For me, it was bittersweet, because I had lost so many friends, both before that battle and in that battle, and a lot of them were killed subsequent to that battle. More bitter than sweet. But I was very proud of having worn the uniform. That’s what I was most proud of.
DR: You had this ceremony at the White House with President Richard Nixon. How was that?
JJ: The most shocking thing about it was I don’t remember much of the ceremony at all, to be honest with you. I remember more about the battle, about which I don’t remember everything, than I do about the ceremony.
We had a reception in the East Room and then we went into the Oval Office with Nixon and Stanley Resor, who was secretary of the army; Melvin Laird, who was secretary of defense; and the president’s aide. Nixon said, “Won’t you sit in my chair, and you can make believe you’re the president.”
It was a beautiful day on the ninth of October 1969. When we came out of the White House, out to the Rose Garden, they had built up a platform. There were four of us from the army, from different actions, who were being decorated in this same ceremony, and we marched up there.
The most shocking thing was the sea of people in front of us. They had opened up the White House grounds for just about anybody who wanted to come watch the ceremony. Government employees, passersby, homeless people, anybody who wanted to walk onto the White House grounds and watch the ceremony could do that. There were people as far as you could see. You couldn’t even see the fence around the White House.
My enduring memory was of that sight—not of the president, of the White House, but of all those people.
DR: What rights does one have as a Medal of Honor recipient?
JJ: A small stipend from the Veterans Administration, which at the time was $100 a month. That’s basically it. You go back to whatever you were doing.
DR: When you’re the Medal of Honor recipient, how does one let people know that without appearing to be bragging about it? Do you just drop it in conversations?
JJ: No, I don’t tell it to anybody. I think most recipients do the same thing. The only reason people would know is if someone were billed as the attraction at some charitable or other kind of event as a Medal of Honor recipient.
My wife was the British exchange officer to the Seventh Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California, when I was a battalion executive officer there. We met and I asked her out. We’d gone out a number of times before one of our other colleagues told her that I was a Medal of Honor recipient. I hadn’t told her. I didn’t tell anybody.
DR: If I had been the recipient of a Medal of Honor, it would probably take me about two seconds to tell somebody.
JJ: I bet you wouldn’t. The first event I ever attended with other Medal of Honor recipients was in Houston right after the award ceremony. At that time there were more than 350 recipients, and probably 300 of them or more were there at the dinner, including recipients from the First World War.
At the end of the dinner, Jimmy Doolittle [a Medal of Honor recipient from World War II who led bombing missions over Japan] came up to me and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Young man, come with me,” and he took me to a corner of the ballroom. I’m a newly minted Medal of Honor recipient. This is Jimmy Doolittle.
And he put his arm around me and he said sternly, “Young man, let me explain something to you. You’re no longer Jack Jacobs. You’re Jack Jacobs, Medal of Honor recipient, and you’d better comport yourself accordingly. Do you understand what I am telling you?” I said, “Yes, sir, I sure do.”
DR: Here’s a question I’ve thought about for a long time. Nobody ever says, “I’m prepared to die for my neighborhood. I’m prepared to die for my high school. I’m prepared to die for my state. I’m prepared to die for my fraternity.” Why is it that people are prepared to die for their country, whereas they’re not prepared to die for virtually anything else?
JJ: First, I think it’s commensurate with wearing the uniform in the first place, performing any kind of community service. The motivator is being part of something bigger than you are.
The second thing, I think, is optimism that it isn’t going to happen to you. I’m prepared to die for my country. I’m prepared to die for my colleagues. They’re also prepared to die for their country. They’re also prepared to die for me. But it isn’t going to happen. The perception that it’s not going to happen figures heavily.
The third thing that motivates people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do is the notion that the other guy would do it for you. And he would, too. I’ve seen it time and time again. You don’t think you’re going to die. You are part of something bigger than you, and somebody else would do it for you too.
3
Restoration and Repair
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim…. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
—Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?,” July 5, 1852
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. on Reconstruction
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; author of Stony the Road and other books
“But after Black people were freed and then Black men had the right to vote, the genie was out of the lamp, and you had to try to put the genie back in the lamp again. You had to convince Black men and the larger society that they were not only inferior, they were subhuman.”
As the Civil War was moving toward an end in which the Union would clearly be victorious, attention shifted to how the Confederate states would be reintegrated into the Union, and also to how the emancipated slaves would be treated—legally, politically, socially, and financially.
Had Lincoln lived, it is likely that these issues, collectively labeled Reconstruction, would have been handled more skillfully, equitably, and judiciously. But even with Lincoln there was no easy answer. His Reconstruction plans would not readily have enabled southern whites or freed slaves to quickly adjust to the new economic, social, and political realities.
