Drew Gilpin Faust served as president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, the first woman to do so, but that is by no means the most interesting fact about her. She is a highly acclaimed historian of the Civil War and the antebellum South whose books include This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Faust grew up in Virginia, where she witnessed how much those century-old wounds still stung. Her passage out of Clarke County, Virginia, and into political activism in the 1960s is wonderfully chronicled in her new memoir, Necessary Trouble.
JIM KELLY: For someone like myself, born and raised in New York City, your account of growing up in Clarke County in the 1950s is revelatory. You had Black cooks you admired, and your dad, who bred and managed horses, employed and highly valued a Black female trainer, yet a kind of “soft racism” permeated your world. When did you first realize that the nostalgia for the Confederacy coupled with a large dose of “moonlight and magnolias” romanticism glossed over the enslavement of other human beings?
