Winthrop D. Jordan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_Jordan

Winthrop Donaldson Jordan (November 11, 1931 – February 23, 2007) was a professor of history and writer on the history of slavery and the origins of racism in the United States. His 1968 book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 earned the National Book Award in History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and other honors. Jordan's assertion in White Over Black that English perceptions about color, Christianity, manners, sexuality, and social hierarchy contributed to their "unthinking decision" to start the trans-Atlantic slave trade and crystallized by the late eighteenth century into a race-based justification for chattel slavery, had a profound impact on historians' understanding of both slavery and racism. The book's discussion of inter-racial sex is credited with inspiring serious scholarly inquiry into that topic—particularly into the relationship between president Thomas Jefferson and his slave named Sally Hemings.

In 1993, Jordan won a second Bancroft Prize for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. In this work, Jordan brought to light details of a previously unstudied slave revolt near Natchez, Mississippi.

Early life and education

Jordan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to a long line of scholars and liberal thinkers. He was the son of Henry Donaldson Jordan, a professor of 19th-century British and American politics at Clark University, and Lucretia Mott Churchill, great-great-granddaughter of the Quaker abolitionists and women's rights advocates James and Lucretia Coffin Mott. One of Jordan's great uncles, Edward Needles Hallowell, was a commanding officer of the celebrated Civil War African-American infantry regiment the 54th Massachusetts of the United States Colored Troops.

As a young man, Jordan attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts before going on to receive an A.B. in social relations from Harvard University in 1953, an M.A. in history from Clark University in 1957, and a Ph.D. in history in 1960 from Brown University, which later recognized him as a distinguished alumnus. Jordan's doctoral dissertation formed the foundation of what became his master work White Over Black.

Career

Jordan's teaching career began in 1955 as a history instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. After completing graduate school, Jordan spent two years as a fellow at the College of William and Mary's Institute of Early American History and Culture. He was Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, from 1963–82, and the school's Associate Dean for Minority Group Affairs Graduate Division, 1968-70. As early as 1962, when he published an article on the status of mulattoes in the British colonies, Jordan's work helped to illuminate the so-called one-drop rule, a uniquely American example of hypodescent. It defined as "black" or African American, persons with any amount of African ancestry, and was adopted into twentieth-century state laws, such as in 1924 in Virginia. His synthesis, White Over Black, looked at the history of race relations in the United States, and was influential for its assessment of issues of interracial sexuality. In assessing allegations about Thomas Jefferson and a liaison with his slave, Jordan was the first historian to use Dumas Malone's timeline of Jefferson's activities to demonstrate that he was at Monticello for the conception of each of Sally Hemings' children.

In 1982, Jordan relocated to the University of Mississippi, where he was the William F. Winter Professor of History and Afro-American Studies for more than 20 years. While there he influenced many graduate and undergraduate students.

Marriage and family

He married Phyllis Henry. They had three sons Joshua, Mott, and Eliot Jordan, and later divorced.

With his second marriage in 1982 to attorney and author Cora Miner Reilly (d. January 10, 2011), Winthrop Jordan became the stepfather of Stephen, Michael, and Mary Beth Reilly. He and Cora Jordan helped to found the first official Quaker meeting in the state of Mississippi.

A few years after his 2004 retirement, Jordan died in his Oxford, Mississippi home at the age of 75 after suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease and liver cancer for several years.

Legacy and honors

In 2005, some of Jordan's former students published a collection of essays inspired by his influence, entitled Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion.

2007, his former students established the Winthrop Jordan Memorial Research Fund "to further Professor Jordan's legacy of teaching, scholarship, and philanthropy by supporting graduate student research in slavery, race, religion, and sexuality."

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Winthrop D. Jordan was a renowned historian, admired professor, and award-winning author on the topics of race and slavery in American history. Best known for the book White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968), which earned him the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and other honors, Jordan spent the last twenty-two years of his career as the William F. Winter Professor of History and F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Mississippi. In White over Black Jordan asserted that English perceptions about color, Christianity, manners, sexuality, and social hierarchy contributed to the “unthinking decision” to commence the trans-Atlantic slave trade and crystallized by the late eighteenth century into a race-based justification for chattel slavery. This argument profoundly affected historians’ understanding of both slavery and racism. The book’s erudite discussion of interracial sex is credited with inspiring serious scholarly inquiry into that topic—particularly the relationship between former president Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. In 1993 Jordan won a second Bancroft Prize for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. In this work, Jordan not only brought to light details of a previously unstudied slave revolt near Natchez but also provided a model of the investigative skill, devotion to source materials, and keen insight that goes into the making of a consummate work of historical scholarship.

A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, Jordan was born on 11 November 1931 into a family of scholars and liberal thinkers. His father, Henry Donaldson Jordan, was a professor of history at Clark University specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American politics. Winthrop Jordan’s mother, Lucretia Mott Churchill Jordan, was descended from pioneering feminist and Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Coffin Mott. His great-great uncle, Edward N. Hallowell, was a commanding officer of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a celebrated African American Civil War unit. True to these roots, Jordan’s midcareer decision to live and teach in Mississippi was fueled in part by a missionary impulse to improve the quality of higher education in the state. In addition, he was a founding member of Mississippi’s first official Quaker meeting, which met weekly at the Jordan home in Oxford.

Jordan attended high school at Massachusetts’s prestigious Andover Academy and graduated from Harvard University in 1953 without having taken a single course in history (because, he later explained, he was a history professor’s son). Although his degree was in social relations, his real major was performing with the Krokodiloes, an a cappella singing group. After a brief stint with the Prudential Life Insurance Company, Jordan began his teaching career as an instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire while earning a master’s degree in history from Clark in 1957. In 1960 he received a doctorate in history from Brown University. His doctoral dissertation formed the foundation of what became his masterwork, White over Black.

In 1963, after a two-year fellowship at the College of William and Mary’s Institute of Early American History and Culture, Jordan joined the department of history at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, where he remained until he joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi in 1982. Jordan taught courses in African American history and early American social and intellectual history and a graduate seminar in research methods. In 2005, a year after Jordan’s retirement, ten of his former doctoral students from both Berkeley and Mississippi published Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion, a collection of essays he inspired.

In 2006 Jordan discovered he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Until days before his death on 23 February 2007, Jordan continued to pursue his scholarly interests, particularly his search for the origins of the one-drop rule—the uniquely American concept that only a small amount of African ancestry is sufficient to categorize a person as black, which he had originally explored in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1962.

Ironically, the Oxford funeral home in charge of filing Jordan’s death certificate incorrectly recorded his race as black. This was not the first time the son of New England seafaring stock had been presumed to have African roots. In 1993 the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education listed him among the year’s “most highly cited black scholars.” Although Jordan’s family and friends viewed his posthumous racial recategorization as an appropriate homage to the man whose life’s work contributed more to our understanding of what he called the “American chiaroscuro” than any other historian, the incident also revealed the enduring significance of racial labels. Mississippi law required the certificate to be amended and refiled, a process that proved an arduous and prolonged obstacle to the administration of his estate. To paraphrase Jordan’s 1999 assessment of public debate concerning the paternity of Hemings’s children, the wonder is not that a man with no known African ancestry was mistaken for black but that it mattered to some people.