Black Reconstruction In America Quotes

Has racial justice improved? Have we moved on from Reconstruction and Jim Crow? Been lifted by Martin and the Civil Rights Act of 1964? It seems that whenever we take two steps forward, we take a step back . . .

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...

It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?

VI. LOOKING BACKWARD How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk.

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

XVII. THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORY How the facts of American history have in the last half century have been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.

Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.

No more idiotic could be laid down than to require a people to follow a written rule of government 90 years old, if that rule has been definitely broken in order to preserve the unity of the government and to destroy an economic anachronism. In such a crisis legalists may insist that consistency with precedent is more important than firm and far sighted rebuilding. But, manifestly, it is not. Rule following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice, and plain common sense.

In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.

IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.

IX. THE PRICE OF DISASTER The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.

By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were “an unsavory lot,” attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to “pluck the golden goose” of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.

...with growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.

By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five.

The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration. The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natural.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction.

XVI. BACK TOWARD SLAVERY How civil war in the South began again--indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.

But we do go forward. Inspired, once again, by military service and a war against a racist enemy—this time Nazi Germany—Black Americans press their calls for equality. The Supreme Court invalidates government racial segregation, in public schools and elsewhere.

III. THE PLANTER How seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and four million black people and sought to make agriculture equal to industry through the rule of property without yielding political power or education to labor.

Here comes the penalty which a land pays when it stifles free speech and free discussion and turns itself over entirely to propaganda. It does not make any difference if at the time the things advocated are absolutely right, the nation nevertheless becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions. -- W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1935, first edition), page 144

The recognition of Black citizenship progressed unevenly during Reconstruction and after, stymied by domestic terrorists, by high-ranking public officials who betrayed democracy, and by statesmen whose leadership proved to be politically indefensible and morally reprehensible.

If the Reconstruction of the southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living in a different world.

I. THE BLACK WORKER How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.

II. THE WHITE WORKER How America became a laborer's Promised Land; and flocking here from all the world the white workers competed with black slaves, with the new floods of foreigners, and with growing exploitation, until they fought to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.

It was the drear destiny of the Poor White South that, deserting its economic class and itself, it became the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy. The man who led the way with unconscious paradox was Andrew Johnson.

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.

Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes, it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter fried. But its logical path would have been straight. The South would have returned to its place in congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.

How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

But the idea that letting people know how deeply rooted racism has been will make them lose faith in America is both patronizing and implausible. Patronizing because it suggests that some Americans can’t handle the truth, and implausible because the people most likely to lose faith—Black Americans—know the problem of racism all too well already.

The “Address at a Sanitary Fair” shifts, somewhat abruptly, to a discussion of the meaning of liberty. “We all declare for liberty,” he says, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Thus, Lincoln continues, “the shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule mankind for their own selfish interests.

the American cowboy was born of Reconstruction and carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: he was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own. The reality was that about a third of all cowboys were men of color—black or Mexican, and sometimes Indian—and that few rose to prosperity.

David Abrams’s Fobbit, Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, Omnia Amin and Rick London’s translations of Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi’s poetry, Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well, Donovan Campbell’s Joker One, C. J. Chivers’s The Gun, Seth Connor’s Boredom by Day, Death by Night, Daniel Danelo’s Blood Stripes, Kimberly Dozier’s Breathing the Fire, Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone, Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, Jim Frederick’s Black Hearts, Matt Gallagher’s Kaboom, Jessica Goodell’s Shade It Black, J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, Dave Grossman’s On Killing and On Combat, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Kirsten Holmstedt’s Band of Sisters, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, Colum McCann’s Dancer, Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam, Roy Scranton’s essays and fiction, the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction Report Hard Lessons, Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe and No True Glory, Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More Than You.

VIII. TRANSUBSTANTIATION OF A POOR WHITE How Andrew Johnson, unexpectedly raised to the Presidency, was suddenly set between a democracy which included poor whites and black men, and an autocracy that included Big Business and slave barons; and how torn between impossible allegiances, he ended in forcing a hesitant nation to choose between the increased political power of a restored Southern oligarchy and votes for Negroes.

W.E.B. Du Bois called such erasure [of the first arrival of enslaved Africans to America] the propaganda of history. "It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is 'lies agreed upon'; and to point out the danger in such misinformation," he wrote in his influential treatise Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois argued that America had falsified the fact of its history "because the nation was ashamed.

