The American Civil Battle was won on the mid 19th Century fields of unprecedented carnage. The Civil War endures.
In this column we read of the grotesque characterization of Reconstruction-era African Americans as wallowing in "corruption, opportunism, display[ing] spectacular stupidity, ... wanton, evil and ignorant."
The case is made and the image rings true, but not on African Americans.
7
The Gentle Southern Way, still just a mask for rampant hatred, violence and disgraceful racism. What would Jesus say? Probably not much before he was shot.
21
The biology now taught in high scools might have been considered science fiction back in my high school days, class of 1970. So, I’m now taking an MIT online Bio 101 to get up to date.
Clearly, the same need for catching up to date in American History must be acknowledged. Accordingly, I recently read about the 3rd party upset of a possible Republican win in the Presidential Election of 1892 thus furthering the racist national agenda of Redemption.
Humanity must work to evolve a moral backbone. We historically pendulum between moral dialectics; hopefully, eventually layering the growth and stiffening of one.
Often history is forged by leaders towards a greater good by heroes like Lincoln and Rabin, yet ultimately thrown off course by their assassinations; and swung towards evil by individuals like Hitler and Pol Pot. All so human. Yet, as tribal and global humanity, followers, leaders, and individuals, we must embody and exert the moral force to diminish human suffering and bring forth...
6
This informative work illuminates the historical narrative and the many complexities and complications experienced by the descendant of the enslaved Africans. And to clarify this point you are delivering today in your piece and exhibit one of evidence of the 'Neo-Redemption' efforts currently underway.
Consider the case of African American (ADOS) media Byron Allen, and his litigation regarding COMCAST/Charter Communications and contentious contracting issues. What's at stake here is the the protections given to then, Black American descendants of slavery, in business and contracting during the post Civl War Reconstruction era in the form of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. I wish there was more reporting and enlightenment of this contentious matter that is soon to be before the US supreme court, and the implications for Africans Americans and 'others' trying to do legitimate business in the US henceforth. For example, I will not have to detail the effects of the US Supreme court dismantling some of the particular protections of Voting Rights Act from the 1960s and the ramped upped voter suppression efforts of voter suppression measures across the nation. Finally, as in Affirmative Action measures initially enacted to remedy the effects of Black enslavement followed by 125 years of Jim Crow-ism, and the unending assault against these measures that are now misdirected federal, state and local 'set aside programs' for women and other minorities. Permanent Interest trumps all else!
2
America has yet to face its history.
“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. The reality of substantial investment to assist Negroes into the twentieth century, adjusting to Negro neighbors and genuine school integration, is still a nightmare for all too many white Americans. White America would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somehow been created that needed only orderly and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change. Yet this is precisely what has not been achieved. [….] These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where Do We Go From Here?: Where Are We?”
“To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
― James Baldwin
12
The answer to when slavery ended is not 1865. It is not 1964. Unfortunately it is “not yet.”
14
Oh Mr. Gates. I am a white person--
--and I wish I could take a course from you.
The facts contained in your article are horrifying--and more disgusting than I have words to say--
--some of them familiar to me, many not.
I have read about Mr. Vardaman. I have read (of course) about "Pitchfork Ben Tillman."
America is not proud of these men. DECENT America, that is. The America we see in our dreams. The America we wish we were--we wish we'd always been--
--but we're not--
--and we never were.
Especially Mr. Vardaman. Not only a racist--Lord knows. the old south (and many other places in this fair land) has produced plenty of racists--
--but a man all but REPTILIAN in his hatred of black people. ANY black people. Of whatever age or sex or level of education or human accomplishment or anything at all--
--he detested and despised every single one of them.
Enough of that.
All this--dear Lord in Heaven, ALL of this--
--should be required learning of every man, woman, and child in these United States.
The great betrayal (as a sometime black judge characterized the bargain of 1877 that brought Mr. Hayes to the White House)--
--the great betrayal of 2016--
--that left me (speaking personally) weeping helplessly as I discussed those dreadful election results with my daughter over the phone.
Vigilance? Oh yes. Plenty of vigilance is required.
More than we've shown so far.
Thanks for your piece.
21
What was then, is still now! White Supremacy is still the rule of law. White Americans still hold fast (consciously or unconsciously) to the belief of,, we shall remain supreme over all others. There is no other course of action to remedy the solution of perpetual hate for the "Other". It's unfortunate, that after centuries of generational hate,,it has become imbedded in their DNA.
The sad part to this, is that, hate and racism is not what one is born with, it is taught, generation after generation after generation.
When anyone is consumed by hate, it ultimately destroys the person, and if the person is a Nation filled with hate, then, that nation too will be destroyed.
Our American history, is filled with hatred for anyone other than white people, starting with the Native Americans.
Without Atonement, or recognition of such deep psychosis, we are a sick people getting sicker.
When we vote for a president like Donald Trump, it is only a symptom of our deeper illness.
If there is an ounce of goodness or righteousness in your heart, you should know, or sense, that America is on the precipice of disaster.
If this president receives another term in office, this country will become unrecognizable to the American people living here!
6
For a look at mid 20th Century “Redemption” I would recommend a book detailing the corruption and brutality of white police and sheriffs in the deep south, specifically Lake County Florida.
“Devil in the Grove” by Gilbert King follows Thurgood Marshall and his efforts to defend innocent men.
3
Unfortunately, the Southern ideology was not subjected to the same cleansing that was imposed on German thinking after World War II. The process of deNazification included outlawing the Nazi party, excluding Nazi leaders from government, prohibition of display of Nazi symbols and propaganda, and extensive education about the crimes of the Nazis. As a result, the many Germans I have met while traveling fully acknowledge Nazi crimes, never offer lame excuses for them, and certanily don't lament a noble lost cause.
Similar deConfederatization was equally warrented after the Civil War to to prevent a recurrence of the American version of a holocaust. Instead, Confederate leaders returned to government after President Andrew Johnson's pardon, Northern enforcement of rights for ex-slaves was turned over to their former masters, and eventually, symbols and Lost Cause propaganda of the Confederate holocaust made an in-your-face reappearance.
Sadly, we missed our chance for deConfederatization and still live with the consequences. Let's hope that articles like this one and numerous books like The New Jim Crow and White Rage will begin to reach the necessay audience. I can only hope that some day those duped by the Lost Cause myth will be a clear-headed as many of the young Germans I meet.
15
Seems that once again the North gets a pass. It was no more possible for a black man to buy a home in 1940's suburban Long Island than it was in suburban Atlanta, Richmond, or Los Angeles for that matter - the house I am currently sitting was build in 1925 and the neighborhood covenant from that time clearly states Jew and Blacks could not own it.
Economic and social segregation was (is) universal in the United States - the South was just more open and homicidal about it.
10
Powerful analysis.
1
Poverty among Blacks is the lowest in US history right now with Donald Trump as president.
That is fantastic!
4
And who now are the minions of this horror?
We condemned recently the Turkish republic for the genocide of the Armenian people.
And what of the genocide of the American Indians?
Has the historic treatment of American Black citizens been anything less horrific?
And now we see whatever progress was made with the Civil Rights Act undone by the republican party.
This is a ghastly horror of American history.
America has been intentionally blind.
Vietnam Vet
4
Now, if we could just get those poor privileged white Southern snowflake tRump voters to read the true History of the South, maybe that flickering Light Bulb might just burst out with Justice and Freedom. Preach on Brother Gates, Preach on.
1
We seem to be in a second “redemption” phase of US history, which is a reaction to the first black president. It is a shameful period that I hope we get through without death and destruction. It is simply shameful that the Republican Party has gone full racist.
4
Shocking, tragic and so little known: simply put, the Union won the Civil War but lost the peace and African-Americans paid the price. This is known to varying degrees to true students of American History. But the first photograph that accompanies Dr. Gates is a shocker, too. There's a monument to treason on the nation's most sacred ground, Arlington National Cemetery? Let's look forward to the day when that monstrosity comes down, just as the moments to Hitler and Stalin came down in Germany and Russia.
6
The United Daughters of the Confederacy are, of course, still at it, refusing to remove Silent Sam in Chapel Hill, and other Jim Crow Lost-Causer statues around my state of North Carolina. The GOP Legislature in NC even created a law to protect these hideous monuments to racism, and when anti-racists in our communities demonstrate to demand their removal, the ever-more-visible KKK appears in our town squares and streets, asserting its ignorant, hateful presence. But the good news is that we keep showing up. And as my anti-racist march in my town of Hillsborough, NC this summer showed, the number of anti-racists is not only greater but we have also proven that we will not give up until every last one of these monuments to white supremacy is gone.
100
As an addendum to a previous posting, I must pass along this historical note. The official stationary letterhead for Hunt County, Texas, in the early 1970s, included this County Motto: “The Blackest Land and the Whitest People.”
3
It's barely a point worth mentioning, since it can't be undone. But the post- civil war U.S. federal government allowing the defeated confederate states to erect monuments to treasonous CSA military heroes and name major thoroughfares after them and former CSA government figures was a huge mistake that retarded the moral evolution of America.
8
Racism is alive and well in this country. It remains powerful, North and South of the Mason Dixon line. It's a hard fact and it has done more damage to this country than anything else in our history. I thought, briefly, in 2008 we may have finally overcome it. But now? I just do not know how we transcend it.
2
We really ought to go back to calling the Civil War its name at the time and in the official histories, the "War of the Rebellion", and limit the use of "confederate" to an adjective modifying "traitor". A couple generations of that in the school books and maybe we can finally eliminate the "Lost Cause" nonsense. The good professor refers to "Gen. Robert E. Lee", but confederate traitor Robert E. Lee flows off the tongue, and is equally factual. Try it.
7
"the Supreme Court’s decision in 1883 to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875"
"The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote"
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…
2
A geographical area where the people have always been discriminated against by their own government one way or another creating poverty, willful ignorance, racial tensions, and a dependency on religion. Where else does that sound like?
1
Dear NYT: I would appreciate it if you would solicit more articles from scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Your readers, I am sure, would agree that this was an insightful and illuminating commentary on Redemption and the rise of Jim Crow.
11
I enjoyed Professor Gates's essay ... up to a point. I found his attempts to pull the lessons of Jim Crow into the Trump era to be clumsy and partisan.
I am even more disappointed that, given his partisan slant, that his biography box failed to note that he is a close personal friend of President Obama. Such an observation would allow readers to put his comments about Obama and Trump into better context.
3
What? It struck me as a perfect parallel. Trump et al have displayed indiscriminate tenacity in their effort to roll back every accomplishment of the Obama years. It’s as if conservatives’ very identity depends on it.
19
Why would Gates' friendship with former President Obama impinge on this piece? Do you have a competing narrative, based in historical fact to counter it? If so, please provide it.
11
@Liberty hound
Some context for the friendship between Gates and Obama.
Gates was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the summer of 2009 by a white police officer, James Crowley, as Gates was attempting to enter his own home in Cambridge, MA after returning from a trip to China.
A week later, Obama invited Gates and Crowley to the White House for the so-called "Beer Summit," an occasion when all parties could express their perspectives. Joe Biden was also present.
Gates can be seen smilingly pleasantly throughout, while Crowley looks sullen.
This experience no doubt cemented not only Gates's friendship with Obama but also Biden's friendship with Obama.
Gates is an exemplary scholar. In any case, there is an element of historical narrative that is always partisan. That is the whole point of Gates's discussion of Redemption and figures like Rutherford and Griffith.
Gates is merely offering a mild corrective to received history, by exposing the roots of Jim Crow in Southern Redemption.
The parallel to Trump could not be clearer.
It is hard to say which is the greater sin, Trump's Civil Rights recidivism or that he has sold out his nation for personal gain.
13
The Southern States are still doing thier best to disenfranchise Black voters in the present day using the argument of voter fraud to purge voter registration rolls and the process of expert gerrymandering by Republicans. The only justice in the Good old U.S. of A is reserved for the dollar bill and those who possess the most of them.
6
Sadly, much of the South is still mired in the remnants of Jim Crow. The populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama have large African American constituency who are still being actively disenfranchised. What kind of Democracy are we if blatant cheating cost Stacey Abrahms her Governorship and the outrage was only from People of Color? The majority White GOP has also taken their techniques to the Swing States and even to the SCOTUS to ensure the tyranny of the White population over POC as demographics change. The underbelly of the Country is truly disturbing.
12
As an exchange student in a Minnesota high school in 1959, I remember NOT understanding the part of my history lessons about the aftermath of the Civil War. It was all so vague and confusing... words like “carpetbagger” floating around.....
Only now, sixty years later, I get the story straight. Thank you, professor.
