Read as part of CBR15Bingo: history-banned. Although this book hasn’t been banned (yet), it goes into great length on the oral testimonies of the victims and survivors of racial terror during Reconstruction. The narratives of slaves and post-emancipation Black persons are being banned across the country in other media.
I can’t remember who tweeted it but someone once wrote a hypothesis that anti-Semitism is on the rise again because so many Holocaust survivors are dying. Reading that hit me like a thunderbolt because it made so much sense. Anti-Semitism is an ancient prejudice and it’s certainly not new to the last ten years but I have no doubt that the loss of living witnesses is a part of it.
Mass media wasn’t as widely available during Reconstruction as it is today but it may have changed some more stubborn northern hearts to hear the stories of freed slaves and their families trying to survive terrorism in southern states. The effort to enfranchise Black persons who had just been emancipated was a weak one, an incomplete one, rife with inconsistencies and poor planning. The result was a decline of the quality of life for Black persons that led to Jim Crow and would persist for a hundred years (and still persists today to a different degree).
This is not a narrative history of Reconstruction. Rather, it’s a reading of Reconstruction as told through the testimonies of several emancipated persons who testified against the Klan violence they had experienced for a variety of reasons, all of them traced back to racism. There’s proof that Congress, the Presidents of Reconstruction, and some northerners with literacy and newspaper access knew this…and yet the appetite for corralling southerners post-war was not there. So it left Black persons vulnerable all across the former Confederate states.
And it’s important to continue to read these testimonies. Because the terror of that age paved the road for the racist attitudes and policies of today. People had to consistently fight for their humanity and it was often a losing battle. Those that survived and felt compelled to tell their testimonies* tell us what was happening. The white governance of the States did not listen. And in this age, far removed from that one yet with many of the same bigotries existing, we are regressing and will continue to do so without major reform. We can start by listening to the stories of those who have experienced it.
*This is where I part ways with people in this and other contexts who would talk about how these survivors are “brave.” Every survivor is brave by necessity, whether or not they share their story in a public manner.