Allen B(utler) Ballard (Jr.) 1930–

Author, educator

Excelled Academically Despite Isolation

Traced Family Roots

Struggled to Master New Genre

Caught in the Middle

Selected writings

Sources

Historian Allen B. Ballard Jr. had already penned two acclaimed nonfiction works prior to the publication of his first novel, Where I’m Bound, in 2000. The story of a black soldier during the American Civil War, the novel earned critical accolades for Ballard, a professor of history and African-American studies. “Ballard’s well-researched and vivid portrayal recreates the decline of the Old South,” noted a Publishers Weekly critique, “and delves into the psychology of racism” among both Northerners and their Confederate counterparts of the time.

Excelled Academically Despite Isolation

Born on November 1, 1930, Ballard grew up in Philadelphia, where his mother’s family had lived for generations. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother supported the family by working as a nurse. At the city’s Central High School, Ballard played football and ran track, but it was his grades that gained him admittance to Kenyon College in Ohio, a small private liberal arts college located in Gambier. When he began classes there in 1949, Ballard became one of the first two black students in the school’s history. He recalled it as a tough time, as he wrote in his first book, The Education of Black Folk: The Afro-American Struggle for Knowledge in White America. “For eighteen hours a day, our manners, speech, style of walking were on trial before white America,” Ballard explained. He was barred by race from pledging a fraternity, and since all campus social activities involved such official houses, Ballard and his fellow black classmate contented themselves with visits to a nearby African-American community for solace. “The cumulative toll, both psychically and academically, was heavy,” he wrote in his book, noting that subsequent black students who came to Kenyon during his time there either dropped out or transferred to less segregated schools.

Despite the isolation, Ballard excelled academically, played football and lacrosse, and was even elected student council president. Racist incidents were few, but he noted that traveling to away games with the football team presented an especially tough challenge, because he was not allowed to stay in the same hotel as the other players. After graduating magna cum laude from Kenyon in 1952, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study at the University of Bordeaux in France for a year.

After a stint in the U.S. Army, he went on to Harvard University’s Russian studies program, earning a doctorate in 1962. By then Ballard had acquired some teaching experience from semesters at the junior college of Boston University and at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, and was hired at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City. He quickly advanced through the academic ranks over the decade, holding dean’s positions as well, and became a professor of political science in 1969. The Education of Black Folk was his first book and was published by Harper in 1973.

At a Glance…

Born on November 1, 1930, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Allen B. and Olive Dorsey (a nurse; maiden name, Robinson) Ballard; divorced; two children. Education: Kenyon College, BA (magna cum laude), 1952; University of Bordeaux, graduate study, 1952-53; Harvard University, MA, 1957, PhD, 1962. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1953-55.

Career: Taught at Boston University, Boston, MA, 1958; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 1960; City College, City Univ. of NY, 1961-86, professor emeritus, 1986–, assistant dean of college, 1965-67, associate dean, 1967-69, university dean for academic development, 1969-72, university dean for faculties, 1973, 1974; State University of New York at Albany, professor, 1986–.

Selected memberships: American Political Science Association, 1964-66; American Historical Association; Organization of American Historians.

Selected awards: Fulbright fellowship, France, 1952-53; First Novelist Award, Black Caucus, American Library Association, for Where I’m Bound, 2001.

Address: Office —Dept. History, State University of New York at Albany, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222.

Traced Family Roots

Ballard turned to a more personal topic for his next work, One More Day’s Journey: The Story of a Family and a People. The 1984 nonfiction book examines the reasons behind two large migrations of blacks from the American South into Philadelphia in the early years of the twentieth century. The first took place in 1917 and a second five years later; the influx effectively doubled the city’s black population. In the book Ballard argues that, unlike many others who came North looking for jobs in the suddenly thriving, labor-short urban industrial centers above the Mason-Dixon line, the new Philadelphians fled the South to escape its sometimes deadly racism. He traces one root of the migration back to an incident in Abbeville County, South Carolina, in which a prosperous black farmer was lynched after arguing with white men over the price of a bale of cotton, and his family was forced to leave the area, becoming part of the growing northward migration.

One More Day’s Journey also explores the impact that the new arrivals had on Philadelphia’s insular black community, whose roots in the city dated back to an earlier Quaker era. In subsequent decades, the fairly militant religious and political leadership of Philadelphia’s African-American populace served to ignite the abolitionist movement. The arrival of so many new residents, who brought with them much of their rural Southern culture, created a certain degree of tension in Philadelphia’s black community.

Ballard himself was a product of this merging of cultures. His maternal ancestry stretched back to the antebellum era, and he was shocked to learn in the course of researching his book that one of his ancestors was the son of Aaron Burr, third vice president of the United States. Ballard’s father, like Anthony Crawford, the black farmer who was lynched, had come North from Abbeville County. Crawford had been an independent landowner who had a school for blacks built on his property, and Mays noted in his biography that he was greatly influenced by the example of a black man who did not have to work for white people.

