Americans are likely to think of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as a time to celebrate the fresh start that a new year represents, but there is also a troubling side to the holiday’s history. In the years before the Civil War, the first day of the new year was often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United States.
In the African-American community, New Year’s Day used to be widely known as “Hiring Day” — or “Heartbreak Day,”
To millions of Americans, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, Lee is a role model and Grant is—despite his gifted generalship and consequential presidency—an embarrassment. What happened? How did the hero of the war become a quasi-ignominious figure, and how did the champion of Southern slavery become, if not the war’s hero, its most popular figure?
Jamelle Bouie tackles this vexing question.
Ten of the Eleven Former Confederate States Are Not Participating in the Expansion of Medicaid
Participating: Arkansas
Not Participating: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee (may reverse rejection), Texas and Virginia
Medicaid expansion plans (as of July 2013)
You likey the red herring?
It would be fun to give this article to students, watch them digest it hook, line, and sinker, then suss out the flimsy rhetoric and hyperbole, leaving nothing but the map for the argument to hang on.
(…then rebuild the argument on more firm grounds)
If I were a more creative teacher I would do this.
Here is Nast’s take on Reconstruction
By Edmund G. Ross! (Ross was the Senator who cast the ballot that kept Johnson in office.)
Edmund G. Ross is one of eight U.S. Senators featured in Profiles in Courage, the 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning history co-written by then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen in commemoration of past acts of political courage in Congress.
This is the concluding chapter of an Foner book on Reconstruction. Foner is arguably the most influential contemporary voice in Reconstruction studies.
Epilogue: the River Has its Bend is worth a read…as is the rest of the book.
This journalistic tour de force is the best piece I’ve read this year. Coates puts the question squarely into the reader’s face and, in so doing, changes the dialogue about reparations.
Chapters
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
V. The Quiet Plunder
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
IX. Toward A New Country
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Read the Case for Reparations
Answer these questions
You might also be interested in Coates’ evolving thoughts on reparations.
“As I’ve said before, the idea of reparations precedes this month’s cover of The Atlantic, and the work around it—among scholars, activists, and writers—has been ongoing, even if the interest of the broader world is fickle. Following up on the autopsy of an idea, I thought I’d give some larger sense of how something like this came to be. My hope is to give people who are interested some entrée into further reading, and also to credit the antecedents to my own thinking. Perhaps most importantly, I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly. It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.”
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
By Dudley Randall
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook,
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.–
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.
This brochure advertises a Ku Klux Klan summer resort to be convened in 1924 near Rockport, Texas. The pamphlet offers KKK members a roster of family activities, including swimming, “watermelon parties,” and “big game fishing.” The excursion would even be educational: Klan members might “learn … what is a hammerhead, a dog fish, a sea urchin, blow fish, a drum or a porpose [sic].”
The Kool Koast Kamp (the KKK scattered Ks with abandon) was meant to serve people who are “not [usually] privileged to enjoy an outing such as this will afford.” Such families might “dream of a trip to Atlantic City or Palm Beach,” but then “crank up old Lizzie, throw the kids in and head for [the Kamp],” which would be “much cooler, much cheaper, more restful and greater sport.”
The brochure manages to work threatened whiteness—and, in particular, threatened womanhood—into its language, without directly referencing race. In the brochure’s illustration, a giant cross looms over the “shaded beach for complexion protection.” “Wonderful Mothers” are assured that “The Fiery Cross guards you at nights,” while “Beautiful Daughters” are told: “The sentiment reflected through humanity by the rays of the Fiery Cross makes you as safe on our Kamp as at home in Mother’s Arms.”
And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought, the thought of the things themselves, the confused half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity — vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men! To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought: suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
Some one may be tempted to ask, Has not the negro boy or girl as good a right to study a French grammar and instrumental music as the white youth? I answer, Yes, but in the present condition of the negro race in this country there is need of something more.
THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the deeper cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves?
This map, compiled using data gathered by the Tuskegee Institute, represents the geographic distribution of lynchings during some of the years when the crime was most widespread in the United States. Tuskegee began keeping lynching records under the direction of Booker T. Washington, who was the institute’s founding leader.
“Some one may be tempted to ask, Has not the negro boy or girl as good a right to study a French grammar and instrumental music as the white youth? I answer, Yes, but in the present condition of the negro race in this country there is need of something more…” Read Washington’s “Awakening of the Negro” from the Atlantic in 1901
“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of Evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what souls I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgrah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”
Read Dubois’ Response to Washinton in “Of the Training of Black Men” from the Atlantic
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched south and north in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the deeper cause of the conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and so at last there arose in the South a government of men called the Freedmen’s Bureau, which lasted, legally, from 1865 to 1872, but in a sense from 1861 to 1876, and which sought to settle the Negro problems in the United States of America.
It is the aim of this essay to study the Freedmen’s Bureau (9 pages from 1901)– the occasion of its rise, the character of its work, and its final success and failure–not only as a part of American history, but above all as one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.
This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an “end” to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of “Carpetbag rule” in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South.
Eric Foner, author of Our Lincoln, talks about the era following the Civil War in which former slaves were promised equal rights and citizenship. Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.
It was over a lunch of Confederate fried steak in Columbia, S.C., that I realized something crucial about North and South. A passport ought to be required to travel from one to the other. Despite decades of economic and cultural homogenization, the regions remain as different as basketball and NASCAR. That thought occurred when my lunch partner, a man named Chris Sullivan, told me this: “To say the War Between the States was about slavery is like saying the Revolutionary War was about tea.” And he meant it, sure as the pear trees bloom in sun-washed Columbia, the South is rising once again…
After the Civil War, the founders’ mistrust of strong federal government yielded to radical Republicans’ demands for a central government powerful enough to protect the newly-won liberties of freedmen.
Read James MacPherson’s: RECONSTRUCTION: THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION