Drew Gilpin Faust served as president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, the first woman to do so, but that is by no means the most interesting fact about her. She is a highly acclaimed historian of the Civil War and the antebellum South whose books include This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Faust grew up in Virginia, where she witnessed how much those century-old wounds still stung. Her passage out of Clarke County, Virginia, and into political activism in the 1960s is wonderfully chronicled in her new memoir, Necessary Trouble.
JIM KELLY: For someone like myself, born and raised in New York City, your account of growing up in Clarke County in the 1950s is revelatory. You had Black cooks you admired, and your dad, who bred and managed horses, employed and highly valued a Black female trainer, yet a kind of “soft racism” permeated your world. When did you first realize that the nostalgia for the Confederacy coupled with a large dose of “moonlight and magnolias” romanticism glossed over the enslavement of other human beings?
DREW GILPIN FAUST: I recognized the discrepancy between what I was being told and the realities of daily life in segregationist Virginia pretty early—as my writing to Eisenhower protesting about segregation when I was nine would suggest. From almost as early as I remember, I was very aware of race—of being white—and aware that my whiteness came with privileges. But understanding how worship of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause contributed to racial injustices took longer. Untangling the intricacies of racist assumptions and thinking was a project in which I was assisted by changing racial ideologies and practices all around me, by my own experiences, and by my education.
J.K.: As you say, you wrote to the president of the United States when you were only nine, which is pretty much what one would expect from a future Ivy League president! A few years ago, you re-read your letter for the first time since you had sent it. Were you surprised by any of it?
D.G.F.: I had long told the story of writing to Eisenhower protesting segregation when I was a child, but in the early 2000s I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection of autobiographical pieces by southern historians. I wanted to use the story but thought I should fact-check it—Had I made it up? I had just finished writing a book about Confederate women for which I had read endless numbers of letters to Jefferson Davis housed in the National Archives. Perhaps, I thought, I could find my letter to Eisenhower.
“From almost as early as I remember, I was very aware of race—of being white—and aware that my whiteness came with privileges. But understanding how worship of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause contributed to racial injustices took longer.”
Turned out it was in the Eisenhower library in Kansas, not in the National Archives, but it was there. The librarian who had located it offered to send a copy to me. This was the era before scanning, of course. I remember waiting the week or so until it arrived wondering—and worrying—about what on earth I had written.
What would surprise me most when I read it was the numerous invocations of religion I made in my effort to persuade the president of my cause. I had remembered the letter as based more on American political values, the Declaration of Independence, the notion that all men are created equal. Ours was not a particularly religious family, weekly churchgoers but not daily grace-sayers. Nonetheless, I had turned to religion as my strongest weapon.
I was amazed to find the letter, amazed to be re-united with my nine-year-old self. And in the years since, I have often hoped I could live up to the fierce idealism of that girl.
J.K.: It is remarkable to read in your book that as late as the 1960s a scholar could seriously describe slavery as “essentially a school that had protected an inferior race and had uplifted Black people from the barbarism of Africa by bringing them to civilization and Christianity.” And yet here we are in 2023, hearing the governor of Florida insist that students should be taught that slavery helped teach Blacks valuable skills. Why do you think what I will charitably dub the “silver-lining school of thought about slavery” is enjoying a resurgence?
D.G.F.: We are in a highly reactionary moment in America where backlash and backsliding against the gains of the movement for racial justice are widespread. Key advances are being challenged and overturned. The Shelby case eviscerating parts of the Voting Rights Act is one example; the ending of affirmative action is another. Creating a rosier version of the past diminishes our understanding of the legacies of racial injustice in the present—and our obligation to address them.
J.K.: You attended Bryn Mawr in the mid-1960s, and you write eloquently about the pluses and minuses of both the education and overall environment there. You also tell of the time in 1965 when you hastily rushed a term paper on Albert Camus because you were going to a Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama. Spoiler alert: the Camus paper suffered. You wryly point out that at least Camus would have appreciated your priorities. What do you find so appealing about him?
“Creating a rosier version of the past diminishes our understanding of the legacies of racial injustice in the present—and our obligation to address them.”
D.G.F.: Like many activists of the 1960s—from Robert Moses to Todd Gitlin and well beyond—I found Camus’s writings meaningful and influential. At the heart of what mattered was the idea that one had to make choices and commitments—had to act on behalf of one’s ideals and values whatever the cost. Camus offered an ethics of responsibility and urgency. It was up to each of us to decide where we stood. One didn’t engage in some version of cost-benefit analysis about a just action; one did what was right.
J.K.: Your book ends in 1968, and with you casting your presidential ballot in Clarke County for Dick Gregory, the Black comedian and civil-rights activist who was waging a write-in campaign for the White House. It was, of course, a protest vote, as much about voting for a Black man in Clarke County as it was about the other candidates. Barack Obama carried Virginia both times, but not Clarke County. Do you go back much, and has the county changed in any significant way?
D.G.F.: I don’t go back very often, though I will for some book events in September. Two of my brothers and a cousin live near where we grew up. One of the major changes is that it has become a kind of exurban satellite of Washington, D.C., because of improvements in highways. Washington seemed an eternity away when I was a kid. Also, the percentage of the county population that is Black has declined significantly as young people found more opportunity elsewhere.
J.K.: Since your memoir is about your own social awakening to the racial injustices in this country, what will be the practical impact of the recent Supreme Court curb on affirmative action on colleges and the workplace?
D.G.F.: Colleges and universities are working out how to respond to the affirmative-action decision. Places like Harvard are dedicated to the principles of diversity—both as a social-justice issue and as an educational imperative: an essential part of learning is being with people different from ourselves.
J.K.: Your specialty as a historian has obviously been shaped by where you grew up. Have you ever thought about what you might have focused on if you had grown up in, say, Maine? And is there a writer or historian whose work has been especially influential?
“We are in a highly reactionary moment in America where backlash and backsliding against the gains of the movement for racial justice are widespread.”
D.G.F.: I have never thought about who I would be if I had grown up in Maine! Many historians and writers have influenced my thinking over many years. I write in a chapter of my book about several who provided me role models for girls’ lives when I was a young child. Books have been a source of power for me for a very long time. Some writers and historians who have influenced me include William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and John Hope Franklin.
J.K.: Finally, I can only imagine how difficult being president of Harvard must have been. How did you structure your time? And what do you miss the most about the job? And, of course, what do you miss the least?
D.G.F.: It was a privilege and a pleasure to spend 11 years as Harvard’s president. It was all-consuming—more a form of existence than a job. I was almost always on.
What I miss most is the people I worked with so closely. They were so talented and dedicated that they inspired me, and I felt great comfort knowing we were in it together.
Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, by Drew Gilpin Faust, will be published on August 22 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at Air Mail