#/media/File:Celia_Missouri_slave.jpeg)
Guest contributor: Zachary Dowdle
In July 2023, I was fortunate to attend the Legacies of Slavery faculty seminar hosted by CIC at Yale University. After several days of intensive reading and discussion about slavery’s long shadow on American society, I returned to my home in central Missouri — excited to get started on a project that had been simmering on a back burner of my mind since I began teaching at William Woods University in the fall of 2020.
William Woods is situated in Fulton, a rural Missouri community that serves as the seat of Callaway County. The town has a long history, much of it marred by slavery and its legacies. However, there was one story that I believed needed more attention and a person who deserved to be better remembered.
Celia was a young, enslaved woman — a girl, really — who was hanged in Fulton on December 21, 1855. A Callaway County landowner named Robert Newsom purchased Celia after his wife Margaret died in 1850. He purchased fourteen-year-old Celia and lived with her as his concubine. During the summer of 1855, Celia — now nineteen and pregnant for her third time in five years — killed Newsom after he ignored her pleas not to touch her body. After a highly publicized trial, the Callaway County Court convicted Celia of murder.
Celia’s life and death should not have been in vain, I thought; there should some way to commemorate her resistance and strength amidst tragic circumstances.
I believed that Celia’s story needs to be commemorated in Fulton for at least two big reasons. First, her story is taught in college classrooms across the country because it demonstrates so well the contradictory legal status of enslaved people as both property and as people — but, oddly, when I teach local students in my college classroom, none have heard her story. Second, Fulton is a community steeped in Lost Cause symbolism, darkened further by the strange local story of the “Kingdom of Callaway.” The story goes that Callaway County, of which Fulton is the county seat, established its own sovereignty in 1861 through a supposed treaty negotiated between a wealthy local enslaver named Jefferson Jones and an officer of the United States Army. Today, there is a town a few miles north of Fulton called Kingdom City, and iconography of the “kingdom” is present throughout the county. I wanted to work to counter some of the pro-Confederate imagery by commemorating Celia.
As I began to think about a project of commemoration, I got in touch with a colleague from another CIC member institution, Nicole Allen at Westminster College, which is just a mile down the road from my office. Allen teaches in a museum studies program while I teach history. Together, we started to discuss ideas for getting something tangible, on the ground, to make folks in Fulton aware of the tragic story that took place right here in their town!
Not long after we started, one of Allen’s connections in the community connected us with Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge, a Black woman from St. Louis (about 100 miles from Fulton). Westbrooks-Hodge had recently found out through genealogical genetic testing that she is the third great granddaughter of Celia and Robert Newsom. (Her story of discovery is remarkable and better told by herself.) Westbrooks-Hodge had recently organized the Justice for Celia Coalition with other descendants of Celia and now invited Allen and me into the coalition to represent the Fulton higher education community.
Our coalition has a five-point plan that includes:
- a pardon for Celia’s murder conviction;
- developing a curriculum for Missouri public schools;
- building a monument to Celia on the Callaway County Courthouse lawn;
- designing and installing an exhibit in the local history museum; and
- creating a foundation to help fund and sustain the other activities.
As part of the coalition, we worked with state senators to draft legislation that would direct the Missouri State Board of Education to develop new curricular materials, thereby ensuring that every public school student in the state learns about Celia’s story before they graduate from high school. (Unfortunately, the bill did not pass during the last session — the result, we believe, of general dysfunction in the state senate rather than a specific lack of support for the bill.) Our coalition has successfully drafted an exhibit plan for the history museum, which should be installed by the end of this year. The other points of the plan will require time, but I am confident that our coalition will help get justice for Celia.
As an academic, it’s easy for me to stay isolated within my own institution. This project has challenged me to transition from the typical, isolated work of researching and writing to work with a larger coalition doing advocacy in the real world. As a result, I’ve been introduced to a variety of local stakeholders, spoken to descendants of Celia, and have integrated Celia’s story into several classes.
Last spring I gave a presentation on campus, mostly geared towards students, to encourage anyone who was interested to call their local state representative to increase support for the proposed legislation. During that presentation, I also invited students to sign up to work on a bibliography that will support educators who want to teach Celia’s story. A small but dedicated group signed up! We will begin work on this project when the fall semester commences.
It is our job to tell more honest histories of our communities. Celia’s story helps us do that and we shall continue to fight to honor her memory and her sacrifice.
Zachary Dowdle is an assistant professor of history at William Woods University. His research focuses on the intersection of party politics, slavery, and economic development in nineteenth-century Missouri and the Border South. He was educated at Angelo State University (in his native Texas) and the University of Missouri. The views expressed here are his own, not necessarily those of William Woods University or the Council of Independent Colleges.