By Guy Trammell Jr.
In 1897, Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller became the first African American psychologist, two years after the proclaimed “father of Black psychology,” Francis C. Sumner, was born. At a time when mental illness sent you to an insane asylum, without cure, Dr. Fuller pioneered connecting institutions of higher learning with laboratory research to develop understanding and treatments. His photomicrograph apparatus permitted his reports to have pictures of cell samples and other specimens.
Dr. Fuller was Boston University’s first African American faculty member. In 1904 he was the only African American of five research assistants selected by Alois Alzheimer to work, in his German research laboratory, on Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Fuller also trained the first African American physicians serving at Tuskegee’s Veterans Hospital.
Justice should mean fairness. However, from investigations into police violence on black skin to drugs being a Black crime instead of a health epidemic, valuable Black lives are being lost to graves and prison, with justice being “Just Us” and the “Us” excluding people of color.
In 1964, William P. Mitchell of the Tuskegee Civic Association successfully challenged Macon County’s “just us” jury selection. Macon had 5,097 Black males and 1,100 white males, but Blacks remained only 1% to 7% of those contacted for jury duty.
Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, great-granddaughter of a lynching victim, recently became the first African American woman on Michigan’s Supreme Court. However, this monumental achievement becomes invisible if she is overruled by fellow justices making “just us” decisions.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dug into the framers of the laws and circumstances of that time in giving her opinion for upholding the “rule of law,” but her single voice becomes invisible among “just us” justices having other motivations.
Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller served as unofficial head of the Neurology Department at Boston University’s School of Medicine and gave 34 years of exemplary teaching and ground breaking research, but was never promoted beyond associate professor.
In 1933, a white assistant professor was suddenly promoted to full professor and named head of the department. Dr. Fuller responded by resigning, with full knowledge that if his skin were a different color he could have contributed so much more to the field that he loved so dearly.
Upon his departure they made Dr. Fuller Professor Emeritus of Neurology. (My goodness!)
Justice without fairness is only an empty promise.
By Amy Miller
What does justice look like? What would justice entail for descendants of the 110 Africans who were packed into the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach America?
How can accounts be settled by a nation, a state, or a family of the men who sent an 86-foot ship to what is now Benin, Africa, to kidnap men, women and children for slave labor in Alabama.
That was a question posed in “Descendant,” an award-winning documentary backed by the Higher Ground Production company of the Obamas and released on Netflix.
Timothy Meaher, an Alabama businessman originally from Maine, bought and paid for the 1860 voyage, immediately afterward burning the ship to hide the evidence. Many of the descendants still live in the neighborhood they moved to when freed five years later. Called Africatown, it is surrounded by factories and highways.
Should the city of Mobile, the state of Alabama, the nation give something back to the people stolen from their lives, families and homeland?
As one descendant noted, justice is impossible. The men and woman who were forced here have died. Would justice mean sending the descendants of the Meahers to another land where they don’t speak the language and making them work without pay?
The story of Clotilda’s descendants has been told only in recent decades, perhaps because of local interest in keeping quiet the story of wealth created illegally. These men and women were brought to the United State a full two generations after the transport of slaves from Africa was outlawed, and only a few years before the Civil War freed enslaved people.
But the history has endured and emerged because of stories passed down through the generations. In 2018, interviews done by author Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s with the last surviving Clotilda passenger were finally published in a book, “Baracoon.”
The documentary has renewed questions of reparations, of justice for people robbed of everything they had and given nothing in return. And in this case, beneficiaries of Tim Meaher are clearly identifiable.
Once freed, Cudjo Lewis asked Meaher for land to make it up to the Africans he had brought to Alabama and the five years of unpaid labor he had forced on them. Meaher refused and the Africans worked and got together enough funds to buy land in what became Africatown.
As the documentary was being released recently, a descendant of the Meahers, who remain prominent landowners in Mobile, reportedly contacted Clotilda descendants with a statement that included: “Our family has been silent for too long on this matter. However, we are hopeful that we — the current generation of the Meaher family — can start a new chapter.”
It is a beginning. A tiny beginning toward healing, perhaps, though questions of justice remain.
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