The people engaged in these acts of depravity were themselves depraved. What appalls is how the depravity was normalized. In photographs of lynchings, the orchestrators, who typically appear proud and self-satisfied, are surrounded by dozens, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of spectators. As they watched the torture and mutilation, they sipped lemonade and passed around baked goods. Afterward, the onlookers mingled around the still-smoldering corpses, posing for group photos with their children, smiling, relaxed as at a picnic. It reminds me of the children of Nazi concentration camp commanders who laughed at the weak, starving Jews when they passed by, not knowing any better. But 90 percent of the lynchings in this country occurred years and decades before those concentration camps even existed.
* * *
Everything continued to be stacked against Black Americans’ full entry into American society—propelled by centuries of race-based discrimination and the white supremacy that created it. The oppression was deliberate, sustained, and multidimensional. Segregation was not a matter of preference, then or now. The average American had no idea just how carefully engineered segregation—of schools, of jobs, and of housing—actually was. At the local, state, and federal levels, laws were enacted and a wide array of government agencies (the Federal Housing Authority, the United States Housing Authority, the Public Works Administration) were deployed to ensure that Black Americans lived separately from and in conditions inferior to those of white Americans.
Segregation was structured and enforced by increasingly Byzantine legal and performative measures that were expensive, disruptive, humiliating to Blacks, and bizarre in their extremity. And although the stereotypical expressions of segregation (separate water fountains and train cars) were confined to the South, housing and school segregation existed across the country.
To this day, most white Americans think that geographic segregation was self-selecting, that Blacks chose to live separately from whites. The truth, as usual, is more sinister, and it led to another massive theft of resources that made it difficult if not impossible for Blacks to enter the ranks of the middle class. Redlining, the discriminatory practice of denying services like mortgages or business loans, was rampant across the country throughout the Jim Crow era. White people were allowed to buy houses with low-interest mortgages and receive free college educations. In the first instance this enabled them to amass wealth and equity, in the second it enabled them to live free of often crushing debt. Blacks were denied these opportunities, robbing them of untold wealth, the result of which has reverberated through succeeding generations.
As Richard Rothstein points out in The Color of Law, “Residential racial segregation by state action is a violation of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment, written by our Founding Fathers, prohibits the federal government from treating citizens unfairly. The Thirteenth Amendment, adopted immediately after the Civil War, prohibits slavery or, in general, treating Black Americans as second-class citizens, while the Fourteenth Amendment, also adopted after the Civil War, prohibits states, or their local governments, from treating people either unfairly or unequally.” Just because segregation has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court doesn’t mean it’s constitutional; it simply means the court came to erroneous conclusions and wrote bad decisions based on them. After all, the first Civil Rights Act has been prohibiting housing segregation since 1866.
School segregation inevitably followed housing segregation. In 1954 the Supreme Court sought to remedy this problem, declaring in its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The reactions were swift, and opposition across the South was organized and violent.
Democrats in Congress drafted the Southern Manifesto:
This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.
The decision was appealed, and a year later the court delegated desegregation to the district courts, where it was to be carried out “with all deliberate speed,” a meaningless phrase that left the matter open-ended and the ruling unenforceable.
Brown had unintended consequences that made the initial decision seem a hollow victory. Ripping children out of their schools in the name of integration had devastating repercussions for Black schools and the communities they served. As the psychologist Milton Schwebel put it, “What many of us fighting for social justice didn’t anticipate was the dark cloud that would hover over us for so very long. The loss of jobs for African-American teachers and administrators, the black students who would have to leave their schools and enter new schools with fear and trepidation, the black parents who once had a voice in their local schools but would now be silenced in the desegregated schools because integration was mostly one way. Black schools closed.”
* * *
From the moment the Civil War ended, this country made a choice to undermine and reverse the very cause for which that war was fought. It took only twelve years for Reconstruction to run its course, as if in that short span of time a still deeply divided country could undo and emerge united from over two and a half centuries of prejudices and the culture, institutions, and lies that perpetuated them. At every turn, white men, even Southern traitors, were given the benefit of the doubt, while Blacks were derided for their supposed inferiority and lack of skills or blamed for their circumstances. The commitment to racial hierarchy was too deeply entrenched and, for many whites, psychologically necessary. As the Equal Justice Initiative points out, “‘Freeing’ the nation’s masses of enslaved Black people without undertaking the work to deconstruct the false narrative of white supremacy doomed those freed people and generations of their descendants to a fate of second-class citizenship,” or worse.
