Forgetting Reconstruction

The end of last year witnessed a perfect storm hit of news stories on race and history in the United States. At one end was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nostalgic reminisces of the Citizens Councils, which attempted to put a “respectable” (and more effective) face to white supremacy. The story breaking on the 150^th anniversary of South Carolina’s declaration of secession seemed too perfect as a demonstration of how alive the gap between ideals and realities of equality remain.

At the same time, these incidents illuminate a profound deficit in how the history of racism and the struggle for equal rights are remembered. For in our popular imagination, the great struggles over these issues exist at two poles separated by exactly a century: the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. With regards to historical memory, the Civil War in the next years is sure to burn brightly, as the 150^th anniversaries of innumerable battles, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc arrive. However, as obviously significant as the Civil War is, focusing on the actual conflict does a disservice to understanding the full history. Certainly the war created many dramatic and concrete transformations, most notably the end of slavery and the intensification of modern capitalism’s emergence. Yet, especially when talking about the African-American community, the war’s greatest importance lies in the possibilities it created for even deeper changes and which, albeit with limitations, were seized upon during Reconstruction.

As well known as the Civil War’s contours are, outside of academics who study it, Reconstruction appears lost in a haze. The single best known depiction of the period remains Gone With the Wind, which traffics in the frankly racist viewpoint which received academic validation from historians of the “Dunning School” (think a somewhat toned down Birth of a Nation in footnoted book form). For the Dunning school, Reconstruction was a tragedy in which the North (or more specifically the Radical Republicans) imposed unfairly harsh conditions on Southern states' re-entry to the Union and Northern opportunists (so-called “carpetbaggers”) swept into the South to take financial advantage of a defeated land. Furthermore, in this interpretation, African-Americans were unable to take advantage of freedom; proving dangerously incompetent at governing or building independent lives. The advent of Jim Crow and the return to Democratic rule are thus seen as the forces that rescued the South from further misery.

Corruption and exploitation by Northern businessmen, entrepreneurs, and politicians of the Southern states did exist. To see Reconstruction as a tragic period is certainly apt, yet the tragedy lies not in its severity, but in its limitations. Many of the struggles for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s were in fact efforts to regain rights that African-Americans enjoyed, briefly, one hundred years earlier. The period saw significant reforms to southern society beyond those directly concerned with the freedmen and women, such as the establishment of public school systems, economic development (such as railroad lines and non-agricultural industry). The reversal of the period’s gains, especially regarding African-American rights and dreams of fairness, represented a severe blow to creating a United States whose policies reflected its highest ideals. To forget it is to forget one of the most concentrated attempts to build a true “land of the free.”

Note: In a second post (and I’ll actually do it!), I’ll go into more detail on the specific history of the period, its gains and failures.

MLK: Judge On the Content of His Actual Beliefs

Banalogies friend Seth D pointed me to this piece from the Moderate Voice, which honestly is best read as an Onion-esque parody of a "sensible" moderate position. The author, Rick Moran, seeks to find a reasonable middle ground between those who believe the Tea Party is the inheritor of the civil rights legacy and those who vehemently disagree. As Seth noted to me, Moran writes as if Martin Luther King Jr. were some ancient figure whose views on modern issues we can only speculate on. This allows him (without linking to any sources) to state, for example, that King "would have scoffed at the modern interpretation of 'social justice.'" Perhaps most ludicrous is Moran's attempt to make King out to be a skeptic of government interventions to achieve greater social justice, asserting that King would have opposed programs based on ideas of "positive rights" because he believed that "change would come only when the hearts and minds of Americans were turned from hate and that only through Christian love and charity."

This is not a matter of difference of interpretation; these statements are factually incorrect. Look at the demands of the March for Jobs and Freedom in 1963; among them are higher minimum wages and a "massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers - Negro and white - on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages." When King was murdered in 1968, he was assisting with a sanitation workers' strike and building to the planned Poor People's March, which again demanded massive government intervention to end poverty.

Not only were King's views on policy clear, so were his politics. Let's take the movement's fight for voting rights. Most of the time, the struggle for full suffrage rights is discussed in a way that make the goals of the movement mainly philosophical. Thus, the main point of fighting for full suffrage rights was for African-Americans to be equal citizens to whites. While this was a vital element, King and the movement also saw gaining full voting rights as a pragmatic tactic towards larger objectives, as seen in his 1961 speech to the Transport Workers Union:

"The campaign to grant the ballot to Negroes in the South has profound implications. From all I have outlined, it is clear that the Negro vote would not be utilized in a vacuum. Negroes exercising a free suffrage would march to the polls to support those candidates who would be partial to social legislation. Negroes in the South, whether they elected white or Negro Congressmen, would be placing in office a liberal candidate, if you will-a-labor candidate. (APPLAUSE) No other political leader could have a program possessing appeal to Negroes."

How about King's views on conservatives? Well, right before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he gave a lecture that included comments on that year's presidential election, in which Lyndon Johnson crushed conservative champion Barry Goldwater. As Rick Perlstein and others have shown, the modern right in many ways came into its own with Goldwater's campaign and a direct line runs between the Goldwaterites and today's conservatism. Here's what King had to say about Goldwater and the right-wing movement of the day:

"Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path."

A lot of history is open to interpretation and debate. Indeed it is often highly problematic to say what a historical figure would have said about current events. However, on the question of King and modern conservatism, there really is no question where he stood.

Still Forgetting Walter

I swung by the "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday which attempted (as many have pointed out) to appropriate the legacy and meaning of the black freedom struggle for the religious right/Tea Party movement. As Saddam Hussein might say, such an assertion may represent the "mother of all banalogies." This is one of those cases where interpretations of history do not even come into play, we are talking simple facts. In this case, it is an indisputable truth that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the key figures around him were progressives and had strong leanings towards Scandinavian style social democracy or more radical forms of democratic socialism. The black freedom struggle had an important economic component, one which many in the movement felt could only fully be addressed by first winning civil rights, but certainly not only through such measures. Figures in the movement forthrightly identified as progressives and attacked conservative political figures and ideas. Really the only way to miss all this is to pretend (as so many seem to) that the entire message of the movement is summed up in King's "content of their character" line, even a reading of the rest of the "I Have a Dream Speech" showcases the importance King placed on poverty and power relations.

It was this sort of assertive amnesia which reached its zenith during a video tribute to King at the rally. The longest single image from that montage featured a slow-motion shot of King at the rally sharing a joke with Walter Reuther, whose birthday is today. Now, I didn't expect people to recognize Reuther, but still the irony was overwhelming. Reuther was then president of the United Auto Workers, perhaps the most powerful (and one of the more progressive) unions in the U.S. at the time. Reuther and his compatriots, while a pragmatic lot, retained a vision of society that much more closely resembles the nightmares Beck sees in Obama's policies than in the reality of the current administration. They wanted to transform the U.S. economy through social insurance programs and economic planning to ensure full employment, good jobs, and even sustainable development.

It was these very views that helped cement an alliance (albeit one which strained and even broke at points) between the black freedom struggle and the labor movement. To cite one concrete detail, a good portion of the funding for the logistics of the August 28, 1963 rally (including the sound system which brought "I Have a Dream" to the world) came from the UAW's coffers. If Glenn Beck wants to be an heir to this he can feel free, but I have my doubts.