Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 30: The voices of the slaves speak to later generations

I picked a couple of songs by Paul Robeson to close this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series:

Paul Robeson, John Brown's Body:

I Got A Home In Dat Rock/ Gimme Your Han':

Sterling Stuckey, "Paul Robeson and Richard Wright on the Arts and Slave Culture" in Winthrop Jordan, ed., Slavery and the American South (2003):

Paul's association in youth with relatives constituted his primary means of contact with the singing of ex-slaves, which was immensely important in his case because he sang slave music exclusively over a period of years, a unique development for a concert artist. His sense of the worth of Negro dialect was in marked contrast to negative pronouncements on the subject by critic James Weldon Johnson and, later, by novelist and critic Ralph Ellison. ...

Robeson knew that Negro dialect was the language of the slave artist/field hand, an aspect of slavery not yet touched on by students of slavery. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, he rejected the view, popular among some Reconstruction historians, that modem black culture owes more to developments from Reconstruction than to slave culture. As explicitly and precisely as Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, Robeson, recognizing himself as a direct and natural beneficiary of vital aspects of the artistic heritage of his ancestors, remarked: "The spirituals and Negro dialect were also part of my earliest background. My father was the minister of a small Negro community, and so the spirituals must have been known to me before I was born. I 'learned' Negro dialect and the spirituals as I learned to talk and walk and breathe and sing." Apparently no attempt by others to encourage him to sing spirituals like a white man made much of an impression. Thus, in his voice as he sang spirituals, the world came to hear, perhaps without knowing it, the projection of slave vocal potential and fulfillment, of which his ex-slave father's voice provided a prime example.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 29: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (3)

John Roy Lynch did a follow-up to the article from which I quoted yesterday. The second piece is called, More About the Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History (3:2 Apr 1918). It's mostly devoted to defending his previous piece on several specific factual points on which he certainly looks to have the better of the particular critic to whom he's responding.

There are two points that I'll emphasize here. One is his discussion of the antidemocratic turn in the Supreme Court, embodied in particular by their overturning of anti-discrimination and voting rights protections in the federal Civil Rights Act approved during Reconstruction that effectively gutted those laws (not unlike the Roberts Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in more recent years!):

I think would have been, different. The unfortunate thing about those decisions is the wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words, they amount to a judicial re-cognition of the dangerous doctrine of States Rights - a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed. Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be, prose cuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

He also mentions the obvious absurdity of the Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which he does not name specifically:

The court has also decided that a State law providing separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution, provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which can be very easily done. Equal separate accommodations are both a physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment, but in some cases, an absolute denial of such accommodations. The ultimate nullification of such unfair, unjust and unreasonable laws must necessarily follow. [my emphasis in bold]

The other point is Lynch's further defense of the quality of the Reconstruction government's in Mississippi. The critic to whom he is responding, to whom he refers as "the expert," had claimed that the alleged mismanagement in Reconstruction was more prominent in local governments than the state:

In other words [as Lynch reads the claims of "the expert"], there was nothing wrong with the State administration; it was the local county and municipal governments that were bad. And yet, a fair and impartial investigation will reveal the fact that there is no more foundation for this allegation than for those about the State government. It is admitted that during the early part of Reconstruction the local tax rate was high, the reasons for which are fully explained in [Lynch's 1913 book] The Facts of Reconstruction. Such an investigation would show that the charges of extravagance, recklessness and maladministration so generally made about the administration of county and municipal affairs were grossly exaggerated and nearly, if not all of them wholly untrue. In fact, the expert flatly contradicts himself on this point, because he admits that the evidence does not support the charge of dishonesty in the case of the Negro sheriffs, and yet the sheriff is the principal officer in the administration of the county government. [my emphasis in bold]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 28: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (2)

John Roy Lynch, who I've been quoting in recent posts and who served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi during Reconstruction, wrote a defense of Reconstruction in Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History 2:4 (Oct 1917). He was responding to the account of Reconstruction in the multi-volume History of the United States by James Rhodes, which he describes as "the most biased, partisan and prejudiced historical work I have ever read."

He objects to Rhodes' description of the "Redemption" (end of Reconstruction) as the restoration of "home rule" to the former Confederate states. Lynch in responding gives an accurate picture of the nature of the Redemption governments:

If home rule were finally restored to the South in 1877, the natural and necessary inference to be drawn is that prior to that time those States were subjected to some other kind of rule, presumably that of foreigners and strangers, an inference which is wholly at variance with the truth. Another inference to be drawn is that those States had enjoyed home rule until the same was revolutionized or set aside by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress and that it was finally restored in 1877. If this is the inference which the writer meant to have the reader make, it is conclusive evidence of the fact that he was unpardonably and inexcusably ignorant of the subject matter about which he wrote.

As he indicates in his argument, the "home rule" trope was a propaganda label meant to disguise the dirty and undemocratic nature of the Redemption governments.

As that term is usually and generally understood, there never was a time when those States did not have home rule, unless we except the brief period when they were under military control, and even then the military commanders utilized home material in making appointments to office. Since the officers, however, were not elected by the people, it may be plausibly claimed that they did not have home rule. But the State governments that were organized and brought into existence under the Reconstruction Acts of Congress were the first and only governments that were genuinely republican in form. [my emphasis]

He is arguing here that even the antebellum governments which were "republican" in the understanding of the Constitution of that time were not genuinely so.

The form of government which existed in ante-bellum days was that of an aristocracy. That which has existed since what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term the restoration of home rule is simply that of a local despotic oligarchy. The former was not, and the present is not, based upon the will and choice of the masses; but the former was by far the better of the two, for whatever may be truthfully said in condemnation and in derogation of the southern aristocracy of ante-bellum days, it can not be denied that they represented the wealth, the intelligence, the decency and the respectability of their respective States. While the State governments that were dominated by the aristocrats were not based upon the will of the people, as a whole, yet from an administrative point of view they were not necessarily bad. Such can not be said of those who are now the representatives of what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term home rule. [my emphasis]

That is a straightforward and accurate description of both the antebellum and Redemption governments. But it was very much outside the mainstream of academic and popular interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1917, which had come to be dominated by the Lost Cause perspective.

Lynch also gives an account of how some Southern whites eventually became attracted to the Republican Party during Reconstruction. He offers a bit of worldly wisdom in that regard:

It is true there are some men whose party affiliations are based upon principle and convictions regardless of consequences personal to themselves. Occasionally there are found some who are even willing to be martyrs, but they are exceptions to the general rule. The average man is politically ambitious. He desires political distinction and official recognition. In determining his party affiliations, therefore, he is more than apt to cast his lot with the party through which he believes that ambition may be gratified.

And he points out that just after the Civil War, Southern whites tended to think it was safer to adhere to the Democratic Party:

The Civil War had just come to a close; sectional animosity was bitter and intense. The Republican party was looked upon as the party of the North and, therefore, the bitter enemy of the South. The southern white men who joined the Republican party were accused of being traitors to their section and false to their own race and blood; they were called Scalawags. Through a process of intimidation, chiefly by means of social ostracism, independent thought and action on the part of southern whites, during the early period of Reconstruction, were pretty effectually prevented. Through such methods, they were quite successfully held under the subjection and control of those whose leadership they had been accustomed to follow.

But with Grant's election in 1868 which put a President in the White House that was in broad agreement with the policies of Congressional Reconstruction, the political atmosphere in the South, and he is writing with particular reference to Mississippi, began to shift:

After the election of Grant, however, in 1868 the feeling of intolerance somewhat subsided, resulting in a large number of accessions to the Republican party from the ranks of the best and most substantial white men of that section. But it was not until the reelection of Grant in 1872 that the feeling of political proscription, social ostracism and intolerance among the whites seemingly disappeared. It was then that white men came into, took charge of and assumed the leadership of the Republican party, in large numbers. They then had nothing to fear and nothing to lose by being identified with the Republican party when social distinctions growing out of politics ceased to be effective. [my emphasis]

I assume in the directly following passage, he was speaking in terms of potential as well as experienced reality, which is never quite so pleasant as this passage might suggest:

The South then entered upon a new era which was destined to bring to that section wealth and prosperity with happiness and contentment among its people of both races, all living under local governments successfully controlled by the better element of native whites with the cooperation and participation to some extent of the newly enfranchised blacks.

