Why write about history? Because it matters

I had an interesting conversation, over on Facebook, about my essay on the roots of White rage. My friend liked the essay, but thought I’d erred in talking about the Wilmington, NC Riots.

“Going back that far gives racial apologist and post-racial promoters too much wiggle room to claim you’re talking about experiences that have little contemporary relevance,” he wrote

No, I disagreed. The riots and coup d’etat are relevant because we’re in the second Jim Crow.  Hold on,  he countered. “We’re in the second Reconstruction and not the second Jim Crow, but that probably depends on where the person experiencing American life is sitting.”

Now we could both be wrong. Historians like Eric Foner warned that we’re really in the Second Redemption, where the South is constructing its hegemony over African Americans.

Yet the words we use – Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Redemption – show how the past remains part of our present. It’s worth a minute to think about Reconstruction, Jim Crow and African American freedom because they’re in an intimate embrace.

Our mythology paints Reconstruction as a failed experiment and Jim Crow as a host of barriers that were finally overcome by heroic action. There’s a morsel of truth in those myths.

Reconstruction was not a failure. Between 1865 and 1877, when Reconstruction ended, African Americans built educational, business and financial institutions and gained some measure of political power. But the experiment ended too quickly. When the president Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the removal of Federal troops from the South, the deposed masters used any and every means necessary to regain their advantage.

In his 1954 masterpiece, The Betrayal of the Negro historian Rayford Logan documents a period he calls “the nadir” of Negro life. He wasn’t talking about slavery, but the years between 1877 and 1918. That “low point in the quest for equality” were the decades that saw the establishment of Jim Crow, and the execution of African American hopes. Limited progress and ambition were replaced with disappointment, anger and resignation.

It’s such a painful history, I can’t stomach it for long. But I return because the lesson is important: the backlash came as African America tottered on the verge of success.That is why I constantly probe the short-lived victories, and long-lived defeats that African America experienced as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Our struggle isn’t over. And it might never end.

As Leon Litwack points out:

“Reconstruction had been over for more than a decade but the experience of biracial, democratic government reminded whites of the urgent need to keep blacks in their place…That memory of the past – black men learning the uses of political power – went far to shape the racial boundaries and ideology of the New South and encouraged the use of terrorist violence to rout any further challenge to white supremacy.” (from How Free Is FREE: The Long Death of Jim Crow)

William Faulkner wrote “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” It’s been more than 100 years since the riots in Wilmington, Tulsa and Atlanta. Yet, once again, African Americans stand on a brink. The election of Barack Obama is just as much a threat to accepted notions of power, as was the election of Hiram Revels, Blanche K. Bruce and other African American politicians.  Is it any wonder, that just months after the inauguration, we hear bigoted rhetoric spouted in the name of political debate.

I constantly probe the past because it is instructive. Our present situation is dangerous. We can go forward, or we can be pushed back.
Either way, we’ll have to fight.