Passages from "Slavery by Another Name" & Remaining Comments on Part 2 of the Video Series

Passages from "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas Blackmon:

Before I post these passages, I want to remind you of the context in which they were relevant. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the institution of slavery was abolished but NOT the race theory and racism that justified it.

"The Civil War settled definitively the question of the South's continued existence as a part of the United States, but in 1865 there was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and intellectual addiction to slavery. The resistance to what should have been the obvious consequences of losing the Civil War -- full emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between blacks and whites -- was so virulent and effective that the tangible outcome of the military struggle between the North and the South remained uncertain even twenty-five years after the issuance of President Abraham Lincoln's Emanciaption Proclamation. The role of the African American in American society would not be clear for another one hundred years."

"In the first decades of that span, the intensity of southern whites' need to reestablish hegemony over blacks rivaled the most visceral patriotism of the wartime Confederacy. White southerners initiated an extraordinary campaign of defiance and subversion against the new biracial social order imposed on the South and mandated by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery." (pp. 41-42)

Later, Blackmon cites W.E.B. DuBois's characterization of whites' attitudes towards blacks around the turn of the 20th century:

"...there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty." (p. 245)

Finally, Dr. King's perceptive comment in the same vein as the first passage above:

"Reading Charles Silberman's "Crisis in Black and White" after its publication the prior year (1964), Martin Luther King scribbled a long note in the margins of his personal copy: 'The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person.' In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion." (p. 394)


REMAINING COMMENTS ABOUT PART 2 OF THE VIDEO SERIES: let me add just a couple final comments about Part 2: the stories we tell.

Toward the end, the narrator spoke of the "white man's burden" in connection with a growing American empire and European colonization of Africa and Asia. This was captured in some of the cartoons around the turn of the 20th century, which usually depicted America or white civilization as a mother or father figure and those we conquered like the Filipinos as backward children needing to be guided.

As a couple of the families noted, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair had people on display, like animals in a zoo, in their "natural" habitats, obviously backward compared to the civilized whites.

Finally, one of the historians reminded us of a signficant contradiction: that our society is based on such wonderful principles worth dying for. And yet our society has allowed us to ignore these principles. A good example of this was an argument many civil rights activists in the 1960s made: that we presented ourselves to the world as the bastion of democracy during the Cold War, and yet we denied many African Americans the right to participate fully in this democracy.

That's all for now. On Thursday (9/29) I plan to comment on Part 3 and then get into those Basic Definitions. Don't forget your first essay assignment which is due next Tuesday, Oct. 4th.