15
From outside America, one of the features that makes America unique has always been its black population. I can hardly imagine something else. Yes, I knew of slavery in excruciating detail, but it was only later in life that I learned how much of their own America has been denied to black Americans and other ethnicities. Not only the Civil War, not only Redemption, but asking black Americans to fight for freedom in Europe while being denied freedom at home has always been bewildering. America vibrates under the tension between greatness and untold cruelty.
And yet some black Americans have been moral beacons which to me endure and exemplify the best of humanity. The powerful voice and moral clarity of Frederick Douglass pierces deep.
I would not call the black America ability to vote "black" power. No, that should be the power of being American. Black Americans have been required without being asked to test if the ideals of America are as pure as we imagine them to be. Equality for black Americans is a step towards equality for all.
11
The North grew tired of forcing the South after 1865 to ensure equality for black people. After Grant there was no political will. Still, black Americans fought and died for their country in WWI and II. Southern white presidents, Truman and LBJ, with Eisenhower and JFK between them, helped bring down the edifice of segregation and overt racial oppression, creating the reaction of Dixiecrats, Wallace, and Nixon's "Southern strategy." Goldwater and Reagan were racists in their convictions and signals to voters, and the Republican Party became the voice of white reaction, now cloaked in "anti-welfare", "law and order", and voting restrictions. The path to Trump's/Bannon's declaration of "carnage in America" and winking at Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists was now clear and broad. But Trump is not simply the voice of racism and xenophobia, he is in the model of Putin's rule by gangsters and thugs in an oligarchy.
11
I was one of the early believers that Barack Obama could win the Presidency. I knew there would be troglodytes triggered by the election but had no clue of the breadth of backlash it would stimulate. I was born, raised and educated in California and even here I was not taught much about the achievements of freed black people in the Reconstruction Era, instead taught that opportunistic northern whites invaded the former Confederate states and drove the events that led to Jim Crow. I “credit” my incomplete education in US history for my naivety in the past decade. I thank Dr. Gates for this column.
9
For those Americans who have trouble believing what happened in reconstruction and Jim Crow just remember that our country was founded by a group of white men, many of whom owned slaves, starting with George Washington.
The management of slaves on plantations was the beginning of America’s version of capitalism and exploiting the workers.
7
We can't undo the decades that led up to the Civil War, or the failed Reconstruction period, or the Black Codes or Jim Crow. We can only face it now and repair things as best we can, but we won't because too many white Americans are still as racist as they can be. Nor will we repair the damage done to Native Americans. Too many white people don't want to repair the damage, because they only see loss of their own privilege, just like those directly after the Civil War did. We haven't grown much at all in 150 years.
11
The book "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stephenson tells of his experiences defending and freeing blacks wrongly incarcerated. The organization he founded, the Equal Justice Initiative, fights injustice in the legal system. It has also founded two museums in Montgomery, Alabama - The Legacy Museum, built on the site of a former slave warehouse, and tells about enslavement, lynchings, legalized segregation and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice also known as the lynching memorial. It memorializes the more than 4400 people lynched by white mobs after reconstruction.
5
Our civil war is still going on. Until the military war, the struggle was over whether slavery would be allowed or encouraged to expand to the nation's new territories, and it was a draw. The Confederacy was formed and the struggle became a military one, which the Confederacy lost. Aided by the U.S. army, Reconstruction cost the Confederacy political power and started chipping away at Confederate economic power. But then the Confederacy launched a political and propaganda counterattack that carried it to victory in the South and in the nation's schoolbooks, and the whole country came to celebrate, and the North to imitate, the Confederate solution of the race question.
The Confederates got the country to see blacks not as fellow citizens but rather as a problem population to be managed. Their white supporters also had to be managed and kept away from high school textbooks and the mass media; the response to "Birth of a Nation" was not epics of Reconstruction from a black/scalawag/carpetbagger perspective.
The elections in Florida and Georgia show that the Confederacy is still strong and that the ethics and Weltanschauung of Redemption (restore/preserve white power and refuse to see how it is done) are still powerful.
The Civil War goes on, and the Confederacy is once again on a roll, energized in revulsion at our first mongrel president.
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave . . .
His truth goes marching on!"
3
The Civil War never ended. When I lived in Mississppi in 1964, they were sill fighting it. The slave states are still a cancer on the nation holding back science and education.
8
My thoughts go to Lee Atwater strutting on the stage, posing as Chuck Berry, simultaneously pillaging while coopting black culture. The message was deep, dark and despicable.
This country would be a far less interesting place without black culture. It defines us. Yet so much of it has been stolen, packaged and sold by whites. It’s when the most vulnerable and passionate black art forms are usurped by whites without thanks or recognition that we should ask “What is White American culture, after all.”
11
“What’s next was the Civil Right Era. Today, the South is more integrated the the North.
If I was Professor Gates, I'd be shaking my head that so many commenters say they never knew about any of this.
I guess I was wrong, thinking that people who read the NYT are better educated. -- I never went to college but I've never stopped learning. It's good to see now, though, that some of you have been enlightened.
Regrettably, the people who need to learn our history are and will remain willfully ignorant.
2
It would have been impossible to create and maintain a system of hereditary chattel slavery such as ours without persuading everyone involved that it was right and just--that the slaveholders were morally and intellectually superior to the enslaved race. Slaves who would not agree were either brutalized into submission or killed. Whites who disagreed were ostracized. White supremacy was rigidly enforced. And the masters found both before and after the Civil War that it was the perfect tool to keep working people from joining together to demand a better life for themselves. Nowadays it is being practiced on a national scale, God help us, and it is just as effective as ever. Those in power play this song and far too many dance to it.
67
Thank you, Mr. Gates. This era was inadequately taught in schools I attended. Hope that is changing, or will change with the help many today are trying to provide. Just forwarded it to all my children.
1
Reconstruction is a lesson about having your dessert first. Instead of recognizing that power can be temporary , freedmen acted like it would be forever and used it to enact social programs prior to making sure equal rights under the law would be assured of long term security. A lesson for today.
1
As context for Dr. Gates essay, required reading should be Charles Dew's "Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War."
After Lincoln was elected, all of the Confederate states did not leave the Union at once but over the period from December 1860 to June 1861. The states that left earliest well understood that they had no chance of success unless they were able to enlist other slave states to join their cause. So they sent prominent emissaries to address the Legislatures of the slave states still in the Union to explain why they should they leave and join the Confederacy.
These addresses were essentially written verbatim into each legislature record so we have direct and accurate explanation of how each state rationalized its need to leave the Union. "States Rights" never comes up. The need to leave centers entirely on the need to perpetuate slavery. Only after the war, after the south realized it could not justify the death of 750,000 Americans for the purpose of perpetuating human bondage, did the loftier"States Rights" myth begin.
9
A couple months ago my wife and I and a neighbor attended a presentation by Henry Louis Gates Jr. over wine at a restaurant near our homes. The talk by Professor Gates was to a smaller group than he normally addresses, because he was set to be the emcee the next night at an award dinner in downtown Cleveland which does every year or two. Also, the owner of the restaurant near us is a close friend of Gates from their days at Harvard.
The subject of the Gates talk which was exactly the same as that of this column: the Reconstruction, the achievements during that period by former enslaved men in the South, the violent pushback by Southern whites, the “Lost Cause” and the revisionist history of the “Redemption” led by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Professor Gates took questions, and he is as charming, smart and witty as he is on television.
Everyone at the Gates talk was familiar with the subject, but those of us who are white liberals were not as aware of the details as were the black attendees, many of whom are old friends of ours. The timeliness of learning more about the bloody war the nation won and the bloody peace it lost is very obvious with Donald Trump in the White House.
Between Trump’s appeal to racists and the political control by the new Republicans – who are the ideological and emotional heirs to the segregationist Southern Democrats of the 20th century – anyone who cares about preserving our democracy needs to know more about how we got into this mess.
9
We have a comprehensive and beautifully drawn Constitution and some of the worst stains on that document, its failure to include everyone in democracy and its blessings, have been removed. But there is no requirement that the states actually follow the mandates. It is kind of a honor system and men/women without honor care not one whit for mere words. They will do whatever they please and await whatever pushback might come, in lawsuits or otherwise.
This is perhaps a great flaw in our American system. By having 50 individual states as separate and with often challenging powers, where are the protections of fundamental rights? Police departments chaff under the strictures of the rights of the accused and, not infrequently, settle the argument with gunfire, often directed toward people of color and those involved in minor crimes.
We have a system of government that is literally set against itself with the goal, in the minds of the original framers, of preventing tyranny and protecting the states. This has allowed the respect of regional traditions and specific needs while also permitting stark discrimination of the fundamental humanity of black men and women, a dastardly crime and an insult to our highest ideals and aspirations.
If we had a truly forceful national govt., perhaps we could have hammered away for the last 100 yrs. at the evil at the heart of our nation and found a better path toward healing, once and for all. Instead, we stew in that rancid bowl, not yet free.
9
An argument exists that both white and black Americans might have been better off if the 13 colonies remained English subjects. Slavery was ruled unlawful in England in 1772 and slavery was abolished in all British colonies by about 1834. If we'd remained English subjects the slaves would have been freed by acts of Parliament 25 years before the end of the Civil War and the war might never have been fought.
My guess is that someday soon there will be calls for a constitutional convention to repudiate and replace the original one and create a new one that more closely approximates the goals of the Declaration of Independence.
2
Another stark reminder of the historical roots of our present political and cultural pathologies. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I'm struck by how much of what we're going through is a function of seemingly ancient debates. If anything - and I view this as a net positive if we can arise to the challenge - the last three years of Trump have lifted the scales from our eyes as a polity. The past isn't dead; it's alive and well, and it demands reckoning on the Original Sin of our founding. Will we ever find a way to get past our past?
10
@Dave Morehouse
The brilliant, eminent social critic of resistance to inclusion in America's promise, Marianne Williamson, has been consistently either ignored or ridiculed in her quest for the Presidency. Reparations to the descendants of slaves is a pillar of her candidacy. Her plan for implementation is a carefully crafted roadmap of common sense.
Television moderators and opinion writers alike give short shrift to Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Ms. Williamson, whose messages of peace, reconciliation, and empowerment threaten the stranglehold on power of the 1%.
Notice the shoutings of moderators at the so-called debates, which consistently ignore ideas of inclusion and progress towards a "more perfect union" in favor of foolish insistence on the worn-out trope: "But how are you going to pay for it?" They elevate war to sainthood: see the persistent praise of the military? See the paean to the patriarchy in a cruelly tilted national budget.
Instead of the continual distortions of such purveyors of violence as national policy, Professor Gates never fails to direct us all toward a gentler, kinder version of America.
3
Good article except for the implication that President Trump is out to hurt the black population. I find that offensive as he is doing a good job (better than Obama) regarding the black population. One can also be reminded that "reconstruction" is greatly needed in cities governed by democrats.
1
He isn’t doing a good job regarding anyone or anything, except his fellow criminals, the gop. Remember, trump doesn’t do anything for anyone with altruistic motivation, he is incapable of that, anything he does which benefits anyone outside his party is purely coincidental and where possible he will do whatever he can to harm to all who are not party to the corrupt and vicious plans of the GOP.
5
As Professor Gates points out, much of the blame for "Redemption" laid with the Supreme Court, from its striking down of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 through the separate-but-equal doctrine set out in Plessy v. Ferguson. Today's Court is hardly better, witness its gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. With Trump's two appointees in place, the damage is sure to continue.
6
Astonishingly, if you compare the map of the anti-Lincoln vote in 1860, it is recognizable as the direct precursor of the Trump vote in 2016. Even Trump's surprising triumphs in the battleground states show up similarly, as anti-Lincoln votes in the same regions.
An all-out, century-plus struggle against racism began with the Civil War. The unavoidable fact which Trump brought to the fore is that the nation accomplished less than anyone supposed. Instead, it succeeded better at suppressing racism's expression than it did at getting rid of racism. Under Trump, even that feeble progress is being overturned.
20
I think you're absolutely right. We really kinda know what this is all about, deep down, even if we have trouble admitting it to ourselves, or others, for that matter: the Civil War and Reconstruction never really ended, and we all live with the consequences to this day, in every way that matters for us as a polity.
11
Tho white, I have black ancestors who were enslaved. They lived in a part of the south where a thriving mixed race culture had existed since the 18th century. They were not members of the Jefferson or other posh plantation families.
That came to an lull with the Dred Scott decision when they all became property, not people. But it was completely reversed for my direct ancestors -- who were not affected at all by the Emancipation Proclamation -- by the Jim Crow Era, in which state-sponsored apartheid raised a direct terrorist threat against all white and black members of any family, by exposing them to challenges to legitimacy and inheritance, and by raising the specter of violence and jail sentences if they dared to utter aloud the fact that they were mixed race.