Lynch leans to the extravagant in his praise of Mississippi whites who became Republicans: "In fact, the southern white men that came into the Republican party were typical representatives of the best blood and the finest manhood of the South, than whom no better men ever lived."

He attributed to discrediting of Reconstruction among Southern whites to three events:

The true reason why so many white men at the South left the Republican party may be stated under three heads: first, the Democratic victories of 1874 which were accepted by southern Democrats as a national repudiation of the congressional plan of Reconstruction; second, the closeness of the Presidential election of 1876 together with the supposed bargain entered into between the Hayes managers and southern Democratic members of Congress, by which the South was to be turned over to the Democrats of that section in consideration of which the said southern Democrats gave their consent to the peaceable inauguration of Hayes; third, the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States [in the Civil Rights cases] by which the doctrine of States' Rights was given new life and strength. [my emphasis]

Lynch noted in a later article that I quoted in a previous post that, in reality, the 1874 election were largely driven by the national repercussions of the Panic of 1873 and Reconstruction was such was not a major theme. But here he's talking about how Southern Democrats interpreted that result at the time.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 27: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (1)

Reconstruction-era Congress John Roy Lynch (1847-1939), who I've discussed in the last two days' posts, is an example of someone who kept a more realistic, democratic understanding of Reconstruction alive when the Lost Cause version was predominant in professional history and popular culture.

In an essay appearing under the title Communications in its published form (The Journal of Negro History 16:1 Jan 1931; Lynch's communication itself is dated 07/17/1930), Lynch addressed distortions in a book by Claude Bowers called The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929). He declares in the first paragraph that Bowers' book is "is a composition of errors, misstatements, misrepresentations, and false assertions." He sees Bowers as distorting by omission: "In spite of its extreme prolixity and verbosity the book is remarkable, more for what is concealed than for what is revealed - for what is unrecorded than for what is recorded."

Lynch challenged the Lost Cause narrative on several points. For instance, on Presidential Reconstruction, he writes:

President Andrew Johnson inaugurated a policy of reconstruction of his own, which did not meet with popular approval. He belonged to that group of public men who contended that the rebel states had never been legally out of the Union. His policy, therefore, was the oath of allegiance to the Union and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. No other conditions were deemed necessary to complete restoration. But it so transpired that the state governments which he thus brought into existence made the ratification of the thirteenth amendment practically worthless, for the "black laws" passed by the different legislatures practically re-established the institution of slavery. [my emphasis]

It was in the struggle with Johnson over Reconstruction policy that led to the Reconstruction Acts and what became known as Congressional Reconstruction or Radical Reconstruction: "Congressional leaders were confronted with the fact that it would be impossible to bring about restoration on any other basis than that proposed by President Johnson without conferring suffrage upon the colored man."

The elections of 1868, in which Ulysses Grant was elected President focused on the issue of Reconstruction:

The first test of strength [between supporters and opponents Congressional Reconstruction measures] took place in the state and congressional elections of 1866, when the republicans were successful. Still, hope of ultimate success on the part of the democrats was not abandoned. The crucial test was to take place in the presidential and congressional elections of 1868. The national democratic convention of that year, which nominated Seymour and Blair for president and vice president, incorporated in the party platform a clause which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void. The republican national convention which nominated Grant and Colfax for president and vice-president, warmly endorsed, and boldly sanctioned the reconstruction acts. This, then was the chief, and it may be said, the sole issue before the country at that time. The result was a victory for the republicans; and yet it was a sore disappointment for the leaders of that party, for the reason that the democrats carried the empire state of New York, and if the southern states, which in the meantime had been readmitted had been lost to the republicans, the hero of Appomattox [Grant] would have been defeated. In other words, it was the southern states that participated in that election that brought success to the republican party. In consequence of this fact southern democrats did not abandon hope of ultimate success in defeating, partially at least, the congressional plan of reconstruction, especially in view of the fact that they had the vigorous cooperation and support of the democratic party throughout the country.

This is significant. The country was faced with a clear choice. And because of the male suffrage that included black men being able to vote in the South, the Republicans won a solid mandate for Congressional Reconstruction.

Lynch also adds some interesting observations about Reconstruction-era Mississippi politics. He describes an African-American leader, also named Lynch but he does not comment on whether he was related to him:

In reading the paragraph above [from Bowers' book from which he had just quoted] the reader would necessarily infer that on the Alcorn ticket [the Republican ticket for Governor in 1868] there were two or more colored men, whereas in point of fact there was only one, in the person of the Rev. James Lynch, a Methodist preacher of marked ability and of superior intelligence, who was the candidate for the office of Secretary of State. As a pulpit orator and stump speaker it is not an exaggeration to say that James Lynch had few equals and no superiors. In fact, it can be truthfully said of him that he was the Henry Ward Beecher of the colored race. He was not only intelligent and well educated, but his command of the English language was such that he could hold a congregation or audience spellbound for at least two hours at a time with his powerful and convincing eloquence. Democratic orators would rather meet any man in joint debate than James Lynch, for the reason that Lynch would be sure to come out in triumph, and yet he typified, in a large measure, the colored men who were brought into political prominence under the administration of James L. Alcorn.

He also defends the Reconstruction governments of Mississippi against Lost Cause calumnies. He cites Bowers as indicating that most African-Americans elected to the legislature in 1868 "had to make their mark," by which he meant they were too illiterate to even sign their names. Lynch responds:

The assertion that most of the colored members had to make their mark is a cruel slander. They were not college graduates, it is true, but most of them were preachers and leaders of more than ordinary intelligence. In this connection it may not be out of place to call attention to the fact that nearly all of the democratic members of the legislature at that time came from what was known in the state as the Piney-woods or Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by poor whites, many of whom were illiterate. The white people of wealth and intelligence lived in the wealth-producing counties, in which there were more colored than white people. Those were the counties that sent republicans to the legislature, while the Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by plebians, or poor whites, were the counties that sent democrats to the legislature. These democrats did not represent the wealth and intelligence of the white people of the state. It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the colored members were superior in every respect to most of the democrats who were then members of the legislature. At any rate a comparison would not be unfavorable to the colored members.

I grew up in the section of Mississippi known as the Piney Woods, so I got a smile out of reading that. But I was a little surprised that the area was a Democratic stronghold right after the Civil War. The slaveowning counties were more heavily along the Mississippi River shore and the Delta in the northwest part of the state. The Piney Woods are in the south-central and south-eastern section of Mississippi. There were plantations with slaves there, but not that many. Western Mississippi was less enthusiastic for secession - there was a vote - than the eastern section of the state where slaveowners were more dominant.

Also, the Free State of Jones, the county where a band of pro-Union Southern white guerrilla fighters were based, is smack in the middle of the Piney Woods. The Free State of Jones is coming to your local theater next year, with Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight and Keri Russel of The Americans as Serena Knight, Knight's first wife.

I'm curious to look more closely at the voting patterns there during Reconstruction. One factor to keep in mind is that "pro-Union" did not translate into "tolerant toward blacks." Most African-Americans in Mississippi prior to the war were slaves. And, as historian has pointed out in some detail, since black people were identified with slavery, hostility toward slavery was often combined with hostility to the presence of black people, slave or free.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 26: Historical transitions in Reconstruction

Every year, I wonder if I'm going to be able to come up with stuff to post every day for a month on the Civil War. Even though it's never happened yet, and people are writing stuff all the time about the Civil War to which I can refer.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's end, so if anything, it's even easier than usual. The New York Times has a Disunion blog, which features substantial posts like Gregaory Downs' The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox 04/11/2015. The theme of the column is that severing the memory of the Civil War from that of Reconstruction and its overthrow is problematic. He's referring specifically to the image of the surrender at Appomattox as the effective end of the war. As Downs notes, that's misleading even in the narrow sense, since "fighting continue[d] in pockets for weeks."

Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.

