Leonard L. Richards Jr.

Teaching tough topics in the American classroom is a major challenge for social studies educators, particularly during times of social and political unrest. Conservative influences both within and outside of K–12 education have long questioned the value of teaching race-related topics and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) literature, and have advocated for sanitized versions of American history and literature instead. More recently, these influences have called for the banning of numerous BIPOC-related topics and books by circulating false narratives about well-established academic fields and methodologies such as African American studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Ibram X. Kendi notes that these misinformation and disinformation campaigns have cast scholars who are speaking “from evidence and expertise” not as “researchers and thinkers but as political operatives and ideologues,” where “the more politically charged the issue that the scholar is researching, the more virulent the response.”^[1] As pioneering CRT scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw explains, such attacks on race-related scholarship are part of a bigger backlash against America’s post–George Floyd racial reckoning, intended to prevent dialogue and debate from happening in the American school system.^[2] In other words, they are intended to prevent teachers from teaching tough topics.

Despite these pressures, educators in the humanities are still attempting to raise awareness of and share what they describe as “hard” historical events to get their students to understand the complexities of the American experience. As Hasan K. Jeffries argues, “Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence. We miseducate students because of it. Although we teach them that slavery happened, we fail to provide the detail or historical context they need to make sense of its origin, evolution, demise and legacy.”^[3] As social studies teacher Alnazir Blackman writes, including African American studies in high school curricula can “help to counter misinformation” that students too often receive “through mainstream media and popular culture.”^[4] Scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Heidi Safia Mirza, and the late bell hooks have advocated for a critical-conscious approach to educating in the classroom. As defined by the twentieth-century thinker Paolo Freire, “critical consciousness refers to the processes by which individuals come to understand, analyze, and take action against systems of oppression.”^[5] In contrast to those approaches that avoid, erase, or deny the existence of tough topics, a critical-conscious approach requires teachers to model an understanding of social, political, and economic contradictions; to tell the full story no matter what time period or event is being discussed; and to be willing to take action against oppressive elements in society.^[6] This approach also opens up opportunities to move beyond oversimplified narratives of great leaders, pivotal moments, and national progress, to stress instead what Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman describe as the “grassroots struggle[s]” that were “an everyday activity that involved ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”^[7] Local Black literature and history represent an opportunity to cut through politicized rhetoric based on misinformation or oversimplification, and instead engage students in tough but necessary topics that help reanimate and humanize history and invite student empathy and understanding.^[8]

George Ambrose Newman Sr. was born as a freeman in Winchester, Virginia, in 1885. Newman was a Renaissance man: He was a minister, musician, and poet, as well as an educator for thirty-three years, most of this time as principal of the Effinger Street School in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Newman also left behind a legacy of political activism within the local community, serving as an intermediary between politicians and the new electorate of free Black citizens in the city. Newman’s status as a prominent Reconstruction-era Black voice in local history and politics makes him an ideal figure through whom teachers can address one of the most sensitive historical topics: the era of slavery and its immediate aftermath. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, as in other former slaveholding states, slavery, the Civil War, the fall of Reconstruction, and their wake are visible in Confederate building names—many of them schools—as well as battlefields, former plantations, and the names of well-known slaveholders, including twelve American presidents. However, the numerous unsung heroes of this time period are rarely discussed in our curricula and classrooms, often replaced with repetitive learning about national figures like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. Likewise, little is said about schools such as the Rosenwald School in Waynesboro or the Lucy F. Simms School in Harrisonburg, which were designed to separate Black students from their white counterparts, but which also provided positive learning experiences, mentorship, and a proud sense of community for Black students despite those schools’ lack of government funding and lack of tangible resources.^[9] These Black schools would serve as essential building blocks to foster intellect in a country that was not designed or prepared to accept them as equals. By relegating history to only a few national figures, we not only diminish the impactful role local individuals or participants in social movements have had in creating the world around us, but also lose the opportunity to have a critical discussion grounded in honest but complex truths of America’s “hard histories.”^[10]

George Newman’s A Miserable Revenge and other writings offer teachers an incredible opportunity to fit local Black stories into the larger American narrative surrounding race, education, and injustice. As presented in his biography, Newman over the course of his career was dedicated to the advancement of social and political change in the Commonwealth and the United States. As an educator, public servant, community organizer, and writer, he fought for Black people’s right to social, economic, and political advancement, self-representation, and self-determination. As he writes in his “Observations on the Negro Problem”:

The truth of the matter is that the Negro, like any other human being must work out his own destiny, choose his own habitat, and take his own chances in the battle of life, and just as freely as the dualist choose their own weapons, or the prize-fighters shape their own rules, so the Negro should choose his own occupation, his own home, his own country. (322)

As in the work of his contemporaries Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Newman’s writings ask what approach newly freed Black citizens could or should take in their efforts to thrive in a country built on oppression, a country committed to upholding freedom for its white citizens alone. For Newman, the answer is that, above all else, Black people must have the freedom to choose their own paths—including what to learn, where to go, how to get there, and who will represent them in government.

Set in the antebellum era, Newman’s novel, A Miserable Revenge (1876–77), explores the complexities of free and enslaved Black efforts to survive the system of slavery. Enter two parallel characters, George and Jack. George is a young free Black male living on the estate of the Sowers, a white family revered for having the best estate in the area. George is someone who values learning: “George had learned to read and write and he always spoke very fluently and it always made Aunt Sally mad to hear him speak as proper as the ‘white folk’ . . .” (20). Being literate, he is often despised for his eloquence and viewed as “white-acting” by enslaved Black characters who do not have the same privilege. Unlike George, Jack is enslaved and therefore not literate; he is also portrayed in the novel as being dedicated to his condition of enslavement. He shows us the miseducation of individuals conditioned to believe their survival depends on their obedience, or at least the appearance of obedience. For instance, in chapter 5, when Jack’s enslaver, Joshua Sowers, goes missing, Jack ridicules both George and Aunt Sally for not joining the search: “‘Why don’t you go an’ look for Marse Josh?’ said Jack indignantly. ‘Well, stand dere I’ll find Marse Josh or die tryin’. You an’ George is jist like dum’ niggers in gen’ral.’” (35). This moment underscores Jack’s internalized subservience and the tension between free and enslaved Black people produced by the system of slavery. Indeed, for many of the enslaved characters in the novel, like Aunt Sally, freedom is viewed skeptically—treated as a gamble in that they would no longer be “offered” the “protection” from their so-called benevolent enslavers. Even when all the enslaved characters are freed at the end of the novel, Jack suggests he will remain loyal to and dependent on his former enslavers: “‘Missus, Missus, may god bless you for dat . . . But I will neber—no neber—leave you intirely.’” (145). George’s position in the novel as something of a moral authority indicates Newman’s critique of such dependency. For Newman, denying Black people their right to education leads them to become either trapped or complicit in that system, with no chance of real social mobility.

That said, although Jack is depicted as weak and seemingly obedient, he is also shown to have found the ability to sidestep physical punishments by outsmarting his enslaver. In chapter 2, Jack is able to use his “ignorance” and “submissiveness” to convince Joshua Sowers not to “cowhide” him or, worse, send him to the whipping post in Winchester, Virginia (12). By performing an exaggerated role play of the punishment he expects, he not only humors his enslaver, but convinces him to waste no more of his time with delivering Jack’s punishment. This form of trickery makes Jack a classic trickster figure, a common trope in Black folktales, in which characters depicted as docile or weak use cunning tactics to outmaneuver seemingly stronger opponents.^[11] Though it is possible to align Jack with antebellum stereotypes such as the docile and submissive Sambo, Jack’s ability to evade punishment demonstrates his wit, agency, and ability to fight back against impending abuse.

Newman’s depictions of antebellum white men are equally complex, and similarly point to the ease with which people become complicit in the system of slavery. If Mr. Sowers, owner of the finest estate “in all Virginia” (3), is the novel’s villain, he has his foil in Mr. Armstead, a well-to-do Northerner who migrated to the Frederick County area from New England. Although Mr. Armstead is considered one of the greatest New Englanders ever to have lived in Virginia, it is notable that he does nothing to infringe upon the rights of white Southerners to exercise the immoral practice of slavery. In this way, Newman points to both Southern and Northern complicity in the institution. Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which valorizes white Northern empathy, Newman’s novel reveals a more pessimistic view of white characters, and thereby casts considerable doubt on Stowe’s progress narrative. In A Miserable Revenge, Black characters exist in the background, barely visible to the white characters whose nefarious activities dominate the plot.