I can't help but wonder if everyone who knew they have mixed race ancestry -- which is probably all descendants of colonial white southerners -- would suddenly start speaking up, out of pride for their ancestors, and attest to the Nazi-style horror created by the Jim Crow Era.
4
I am a fan of Professor Gates' ability to tell the stories of our racial lineage and associated conflicts of the past.
However, I wonder whether such domination of one group by another is the rule rather than the exception in history whether we are talking about Black slave traders in Africa capturing slaves from rival tribes and selling to White European slave ship owners, Native American tribes subjugating rival tribes, Whites originally from Europe controlling Black Africans in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Blacks now taking land from White Farmers in these southern Africa areas, British colonizing India, Hindus and Muslims in constant struggle for domination in India, and if we go back Ancient Romans enslaving Ancient Germans, Vikings invading and dominating much of Northwestern Europe and on and on.
I realize that this is a sad commentary on human nature that those groups in power will wield that power for economic gain. But it may be human nature.
2
Some basic similarities hold—tribes warred against each other & captured losers became slaves—for a period. However, no other culture had as long & cruel institution as our slavery, followed by more than a century of white supremacy enforced by a vast, national system of terror & violence. Black folks are still mowed down by police, etc. on a regular basis. White folks need to stop trying to find ‘what-about’ isms & admit what we’ve done. Follow Ibram X Kendi’s words—admit that we’re all racists by virtue of being born in this culture & then begin to live your life as an anti-racist.
4
Pure speculation, of course, but one of the ideas promulgated around the time of the Civil War was a mass repatriation of blacks back to Africa, once freed from slavery. Indeed, the state of Liberia was established on this basis. One can only wonder if the worst of our history, the later lynchings and discrimination plus the long term legacy of racism could have been avoided had such a policy actually been enacted. Certainly a different history than what we have now, but no doubt it would have its own share of both good and bad. That seems to be a constant of the human condition.
1
Another speculation; What would the old slave states (and the rest of American) have come to look like today racially had Reconstruction been taken to it's complete fulfillment? Hint; what happened on the athletic playing fields, e.g., college basketball and football, the NBA, NFL, etc. once the playing fields were in the old slave states and America were totally leveled 50 years ago? Just wondering...
@Patrick there was a group, The American Colonization Society, founded in the early 1800's that promoted the return of blacks to Africa. It continued in existence after the Civil War is my recollection.
@Patrick
Clever... but not quite.
1
Wow; so true. Sad beyond words.
Economics. Equality. No more billionaires or poverty. Yes, good and decent and safe public housing. Yes, universal health care. Yes, a more perfect Union and the common good and the golden rule and compassion and love. Yes we can.
6
Dr. Gates, Thank you for another thoughtful, insightful and thought provoking article. Your summary of the present political situation and putting it into the perspective of history and Redemption reminds us that history often repeats itself.
Although I am white and work most of the time in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, I am appalled since coming back to the US in the present divisive atmosphere. Hopefully the backlash over O'Bama and those who voted for regression will see the error of their ways. But in any event, the older whites who drive this new version of Redemtion are already dying off. Hopefully the next generation will outgrow this fear so prevalent with so many. I've talked to some and their fear is not just for one thing - but almost everything.
Again, thank you for your insight and courage.
7
I too grew up in a southern world where the past was not clearly or accurately explained . As an American Studies major, I did take Afro-Am Stud at UNC in 1970, but it has taken me 45 years to understand the full context of US history that was not taught in school in my lifetime. I romanticized the south for many years, and there are many things I still love, but I am sad and embarrassed by the current racism and hatred that has reared its head in the last few years. Thanks to Professor Gates for helping more of us see the past more clearly.
12
To someone who studies the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War, it is astonishing that so much progress was made in the years of and just after the Civil War. In some ways, we have yet to equal the belief in equality that pervaded national policy (if not individual attitudes) during Reconstruction.
And it continues to be a national shame that the reversal of progress was permitted, and perpetuated to the present day. Truth is, we have a ways to go before we get back to where we were in 1875.
4
It’s a misconception that the Confederacy was defeated entirely following the installation of the Reconstruction state governments. The former rebels may have lost military conflict and the franchise, but, institutionally, they, still retained formidable cultural, political and economic power over the freed slaves.
In defeat, the white South controlled the markets for agriculture, retained control of the institutions of higher learning, hospitals, newspapers, religious property, most commerce, and libraries, and they still owned most of the land and water rights. The absence of black cultural institutions, particularly cultural ones, made freedmen political organizations weak, leaders difficult to develop, statewide communications haphazard. Black legislative seats depended on white minority caucuses appointed by Northern Republicans. Thus former Confederates had no fear in any state of a black demographic voting majority, none that is that they could not defeat or intimidate, nor had they fear of a solid black voting district majorities, nor feared black separatist governed states.
Reconstruction was doomed long before the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, or before the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. When white Southerners regained the franchise, they had no difficulty imposing a regime of Jim Crow on the freedmen. Later Southern “Redeemers” had no seriously organized black adversaries.
6
@Bayou Houma
Postscript: Oh, yes, I ought to have added that the former veterans of the defeated C.S.A. were permitted to retain their guns, that is, their small arms, uniforms, military parade units, and veteran lodges - the perfect organizational formula for the kind of terrorism practiced by the Ku Klux Klan to disenfranchise freed slaves and reimpose white supremacy.
6
This article triggers two images for me. One, is the constant parade of black men gotcha photos on the front page of local newspapers, weekly community papers and local TV newscasts. This is the drumbeat set in motion during the Redemption period no doubt. The second is the insane evisceration of any/all accomplishments of President Obama. Regardless of who it hurt or put in jeopardy the redemptive spirit drives to erase it all. If you have any doubt why as to the most basic reason why torpedoing Obamacare was first on the list Mr. Gates give you the historical reference as to when America was great for the Trump base of white folk.
15
Thank you for the history lesson that shows us that the philosophy of today’s Republican Party is just a continuation of “The Redemption.” Republicans have truly become a force for white supremacy. Oh, they are never so crude to use those very words; they have Donald Trump to do that for them.
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, I thought that it would be good for the country. I was wrong. Little did I realize how repressed racial attitudes would rapidly rise to the surface even though Obama was a moderate in everything he touched.
Maybe Lincoln was right—this Civil War will not end until the last drop of wealth earned from the lash of the bondsman’s whip has been fully paid for by society. It certainly means that our work as a nation is not done.
19
@Mark Young The election of Mr. Obama was definitely very good for the country. It exposed what too many of us had not seen. Now we know that it’s a much longer journey than some of us had thought.
7
'“Strange things have happened of late and are still happening,” [Frederick] Douglass himself worried aloud in that last major speech of his. More than 200 years after his birth, I can’t help wondering what he’d say about the current state of affairs in our democracy.'
As I listened to the 29 CDs of the audiobook version of David W. Bight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom last summer (long solo road trip), what struck me was that huge chunks of Frederick Douglass's speeches could be read aloud today and apply to the situation in which we find ourselves -- without a word changed.
11
@Lennerd
The same is true of MLK's speeches and James Baldwin. The reason why all three men continue to be relevant is that until we have truth (spoken and taught), reconciliation, and reparations, we will continue to go in cycles.
7
During the 2016 campaign, an African-American man was asked which presidential candidate he would vote for, and he replied, “I got no dog in this fight.” Perhaps, by now, that man’s outlook has changed in reaction to Trump’s and SCOTUS’s unrelenting assault on civil rights, and he will vote in the 2020 election to end this nightmare.
5
@Miriam
I'm more concerned about the majority of white voters who voted for someone so unfit for the position.
3
One of the best primary sources on slavery were the oral histories gathered during the 1930s from the survivors of slavery. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the many gatherers of these stories. This Testimony reveals that the Ante Bellum South was basically Auschwitz with Magnolia Trees.
14
Dr. Gates, thank you for connecting history for us.
There's a circular quality to looking back to a greatness lost: never mind that it wasn't greatness, but it explains people's feelings that they have been left behind, abused, disrespected, and unwanted -- all features of the child-abusing, economically backwards South, similarly of the post-WW-I period in Germany, and similarly of sexism, abuse, and mafia-style intimidation that pervades public life in Russia.
I completely agree with fighting the propaganda drugs, to inoculate victims and victimizers alike against racism. But until we find a way to address the underlying anxiety, we won't stop the drug trafficking.
Capitalism guarantees that labor will never be enough to live decently, and will forever pit workers against each other in fights over racism, sexism, nationalism, politics -- whatever prevents people from realizing their kinship.
I would look to how slaves built their own communities after the civil war, notwithstanding their poverty and split families, as a starting point for how to insulate a community against the anxiety and contention of capitalism.
7
I commend Dr. Gates on his work, however, it is even worse then he portrays it because the portrayal is incomplete.
A pivotal question is how did land in areas that became states like Georgia become available to the Southern way of life? What peoples and societies were there prior to 1619? What Supreme Court decisions allowed the land transfers to happen? Why would a an organized society, in terms of government, literacy, and publications decide to move from Georgia to Oklahoma?
The beginnings of what is now the United States is both triumphant and tragic. It is darkened by enslaving people; it is also darkened by colonization, violent dispossession of Native Peoples, internment of Native Peoples into a reservation system, and efforts to "kill the Indian and save the man" by forcing Native children into boarding schools.
Mr. Gates, your narrative is worthy but incomplete. See Maggie Blackhawk in May 2019 Harvard Law Review for an invitation to expand the dialogue on the Constitutional framework beyond the current black/white paradigm. The challenge is in, the Supreme Court calendar in the 1820 and 1830 era was full of issues on Indian policy and Indian removal. It is an explanation of the 1862 Union Army Sand Creek Massacre (note, no Confederate troops were at Sand Creek)
10
Isn’t this topic irrelevant to the author’s purpose. Isn’t your point also irrelevant to the notion being addressed. While important, not the venue.
2
Chief Justice Roberts should be required to read this article. He might want to reconsider his opinion that gutted the Voting Rights Act.
21
I was fortunate in that my high school teacher had my class read The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, which deals with some of the material presented here by Mr. Gates. A year later, I was able to hear Woodward speak. It was quite an educational experience.
13
I wonder how the Trump term as US President, will be recorded in a hundred years time. In the US there are still around 40% of the population who support Trump, despite his words and actions continuing to show, he should have never been given the Republican nomination to run for President.
Those 40% will have a completely different view of President Trump, which is based on emotion, rather than facts. They will continue to push the narrative that Trump was a great President, even though Trump represents the tyranny by the minority.
9
It is articles such as this that reminds me of the oft-spoken term, American Exceptionalism. Well, I do agree that there is a lot of exceptionalism to go around but most of it isn't good. Just because a country consisting of a massive wealth of stolen natural resources, slavery, genocidal wars against the original inhabitants has enabled the ability of some to make a LOT of money, the much vaunted morals and values so often bragged about are often pretty hard to detect. Of course, there are lots of good Americans (I married one) and other achievements but the same could be said about every other country on the planet. But it's only the US that claims this mantle of exceptionalism. The rest of us disagree.
18
It's called hypocrisy. To this day, the US extracts real resources and goods from the world in exchange for green pieces of paper. Because they control the world militarily, they can do whatever they want, and push their corporate form of 'democracy' onto others.
1
@JimJ
Did the European settlers to Canada bargain in good faith with members of the First Nations? Or rather was it "a massive wealth of stolen natural resources" and "genocidal wars against the original inhabitants" that gave birth to your country and a platform to condescend towards your Southern neighbors?
Our wealth may be repulsive but if we ever stopped buying three-fourths of your country's exports Canada -- and your vaunted safety net and national health care -- would more closely resemble the First Nations tribes whose country you stole.
2
@jim You're absolutely right. Canada did and continues to treat its First Nations appallingly. The genocide practiced in Canada was somewhat less blatant than in the US but ultimately almost as effective. But we're not the ones calling ourselves exceptional.
On your second point, why would you even consider not buying our exports? They're handy, cheap and in large part being extracted and processed in Canada by American corporations. This is easing some but that's the history of Canadian industrial development. If you think you've been harmed by globalism, Canada has been getting the raw end of that for far longer than you have.
Our safety net and public health care system certainly sets us apart from the US but not so much from the rest of the developed world.But that's because of decisions we made as a country as opposed to the ones the US made and continue to make. So it's hard to know whether this so-called exceptionalism is a positive comment or a negative one.
1
I was an American history teacher and an American history student. Reconstruction has been covered over and over. No one version exists in isolation. And primary sources have pretty much been exhausted. So the facts that can be known are known. What changes is point of view.