To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

This is also a reminder not to make too drastic a distinction between Reconstruction and Redemption. Militant and violent white resistance occurred during Reconstruction, and pockets of democracy and maintenance of elements of African-American rights during Redemption.

But for that matter, even segregation at its worst did not mean the complete disfranchisement of every single black voter in every former Confederate state.

But none of that should become an excuse for rejecting important distinctions in describing historical developments. Reconstruction was an important democratic moment, in both its "Presidential" and "Congressional" versions, the latter also known as Radical Reconstruction. There was a turning point usefully dated to 1876 in which antidemocratic former Confederates went on the offense, with both "nonviolent" coercion and murderous Klan-style terrorism, and effectively suppressed African-American suffrage.

And sometime around 1890, the new system of segregation and white supremacy was well enough established that Jim Crow laws forcing various forms of public performances of racial division proliferated in the South, a condition that endured well into the 1960s.

Downs describes the new white narrative on the Civil War that became dominant for decades this way:

After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).

While it's true that Northern whites, including the Supreme Court, didn't keep faith with African-American citizens and pro-democracy whites in the former Confederacy, that wasn't all that was going on in American politics.

John Roy Lynch (1847-1939)

Former Reconstruction African-American Congressman John Lynch, who I discussed in the previous post in this series, reminded readers of the Journal of Negro History that economics affected politics, too (Communications 16:1 Jan 1931). Writing about the decline in popularity of the Grant Administration, he writes:

But the one thing that caused a revulsion in popular sentiment was the disastrous financial panic of 1873. It was one of the worst financial panics with which the country had ever been afflicted. Beginning with the failure of J. Cook & Co. in Washington, bank failures were universal throughout the country, which resulted in thousands of people being reduced to poverty. Of course, the party in power gets the credit for prosperity, when we have it, and is blamed for whatever disaster may overtake the country whether it be merited or not. Consequently in the state and congressional elections of 1874 the whole country went as overwhelmingly democratic as it had gone republican two years prior. The democratic party not only carried the national house of representatives, but elected more than two thirds of the members of that body and came very near wiping out the large republican majority in the senate. [my emphasis]

Lynch goes on to describe the practical result in the South:

The probabilities are that the reconstruction policy of the government had very little, if any thing, to do with bringing about this result. The voters simply regarded reconstruction as having been settled and that they could give their attention to other matters; hence, those who voted the republican ticket in 1872 and the democratic ticket in 1874 did so, not as an endorsement of what the democratic party stood for, but as a protest against and a vote of dissatisfaction with, what had transpired under the Grant administration. But let the reasons be what they may, southern democrats accepted the result of that election as a national condemnation and repudiation of the congressional plan of reconstruction and an endorsement by the nation of the declaration contained in the national democratic platform of 1868, which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary and void. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 25: Early decades of "Redemption"

The end of Reconstruction is conventionally dated to the deal after the 1876 Presidential election that allowed Republican Rutherford Hayes to become President despite losing the popular vote. The Republican concession was to abandon the Reconstruction program in the former Confederate states. The opponents of democracy who overthrew the Reconstruction governments with force, violence and fraud styled themselves as "Redeemers." And the post-Reconstruction disfranchisement of African-American citizens and the establishment of segregation is known as "Redemption."

But major historical transitions are very rarely able to date so cleanly. Reconstruction is no exception. There had been resistance from white elites and many ordinary whites to the black franchise before 1876. But federal discouragement with enforcing the Constitution and Democratic attempts to undermine the elected governments achieved a new success with the campaign of violence against Mississippi Gov. Adelbert Ames, culminating in his impeachment and resignation in 1876. This method of what we now call "regime change" was even called the Mississippi Plan after the state where it was so successful in 1875-6.

The former slave and African-American politician John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi (1873-1877, 1882-1883). While the end of his first stint in Congress corresponds to the turn of the political tide in favor of the Redeemers, the second came after the general victory of Redemption. That doesn't mean that the Redeemers were happy to have an African-American Congressman. It represents the efforts of black voters in the Congressional district around Natchez to hold on to their rights even in the face of federal abandonment and Democratic power in Mississippi.

Lynch published a collection of essays title The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913, which was republished in 1970 in an edition featuring an introduction by historian William Harris. Harris writes:

When Lynch was selected for Congress by Negro delegates to the Sixth Congressional District convention, the struggle between the black and white factions in Natchez was brought into the open, and its reverberations threatened to disrupt the Republican party throughout the river counties. The factions assumed the names of "Warm Spring Indians" (blacks) and "Modocs" (whites), but such colorful appellations had no effect on the outcome of the dispute. Complete victory for the Warm Spring Indians came when Senator Ames, who naively envisioned himself in the role of mediator, placed the influence of his patronage at the disposal of Congressman-elect Lynch. The growth of black authority in the river counties, however, was checked in 1875 with the so-called redemption of Mississippi from Radical rule. But in Natchez Lynch and his followers remained until the 1890's a political influence to be reckoned with by the Democratic Conservatives. [my emphasis]

The use by both factions of Indian nicknames is also an interesting twist on race relations in Mississippi at the time.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) also explains:

Too often the period of Redemption (1876-1903) has been misunderstood as a return to absolute white control; instead, historians have come to view these years as a contentious time when Republicans continued to share power and a variety of political parties challenged the Bourbons, as the Democratic elite became known, for control of state and local government. Intertwined with the political conflict, a racially segregated society emerged with customs designed to remind black Mississippians daily of their status as an inferior caste. (p. 217)

And he continues to describe how the neo-Confederate myth of the Lost Cause as well as the white racist version of the Christian religion functioned as part of that process:

White Mississippians bolstered their new political and social system with a civic religion that held the "War Between the States" to have been a holy crusade fought by saintly men defending a righteous cause. J. William Jones, Virginian prophet of the creed, routinely invoked the secular saints Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in his public prayers. By the end of this period, white Mississippians had incorporated segregation into their worldview based on evangelical religion and deemed a violation of the informal segregation code a sin. On the other hand, maintaining white control justified lying, theft of ballot boxes, stuffing them if necessary, or violence against political opponents when required. The political conflict and growth of a new social system took place in a declining cotton economy in which furnishing merchants used legislature-provided lien laws to exploit and essentially enslave a growing sharecropping population whose economic desperation grew with the fall of cotton prices. [my emphasis]

It's fascinating to me to think that someone who turned 19 the year the the Civil War ended lived to see the second Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Harris quotes from an essay that Lynch wrote in 1929, "The Republican Party South," in which he warns the new President Herbert Hoover that he should "not flatter himself with the belief that because he carried several southern states that he can keep those states in the republican column by making a trade with southern democrats at the expense of the fundamental principles and doctrines for which the republican party has heretofore stood."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 24: the neuroses of segregation

Dennis Mitchell in his A New History of Mississippi (2014) writes about the post-Reconstruction segregation system and its often weird complexities.

He describes this version of what Chauncey DeVega calls the White Gaze, "Whites treated blacks as unclean in the same way a Brahmin understood an untouchable." (p. 282)

Segregation involved customs and rituals that included what certainly qualify in some way as collective neurotic symptoms. In the following passage, he uses the term "colored people" as it was employed by segregationists, a polite term for African-Americans:

According to racial customs, a white Mississippian refused to call a colored person by his or her last name, addressing them by their first name or as "boy" - never "man." A black person, on the other hand, had to use a title of respect when speaking to any white. Boss, Captain, Mam, or Miss and the child's first name for a white child were acceptable. A white man never removed his hat or touched it on the street for a black woman, but he always made those signs of deference to a white woman. Blacks did not sit in the presence of whites and always removed any headgear when a white man entered their vicinity. If whites approached blacks on a sidewalk, blacks had to step into the street for the whites to pass. A black driver dared not pass a white driver on any road. In some towns, blacks could not drive on certain streets- Capitol Street in Jackson, for example. Blacks never approached the front door of a white residence because they could only use the back door. Some whites adopted the habit of locking the back door when they were out, but not the front so strong was their confidence that even a black thief would not enter by the front door. (p. 281) [my emphasis]

