TRIBUTES

Why do we offer tributes to others? To show respect, gratitude, and admiration for another person. Most importantly, tributes can highlight the long arc of history that has unfolded within one honoree’s life and work.

May the following tributes to the late Professor of History, Dr. James Brewer Stewart, Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, spark a deeper understanding of and gratitude for a man who included racial justice work in his epicenter; it was part of his being.

The tributes, written by those who knew him well, prominent in their own spheres of expertise, highlight Jim’s extraordinary scholarly life — his impact to Macalester College, his influence to students who became future historians, his achievements as Professor and Professor Emeritus, and his legacy of racial justice work.

  • Peter Rachleff: Emeritus Professor of History, Macalester College and Co-Founder and Emeritus Co-Executive Director, East Side Freedom Library 

  • Donald Yacovone: Lifetime Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University

  • Walter D. Greason: DeWitt Wallace Professor of History, Macalester College, and Founding President of the Timothy Thomas Fortune Foundation

  • Tsione Wolde-Michael

Peter Rachleff, Emeritus Professor of History, Macalester College and Co-Founder and Emeritus Co-Executive Director, East Side Freedom Library

I had the good fortune to know Jim for more than forty years. He was my role model and my colleague at Macalester, in the historical profession, and in the world at large. As sad as I am that he has passed on, I am encouraged to know that his impact and influence lives on, and will live on for generations to come. Not only are Jim and Dottie's children and grandchildren carrying it on, but Jim's students now have students of their own (are they Jim's "grandstudents"?) whose learning experiences are influenced by Jim's work.

I arrived at Macalester in the fall semester of 1982. I had completed my Ph.D. a year earlier and, while I had done some adjunct teaching, Macalester was my first full-time teaching job. Jim helped me conceive and design my courses in American history, encouraging me to place my interests in labor, immigration, and African American history, front and center. He also encouraged me to seek out collaborators across the Twin Cities, from faculty at the University of Minnesota to activists in the labor and racial justice movements. Perhaps most importantly, with my office located near his, I came to understand the significance of the lines of students waiting their turn to talk with him during his office hours. Yes, the classroom was important, but the deep learning took place in those one-on-one conversations. Jim taught me what it meant to teach at a liberal arts college.

Jim also modeled for me what it means to be a responsible scholar. His approach to historical research and writing pushed me to develop my mantra that the study of history is about encouraging a conversation between the past and the present. Jim's passion for racial justice informed his selection and shaping of scholarly projects. What can we learn from the past to make us more effective agents of positive change in the present and able to work to create a better future? I kept this in mind every time I began to imagine a research project, a project I could share with my students, my colleagues, and my community.

I also witnessed—and appreciated—the ways that Jim wielded the power that he, occasionally, had access to. As History Department chairperson and as Dean of the Faculty and Provost, Jim not only treated everyone fairly and respectfully, but he led, on the one hand, and worked collaboratively, on the other, to promote progressive change. His advocacy of affirmative action in hiring and in the development of the Cultural Pluralism program helped set a tone, a flow of energy and resources, and a narrative that led to Macalester being invited by the Mellon Foundation to become one of the thirty-odd colleges and universities to participate in the Mellon Minority (later Mellon Mays) Undergraduate Fellowship Program. I would direct Macalester's program from 2000 to 2012, supporting dozens of students of color on paths to graduate degrees and academic careers. Many of them are out there, in the world, having an impact, shaping the next generation.

Last but hardly least, Jim modeled for me how to carry all this forward into so-called "retirement." He continued to be a scholar, a teacher, a colleague, and an engaged member of his community. Jim continued to research and write, to teach, to mentor students, to organize programs, and, above all, to fuel conversations about how we can learn from the past in ways to make racial justice central to the fabric of our lives. He would be the first to say that we still have a long way to go.


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Donald Yacovone, Lifetime Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University

James Brewer Stewart: Liberty’s Hero

Jim Stewart used his ability to read, think, and write at astonishing speeds to become the nation’s leading authority of the antislavery movement. The year after completing his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1968, he began his forty-year tenure at Macalester College where he became the James Wallace Professor of History, chair of the history department, and the college’s dean and provost. In 1977, he helped establish the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), becoming its president in 2004. He and his colleagues created the organization dedicated to the study of American history and culture from 1776 to 1861, as its mission statement declares, to uphold “the highest intellectual standards of the historical profession” and encourage “the broad diffusion of historical insights through all appropriate channels, including schools, museums, libraries, electronic media, public programming, archives, and publications.” With his dedication, innovation, and the unmatched quality of his scholarly output, Jim embodied the organization’s purpose.