XIV. COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF PROPERTY How, After the war, triumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of death that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war; and how revolt against this anarchy became reaction against democracy, North and South, and delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South.

There are many, many exceptions, but, in general, it is true that there is scarcely a bishop in Christendom, a priest in the church, a president, a governor, mayor, or legislator in the United States, a college professor or public school teacher who does not in the end stand by War and Ignorance as the main method for the settlement of our pressing human problems. And this despite the fact that they may deny it with their mouths every day.

VII. LOOKING FORWARD How two theories of the future of America clashed and blended just after the Civil War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power. The uncomprehending resistance of the South, and the pressure of black folk, made these two thoughts uneasy and temporary allies.

In the end, it would turn out, just as Bishop Turner seemed to have forecast, that Black America did not need a New Negro; it needed the legal and political means to curtail the institutionalization of antiblack racism perpetuated against the Old Negro at every level in post-Reconstruction American society through an ideology gone rogue, the ideology of white supremacy. One can say that to thrive, the Old and New Negroes needed a New White Man.

Most Americans don’t know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.

It is fair to say that the Negro carpetbag governments established the public schools of the south. Although recent researches have shown many germs of a public school system in the south before the war, there can be no reasonable doubt that common school instruction in the south, in the modern sense of the term, was founded by the Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies, and that the state public school system was formed mainly by Negro Reconstruction governments.

The fact of the matter was that in the pre-war South, there were two insuperable obstacles to a free public school system. The first was the attitude of the owners of property. They did not propose under any circumstances to be taxed for the public education of the laboring class. They believed that laborers did not need education; that it made their exploitation more difficult; and that if any of them were really worth educating, they would somehow escape their condition by their own efforts.

Republicans, white and black, heaped scorn upon “respectables” who did not participate directly in the violence but “could not stop their sons from murdering their inoffensive neighbors in broad daylight.” Yet their complicity went beyond silence in the face of unspeakable crimes. Through their constant vilification of blacks, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Reconstruction, the “old political leaders” fostered a climate that condoned violence as a legitimate weapon in the struggle for Redemption.

For a country that is famous for exporting democracy across the globe and has branded itself as the shining city on the hill, the United States has a shameful history when it comes to embracing one of its most basic rights at home. In 1787, when the founders ratified the Constitution, only white male property owners could vote in the eleven states of the Union. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, black men could cast a ballot freely in only five states. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The remarkably brief Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, when there were twenty-two black members of Congress from the South and six hundred black state legislators, was followed by ninety years of Jim Crow rule. The United States is the only advanced democracy that has ever enfranchised, disenfranchised, and then reenfranchised an entire segment of the population. Despite our many distinctions as a democracy, the enduring debate over who can and cannot participate in it remains a key feature of our national character.

The method of force which hides itself in secrecy is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked and at night. The method has certain advantages; it may, with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage at maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamour. It attracts people who would otherwise not be reached. It harnesses the mob.

Rather than try to restore what had been, the Reconstruction Congress decides to build something new. There will be no more compromises with slavery, no more deals with the devil. The Black soldiers who fought for the United States in its war against traitors will be citizens, and as citizens they will have rights. Reconstruction destroys the Founders’ Constitution—and not by the method the Founders’ Constitution sets out. It is not a fulfillment of the Founders’ vision, but a rejection of it, a recognition of its failure.

He spoke of Black suffrage: on April 11, 1865, he expressed a desire to allow some Blacks (those who had fought for the Union and, in a less appealing phrase, the “very intelligent”) to vote. Present at that speech was John Wilkes Booth, who fumed in response, “That means n***** citizenship” and “That is the last speech he will ever make.” Four days later Lincoln was dead—a martyr not for the cause of Union, but for Black citizenship. Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency, and public opinion hardened against the South.

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation. It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.

Johnson’s legislation essentially crystallized a long-term pact between blacks and the Democrat Party that still exists today, lending credence to his alleged statement that he would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” There is some uncertainty about whether Johnson actually made that bold claim, but even if he did not, a quote attributed to the president by numerous historians and publications lays bare the actual intention behind his historic civil rights legislation: These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.