The whites wanted to return to their prewar economic and political power, and could not truly accept the freed slaves as “equals.” And the freed slaves had expectations of economic and political power that would have been hard to realize, even under Lincoln.
As events unfolded, Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment giving former slaves citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving these new citizens the right to vote. Those amendments, and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, were intended to put the original sin of slavery behind the U.S., and to usher in a new era.
But Andrew Johnson, a native of Tennessee, had neither Lincoln’s credibility and political skills, nor his concerns about the rights of the freed slaves. And as a result, the anti-Black actions taken in the South meant that Reconstruction essentially devolved into a return to the pre–Civil War economic and political structure in the old Confederacy, minus only the legality of slavery.
Jim Crow laws, regular lynching of Blacks, and the rise of KKK groups in the South thwarted the ambitions and expectations of freed slaves. And it turned out, as well, that many northern abolitionists and strong opponents of the Confederacy did not actually feel that Blacks were equal to whites. To many of those opponents of slavery, fighting slavery did not translate into supporting equality. That reality became apparent as Blacks, frustrated with the violence against them and the lack of social, political, and economic progress in the South, migrated to the North and often found, to their surprise, many similar challenges.
In truth, the best of intentions that some in the North had to make Reconstruction a time to right earlier wrongs and to produce postwar healing backfir
ed terribly. From the end of the Civil War until the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the South was essentially unreconstructed, and the North was far from a paradise for most African Americans.
The sad story of Reconstruction and its aftermath has been vividly recounted in Stony the Road by Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr., following a PBS documentary he earlier produced on the same subject. Skip Gates, a professor at Harvard University and the director of its Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, is the acknowledged dean of African American scholarship. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books, the editor of twelve books in the general area of African American scholarship, and the recipient of nearly sixty honorary degrees.
To the general public, Skip Gates may be best known for his work on public television over the past quarter century. He has produced more than twenty films for PBS, many dealing with the genetic and other roots of African Americans. I thought he would be the perfect person to discuss Reconstruction and its aftermath, and we did so in a January 22, 2021, interview facilitated by the New-York Historical Society.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): If Lincoln had lived, would Reconstruction have become more successful than it was?
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. (HLG): One of the things people forget is that one of the crucial elements in the rollback of Reconstruction was a conservative Supreme Court, and many of those justices had been appointed by Abraham Lincoln. That is almost never talked about. There was a series of Supreme Court cases that severely restricted the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to the rights of Black Americans. I’m thinking of the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, which quite disastrously declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
That was the last thing that the great Charles Sumner, one of my genuine heroes, wanted to see passed by the Congress before he died in 1874. It was passed in 1875, and guaranteed equal enjoyment of public accommodations, et cetera, et cetera.
It would take a hundred years for us to get those rights back that had been guaranteed in 1875. It was the conservative court, among other things, that helped undermine the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment and then the Fifteenth Amendment. And we know that the court in Plessy v. Ferguson sanctified “separate but equal” as the law of the land in 1896.
I was thinking about this when I was listening to Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, which moved me very much by its sincerity. We would have to fact-check this, but I think he was the first president to use the phrase white supremacy ever in an inaugural address. I almost fell out of my chair. When you and I were teenagers, white supremacy was used by George Wallace and Orval Faubus [governor of Arkansas during the Little Rock school crisis].
It actually originated in 1824—that’s the first known usage of the phrase that I’m aware of—but it really became an ideology during the rollback of Reconstruction, which is called Redemption. Reconstruction was ended because of the Compromise of 1877, because of a series of opinions by a conservative Supreme Court, and because of the first Great Depression, which is now called the Great Panic of 1873. Then, after 1890, former Confederate states beginning with Mississippi held new state constitutional conventions and, without ever using the word Negro or Black, rewrote their constitutions in a way that would undercut the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote.
And if you want to know how effective that was, in Louisiana, which was a majority Black state, there were 130,000 Black men registered to vote in 1898. By 1904, that number had been reduced to 1,342.
South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana were majority Black states. Georgia, Alabama, and Florida were in the high 40 percent range. So there were six states that together constituted a mini Black republic. And Black men in the former Confederacy got the right to vote before Black men did nationally through the Fifteenth Amendment, which was ratified in the 1870s. Southern Black men did because of the Reconstruction Acts, which Congress passed in 1867, that gave them the right to vote.
