BY MARTIN KICH
The publication of a new biography of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, written by his now elderly “step-sister,” Annye Anderson, with the assistance of Preston Lauterbach. As with just about everything else associated with Johnson, his blood relation to Annye Anderson is actually not quite as straightforward as “step-sister” suggests, for, in actuality, she is the half-sister of his half-sister.
But the major controversy provoked (or, more accurately, provoked again) by the publication of this biography surrounds a photograph that is owned by Anderson and included in the book and that is purportedly only the third known photograph of him. Indeed, this photo was first authenticated as genuine by several experts and then declared a fraud by a slew of highly credentialed investigators, including a number of academics.
This is the photo at the center of the dispute:
The cases for and against its authenticity have been thoroughly chronicled in a 2015 article written by Alan Yuhas and published by The Guardian.
These are the two undisputed photos of Johnson:
But although their authenticity has not been a matter of much dispute, their ownership has been at the center of a lengthy legal battle, which was chronicled in another article published a year earlier, in 2014, by The Guardian.
Reading about these issues filled about two hours of my day today, giving me a rare opportunity to enjoy the conjunction between my professional interest in the conduct of scholarship and my personal interest in blues music.
Then, I coincidentally came across this rare photo, and I could not help but wonder how historians might be arguing about it across future decades:
It shows President Trump at the Ford plant in Ypsilanti, and it was published with the TMZ article “Donald Trump—NO MASKING IT . . . Finally Puts One On.”
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A fine potential tribute story undermined by untempered ideology and prejudice. Is this the executive summary of the modern classroom, and what parents pay tens of thousands of dollars for? As former Emory University professor Donald Livingston said so eloquently, when ideology dominates, thinking stops. It is free speech otherwise, so here’s at least a toast, and blues track, to freedom. Regards, UChicago, ’96
No, it’s not an “executive summary” of what I present in the classroom.
But I can turn the accusation around and ask if your comment is an “executive summary” of your own “untempered ideology and prejudice”? Or perhaps the premise here is that only the kinds of views that I express are products of “untempered ideology and prejudice” whereas yours are unassailably enlightened.
I was president of our chapter for almost a decade, including a three-week strike last winter. I do not believe that I have ever mentioned AAUP in any of my classes, and after the strike, a sizable number of my students expressed how surprised that they were when they realized that I was so centrally involved in everything that occurred. Likewise, I am absolutely certain that I have never mentioned Trump or anything having to do with his administration in any of my classes.
I wonder if you can say the same, with surety, about yourself or faculty who share your political views.
More broadly, the issues surrounding the photos of Robert Johnson are ultimately footnote topics in a historical sense. I would argue that what now seems to be a footnote, a historical curiosity, in Trump’s attitudes about masks may become more emblematic of his whole handling of this pandemic.
And, lastly, I think that your relatively short comment is actually much more pointedly political than anything that I have written in the post.