A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond
Page 6
Mart
FROM THE DESK OF PERCIVAL EVERETT
October 7, 2002
Jim—
Take a nap.
Didn’t you mention some other project you were working on? One of those Victorian writers? Maybe you should keep that alive, vary your interests some. There is such a thing as over-dedication, you know.
All things will come to us, if we wait. I sure don’t want to rush Strom. He can’t stand much rush, is my guess. Wouldn’t want to be responsible for killing him, not directly responsible.
So just hang tight. They’ll send us some stuff when they’re ready.
Did you see that student who lodged the complaint about you? Just be sure you have a witness when you talk with her, and don’t threaten her or anything.
P
OFFICE OF SENATOR STROM THURMOND
217 RUSSELL SENATE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20515
To: Percival Everett and James Kincaid (just one copy each)
From: Barton Wilkes
Date: October 14, 2002
I figured it was best to send a copy of everything to both of you. That way, it wouldn’t look as if I were favoring one of you over the other. Also, it wouldn’t look as if I gave a damn what your internal relations might be. Just so long as you produce results that meet the Senator’s demands, I don’t care if you are mortal enemies, lovers, locked in a custody battle, contenders for the light-heavyweight crown, married, operating an auto parts store together, or father and daughter. I’m both easy with and indifferent to your workings, writerly and otherwise. On the other hand, I am not made of stone.
Here are some historical materials that the Senator plans to use.
What he’d like you to do is write them up as you plan to write things up, just so he can see how you do things.
These are very short snippetty things, just so he can see. You understand.
So please write them up, using whatever methods you have worked out mutually, and send them back.
FIRST DOCUMENT:
An Address of Delegates of the State Convention of the Colored People of South Carolina to the White Inhabitants of South Carolina—1865
Here are a few points excerpted from the first official document of its kind I can locate. It was published in the New York Daily Tribune, November 29, 1865. Please notice the date and think of this remarkable document as representing the deliberate thoughts of men newly freed and thus subject to all the raptures of what they certainly regarded as victory.
This document, in other words, we can think of, justly, as representing the most elevated wishes of those colored people, flushed with triumph and set upon making what they felt they had reason to see as fair demands, demands that a bloody and most abominable war had been fought to secure.
In other words, this is what the colored people wanted. Uncorrupted by what came later, this is what they wanted. Further, these are the terms in which they expressed exactly what it was they wanted. They didn’t want something else. They wanted this.
Prior to the influx of carpetbaggers and other interested scoundrels from the North, of corrupt Northern politicians and unscrupulous businessmen with morals low enough to allow them to work on the simplicity and ignorance of the colored people, prior to all that, this is what colored people wanted and how they wanted it.
Think of these things.
The address from these delegates begins by saying they have met together to “devise ways and means which may, through the blessing of God, tend to our improvement, elevation, and progress, fully believing that our cause is one which commends itself to the hearts of all good men.”
While I do not wish to bias your work, or control it, Everett/Kincaid, I do wish to draw your attention to the Senator’s feelings that these sentiments, uncontaminated by revisionist lies, are such that do honor to the colored men who composed them and to all the white people of South Carolina, the vast majority, who were fully ready to join in devising ways and means tending to the improvement and progress of the colored people. The Senator’s own career—though he is too modest to say this—has been directed by the very same goals announced by these newly freed slaves so long ago. The true feelings of the South, in other words, have not been the feelings of colored people or of white people but of PEOPLE. Senator Thurmond has always stressed that unanimity and worked to preserve and further it. It is only the cynical meddlings of Northerners, who used their simulated sympathy for the colored man to advance Northern interests, that obscured and misdirected the unity that was there from the very day the War ended.
The document, which we might as well say represents the uncontaminated wishes of all Southern colored people in 1865, goes on:
“We fully recognize the truth of the maxim, ‘The gods help those who help themselves.’”
That is, they simply wanted the opportunity to develop their domestic and commercial lives by helping themselves. Unfortunately, this was not allowed to happen, due to Northern “helpers.”
Finally, they summarize their view most sensibly:
“We simply ask that we shall be recognized as men; that there be no obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall govern black men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of our peers; that schools be established for the education of colored children as well as white, and that the advantages of both colors shall, in this respect, be equal; that no impediments be put in the way of our acquiring homesteads for ourselves and our people; that, in short, we be dealt with as others are—in equity and justice.”
SECOND DOCUMENT:
This is offered without comment—it’s from the Reconstruction Period—reprinted from the Montgomery Alabama Daily Advertiser of August 8, 1872. In this Resolution, passed by this group of prominent colored people in the city and county of Montgomery, the following clause appears. The Resolution as a whole announces the Club’s support for the Liberal Republican-Democratic Party ticket, headed by Horace Greeley and Benjamin Gratz-Brown:
“Be it further resolved, that we recognize no other place but the South as our home, that the interests of the white and colored people here are one and in common and should be regarded by both in order to secure a peaceable settlement of existing prejudices.”
