Just when Free Frank McWorter is finally poised to take his place alongside Harriet Tubman and other pre-Civil War heroes, the nation is embroiled in an attack on African American history.
McWorter was the first Black man to found a town in America, New Philadelphia, which has just become the country’s 424th national park.
McWorter was an entrepreneurial enslaved man in Kentucky who bought his and his pregnant wife’s freedom by selling saltpeter, a component of gunpowder, and buying land in the free state of Illinois. By 1836, Free Frank, as he was called, owned 600 acres of farmland a few miles from Barry in Pike County. He platted and sold the land to Black and white Americans in order to purchase freedom for 16 other family members.
The bill establishing New Philadelphia as a national park was signed by President Joe Biden in December, at the same time that Chicago’s Pullman National Monument was redesignated as a national historical park.
For both, it means securing the future with additional funding and national recognition.
McWorter’s descendants, and a handful of volunteers forming the New Philadelphia Association, have dedicated decades to getting such recognition.
Named a national historic landmark in 2009, the site was acknowledged as a stop on the Underground Railroad in 2013.
The interracial community was dissolved in 1885 and its acres reverted to farmland. Archaeological digs in the last 20 years have unearthed thousands of artifacts. Today, three 1800s-era cabins sit on original foundations, and a kiosk offers augmented reality stations. New Philadelphia relics are exhibited in museums statewide and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Yet McWorter’s name and achievements remain obscure, even in Pike and nearby Adams counties.
What can we do to get the story of New Philadelphia into the schools? That was the question posed by Mark Philpot, a Quincy Human Rights commissioner, while sitting front row at a Black History Month lecture about McWorter earlier this month.
“We’re watching events across the country robbing our children of real American history,” he said.
He’s referring to the systematic whitewashing of Black history caused by book bans at schools and libraries and similar actions, largely driven by political figures. On Feb. 1, the College Board released a stripped-down curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course on African American studies following criticism from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The revised course eliminates topics such as Black Lives Matter, reparations and the Black queer experience. (The College Board’s top executive insists experts came up with the latest framework months ago. Notably, a newly released letter shows repeated contact between the board and Florida officials.)
Outraged by DeSantis’ attack on the course, hundreds of educators from dozens of colleges and universities responded with an open letter to the governor. “We will not mince words. The contention that an AP curriculum in African American Studies ‘lacks educational value’ is a proposition supported by white supremacist ideology, because it fundamentally demeans the history, culture, and contributions of Black people.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker weighed in as well, saying Illinois will not accept a “watering down” of history.
Such expungement doesn’t affect only education. A subtle form of self-censorship is taking hold in the publishing industry. Who will write McWorter’s story while established Black authors such as bell hooks and Ta-Nehisi Coates are being erased?
Gerald McWorter, a great-great-grandson of Free Frank and a founder in the Black studies field, takes the long view. “I’m not surprised, annoyed or upset about what DeSantis is trying to do. This is a wake-up call for the American people,” he said.
There is always a reactionary racist tendency to target Black Americans, said McWorter, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and author of the recent book “The History of Black Studies.”
While the polarity seems extreme, “it is only a matter of time, one or two generations, when democracy will have some serious changes to reflect the demographics,” he said. That’s when white people will no longer make up the majority.
After meeting with National Park Service officials, McWorter believes there will be an upsurge in knowledge about New Philadelphia families, as well as an increase in tourism and economic development.
That could bring much-needed diversity to an area known mainly for its whitetail deer. With Springfield, home to Abraham Lincoln, to the east and Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, to the west, a cultural heritage corridor emerges.
About a dozen members of the fifth generation, many of whom are educators and activists, lived to witness this moment. In a family letter, McWorter writes: “We are now part of the nation’s history. And all of us are somehow responsible, not only for the memory of our descendants but for the legacy of New Philadelphia.”
In the end, Free Frank McWorter’s story should be elevated from obscurity and written into textbooks; it is a story of courage, love and discovery of a way to exist in a segregated nation. His achievements — buying his family out of slavery, helping freedom seekers, founding an interracial community — stand as a model of hope for those discouraged by today’s racist rhetoric.
