The Slave Went Free Stood a Brief Moment in the Sun Then Moved Back Again Toward Slavery

Thomas Nast's September 1866 political cartoon shows President Andrew Johnson as Iago, who betrays Othello, depicted as a black veteran of the Civil War. (Library of Congress)

Stony the Route: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Ascension of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Penguin Printing, 320 pp., $xxx

In Blackness Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a cursory moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." The forces that pushed the freedmen back and how the black community responded are the subjects of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Stony the Route, its championship taken from James Weldon Johnson's 1900 verse form "Lift Every Vocalisation and Sing." Gates, a distinguished scholar, filmmaker, and critic, writes with clarity and force about Reconstruction, Redemption, and the problem of representation. He describes his book—a combination of text and visual essays—equally "an intellectual and cultural history of black agency in the face of white supremacy and resistance to it."

In the spirit of Eric Foner'southward Reconstruction: America'due south Unfinished Revolution (1988), Gates views Reconstruction as a revolutionary moment in American history. He emphasizes the importance of the Civil Rights Deed of 1866, and ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as well every bit efforts by African Americans to build "businesses, churches, schools and other legacy institutions." He reminds usa that, during the catamenia, in that location were at least two,000 elected black officeholders, including two United States senators and twenty representatives. With citizenship and voting rights bodacious, Frederick Douglass wrote in 1870, "at terminal, at last the black man has a future." How, Gates asks, was Reconstruction "allowed to neglect"? The answers, he suggests, "are relevant to agreement our contemporary racial politics."

Reconstruction yielded to Redemption equally white Southern Democrats "redeemed" their state governments from Republican control, which they derided as "Negro dominion," and crafted a multifaceted racist ideology. Critical to this process of dehumanization was "a fixed set of signs and symbols" that denigrated freed people and led to the invention of the "Old Negro," the portrayal of blacks as uncivilized, illiterate, and artless, but besides dangerous. Gates meticulously unravels the strands of this soapbox that led one writer to conclude that all "scientific investigation … proves the Negro to be an ape."

White southerners asserted supremacy through the practice of lynching (justified by the myth that black men rape white women), implementing a legal system of segregation, and producing literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes. Uncle Remus, for instance, a black character popularized by Joel Chandler Harris in a volume of folktales published in 1880, represents the contented plantation blackness man equally imagined past whites. The image would accept staying power, made central to the film Song of the Due south, released in 1946, just since 1986 kept out of public view in the United States by Disney.

Gates argues against such self-suppression considering racist representations are fundamental to understanding the architecture of white supremacy. The Birth of a Nation (1915) did more than than whatsoever other work to legitimize Redemption and promulgate antiblack racism. Nosotros proceed to view it, just differently now than originally intended. Gates includes 2 pages of images from the motion-picture show, testify of how the culture manufactured a fear of blackness men and justified white rule.

The book's visual essays are much more than illustrations of points made in the text. They force readers to see and feel what African Americans experienced. The repeated broadcasting of what Gates calls "Sambo art" created a portrait that not only justified Jim Crow and disfranchisement but likewise became an archetype that "black people would see when they saw themselves reflected in America's social mirrors."

Gates decided to include these powerful images "without comment," writing that "they speak for themselves." Only I wish he had presented them with the same composure he brings to his analysis of literary works. Images do not speak for themselves; like a text, they must be read. This is specially true for political cartoons, such as Thomas Nast's "Reconstruction and How It Works" (1866), which is filled with references to specific acts of violence against blacks and portrays Andrew Johnson as Iago, who betrays Othello, depicted as a blackness Civil War veteran. Not every paradigm requires extended explication, but many deserve further historical and visual analysis.

Gates combines the literary and the pictorial in his final chapter on the New Negro. Best known as an expression of the Harlem Renaissance, and given prominence with the publication of Alain Locke's 1925 anthology of that proper noun, the construct dated to the late 19th century and marked what Gates calls "a war of representation" as blacks sought to "take dorsum their prototype from the choking grasp of white supremacy."

Disquisitional to this motion was photography. In 1900, at the Paris Exposition, Du Bois curated the Exhibit of American Negroes, which independent more 350 photographs of middle-course, respectable, and cultured black men and women. Only as everyone in the photographs looked unlike, and so likewise was in that location never one version of the New Negro. Du Bois'southward "talented 10th," which raised form differences within the black customs, contested with the conservatism of Booker T. Washington, the nationalism of Marcus Garvey, the activism of William Monroe Trotter, and the socialism of A. Philip Randolph.

Gates is aware that progress tin can atomic number 82 to complacency, peradventure never more so than when some proclaimed the election of Barack Obama every bit the starting time of "a postracial America." The lessons of the by require continued activism, he argues, and he admonishes those who think cultural expression is a grade of power: "No people, in all of man history, accept ever been liberated by the cosmos of art. None." Simply Gates also knows that art can inspire. He calls jazz "the world's greatest fine art form" and quotes Langston Hughes: "jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world." It may not be a political revolution, but information technology sounds like liberation to me.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

 is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. This essay is adapted from his new book,The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America.

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Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/how-the-south-rose-again/

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