Stony The Road

Henry Louis Gates, JR., “Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” Penguin Press, 2019, 259 pp.

The author is an African-American professor who describes the bigoted behavior of whites against blacks following the civil war, particularly following Reconstruction.  This book is an intellectual and cultural history of black agency and the resistance to and institutionalization of white supremacy.  The book is a complement to a documentary film series the author produced for PBS concerning the period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction (1865-1877)—and the following period (1877-1925) known as The Redemption when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically erased and the country witnessed the rise of a white supremacist ideology that went rogue.  The author defines The Redemption, beginning in 1877, as the time when the last of the former Confederate states were reclaimed by Southern Democrats, reaching its zenith with the screening by President Wilson at the White House in 1915 of D.W.Griffiths The Birth of a Nation.

My Notes: 

Pg. xvi:  The Redemption period were years of the most nominal freedom for blacks and a period that black people would attempt to stem the tide of racism that was engulfing many of the gains of equal rights and equal protections made under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments through the concept of a New Negro, a phenomenon that began in 1894 and culminated in 1925 with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance.  (A period, in my opinion, worse for blacks in the South than slavery). 

Pg. 6f:  Reconstruction began in 1865 but was clearly on the road to ending by the Panic of 1873, the first “Great Depression” in post-Civil War America, and suffered a devastating political blow just four years later, with the Compromise of 1877, which, in the most stripped-down of terms secured the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by giving him the electoral votes of Democratic South Carolina and Louisiana in exchange for a promise to withdraw the remaining federal troops from those states. 

Pg. 7:  The process of Reconstruction involved nothing less than the monumental effort to create a biracial democracy out of the wreckage of the rebellion.  It began with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the nation’s first federal civil rights law.  The ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in 1865, 18678, and 870, respectively, permanently altered the status of African Americans under the US Constitution.  And, after seizing control of Reconstruction policy from President Andrew Johnson, who had called for a speedy readmission of the former Rebel states (as they hastily set about imposing a series of harsh “Black Codes” on the freedmen and women almost as soon as the war ended), Congress, between March 1867 and March 1868, passed four successive Military Reconstruction Acts that carved the defeated Southern states into five military districts and required them to hold elections for new constitutional conventions, which would not be deemed legitimate unless black men were given the vote.  They also had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which, among other things, established birthright citizenship and prohibited any state from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the US, depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, or denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Pg. 18:  The Lost Cause: its Southern advocates argued that the Civil War was not an act of treason but rather a revolt against an overreaching federal government, in which the Confederates lost but fought with courage and honor.  In other words, similar to the American Revolution with Robert E. Lee as George Washington.  Second, slavery did not cause the war; on the contrary, the Lost Cause was fundamentally based on white supremacy.  The war properly decided only what was put in issue: the restoration of the Union and the excision of slavery.  The war did not decide Negro equality. 

Pg. 26f:  At least ten percent of the black members of constitutional conventions in the South in 1867-68 became victims of Klan violence, including seven who were murdered.  White vigilantes lynched an estimated four hundred black people across the South between 1868 and 1871.  (Note: this was the good period before Reconstruction was ended in 1877).  It was during this time that Pat Donan the editor of a Lexington, Missouri, newspaper, declared, “No simian-souled, sooty skinned, kink-curled, blubber-lipped, prehensile-heeled, Ethiopian gorilla shall pollute the ballot box with his leprous vote.”

Pg. 30:  Special Field Orders, No. 15 (series 1865) were military orders issued during the American Civil War, on January 16, 1865, by General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi of the United States Army. They provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels of not more than 40 acres on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 formerly enslaved families and other Blacks then living in the area.

My additional Notes:  The orders were issued following Sherman's March to the Sea. They were intended to address the immediate problem of dealing with the tens of thousands of black refugees who had joined Sherman's march in search of protection and sustenance, and "to assure the harmony of action in the area of operations". (Sherman’s intention was for the order to be a temporary measure to address an immediate problem, and not to grant permanent ownership of the land to the freedmen, although most of the recipients assumed otherwise; author of this book left this part out).

The Special Field Orders had little concrete effect, and President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that returned the lands to southern owners that took a loyalty oath. General Saxton and his staff at the Charleston SC Freedmen Bureau's office refused to carry out President Johnson's wishes and denied all applications to have lands returned. In the end, Johnson and his allies removed General Saxton and his staff, but not before Congress was able to provide legislation to assist some black families in keeping their lands.

Although mules are not mentioned in the Special Field Orders, the orders were the main source for the expression "forty acres and a mule".

Pg. 33:  In subsequent years after the big three amendments, Judges began narrowing the scope and meaning of laws and amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment, so that they offered fewer and fewer protections.  For example, the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) held that the Fourteenth Amendment only protects the rights derived from national citizenship—not state citizenship—and defined those rights as so narrow as to be almost meaningless.  Also, the Equal Protection Clauses of The fourteenth Amendment was ruled during this time to apply only to state civil rights violations, not civil rights violations by individuals.  The most notorious example was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that ruled that separate but equal was OK.  Virtually all the former Confederate states threw out their Reconstruction-era constitutions—those that black people helped draft and which they voted to ratify-and wrote new ones that included disenfranchisement provisions, anti-miscegenation provisions, and separate-but-equal Jim Crow provisions.  These new constitutions solidified Southern states as governed by legal segregation and discrimination.

