Jan Crawford Greenburg has a pretty great piece discussing John Lewis's comments. Greenburg is white and from Alabama, and so it's interesting getting the context for racial violence from the perspective of white native Southerner:
One thing that's come to me, during this election, is how so many people view pre-Civil Rights movement America as this distant aberration. There's sort of this belief that--at some point in the past--there were slaves in this country. And then Abe Lincoln ended it all and saved the union, though the people who fought Abe were honorable men themselves (can't forget that caveat). Then later someone put up some signs saying "Whites Only." A few bad apples killed some black people who didn't like the signs. Then Martin Luther King proclaimed he had a dream, and it was huggie time--until some fool, motivated only be his own individual sense of evil, killed him. But we're mostly all better now.The laws then said blacks were unequal; the politicians would come to preach that blacks also were dangerous. The governor of my home state declared "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," and crowds cheered. He later stood in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks students from entering the University of Alabama, and emboldened crowds threw bottles and sticks and hurled epithets.
When I was a student at Alabama decades later, I used to walk by that building, Foster Auditorium, on my way to class. I saw R.E.M. play there on Sept. 22, 1984. But I can still imagine Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door.
It was just the other day.
I think that's the narrrative that McCain/Palin are working from. A lot of folks think that these guys are intentionally stirring up these old forces--but that gives McCain/Palin too much credit. They don't really know how close this stuff is to us--that this country sacrificed 750,000 of its best men on the altar of white supremacy. They don't really know what the 60s cost John Lewis. They don't know that the only successful coup d'etat in America's long illustrious history, was led by white racists. Wilmington still hasn't recovered from that. They don't know anything about housing covenants, black vets lynched in their uniforms, the government conspiring to keep black neighborhoods poor, states conspiring to make black children stupid, or Alabama sharecroppers being used as guinea pigs. They just have no idea how history walks with us all, that all of this happened just the other day.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Here here, TNC. That is the best way to put it. I remember sometime in the early 90s, when I was twelve or so, realizing that MLK's assasination happened only some 10 years before I was born. I mean, I knew it, but I didn't *know* it. It wasn't until I recognized that I had memories from 10 years before that I realized that what to me seemed distant history was still very real, and that it wasn't some grainy documentary footage or a page in 6th-grade history. I think, especially with the enormous glut of information we receive these days, that we tend to close the book far too quickly, and the not-so-distant past seems unimaginably remote. But there are people in the McCain crowds who participated in Jim Crow, and aren't ready to let it go. Thankfully, they are dying off, and my only hope is that they all live to see the Obama innauguration. Thanks for the great post.
This was a beautiful post. I love how you kept it in the context of this was just the other day not in some long distant past.
Thanks
Jaycee
Good post and I also liked reading a white person's point of view.
I agree with you that it seems like people just really don't understand or even stop to think about how much the 60s cost people like John Lewis.
I really think that the way McCain-Palin are tanking in the polls is not just the economy, it's moderates who are repelled by both the culture war in place of economic solutions, and the sheer ugliness that McCain and Palin are stirring up. Who wants to sit next to the people in the video below and call them your fellow McCainiacs?
And for that reason I agree with you that they didn't realize what they were launching--it's not like either of them is living with racism as a real and constant part of their family history and present lives. Nor, I assume, is the McCain team that insisted this strategy would work. They thought they could get people to pause in the booth and think "Who IS this guy?" (TM Penguin); they were not expecting the death threats at their rallies, or the steady stream of white interviewees, emboldened by all their "he's not like you and me and other Americans; he's different" talk, to express prejudices and conspiracy theories most people consider socially unacceptable.
(Okay, Palin is not involved in strategy and is just loving the attention and adoring crowds; I don't see deep thinking about how to get McCain elected going on behind her eyes. McCain was but God's method of launching her, and he deserves our respect for that important, Moses-like role. McCain will never see the White House, but through his mavericky priestess, his people shall be delivered there...Whether in 2009 as ascending veep, or in 2012 as the wacko wing's new leader, we shall have to see. Though I think they'll find the wacko wing too small to get anyone elected nationally.)
Great post but you don't know these people that well. I do, only because I have wingnut rural Pennsylvania relatives, the 20% who still like Bush and who are voting for McCain on autopilot.