          Reflecting his dedication and professional commitment, Jim also founded Historians Against Slavery in 2011 to bring the talents of scholars like himself to current social crises and the world’s horrific dedication to the continuation of enslavement. “We are a community of scholar-activists,” the society explains, “who collaborate with partners across sectors to contribute research and historical context in support of today’s global anti-slavery movements. We are equally committed to using the same tools to confront and challenge the legacies of enslavement in the U.S. today, including white supremacy, mass incarceration, police violence, economic injustice, and more.”

          From 2003 to 2018, Jim also helped shape the nation’s understanding of its past as co-editor of Louisiana State University Press’s series “Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World.” Now offering thirty books on a host of subjects related to slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, emancipation, African American history, antebellum politics, the South, and the Caribbean, the series—like Jim’s own career—helps shape our understanding of the first years of the republic and its struggle over slavery. The LSU series includes the essay collection I edited on Jim’s most favored subject, Wendell Phillips. Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past, a title that Jim coined, includes three of his own essays on Phillips and abolitionism, the last one exploring the Wendell Phillips community in Minneapolis.

          His extraordinary literary output explains his unmatched professional influence during his more than forty-year career as a scholar, teacher, leader, and advocate. In addition to Jim’s books—essay collections and his own narratives—he published many articles in academic journals and in volumes edited by his colleagues. One database found eighteen articles that Jim had published in a wide variety of academic journals with a dozen more in volumes of edited essays. Whenever domestic or international scholars wanted a summary history of the American antislavery movement or various aspects of its history, especially regarding race and religion, they inevitably turned to Jim. Thus, when Cambridge University Press’s World History of Slavery, published in four large volumes from 2011 to 2020, sought an essay summarizing the history of the American antislavery movement, they turned to Jim. Displaying his indispensable role as a leading national scholar, in 2000 he did a five-part interview with PBS’s famed program “The American Experience” on the story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry, and in 2013 he returned and spoke on the wider history of the abolitionist movement.

          But it was Jim’s own twelve books that made the greatest impact. His biographies, introductory studies of the antislavery movement, and edited volumes on women’s rights, William Lloyd Garrison, the long-term impact of abolitionism, pre-Civil War African American history, and the law, defined how scholars would understand the American past. His 1987 edited collection, The Constitution, the Law, and Freedom of Expression, 1787-1987, came with a foreword by Supreme Court Justice Warren E. Burger. The one book that touched the most readers was his 1976 Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. Generations of students would gain their first knowledge of the antislavery movement through his lively 226-page paperback. His colleagues spared no energy in praising Jim’s work. One of the nation’s leading historians and editors, August Meier (who edited one of my books from his hospital bed) declared after reading Holy Warriors that: “Here at last is the kind of synthesis of the historical literature on the abolitionist [movement] for which we have long been waiting.”  The eminent Princeton scholar James McPherson succinctly declared: “This is the best survey of the abolitionist movement in print.”

         Jim’s favorite of his many books, however, quickly became his 1986 biography of the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero, the absolute best of all the studies of the uncompromising antislavery leader stretching back to 1884, as the Boston Globe had declared, “gives Phillips his deserved place in the American pantheon of reformers.” It also gave Jim a model for his own life. An uncompromising advocate for African Americans, women’s rights, labor rights, free speech and a free press, and religious freedom, Phillips became, in no small measure, a living model for Jim. Indeed, as Jim explained to me less than a year ago, he was Wendell Phillips. His beautiful biography of the radical Bostonian became so much a part of his everyday consciousness that Jim believed he embodied the radical reformer; that Phillips’s divine spirit had come through the ages and rested in his soul. “I am,” Jim told me, “Wendell Phillips.”


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Walter D. Greason, DeWitt Wallace Professor of History,
Macalester College, and Founding President of the Timothy Thomas Fortune Foundation

The Standard Bearer

Historians never stop fighting the wars that shaped human civilization. Where generals and warriors bleed and give their lives for those battles, the scholars hold to the evidence and argue the meaning of those sacrifices ferociously. No scholarly historian represents the courage and determination for these academic battles more than James Brewer Stewart.

To understand his significance, one must approach the subject with a knowledge of a century of writing that preceded him. Professor Stewart entered into the academy at a time of fierce revisionism when historians began to challenge longstanding assumptions about racial enslavement in the United States. His choices shaped a campaign of unrelenting battles against anyone who maintained the falsehoods and bad evidence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in professional research. Even the most basic understanding of abolitionism required more intense scrutiny. Stewart gave his all to this work.