Black citizens voting in New Orleans, 1867

But the neurotic symptoms, ugly and harmful as they were in themselves, shouldn't be confused with political disease itself. The disease was the success of the anti-Reconstruction "Redeemer" project to deprive African-Americans of their rights as citizens. In the 1977 of the famous history textbook by Samuel Eliot Morrison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic, the authors write:

The end of Reconstruction and the nullification of the Enforcement Acts exiled the Southern Negro to a kind of no-man's land halfway between slavery and freedom. No longer a slave, he was not yet free. He was tied to the soil by the sharecrop and crop-lien systems, excluded from most with 'separate' accommodations that were rarely 'equal.' He was expected not only to accept a position of social inferiority without protest, but to rejoice in it by playing the role of 'Uncle Tom.' At first gradually, then with dramatic speed, he was rendered politically impotent: 'grandfather' clauses, literacy tests , poll taxes, and - where these failed - naked intimidation, deprived him of the vote. (pp. 358-9) [my emphasis]

This is why the current Republican Party's nationwide push for voter suppression laws and dirty tricks to the same end are such a nightmare for anyone who believes in democracy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 23: Emancipation and the 1864 election

Returning to The Cambridge University Press blog fifteen eightyfour post The Legacy of the U.S. Civil War: 150 Years Later 04/09/2015, historian Robert May focuses on what he sees as the two most important key moments in the Union victory in the Civil War:

I believe there were two equally important moments determinative of the outcome of the Civil War. The first was Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 – which amounted to a nearly final guarantee the European powers would refrain from entering the war in league with the Confederacy. It also quickly led to an exponential increase in the contribution of African Americans North and South to the Union military effort. Approximately 180,000 black soldiers eventually served in the Union army during the Civil War, the overwhelming number of them enrolled after the Emancipation Proclamation. Moreover, almost 30,000 blacks served in the Union Navy, greatly enhancing the manpower of the North’s power at sea.

The second of these moments was the point when Lee’s decision to invade Pennsylvania, made a few months after the Proclamation, became irreversible. The ensuing battle of Gettysburg was a catastrophic blow to Confederate manpower and morale. Had Lee remained in Virginia and adopted a more Fabian strategy in 1863, he could perhaps have avoided disastrous defeats, strung out the war, and induced enough war weariness in the North as to undermine Lincoln’s campaign for reelection in 1864. It is well known that Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was uncertain through most of the the summer of 1864, even with the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the year before. Although the Democratic candidate in 1864, General George McClellan, refused to run on his party’s peace platform, it is unclear whether he would have had the will to crush the Confederacy if elected. One has to wonder, given his longstanding reluctance to risk high casualties in battle and his deep qualms about both emancipation and taking the war to civilians, whether a President McClellan would have unleashed Grant and Sherman in 1864 the way Lincoln did. Without aggressive Union military strategies in 1864-1865, the Confederacy might have hung on long enough to eke out a fragile independence. [my emphasis]

If anything, May is probably understating the risks a McClellan Presidency would have brought to the Union cause.

Although it's worth remembering that Presidents then took office in March following the election, not in January as it is now. In the history that actually happened, Lee's surrender at Appomattox occurred in April. So the Lincoln Administration could very well have done such irreparable damage to the Confederacy by March 1865 that even a President McClellan sympathetic to the South might not have been willing to let the Confederate states go from the Union.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 22: Emancipation and the Civil War

The Cambridge University Press blog fifteen eightyfour has a post on The Legacy of the U.S. Civil War: 150 Years Later 04/09/2015 featuring five historians.

BTW, yes, I'm aware I'm currently a day behind on the daily postings.

Susanna Michele Lee, author of Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post-Civil War South (2014) says:

The most important moment of the Civil War, in my judgment, occurred when enslaved people first escaped to Union lines and found refuge there. These moments, as they recurred over and over again, started a revolution. The United States initially pledged not to interfere with slavery in the Confederacy. Slaves who ran to Union lines, however, placed abolition on the wartime agenda. Soldiers and officers were confronted with a choice: they could allow slaves to stay in camp and accept their assistance in waging war against the Confederacy, or they could send them back to their masters and mistresses who would attempt to use them to support the Confederate war effort. Soldiers and officers allowed slaves in Union lines with General Benjamin Butler serving as the most well-known example. The Union armies then became forces of emancipation. Slaves provided the initiative that ultimately culminated in the Confiscation Acts, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Slaves’ efforts in running to Union lines and offering their services as laborers and as soldiers helped to ensure that the Union preserved in the war would be fundamentally transformed, recognizing not only black freedom, but also black citizenship. [my emphasis]

The "starting a revolution" phrase isn't just rhetoric. When the Union declared the end of slavery its goal in the Emancipation Proclamation - technically, it didn't includes slaves in states like Missouri remaining in the union - it became a war to overturn the social and economic system in the South. In the language of the time, derived from the experience of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, that converted the War for the Union from a conventional war into a revolutionary war.

The key role of African-Americans' initiative is important to remember. Because erasing them from the narrative of the Civil War is one of the main features of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate version of the war. In which slavery had nothing to do with starting the war. And in which black people were the passive recipients of the gift of freedom from white soldiers.

Benjamin Butler after the war became a pro-Reconstruction Republican Senator. His son-in-law, Adelbert Ames, was the last Reconstruction Governor of Mississippi. And in my mind the greatest of Mississippi's Governors because of his intense commitment to democracy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 21: John Brown, John Wilkes Booth and political violence

Historian David Reynolds writes about political violence of 150 years ago in John Wilkes Booth and the Higher Law: Was Abraham Lincoln's assassin inspired by the militant abolitionist John Brown? Atlantic Online 04/12/2015.

The question posed in the subtitle seems to invite trite comparisons. And, at first glance, that's what Reynolds seems to provide:

Booth and Brown — and, surprisingly enough, Lincoln himself — were conjoined on a deep level by what in that era was called “the higher law.” They were inclined to follow the dictates of the higher law — moral or religious principle — rather than human law. Reconsidering Booth’s murder of Lincoln in light of John Brown and the higher law leads to troubling questions. When is violence in the name of a higher cause justified, and when is it not? Can we distinguish between bad terrorism and good terrorism?

But he doesn't let the question rest with that pat non-answer.

Reynolds in a single column doesn't come up with what has also eluded the rest of humanity so far, a normative standard that provides clear guidance for the legitimacy of all uses of violence. Or even for the various forms of political violence.

We do have positive law standards that address the issue. One of the criteria of being a successful state as opposed to a "failed state" is whether the state has a "monopoly on violence." Which basically means that it's police and the court and penal systems that enforce the laws, who decide who is breaking the law and who isn't, who goes free and who doesn't. André Munro describes the concept in State monopoly on violence Encyclopædia Britannica Online 04/22/2015:

State monopoly on violence ... [is] the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorize the use of physical force. It is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern state. ...

As the use of the term legitimate underlines, this concept does not imply that the state is the only actor actually using violence but rather that it is the only actor that can legitimately authorize its use. The state can grant another actor the right to use violence without losing its monopoly, as long as it remains the only source of the right to use violence and that it maintains the capacity to enforce this monopoly. The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is also not refuted by the use of illegitimate violence. Criminal organizations may undermine order without being able to challenge the state monopoly and establish themselves as a parallel source of legitimate rule.

And he notes a qualification relevant to Reynold's topic, "The state monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force can be challenged by a number of nonstate actors such as political insurgents or terrorists or by state actors such as the military forces claiming autonomy from the state."

International law also defines what kind of violence is legitimate, as well, in laws regarding the use of force in international relations and in civil conflicts, including the treatment of prisoners of war.

Part of why any comprehensive normative standard regulating political violence is so hard to come by is simply that real political violence takes places in concrete historical circumstances. The border between ethics and pragmatism is difficult if not impossible to define precisely.

Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1921 essay, "Critique of Violence" that neither natural law nor positive law were sufficient his analysis of political violence, declaring that the necessary perspective "can be furnished only by a philosophico-historical view of law."