It's not that they don't know that history walks with all of us. It's that they don't care. Their world (as long as gas is cheap and their house is expensive) is right as rain, and if it's not, that must be the fault of some other evil people (because they are the salt of the earth, you see). The fact that their world is ruled by white people just reflects the normal reality that all the good people they know are white. They don't know anyone who's black, so why should they care about black people?
Last time I visited my relatives (and trust me I don't see them often) the big issue with them was the evils of immigration. For untold decades anyone who was different left Pennsylvania. The last batch of new immigrants the region had ever seen was the potato famine Irish. Now, all of sudden, there are Mexicans, an Indian family took over a corner store in town, and Walmart is selling foods no-one's ever seen before. Clearly this is a threat!
What happens to the rest of us is not their concern. Never has been, never will be. Watch Sarah Palin's videos on youtube for the kind of thing they like to hear. It's all us-the-good vs. them.
I definitely feel you on this one. The American memory has selective Alzheimer's disease. Implicit in the "slavery was a long, long time ago" idea is the "so, get over it" rejoinder. But if we remember slavery (and Jim Crow/ Civil Rights era) as something that occurred in the relative yesterday of America's history, we cannot afford to be so glib and callous as to suggest that we have traveled nearly far enough.
Great post.
Great post my friend! We were having a pretty engaged debate in my AP lit class in high school regarding race. And one of my buddies said the most profound thing. He said "the 60's were only 30 years ago (at the time)" Which for me meant that people on both sides (whether changed or not) were still with us today, still carrying the burdens and memories of those times and it didn't magically disappear because some people gave speeches and passed laws. We tend to just gloss over that fact as if that was some distant past and it wasn't. And we tend to marginalize the suffering of that "distant past" as isolated or bad apples, but it wasn't either.
And I'm almost certain that the fed, state and local govt told civil rights leader that "don't worry it's just Cletus and Jethro running their mouths, they ain't gonna do nothing" the day before their daughter was raped and beaten or their son strung up, so this talk of its just fringe crazies needs to stop. These don't all look like backwoods, holed up citizens. They look like co-workers and people I see in my grocery store. This is serious and we need to treat it as such.
My main concern with all of this is that, if Obama wins some people will be so filled with their UNWARRANTED hate and so unwilling to give him a chance that the country will in fact fracture and not in an academic bush/gore fashion but for real this time. This will no doubt be coupled with right pundit hackery that will espouse that 1 year into an Obama presidency that he is solely to blame for the 7.5% unemployment rate and that he is redistributing wealth to minorities and other such easily bought nonsense.
And I'm serious when I say this, I don't expect that BO will be assasinated, if only because our SS protection is so much more advanced. But I wouldn't be surprised to see hate crimes spike should he be elected.
John McCain in his desperate effort to win has severely fractured the country and since those supporters don't really like him anyway, he can't speak to his supporters in anyway that can direct their actions (unlike Obama could) because they simply don't respect him.
TNC, I don't buy into that narrative you're describing, but I know that I don't get it either. The Vietnam War went on for years after the assassination - and Vietnam was forever ago. I guess I just live looking at the future too much. The past just doesn't stick with me the way it does for some other people. Even 9/11 - it seems like forever ago, but it's just 7 years ago, if you can believe it. It's fading into the mist along with the rest, even though I know we still have a bunch of work to do fixing up the mess it made.
I was born in the 80s. We grew up being promised that we'd be vacationing on the moon, and also that our parents were idiots that were destroying the planet with wars and pollution. We were told to look ahead, see beyond the present stuff, and work to make the future possible. History doesn't walk with me or the people I grew up with. Mostly it sneaks up behind us and kicks us in the butt, leaving us confused as to just what its problem was.
TNC,
Hello. Did not know about Wilmington. Thanks for this link.
It goes without saying that death threats against any politician is unacceptable and should be condemned -- but what has been telling is the disgusting moral equivalence of those claiming that there were death threats against Bush.
Historical ignorance and denial runs deep through America.
Ta-Nehisi,
Bring the fire!
You've done it again. you just dropped more knowledge in one post than I've heard in three months of cable news chatter.