The Civil War and its causes remain the most popular topics in American history, perhaps only recently challenged by the mythology that has grown around the Second World War. Stewart requires us all to take the study of history more seriously by returning to the American Revolution. Unlike historians almost one hundred and fifty years ago, he looked at the late eighteenth century and brought attention to critical evidence that was not available in previous generations. He followed in the tradition of Charles and Mary Beard in grounding his analysis in rare documents and sharp, historical insight. Stewart examined the transformation of the intellectual foundations of abolitionism between 1763 and 1876 in order to raise the standard of human freedom as the topic most worthy of sustained inquiry.

In this way, he removed a collection of social blinders from the eyes of academic historians. Professor Stewart was the standard bearer for the profession.

Most importantly, as a leading voice in the study of the early American republic, he emphasized questions that discerned liberty from freedom and both ideas from equality. Too often, these terms are confused, intentionally or unintentionally, for rhetorical purposes. Even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams recognized the utility of popular confusion on these subjects in their debates about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence or the framing of the United States Constitution. Alongside luminaries like Barbara Fields, Nell Irvin Painter, Peter Kolchin, David Blight, Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter Wolf, Gerald Horne, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, Professor Stewart redefined a range of historical truths about the American Revolution and its aftermath. He focused on the ways that bondage evolved, specifically through the rigorous examination of the work of Wendell Phillips. He carefully traced abolitionist thought and opinion for decades to show the slow progress towards universal human equality as it unfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century. He stands alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, Winthrop Jordan, and George Fredrickson as scholars of the first order on the questions of race, racism, and democracy. His voice contributes substantially to the foundations of American and world historiography, earning study alongside Edward Carr, Peter Novick, John Gaddis, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Julie Des Jardins, Maghan Keita, Juliet E.K. Walker, and Janet Abu-Lughod. Professor Stewart understood that history is a living, breathing endeavor that requires constant vigilance, careful inquiry, and a commitment to powerful writing. The responsibility to shape a contributing voice to posterity is heavy. It is much more intricate than simple appeals to the “judgment of history” too often offered in mass media, law, or other fields of study. At its base, this work is about a profound humility. It requires decades of sustained effort to achieve a preliminary perspective on a topic. Then, decades more are required to collaborate through peer review and create a shared community of knowledge. In our last years, there is often a temptation to cynicism and a rejection of a voracious presentism that constantly threatens to disregard the past. Professor Stewart resisted all of these forces as he forged a path that requires all of us to understand abolitionism as the foundation of true freedom AND liberty in the world ahead.

A career in education raises the bar for sustained achievement. Many people believe that a research historian is the highest calling. That path certainly leads to some of the better financial rewards as well as some symbolic recognitions that endure. It is a different character who commits to the life of liberal arts education, blending research with teaching and service. Many outstanding leaders make a profound difference in the classroom for their students. Professor Stewart certainly exceeded this criterion as several of his students have gone forward to pursue doctoral degrees, earn faculty positions, achieve tenure and promotion in distinguished institutions, and win professional awards for their own research. These measures match any of the research scholars who have done professional history over the last century. However, Professor Stewart also served as Dean of the Faculty and Provost in a crucial era at Macalester College. In a fraught era of faculty governance, he protected the voice of the intellectual in higher education. He chose the difficult path to bring new voices into the academy and expand the impact of the college in its metropolitan area. He created curriculum and public initiatives that expanded the importance of education across Minnesota, in the United States, and around the world. This combination of research, teaching, service, and leadership is extraordinarily rare. In a world of over 8 billion people, there are perhaps 100 human beings who have reached this stature. Professor Stewart was, is, and will be a singular figure in the landscape of human achievement.

A final word, and a personal note, about Professor Stewart must address the last conversations we had. As he put together a public history campaign titled “Pay Attention!”, he frequently reached out to me with grace and camaraderie to welcome me into his academic home. We sat and discussed curriculum design as well as the importance of non-academic voices in the work of scholarly production. His efforts to bring schools and communities into scholarly discourse reflected much of my work in other states and communities around the world. He expressed his joy and admiration for the emergence of new areas of study like Afrofuturism and Graphic History. I have not met another senior scholar so open with praise and guidance for the next generation of scholars and educators. For his optimism, for his candor, for his courage, and for his creativity, Professor Stewart has earned a place as a legend of anti-racist education and recognition as one of the founders of the critical study of abolitionism in the modern world. May we all strive to make his vision real for humanity in the centuries to come.


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Tsione Wolde-Michael

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