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So pleased to have seen a fantastic group of scholars from @CentreC - Professor Pierce’s Islam in America class - to view our 4 documents related to the life of Omar ibn Said. Thanks for a great discussion and travel safely! @WilsonLibUNC
For more information about Omar ibn Said see https://guides.lib.unc.edu/omar-ibn-said and I will add more contextual information to this thread as time permits!
Thread to show how Omar ibn Said is connected to #SilentSam & his story/experience as an enslaved Muslim essential for understanding the Lost Cause & commemoration/memorialization thereof in NC. This is a brief explanation & more details in primary documents @WilsonLibUNC . /1
Omar ibn Said was enslaved in NC by the prominent Owen family of Eastern NC. James Owen was a legislator whose brother John was 24th governor of NC. John attended UNC & was a trustee 1820-41. This photo comes from the DeRosset family of Wilmington papers. Note writing on back. /2
DeRosset papers https://tinyurl.com/y88x75mf Several DeRossets attended UNC, were slaveholders, & active in NC business & political circles, so knew the Owens. The Owens would “show” Omar ibn Said to their friends, exoticizing him & belittling his culture, language, & religion. /3
He would be asked to perform his culture & write something in Arabic so that Owen’s associates would have a special memento to take with them. Therefore, some handwritten manuscripts in his hand exist – Wilson Special Collections has two examples. /4
Supposedly Omar ibn Said converted to Christianity in ~1820. Newspapers reported that he would sit with the DeRossets and Owen friends in church. The DeRossets were associates of Alfred Moore Waddell who wrote the short “biography” of Omar ibn Said on the back of the photo. /5
So the photo may have first belonged to Waddell. He was a white supremacist, defender of slavery, politician, officer in the CSA, attended UNC (class 1854), & became mayor of Wilmington via orchestrating the Wilmington Massacre in Nov 1898. His papers https://tinyurl.com/yc7gql96 . /6
Waddell was part of a group orchestrating the Wilmington Massacre. This group included several white men who attended UNC & not only knew each other from UNC but came from slaveholding families in Eastern NC, all prominent & influential in the Reconstruction Democratic Party. /7
The core group instigating the Wilmington Massacre incl. Waddell & William Rand Kenan, Sr. (UNC class 1864). Kenan was the Rapid Fire Gun Squad Captain of the Wilmington Light Infantry. See the research of LeRae Umfleet & the 2006 commission https://tinyurl.com/y73mwzmp /8
William “Buck” Kenan’s sister-in-law, Annie Hill Kenan, was president of UDC's North Carolina division & in 1908 approached UNC pres Francis Venable to erect a Confed statue on UNC’s campus. For more info see https://tinyurl.com/yceayvl8 Kenan family papers https://tinyurl.com/yatkrod6 /9
Not many degrees of separation b/t Omar ibn Said and #SilentSam. Knowing his story helps understand Silent Sam today. The people who enslaved him & their associates had a vested interest in using him to increase their prominence & put forth a paternalistic narrative. /10
His supposed conversion to Christianity was used to bolster their narrative that slavery was “civilizing.” People such as Waddell dehumanized Omar ibn Said & manipulated his story to further their version of history - the Lost Cause – in the service of white supremacy. /11
As an aside, Wilmington has a huge park named after Hugh MacRae, another leader and orchestrator of the Wilmington Massacre. https://tinyurl.com/yb8kbghe UNC gave him an honorary LLD in 1932, so although he attended MIT, H. MacRae also has a personal UNC connection. /12
Revisiting thread to again make explicit the VERY close connection bt white supremacy, Lost Cause commemoration, UNC, Silent Sam, Omar Ibn Said bc I just realized ANOTHER connection: UNC President Edward Kidder Graham's gr-grandfather was James Owen, enslaver of Omar Ibn Said.
This is not an accident, a Confederate constellation. This network has Chapel Hill at the center & also means that Frank Porter Graham, EKG's cousin, is related to the Owens & realities-legacies of slavery & the Confederacy. UNC is embedded & complicit in these crimes.
And this is why it’s so very pressing and crucial that true reckoning and reconciliation be undertaken at UNC - not just renaming buildings, which is a must, but exposing these connections and these crimes through the documents and public work. Abolition and reparations now!