To date, the highest profile account of Reconstruction was written by Eric Foner, a prominent leftist historian. Most accounts of Reconstruction before Foner emphasized the futility of reform. To highlight the achievements of Southern blacks, Foner focused on the exercise of the vote in early Reconstruction, and the historic change achieved by giving blacks the vote. Gates by contrast, is a black activist and glosses over the achievements to catalogue what went wrong.
The lesson I take from this is that white leftists and black activists are miles apart. And that’s as true in politics as it is in history. And liberal Democrats who think they speak for black activists, even of the professorial type, are sorely mistaken.
1
Gates acknowledges the achievements and addresses how white southerners reacted by destroying those achievements. You can emphasize the achievements or the destruction, but that doesn’t change the fact that the reaction by the southern white establishment was to destroy those achievements and to destroy free black Americans. The story of reconstruction is incomplete without including how it ended.
7
Thank you, Dr. Gates. I've spent most of my life in school, and I have never heard most of this. The truth must be made available to all. We cannot be complacent. Nothing is guaranteed to us. We must struggle anew each today to achieve and maintain a country in which all men, women, and children are valued and allowed an unobstructed view of their past and opportunities to achieve to the best of their abilities in the present and future.
9
Thank you Prof. Gates. This should be mandatory reading for young and old alike.
6
Opinion and comments. The sweet feel of the truth. Very encouraging and should continue.
8
Yep. Also, nice re-read of the horrific, “Birth of a Nation.”
Thank you, Professor Gates. As Professor Gates knows better than I do, the accomplishments of black Americans during Reconstruction were all the greater because the violence began virtually at once, and Federal troops were reluctant to suppress it, and inefficient at doing so, while Congress, even with large Republican majorities (but always mostly of white men even after black men began to be elected) took very quickly to making excuses for the perpetrators of the violence, or suggesting that there simply was nothing to be done. It's also important to remember the role of the Union Army in pushing newly liberated black people into sharecropping. Frequently, they wanted nothing more than to get away from the places of their enslavement and to live without anyone telling them what to do. Union generals nearly always interpreted this urge to freedom and to escape trauma as "unwillingness to work" and as a sign of irresponsibility. The sharecropping system wasn't only the product of the Redemptionists, although they worked hardest at establishing it and making it as permanent and as dishonestly run as possible.
9
As an Elementary school student in the 1950s, I was told that reconstruction was a terrible failure because African Americans couldn't govern themselve. This was supposedly because they were manipulated by the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags, and Rutherford Hayes was a great hero because he eliminated reconstruction and returned Democracy to the South. I didn't find out that this was all lies until about a decade ago.
We need a movie about reconstruction to replace the images instilled in popular culture by Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation.
17
@Teed Rockwell I was taught in the 1950's that Reconstruction was a total failure because the North viciously punished the South. That wasn't true either. Reconstruction was very sympathetic to the South. Having been militarily conquered has never been pleasant for anyone, so the Union was extremely motivated to prevent any more disunion.
8
@Sequel Now that you mention it, that was part of the story I was told, also.
Important essay. Too few have much understanding of Reconstruction and it aftermath. There's better comprehension of the civil war, but little of the reality that for freedmen, life went back to where it was or worse. And essentially another century passed before the promise began to be realized. We can't let things slip again.
4
@Bill My strong impression is that "Gone With The Wind" was born of a fairly common, often mutual, and always pablum-y white and black longing for the good old days.
But the reality faced by formerly enslaved people was more comparable to that of people released from death camps after WWII.
There was no way back into the past. I can almost understand (but not quite) why Elijah Mohammed advocated that the state of New Mexico should be given to blacks, in the same way that death camp survivors saw Israel as a protective post-war haven.
Progress seldom goes forward in a straight line. There were also backlashes against increased rights for women. The account of Reconstruction I was taught in integrated schools in the early 1970s was appalling.
5
A number of commentors note the short shrift this is given in schools, in all parts of the country. That was my experience too. Public education is under almost entirely the domain of the states. Probably to effect any changes Congress must be involved. In my view national education must be the major outcome of any discussions and results of reparations. Civics should be included.
11
Ron Cherno’s recent biography of General and President U. S. Grant delves into the period of the Republican Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Democratic Party efforts to resist, which eventually led to the Reformation movement mentioned in this article.
Mr. Gates lost me, though, in making the leap that Trump being elected President in 2016 was the result of renewed racism that arose during Obama’s presidency.
It’s probably time for Henry Louis Gates to partake in another “Beer Summit,” this time with President Trump! Except Mr. Trump would have an “O’Doul’s!”
6
@Bill Weber The White backlash to Obama that resulted in the Election of a completely unqualified White man whose only goal was to uphold Racists "values" couldn't be more obvious. Note also the so called Tea Party movement that sprang up during the Obama administration that didn't have one thing to do with controlling deficits. We've not heard a peep from them during the current GOP Tax Cut fueled rapid deficit increase.
2
Mr. Weber, your privilege is showing.
1
No way in heck would Trump get anywhere near Gates. First, Gates is black, second, Gates is well-educated, and most of all, Gates is far smarter than Trump. There is nothing Trump hates worse than those three things. Why do you think he loathed Obama?
2
All school curriculums should cover this history truthfully. I graduated from high school in 1971 in a very segregated town in Southern California. This was not unusual at that time. Everyone of course was aware of the civil rights movement and the nightly television coverage of the violence in southern states against the movement. As a family were horrified by these images. I was motivated to take a class in Black History taught by a black instructor in my all white school which was offered for the first time in my senior year. This opened my eyes and instilled in me a desire to learn about other races, other cultures, and injustices the world over. This has informed my political views and values of equality, justice and empathy which I have passed on to my kids. We need more education early in our schools curriculum.
14
My spouse and me are reading “Stoney the Road.” It is a informative work which has helped us to fill in the empty spots in our understanding about the origin of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the racism that lingers to this day. Until we have Truth and Reconciliation, the stain of slavery will remain.
7
A day late and a dollar short. But Henry Louis Gates Jr. never disappoints in filling in some of the most egregious gaps of American history.
I remember mysterious photos of black southern representatives in my high school history book. Faces without context. Reconstruction. No mention of what these men accomplished or where they went, or why it took so long for their legacy to continue.
And, thanks to some friends commenting here, Shelby Foote is now on my reading list.
7
thank you. Astonishing to me that Egan doesn't get his sister to read this, and lead her to see what real debasement looks like and how trump profits from it.
7
@Rhporter I doubt she would believe it.
This article and the articulate comments confirm my belief that the lofty sentiments of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are just a glossy billboard in front of a real estate project meant for more corrupt purpose - white financial power. The “Forefathers” wanted separation from their King and his pesky religion, but that was really as far as it went. All others were disenfranchised. Mr. Gates speaks eloquently here about blacks specifically, but the fight for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, Labor’s rights, etc., point to the same culprit. I feel many of us believe in the promise of the glossy billboard and our struggle is the vigilant fight to make it a reality: “All are created Equal.” and “Equal Justice under the Law”. This is the real estate project I want built in America. And yet they are building another “Trump Tower”.
3
@M It wasn’t the King’s religion: most of the people who actually financed the Revolution were of the Anglican faith.
It was the taxes.
7
In the middle 1980s I taught fifth grade in a public school district in coastal North Carolina. I remember lamenting how inadequately textbooks addressed the topic of the Civil War and its aftermath. It was an unspoken “rule” to address issues of race and power euphemistically, if at all, lest the white majority of parents and teachers object. Later, when I carpooled to Greenville, NC, to earn a M.A. Ed., I learned firsthand of my colleagues’ unwillingness to allow their own white children associate with their African-American classmates. I was stunned! At the time, I passed off their bigotry as ignorance, as I grew up in “progressive” Raleigh, graduated from the University of North Carolina, was raised by liberal, educated, suburban parents, etc.
It took me years to realize how insidious and pervasive revisionism had corrupted my own understanding. In fact, it was only in 2006, when the Raleigh News and Observer reported on the 1898 Wilmington race riot, a pivotal piece of US history I had never learned in school, that I began to comprehend the willful ignorance of public education to address its own role in obstructing racial reconciliation. Dr. Gates, whose documentary series on the Reconstruction should be mandatory viewing for all middle school students, has become my hero. His article reveals the tip of a long-buried splinter in the American psyche. Sadly, some of my own ancestors participated on the wrong side of history. Only the truth can and will set us free.
389
@Freda Zeh do you think we should nationalize education rather than continuing to let the states set the curriculum and methods? I’m a former teacher—I left the profession early on, due to my conclusion that I could not change the status quo—and I developed the belief that the individual states are not, and have never been, on equal footing.
It seems that things will never change until something or someone makes the Southern states change. I always say that Reconstruction should have lasted 100 years.
As a student in East Alabama in the 90’s (and not being raised by liberal parents, I envy you), I experienced the de facto segregation that characterizes the south and is only getting worse by the day. There were very few black kids at my school, and when I invited a black friend over to swim at my house, my dad and brother thought I was crazy. My little brother, who is a Trump supporter, made a huge deal about it, saying I needed to put more chlorine in the pool before he would get in it. He was born in 1985. But you would think he was born a century earlier than that.
My one saving grace growing up was that my dad’s mom, a teacher, had traveled extensively, actually lived the “do unto others” creed so she treated black people the same way she treated white people, and spent a lot of time teaching me. That was about as liberal as it got and she was the closest thing to a feminist I’d ever met. It’s the white Southern men in my opinion who keep us from moving forward.
120
Corrie,
Your comment about Southern men holding all the southerners back is incomplete.
The revisionist, redacted lost cause curriculum was created, produced, disseminated and regulated by the insidious Daughters of the Confederacy. This propaganda has infected many over the years. This includes people all around our country.
24
@Corrie Prejudice and racism are certainly not confined to Southerners. I was raised in NY on Long Island. It is (or at least used to be - I left many years ago) one of the most racist and segregated places in the US. Newsday ran an article quoting police in Garden City saying they routinely followed and stopped black people there since "they" did not belong in Garden City. Black people were pretty much confined to Hempstead, Uniondale and a few other places. Racism is a national problem. Living now in the Triangle region of NC, I've never experienced the level of prejudice here that I did in NY.
23
This story should be seen as linked to one from yesterday, "For much of the past decade, schoolchildren in Detroit were forced to endure conditions that can only be described as abhorrent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/detroit-public-schools.html
That is extreme, disgusting race-based discrimination. It is a direct continuation of what this article addresses.
13
@Mark Thomason
It should also be seen as linked to the story yesterday about the descendants of slaves movement. I get that the modern Democratic Party has not delivered for the black community as it should have, and must work with the black community to do better. However there are black folk who honestly believe the real solution to this is to throw their support behind southern and western Republicans who are nothing if not a continuation of the Redemption movement. Why do so many people of all colors and classes support the GOP against their own self interest?
2
@Mark Thomason
It should also be seen as linked to the story yesterday about the descendants of slaves movement. I get that the modern Democratic Party has not delivered for the black community as it should have. That there are black folk who honestly believe the pat the solution to this is to throw their support behind southern and western Republicans who are nothing if not a continuation of the redemption movement is
Is this news or an attempt to create a not-to-subtle parallel to the present?
5
There's something(s) so alike between the 'South Rising Again' and Nazism, that it is frightening. The embers are still there, smoldering in the minds of the fewer and fewer socially devolved. Perhaps Trump's racism and bigotry, surfacing at this time, is a good thing. It reminds us that they still exist and the cancer must be removed.
16
The Republican Party is running a nationwide Redeemer program suppressing black votes in Northern states Wisconsin and Ohio as well as Georgia and Texas. Barr refuses to end federal mass incarceration, today’s chain gang and method of disenfranchising blacks. Police shootings of unarmed black men are the update of lynching, terrorizing black communities.
The Democratic Party coalition of urban white liberals, minorities, and youth is a permanent, growing majority. The Republican Party sees black communities as most vulnerable and targets them. Texas and North Carolina Republicans are also reducing voting on college campuses, proving their program is conscious and purposive. The Roberts Supreme Court, from gutting the Voting Rights Act to validating gerrymandering, has ended Equal Protection and Due Process of Law applied to racial discrimination.
There is no bottom to the Trump-Republican-Fox News white nationalist, authoritarian Redeemer program unless citizens fight it.
15
The issues we have with race today are tied to the abandonment of reconstruction. It is a tragedy that Lincoln was assassinated. I wonder if he had lived out his second term if we might be in a better place today. Even though the confederacy lost the war they were able to win the white supremacist narrative.
141
@Jtm Lincoln's views on race would probably qualify him as a racist by today's standards. He plea for "malice towards none and charity for all" implies he was willing to forgive the slaveholders' treason and that he would have opposed radical reconstruction if he had lived.