Pg. 36:  However, Reconstruction did provide a space for the creation of key institutions of Black America—the independent church, schools and colleges, and stable families, which became the springboards for future struggle.  The amendments, while flagrantly violated, remained on the books ensuring that the Jim Crow system, at least as a matter of law, remained a regional, not a national system.  To some, it may seem that black people somehow went underground in 1877 and didn’t appear again until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Pg. 75f:  Eugenics and Progressivism.  The British biologist Francis Galton coined the term ‘eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek “well-born.”  All around him the technology of the industrial revolution confirmed man’s mastery over inanimate nature.  Eugenics, therefore, reflected, ironically, impulses of progressivism—that man could shape and control nature through the application of science and technology.  Galton was a supporter of ‘positive eugenics, or the use of selective breeding to create a genetically superior race and to eliminate inferior people.  However, this all led to negative eugenics which called for outlawing interracial marriage, severely restricting immigration, and mandating sterilization.  The eugenics movement in the US was by no means the philosophy of a fringe element.  In 1927 the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell upheld the sterilization law of Virginia.  In his majority decision for the court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Pg. 130:  In the short period that Reconstruction lasted and, what the South called “Redemption” began, blacks had demonstrated that they were capable of organizing for elections, cultivating land without a boss, forming stable social and cultural intuitions, functioning as members of families, and suing in court to defend their rights, despite centuries of enslavement.  The Redemption assault was double-barreled: legally, through a series of court rulings and laws that narrowed the Reconstruction Amendments and neutralized the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and simultaneously through multiple narrative forms of white supremacy, ranging from ‘scientific’ conclusions about the nature of Negroes, through depictions of black people in fiction and folklore, political rhetoric, and journalism.  One cannot underestimate the enormous importance of this massive number of negative Sambo images, intended to naturalize the visual image of the black person as subhuman and thereby subliminally reinforce the perverted logic of the separate and unequal system of Jim Crow itself. 

Pg. 146:  We now know, thanks to developments in DNA analysis, that one in three African American males’ carries a DNA signature inherited from a direct white male ancestor and that the average African American admixture is about 25 percent European.  This can only reflect the frequency of the rape of black women by white men during slavery. 

Pg. 151: The Birth Of A Nation: spread the fantasy of black male-white female rape and would continue to be drawn upon to titillate white Americans as the century progressed, becoming even more deeply inscribed in the American cultural imagination through D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.  The film is one of the most blatantly racist motion pictures ever produced.  Released in 1915, at the height of Jim Crow, President Wilson previewed at the White House and thought it quite realistic.

Pg. 188:  As the percentage of free Negroes increased—about 10 percent of the overall black population by 1860—distinctions between the enslaved and the free were also drawn by some free back people.  It was not until the color curtain ultimately came down as hard on the black elite as it had on the black poor that the black elite had to stop conceiving of itself as somehow separate and above all the controversy. When all hope of political rights and social equality had been definitively closed in the second decade of the twentieth century…did…leading black Americans begin to think of themselves as Negroes first. (P. 202) 

Pg. 192:  Booker T. Washington in an 1895 ‘Atlanta Compromise speech” stated: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress”—essentially accepted Jim Crow or de jure segregation in social and political matters, with the hope that this accommodation would appease the radical segregationists and enable the mass of black people in the South slowly but steadily to achieve economic progress through manual labor and the trades. 

Pg. 210:  On May 28, 1917, a powder keg of racial tensions exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois, after a rumor spread that a black man had shot a grocery store owner in a holdup.  More than one hundred African Americans died with the National Guard looking the other way.  Violence grew, culminating in the Red Summer of 1919 when white-instigated violence tore through Chicago, Washington, DC, and Elaine, Arkansas.  Across the country, black veterans, in particular, were targeted for lynching.

Reconstruction ended in 1877 with The Compromise of 1877 which secured the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by giving him the electoral votes of Democratic South Carolina and Louisiana in exchange for a promise to withdraw the remaining federal troops from those state houses.  The author calls this period The Redemption, the period that white southerners redeemed all the political power in the south and the rise again of the Ku Klux Klan that Grant had effectively suppressed.

I chose this book because I wanted to expand my knowledge of the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century.  The historical record is enlightening but the author’s failure to present a convincing case against the biological claims that blacks are inferior to whites I found disturbing.  The author presents Gould’s views that support the author but entirely ignores Charles Murray’s conclusions in The Bell Curve.

Monogenism:   the doctrine or belief that all human races have descended from a single created pair or from a common ancestral type

Polygenism: the doctrine or belief that existing human races have evolved from two or more distinct ancestral types

Addenda:

Gates takes his title from one of the New Negro’s most enduring cultural artifacts: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” composed in 1900 and still widely known as the “Negro national anthem” (the “Negro” here is historically correct). The song looks back at enslavement and exclusion — at our people’s “dark past” and “stony road” — decrying its “chast’ning rod” and the “blood of the slaughtered.” It exhorts black Americans to stay “in the path” toward full emancipation, to remain faithful to “our God” and to “our native land.” The struggle remains a long way from over.

Now American history is once again at stake according to Gates. “Few American historical periods are more relevant to understanding our contemporary racial politics than Reconstruction. Think of the fundamental questions that the study of the period forces us to consider: Who is entitled to citizenship? Who should have the right to vote? What is the government’s responsibility in dealing with terrorism? What is the relationship between political and economic democracy?”