So, please write these up and send them back as soon as it’s convenient for you. Also, though I know I talked a little rough about your internal relations, I gladly offer my services to help heal any little sores that open between you. Anyhow, to it!
Bart
SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
October 18, 2002
Dear Barton,
Sorry to be slow answering your last letter, which was certainly a fine one. It’s just that things have been high-pressure hell around here. On top of everything I have to do, Martin keeps threatening to share me with this horrible guy Vendetti, who always looks like he’s just been playing football for 3 hours in the broiling sun, with no shower for miles. Vendetti also weighs about 400 pounds—slight exaggeration—and has a personality to match his revolting, hulking look. I mean, one of the terrible things about working for him would be having to look at him a lot. He also handles the sleazier things we do—unauthorized biographies of the stars, inside looks at serial killers, diet books.
I don’t dispute anything you so shrewdly guessed about my psyche. You got my insides right, as it were. But not my outsides. I protest against your jocular suggestions that I played with myself in time with my sister’s heavings or that I did so again on recreating the scene for you. Remember, my sister, though very beautiful, was, as I recall, bitchy to me. That was quite sufficient to cool any incestuous urges, had there been any, which there weren’t. You might as well suggest that my sister got caught on purpose, hoping to draw my mother into a mutual masturbation league or something.
As for “R.” I don’t quite see how changing your name from “John” matches my humiliation
or in any way lessens it, but since you make all this a test of my trust for you and since I don’t wish to be stand-offish, here is the vile truth. “R” stands for “Roba,” pronounced “Robe-ah,” accent on the first syllable. My older sister is named Reba, as you know. My parents evidently regarded the Reba/Roba pairing as clever. Or so I guess. Well, or so I know. But what a name! Kids called me “Rubba,” and, when Terry Southern’s novel “Candy” was passed among them, “Dubba” or “Give me your Hump!” In college, even friends often called me “Dis-Roba,” as if that were witty. Anyway, there you have it.
But hey. Enough about me. You know, your little return for my deeply personal, my embarrassingly personal, my no-holds-barred personal revelation was—what? Nothing but a generic playing-doctor-in-the-clubhouse reference, and even that general and vague. Sure, the enema game stuff sounds disgusting enough, but details, man, details!
You talk about coming here, which would be fine. But instead of you going all that way or me all that way—I mean you from Washington to New York, or me backwards there—why don’t we meet halfway? I make that Wilmington, just about. Want to do that?
Someday I’ll tell you about the company picnic.
Joy
FROM THE DESK OF PERCIVAL EVERETT
October 20, 2002
Jim:
Don’t write back to Wilkes or anybody else. Probably too late to say don’t write to me. Above all, don’t bother going to the library to look this stuff up.
OK. I’ll read what you are writing to me at this very selfsame moment—and then we can decide what we want to do.
Be cool.
Drink some of that Old Overholt you like so much and take a full dose of the pills you say are for pain. All will be well.
P
Interoffice Memo
October 20, 2002
Dear Percival,
Well, what in Christ do you think of this?
Do they expect us to write a history based on selections from one document, representing the true feelings of all “colored people” before the North came down and corrupted them? Match what they say up with Strom’s views on Strom’s career, distorted by senility and dishonesty, and then before you know it, butt-fuck-your-aunt, we’ll have our book?
Even in these snippets, doubtless selected from thousands of pages of documents as the only examples that would suit the Senator’s sick purpose, there are the seeds of an accurate, that is to say anti-Strom, history. The South Carolina address asks for equal protection under the law, to the right of trial by a peer jury, for integrated schooling, for open housing, and for complete equity. Does Thurmond think those things came about, that he struggled to bring them about, that they obtain in South Carolina even now?
And then that pathetic thing from the Montgomery newspaper, saying that the interests of black folk and white folk are the same. Yeah, sure. Can’t we all just get along?
And then—how in hell are we to “write this up”? Is this history to begin in 1865—as if slavery never happened?
Well—I say we tell Barton to take these papers and use them to set fire to the Senator’s dog.
Jim
OFFICE OF SENATOR STROM THURMOND
217 RUSSELL SENATE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20515
October 20, 2002
Dear Percival and James (if I may),
I realize that you possibly have not yet had time to fully write up what I last sent you. But you know what? I was thinking after I sent it that, by giving you so little to work on, I was, as it were, giving you too much. You see what I mean?
You might suppose that you could take those two brief snippets and infer from them the entirety of the Senator’s views or career. You might think that these two brief snippets were the SEED of a comprehensive view of the Senator’s ideas on the Negro in this country. Don’t think that for a minute. But I can see how you could.
I didn’t give you more because I didn’t want to overburden you right off and because I wanted to see a sample of how you wrote things up. So did the Senator. We both still do. My feelings for you ran wild with me and thereby caused myself and the Senator great loss of time and exertion, as I said previously.