2
@Jtm Mr. Gates accurately states what happened during Reconstruction. No one can dispute the fact that blacks were abandoned by Republicans in the face of Southern Democrats who refused to budge. There is a temptation to turn this into a moral drama, with good guys and bad guys. The more thoughtful put themselves in the shoes of the people of the time.
The Civil War called on every resource of both the North and the South. And little attention was given to what came next. When the time came, the feds turned attention to drafting the 14th Amendment. What emerged was a beacon of freedom shining light on a world that was not even close to the goal.
Millions of uneducated ex-slaves were granted full freedom in the South, where whites were subservient to the North. Those Republicans instilled with the spirit of reform didn’t have a clue how to go about it. Blacks rightfully wanted to lift themselves. Neither Republicans or Democrats—after slavery, why would they trust whites? Southerners AND Northerners were not ready for that. And, in context, free slaves with an equal voice boggled the minds of whites and presumably, some blacks. Jim Crow was in the cards. Too far to go, and even among the willing, no idea how to get there.
3
joe,
Lincoln wanted to show mercy to a people who were fellow US citizens before the secession. Freed blacks surprised many with their successes at the ballot box. Lincoln did hold erroneous views about slavery, but he was not a racist. He thought after the horrendous treatment they endured they would not want to stay in the re-united states. As I said, many were surprised, but Lincoln would have been very impressed and happy to support their efforts.
9
I’ve written in various comment threads in this newspaper that very little has changed from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and Redemption.
Conservatives wailed and snarled when the Times published its 1619 Project earlier this year; “revisionist history” they sneered. Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph brought Redemption full circle: from evil concept to the gate of evil fulfillment. All that stands in this insidious movement’s way is Trump’s defeat next year.
Disenfranchisement of slaves and their descendants is the cornerstone of the modern Republican Party. The chieftains have been—and are—Dwight D. Eisenhower; Barry Goldwater; Richard Nixon; Ronald Reagan; William Rehnquist; Lee Atwater; Patrick Buchanan; Karl Rove; Rupert Murdoch; Roger Ailes; Newt Gingrich; Bush pere et fils; Mitch McConnell; John Boehner; John Roberts; Mike Pence; and the reigning Redemptist exemplar himself, Donald Trump.
Those few who will read my entry might take violent exception to my roster of latter-day Redemptists but no fair-minded person could—or would—take serious issue with my inclusive—but certainly not exhaustive—roster. For the aim of the original Redemptists was to erase any and all gains that black people effected. We saw this during President Obama’s two terms; the Congressional and gubernatorial obstructionism that underlay his eight years were on full display. Why is Donald Trump’s only raison detre the obliteration of his predecessor’s legacy?
What else is “Make America Great Again?
34
@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18 well said and I agree with all of it, but you left out one critical group in the chieftains category: the evangelical ministers. Southern states are very evangelical, and the fact that Southern churches continue to be racially segregated sets the tone in society. The white evangelical churches, like the Southern Baptist Convention, play a key role in helping Republicans perpetuate racism.
22
@Corrie: Thanks; I ran out of characters. And, to make it clear that I, a black man, am not some stereotypical complainant, left out folks like T(homas) Woodrow Wilson ( FDR; JFK; LBJ, etc. The finest Civil War history is (Tennessee’s) Shelby Foote’s weighty three volume. It’s all there, and most Americans don’t have the smallest clue about how close South came to winning the war. It was a very near thing. The rebels were very unlucky and—give them credit—resourceful and inspired.
11
@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18 was thinking the other day how I wish that Shelby Foote were alive right now to help steer through this Trump presidency. I wonder if he could help these white Southern men come to their senses. I read Foote’s history in college, and I enjoyed him being part of Ken Burns Civil War series. It’s hard to understand Reconstruction without understanding what the average Southern soldier thought he was fighting for. Lowcountry slave owners hired people to fight for them but the poor white Appalachians didn’t have that luxury, and many of them didn’t want the war in the first place, especially since it would be fought mostly in Appalachia.
It’s really despicable that the slave owners had to fearmonger about blacks taking their land and jobs to get them involved. The Republican Party is doing the same thing the slave owners did. The elitists are firing up poor whites. Will we ever stop fighting this war? Maybe that’s why Reconstruction failed. The war never truly ended. I personally feel like I am fighting it within my own family.
19
How does one wrap one's head around the paucity of spirit, that utter lack of soul, that demands that one can only elevate oneself by believing that a fellow traveler is Less Than Human based solely on the color of their skin? It's incomprehensible.
15
I believe that the Southern Baptist Convention is largely to blame for the fact that the two poorest, most racially divided Deep South states, Alabama and Mississippi, still function as if it is 1860. The SBC’s political influence reaches into the state legislatures and the schools and keeps us from moving forward. They actually want to allow de facto segregation of the schools, and their biggest champion is Betsy DeVos. 1 out of 4 people in Alabama attend Southern Baptist churches, and 21 percent of Mississippians do. It’s a right-wing political machine more than anything.
Southern Baptists split from Baptists in the name of slavery preservation. They were instrumental in pushing segregation during the Civil Rights movement, and today they are instrumental in this school choice movement that favors the white and the wealthy. It’s really no different from slavery when you really think about it.
Why are Alabama and Mississippi in a perpetual tug-of-war to see who can be dead last in education? Because we cannot move past the racism that says black children aren’t as important as white children.
That the churches remain segregated spills over into the rest of society. Until white people of conscience stop attending this church, things won’t change. I grew up in one. My parents still attend one. My father is a Southern Baptist deacon. He also calls biracial children “fudgecicles.” And Southern Baptist women my age (30’s) join the Daughters of the Confederacy! It is UNREAL.
23
Are there any examples of a functioning democracy where political parties are based on race or religion? If elections are just going to be people of different ethnic groups fighting each other for money and power, why bother even having an election? What is there to talk about? Why not just fight a real war and get things over with? That's how things work out in the Balkans and the Middle East.
People seem to have forgotten that diversity without any sense of unity is not strength--it's a recipe for a blood bath. To put it bluntly, people need a reason not to resolve their differences by simply killing each other.
2
Jim Crow is alive and well throughout the South. I moved to Florida about 7 years ago from NY and PA. White supremacy is not an underground movement or spoken of in whispers or back rooms. It is a way of life and its ingrained in the institutions, organizations and social fabric. In Florida gated communities that offer housing for retired people 55 and older are literally euphemisms for "whites only". The words "age restricted" mean whites only. There is not one African American gated community in Florida. In our community, The Villages, only 1.8 % of the population is minorities and barely 1% is black. Recently the people of Florida voted to allow former convicted felons who have served their time to be allowed to have their voting rights restored. Several hundred thousand blacks and Hispanics would be eligible to vote but for the new Republican governor who declared that serving a full sentence including paying all debts and fines associated with the prison sentence. In other words he instated a poll tax that nullified the vote of people to restore voting rights. Education suffers too as the Republicans cut spending to the bone. Impoverished school districts have crumbling buildings, and students of impoverished parents sometimes even lack money for lunch. Sales tax on clothing and food also strike at the poor (read blacks and minorities) unequally and makes life unaffordable for millions. Republicans support white racism. A gated community is a white community.
21
Great article--thank you so much. I want to share every single word in it--on giant neon billboards throughout the USA!
9
The Redemption was and in its current form remains nothing less than an anti-Constitutional insurgency with both an insidious public presence that actively and ceaselessly contorts and misapplies the rule of law and redefines our norms and liberal aspirations, and a companion guerrilla or domestic terrorist campaign committed to the established, open rule of white nationalism. One doubts that this cancerous condition can ever be completely eliminated but with constant diligence and successively reinforced positive results of economic and social well being, coupled with active legal measures to defeat domestic terrorism, it can at least be fought into remission. We recognize these circumstances in other countries and populations but seem blind to our own fraught and near fatal situation.
9
Thank you Dr. Gates. My hope is that this essay will find its way into as many media outlets as possible so that all Americans will learn the truth.
16
All too true, but we should call the process of "Redemption" by its real name, domestic terrorism. And while white southerners were the perpetrators, white northerners were not-so-innocent bystanders. The Supreme Court that ruled in favor of "separate but 'equal'" had a northern and Republican majority, but the only dissenter was a southern Unionist and former slave owner: John Marshall Harlan.
22
Thank you Dr. Gates. Brilliant piece.
14
The truth is sometimes hard to swallow. This article show the miseducation of generations to continue life as it was prior to the civil war. Just as 45, during his Atlanta visit, referred to the republican party being the party of the African-American after the civil war. 45 uses the same ideology to minimize the African-American vote. This country could be should be better.
As this article speaks the truth, we must face the truth and understand the ideology based on hatred will always lead to division and destruction. 45's administration must be dismantled, his supreme court must be dissolved, and his senate must be removed from office.
America must live up to its constitution. We must acknowledge the truth. Thank you for this article.
18
"Though Reconstruction’s end is often identified as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, the final blow would be the Supreme Court’s decision in 1883 to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, to which black leaders responded immediately with grave dismay."
I need to study this history in much more detail, however, the Hayes-Tilden Compromise is considered the final blow to Reconstruction because it was directly responsible for the withdrawl of federal troops from certain southern states, upon Ulysses Grant leaving office.
However, it's curious that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 had been drafted 5 years earlier in 1870 -- right after the 3 Reconstrution Amendments -- by Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner with the assistance of John Mercer Langston and others, but was not passed for 5 yrs., ostensibly because of opposition by President Grant.
I wonder if it's because of Sumner's vehement opposition to Grant's 1870 scheme to annex Santo Domingo (present day Dominican Republic) for its natural resources, but also create a "black state" for African Americans. This is according to the William S. McFeeley biography of Frederick Douglass, although I'm guessing that David W. Blight has a more sympathetic view towards Douglass's part in the scheme.
Did the 5-year delay weaken the Act in any sense?
3
"When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop."
On reading Douglass' above remark I had a brief fantasy that, when Trumps impeachment trial unfolds in the US Senate, the chief prosecuter would read out this statement in thundering tones and that the hands of those about to ignore Trump's guilt would tremble just a little.
23
It would make a moving and dramatic movie scene. I hope I see that movie some day.... part two of All the President’s Men.
7
"..the Confederacy didn’t die in April 1865; it simply morphed"
How true. The Confederacy may have surrendered "on the books" but never in their hearts. Generations later, they are still spouting hatred, racism, misogyny. And it's only gained momentum since DJT donned his white robe and hood in public.
Thank you for the history lesson, but how hard this is to absorb.
49
@Feline It is so true, what you say.
2
Amazing and important. Thank you.
8
Thank you so much for this article.
10
“the folly of endeavoring to retain the new wine of liberty in the old bottles of slavery.”
I now believe that the greatest mistake the United States made in its history was the Civil War. If the North was not fully committed to completely destroying the cancer of slavery and racial thuggery once and for all, it should have cut the South loose. Then the US could have contained the malignant cancer and worked from the outside to subvert its economy, form land and naval blockades, ferry escaping slaves to freedom, and set up the conditions from within that would have destroyed of the “Southern way of life”.
Instead, it was a colossal waste of time, energy, and lives. We slapped the hands of a malignant cancer, stopped the radiation treatment way too early, rolled out the welcome mat, and allowed that cancer to travel unhindered to all corners of the continent. We would not be dealing with the now graver threat to our democracy we face today if we had stood our ground during Reconstruction or simply allowed Southern states to withdraw and treat them like the enemies to democracy they truly were.
And Mildred Lewis Rutherford: truly vile and yet another shining example of women being the greatest enablers of White Christian patriarchy.
19
As bad as Jim Crow happened to be, those states in which it was institutionalized suffered from little participation in the great economic and technological advances which made the United States so wealthy and powerful by the start of the World War I, which effectively ended the dominance of European empires in world affairs. The fact was that non-whites were deliberately limited in their ability to share in that great period of growth by the non-Jim Crow areas of the country where whites were also of the opinion that whites were a superior race. The ability of racist white southerners to impose their Redemption was in no small part allowed by the majority of Americans, eighty percent were white, to allow a tenth of Americans to have their rights suppressed.
12
It's terribly depressing what cruelty and evil people will inflict to protect wealth and power. Especially power.
We're seeing that now, doing everything to fool the voters, or thwart their ability to express their will.
15
Dr. Gates’ fine and timely article brings to mind the story of Norris Wright Cuney, born in 1854, the son of a Texas plantation owner and one of his slaves. Cuney rose in the ranks of the post-war Republican Party, to lead labor movements and eventually to lead the Texas delegation to Republican National Conventions. This ended in 1896, when his delegation was denied seating in favor of a white delegation. Jim Crow had arrived.