Struggled to Master New Genre

One More Day’s Journey won critical praise for deftly tracing the story of Philadelphia’s black community. New York Times Book Review writer David Levering Lewis asserted that “the ideal ethnic migration study would combine the large and the particular, the statistical and the biographical, in a bond of mutual illumination,” and that One More Day’s Journey met these requirements. “A good ear, clear eye and sustained empathy during his sojourns … have enabled Mr. Ballard to recover the energies of migrant identity and to interweave large social changes with the voices of average people who participated in them,” Lewis remarked.

In 1986 Ballard became professor emeritus at CUNY and took a post at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany as a professor of history and African studies. Some years later he wrote about his struggles with creating fiction in an essay titled “Writing History/Writing Fiction” that appeared on a SUNY-Albany website as part of an online conference. He commented that he had always hoped to write fiction, and noted that he had been a lifelong reader of such authors as Mark Twain, Jack London, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy. He conceded that he had a “woefully mistaken belief that a lifetime love affair with fiction would prepare me to write it.” His first attempt—a contemporary story set amidst South Africa’s political turmoil of the 1980s—was summarily rejected by several publishers. He then purchased a fiction-writing software program that taught him the basics of plotting, characterization, and dialogue, to help him overcome what he considered an ingrained professional handicap: “Historians and social scientists are trained to explain things, to pile up facts and let the evidence speak for itself,” he wrote in the essay. “The historian’s impulse is to show how much one knows about the subject, how much one has mastered the area. The result in all too many cases where historians attempt to write fiction is too much history, and not enough story.”

The end result of Ballard’s struggle to create fiction was the novel, Where I’m Bound. Its story centers on Joe Duckett, an escaped slave from a Louisiana plantation who joins the Third U.S. Colored Cavalry Regiment, part of the Union Army, after the Civil War erupts in 1861. Ballard drew upon actual historical documents for the background of the story, including a 1905 first-hand account written by a Regiment veteran, to help trace its movements during the conflict. As the novel unfolds, Duckett is promoted to sergeant. He longs to return to his wife, Zenobia, who has remained behind on the plantation with their infant daughter. Two other children have already been taken from them by the plantation owner, Kenworthy, who becomes an officer in the Confederate Army. Zenobia relates her own wartime experiences, as does Kenworthy, giving Ballard’s book a unique perspective that was praised by several reviewers.

Caught in the Middle

The battlefield action in Where I’m Bound takes place up and down the Mississippi Delta, which proves to be hostile ground for black soldiers wearing Union uniforms, and Duckett’s experiences serving under white Union Army officers teach him that the North practices its own form of racism as well. A Publishers Weekly review noted the book’s descriptions of the “many Yankee soldiers who resisted viewing their black troops in human terms.” Duckett hopes for a Union victory that will spell the end of slavery in the South, but on a more personal level he simply hopes that his family can be reunited.

School Library Journal reviewer Joyce Fay Fletcher found that the book’s “characters are vivid, and the battle scenes are alive with tension and action.” A critic for the Los Angeles Times, Mark Rozzo, liked Ballard’s depiction of the dissolute, enraged Kenworthy, calling it “a convincing embodiment of slavery’s brutality and heartbreak.” Ann M. Fleury, writing in Library Journal, termed Ballard’s fiction debut “a well-told narrative of life in all social strata of Louisiana and Mississippi.”

Ballard was pleased that the critical reception for his book seemed to vindicate his earlier struggles to craft a well-paced plot and create convincing dialogue. “It is truly gratifying to be able to look back over my own work and see where I have made errors,” he wrote in the SUNY-Albany essay. “Now I also read biographies and letters of the great masters and am amazed to see that they too had problems with mastering some of these techniques. I love the daily learning involved in the writing of fiction, and have come to have great respect for the craft of fiction.”

Selected writings

The Education of Black Folk: The Afro-American Struggle for Knowledge in White America (nonfiction), Harper, 1973.

One More Day’s Journey: The Story of a Family and a People (nonfiction), McGraw, 1984.

Where I’m Bound (novel), Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Sources

Periodicals

Booklist, October 15, 2000, p. 416.

Library Journal, August 2000, p. 151.

Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2000, p. 10.

New York Times Book Review, August 14, 1984, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2000, p. 50.

School Library Journal, March 2001, p. 281.

On-line

“Allen Ballard K52,” Black Students @ Kenyon College, www2.kenyon.edu/depts/amerstud/blackhistoryatkenyon/1950s/Allen#20Ballard/Allen#20Ballard#20’52.html (April 21, 2003).

“Allen B(utler) Ballard, (Jr.),” Contemporary Authors Online, reproduced in Gale Literary Databases, www.galenet.com/servlet/GLD (August 4, 2003).

“Essay by Allen Ballard,” Writing History/Writing Fiction: A virtual conference session, www.albany.edu/history/hist_fict/ballard/ballardes.htm (April 21, 2003).

—Carol Brennan