So, here are some more things to add to what you are writing up.
The first is from a speech in Congress, made by Representative Richard Harvey Cain of South Carolina on January 10, 1874. The Honorable Mr. Cain had earlier been a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—I know this church sounds like an incongruous mix, like doilies on a pig trough, but try not to become distracted by such details, as neither the Senator nor myself is—and was prominent in South Carolina politics. South Carolina is Senator Thurmond’s state. Representative Cain was a colored man, you see, and in this speech he refutes the claims of a North Carolina representative, a white one. This North Carolina fellow had spoken against civil rights legislation then pending, arguing that the mixture of Negro and white would cause disturbances and citing what he called the destruction of the University of South Carolina “by virtue of bringing in contact the white students with the colored.”
Here are Representative Cain’s remarks on the forward-looking and successful efforts of the state of South Carolina to solve its own problems:
“It is true that a small number of students left the institution, but the institution still remains. The buildings are there as erect as ever; the faculty are there as attentive to their duties as ever they were; the students are coming in as they did before. It is true, sir, that there is a mixture of students now; that there are colored and white students of law and medicine sitting side by side; it is true, sir, that the prejudice of some of the professors was so strong that it drove them out of the institution; but the philanthropy and good sense of others were such that they remained; and thus we have still the institution going on, and because some students have left, it cannot be reasonably argued that the usefulness of the institution has been destroyed. The University of South Carolina has not been destroyed!”
Now there is testimony by a colored man that South Carolina was not only on the road to solving, but had solved, its problems on its own terms and to the betterment of all. If only meddling outsiders…. But the analysis is yours to make. If I make it myself, then I might as well write the book. What are we paying you for, anyway?
Meanwhile, consider the position of the Negro outside the South during this same period. We generally hear little about these people and the abominations visited upon them in the North and in the West. Why? Don’t make me laugh! Because the situation for Negroes outside the South was horrible, far worse than in any part of the South. The Northern press and Northern muckrakers needed to vilify the South, to invent problems there, and often (as with carpetbaggers) to actually create these problems in order to draw attention away from the plight of the Northern Negro. Put it this way: by inventing a myth of Southern brutality toward the Negro, by ignoring the truth evident in such states as South Carolina, and by sending down to the South ruffians and brutes to stir things up, the North allowed itself the luxury of exploiting black labor and sadistically torturing black people silently and invisibly.
Item—an 1866 Illinois State Convention of Negroes noted that the “free” state of Illinois, being perfectly willing to enlist black soldiers, to slurp up the fruits of black labor, and to wallow in black tax dollars, still does not allow black equality in the courts and does not even allow black men to vote. Worse, and in direct contrast to South Carolina, the writers say, “The colored people of the State of Illinois are taxed for the support of the public schools, and denied, by the laws of the State, the right of sending their children to said schools.” At that time fewer than 100 Negro children, out of the tens of thousands (or more) Negro juveniles living under the blessings of Northern liberation, attended public school. This speaks for itself—or, rather, you should speak for it. So much for Northern protests against separate but equal schools. How about no schools at all?
Item—an 186
9 Convention of New York Negroes listed the following grievances:
“[The Negroes of this state] are taxed without being represented; they are subject to trials by juries which are not their peers; they are murdered without having redress; they are taxed to support common schools while their children are denied the privilege of attending those in their respective wards; they are called upon for military service of their country without receiving proper protection from the country, and without any incentives whatever of being commissioned officers.
“These grievances belie the Declaration of Independence by which the American people profess to be governed” [italics theirs].
Item—an 1870 memorial from colored physicians, all graduates from medical school and with experience as surgeons in the Union army, addresses the American Congress with clear evidence of the refusal of the District of Columbia to admit to membership in the medical society any colored physicians and even white physicians who favored the fair treatment of colored physicians. As membership in the Society was necessary for licensing, and licensing for practicing medicine, all these fine colored doctors were denied the right to pursue their profession simply on the basis of the color of their skin [italics Senator Thurmond’s].
You will find nothing of this sort happening in the South and particularly in South Carolina, where black physicians were treating black patients with full sanction of the medical board. Only in the North were such systematic monstrosities recorded.
I will be sending more materials in a few days.
If you have already finished some of the work and sent it, why that is fine. It may be that your reply is winging its way to me as mine is gliding to you. Some would say such crossings in the mail could be confusing. I prefer to regard them as aviarially poetic, and I feel certain you do as well, both of you.
While we are at it, perhaps it would be as well if you gave me some means of distinguishing you. I know that Everett is a writer and James is a researcher, but I think you’ll agree that doesn’t tell me much. Tell me more. For instance, are you both black or only one of you? How exactly black? Do you enjoy Sidney Poitier movies? What is it that draws you together and shoves you apart, emotion-wise? That sort of thing.