Written during the collapse of Reconstruction, Newman’s novel obliquely asks what life will look like for newly freed persons who have now been granted citizenship in a country that once viewed them as only three-fifths of a person. How do wealthy white people like Mr. Sowers and Mr. Armstead continue to benefit from exploitative practices? Who truly can achieve the promise of America, or be part of the romantic narrative arc of The American Dream? From calls for reparations for the Black community to generational wealth and other injustices, talking about tough topics like these is necessary in critiquing American idealism. Newman’s work opens up opportunities for teachers to lay down the historical foundation to have these critical conversations in the classroom.

Although Newman’s novel would work well in African American studies or US history courses for these reasons, the length of the novel might require teachers to pull out a chapter or two—such as chapters 2, 4, 5, or 21—for deeper study, and those excerpts would need to be carefully contextualized. The direct address of the novel’s narrator is likely to be of particular interest for teachers and students seeking to understand Newman’s original audience and historical context. Indeed, students who find themselves identifying in some way with the white or Black characters in the book could be encouraged to consider how they themselves might have responded to the moral dilemmas of the antebellum era. It is also a work that would benefit from comparative study: for example, with abolitionist novels of the antebellum era, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; with nonfiction and fictional works by nationally recognized Black figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Wells Brown, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; with oral histories from the WPA Slave Narrative Collection; or with shorter works by Newman himself, which are included in this volume. Teaching selections from this novel alongside Newman’s biography, including his work in early Black schools and his impact on local Black life, also offers teachers a unique opportunity to showcase the importance the Black community placed then and still places on education. Newman overcame many stereotypes and obstacles regarding who could or should be able to read, write, and create. Together, Newman’s work and life reveal his defiance of antebellum and Reconstruction-era notions that creativity and knowledge were reserved for rich white elites.

Newman’s shorter works also offer rich resources for teaching about the history of race in America through a local lens, as they allow students to explore the debates among Black activists and intellectuals regarding their position and path forward in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America. Judging from his 1877–78 “An Essay on Truth,” Newman took an optimistic position, believing that white people, particularly in Virginia, were ready to live side by side with Black citizens. In many ways, Newman’s essay suggests an embrace of conservative white American ideology that is also visible in the work of other Black Southern writers of his time, such as Booker T. Washington. Much as Washington did two decades later in his controversial Atlanta Exposition Address (1895), Newman represents Black Southerners as loyal to their former enslavers and invites them to stay in the South, where he believes they have the opportunity to build, grow, and thrive. Why pack up and head out west or back to Africa, he argues, instead of building right where you were born?

In this, Newman is directly countering the views of Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet, an important predecessor to Marcus Garvey and his 1920s “Back to Africa” movement. In Garnet’s Address at Cooper’s Institute (1860), he laid out his goals to relocate to Africa and described America as needing to assist in this effort because of its participation in the immoral act of African enslavement. Like Newman, Garnet believed that Africans were without civilization, arguing that “we appeal to the patriot, the philanthropist and the Christian-believing that the generous sympathy of our nature will lead very many to act the part of the good Samaritan towards Africa” and “enter at once upon the work of African evangelization and civilization.”^[12] But Garnet saw the liberation of Black people in the United States in terms of reparations owed to them, whereas Newman promoted a vision of liberation as a form of reconciliation. By encouraging Black Virginians to stay in Virginia, he is also calling upon them to hold white Virginians to their word on Reconstruction-era promises, such as the “commitment” made by former Confederate generals in the Readjuster movement to advance the needs of the Black population. In the classroom, pairing Newman’s essay with works by Garnet or Washington could highlight the differences and similarities among nineteenth-century Black thinkers whose voices are often left out of the US history curriculum. Read together, their works demonstrate the diversity of Black thought on the path forward for Black men and women before and after the abolition of slavery.

