents in Orangeburg. “I had the privilege of telling Harold Robinson, who was 92 years old, and Louisa Robinson, who was 87, that they had lived to see a Black man elected president of the United States,” he writes.
His dismay at the backlash in the years since Barack Obama’s election is palpable, as freedom and opportunity won in the civil rights era has come under continuous and unrelenting attack. Still, he sees his family’s “long and proud American history” as evidence that, despite recurring periods of backlash and retrenchment, things have changed.
It is this hard-earned outlook that connects the different generations in his story and offers a lesson for weathering the present. “We, the unloved and erased, are the true American optimists,” he writes. “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.”