Here were grown, sensible men arguing about a written form of government adopted ninety years before, when men did not believe that slavery could outlive their generation in this country, or that civil war could possibly be its result when no man foresaw the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; and yet now, with incantation and abracadabra, the leaders of a a nation tried to peer back into the magic crystal, and out of a bit of paper called the Constitution, find eternal and immutable law laid down for their guidance forever and ever, Amen!

partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future. —W. E. B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

The Revolution and the Founders’ Constitution chose unity over justice, but the Civil War and Reconstruction put justice ahead of unity. The heroes and villains are different. The Founding reveres paramilitary organizations like the Sons of Liberty. The army of the national government is viewed suspiciously—the Founders did not want a standing army. In Reconstruction, US Army troops, including many Black soldiers, are the heroes, and paramilitary organizations like the Klan and the White League are the villains. The presence of a standing army within a civilian population, dreaded by the Revolutionaries, is what protects the freedpeople

One has but to read the debates in Congress and state papers from Abraham Lincoln down to know that the decisive action which ended the Civil War was the emancipation and the arming of the black slave; that, as Lincoln said, "Without the military help of black freedmen, the war against the south could not have been won." The freedmen, far from being the inert recepients of freedom at the hands of philanthropists, furnished 200k soldiers in the Civil War who took part in nearly 200 battles and skirmishes, and in addition perhaps 300k others as effective laborers and helpers In proportion to population, more Negroes than whites fought in the Civil War.

Surprise and ridicule has often been voiced concerning the demand of Negroes for land. It has been regarded primarily as a method for punishing rebellion. Motives of this sort may have been on the minds of some Northern whites, but so far as the Negroes were concerned, their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified, and to give them anything less was an economic farce. On the other hand, to have given each one of the Million Negro free families a forty acre free-hold would have been the basis of real democracy in the United States that might have easily transformed the modern world.

Reconstruction prompted a vicious white backlash, which gained traction following the disputed election of 1876, when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in return for the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Segregationist whites, known as Redeemers, regained power and quickly targeted black voters, first through violence and fraud and then via devices like literacy and good character tests, poll taxes, and stringent residency requirements. Mississippi became the first state to change its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Every other southern state quickly followed. Black voters disappeared seemingly overnight.

The bravest of the carpetbaggers, Tourgee, declared concerning the Negro voters, "They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule in the south. They abolished the whipping post, and branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time, no man's rights were invaded under the forms of law

the lower South, its meaning was settled by the overtly discriminatory Black Codes. These codes, described by Kenneth Stampp as “a twilight zone between slavery and freedom,”12 restricted Blacks by, for instance, requiring them to sign labor contracts and prohibiting them from taking any job other than farmer or servant without receiving a license and paying a tax.13 Extensive regulation of the “employment” relationship made it resemble slavery, with “masters” allowed to whip “servants.” Breaching or not entering into a contract could trigger the application of vagrancy laws, which took advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment back door: Blacks convicted of vagrancy could be sentenced to work or leased out while prisoners.

The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the federal government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the south, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of that there has arisen in the south an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up. The methods of government have gone uncriticized, and elections are by secret understanding and manipulation; the dictatorship of capital in the south is complete.

Democracy, that inevitable end of all government, faces eternal paradox. In all ages, the vast majority of men have been ignorant and poor, and any attempt to arm such classes with political power brings the question: Can Ignorance and Poverty rule? If they try to rule, their success in the nature of things must be halting and spasmodic, if not absolutely nil; and it must incur the criticism and the raillery of the wise and the well to do. On the other hand, if the poor, unlettered toilers are given no political power, and are kept in exploitation by poverty, they will remain submerged unless rescued by revolution; and a philosophy will prevail, teaching that the submergence of the mass is inevitable and is on the whole best, not only for them but the ruling classes.

But where Lincoln’s absent hand was felt most keenly was in race relations. Black codes were passed in state after state across the South—as restrictive as the antebellum laws governing free blacks (Richmond’s old laws had even regulated the carrying of canes). These codes propounded segregation, banned intermarriage, provided for special punishments for blacks, and, in one state, Mississippi, also prevented the ownership of land. Not even a congressional civil rights bill, passed over Johnson’s veto, could undo them. For their part, the Northern states were little better. During Reconstruction, employing a deadly brew of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and property qualifications, they abridged the right to vote more extensively than did their Southern counterparts.

