Named Casper George Garrett, he invented himself after Reconstruction’s end, a feat that inspires me as much as the story of his great-grandfather, an African who bought his freedom in 1819 and then managed, somehow, to release his wife and two of his children from bondage. Happenstance allowed C. G. Garrett to escape slavery—he was born just months after the end of the Civil War—but the rest was his doing. Educated by Black and white missionaries who ventured south after war’s end, and encouraged by his mother, he taught in a country schoolhouse before training as a teacher, then went on to earn bachelor’s and law degrees. He seldom practiced as a lawyer, but he edited or published three newspapers and taught for more than 20 years at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. And if all that was not enough, he was active in local and state Republican politics, helped found the Colored State Fair, and was a staunch advocate for laymen in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
My search for Garrett, and those who’d come before him, was a quest for what the historian David Levering Lewis dubbed “psychic citizenship” in an email he sent me. Born in the United States, I spent my childhood in Jamaica. When I returned at age nine, I felt out of place, a burden that has never quite eased. The more I learned about Garrett’s life, the more I felt both admiration and a sense of connection. It isn’t just that he went from almost-slavery to becoming certified to appear in South Carolina courtrooms when he was only 24. It is what he did afterward, becoming an example of what the historian John F. Marszalek calls “unknown black leaders”—men and women little recognized outside their communities who selflessly devoted themselves to education and uplift in the difficult decades that marked “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” as another historian, Rayford Logan, put it. These Black Victorians—sober, industrious, thrifty, and self-restrained—worked in hope of a better future.
Though parts of Garrett’s program to better the race and, eventually, prove its members worthy of full citizenship sound a lot like the now-discarded notion of respectability politics—he believed in education, homeownership, obeying the law, voting, and “proper leadership”—I sometimes think we could do worse than to return to those principles today. Saying that I admire him, however, is not to imply anything so simple as hero worship. To claim him, I also had to accept his failings.