Reynolds looks at the concept of "higher law," really a variation of natural law, that was shared at least in the abstract by John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth. Booth as a soldier was actually present at Brown's execution by the State of Virginia in 1959, exercising its own political violence via positive law: "For Booth, Lincoln and other antislavery politicians were duplicitous and treacherous. In 1860, as he witnessed the rise of Lincoln and his fellow antislavery Republicans, Booth wrote that John Brown was far nobler than Lincoln, since, in Booth’s words, 'open force is holier than hidden craft.'”

But in the end, the historical significance of the three men, of the history in which their acts of violence took place, has to be judged not just for their individual acts but for their cause and the results. Booth's cause was slavery. John Brown and Lincoln were partisans of democracy and enemies of slavery. Their antislavery cause was the more just from the standpoint of democracy, honest Christianity and common human decency than Booth's was.

Reynolds writes:

And so, on the fateful evening of April 14, 1865, three forms of higher law mingled explosively: that of Brown, who inspired Booth, though from the opposite vantage point of racial equality; that of Booth, who believed God-backed terrorism could preserve white supremacy; and that of Lincoln, who cited “the judgments of the Lord” to promote a holy war against slavery. Of the three, Lincoln has of course been best received by history, and we can say that his form of higher law—channeled as it was through American institutions like the electoral process and presidential proclamations—is indeed the most admirable. The loose-cannon higher law actions of Brown and Booth seem out of bounds, for these men acted outside of institutions, without the sanction of some larger group. To be sure, both Brown and Booth, by turning to violence, succeeded in galvanizing change. Brown did become a martyr in the North and was a major inspiration to Union troops as they marched southward, singing their favorite song, “John Brown’s Body,” quickly adapted by Julia Ward Howe as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That’s why many antislavery leaders attributed the fall of slavery largely to John Brown’s heroic example.

And we winds up with what can legitimately be described as "a philosophico-historical view" of these three practitioners of the "higher law":

... Lincoln is not just a unifying national icon. He is a lasting example of the proper use of the higher law: that is, the principled pursuit of justice through a popularly elected government. Although lone-wolf higher-law types like John Brown and John Wilkes Booth sometimes have positive results, history has shown that the higher law of individuals can also be a slippery slope that leads to unleashed violence. At Gettysburg, Lincoln announced “a new birth of freedom” for “this nation, under God”—a higher law declaration. But in the next breath he expressed a firm commitment to preserving “government of the people, for the people, by the people.” Even the most apparently virtuous aims, Lincoln knew, can be dangerous if they are not channeled through a democratically chosen government.

Reynolds here is more restrained in his judgment of John Brown that I am willing to be. Brown's participation in the Underground Railroad to free slaves was the right thing to do. The pro-democracy, anti-slavery guerrilla war in which he participated in "Bloody Kansas" was the right cause, the pro-democracy cause, and the proslavery cause was both despicable and antidemocratic. Brown's attempt to set up an armed antislavery band in the Appalachians, the plan thwarted by his capture at Harper's Ferry, was also a legitimate and pro-democracy cause, though it's hard to see how positive law could ever specifically sanction his actions.

But the proslavery advocates also were willing to throw positive law to the winds, as Brown saw live and person in Kansas territory. Ultimately they were willing to discard the positive law of the United States entirely and stage a most certainly violent rebellion against the Constitutional government.

Reynolds is the author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005), which I recommend highly.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 20: the enduring effects of the three-fifths compromise

Alex Sayf Cummings has a useful look at the notorious 3/5 compromise in the Constitution of 1787, Article 1.2.3, which reads, "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

Cummings writes in What Did the Three-Fifths Compromise Actually Do? Tropics of Meta 04/17/2015 that while the compromise was for counting 3/5 of slaves for purposes of taxation in exchange for counting them also for Congressional Representation, even though slaves actually had zero votes. IN practice, it was rarely used for tax purposes. But it famously gave the slave states, or the Slavepower as its opponents came to call it, extra representation in Congress that was rightly understood in the free states as a slavery bonus in representation:

What Americans got ... is a system of taxation and representation that still bears the impact of the weird compromises that were necessary to accommodate people who owned people. If the tax burden rarely fell on the basis of three-fifths, political power certainly did. The South was able to pad its margin in the House and the Electoral College throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, making possible the many odious compromises and workarounds that sustained slavery. As Einhorn notes, even as the population of the free North swelled due to immigration, Southerners could play the game of balancing power in the Senate through the selective admission of new free and slave states—until the game was up in 1860.

In a final irony, it turns out that the three-fifths compromise actually constrained the full political force of the South in a sense. Prior to the Civil War, the provision meant that Southern states did not get the benefit of counting their entire populations for political representation; afterward, they got 100% representation with the abolition of slavery. As the South gradually disenfranchised black men in the late nineteenth century, their numbers counted for purposes of representation, but not for voting—meaning that the political power of white conservatives was more potent and concentrated than it had ever been before.

The three-fifths compromise was, in the end, just one of many jury-rigged features of American democracy that were meant to constrain it. It was designed to tie the hands of majorities and preemptively constrain the taxing power of the [national] state — a legacy of both the anti-tax spirit of the Revolution and the anti-equality conviction of slaveholders. If its implications for allocating taxes have been far less important than the founders imagined or feared, its impact in terms of amplifying the voice of Southern reactionaries and their descendants has been far more significant. It also reveals one root (among many) of a long-standing American aversion to reckoning with how to tax property and income fairly, since, from the very beginning, a democracy had to account for human beings as both people and property. [my emphasis]

He also makes a point that may seem nit-picking at first. But the phrase "all other Persons" was specifically set off from "free persons" in the Constitution. The three-fifths clause did not apply to free blacks, only to slaves. Since most people of African descent in America were slaves in 1787, it is an indication of the extent to which the White Gaze in 1787 did not regard people of color as equal to whites. That attitude would intensify greatly in the following decades. But the clause specifically did not apply to "free persons."

Cummings cites an article by Barbara Jeanne Fields on this point, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America New Left Review May-June 1990. She argues:

Loose thinking on these matters leads to careless language, which in turn promotes misinformation. A widely used textbook of American history, written by very distinguished historians, summarizes the three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution (article 1, section 2) thus: ‘For both direct taxes and representation, five blacks were to be counted as equivalent to three whites.’ The three-fifths clause does not distinguish between blacks and whites—not even, using more polite terms, between black and white people. (Indeed, the terms black and white—or, for that matter, Negro and Caucasian—do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, as is not surprising in a legal document in which slang of that kind would be hopelessly imprecise.) The three-fifths clause distinguishes between free Persons—who might be of European or African descent—and other Persons, a euphemism for slaves. The issue at stake was whether slaveowning citizens would hold an advantage over non-slaveowning citizens; more precisely, whether slaves would be counted in total population for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress—an advantage for slave-holders in states with large numbers of slaves—and of assessing responsibility for direct taxes—a disadvantage. The Constitution answered by saying yes, but at a ratio of three-fifths, rather than the five-fifths that slaveholders would have preferred for representation or the zero-fifths they would have preferred for taxation. When well-meaning people affirm, for rhetorical effect, that the Constitution declared Afro-Americans to be only three-fifths human, they commit an error for which American historians themselves must accept the blame. [italics in original]

Fields was making a point incidental to a larger argument about what she viewed as misplaced or misleading uses of race as a category in historical explanations. Whether or not one agrees with her larger academic and methodological point, her description of the three-fifths clause is accurate.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: a sit-in case and fatuous but sadly durable arguments for segregation

In a column of 09/30/1963, "Judicial Sustenance for the Southern Racist," I.F. Stone commented on the landmark civil rights case Bell v. Maryland. His column is included in the collection In a Time of Torment (1967).

