The Organization of American Historians meets in Chicago this weekend. So if you don’t mind, allow me to talk shop with 1,500 scholars and teachers.
Can I put in a plug for DEI? Someone should. When President Trump roots out efforts to reflect the diversity of this country, he paints the idea of inclusion as some kind of undeserved sop.
That isn’t how I see it.
Let me explain how diversity is reflected in my work. The 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was in 2021. I volunteered to write the newspaper’s stemwinder article about the fire. Because I’m crazy.
Kidding. Because I was writing a book of Chicago history, and stumbled upon an approach I thought could make the story sing. A huge peril of teaching history is boredom. When everybody knows a familiar story, or thinks they know: Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, a lantern, and the reader drifts off.
I had one fresh fact, pulled out of Carl Smith’s book, Chicago’s Great Fire: Mary Todd Lincoln was living here at the time of the fire. This floored me. I had no idea. Smith tucked that in as an aside on page 48.
To me, it was fresh and fantastic. Lincoln’s widow! In Chicago! One guideline I use is, if I don’t know something, nobody knows. If a fact excites me, I can use it to excite others.
I began the tale with how the summer of 1871 was terrible for Mrs. Lincoln — her beloved son Tad died, she sank further into mental illness. And then the city burned down around her.
That start gave me my structure. I would hand the narrative from one witness to the next — the maligned O’Learys, a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, the night watchman, a fireman. It wasn’t a story about flames. But about people.
The form gave me flexibility — I could include anybody who encountered the fire. Some fell into my lap — a seamstress, Mary Jones, who would be radicalized by the fire and become Mother Jones, an important labor figure.
Others I went looking for. There were not a lot of Black people in Chicago in 1871. But I dug up John Jones, a tailor who lived at 119 Dearborn. I introduced him like this:
“Jones had arrived in Chicago in 1845 with $3 in his pocket. He had been born free in North Carolina, but his white father died, and the man’s heirs conspired to enslave him. So Jones fled to Illinois, first to Alton, then Chicago, where he set up a tailoring business and thrived. He used his success to fight the Black Laws, Illinois codes restricting the rights of Black residents.”
Why go looking for Jones? Well, after the Great Migration, Chicago became the nation’s Black metropolis. It’s 29% Black now, and I imagine the Sun-Times readership is similar. People like to read about themselves. They want to be included. It holds their interest.
Did the DEI police force me? No. I doubt very much whether my editor would have handed my story back with instructions to stick a Black person in.
But I wanted to cast the widest net, and was rewarded by snagging Jones. He was anything but dull. His home became a hub of the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass was a houseguest, as was the wild-eyed abolitionist John Brown.
I had no idea Brown, the avenging angel of American history, stopped in Chicago on his way to Harper’s Ferry and the gallows. That November, Jones ran on the Fire-Proof Ticket and was elected a Cook County commissioner, becoming the first Black elected official in the state of Illinois.
Now Black faces are being scrubbed from government websites. The Smithsonian is being whitewashed. Were the Trump administration running this newspaper — not to give anybody any ideas — they’d eject Jones as a DEI hire. When in fact, he was more grounded in the city than Mary Todd Lincoln, arriving two decades before the president’s widow, and just as interesting.
On every college tour I have ever been on, the earnest guide explains that applicants from Wyoming have a huge advantage, because every college wants to say it has students from all 50 states, and sparsely populated Wyoming is a state. Or if the Yale marching band needs a trombone player, then a B-student trombone player gets waved into the Ivy League.
Is that fair? No. Life is unfair — if history teaches us anything, it teaches that. But the president isn’t lashing out at Wyomingites or trombone players. Diversity promotes people who historically get the shaft, and given how that shaft is back in vogue and being whittled to an even sharper point, DEI seems more important than ever.