My knowledge and interest in the Cuney story dates to about 1973, when I was employed by the state agency responsible for developing historical markers. I was tasked to research and write a state-sponsored marker for Norris Wright Cuney, to be installed along a highway in Waller County, Texas, near the old Cuney plantation, where the slave quarters still stood. Upon submitting the marker text to the county historical agency for local approval, I received the frantic reply: “I will not be able to continue living in this county if I approve this text the way it is written.” After much negotiation by my superiors and several renditions, a text was finally settled upon, one which in my opinion, you could barely comprehend that Cuney was of African heritage.
The crowning embarrassment to the state of Texas was, however, that the installment program at the site was presided over by U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan. Jim Crow is alive and well in many area of the Old South.
44
It's weird when a modern politician can, with a straight face, claim that this country has a history of equality stemming from this "All men are created equal" phrase. First, obviously, "men" doesn't include half of the population. Okay, you may say in that day and time "men" meant everyone. Apparently it didn't, since women were not allowed the vote, and African Americans were considered as only a fraction of a human being. It's extremely important that we honor and define our progress clearly and keep going.
7
An important, informative and necessary reminder of some of the realities of American history. There are several important insights, especially that history is not, unfortunately, always a march toward progress. In the words of an old spiritual, “Freedom is a constant struggle”. I wish I was still teaching middle school history- this would definitely be required reading.
135
I have been learning more and more about the truth of Reconstruction in the last year, no thanks to my AP U.S. History class in high school 40 years ago. That course spent all of about 10 minutes on it, and grossly misrepresented what it was. For generations, Americans have grown up and even if it was covered at all in their education, learned that Reconstruction 'failed'. It most certainly did not fail; in fact it was very successful. The only failure was in its premature dismantling, and then replacement with a system of segregation, disenfranchisement and terror, the remnants of which still exist all around us today.
Thank you professor Gates.
365
Mikeweb so true! Articles like this make me wince at how we were taught. I was a Boomer honor student & the slant we were given on the post Civil War period in the 50’s & 60’s is just as you described.
24
@Mikeweb
Professor Gates lost me years ago when he had his ancestry program on the educational channel, it started with minorities and then incorporated white people. As a fool, I actually believed him. However when he allowed Ben Affleck the actor to change his history to highlight his families involvement in the revolutionary war but nothing in depth to his family being slave owners . I wondered what was real and what was Hollywood influence for better ratings.
When Professor Gates was abused by the Cambridge Police he didnt use that incident with his meeting with President Obama to further the conversation about racial injustice ,Cambridge is still a haven for white people an a welcoming place for minorities. he did not.
Most minorities know our history we know how we enhanced capitalism for the white man and we have suffered decades the injustices from social policies and American blacks who wanted to be white . However we have had great champions for the black race from people who are knew they were black.
Hopefully once Trump is gone we can get back on the road of progress and under the leadership of Bernie,Warren and whoever we get behind, we have hundreds of years rich Bloomberg, is not the answer.
1
@Mikeweb well, we were taught that the North failed--to continue spending the money on federal troops that would have been necessary to defend black people against the resurgent Klan types.
1
Henry Louis Gates’ review of our nation’s history — and his analysis of where that history has brought us — should be required reading in our schools. But even more important than our children’s future education is re-education for today’s adult Americans: How do we effectively communicate these facts to the millions of adult Americans who were never exposed to this history, and who (finally made aware of it) still refuse to accept it now?
374
@Donna Ross Many of us were exposed to this history in school--I remember all this and more from the Regents U.S. history curriculum in NYS in the 60s. Plus biographies of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, along with Anthony, Stanton, and the other ladies of Seneca Falls. Plus intense study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The centennial of the Civil War was a big celebration--albeit premature--of the end of black oppression. The sesquicentennial went by with far less overt remembrance of the specific events leading up to and during this conflict. What happened? Have curricula become dumbed down so as not to offend anyone, or to make sure everyone passes?
4
TV. We need Ken Burns to do a series on this.
6
@Donna Ross
In the Internet electronic age any absence or ignorance or invisibility about the history and origin of all humans in American history is willful.
Black Africans were no more immigrants to America than were brown aboriginal many nation inhabitants.
Africans weren't Negroes nor colored nor black nor African Americans.
Aboriginal humans weren't Indians nor Redskins nor Americans nor Natives.
4
"The Redeemer base consisted primarily of white Southern Democrats whose most urgent intention was to neutralize the black vote, which under the protection of United States troops during Reconstruction had shown astonishing power in sending Republican majorities to Southern statehouses. "
Lest we forget. The preachy Democrats need to remember their own past.
5
@Ludwig , I'm sorry that you seem to have missed the main point of this article. After the Civil War, blacks were the ones who were out working for the public good - establishing schools and businesses that benefited all citizens. The white southern elite did everything in their power to prevent this and rip this budding freedom from it's roots.
And we still feel the effects to this day - yes, back in the lat 1800's the Democrats were the party of the status quo, and the Republicans were the liberals. As Mr. Gates noted in his article, the parties have completely switched positions since then. However, the fact remains that even though the Republicans of the late 1800s were the party of liberal beliefs, it doesn't appear that they did much to speak out or stand up to protect their black members.
Slavery and discrimination are twin stains on our nation, and until we all need to face and accept the horrors that our white ancestors inflicted on others (whether those people were Native American, black, Chinese, Japanese, ect), we will never move forward.
141
@Ludwig
"Lest we forget," let's keep in mind too that comparing today's Democrats to those of one & a half centuries ago is not precisely what one would call a legitimate or laudable exercise. It's akin to saying that this year's loaded F-150 Ford pickup is the same as a bare bones 1908 Model T. :)
21
@Ludwig perhaps you should re-read the article and take note of this statement in particular: "It is worth remembering that Democrats and Republicans occupied positions opposite to those of today’s parties with regard to “states’ rights” until around 1964."
55
This insightful piece by Professor Gates forces reconsideration of the adage that history is written by the winners. In this case, the losers dominated production of scholarly works on the Civil War and Reconstruction until the post-WWII era. These historians, mostly from the south, portrayed slavery as a benign institution, dismissed Abolitionists as troublemakers, and interpreted Reconstruction as a period of corruption and oppression of the south.
David Blight, in his superb study, "Race and Reunion," implies that this interpretation stood for so long because white northerners, including scholars, themselves handicapped by racial prejudice, concluded that harsh criticism of the south would hamper efforts to reunite the country.
After WWII, however, a new generation of scholars, including Professor Gates, David Blight, and Eric Foner, stimulated by the struggle against Nazi racism and the rise of the civil rights movement, reexamined the period. As many readers have indicated, the new interpretation made its way into the nation's classrooms slowly.
This controversy reminds us that the study of history reflects in part the biases of the men and women who devote their careers to it. This fact explains the impossibility of producing a definitive history of anything and imposes on the reader the responsibility of exercising critical judgment even when reading scholarly works.
11
When people object to the removal of Confederate memorials, they need to be mindful of what those Confederates were fighting for. And that those same Confederates were very clear about what they were fighting for in newspaper editorials at the time, in the Articles of Succession passed by various southern state legislatures, and most especially in Confederate Vice-President Andrews Stevens "cornerstone" speech of 1861 .
Personally, I don't feel that armed rebellion for the purpose of perpetuating and expanding racially-based slavery is something to be honored or memorialized. And frankly, I find it shocking that some people apparently do.
26
Born in North Carolina in 1951, I started school after the Brown v Board of Education decision, but our town’s schools weren’t desegregated until more than a decade later. Our deplorably unequal black schools were burned down by “Northern agitators” and we had instant desegregation when I began seventh grade. School enrollment didn’t increase because so many whites fled to non-accredited Christian schools. By the time I began high school I understood that all our lives were much improved by integration.
Before desegregation, the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy made sure children were indoctrinated into their vision of the Lost Cause. We celebrated only Confederate Memorial Day and were taught Civil War camp songs to prepare for the annual march to the courthouse square, where we placed flowers around the memorial to the Confederate dead. My parents had gone through the same process at the same schools, so were prepared to fill in the gaps of our education at home.
The mention of Reconstruction, never mind Redemption, was omitted because many states saved money by allowing Texas to “vet” and select the textbooks used in much of the public schools.
15
Good point about the outsized influence that Texas has on textbook selection across the country.
11
@Clio And as a person with a residence in Texas in the highest property tax area in the state, I’d pay more tax if the public education system was capable of imparting any learning whatsoever. The level of absolute ignorance in Texas is absolutely appalling.
1
Many believe that we have come very far from our post reconstruction phase, however, as Dr. Gates posited, we are experiencing a neo-redemption era with the rise of Trumpism, a leader who stands for division of a nation. For the nation to move ahead after the civil war, reconciliation between the north and south had to square on the backs of the freed blacks as they were always considered expendable.
In Germany, great lengths are reached to educate the population about the holocaust, not as an exercise but so that it never happen again. Not enough white or black americans know the breadth and depth of their own history and that in and of itself is a factor of how someone like Donald J. Trump is the POTUS.
25
One of the best articles in the NY Times in five years.
Thank you.
27
After watching the extraordinary PBS series on Reconstruction created by Prof, Gates, and then reading Eric Foner's seminal history of Reconstruction, I was stunned by a simple insight:
No period of American history is as central to understanding the national shame of our pervasive, institutional, violent racism as Reconstruction and so-called Redemption.
To see how the immediate flowering of black institutions and political participation was destroyed almost as immediately by malignant, homicidal white supremacist racism is to viscerally understand why "dreams deferred" have so often exploded.
I also think I now understand why this period has, as other readers have noted, been given short-shrift in the study of American history.
While there are many contenders in our history for recognition as a seminal episode of cruelty and racism, the special cruelty of offering hope and immediately and violently destroying it was evil in its purest, most hellish form.
68
America took a group of people and destroyed their lives/ identities via slavery, took a ten-year deep breath during reconstruction, and started over again with Jim Crow/racial discrimination laws no less.
A whole lot was kept away from the African American populace since the end of reconstruction, by keeping them out of the loop in educational and economic progress, while white folk kept telling themselves how lazy, uneducated and out of sort black people were.
As professor Gates stated, Trump and his following are looking to roll back any progress gained up until now. Stuffing the courts with unqualified ideologs is testament to that. Just ask the ABA.
19
Congratulations to Professor Gates for compellingly and convincingly presenting a graphically telling critical historic narrative of juxtaposed political, societal, and economic positions addressing the issue of race. The Opinion both enlightens and instructs upon the stellar virtues of Reconstruction and the perfidious malignancy of Redemption. The implementation and execution of the coarse, brutal vicious terrorism and the correlative institutionalized racial demagoguery that is Jim Crow America demands vigilance today and a reading of history as a realistic reminder. The current occupant of the White House resorted to racial vilification and ethnic xenophobia, fomenting and engendering distrust, suspicion, and apprehension through fueling race baiting reminiscent of Governor George Wallace. Wallace persistently played the race card, exhorting his supersized rallies that they were better and smarter, moral and honest, and racially superior than Black Americans. The persistency of the race baiting campaign reminded his supporters that though they may not be college educated or socially informed about racial and ethnic diversity, "they" were better than "them." So the scene plays in 2019. The Vietnam War draft dodger incites and promotes a continuum of crass racial and immigrant internecine, reminding his MAWA minions "they" are better than "them." Birthright citizenship, DACA, TPS, asylum protection, and the "Wall" reflect a kaleidoscopic menagerie of issues. Race matters.
8
The poison of Trump, and the delusion of his supporters, haven't come from nowhere, as Henry Louis Gates points out here. They both have a long, and powerful, history - and they will take a long time and a lot of concerted effort - to get to the roots of our national cancer before it kills us all.
13
"Never wound a snake, kill it," was Harriet Tubman's line about racism. I titled my latest novel, A Wounded Snake, around it and the fight in 1890's Lexington, KY, against the guerilla warfare of white supremacists against the black franchise, black achievements in horse racing, and black aspirations in education. Twenty years earlier had been a hopeful time. But hope would take another forty years to reappear. The snake didn't die---isn't dead yet.
12
And then he posed a question still haunting us today: “What’s next?” If Trump & the Republicans get their way this is an easy question to answer. The ideological decedents of the not so old south are still entrenched in much of the confederacy. The current governor of Georgia "Brian Kemp purged half a million voters in 2017 ahead of his race for the office against the Democratic Party’s candidate, Stacey Abrams. He said they left the state. Experts went through the list name by name and found at least 340,134 voters had never moved. You’re talking a third of a million voters who were removed without notice. They showed up and were either handed provisional ballots, which were thrown in the garbage — and about 50,000 people were simply denied a provisional ballot in violation of federal law". This is just one fragrant example of the not so old south rearing its ugly head. Others abound and the new Jim Crow has been spread around the country by other Republicans in power. This is the carnival the Trump barks for, the "least racist guy he knows". & Supreme Court Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues have adopted the monkey strategy. IE: hear no evil (racism) see no evil (oppression) and speak no evil (say the truth about voter suppression and intimidation). The perfect tweet for the Twitter age.