I'm not sure if Wilmington was the only successful coup d'etat on U.S. soil. I guess it depends on how you define "coup d'etat" or "on U.S. soil." This thing was kinda common during the end of Reconstruction. Read Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction or Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann.
Yes. And. There's suppressed rage on both sides. You'd have to be an awful fool to play with forces like that-- to think "Hey, it's just politics, and maybe it'll get me elected".
One correction, if I may: it's not a rambling post; it's concise, eloquent and spot-on.
Thanks
And yet John McCain is the same person who went to Memphis on the 40th anniversary of MLK's assassination to ask forgiveness from the black community for opposing the holiday. Why did he bother?
thanks for a nice post. i'm not old enough to remember the sixties, and during the seventies i was just a kid. but i remember how overt a lot of this stuff was. try growing up in Detroit as an asian during the automobile bust, when everything was blamed on the japanese! but i think it's important to keep in mind that we veil a lot of the racism that's going on now. 2 million in prison, mostly black and latinos, and it doesn't seem like an act of racism somehow. or think about the number of deportations. what it's like to be an undocumented immigrant in this country? constant fear, surveillance, any state authority a potential trap - it would be exactly like living in every bad scifi movie about a totalitarian state, and we're somehow not suppose to think it's racism because they deserve what they get as law-breakers.
FYI the City of Wilmington, NC has just this year installed a memorial to the event (google - http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=wilmington+1898+memorial&btnG=Google+Search).
Until I moved down here, I never knew about it.
But really, in the history of our nation, it really is shocking that such a thing is not taught as a part of the struggles against racism and bigotry, and what people had to deal with.
Can you imagine how many people would know about it, had the situation been reversed?
Some of it comes down to a theological question about original sin: can it be erased? can it be atoned? or does it exist at all?
Modern patriotism and portions of modern "what, me worry?" American Christianity seem to have settled on the comfortable, final answer -- sin is something that other people do... as if the Connecticut compromise (in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution) could be erased from our history.
The history you described is the history which most of my college students know, it seems. I've been teaching a section on political poetry for the last 4 weeks and every time I do it, I wind up spending as much time on history as I do in the poems, because my students just don't know it. Most of them can't even tell me roughly when the Civil War ended, much less what happened between then and the "I have a dream" speech.
And it's more than a little disheartening at times, because I wonder about the chances of a great regression, a backlash, and if the battles my parents fought will be the same ones my grandchildren fight.
I think McCain and Palin have both been isolated from the realities of race--Palin by geography, and McCain by his military background. Race obviously matters in the military, but the "band of brothers" mentality gives at least the illusion of transcending racial differences.
nice post, i came to a realization similar to this very recently. I was watching the spike lee doc "Four Little Girls" for a course i'm taking called "race and the courts." For those of you who havent seen the film, you definitely should, powerful stuff. Anyway, there is a portion of the film in which Spike interviews an aged George Wallace, he of "segregation now, segregation forever" infamy and my jaw dropped. George Wallace??? The film was released in 1997, well within my lifetime, and i was just shocked to see that the dude had been alive. He always just seemed like a character of history to me. The studying of history is usually (for me at least) such an exercise of disconnection, its so easy to just learn our past without absorbing it, without contextualizing it or even realizing that you are learning about peoples lives. Tons of people who lived during jim crow are still alive, and its so easy for young people such as myself to remember that this time period isnt just a page from a textbook, its effects are still screamingly relevant today
TNC- Great post, as always.
I think the greatest tragedy in American history wasn't the Civil War, it was the failure of Reconstruction. The Union should have stayed there, crushed the KKK, and finished what it started. Former slaves were serving in the Mississippi legislature until the North pulled out---hard to believe that now. History might have looked very different had Reconstruction worked.
Again, keep up the fight.
I lived in Wilmington for ten years as a child, and never learned about 1898 until college.
There's a helpful bibliography at the North Carolina Archives: http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/bibliography.htm.
I think you are being way too dark here. Nothing (maybe not even time) can fully remedy the tortured history of race relations in this country. While no reasonable person can claim that all the horrors of the past have been rectified, things have changed … and are changing. Even in the South.
