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ARMCHAIR TRAVELER
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Oregonian
Until the Smithsonian Institution opens its National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington in 2015, the best way to learn about African American contributions to achievements around the capital is to read Jesse J. Holland's book. A political reporter for The Associated Press, Holland takes readers on a journey around the District of Columbia and neighboring Virginia with black history as the focus. The story isn't always pretty. Black slaves were hired from their masters to help build the foundations of the White House in 1791. By 1859, the situation had changed enough that Thomas Green Bethune became the first black musician to perform in the White House for President James Buchanan. In 2004, Simmie Knox became the first African American to paint an official White House presidential portrait, of President Bill Clinton. The author fills the intervening years with numerous interesting facts and stories.
-- Terry Richard
The other Founding Fathers
By Andrew Glass
September 12, 2007
As a birthday gift when Jesse Holland turned 32 in 2003, his fiancée gave him a trip to Tidewater Virginia, including a day at Colonial Williamsburg. While there, they signed up for a tour called “How the Other Half Lived.”
Holland, who covers the labor beat at The Associated Press’ Washington bureau, does not recall the name of the African-American guide who spent an hour telling them about blacks’ contributions to the pre-Revolutionary site.
He does remember, however, that the guide said, “The history you’ve learned here from everyone else is not incorrect; it’s just incomplete if you don’t include us.”
“A light went on in my head,” Holland wrote in a preface to his newly published book, “Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History in and Around Washington, D.C.”
The birthday visit to Williamsburg generated a black-oriented book about Washington — one aimed at meeting the needs of history buffs and tourists alike.
Holland quips that the resulting 192-page soft-cover volume, which has already sold out its modest 4,000-copy first printing, “is a history book that travels well.”
“We as African-Americans have been here since the city was founded in 1790,” Holland said. Personally, he spent most of the last seven years of his career based at the Capitol.
As a member of the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents — the first black elected to that body — Holland would shepherd newly arrived AP reporters through the credentialing process. Since many of them had only recently arrived from out-of-town bureaus, Holland also often showed them around Capitol Hill.
“The more I did those quickie tours, the more it bothered me that there wasn’t more information about African-Americans in the Capitol,” Holland notes in amplifying why he wrote the book.
Before beginning his research, he knew that blacks had long exchanged rumors that slaves had built the Capitol, including the nearly 20-foot, 15,000-pound bronze Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol dome.
Aided by the Architect of the Capitol, the Senate Historical Office and the Library of Congress, Holland verified quite a few of those rumors.
Among his findings:
• Philip Reid, a 39-year-old mulatto slave, helped cast the Freedom statue. The government paid Reid’s owner, Clark Mills, a Bladensburg, Md., ironworker, for most of Reid’s work. Slaves, however, were paid directly if they toiled on a Sunday. Pay stubs reveal that in 1861 Reid earned $1.25 a day for each of the 33 Sundays he worked on the project.
• Slaves also played a major role in the original construction of the Capitol, the White House and other key historical Washington structures.
• The National Mall sits on what was once the city’s busiest slave market. The Mall will soon become the site of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, scheduled to open next year on the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination. In 2009, the National Liberty Memorial, which honors blacks who fought in the Revolutionary War, will open. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History, at Constitution Avenue and 14th Street, is due to open in 2015.
• From 1863 to 1888, the federal government paid former slaves $10 a month to live in “Freedman’s Village,” on a large swath of what is now Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s most hallowed military burial ground. The village, originally a refugee camp for Robert E. Lee’s freed slaves, became for a time a thriving black community that included its own schools, job training centers, hospitals, churches and farms.
Holland comes to his love of learning — and history — from growing up in Mississippi in a family full of teachers.
He was raised on a farm not far from the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi. In addition to owning a farm, his father, now retired, was a teacher, as were his mother, grandparents and many other relatives. His younger brother, Fred, teaches agriculture at Byhalia High School in Byhalia, Miss.
“I love Mississippi,” Holland says. “There’s a long history there, too. Despite its faults, it will always be home to me.”
Holland graduated from Ole Miss in 1994. While there, he was the second black student to edit The Daily Mississippian, the independent college newspaper.
After graduating, he interned at the AP’s Columbia, S.C., bureau, and the AP hired him less than a month into his internship. He remained with AP in the Columbia bureau until April 1999, when he transferred to the Albany, N.Y., bureau, the launching station for his Washington-based career.
As his AP assignments permit, Holland plans to keep updating “Black Men Built the Capitol.” “History doesn’t just stop,” he says. “It keeps on going.”
D.C.’s Black History Revealed
October 2, 2007
By Alison McSherry, Roll Call Staff
Book Is Part History Lesson, Part Travel Guide
Most D.C. residents probably have heard that the Capitol’s Statue of Freedom was built by slaves, but how many really know the truth behind the tale?
This question and dozens of others are answered in Jesse J. Holland’s new book, “Black Men Built the Capitol.”
Holland informs his readers that slaves did in fact build the statue that sits atop the Capitol, as well as much of the building itself and the surrounding monuments, with their earnings going to the slave owners rather than the men who actually worked on the structure.
A cross between a history book and a travel guide, the tome unmasks dozens of facts and stories about the role black people have played in the construction of Washington, D.C., Maryland and
Virginia. The book talks about everything from slaves building the Capitol and White House to Freedman’s Village, which was located where Arlington National Cemetery is today.
“As I kept working [in Washington] I kept seeing more and more of these things that I was surprised that no one knew about,” said Holland, a self-proclaimed history buff.
Holland said the idea to write the book came to him after many visits from family and friends. In the prologue, he says he would take them on tours of the city and they would wonder where the black monuments were. Frustrated by the lack of black history on display in Washington, Holland began writing the book, which he says is designed to feel like the reader is driving around town with him looking at monuments and buildings. The product, he says, is a book with an original approach to the District’s history.
“A lot of the material exists, it’s just in little pieces,” he said. “I could never find one source for the history.”
Holland took an unpaid leave of absence from his position as a political writer with The Associated Press in February 2006 and began writing his book without a publisher.
“I have to admit, I took a pretty big leap in leaving a steady paycheck to attempt to write ‘Black Men Built The Capitol’ with no guarantee that it would ever be published or that I would ever make one penny back out of the time I put into it,” Holland said.
He spent about three months sending out book proposals only to receive a stack of rejection letters. It wasn’t until early July that Globe Pequot expressed interest in the book.
The contract “was concrete affirmation of my idea that the African-American history of the Capitol, White House and National Mall was not only interesting to African Americans in Washington, D.C., but to all Americans all around the country,” he said.
Holland spent time researching in the Library of Congress and National Archives, while also talking to the Senate historian and Capitol curator. “I pretty much lived in libraries for a year,” he joked.
Holland’s favorite story from the book is of Sojourner Truth, a freed black woman who sued a white streetcar driver for shoving her and refusing to let her ride shortly after the Civil War ended. Truth sued the driver for assault and battery and won in D.C. court, bringing the city one step closer to integration.
“That’s an amazing story!” Holland said. “It’s hard to find anything about it in D.C.”
As for what’s next, Holland says he has more ideas than time, estimating that it would take three years to write another book since he would have to balance a new baby and a full-time job.
“I’m working on several projects,” he said. “But I don’t expect anything to culminate anytime soon.”
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