The summer of 1867 is a great story. It’s the first “Freedom Summer.” There was a massive attempt through Black churches and by former abolitionists to register all of these formerly enslaved Black men plus free Black men in the South. Some 80 percent of eligible Black male voters in the former Confederate states registered to vote, and in 1868, 500,000 of them cast their ballots, the lion’s share of them for Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant won the presidency overwhelmingly in the Electoral College but only by 300,000 odd votes in the popular vote. So, in effect, Black men had elected a president.
This scared the daylights out of the new representatives of the former Confederacy but also out of white, so-called liberal people in the North. This was too much Black power. That’s why, eventually, Black males in the South were disenfranchised.
You could say that Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump was the fourth Reconstruction defeating the third Redemption. Donald Trump was redeeming the country from the Reconstruction politics of Barack Obama and Joe Biden through the Black vote. The Black vote and the Black church were crucial to Biden’s victory, as you know, because when Biden came out of New Hampshire, nobody thought that he would be sitting in the White House today until Congressman Jim Clyburn pushed the button and mobilized the Black vote in South Carolina. That created a domino effect, and Biden emerged as the victor. This shows the inherent power of the Black church still to this day.
DR: Let me go back for one second. The general view is that Lincoln would have had a better Reconstruction for Blacks. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was very anti-Black. Had Johnson been more sympathetic to the Black position, would it have made a difference?
HLG: Andrew Johnson was a nightmare. He took away the “forty acres and a mule” order that General [William Tecumseh] Sherman had issued—Special Field Order Number 15—in January of 1865, which redistributed land, from the Georgia sea islands down to Florida, to the formerly enslaved people who lived there.
They were given the redistributed land from their former masters, and they lived on it and worked it for months. And Andrew Johnson sent General Otis Howard, a white man for whom Howard University is named, down to tell these poor people face-to-face that they had to give that land back in the fall of 1865. So there was no hope. Andrew Johnson was a racist man. He wanted to roll back Reconstruction as quickly as he could. That’s why they had to impeach him, so that there could be Radical Reconstruction by the Republican Congress.
DR: Johnson stays in office but he’s not reelected. Beginning in the 1870s, powerful whites in the South said, “We can regain our power by disenfranchising Blacks.” That went on for a long time. When did the idea of Jim Crow laws come along?
HLG: Lincoln said he was for the limited franchise for Black men, for his Black warriors, his Black soldiers. He really thought the main reason for the Union victory was the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation included the provision that Black men could carry arms and fight. That was quite radical. He authorized Black men, if they were in the Union Army, to kill white men. That was unheard of.
But in that speech, he said he believed that Black men should have the right to vote, the men who had served the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Lincoln said “the very intelligent Negroes,” so he was not for giving all Black men the right to vote. He wanted to start with that limited group of people. I’m sure that Lincoln was a very cautious politician, and he knew it was a radical idea. Without the Radical Republican Congress, it never would have been ratified.
Here’s something people don’t realize. Freed Black men in the South got the right to vote before Black men whose families had been free for a century in the North. Until ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Black men could only vote in five of the six New England states, not in Connecticut. And in the state of New York, only if they satisfied the $250 property requirement.
Jim Crow became formalized after the Mississippi plan caught fire starting in 1890. The Mi
ssissippi plan was the state constitutional convention movement that disenfranchised Black people.
DR: Who was Jim Crow?
HLG: Jim Crow was a white man, a minstrel who was very popular. That was his stage name in the 1830s. There was a dance he created called “Jumping Jim Crow.” Blackface minstrels were one of the most popular forms of entertainment, if not the most popular form of entertainment, in America even through the Civil War. So he was a minstrel character, and that name, for reasons that no one knows, affixed itself to what the Supreme Court called “separate but equal.”
DR: Now, the whites were trying to regain their power in the South. They passed Jim Crow laws, and a lot of Blacks began to leave and go to the North. And they discovered there that life wasn’t all that much better.
HLG: We tend to forget this, but until 1910, 90 percent of the Black community lived in the South. That changed with the Great Migration, which continued until 1970, when reverse migration took effect. More and more Black people moved from the North to the South than the other way around.
Charles Blow, the distinguished New York Times columnist, has a new book, The Devil You Know, that calls for Black people to reclaim their entitlements to the South, moving back to the South. Look at Georgia. Think about that tremendous power base that manifested itself in the general election of 1868. Then think about this election. Stacey Abrams pulled it off. Raphael Warnock becomes a United States senator from Georgia. That’s because of the old Black community and the recent migration of Black people from the North to the South.
DR: You point out in Stony the Road that the upper class of the Black population began to say, “They’re making fun of us. They’re calling us minstrels, or saying we’re not very smart. We actually are better than the average. We are the New Negro.” Can you explain what that meant?
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