On Learning History

Last week I started a new course on EdX on Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, taught by Eric Foner, at Columbia University.  (It's actually the third part of a three part series on the Civil War, but I didn't take the first two parts.)  Last week he talked about how even today many people, if they know anything at all about Reconstruction, have a very negative view of it that was influenced by the work of historians in an earlier era who in turn were influenced by what had been contemporary anti-Reconstruction propaganda.  As an example of how Reconstruction was portrayed in the early 20th century, he showed excerpts from the 1915 film "Birth of a Nation."  However significant the movie may be in the history of American film, as history it is not correct and reflects the racism of the era in which it was made.

The week's assignment on using primary sources included an editorial written by James Weldon Johnson, the Executive Director of the NAACP, which was published in the New York Age in May 1921 following the re-release of the film.  Mr. Johnson wrote,

"Whatever other reasons there may be for the revival of “The Birth of a Nation” at this particular time I believe that one of the reasons is a determination to offset the shocking revelations that have just come out of Georgia.  The whole country has been stirred by the accounts of barbarous brutalities committed in connection with the Jasper County peonage cases; now comes this picture to instill the idea that no matter how brutally the Negro in the South is treated, there are justifications for the treatment."

I had no idea, on reading this, what had happened in Jasper County, Georgia, and I was curious.  Google turned up several good summaries, including one by Marshall McCart.  A man named John Williams was keeping 11 African-American men as involuntary indentured workers (the law calls it peonage).  One man escaped and made his way to Atlanta and talked to the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI).  Federal agents visited Williams' farm and talked to workers, who knew they had to lie.  But the visit was enough to prompt Williams to order his African-American overseer, Clyde Manning, to kill the men, a few at a time.  Several were killed and their bodies dumped in the Yellow River, and it was the discovery of those bodies in Newton County that led to an investigation that ultimately resulted in the convictions of both Williams and Manning for murder.  The investigation and subsequent trial was followed by the national press; this headline is from the New York Times.

This is a piece of Georgia history I certainly didn't know, just like most of us don't know much about the lynchings that occurred throughout the South, except for a few of the most famous ones.  A group called the Equal Justice Initiative has documented almost 4,000 "racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states during the period 1877 to 1950.  There is an effort now to place historical markers or memorials to mark some of these sites.

I've been thinking about this just as there have been stories in the news about pushback by some state legislators, including in Georgia, about the revised AP History curriculum, which is described as being insufficiently pro-American, and overly focused on the negative aspects of our country's history, including slavery. This makes me glad that I no longer have children in public schools, who could be impacted by directives from state politicians to leave out the bad parts of our history, but I do worry about the kids who wil be impacted.

As I write this, President Obama is about to speak in Selma, at the commemoration of the attack on peaceful civil rights marchers by state police,fifty years ago.  Iain is there, right now, with a group from school, and Tom was there last night.  He said that he heard lots of moving stories from people in Selma, about the police chief who spent the night in his car outside a house where Martin Luther King was staying, about the editor of the local paper who opened up his office to international press who had come to Selma.  There were a lot of good people there, he said, and those are stories that you never hear.

Our history is tumultuous and full of contradictions.  We can't understand the present unless we understand the past.  Leaving out the parts that make us uncomfortable is not patriotic; it's a lie, and we under estimate our young people.  I just heard the President say this, in Selma:

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

Exactly.