Monuments of Hope, Memorials to a Poisoned Past
Looking back at the revolution in democracy that began during the American Civil War and continued during Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois, the preeminent black intellectual of the 20th century, lamented how short-lived the experiment turned out to be. Du Bois himself had been born less than three years after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, yet he was only nine when Reconstruction ended, a retreat by the federal government that cleared the way for Southern “home rule” and the birth of Jim Crow. In between, a trio of constitutional amendments had been ratified, securing to millions of formerly enslaved African Americans their freedom and citizenship while removing race as a barrier to voting. Though these laws were “on the books,” the will to enforce them then dissipated. Some 60 years on, Du Bois described this horrific state of affairs in his magisterial history, Black Reconstruction (1935): “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
(Read Britannica’s biography of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)
It would take an entire civil rights movement, including the deaths of too many leaders and foot-soldiers, to cure the sickness that white supremacy and its cultural manifestations—segregation, disenfranchisement, sharecropping, lynching, and vigilante “justice”—afflicted on post-Civil War America. And its victims were both black and white, those who suffered from the harm and those who inflicted it; as James Baldwin observed, “in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”
Reading Black Reconstruction today, a half-century after the heroic phase of the civil rights movement and so soon after the two-term presidency of America’s first black president, one cannot help but feel the powerful resonance of Du Bois’s wistfulness. Today, it seems that certain forces are determined to erase Pres. Barack Obama’s legacy. Adding to the alarm, the recent violence visited upon places from Charleston, South Carolina, to Charlottesville, Virginia, has reminded us of the enduringly charged symbols of the former Confederacy. It also has added to our fears that, instead of embracing the promise of democracy in a diverse society, some want to return us to a far more restrictive time, when freedom was circumscribed by race.
At the same time, Du Bois is a reminder that mobilizing against the forces that ended Reconstruction never really ceased. There were always organizers and institution-builders out there fighting and resisting, even at “the nadir,” from Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Those resisters are still in our midst today, standing courageously against hate and deploying that most powerful weapon of resistance: the hard-won right to vote.
Fifty or a hundred years from now, my hope for the present generation is that a future Du Bois will look back on our time and say that, in this era of fracture, we drew a line. We defended the right of every American to vote. We fought to keep the pipeline of opportunity open, and, despite our ideological differences, we found a way to link arms against every form of bigotry. Let it also be said that, in bringing the larger story of our journey forward, we added new monuments of hope and of democratic heroes to a landscape previously dominated by memorials to a poisoned past.
May those of us who love truth and justice, and the principles of democracy and equal opportunity upon which this great nation was founded, stand against division and hate, just as our ancestors did when Reconstruction was abandoned and Jim Crow became the law of the land. With unbroken faith in America, I remain hopeful that we will succeed in reclaiming and building on the promise of our nation’s founding ideals.
This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).