While narrowly focused on segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education did not really overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that first challenged segregation of public facilities (in that particular case, a train in Louisiana). In that ruling, Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote that it was not up to the Constitution to “abolish distinctions based upon color” or put the two races “upon the same plane.” So with the exception of education, “separate but equal” remained in place.
In the years that followed, the civil rights movement began to gain traction after the brutal murder of Emmett Till, who was falsely accused of “offending” a white woman, and his mother’s courage in deciding to publicize not only his funeral but the scope of his injuries. Till’s murder was followed by the Montgomery bus boycott, and the increasing ubiquity of television made it impossible to keep the violence against Southern Blacks out of view. Progress was made with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but of course it turned out the fight was just beginning. And the powers that be had no intention of losing.
CHAPTER 2
Impunity
James Eastland, the scion of a wealthy, powerful Mississippi plantation family, was elected to the United States Senate in 1942. He was named for his uncle, who had been murdered in an altercation in 1904, the year he was born. The hunting and lynching of the alleged murderer and the woman who ran with him were orchestrated by the younger Eastland’s father, Woods Eastland. The man and woman Woods lynched were Luther Holbert and his wife.
While in the Senate, where he used his power to promote a virulently white supremacist agenda, Eastland, who continued to run his plantation with the labor of sharecroppers, was called “The Voice of the White South.” In 1956 he became chair of the Judiciary Committee, which, under his leadership, was known as the graveyard of civil rights legislation. He was still chair of the Judiciary Committee when he retired in 1978, taking his unreconstructe
d Southern racism with him.
* * *
Ours is an ugly history full of depraved, barbaric, and inhumane behavior carried out by everyday people and encouraged or at least condoned by leaders at the highest levels of government. A denial of that history is a denial of our trauma.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Robert E. Lee was a brilliant military strategist (he wasn’t—he and his army were beaten decisively by superior military minds like Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant). Let’s assume that he was a good Christian man who worked hard after the Civil War to unite the country. Given certain indisputable facts about Lee’s life, it’s hard to see how any of that is relevant or makes him worthy of absolution.
First of all, Lee presided over a traitorous army whose mission was to destroy the United States for the purpose of protecting the right of the Southern states to continue to own and torture human beings. In the process of this failed secession, millions of soldiers on both sides suffered horribly under terrible conditions, and about 750,000 of them perished in battle and from disease.
Second, Lee enslaved people, despite claiming it was a “moral and political evil.”
I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race.
For Lee, the “painful discipline” included the practice of brining. In one instance, siblings Wesley and Mary Norris and a cousin of theirs, all three of whom had been “bequeathed” to Lee by his father-in-law with the expectation that they be emancipated within five years, were each given fifty lashes for attempting to run away to the North. Not satisfied that this punishment was sufficient, Lee ordered that their wounds be soaked with salt water.
Third, despite having written that he wished Blacks “no evil in the world,” Lee broke up all but one of the families of enslaved people on his estate. Being separated from children, parents, siblings, and spouses was one of the most profound cruelties of slavery. After emancipation, freedmen and freedwomen did everything in their power to find their lost loved ones. Some kept up the search for decades, usually without success. The pain these separations caused was so great that it led one formerly enslaved man, Henry Bibb, to write in 1849, “If there was any one act of my life while a slave, that I have to lament over, it is that of being a father and a husband of slaves.”
Whatever Lee’s real or imagined accomplishments as a general of an army of traitors, he was a vile human being. That he was allowed to walk free after the war was a travesty. But he actually thrived, becoming president of Washington College, which was later renamed, in his honor, Washington and Lee. During his tenure as president, a chapter of the KKK was founded at the school, and Lee, not surprisingly, looked the other way.
According to U.S. constitutional law, Lee and the other leaders of the rebellion should have been hanged for treason or at the very least been made examples of. That former Confederate leaders were allowed not only to be rehabilitated but elevated was one of the reasons Lee’s reputation has mutated into an utter fiction.
Robert E. Lee was a traitor to America who, as far as I can tell, never repented of his crimes against this country or against humanity. After the war, he did lose the right to vote, and some of his property was confiscated and turned into Arlington National Cemetery. (It’s worth noting that, unlike Black Americans, Lee’s family was compensated for the property confiscated from Lee, ten years after his death.) Other than that, he was neither jailed nor punished. He petitioned to have his citizenship and voting rights restored but, thanks to the decency of Secretary of State William Seward, those requests were ignored.