Whites generally are unable or unwilling to acknowledge how structural patterning generates white bias and responsibility for that structural patterning. Perhaps it is Mumia Abu-Jamal who again has deftly and complexly summarized the phenomenon of viciously racist bias in relation to African American experience of “criminal justice.” Contemplating Pennsylvania’s death row population which was 60 percent black at the time of his writing in a state where blacks make up only 11 percent of the population, Abu-Jamal reflects: Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.[94] Hence, we have the prison house and criminal justice structures as a bastion of white racism, displaying severe racial disparities, unequally disseminating terror and group loss for racialized groups in the US. It is a bitter fruit of the nation’s legacy of four centuries of slavery in North America, of the Jim Crow rollback of Reconstruction that often was reinforced by lynching practices. Some of today’s prisons are, in fact, built on sites of former slave plantations.[95] More importantly, prisons today are institutions that preserve a white society marked by white dominance and the confinement of nonwhite bodies, especially black bodies, exposing those bodies to commodification, immobilization, and disintegration.

The transubstantiation of Andrew Johnson was complete. He had begun as the champion of the poor laborer, demanding that the land monopoly of the Southern oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the soil, South and West, to the free laborer. He had demanded the punishment of those southerners who by slavery and by war, had made such an economic program impossible. Suddenly thrust into the presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up extravagant ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demands for dividing up plantations when he largely realized that Negroes would be beneficiaries. Because he could not conceive of Negroes as men, he refused to advocate universal democracy, of which, in his young manhood, he had been the fiercest advocate, and made strong alliance with those who would restore slavery under another name.

As negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist. Thus labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor. Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the bargain of 1876 and maintained the power of the labor vote in the South; and suppose that the Negro with new and dawning consciousness of the demands of labor as differentiated from the demands of capitalists, had used his vote more specifically for the benefit of white labor, South and North?

Although industry was now in control of the national government, the Republican party which represented it was a minority party; and Northern and Southern Democrats, especially Southern Democrats with increased power by counting the full Negro population, together with Western malcontents, could easily oust the Republicans. It was because of this thought that Northern industry made its great alliance with abolition-democracy. The consummation of this alliance came slowly and reluctantly and after vain effort to- ward understanding with the South which was unsuccessful until 1876. When Lincoln first laid down his general proclamation concerning Reconstruction, industry paid little attention to it: let the South come back; let it come back quickly, and let us go to work and make money and repair the losses of the war by increased business; and then let the nation go far beyond this through domination of the American market, and perhaps even of the markets of the world.

When we say that the Negro wants absolute and immediate freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today, the answer is disturbingly terse to people who are not certain they wish to believe it. Yet this is the fact. Negroes no longer are tolerant of or interested in compromise. American history is replete with compromise. As splendid as are the words of the Declaration of Independence, there are disquieting implications in the fact that the original phrasing was altered to delete a condemnation of the British monarch for his espousal of slavery. American history chronicles the Missouri Compromise, which permitted the spread of slavery to new states; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which withdrew the federal troops from the South and signaled the end of Reconstruction; the Supreme Court' compromise in Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the infamous "separate but equal" philosophy. These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America. In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious.

Sons of ditch-diggers aspired to be bastard sons of kings and thieving aristocrats rather than of rough handed children of dirt and toil. The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more and thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America, but in Asia and Africa. The world wept because within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque profits and poverty plenty and starvation empire and democracy staring at each other across world depression. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876--Land light and leading for slaves black brown yellow and white...

Let us have peace." But there was the black man looming like a dark ghost on the horizon. He was the child of force and greed, and the father of wealth and war. His labor was indispensable, and the loss of it would have cost many times the cost of the war. If the Negro has been silent, his very presence would have announced his plight. He was not silence. He was in usual evidence. He was writing petitions, making speeches, parading with returned soldiers, reciting his adventures as slave and freeman. Even dumb and still, he must be noticed. His poverty has to be relieved, and emancipation in his case had to mean poverty. If he had to work, he had to have land and tools. If his labor was in reality to be free labor, he had to have legal freedom and civil rights. His ignorance could only be removed by that very education which the law of the South had long denied him and the custom of the North had made exceedingly difficult. Thus civil status and legal freedom, food, clothes and tools, access to land and help to education, were the minimum demands of four million laborers, and these demands no man could ignore, Northerner or Southerner, Abolitionist or Copperhead, laborer or captain of industry. How did the nation face this paradox and dilemma?

This journey by time capsule to the early 1940s is not always a pleasant one. It affords us a glimpse at the pre-civil rights South. This was true in the raw copy of the guidebooks as well. The Alabama guidebook copy referred to blacks as “darkies.” It originally described the city of Florence struggling through “the terrible reconstruction, those evil days when in bitter poverty, her best and bravest of them sleep in Virginia battlefields, her civilization destroyed . . . And now when the darkest hour had struck, came a flash of light, the forerunners of dawn. It was the Ku Klux Klan . . .” The Dover, Delaware, report stated that “Negroes whistle melodiously.” Ohio copy talked of their “love for pageantry and fancy dress.” Such embarrassingly racist passages were usually edited out, but the America Eats manuscripts are unedited, so the word darkies remains in a Kentucky recipe for eggnog. In the southern essays from America Eats, whenever there is dialogue between a black and a white, it reads like an exchange between a slave and a master. There also seems to be a racist oral fixation. Black people are always sporting big “grins.” A description of a Mississippi barbecue cook states, “Bluebill is what is known as a ‘bluegum’ Negro, and they call him the brother of the Ugly man, but personal beauty is not in the least necessary to a barbecue cook.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black

Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a 'rifle club' of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina's government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that 'the leading white men of Edgefield' had decided to 'seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.' Although a coroner's jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statute honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state's public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman's honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.

America thus stepped forward in the modern age and added to the art of beauty gift of the Renaissance and to freedom of belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self sustaining men. What an idea and idea for its realization--endless land of richest fertility, natural resources such as Earth seldom exhibited before, a population infinite in variety, of universal gift, burned in the fires of poverty and caste, yearning toward the Unknown God; and self reliant pioneers, unafraid of man or devil. It was the Supreme Adventure, in the last great battle of the west, for that human freedom which would release the human spirit from lower lust for more meat, and set its feet to dream and sing...And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst. It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.

Until midcentury, the Dunning School’s fables of slavery and Reconstruction were transferred into schoolbooks, or at least into those that mentioned Black people at all. Most textbook writers excluded Black people from schoolbooks as deliberately as southern Democrats excluded them from the polls.

America could never have a truthful history “until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois concluded in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935.

White citizens, caught up in the delirium in the decades following Reconstruction, rioted in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and central Illinois. They killed colored residents and set fire to their homes on rumors of black impropriety, as authorities stood by or participated.

In the aftermath of the [Civil War], we find one of the most hidden eras of US history. And that is the period of Radical Reconstruction. It certainly remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America. And this is an era that is rarely acknowledged in historical texts. We had Black educated officials, the development of public education. As a matter of fact, former slaves fought for the right to public education; that is to say, education that did not cost money as your education here costs. I'll say here parenthetically -- the fight was for noncommodified education. And as a matter of fact white children in the South, poor white children, gained access to education as a direct result of the struggles of former slaves. There were progressive laws passed challenging male supremacy. This is an era that is rarely acknowledged.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

Fundamentally, however, blacks resented not only the incidents of slavery—the whippings, separations of families, and countless rituals of subordination—but the fact of having been held as slaves at all. During a visit to Richmond, Scottish minister David Macrae was surprised to hear a former slave complain of past mistreatment, while acknowledging he had never been whipped. “How were you cruelly treated then?” asked Macrae. “I was cruelly treated,” answered the freedman, “because I was kept in slavery.”4

It was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” And it was Du Bois who made repeated connections in his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, about conditions after the Civil War: “The slave went free,” he wrote, “stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. The whole weight of America was thrown to color caste.

many white Americans viewed laws designed to constrain and marginalize free Black people as entirely justifiable within a broader legal and cultural tradition that encouraged state and local governments to regulate groups of people who were construed to be dependent and potentially disruptive, including paupers, vagrants, wives, and children.

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

I began to see that the pattern of American history was not a straight line of progress on race but rather an uneven and often painful process of progress followed by backlash. We hadn’t moved as a country from the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama. Rather, the rights of Blacks to vote and hold office and own property were steadily eroded and erased after the end of Reconstruction, the bodies of Black men and women stayed effectively enslaved through convict leasing, and this apartheid system was upheld and enforced through terrorism, mob torture, and vigilante justice.3 Slavery had effectively continued in many parts of the country, under other names, even as America was liberating Europe during World War II.

In March 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became the nineteen president of the United States. The hell that followed was the seeds of Jim Crow beginning to sprout with Democrats and Republicans enabling more white terror. As agreed on in the Compromise of 1877, federal troops abandoned the South. Democrats tightened their hold on the former Confederacy. Reconstruction, a time designed to repair the nation after war, was a closed chapter. It wasn’t only slavery that led to Black America starting from behind the rest of the nation; it was the Democratic and Republican failure of Reconstruction.