Kali Borkoski summarizes the case in Bell v. Maryland: Kenneth Mack challenges three common views SCOTUSblog 10/26/2013:

In 1960, when Bell was sixteen, he and eleven other African-American high school students participated in a sit-in at Hooper’s Restaurant in Baltimore. When they arrived, the hostess apologized that the establishment “hadn’t integrated yet,” and she asked them to leave. After they refused, the restaurant had them arrested for trespassing. Three years later, the case had made it way to the Supreme Court, which vacated the judgment against the students and remanded the case for further consideration in light of the “public accommodation laws” that Maryland had passed since the students’ arrest. Those laws made it illegal for privately owned establishments to discriminate on the basis of race. The state’s highest court, the Maryland Court of Appeals, eventually reversed the students’ convictions. After attending college and Harvard Law School (where his case was on on the syllabus), Bell went on to serve on that very same court alongside his defense lawyer, the prosecutor who tried him, and several judges who were involved in his case.

The title of Stone's column may seem incongruous for a comment on a case which now looks like it had a Happy Ending.

But what Stone particularly criticizes is the dissent written by Justice Hugo Black and joined by Justices John Harlan II and Byron White. Black had established a reputation as very liberal Justice, despite his one-time membership in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan before he was appointed to the Court. Stone worried about "the bigots who will now say, 'Why even Black....'." Or, in our present version, even-the-liberal-Hugo-Black ...

Stone writes, "The whole emotional coloration of the Black dissent is on the side of the aggrieved white Southerner, not his Negro victim."

The same observation could be made today about almost any commentary today on a race-related issue on FOX News or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast or any of its many cousins on Republican hate radio.

Stone explains that the Court sent the case back to the State of Maryland and declined to decide the constitutionality of the state statute that was involved. Stone agreed that the latter was appropriate judicial restraint in that particular moment "when Congress is in the final stage of passing the first public accommodations law since the Civil Rights Act of 1875." A constitutional ruling on the Maryland statute might have complicated the high-priority political decision in which Congress was involved at the moment.

After several paragraphs recognizing the reasons for restraint, Black proceeds in the dissent to comment on the constitutionality of the statute that allowed the police to arrest the black students for trespassing for refusing to leave a segregated public restaurant. Black was willing to accept the fatuous argument of the segregationists in this case that private property rights overruled the freedom of the black students to be served in a public restaurant:

... it is hard to take seriously a contention that petitioners were not fully aware, before they ever entered the restaurant, that it was the restaurant owner's firmly established policy and practice not to serve Negroes. The whole purpose of the "sit-in" was to protest that policy. (2) Be that as it may, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that "the statutory references to 'entry upon or crossing over,' cover the case of remaining upon land after notice to leave," and the trial court found, with very strong evidentiary support, that after unequivocal notice to petitioners that they would not be seated or served they "persisted in their demands and, brushing by the hostess, took seats at various tables on the main floor and at the counter in the basement." We are unable to say that holding this conduct barred by the Maryland statute was an unreasonable interpretation of the statute or one which could have deceived or even surprised petitioners or others who wanted to understand and obey it. It would certainly be stretching the rule against ambiguous statutes very far indeed to hold that the statutory language misled these petitioners as to the Act's meaning, in the face of evidence showing a prior series of demonstrations by Negroes, including some of petitioners, and in view of the fact that the group which included petitioners came prepared to picket Hooper and actually courted arrest, the better to protest his refusal to serve colored people.

Short version: they knew the restaurant was segregated, so they should have just stayed out and not worried about this nonsense of equal rights and all!

Black's dissent also sidesteps the role of the State of Maryland in enforcing segregation in order to sidestep the 14th Amendment's requirement for equal protection of the laws:

The Amendment does not forbid a State to prosecute for crimes committed against a person or his property, however prejudiced or narrow the victim's views may be. Nor can whatever prejudice and bigotry the victim of a crime may have be automatically attributed to the State that prosecutes. Such a doctrine would not only be based on a fiction; it would also severely handicap a State's efforts to maintain a peaceful and orderly society. Our society has put its trust in a system of criminal laws to punish lawless conduct. To avert personal feuds and violent brawls it has led its people to believe and expect that wrongs against them will be vindicated in the courts. Instead of attempting to take the law into their own hands, people have been taught to call for police protection to protect their rights wherever possible. It would betray our whole plan for a tranquil and orderly society to say that a citizen, because of his personal prejudices, habits, attitudes, or beliefs, is cast outside the law's protection and cannot call for the aid of officers sworn to uphold the law and preserve the peace. The worst citizen no less than the best is entitled to equal protection of the laws of his State and of his Nation. None of our past cases justifies reading the Fourteenth Amendment in a way that might well penalize citizens who are law-abiding enough to call upon the law and its officers for protection instead of using their own physical strength or dangerous weapons to preserve their rights. [my emphasis]

This is a remarkably blunt defense of the segregationist view in which the world is seen exclusively from what Chauncey DeVega calls the White Gaze. This comment of his could have been directed against Black's dissent (The White Gaze Kills (Again) ... WARN 11/07/2013):

Full citizenship involves the presumption that one belongs to a political community. By virtue of that fact, citizenship also means that a person is entitled to safety and security in their person without qualification, exception, or justification. Full citizenship is not contingent or precarious.

African-Americans are not allowed such protections by the White Gaze. They are viewed as guilty until proven innocent, a criminal Other who is a priori categorized as “suspicious” and “dangerous”. While formal racism and Jim and Jane Crow were shattered and defeated by the Black Freedom Struggle, this ugly cloud continues to hover over the United States, some 400 years after the first black slaves were brought to the country.

Consequently, black Americans are not really allowed to seek help from white people; the Parable of the Good Samaritan does not apply to people of color as viewed through the twin lenses of Whiteness and the White Gaze. The black and brown Other is not allowed the luxury and privilege of knowing that if they seek help when in distress—either from the police, or white folks, more generally—that such pleadings and requests will be met with a “How can I help you? Are you in trouble?” [my emphasis]

The white authorities in segregated states could be counted on to enforced the unconstitutional segregation laws and practices. Black citizens could not count on the law to enforce their equal rights as citizens even on something as simple as restaurant service. Black, Harlan and White knew this, of course. But the White Gaze discounted it all to insignificance in this dissent.

Stone in 1964 also observed:

The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were intended to free the Negro from slavery and give him first class citizenship. The Southern states sought to circumvent them first by the Black Codes and then by Jim Crowism. In this they were aided by Supreme Court decisions which read the 14th amendment so narrowly as to take the heart out of the first Civil Rights Act. Their spirit lives on in the Black-Harlan-White dissent. But the records of these cases is full of testimony that restaurant and hotel owners refuse service to Negroes not because of their own prejudices but because they fear those "local customs" the Southern states foster. [my emphasis]

Black also states in the dissent, "But the Fourteenth Amendment of itself does not compel either a black man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone else against his will." Stone rightly notes of that comment:

It is the standard Southern answer to say, as the dissenters do, that "the 14th Amendment of itself does not compel either a black man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone against his will." This is a tissue of invidious misstatement. The 14th Amendment can and should be read as part of the public policy of this country, which is against racial discrimination. What a man does in his "private business" may be his own affair. But where he has a business which opens its doors to all comers then he cannot deny entrance or service to some solely because of their race. When he does so, he cannot under the 14th Amendment have state support in the shape of police and judicial action to enforce the discrimination via "criminal trespass." Nor can states which have done all they could to maintain the Negro in subjection then come into court and claim that they are merely enforcing property rights. This was the argument of the Solicitor General and of counsel for the sit-in demonstrators. [my emphasis]

The segregationist subculture never gave up some ideas and arguments and excuses. And it seems now with every day that passes they become more deeply ingrained as the positions of today's Republican Party.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 18: White racism as a method of domination

Paul Krugman has been saying for a while that these days, the way to get new ideas in economics is to read old books. He uses that to refer to the fact that basic Keynesian macroeconomics, which was founded on a solid theoretical and empirical basis, was abandoned by many policymakers, respectable economists and financial commentators during the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

And the neglect of those old books and their still-valid ideas inflicted a terrible toll in the real world when applied to economic policy in the wake of the crash of 2007-8.

It may not be the same with history. But sometimes it is. This article is an example: William Best Hesseltine, Some New Aspects of the Pro-Slavery Argument, The Journal of Negro History 21:1 (Jan 1936). Even during that period when a neo-Confederate Lost Cause/Gone With the Wind viewpoint was the dominant narrative from this history profession to textbooks to public memory ceremonies to popular culture, there were still people telling a realistic story about the Civil War and its implication.

Hesseltine's article is an example of this. He talks about the conscious usage of white racism as a means of social control in a more blunt way that we normally see it stated:

The pro-slavery argument carried but little promise to the lower classes, yet it sufficed to draw a line of demarkation between the exploited groups of the South. Playing upon the race prejudice which the argument inculcated, the planter aristocrat and his Bourbon successor have been able to remain in control. When the Civil War began, the non-slaveholders of the South did battle to maintain the Southern system of life. Following the war, there was imminent danger that the lower orders might forget race and unite, but the Ku Klux Klan saved the day for the Bourbons. In the nineties, the Populist movement brought whites and blacks of the oppressed classes together, but again the heritage of the pro-slavery argument brought division and eventuated in new constitutions which effectually disfranchised both the Negroes and their potential allies among the poor whites. Occasional lynchings have sufficed to keep burning the flames first kindled by the pro-slavery argument. Only in recent months has depression-born necessity brought tenant farmers of both races to stand shoulder to shoulder against their oppressors. For more than a century, the pro-slavery argument has enabled the planting aristocrats to dominate Southern society.

Now, those are some broad generalizations about complex processes, of course. But it's also an accurate broad description.

Most of his article is about developments in proslavery arguments during slavery times. As he explains, the theory of racism that the planter class used to justify slavery was also used in modified form, without the slavery part, to justify the suppression of African-American citizens after the war.

In addition to combating Northern Abolitionists, the active pro-slavery arguments were always also consciously directed at nonslaveholding whites of the South:

Despite this [contemptuous] attitude [of planters] toward the lower classes, the planters were obliged to appeal to them in the pro-slavery argument. The primary purpose of this exposition was to convince the non-slaveholding whites of the superiority of white over Negro blood. An analysis of the literature of the Southern "defense" will indicate that the fundamental premise of the slaveholders was that Negroes were inferior to whites. Throughout the era of the sectional conflict ministers of the Southern churches searched the Scriptures and compared Hebrew texts to show that God had made the Negroes a subordinate race and ordained them for slavery. In addition, a pseudo-anthropology demonstrated the biological inferiority of the Negro race. In the field of politics, the planters abandoned the principles of democracy, and frankly proclaimed that the Declaration of Independence was designed for white men alone.

Racism, either theoretical or practical, is not compatible with democracy. Even without the institutional of chattel slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 17: Cilil War and Reconstruction graphic novel

David Neiwert on Facebook flagged this excerpt from a graphic novel to be published this year: Revisiting Lincoln's Assassination and the War After the Civil War TPM 04/15/2015.

The book is Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War by Ari Kelman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. It's due to be published May 5.

As the TPM title indicates, the excerpt deals with the death of Lincoln and the aftermath of the war, including Southern white resistance to Reconstruction democracy.

Here is one panel:

Kelman's website has a portion of the book available for online viewing.

Slate has also published a portion in General Lee’s Sword 04/09/2015.

For such a broad sweep of events as the Civil War and Reconstruction, the graphic novel format has its obvious limits in terms of space. But it has the advantage of being able to use extensive imagery to help tell a big story in a relatively smaller space.

And if this excerpt at TPM is a measure, Kelman and Fetter-Vorm seem to be doing a great job in the effort!

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 16: Civil rights and the Second World War (2)

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition; 2003) devote a chapter to African-Americans and the Second World War. They note that black Americans had taken a concerned interest in developments in Italy and Germany well before the war began.

African Americans watched events in other parts of the world with growing concern. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, they protested with all the means at their command. Almost overnight even the most provincial among black Americans became international-minded. Ethiopia was a black nation, and its destruction would symbolize the final victory of whites over blacks. In manyvcommunities funds were raised for the defense of the African kingdom, while in larger cities elaborate organizations were set up. In New York the International Council of Friends of Ethiopia was organized, with Willis N. Huggins as executive secretary. In 1935 Ethiopia Huggins pleaded for Ethiopia before the League of Nations. Other organizations, such as the United Aid to Ethiopia (later the Ethiopian World Federation), raised funds for the beleaguered African country. The Pittsburgh Courier sent its historian-news analyst, J. A. Rogers, to cover the war. Upon his return he issued a booklet, "The Real Facts about Ethiopia," and lectured to many black and white groups. (p. 476)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote about Joel Augustus Rogers in J. A. Rogers’ 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro The Root 10/15/2012. The article's title is taken from another of Rogers' books. Gates writes:

Rogers was soon launched on a path that would make him one of the leading black journalists of his generation. Rogers wrote regularly for the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender, and he contributed several important essays to A. Philip Randolph's radical-socialist Messenger Magazine during the Harlem Renaissance. (He also wrote the only essay on that emerging art form called "jazz" in Alain Locke's seminal 1925 anthology The New Negro.) But the triumph of his career as a journalist, without a doubt, was his coverage of events in Ethiopia. The Courier sent Rogers -- the only African-American journalist on the ground -- there to cover the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935-1936), including an interview with Emperor Haile Selassie, whose coronation Rogers had also attended in 1930.

Haile Selassie, 1942:

Franklin and Moss expand on this prewar background:

African Americans were among the earliest and most energetic Americans to condemn the fascism that was rising in Europe. They quickly learned to hate Nazism and its Aryan doctrines. Some had read Hitler's Mein Kampf and had resented its unfavorable comments about blacks. It had been claimed, moreover, that in 1936 Hitler had refused to treat the African-American Olympic stars Jess Owens and Ralph Metcalfe with civility in Berlin. When Max Schmeling knocked out the black idol, Joe Louis, in 1936, African Americans had little to say for Hitlerism. Not until Louis gained complete revenge in 1938 could the average black speak of Nazis without a feeling of personal antagonism. By that time, however, public opinion in America was generally censuring Hitler's tactics in overthrowing Austria and dismembering Czechoslovakia, and African Americans joined in the loud condemnation. (p. 476)

Louis and Schmeling, 1936:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015: Civil rights and the Second World War (1)

DECEMBER 7, 1941:

When Dorie Miller took gun in hand-
Jim Crow started his last stand.
Our battle yet is far from won
But when it is, Jim Crow'll be done.
We gonna bury that son-of-a-gun!

- from "Jim Crow's Last Stand" (1943) by Langston Hughes

Doris (Dorie) Miller was a black Navy cook who received the Navy Cross for his bravery at Pearl Harbor. This recuiting poster featured him:

The experience of both blacks and white in the Second World War in the United States was a decisive moment in the fight for recognition of African-American civil rights.

Dennis Mitchell in his A New History of Mississippi (2014) writes about the effects of the war in my native state:

The infusion of federal funds revolutionized the state. The military buildup began with the New Deal alphabet agencies still in place, and for a brief period funds continued to flow from those agencies and the military. During the war, Mississippians doubled their per capita incomes ...

Relative economic prosperity mattered, but perhaps more important, Mississippians met new people, traveled the world, and encountered an infinite variety of cultures. More Yankees came to train at the state's thirty-six military bases than invaded the state during the Civil War. Many of them took Mississippi wives home with them, forging new ties of kinship across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Mississippians served in the armed forces dispersed to every conceivable corner of the globe, where they encountered cultures very different from their own. Japanese American soldiers trained in the state, befuddling the caste system, which usually recognized only black and white. Northern, city-raised black troops also trained in Mississippi, generating conflict and confusion. Mississippi women worked in factories building ships and manufacturing ammunition. They learned auto mechanics when the men got drafted. They acquired new skills, such as shopping. Traditionally, farm men went to the general store and brought home the family's few store-bought goods, often including the material the wife asked for to make a new dress. The war emancipated women and provided a new independence as well as loneliness at times. (p. 350) [my emphasis]

American Imago recently published the presentations of four psychoanalysts recalling their experiences in the Second World War at a 1995 conference ("Future Psychoanalysts and Memories of the Second World War" Vol. 72/1 Spring 2015).One of them, M. Donald Coleman, talked briefly about his encounters with racial and other kinds of diversity in the Army:

While exact figures are not available, much of the act of fighting — certainly by enlisted men — was done by those aged eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. In many units a man of twenty-six or twenty-eight was likely to find himself called “Dad.” Those few enlisted men thirty to thirty-four [years] were of an age that defied comprehension by most of us, and their preoccupation with writing long letters to wives and family was observed but barely understood emotionally.

