Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Books. 2019. 320 pages.
Several years ago, there was a story in the New York Times in which a woman from Alabama said: slavery wasn’t so bad; they got food, a place to live and healthcare.
I grew up in South Carolina, a child of the 1960s. My great-great-grandfathers fought on opposite side of the Civil War: Richard Travis Earnhardt, with whom I share a birthday; Francis DeMars, whose name I eventually took.
DeMars was referred to by the mother of someone I was close to as a “carpetbagger.” He came from New York as a Union soldier and would eventually be elected among South Carolina’s “Radical Republicans” of Reconstruction, legislators considered too far left for Lincoln, dangerous to a South that was resisting reinventing itself. (Chris Rock’s great-great-grandfather would be among those, as well, just four years later.)
I didn’t know any of this until I was fully grown, nearing middle age. (The Chris Rock connection I learned in this book.) As a public school student in South Carolina, I’m not sure I knew what “Reconstruction” referred to, and I had never heard the language of “Redemption,” other than in church. I was surely more informed than the Alabama woman (and had a hell of a lot more common sense), but I was missing some things. A lot of things.
A few years ago, then, I decided it was time to broaden my education, especially my knowledge of this region that had shaped me.
I feel like I’m still catching up. Putting pieces together, picturing it all on a timeline.
Gates’ Stony the Road is something of a “survey course.” Dedicated to the Black members of Mother Emmanuel AME slaughtered in Charleston SC in 2015, perhaps it is an entry point for folks who are ready to understand, to take the reality of racial injustice from the fog of confused denial to the accountable clarity of “we did this” — we being white America.
First, from slavery to Reconstruction, which promised a New South but ended just 10 years later, when “building a new south” clashed face-first into the same old southerners, when white people who had seemed so high-minded realized it was going to cost them something, when they lost their nerve or got bored — the white Northerners who in the Compromise of 1877 traded four years of a president of their choice for 100 years of misery and inhumanity for formerly enslaved Black men and women, and 5 generations of their descendants.
Then, from Reconstruction to Redemption, that period of white southern defiance and retraction of the freedom that was supposed to be the end result of the Civil War; from Redemption (which may be ongoing) through the constant attempts to annihilate a people, the degradation of black stereotypes in advertising and publishing, the false science of eugenics, the shame of lynching and the photo postcards that followed, the many Supreme Court battles, the racist film The Birth of A Nation with its screening in the Wilson White House, to the founding of Black colleges, the Paris Expo, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black creativity which promised to infuse a nation and perhaps — perhaps — get us somewhere, but which apparently gave white people even more culture to appropriate. (Did you know that Picasso’s “cubism” was based on the structure and shape of African masks?)
The Old Negro v the New Negro, the constant strategizing about which approach would somehow create a place for Blackness in racist white America. The vocational, useful approach of Booker T. Washington? The respectability of the 10 percenters of W.E.B. DuBois? The separatism of Marcus Garvey?
“Perhaps it’s useful to think of the entire period of post-Civil War American history as a long Reconstruction locked in combat with an equally long Redemption, ebbing and flowing over decades.”
But here’s a good one, wrote the editor of the Atlanta Constitution in 1886: Mistreatment of Southern Black people was not systemic but rather the result of a few bad actors. And doesn’t that sound familiar?
Somehow, the promise of American democracy still seems every day like a bad joke or a secret handshake among the well-connected.
“Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it… To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem?” (W.E.B. DuBois).
How does it feel to be a problem? It is still the right question, but the ones who ought be pondering it are us White ones.