Plantation owners redefined their former slaves as sharecroppers to maintain harsh and exploitative conditions. Events in the African American town of Hamburg, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, were typical of many others across the former Confederacy where white paramilitary groups mobilized to regain control of state governments. Their aim was simple: prevent African Americans from voting. In July 1876, a few months before the election that gave the presidency to Hayes, a violent rampage in Hamburg abolished the civil rights of freed slaves. Calling itself the Red Shirts, a collection of white supremacists killed six African American men and then murdered four others whom the gang had captured. Benjamin Tillman led the Red Shirts; the massacre propelled him to a twenty-four-year career as the most vitriolic racist in the U.S. Senate. Following the massacre, the terror did not abate. In September, a “rifle club” of more than 500 whites crossed the Savannah River from Georgia and camped outside Hamburg. A local judge begged the governor to protect the African American population, but to no avail. The rifle club then moved on to the nearby hamlet of Ellenton, killing as many as fifty African Americans. President Ulysses S. Grant then sent in federal troops, who temporarily calmed things down but did not eliminate the ongoing threats. Employers in the Edgefield District told African Americans they would be fired, and landowners threatened black sharecroppers with eviction if they voted to maintain a biracial state government. When the 1876 election took place, fraudulent white ballots were cast; the total vote in Edgefield substantially exceeded the entire voting age population. Results like these across the state gave segregationist Democrats the margin of victory they needed to seize control of South Carolina’s government from the black-white coalition that had held office during Reconstruction. Senator Tillman later bragged that “the leading white men of Edgefield” had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson.” Although a coroner’s jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never again came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state’s public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman’s honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.*

Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths in the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle and low income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle and upper income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free from racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latino racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.

We are the hewers and delvers who toil for another’s gain,— The common clods and the rabble, stunted of brow and brain. What do we want, the gleaners, of the harvest we have reaped? What do we want, the neuters, of the honey we have heaped? What matter if king or consul or president holds the rein, If crime and poverty ever be links in the bondman’s chain? What careth the burden-bearer that Liberty packed his load, If Hunger presseth behind him with a sharp and ready goad? JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE

Profit? What profit hath the sea Of her deep-throated threnody? What profit hath the sun, who stands Staring on space with idle hands? And what should God Himself acquire From all the æons’ blood and fire? FANNIE STEARNS DAVIS From Crack o’ Dawn, The Macmillan Company

The Reconstruction era—the dozen or so years following the end of the Civil War in 1865—had been a horrific time for southern White men like Wade Hampton who were used to ruling their Black people and their women. They faced and beat back with violence and violent ideas a withering civil rights and Black empowerment movement—as well as a powerful women’s movement that failed to grab as many headlines. But their supposed underlings did not stop rebelling after the fall of Reconstruction. To intimidate and reassert their control over rebellious Blacks and White women, White male redeemers took up lynching in the 1880s. Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929. Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of human beings—all the while calling the victims savages. Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.24

Angrily watching the GOP snatch southern states in the presidential election, he decided to remind White southerners that the Republicans had been responsible for the horror of Reconstruction. His best-selling book, published in 1929, was called The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. “Historians have shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers,” he said, where guiltless southern Whites were “literally” tortured by vicious Black Republicans. We will never know just how many Americans read The Tragic Era, and then saw The Birth of a Nation again at their local theaters, and then pledged never to vote again for the Republican Party, never to miss a lynching bash, and never to consider desegregation—in short, never to do anything that might revive the specter of Blacks voting on a large scale and Whites being tortured. But there were many of them. More than any other book in the late 1920s, The Tragic Era helped the Democratic Party keep the segregationists in power for another generation.15

[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. —W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America For

Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64

With the ending of Black Reconstruction in America at the forefront of his mind and heart, Du Bois nevertheless could mourn a whole world’s suffering: Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.

With the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex working together in these ways there is a continuous, intensifying coordination of power between Lockdown America at home and imperial Pax Americana abroad. We need to feel these connections conceptually and viscerally, as did W. E. B. Du Bois in his time, because it surfaces not only coordinated powers of domination but a network of shared suffering by those exploited at home and abroad. When in the 1930s Du Bois surveyed the way industrial classes had destroyed post-Civil War Black Reconstruction in America, indeed enabling white power to be resurgent again inside the U.S., Du Bois was able also to perceive (and feel) how it also consolidated a structural violence abroad. While lamenting the devastation at home he thus lifted a lament, too, for multiple peoples abroad, for those he termed “the darker nations.