The youth of the soldiers presumably made them relatively open to new experiences, although they may also have brought more simplistic stereotypes than some of those more senior thirtysomethings.

But before bonding could take place each unit had to sort itself out and test the true value of each member against stereotypes of rank, education, and ethnic, regional, or religious groupings. In this process there were often conflicts, sometimes physical fights, but once the true worth of an individual was established, good or bad, the old stereotypes were of little use. Intelligence, honor, capability or the lack of it were discovered to reside in individuals not the group. It was an eye opener for many big-city-bred soldiers to discover that high native intelligence could reside with a southern backwards farmer or for that farmer to be disabused of some of his big-city stereotypes. Others found that some highly educated men from socially elevated backgrounds didn’t seem as smart or dependable as poorly educated, ethnic Americans.

And he gives this example:

To give a concrete example: for the surgery department of a great Boston teaching hospital to tell those who had worked beside Captain Howard Schlossman and others like him in the field that we don’t want Jewish surgical residents because they are not team players became unacceptable to the experiences of the generations who had returned, and after several postwar years such contentions were heard no more.

Of course, this doesn't mean that whites who made an adjustment to a light-skinned Jewish surgeon would easily extend the same level of acceptance to working-class blacks. But it does mean that many whites North and South were forced to deal with a wider variety of people on more equal basis than they would have at home. Coleman says: "Millions of such discoveries were made, so many that those twelve million servicemen who returned to civilian life after the war shaped a very different America, where previous exclusions in professions and workplace were no longer tenable."

And he recognized the bitter irony of African-Americans fighting for a country that deprived many of them of the basic rights of citizens:

A significant group in every company were Americans whose ethnic or religious background had made them subject to a degree of discrimination and contempt now almost erased from our social memory. Black Americans served in segregated units - and for a nation which enforced their segregation. Yet, when faced with the danger to a way of life that was for so many a dream still unfolding, this generation chose the dream as something worthy of all they had — even their lives.

And a lot of those black soldiers came back expecting to see that "dream" unfold much faster than it had.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 13: the Tulsa shooting

I really hate these stories. But they are an important aspect of institutional white racism in the United States.

Ian Millhiser gives an account of the Oklahoma shooting of yet another unarmed black man in the back, with video, ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet Think Progress 04/12/2015.

Cenk Uygur explains the case here, Elderly Volunteer Thinks Gun Is Taser, Kills Unarmed Black Man 04/13/2015:

One unusual feature of this case is that despite the Tulsa Sheriff's Department supporter the killer cop, the district attorney is charging him with a felony in the killing, as the Tulsa World reports, District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler charges reserve deputy with second-degree manslaughter 04/13/2015:

“Mr. Bates is charged with Second-Degree Manslaughter involving culpable negligence. Oklahoma law defines culpable negligence as ‘the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions,’” District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said in the statement.

“The defendant is presumed to be innocent under the law, but we will be prepared to present evidence at future court hearings."

Shurff Stanley Glanz, on the other hand, was good buddies with the killer and said, in effect, oh, hail, boy, it was just an accident! With the undertone, of course, that it was just a n*****r who was killed. Black lives really don't seem to matter to Shurff Glanz.

Probably like most people, I'd like to believe that most cops are decent people who are actually committed to following the law. But when a cop stops you, unless you know the cop personally, how can anyone be sure he's not dealing with cops like this? While as a rule it's not a good idea to run from cops in such a situation, it's pretty obvious that the man who was shot genuinely had something to fear from this guy - who wasn't actually a regular cop at all but some wealthy guy playing cop with the city's approval!

An unusual twist in this story is that Bates, the reserve deputy who shot Harris, is not a full-time officer. He is a 73-year-old insurance executive and a wealthy donor to the sheriff’s department. The department includes 130 reserve deputies who are volunteers who donate their time to law enforcement. Bates is classified as "advanced reserve," the highest level of reserve deputy, a position that permits him to "do anything a full-time deputy can do."

For more on Bates' donations, see: Ziva Branstetter, Tulsa County reserve deputy bought cars, equipment for undercover unit Tulsa World 04/13/2015.

As we saw with Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Bates can also expect to receive donations from white supremacist admirers around the country. I haven't heard of a fundraising site being set up for him yet.

And given how the other presumably regular cops respond on the video, I'm not sure they qualify as the Good Cops either. And if the Good Cops aren't willing to enforce the law against the Bad Cops - well, it doesn't exactly generate a lot of trust in the police department.

The I-meant-to-use-my-Taser excuse may be true. That was the excuse for Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who murdered an unarmed young black man named Oscar Grant in 2009 by shooting him in the back while he was laying face down on the ground. That murder was the basis of the Fruitvale Station film. Mehserle's case was highly unusual in that he actually was tried and convicted of a felony, though he got only two years for an entirely unnecessary murder, and the Taser excuse helped him avoid a longer sentence.

But until the judicial system, including cops, prosecutors, judges and juries actually fix the culture of impunity for killer cops, we'll continue have a big problem. In this Oklahoma case, what kind of responsible officials of any kind let some old fart who donated stuff to the department go out with a loaded gun with the authority of a deputy? His only actual experience as a policeman was supposedly back in 1964-5. I'm also pretty dubious that cops yelling "f**k your breath" to a dying man that a 73-year-old honorary cop just shot in the back should be given the authority to carry a weapon on behalf of law enforcement. I'm guessing that shouting "Taser, Taser" the way this killer cop did may become standard practice for cops about to shoot somebody in the back.

Meyserle in the Oakland BART case did avoid a longer mandatory sentence because the jury thought his claim that he meant to use the Taser constituted reasonable doubt that he intended to murder the black guy he shot in the back while he was lying face down on the ground (also the Meyserle scenario). This blogger explains why there's a good chance that Michael Slager in South Carolina may walk: Why Slager Will Walk Zandar Against the Stupid 04/10/2015.

If trust between the community and the police is any part of a city's or county's goal, I don't see how it can happen in a department that tolerates things like this. And I know from the experience of San Jose and the City of Oakland around here that a department where serious misconduct has become accepted is very difficult for even responsible officials to clean up. Between the War on Drugs, the War or Terrorism and a culture of impunity for white cops who murder unarmed black people for no good reason, these are definitely not easy problems to fix. And, unfortunately, lots of white people see no need to fix them at all.

More from the Tulsa World:

Editorial, Time for a thorough review of Tulsa County reserve deputy program 04/12/2015:

So why was the reserve deputy involved in the first place?

The sheriff’s office says there is nothing odd about that.

Sheriff’s Maj. Shannon Clark said it’s not unusual for a reserve deputy to be on an assignment such as the Violent Crimes Task Force. They’re an important force extender for the department, he said.

Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark, who reviewed the incident independently for the sheriff’s office, said he has looked at the reserve program in the past and that it meets national standards.

Even more scary if that's true!

The reservists are typically unpaid volunteers who work other full-time jobs, but they go through the same although abbreviated training components as a normal deputy and have full powers and authority of a deputy while on duty.

Bates has received hundreds of hours of specialized training, including homicide investigation and meth lab investigation and decontamination. He also was chairman of and a $2,500 donor to Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s 2012 re-election campaign.

We respect Sgt. Clark, but we’re not convinced.

We think the sheriff’s reserve deputy program is a good idea. We encourage civic-minded people interested in helping law enforcement to join.

But reservists should be working in appropriate roles for what they are: concerned, dedicated volunteers.

Clark said TPD has used reservists in undercover operations, but a spokesman for the department said they are mostly used for traffic control and parking lot patrols during “safe shopper” operations.

There’s danger there too, but it’s a far less exposed position than being part of an undercover gun buy from a drug dealer. We want full-time, paid deputies doing the gritty work of policing the county. [my emphasis]