15
What a great piece. Thank you, Dr. Gates, and thanks to the Times for it's publication.
6
The public needs to be reminded of our imperfect history to prevent repeat or continuation of policies that ultimately hurts the nation. No one is immune to prejudice or limitations, as illustrated by South Carolina’s Rep. Jim Clyburn’s ugly comments about Mayor Pete’s orientation. The more things change, the more they remain the same...
7
My dad was born in Alabama in 1910. He used to tell me the horrors and indignities the (white) South had suffered during Reconstruction until the white man took back what was "rightfully his" from the ni**ers and the carpetbaggers.
His dad (who died in 1925) had served in the Confederate army as a teenager at the very end of the war. He was also a member of the Klan. He had been told that if the North won the war that Abraham Lincoln was going to give the white men's women to sexually insatiable black men.
ironically, my dad married an Italian from Brooklyn. Unfortunately, she was a bigger racist than he was.
The biggest irony here is his mom (my grandmother), who was born in Valdosta, Georgia, always passed herself off as a "daughter of the 'Lost Cause'" until her cousin revealed that her family were carpetbaggers from Wisconsin!
Needless say, me and my family had some serious disagreements about the subject of race when I was in college.
50
Thank you, Dr. Gates, for your tireless and patient efforts to educate white America about a history that is willfully forgotten. Until we face the truth about the racism that is at the core of our nation's story, we cannot hope to heal it's poisonous effects.
21
The undoing of US conservatism is here. Conservatives value tradition. They claim that an imperfect past is preferable to the accidental tragedies of change. At times, this made sense; it's no coincidence that conservatism was a response to the French revolution's excesses.
But US cultural traditions reek of racism, and southern ones are redolent with it. Embracing the imperfect past has been a disaster because of it. There's no way around it. American conservatism has been morally corrupted from the start, because it sunk roots in the repression of African-Americans.
Conservatives claim Americans are too alienated from one another, so they need to embrace their own locales, their cultural heritage, before joining multiculturalism. The problem is that many locales and heritages have done more harm than good, and that spills out still.
The failure of US conservatism is everywhere on display. They've lost control of the GOP, yet rejoice that a majority of white Americans, the GOP base, identify as conservative. A new conservatism has to face history and forget about power. It can warn that progressive schemes will produce sad outcomes. But those warnings need to be based on the sad histories of disenfranchisement in America, and a realistic assessment that it will continue, even in new, green, and other deals.
8
@Brian "U.S. conservatism" is multifarious, much like our liberalism. Destroying our conservatism would mean the dominance of liberalism, thus creating a hive mind. Hannah Arendt talked a lot about the importance of disagreement, dissent, discussion. The fact that we do disagree, and that, except on college campuses, we're free to express ourselves, is vital.
Some of what you say is actually true. The idea that localism is always freedom-loving and distant States are always tyrannical is demonstrably false. The expansion of State power often destroyed the localist tyrannies of the Middle Ages, thus expanding freedom and liberty. And the history of America's southern states shows the same thing: localist tyrannies being eradicated by the distant State.
History is complex, just like our own lives are complex. And while I think you mean that a certain kind of conservatism could be shown to be based on a fairytale version of U.S. history and thus eradicated, how would one go about doing this? Many people are on the Right rather than the Left because of the experience the world has had with leftist radicals since 1917 -- and they grasp the entwinement of capitalism and liberty.
The views you ascribe to conservatives are really just the views of the hoi polloi. But how overblown are fears about "socialism," anyway? If Sanders was replaced by Chomsky, many would be happier still. And that's not "socialism." That's just socialism, without the scare quotes.
@Brian
American conservatism since WWII has always been elitist (they are the elite), racist, regressive, and contemptuous of poor people of any race.
1
The problem with conservatism in the U.S. is that it has become enamored with white identity politics and thinks respecting others is "PC".
My black African American ancestors were enslaved in Georgia and South Carolina where they were owned by and bred with my white European American ancestors until William Tecumseh Sherman came by.
My freed black African American ancestors in Georgia along with a few other families made a real and symbolic exodus to a land they named New Canaan not wanting to live free near where they were in bondage through Reconstruction and beyond to 1915.
But my freed black South Carolina ancestors remained in place and maintained a secret common law status that lasted until they left for Chicago in 1915.
My free-person of color ancestors living in South Carolina and Virginia stayed in place beyond Reconstruction to 1915 when they came North to Chicago, Baltimore and the District of Columbia.
My Reconstruction era born and bred Georgia ancestors came north to Chicago in 1930.
Despite college educations, economic prowess and stable families they fled the South because they were always separate and unequal through the Civil Rights era.
38
@Blackmamba
Thanks for your family story. It is heartbreakingly true in every word. We rush past the centuries of horror whites in No. America visited upon blacks, indigenous peoples, Japanese, and even most Eurpean immigrants - but most of all, for the cowardice in not telling the Remediation of "Jim Crow" to anyone, any color, in most schools. To be fair, I heard much about slavery in my first-rate pblic schools in Philly, but the unions in Brotherly Love were almost all white until WWII, when the black streetcar workers shut the sytem to get permission to become trolley drivers -- and won. At my bank in Canada, my teller was from the Caribbean, my security specialist from Zambia, my credit advisor from China, and no one seemed to care. Or know how this would have been impossible south of Canada even after the Civil War. I have researched in the U. of Mississippi: racks of racism were commonplace. Ditto when I lectured in West Texas.
American democracy is being written anew, reshaping our "knowledge" of what is true and what hidden Reading Gates is crucial to understanding history. So are your words. Thanks again.
4
@Blackmamba
What drove my black ancestors out of the South in 1915 and 1930 was color aka race aka ethnic aka national origin terrorist lynching by the white European Judeo- Christian majority.
My black ancestors who came to Chicago included World War I veterans who were present during the white European American Judeo-Christian terrorist riot in Chicago in 1919. They and other veterans were armed and fought back while the white cops looked away from the white terrorists and arrested blacks defending themselves.
3
This is so sad. And even sadder is the fact that none of this was taught in my history classes... and I grew up in the PNW... about as far from the old south as you can get.
Those alive today who support what happened during this period are, in nearly every way, irredeemable. Maybe the Reconstruction should have included a healthy dose of incarceration and lifetime banishment from politics for those who participated in the rebellion.
25
@Brian Hughes
The PNW and the old south had a lot in common:
https://nyti.ms/2sEt82J
2
Appropriate at this time when SCOTUS is engaged in a battle somewhat along the lines of the Redeemers to be reminded that the Supreme Court was pivotal to dismantling Reconstruction. Of course, SCOTUS with Dred Scott v. Sanford 1857 and with other decisions was no trivial actor in the events that precipitated the Civil War.
37
@Branagh But suppose Dred Scott had been decided differently? If the Supreme Court had overturned the fugitive slave law in 1857 the South would have likely succeeded when James Buchanan was president. He would likely have let the South go in peace. Instead the Supreme Court bought the nation more time to allow Lincoln to be elected. And the rest is history. The moral is there is something to be said for judicial restraint.
The waning days of Reconstruction are covered extensively in Ron Chernow's biography of U.S. Grant. In it he notes that the Republican's white northern base grew weary of enforcement of the suffrage and civil rights of southern blacks at the point of a bayonet and Grant received increasing push back, even from the former abolitionists of his party, to military intervention in the South. This too is part of Prof. Gates' message. The forces of the current Neo-Redemption cannot today get away with the bald faced brutality and murderous intimidation of the prior period and in that fact is today's opportunity. The black community of today cannot just rely upon the liberal white progressives and must be more self reliant. The barriers to black political power today, though significant, are forced into more subtle and disguised forms and can be more easily surmounted by motivated voter turnout overcoming these weaker barriers. Today, a motivated black voter is not endangering his/her life as in the waning days of Reconstruction. To be empowered they must surmount the significant barriers of voter suppression and with electoral success the barriers themselves can be dismantled. That can and must best be done by the black community itself getting out and voting their interests in greater numbers.
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Dr. Gates, what a wonderful, and timely piece of work. Thank you.
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Thank you, Professor Gates: a succinct summary of our post-Civil War national tragedy; as well as a portrait of our ongoing racial malady, so many generations later. Appreciate your pointing out the racism brought forth anew by the presidency of Mr. Obama. Incipient or overt racists simply could not deal with President Obama’s brilliance. We see that same brilliance in the portraits of Reconstruction’s office holders. The entire phenomenon of white hatred, white jealousy and racist violence, produces an irrevocable sadness.
In this piece resides the basis of what should be, must be, a compulsory high school history course. Without knowledge of the events of Reconstruction and “Redemption,” our nation will continue to bear the burdens, the blight, caused by racists, who still today are prepared to enact their incumbencies “by any means necessary.”
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Excellent telling of history from one perspective. The role of white supremacy racism was crucial in the policies of the United States right up to the 1960's. Reconstruction was an institution imposed with Federal occupation forces, and it represented suppression of former supporters of the Confederacy as well as protection from white racists for the recently freed slave population. What no white people appreciated was the ability of former slaves to become active and prosperous citizens immediately upon emancipation. How could people so clearly depressed and living with the freedoms enjoyed by all others, transform so quickly. But they could and did. For white supremacists their justification for slavery being that God intended Africans to be servile and dependent upon more advanced human races simply fell apart. It angered them and it made them fear suffering at the hands of former slaves the kind of oppression they had imposed.
What Gates omits is the role of Republican controlled institutions treating the white southern people as traitors and disenfranchising them to keep them from any say in their state and local government as well as representation in the U.S. Congress. The Federal Government offered benefits and national cemeteries of for Union veterans and dead but would not do so for Confederate ones. Today we think of all of those who fought in the Civil War as Americans, but after the Civil War, that was not the case. This fed into the support for Jim Crow.
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@Casual Observer : Well, Casual, lets do it by the numbers:
1:they were traitors, sort of by definition.
2:only military officers and Confederate government officials were disenfranchised, and only briefly- their voting rights were restored long before 1876.
3.Republicans winning state and national office doesn't equate with "white Southern people having no say"
4.Last time I checked, the U.S Federal government provides support and cemeteries for veterans in the U.S armed services.A Confederate soldier was clearly not a member of the U.S military.
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@Casual Observer This analysis overlooks the main reason for temporarily denying voting rights to many white southerners after the war. In the first place, they had demonstrated their disloyalty to the Union through their participation in the recently concluded war. Initially permitted to vote in 1865, they promptly elected former Confederate leaders to congress and state offices.
Equally, if not more important, whites rejected the democratic principle that their former slaves should share political power through the right to vote. Blacks were willing to share power with whites, but not the other way around.
The notion that support for Jim Crow stemmed from mistreatment by the federal government ignores abundant evidence that, from the very beginning of the postwar period, white southerners sought to restore their former slaves to a subordinate status. The so-called black codes enacted in 1865-1866 confirm this interpretation.
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@Casual Observer: I have got to object. If the victorious federal government had treated the white southern people as traitors, then Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and dozens of others would have ended up at the end of a rope. They raised an armed rebellion against a government to which they had previously sworn allegiance. That is -- by definition -- treason. (If they had won -- treason never prospers, etc. -- it might have been a different story. But they didn't.)
By any legal standard at the time, the Confederate leadership should have expected to hang. They certainly showed no reluctance to hang local partisans who rose in support of the federal government in eastern Tennessee. And black soldiers taken prisoner by Confederate forces were -- as a matter of policy -- often murdered out of hand. Such things (Fort Pillow et al) could have -- perhaps should have -- resulted in war crime trials and more hangings. Instead, the ultimate terms were -- frankly -- an astonishing gesture of magnanimity on the part of northern leaders, particularly after Lincoln was assassinated. Such leniency might have been wise in reconciling the defeated population to their defeat, but they were still far more generous that what should have been expected. And if those same white southerners had shown half that degree of generosity to their former slaves during and after Reconstruction period, then this country would be a much better place today.
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As usual, well said, Professor Gates. That the Redemption story worked so well is probably simply due to the fact that most of the country was white and related to that white story. It's also a noble-sounding story that people still relate to, as in hearing the name Dixie as a name of honor.
My bit of remaining optimism for this country is that the smoking coals of past times that are kept alive by hate, fear, ignorance, and the lust for power, are slowly, very slowly cooling off and heading out of the picture. Of course, I thought we were just about there when Barack Obama was elected, but boy was I misguided. But our current time of Trump surely must be the death knell, as all the underlying factors are false, inflated, or dying off. Yes, as I assumed in 2008.
