History professor Estelle Freedman recalls one of her first encounters with the lanky colleague who shaped the field of comparative history. She knew George Fredrickson by reputation, having read his first book, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Harper & Row 1965), when she was a graduate student at Columbia. “The first generation of women’s historians had to train under people who had not been women’s historians,” Freedman says of her specialty. “George Fredrickson was one of those sympathetic male historians who not only included women in his own work, but also trained people who became the founding mothers of the new women’s history.”
And so it was that one day in 1985 Freedman found herself sitting on the ground in the Main Quad, surrounded by hundreds of faculty and students, listening to Fredrickson address a teach-in on divestment from South Africa. “There was George, newly arrived on campus, standing up, with students and faculty literally sitting at his feet as he gave a cogent, clear and comprehensive history of apartheid in South Africa,” Freedman recalls. “George brought the history to bear on their protest in a way that made the students’ actions even more reasonable.”
Fredrickson died February 25 at age 73 (see Obituaries).
History professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, recalls that when he was organizing the King Papers Project in 1985, Fredrickson was an adviser who came to the task with equal commitments to social justice and racial equality. Having written White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (Oxford), a 1982 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Fredrickson was a “brilliant historian” who tried to “understand why it is that we conceive of race in the way we do,” Carson says.
“His books comparing American race relations to South Africa had the most impact on me,” Carson adds. “What he was doing, essentially, was taking an interest in the African-American freedom struggle and saying, ‘It’s vital that we look at that in a comparative perspective, and understand how these two nations address the problem of black and white relations in both similar and different ways.’”
Apocryphal stories about Fredrickson circulate in the history department. Like the one about the bonding trip a group of male colleagues took one spring afternoon to a professional baseball game. “You know, baseball—it’s slow,” says one faculty member. “And there was George, reading the Journal of American History between innings.”
Humble. Not full of himself. A gentle giant. Without arrogance. Generous in his reviews of others’ work. The remembrances flow when colleagues look back on the years they enjoyed with Fredrickson.
Al Camarillo is founding director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He says a seminal book that helped establish Fredrickson’s stature was The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Harper & Row, 1971)—compelling for “anyone reading about ideologies about race.” With psychology professor Claude Steele, Fredrickson co-founded the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in 1996.
“For George, the critical thing was that you must know the historical context of this thing we call race in order to understand what we’re doing today and where we’re going in the future.”