Great post. "Just the other day." Very insightful. And on that note, did anyone else happen to see Alec Baldwin's latest post on Huffington Post today? It relates to this, cause he makes a comment in his piece, that if Obama is elected, that'll be the end of racism...take a gander...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-baldwin/what-an-obama-presidency_b_134800.html
This is one of the things I constantly talk about. Usually I talk about it in reference to how those days still affect the Black community. People like to act like we are so removed from those days. It very infuriating. It's the cousin of white privilege
I think the fact that so many people like the McCain crowd are oblivious to the impact race has on our country, speaks to their white privelege. Not be confused with wealth. And that annoys me more than a Wallace-type. It's a convenient state of unconsciousness.
My professor used to say that history is the pursuit of truth. For anyone whose ever been in therapy, that can be a painful journey but it ultimately liberates you because you now have the power to throw your crutches away and live like a functional person. An entire society of people is no different.
McCain and Palin are both willfully ignorant, but you let them off too many hooks with this: "A lot of folks think that these guys are intentionally stirring up these old forces--but that gives McCain/Palin too much credit. They don't really know how close this stuff is to us..."
Then why are they saying it? They are both politicians, and documentably craven. They are losing the biggest election of their lives, so they don't want to be wasting time stirring up a pot that's empty. John McCain talks as if Vietnam was the greatest event he lived through, even though history will remember it as a neocolonial spasm that ended like all the rest of them. In the meantime, McCain's life has spanned the civil rights era--a sea change in American life that some die-hards (who else is left in McCain's base) remain unhappy about. McCain came up through a very segregated Naval Academy and joined a very gradually integrating officer corps. He must remember some of that.
As for Palin, her family history might be construed as very radical white flight, through Coeur d'Alene to palest Alaska.
They may be small, misguided, bitter, desperate people who have risen like scum to the top of the Republicans' sacrificial ticket, but they are adults and they are responsible--like the rest of us--for their histories, their actions, their intentions, and their miscalculations. Just because they have no shame is no reason that the rest of us should pretend not to notice.
Re Wilmington:
http://www.newsobserver.com/print/friday/other/story/511596.html
A special section from the Raleigh News and Observer, published in late 2006. The author also edited a collection of academic essays on the subject.
Tel -
I don't know that it's a generational thing; I was born in 1980s as well and I'm if anything hyperaware of history surrounding events and places. I was raised by an archivist, which probably influences my view of things, but most of my friends see things the same way I do. The only thing harder than living in the present without knowing the past is trying to plan for the future without knowing the past.
I think a lot of the forgetting is self-serving (like the French, Germans and Japanese treated the 1940's), but it is also that people have short memories. This is how Bush can be called a fascist while people forget about the trampling of civil rights under Wilson, FDR, J Edgar Hoover, or even Bill Clinton (read what the ACLU said about him back in 1995). Short memories are why people can mindlessly compare Vietnam to Iraq.
It is also how conservatives can consider Obama a socialist for having tax rates that are lower than during large chunks of the Reagan Presidency.
Hence its tendency to kick us in the butt. ;)
I don't mean to say that I don't know about the past intellectually. I'm curious about it, and studied quite a bit of it. I know some of the dates and some of the personalities, and can research what I don't know just as well as anybody else. What I can't do so well, is connect with it emotionally, in the same way that TNC is talking about it. It's history, but none of it seems like *my* history. Or maybe all of it does, which would amount to the same thing.
Do they not know about it, or are they not defined by it? McCain would almost certainly be intimately familiar with some of these struggles, having grown up in a military family and entered the Naval Academy around the time Truman was integrating it. Of course, you don't know whether McCain understands this because . . . . wait for it. . . . you've never asked him, nor has anyone for that matter. So you get to assume his ignorance for purpose of tarring him, but really, you expose your own by the assumptions you make.
It's one thing to be in the tank for a candidate, it's another to basically make up the opponents views.