In some ways, the North is just as responsible as the South for Lee’s role in perpetuating the propaganda known as the Lost Cause, the myth that the South seceded as a rebuke to an overreaching federal government and had nothing to do with slavery. A great opportunity was missed when the Confederate battle flag, which stands for treason and human cruelty, did not come to be viewed with the same universal horror as the swastika is in Germany. Today, it is still proudly flown as a symbol of what some call “Southern pride,” even though it is still, as the Southern Baptist Convention said in 2016, “a symbol of hatred, bigotry, and racism.”
* * *
Slavery was legal and accepted throughout America, but it was not universally accepted, and even among enslavers it was believed to be an “evil,” if a necessary one. While it is indisputable that Thomas Jefferson was an architect, author of the Declaration of Independence, founding father, and third president of the United States, he was also a man who enslaved more than six hundred people. He repeatedly raped Sally Hemings, whom he considered his property, starting when she was fourteen and he was forty-four. Despite the fact that Jefferson argued against race mixing because Black people were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” he fathered children, at least six, with Hemings. These children—his children—were also enslaved by him.
Do criminality, racism, and cruelty erase the achievements made during the tenure of a particular administration? No, but those things should force a conversation at least about the individual at the head of the administration. We expect a certain amount of hagiography, but regardless of his accomplishments, it’s hard to reconcile Jefferson’s stature as a “great” president or man with his disastrous assimilationist policy for Native Americans, his slaveholding, and his cruelty toward those enslaved human beings who, by virtue of his owning them as property, were entirely dependent on him. That an individual who championed democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, especially one with the power and influence Jefferson wielded, and especially the writer of the document that forcefully argued for equality and the “rights of man,” would choose to own other human beings is important information to have. How an enslaver treated the enslaved also matters. There is no sliding scale when it comes to the crime against humanity that is slavery, but when that crime is exacerbated by acts of torture, rape, and brutality, those acts speak to an enslaver’s character, whether such behavior was legal or not.
The need for and purpose of accountability are often obscured by revisionist history that hides or completely elides facts that might otherwise help us revise our assessments of people like Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson. Only by clear, factual reckoning of history can we make more informed decisions about who we hold up as an example.
We want to identify with our leaders. At least retrospectively, we want to find things in them to admire, to emulate, even if they made mistakes—or perhaps because they made mistakes. But many of our founders and most of our presidents who are held in the highest esteem held repugnant views or committed horrible acts. Indeed, seventeen of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were enslavers, as were twelve of the first eighteen presidents.
The lack of accountability continued into the twentieth century, in sometimes flagrant and shocking ways.
President Gerald Ford is responsible for two of the worst pardons in American history, with an honorable mention for President Jimmy Carter.
In 1975, after 110 years had washed away Lee’s sins and reinvented him as some kind of hero, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 407–10 to restore Lee’s full rights of citizenship. A couple of weeks later, President Ford signed the resolution in order to correct an “oversight.”
During the ceremony, Ford said:
As a soldier, General Lee left his mark on military strategy. As a man, he stood as the symbol of valor and of duty. As an educator, he appealed to reason and learning to achieve understanding and to build a stronger nation. The course he chose after the war became a symbol to all those who had marched with him in the bitter years towards Appomattox. General Lee’s character has b
een an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.
I can only imagine how the descendants of the people he enslaved and of the Union soldiers who died because of him must have felt.
Three years later, in an equally gratuitous act of historical illiteracy, Jimmy Carter restored citizenship to the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis; doing so, he said, “completes the long process of reconciliation that has reunited our people following the tragic conflict between the states.”
As historian Francis MacDonnell wrote, “The separate measures assured that the two deceased Confederates might legally hold office and serve jury duty.”
* * *
Richard Nixon would provide the paradigm for what’s come after him—the danger of allowing a candidate’s attempt to steal (or succeed at stealing) an election to go unchallenged because it would “look bad.” Once he’s allowed in, there’s a good chance he’ll use his considerable (though illegitimate) powers to cover up the original crime and then go on to commit other crimes with impunity.
In a piece in Politico, “When a Candidate Conspired with a Foreign Power to Win an Election,” on Nixon’s successful plot to scuttle Lyndon Johnson’s nascent peace talks with the Vietnamese just before the 1968 election, John A. Farrell dissects the details not just of the crime but of the successful efforts to keep Nixon’s involvement in the theft of the election under wraps for over fifty years.
In October 1968, concerned that President Johnson’s efforts to hold peace talks would bear fruit, Nixon ordered his future chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to find ways to sabotage them. He hoped that if Johnson failed to achieve a cease-fire before November, voters would punish the Democratic Party and its candidate, Hubert Humphrey, and reward the Republican candidate with a victory in the upcoming presidential election.
The Reckoning Page 4
