Dear
Boo and Bubble,
We
are living through some very difficult and roiling times right now. Once again,
our country seems to be going through yet another iteration of its grappling
with the aftermath of the American Civil War and the eternally linked issue of
civil rights for people of color. You’d think 150 years is a sufficient amount
of time for most any wound to heal and for such matters to be sorted out, but
alas, not in this case. (I alluded to this in my last post called “The
Merry-Go-Round.”)
At
least the debate this time seems to have brought some tiny shift of focus and
the questions raised are of a slightly different nature. For the first time
that I can remember there is serious discussion about whether military bases of
the United States should logically bear the names of men who made the conscious
decision to secede from and fight against the very same United States. And, seemingly
untouchable yet controversial statues honoring Confederate leadership in
communities across the country are now coming down.
Perhaps
the most intriguing difference this time for me, though, is the overwhelming
sense of ignorance that I feel upon learning for the first time about significant
events in the history of our country…events experienced by hundreds of
thousands of people whose existence was relegated to the underground of an
alternate universe and, therefore, never brought to the attention of people
like me through any incorporation in my formal education. As a college history
major, I am embarrassed and mortified. And because of this mortification, I am
determined to make sure that you do not suffer the same lack of awareness.
The
history of a country cannot…and should not…be bifurcated by race. What happens
to any of us, happens to all of us. Those who officially record events for
posterity cannot choose which ones happened and which did not. No matter the
effort, there is no sufficient whitewash to erase reality. Sooner or later, the
whispers of truth are given the microphone by uncontrollable circumstances. We
are in such a moment right now…and I have learned about these things.
(With
credits to Wikipedia and JSTOR/Daily)
Tulsa,
Oklahoma’s Greenwood District — In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, known as Black Wall
Street, was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the
United States. But on May 31 of that year, the Tulsa Tribune reported that a black man, Dick
Rowland, attempted to rape a white woman, Sarah Page. Whites in the area
refused to wait for the investigative process to play out, sparking two days of
unprecedented racial violence. Thirty-five city blocks went up in flames, 300 people
died, and 800 were injured. Defense of white female virtue was the expressed
motivation for the collective racial violence.
Juneteenth —
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of
slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June
19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon
Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and
that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after
President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official
January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans
due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order.
However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of
General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence
and overcome the resistance.
The
Wilmington Coup of 1898 — Also known as the Wilmington Insurrection or the Wilmington
Massacre of 1898, it occurred in
Wilmington, North Carolina, on Thursday, November 10, 1898. It is considered a
turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. The event
initiated an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement
of African Americans throughout the South, a shift already underway since
passage by Mississippi of a new constitution in 1890, raising
barriers to voter registration. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy
Betrayed (2000): "What happened in Wilmington became an
affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South
and in the nation as a whole," as it affirmed that invoking
"whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and
equal protection under the law that blacks were guaranteed under the Fourteenth
Amendment.
The
white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race caused
by black. However, over time, with more facts publicized, the event has come to
be seen as a coup d’etat, the violent overthrow of a duly elected
government, by a group of white supremacists. Multiple causes brought it about.
It is claimed to be the only such incident in American history, (other late
Reconstruction Era violence did not result in a direct 'coup' or removal
and replacement of elected officials by unelected individuals).
The coup occurred
after the state's white Southern Democrats conspired and led a mob of
2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected local government.
They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city,
destroyed the property and businesses of
black citizens built up since the end of the Civil War, including the only
black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300
people.
Alexander
H. Stephens Cornerstone Speech — Delivered extemporaneously by the vice president of
the Confederacy on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, GA, a few weeks before the
Civil War began, this speech explained implicitly and without equivocation that
slavery was the cornerstone of the motivation for the South’s rebellion against
the union of the United States. It began:
“The Constitution has put at rest forever all the
agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it
exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which
the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is
now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon
which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas
entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the
formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was
in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially,
morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with;
but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in
the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. Those
ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of
the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the
idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew,
it fell."
Stephens
contended that advances and progress in the sciences proved that the
18th-century view that "all men are created equal" was erroneous and
that all men were not created equal. He stated that advances in science
proved that enslavement of African Americans by white men was justified and
that it coincided with the Bible’s teachings. He also stated that the
Confederacy was the first country in the world founded on the principle of racial
supremacy.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas;
its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the
superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government,
is the first, in the
history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral
truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all
other truths in the various departments of science.”
Stephens
stated that the Confederacy's belief in human inequality was adhering to the
"laws of nature":
“May we not therefore look with confidence to the ultimate
universal acknowledgement of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the
first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to
nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human
society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the
subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and
are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of
nature's laws.”
(I
must tell you, boys, that these words are abhorrent to me. They are lies in
every sense—moral, Biblical, political, societal. It is just staggering that we
are still trying to beat them down.)
In
closing, I found this editorial in today’s Washington Post written by Kathleen
Parker. She is an acquaintance of our family—your mom used to babysit her son.
I found it somewhat apropos to the topic of the South and how slow its customs are
to fall.
