CORRECTING HISTORY Last year, after seeing “12 Years a Slave” in preview in New York, I wrote a review and an overview of both the movie and the book in two articles. One article was published in Newsone. Another article about the historic underpinnings of how Solomon Northup’s story was handled in 1853 did not find a publisher, so I am delighted to see that Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” revisited the New York Times 1853 report about Northup. When the film won the Oscars, she tweeted that the New York Times’ 1853 article had misspelled Northup’s name twice, once in the article and again in the title, spelling it as Northrop in the article and as Northrup in the title. The New York Times ran a correction of the 1853 article on Tuesday, March 4, 2014, 161 years later. The New York Times, which was one of the first publications to preview the upcoming film, had also misspelled Solomon Northup’s name in a 2013 article. It also made a correction in 2013. “This post has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: November 6, 2013 An earlier version of this articles title misspelled the name of the author of 12 Years a Slave. It is Solomon Northup, not Solomon Northrup.” In my historic article and in commentaries responding to the op-ed articles about the film and the era in American history, such as The Times’ November 6, 2013 article, “The Passion of Solomon Northup,” I pointed out the complexity of this historic era and its people. One of Solomon Northup’s kidnappers used The New York Times. In 1853, the kidnapper, James H. Burch, whom Solomon Northup and his abolitionist allies sued but lost in court, because a black man was not allowed to testify against his kidnappers or any other white person in court, was later supported indirectly by The Times, because he was able to run a vile ad in the paper in 1853. I commented (and had to comment a few times because another reader responded and said Northup kidnapped himself). This was one of my comments, a point I had made in the article that did not run: PearlDuncan New York 7 November 2013 The New York Times is leading other publications in the discussion of the authenticity of Solomon Northup’s account in his memoir and in the movie, but in none of these articles has anyone mentioned that the Times played a role in the Solomon Northup story. When Northup and his abolitionist supporters, in 1853, sued James H. Burch, one of his kidnappers who kidnapped him in 1841, he lost in court, because the law of the land at the time said a black man could not testify against any white person in court. Well, the boldfaced kidnapper, James H. Burch, in 1853, took an ad in the New York Times tarring the free man, Solomon Northup and his abolitionist supporters. Newspaper ads were a major tool of slavers and slaveowners; they used ads to buy and sell humans, and to recapture escaped people. Although this kidnapper was not indicted, because as a black man, Northup, by law was not permitted to testify against him for his abominable activities, the kidnapper then tried to justify his activities by suing Northup. For historians and genealogists, advertisements in publications like The New York Times in that era are a good source of information about the social and legal cultures. opinionator.blogs.nytimes/2013/11/06/the-passion-of-solomon-northup/?action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults%230&version=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry46%23%2F2013+northrop
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 06:27:58 +0000
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