I am sure many people have been eagerly awaiting a new post in this thread. Well wait no longer!
I will begin today with something that is related to the tweet from How The Word Is Passed by Clint Smith, which I've purchased and I'm an eagerly looking forward to read. The book I want to lean on to further introduce this topic is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen.
I will let him do the talking. This is the intro to Chapter 5: "Gone With The Wind"
Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life. Issues of black-white relations propelled the Whig Party to collapse, prompted the formation of the Republican Party, and caused the Democratic Party to label itself the “white man’s party” for almost a century. One of the first times Congress ever overrode a presidential veto was for the 1866 Civil Rights Act, passed by Republicans over the wishes of Andrew Johnson. Senators mounted the longest filibuster in U.S. history, more than 534 hours, to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights bill. Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown how race prompted the sweeping political realignment of 1964-72, in which the white South went from a Democratic bastion to a Republican stronghold. Race still affects politics; George W. Bush won just 11 percent of the black vote but 57 percent of the white vote in 2004.
Almost no genre of our popular culture goes untouched by race. From the 1850s through the 1930s, except perhaps during the Civil War and Reconstruction, minstrel shows, which derived in a perverse way from plantation slavery, were the dominant form of popular entertainment in America. During most that period Uncle Tom’s Cabin was our longest-running play, mounted in thousands of productions. America’s first epic motion picture, Birth of a Nation; first talkie, The Jazz Singer;, and biggest blockbuster ever, Gone With the Wind, were substantially about race relations. The most popular radio show of all time was Amos ‘n’ Andy, two white men posing as humorously incompetent African Americans. The most popular television miniseries ever was Roots, which changed our culture by setting off an explosion of interest in genealogy and ethnic background. In music, race relations provide the underlying thematic material for material for many of our spirituals, blues numbers, reggae songs, and rap pieces.
The struggle over racial slavery may be the predominant theme in American history. Until the end of the nineteenth century, cotton--planted, cultivated, harvested, and ginned mostly by slaves--was by far our most important export. Our graceful antebellum homes, in the North as well as in the South, were built largely by slaves or from profits derived from the slave and cotton trades. Black-white relations became the central issue in the Civil War, which killed almost as many Americans as died in all our other wars combined. Black-white relations were the principal focus of Reconstruction after the Civil War; American’s failure to allow African Americans equal rights led eventually to the struggle for civil rights a century later.
He goes on from there to further discuss the significance of race throughout our history, how prevalent race and racism have been in our culture, economics, domestic and foreign policy, and how we have generally been taught a false narrative in regards to all this, sometimes more so than others.
We can dive further into what he has to say in this chapter and the book at large later, but for now, let's skip to the end of the chapter focusing on the aftermath of the Civil War, a period known as Reconstruction, which many Americans know little about and of what we do know has largely been driven by narratives that have often dominated our books and schools has been inaccurate and purposely racist:
Today’s textbooks show African Americans striving to better themselves. But authors still soft-pedal the key problem during Reconstruction, white violence.The figures are astounding. The victors of the Civil War executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandment of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders and other Unionists, white and black. In Hinds County, Mississippi, alone, whites killed an average of one African American a day, many of them servicemen, during Confederate Reconstruction--the period from 1865 to 1867 when ex-Confederates ran the governments of most Southern states. In Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 persons, mostly African Americans and white Republicans. In one judicial district in North Carolina, a Republican judge counted 700 beatings and 12 murders. Moreover, violence was only the most visible component of a broader pattern of white resistance to black progress.
Attacking education was an important element of the white supremacists’ program. …
Almost all textbooks include at least a paragraph on white violence during Reconstruction. Most tell how that violence, coupled with failure by the United States to implement civil rights laws, played a major role in ending Republican state governments in the South, thus ending Reconstruction. But, overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not African Americans, into the new order. As soon as the federal government stopped addressing the problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since textbooks find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity.
Into the 1990s, American history textbooks still presented the end of Reconstruction as a failure of African Americans. … Actually, black voters voted more wisely than most white voters. To vote Republican during Reconstruction was in their clear interest, and most African Americans did, but some were willing to vote for those while Democrats who made sincere efforts to win their support. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of white Southerners blindly voted for white Democrats simply because they stood for white supremacy.
Because I, too, “learned” that African Americans were the involved problem of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was an eye-opening experience for me. Myrdal introduced his 1944 book by describing the change in viewpoint he was forced to make as he conducted his research.
When the present investigator started his inquiry, the preconception was that it had to be focused on the Negro people….But as he proceeded in his studies into the Negro problem, it became increasingly evident that little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves….The Negro problem is predomantly a white...problem.
This is precisely the understanding many nonblacks still need to achieve.
The end of that is paramount. Further on that going into a time period where race has generally been glossed over in our teachings of American History:
Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding the period Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”: the years between 1890 and 1940 when African Americans were put back into second-class citizenship. During this time white american, North and South, joined hands to restrict black civil and economic rights. …
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It is also crucial that student realize that the discrimination confronting African Americans during the nadir (and afterward) was national, not just Southern. Few textbooks point this out. Therefore, most of my first-year college students have no idea that in many locales until after World War II, the North, too, was segregated: that blacks could not buy houses in communities around Minneapolis, could not work in the construction trades in Philadelphia, would not be hired as department store clerks in Chicago, and so on. As late as the 1990s and 2000s, some Northern suburbs still effectively barred African Americans. So did hundreds of independent sundown towns more than half a century after the Brown decision.
Even The American Adventure forgets its own good coverage of the nadir and elsewhere offers this simplistic view of the period: ‘The years 1880-1910 seemed full of contradictions….During Reconstruction many people tried hard to help the black people in the South. Then, for years, most white Americans paid little attention to the blacks. Little by little, however, there grew a new concern for them.” The trouble is, many white high school graduates share this worldview. Even if white concern for blacks has been only sporadic, they would argue, why haven’t African Americans shaped up in the hundred-plus years since Reconstruction ended? After all, immigrant groups didn’t have everything handed to them on a platter, either.
It is true that some immigrant groups faced harsh discrimination, from the NO IRSH NEED APPLY signs in Boston to the lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans to the pogroms against Chinese work camps in California. Some white suburban communities in the North shout out Jews and Catholics until recent years. Nonetheless, the segregation and physical violence aimed at African Americans has been of a higher order of magnitude. If African Americans in the nadir had experienced only white indifference, as The American Adventure implies, rather than overt violent resistance, they could have continued to win Kentucky Derbies, deliver mail, and even buy houses in white neighborhoods. Their problem was not black failure or white indifference--it was white racism.