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I grew up in South Carolina's segregated schools until my 9th grade year. We studied "South Carolina history" in 7th grade, a romanticized tale of lost cause mythology. The treatment of Reconstruction was heavy on Radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers as I recall, and silent on groundbreaking South Carolinians like Alonzo Ransier and Joseph Hayne Rainey.
Here in North Carolina, I'm sure that my children heard little if anything about the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, and Georgia's texts were likely equally silent on the ethnic cleansing of Forsyth County, northeast of Atlanta, in 1912. And not many of us anywhere in America know of the Red Summer of 1919, when black WWI veterans were lynched in their Army uniforms.
These are stories that need to be told over and over again.
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Maybe there should be more emphasis on the "created" than on the "equal" in Jefferson's too often(mis)quoted phrase.
Created by Whom, and in behalf of What.
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There is nothing more sickening than this country's neo-Confederate history.
Of course what preceded it was worse, but the continual whitewashing of American history by Southern whites and Lost Causers is as deplorable as deplorable gets.
The Lost Cause is a white supremacist ideology that pretends that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one.
It endorses the 'virtues' of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle primarily to save what they view as the beneficent and ethical Southern way of life or "states' rights" in the face of overwhelming "Northern aggression".
The Lost Cause minimizes or denies outright the central role of slavery in the Civil War.
One intense period of Lost Cause activity happened when the last Confederate veterans began to die and a push was made to preserve their racist memories.
Another period was when Southern whites respond to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Through the building of prominent Confederate monuments and writing revisionist school history textbooks, Lost Causers sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would know of the South's "true" reasons for fighting the war and therefore continue to support white supremacist policies, such as Jim Crow.
If you want to see the bottom of the American barrel, visit today's neo-Confederacy that would love to Make America White Again.
The White Wonder Bread Society is America's national disgrace.
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@Socrates
To the credit of my county, my Maryland elementary school was integrated shortly after Brown v. Board of Education. I was in third grade. Not everyone was on board. For instance, in our newly-integrated school, blacks and whites alike were taught to sing, "The Bonnie Blue Flag." It started like this:
We are a band of brothers and native to the soil
Fighting for our liberty, with treasure, blood and toil
And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Southern rights, hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
As long as the Union was faithful to her trust
Like friends and like brethren, kind we were, and just
But now, when Northern treachery attempts our rights to mar
We hoist on high the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Southern rights, hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
At the time I was just alert enough to think it peculiar. In reflection, the viciousness is breathtaking.
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@Socrates The new Neo-Confederacy is the GOP party in the south; abandoning the Democratic Party after the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. They are still fomenting hatred and bigotry, just slightly veiled. I wonder how many people saw their relatives in the black and white photo of the crowd in the courthouse after the murderers of Emmit Till were acquitted. Bigotry and hatred continues to be a sad story for the US. Please vote democratic for every seat in 2020.
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@Socrates I would only point out that ALL nations "whitewash" their history, not just the U.S. Israel, Russia, Germany, England, etc they all do it. History is crafted by emphasizing some facts over others and almost NEVER is the whole story told.
What a brilliant piece. This must be required reading in every high school history class in the land! We whites need to ensure that this full context of our current lamentable state is understood by all young people everywhere - that's the only hope for real and lasting progress. Thank you, Dr. Gates.
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Exactly! Great piece.
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Another vestige of Jim Crow, to this very day, is the death penalty, an American abomination in which the great majority of those executed have been members of minority groups whose victims were white. We shouldn't forget that the Supreme Court, on the eve of the nation's Bicentennial in 1976, upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment.
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Mr. Gates, who brings such a powerful and humane voice, along with a plentiful set of credentials of distinction, to this kind of piece, has given me a fresh vocabulary and a freshened heart for resisting what he terms Neo-Redemptionism. It is ominous to see how bitterly determined, how unscrupulous and how murderous--and in large measure effective--the forces of re-segregation and racial oppression have proved to be. That the current administration--150 years later--embodies many of the same poisonous values and the same malignant purposes is crystal clear to me. Indee, our imposter president is quite likely now in office on the basis of a ridiculously unfounded, insidiously concocted, race-based campaign to invalidate--personally and politically--the nation's first African-American President. And both his rhetoric and his actions, in denigrating and rolling back dozens of strong achievements of the Obama presidency, is a "perfect" (one of his favorite adjectives these days) analogy to the demolishing of Reconstruction. Our vocation is to...resist. As long as it takes. And then, and ever, to be vigilant.
13
When white people say, "I did not own slaves" or "I am not responsible for the past", need to read this because Jim Crow continue to reverberate today. You have been enriched by those actions in the past. When you deny the past, just like those who deny the holocaust, armenian genocide, colonialism wasn't that bad, japan treatment of the koreas of china etc, not only is a slap in the face of the families who endured and continue to be affected by those acts, but is just plain ole ignorance and not only displays a lack on empathy, but cowardliness. The question is what are you afraid of. We are either equal or not.
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American patriotism as we know it was in great part constructed after the Civil War, as a way of reuniting the North with the defeated South. Incredibly, the white South was increasingly able to demand the North acquiesce to, and even emulate, its views on race as the price of national unity – hence all those now-contested Confederate statues.
Race, or more precisely, whiteness, came to dominate the criteria for national reunion and national belonging. Organisations of veterans on both sides, and organisations of women as well, purged themselves of black members to achieve what they considered a national reconciliation. Public institutions did likewise. Patriotic symbols, celebrations, and rituals were created during this period to encourage good citizenship and loyalty.
Nationwide, powerful, large organisations including the Grand Army of the Republic, the Organization of Northern Civil War veterans, and its Southern counterpart, the United Confederate Veterans all eventually fell in line. Even the Woman's Relief Corps, an independent association of black and white women who had demonstrated their loyalty to the Union cause, marginalized their black membership and became racially segregated under pressure from white members interested in fellowship with the white South, an often-repeated phenomenon of liberals, reformers voluntarily co-opted into the system's ideological mechanisms.
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This is why I subscribe to The New York Times. This is the kind of piece that should be running in Southern newspapers—the sad few papers still in existence, anyway—and this is the kind of piece that every high school student in American Government courses should be required to read. I will be printing this out and putting it on my coffee table for conversation (since I live in an area where I cannot get the paper version of The Times).
It was impossible not to think about Booker T. Washington when I read this. In 1901, the state of Alabama held a constitutional convention, and Booker T. Washington and several other prominent black leaders wrote to the convention, asking for the opportunity to be represented:
“It could not be expected that the 800,000 colored people in this state would not have some interest in the deliberations of a body that is to frame the fundamental law under which both races are to be governed in this state, perhaps for all future time.”
They were flatly ignored and the Constitution of 1901—which, by the way, is still Alabama’s governing document in 2019—disenfranchised them, made it legal to seize their farms, kept their schools from being properly funded, and the list goes on and on. Booker T. Washington, the man who dined at the White House with Teddy Roosevelt, was ignored. But did I learn the truth of this time period in my Alabama public school? No, thanks to the UDC’s influence on state textbooks, which spun reality to favor the Lost Cause.
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This is a recurring set of variations on the ugliest theme in American history . We have once again opened what has arguably been America’s greatest unhealed wound with the presence of Donald Trump in the White House .
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I'm shocked at the number of people here who claim they knew nothing of this history of Reconstruction or that it was never in their education in public school. Where did they grow up, in the South? And for those that admit they are older (like me), did they never read anything after they got out of high school?
All the more evidence I guess of the importance and necessity of this powerful essay from Dr. Gates.
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@Dennis
My AP (college credit) U.S. History class in high school barely covered it, and inaccurately at that. And that was in true-blue Connecticut.
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@Dennis
My own jr. high & high school history classes covered it in detail ... in south GA in the early 1960s. Southerners then weren't all as benighted as current fashion would seem to indicate.
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@Dennis I was in high school in the 1950s and our teacher covered the postwar South a little. Looking back now at those lessons I received, it really does appear that she got the entirety of what she taught us from "The Birth of a Nation."
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The case for reparations should focus on this period if it wants to win. Considering the precedent of Japanese American incarceration during WWII several factors make Jim Crow era reparations more winnable than pre civil war and colonial era slavery reparations. Such as ; the documentation of who did what to whom is very extensive, both in the facts and the motivations, the actors on both sides are for the most part, US citizens; the genealogy of the direct victims and their living descendants is in many cases, very well established through official records, church records and family records and maybe also DNA, the losses suffered are in many cases well documented and in others, assessable by established methods.
While redress for the entire period of African slavery might be the more satisfying end, the more winnable fight is reparations for the denial of citizenship and loss of life, liberty and property suffered by the victims of Jim Crow policies by the states and government bodies that enacted them. Again, consistent with the precedent of the Japanese American incarceration reparations.
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@doug mclaren
Yes, the relationship of current circumstances of people correlating to race is due to Jim Crow but also to a popularly held concept of race that allowed people outside of the states where Jim Crow defined the laws to let it be. During this time the U.S. expanded faster and more greatly than any country before and the result was the country which became dominant by 1945. During that time, racism was used to justify repressing the ability of non-whites to prosper as well as whites.
The problem with focusing upon slavery was the simple fact that the portion of the country where slavery was crucial was were the Civil War was fought. The devastation across this portion of the country resembling nothing before but much like that in Europe and Japan in World War II. The assets of centuries built by slaves was lost.
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@Casual Observer
Another challenge for slavery reparations at large is where to start the clock. As colonial masters is Great Britain responsible for the proportion of slavery prior to American independence, including their descendants? How about the descendants of the Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish shipping companies that purchased the slaves in Africa and traded them throughout the Caribbean, south, central and North American ports? Do those modern nations share the culpability for the wrongs , though then legal, of their long deceased citizens? Arguing the case for total reparations may be the desired approach for those who want no reparations at all.
1
what an extraordinary piece! the topic has been coming up here and there recently, but this is the most cogent and complete account i've read thus far. kudos!
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Dr. Gates, Thank you for this history lesson. I am appalled that I never learned this until I read your article. The historical facts should be taught, and discussed, in every American history class of every high school.
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@Alarmed
Many years ago, I lived in a neighborhood, and attended a high school in a racially changing neighborhood in Chicago.
We SAW the racism for what it was, a filthy real estate scare strategy.
We needed no class lessons in integration and equality.
God blessed us!
We simply met and learned to know each other as people.
On our 50th anniversary high school in 2018, we met with our old fellow students and we laughed and, yes, danced with each other as normal people do at high school reunions.
Thanks to you, dear but sadly late, Dorothy Humphries, who sat next to me, for four years, in the cello section of the orchestra, our home room.
What a wonderful last dance!
God bless my fellow students of John Marshall High.
Go Commandos!
20
Dear Professor Gates,
I add my voice to those commentators already lauding you for this piece. It is moving, erudite and, if one lets it be, heartbreaking. I also was never taught this in the northern Catholic schools of my youth. And it should have been. I thank you again for educating me about a past I should - no, need to- know.
And as a side note, I hope you are still enjoying those fantastic suits you wear so well.
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As a student in middle school in the 1980s we read of a slavery that was relatively benign in our history class. Sure people were slaves, but they had a pretty good life, we were told. The notion that the Civil War, aka The War of Northern Aggression, was about slavery was mere propaganda. States’ rights, we were told, was why the south seceded. Since then I’ve read Howard Zinn, been to the Legacy Museum, and seen for myself just how horrible my country has been to our brothers and sisters. To see a whole swath of Americans start repeating these lies on Fox and other conservative outlets, to see the President say there were bad people “on both sides” and to hear citizens turn a blind eye to the horrors we’re still, as a society, perpetrating on people working 50-60 hours/week to feed their families so that greedy corporations and stockholders makes me angry and understand The Civil War never really ended. It just changed forms and methods.
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@Mark Larsen Isabel Wilkerson's book should be required reading in every middle and high school in this country. I, too, had never learned just how horrific the Jim Crow era truly was until I read The Warmth of Other Suns.
32
I started with The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It was eye-opening, and since reading it, I’ve come to understand the pervasive reach of Jim Crow into today’s American society. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.
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@Kathryn Baron Just ordered it....
2
Spreading the truth is an essential task for the fluent and knowledgeable and I thank you for doing it so well. But could you also use your influence to strongly encourage citizens eligible to vote to actually do it? A major problem with our democracy is the unmet need for citizen participation in the process. A true citizen votes.
49
Powerful essay. And most of it new to me. We need more emphasis on this part of American History. It's been 50 years since I was in 8th grade. We never got any information like this then, but it ought to be in every 8th grade American History curriculum now. I suspect it isn't.
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@Puck
You have my sympathy. In my conservative little town in south GA back during the same timeframe it was taught to us, in both junior high & high school.
1
I have rarely read anything in my 67 years of life that broke my heart more than this.
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