The Colors of the Night
By Michael West, Lowell Astronomer
Stars come in a rainbow of colors. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that some stars are lemony yellow, others have pink, green or blue forget-me-not glows,” wrote Vincent van Gogh. A star’s color reveals its temperature; blue stars are hottest, and red ones are coolest. Yet their different tints are, in a sense, only skin deep—inside they’re all made of the same stuff.
Benjamin Banneker loved the stars in all their many hues. Born in 1731 near Baltimore, he was a free black man in an era when most African Americans were still slaves. A self-taught astronomer and mathematician, Banneker published an almanac in 1791 with the predicted times of sunrise and sunset, tides, and the nightly positions of the stars and planets.
That same year, Banneker wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the man who would eventually become the third president of the United States. Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence with its assertion that “all men are created equal,” with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves.
“I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am of the African race, and in that color which is natural to them of the deepest dye,” Banneker began his letter. He went on to denounce Jefferson’s hypocrisy, accusing him of “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”
To prove that black individuals were as capable intellectually as white, Banneker sent Jefferson a copy of his almanac. He implored the future president to recognize that people of all races are equal and to set an example by freeing his slaves. Jefferson replied, “Nobody wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men.” But he took no action to free his slaves. After Banneker’s death in 1806, Jefferson wrote disparagingly of him, suggesting that he could not have done the calculations for his almanac without help from his white friend and neighbor, Joseph Ellicott.
Nearly two centuries after Banneker’s death, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in 1963 for organizing a peaceful protest against racism in Birmingham, Alabama. In a letter written from his jail cell, King said, “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away…and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.” It’s a sentiment that Benjamin Banneker, astronomer and abolitionist, would have understood well.