Newman’s essay could likewise be compared with the work of Reverend H. M. Turner, who like Garnet was vehement in his support of Black nationalism and emigration from the US. Unlike Newman, Turner saw no justice or equity in Black Americans’ future. In his 1879 Emigration of the Colored People of the United States speech, Turner states:

There is no justice for us where we have no representative, except in the court of the God of the universe. And will you tell me to sit still and wait for better times, trust God, and pray? Such language is the wildest jargon. God would help us infinitely more by leaving such a country, than by preaching up endurance, patience and forbearance. . . .  There is not an instance in the history of men where a people ever overcame the ills that fettered them, unless they fought or emigrated to another locality. And, I repeat, that African emigration is the surest, quickest, most peaceable, most dignified, and most religious way out of our troubles.^[13]

The long “Back to Africa” movement sparked debate over whether African Americans should emigrate to Africa to escape racism or stay and fight for equality in the US Advocates such as Turner and Marcus Garvey saw Africa as a homeland offering dignity and opportunity, while opponents such as Newman and his predecessor Frederick Douglass argued that leaving conceded defeat to white supremacy. Others questioned the feasibility of such a return, considering cultural, economic, and political challenges, and advocating instead for integration and civil rights at home. Black emigration highlighted the tension between seeking refuge from systemic racism and striving for equality within the United States, and although it inspired pride in African heritage, it also raised practical and ideological concerns about identity and belonging. Ultimately, both advocates and critics of the long “Back to Africa” movement underscored the complexities of addressing racial injustice in a nation deeply rooted in inequality.

Any teacher of Newman’s text must also address the language of white supremacy in his work, as well as evidence of white supremacist efforts to sow division among members of the African Diaspora. Like many other Black thinkers of the nineteenth century, he embraces a primitivist and colonialist view of Africans and indigenous peoples, viewing them as uncivilized or even “benighted” by what poet Phillis Wheatley described as “a diabolic die.”^[14] Newman describes Africans as “Hottentot[s]” (309), a derogatory Dutch term used to address Khoi Khoi and San peoples of modern-day Namibia and South Africa. He ascribes to the idea that those who have been deprived of the white man’s education in the United States are ignorant, describing those who are from the “Soudan” as “engulfed in the deepest ignorance” (309). Given what we know about Newman’s life, his arguments about the African continent appear to be based not on direct experience but on information received by white educators and white-authored texts. Unsurprisingly, his views of Africa conform with white America’s stereotypes about the continent and contrast with those of such contemporaneous Black thinkers as Turner, who regularly visited the British colony of Sierra Leone and the American colony of Liberia in West Africa. Newman also endorses slurs and stereotypical thinking about Indigenous Americans, describing Black Americans as “enjoying the free sunshine of the red man’s native home” and saying that “Indians have a tendency, as the old folks used to have, a desire to possess a lock of your hair, which shows that they would rather have your room than your company” (309–10). Newman’s essay demonstrates how ingrained white supremacy is in US culture, while also opening up opportunities to discuss inter-minority racism, as well as stereotypical and hierarchical thinking more broadly.

Much like W. E. B. Du Bois’s later investment “The Talented Tenth” (1903), which refers to the idea that a small, elite group of highly educated and skilled African Americans would uplift the Black community through their leadership, education, and moral example, Newman touts the worth of a select group of Black men capable of leading the Black community through their “morality, industry, and knowledge.”^[15] Such controversial ideas should not be avoided in our classrooms, as they open up important conversations about the intersection of race and class that are with us still today. The “Talented Tenth” provides a starting point to understand why there are still many calls to protect affirmative action and close achievement gaps, as well as why there are calls for prison abolition and reparations. In “An Essay on Truth,” Newman demonstrates his awareness of the benefits that are reaped when one is either born into whiteness or embraces white supremacist ideologies as the norm. Having students analyze Newman’s “truth” in this essay sets the stage for later works by civil rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and John Lewis, whose writings and activism refuse to embrace those ideologies.