Their whole worldview may not be tied to slights to their ethnicity, as yours is. In fact, is any other ethnic group in the US so defined by the events of the past as African Americans? You are praising people voting for a man simply because of a similar skin color as if that's something to be proud of. The Howard Stern interview the other day is indicative of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5p3OB6roAg&feature=related
Why is this something to celebrate? As I said in another post that you found lacking in "class" (apparently defined as anything that does not praise Obama), it's like Arkansans voting for Bill Clinton for President just because he's from Arkansas? Because they really, really want a presidential library is about the only reason I can figure. Should "he looks like me" trump his tax policy, foreign policy positions, etc? And if it does, why is that not a racist stance?
And yes, I'm white. And no, I'm not an Obama supporter. And no, I'm not moving to France if he gets elected or stocking up on staples for the Armageddon. And no, I don't think he's Muslim. I think he's got potential to be a great President, but I'm tired of rookies who have to learn on the job. 8 (and arguably 16) years is enough of those.
It's also a little ironic that in his post on Jesse Jackson's allegedly anti-Jewish statements Mr. Coates says " But whenever I've speculated on the contents of the hearts of men, I've gotten in trouble." yet a day later has no problem speculating on just that.
Perhaps he has decided the way to sidestep that issue is to only speculate on the dark thoughts harbored in the hearts of Republicans?
Not Republicans Matt. Just you. Only you.
I take it that's in lieu of a substantive response? In that case, not bad. You gotta go with humor if you got nothing else there.
i was born in 1957, so there are things i remember. growing up in L.A., i remember the watts riots in 1965 -- but what i remember from then is seeing the flames and guns on TV, and my mother's orders to not stand in front of the windows. we lived over the hills, some 15-20 miles from south central.
it was about 11 years later that i first talked with a classmate who grew up in south central about those horrible times. he lived in a war zone; his reality was SO far from mine, in the same city. and his was true; mine was what i saw on TV plus some really idiotic fear. thanks, mom.
my mother's mother was a flat-out racist; she had fond memories of her family's "laundress," an african-american woman whose family had been slaves to my grandmother's family, before the "recent unpleasantness." my grandmother freely used terms such as "pickaninnie," and worse. damned right, the history is recent enough.
and it is recent enough to still be affecting african-americans everywhere in the country, from a presidential candidate down to the girlfriend of a guy who was dealing, who is serving a long prison term. it is recent and strong enough to still be affecting white americans who wave the flag, say they are for equality, and pretend like equality has worked well all along, while they complain about "those people." we have a long way to go, still.
Matt:
TNC likes to portray himself as above the fray ... all the while lecturing white people on history and how we are supposed to feel about it.
Like Obama, however, he is as blinded by race and partisanship as the very people he condemns.
matt, as a white woman who was raised in a replublican household where a can of "goldwater" held pride of place in the kitchen -- could you just settle down a little? maybe you have not heard much about other people's experiences, or read up on cultural shifts and differences. listening helps a lot; so does getting out and seeing things that are not comfortable to one's former experiences.
Kathy,
I apologize - I didn't mean for that to read in an excited manner - I promise, my blood pressure didn't spike a bit as I typed. I think that goldwater you're drinking may have caused you to read it wrong.
I agree with your post TNC, and I think it needed to be said. I feel what you are saying, even though I'm a white northerner. And I may get myself in trouble saying this, but...
If this is close and wrenching for us, then the other 60's culture wars that the GOP are fighting might be just as close and wrenching for them. Not for me, but I'm pretty sure I would have been against the VietNam war if I had been alive then. But the 60's might not be so long ago for other people who remember them, and some people remember the 60's as being about VietNam. That's why they get so fired up about Iraq.
TNC,
Keep up the justice!
Great post Mr. Coates and nice point Zak.
I'm 51 and of Mexican ancestry. I've tried to pass along the experiences of my grandparents (who came to this country in the late 1910s) to my children. I've also tried to note to them the treatment of African Americans I observed while growing up on Chicago's sout' side. We cannot forget what we observed and we cannot allow our children to forget the history of our nation.
Earlier today, I was at a grocery store where I met a older black man who was working as a bagger. He saw my Obama button and asked where I got it - he's been looking to get a couple for himself & his wife. I gave him the button and we talked for a few minutes about what this electon means to us personally, not just for the future but for what we saw in our pasts. As we parted, he said that this election day could be like the days his children were born, his grandchildren were born - so full of joy and anticpation for a brighter tomorrow. Hope!
Ta-nehisi, this a great post.