“An Essay on Truth” can also be connected to the notion of the “American Dream,” the promise supposedly available to all citizens of the country that their hard work will be rewarded. Historically, many Black intellectuals have critiqued this idea, arguing that the systemic racism, economic disparity, and social exclusion to which African Americans have been subjected shows that the American Dream is really the American illusion. As James Baldwin eloquently stated in 1965, “We have a civil rights bill now. We had the 15th Amendment nearly 100 years ago. If it was not honored then, I have no reason to believe that the civil rights bill will be honored now.”^[16] More recently, these same questions have been asked again as our federal and state governments have sought to dismantle the laws aimed to protect the rights of historically marginalized citizens and erect barriers to teach or discuss works written by thinkers such as Baldwin and Newman in our classrooms. Newman’s essay brings a local voice to this national conversation. Indeed, the essay could open up opportunities to have this debate in a high school government class, asking students to use what they have learned from Newman’s essay to take positions on whether our nation has lived up to its promises.

Lastly, Newman’s essay can be used to query notions of Black male leadership as it relates to theories of racial uplift and progress. Since Newman’s time, there has been a call for strong Black male leadership from within the Black community, and progress was often associated with masculinity. As Newman states, “I don’t want to see a Caesar or an Alexander among our races but we want ambition enough to respect ourselves. We are not wood, we are not stones, but men, and being men we must set our own standard high and then try to climb to the top” (311). However, this focus on Black male leadership and heteronormative masculinity perpetuates gender hierarchies and obscures the leadership and activism of Black women, working-class activists, local organizers, and members of the Black queer community.^[17] Newman’s beliefs about the standards, values, and traits necessary to lift all members of the community higher can be used to query this issue. Why does the Black community need a strong male leader to unite us? What standards or values did Newman believe would lift all members of the community higher? What other models of Black liberation are available?

Bringing this work into a classroom offers students the opportunity to think about why women were seen as background members of society even among Black men, who were similarly oppressed and exploited. To explore this issue, teachers might note the dependency and submissiveness of white female characters in the novel, as well as the lack of mention of Black women in Newman’s contemporaneous essay. Teachers might also note that the representation of Aunt Sally in the novel conforms with the stereotype of Black women as domineering, combative, or “sassy mammies,”^[18] especially during her interactions with Black male characters in the book, specifically George and Jack. In the essay, the models of Black leadership are exclusively men. Cleopatra, Queen Amina of Zazzau, Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, and Matamba  Amanitore . . . the list could go on and on of well-known women leaders whom Newman does not mention, even though he does specifically mention two ancient male European leaders. Much like the white men Newman would have encountered in and around the Shenandoah Valley, Newman understands leadership as the work of men. Again, this provides an opportunity for teachers to build connections between past and present. Using this primary source in a high school classroom could offer a chance to have students analyze the Civil War–era constitutional amendments (thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) in terms not only of race, but also gender. Like the Fifteenth Amendment, this text makes clear that equal rights should belong to all men, effectively denying those rights to women of all races and ethnicities in the United States.

A Miserable Revenge and “An Essay on Truth” were written at the tail end of the Reconstruction era (1865–77), a period when Black people were dedicated to establishing themselves as citizens and hoping to see their rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and protected by federal troops. However, Reconstruction came to an abrupt end due to the Compromise of 1877, which resulted in Congressional Southern Democrats swinging their Electoral College votes to Republican President Elect Rutherford B. Hayes. This election would result in the removal of federal troops from the South and the return of former Confederate generals as governors, mayors, and judges, who were now free to develop segregation practices that were quickly codified in state law. Along with this revival of the planting class in the South, voter suppression, mob law, and vigilantism would become a common strategy to disrupt any form of progression made by Black communities at this time. Indeed, just a year after the end of Reconstruction, Harrisonburg became the site of the lynching of a Black woman named Charlotte Harris. She was accused of convincing a seventeen-year-old Black male to burn down the barn of a white citizen in Rockingham County. Several white men stormed the city’s jail, kidnapped Harris from her cell, and lynched her from a blackjack oak tree.^[19] The case made national news and shone a light on the growing mistreatment of African Americans in the Jim Crow South.

In spite of these events, Black citizens in Harrisonburg and Rockingham would continue to push forward during a time of oppression and lack of reconciliation. Newman himself continued to work as a community leader and activist, attempting to use his influence to bridge the massive gap between Black citizens and their state and local government, and paying his community members’ poll taxes to ensure that they could still vote despite rising disenfranchisement tactics. Like the handful of Black men who would assume office in their state houses and the US Congress, Newman would have the opportunity to serve in a public office as a US Shopkeeper and Gauger for the Internal Revenue Service in 1880, a significant position for a Black man to hold at that time. Using his political influence with local elites, many of whom were former Confederate generals, Newman served as an example of the finesse required to make the United States live up to its ideal that “all men are created equal.”

Despite Newman’s influence in the Valley, he still faced serious discrimination. For example, in his 1891 poem “The Jim Crow Car of Tennessee,” Newman details his experience on a newly segregated railcar in the Volunteer State. The poem is a heart-wrenching reminder of the animosity that Southern white business owners, plantation owners, politicians, and members of the working class held toward newly freed Black men and women. Writing five years before the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision, during his service as Deputy Marshal on the railroad in 1890 and 1891, Newman found himself tested as an educated Black man and as a representative of the federal government, forced in Tennessee to travel in the “colored” car. In response, he writes:

The Jim Crow Car has seats for all
Who bear the fateful mark,
And, though you tower e’er so tall,
Get in: your skin is dark!
Your first-class fare is no defence,
Your ticket’s but a lie;
A sham, an insult, a pretence;
This fact you’ll not deny. (314)

 

This ride to Tennessee was a wake-up call for Newman regarding America’s devolving racial climate. It was here that Newman realized that no matter his position as an educator, activist, or Christian, Jim Crow was the new law in the South. For teaching purposes, Newman’s poem could be taught alongside Rev. Walter K. Brooks’s “The Jim Crow Car” (1900):

There is a Yellow man from China,
And Red man from the plain,
Are seated with the White man,
But I could not remain.
However, clean my person,
My linen and my life,
They snarl: “Your k’yar ahead, Jim,
Go thar and take, your wife.^[20]

Like Newman’s poem, Brooks’s poem emphasizes the harsh reality of a social hierarchy that places Black people at the bottom. They were not Asian or Indigenous; they were Black. Under white supremacy, they were the lowest of the low. In this way, Jim Crow was a continuation of the master-slave hierarchy of the antebellum era, maintaining a strict social, political, and economic hierarchy based on racial status by birth, and maintaining continued control over Black people through new forms of control, such as racial terror, convict leasing, sexual violence, and economic exploitation and oppression.^[21] Teaching Newman’s and Brooks’s poems alongside Plessy v. Ferguson would foster in students a critical understanding of systemic racism and resistance through literature. These works illuminate the emotional toll of Jim Crow and connect personal narratives to structural oppression. By pairing poetry with historical context, educators can inspire discussions on race, power, and justice, linking past struggles to contemporary movements for equality such as Black Lives Matter or the current work of the NAACP.

In a later work entitled “Observations on the Negro Problem” (1913), Newman introduces the audience to various stances held by prominent Black leaders of his era, showing a shift in perspective that begins to take shape in the early twentieth century regarding Black citizens’ place in a “progressive” America. Like other thinkers of his day, such as Booker T. Washington in the South and W. E. B. Du Bois in the North, Newman believed that the time for soul-searching was now. He argues that now is the time to carve out a path forward and build self-sufficient Black communities. In particular, he outlines four types of agency that he saw as important in preparing Black youth for a road toward progress in America: “the home, the church, the Sunday School, and the day school” (324), all of which speak to the various roles Newman himself held while living in the Valley. He was a reverend, educator, father, and political activist. The principles he viewed as important for himself are what he imagined all Black people should have to obtain prosperity, especially young Black citizens. Contextualizing this essay with Newman’s biography promises to offer students a deeper understanding of the ways in which the many varieties of Black intellectual thought are rooted in specific times, places, political contexts, and individual circumstances.

As a Black male social studies educator who has been raising a family and teaching in the Shenandoah Valley since 2014, I am honored that I had the opportunity to read and engage with this fascinating work by an unsung, yet pioneering educator from my own area. Above all, I am grateful to Newman’s family for their willingness to donate this work to James Madison University’s Special Collections. I applaud them for the strength and responsibility it took to preserve Newman’s work for almost 150 years, and for their vision in ensuring that his work remains a source of inspiration, reflection, and learning for scholars, educators, and community members for generations to come.

 

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