I grew up in the segregated south and I was there throughout the civil rights era. My parents and my whole extended family were white racists. They were passive racists, kind of limited to racial slurs but totally unconcerned about social or economic justice. If you asked them about segregation they would just say, "that's just the way things are."
As for me, I had to figure it out for myself, and I have memories of Jim Crow going back to when I was about four years old. I think they are my earliest memories.
Having lived in that time and place, it was a major revelation to me when I moved to California and realized that there were people my age and older who had no real connection to those events or even book knowledge of what went down. And I have come to believe that there are many people who know so little about those chapters in American history that they are very much the way you describe them.
The Obama canididacy has really given me an opportunity to think about what happened during the civil rights era with a different perspective, that of a considerably older and wiser person who might actually get to live to see the historical moment of an African American president. It has taken just a little of the edge off the pain of those memories.
But, I still can't watch the film footage of Martin Luther King's speeches or the marches or people getting hosed down and attacked by dogs and police without crying.
So, it's hard for me to understand the lack of awareness of or perhaps the lack of interest in the civil rights era. This was the most significant populist movement in American history and certainly one of the most significant in the history of the world.
"Here here, TNC. That is the best way to put it. I remember sometime in the early 90s, when I was twelve or so, realizing that MLK's assasination happened only some 10 years before I was born. I mean, I knew it, but I didn't *know* it."
I think that may be a common age for getting that kind of awareness. That's the age I was when I realized that the war Dad used to tell me about, where his country got invaded and put under occupation and my uncle joined the guerillas, was the same thing as the WWII I'd heard about in history lessons, and imagined as utterly remote.
MLK's assassination? It's my first political memory. I was seven at the time, the same age Obama would have been. George Wallace ran for president that same year, the old style, still segregationist George Wallace, before he recanted, and won a pretty significant third party vote (I don't remember there being a third candidate again who was counted as significant as Wallace till John Anderson). And the Nixon/Humphrey election was close, close enough that Wallace drawing away votes mattered.
this was a good post, Coates.
As for McCain/Palin not knowing the history, probably true, but I don't care. the evil that they stir up is still their responsibility.
Matt,
Black people are not voting for Obama because he's black. Al Sharpton (and many, many other black candidates) never had our support. Please get a clue.
Love,
Oguejiofor
I'm sorry, but could all the white southerners just chill from shitting on the less enlightened attitudes of their families?
I'm a white southerner too and we all can tell uncomfortable family stories about behavior that would get you drummed out of polite society today, if not locked up. Yes, it was terrible. But I've listened to my peers do this most of my life. And it's got nothing to do with "getting past" anything or acknowledging the scars of history - and you fucking know it. It's cheap preening - mostly on the memories of people whose lives were exponentially harder than ours - to impress others with how progressive we are.
"Black people are not voting for Obama because he's black. Al Sharpton (and many, many other black candidates) never had our support. Please get a clue."
Because. . . you say so? Sharpton lasted through how many primaries? How about Jackson? 95% of Black Americans just like Obama's policies? Which do you think appeals the most? Tax increases? His willingness to sit down with Chavez? Do tell.
Sharpton lasted through how many primaries?
Kucinich lasted through how many primaries? Candidates like Sharpton and Kucinich, who are trying to make their difference by running and getting their voice out regardless of whether they win, will often last more primaries than candidates who are only in the race as long as they think they have a good shot at winning.
I don't really have a good sense of how much support Sharpton did or didn't have from black people (being white myself), but the number of primaries he lasted, in itself, doesn't say very much.
Jackson actually did considerably better than Sharpton; I don't recall Sharpton actually winning any primaries, but Jackson won five primaries and caucuses in 1984, and got 21% of the popular vote, coming in third.
so, I'm late here but i wanted to add: John Lewis's comment was appropriate for another reason. George Wallace didn't start his career as a race-baiting politiician. tho he came ot it much earlier than John McCain, Wallace turned to race-based populaist incitement after losing a close election to a harder -line segregationist. This isn't to vouch for the character of either man, but to point out that they were both cheap dates for the devil, that whatever their personal feelins, all they needed was a losing campaign to convince them that a soul wasn't so much to give up after all.