Slavery, Racism and Education: Racism II

Racism is an ideology. An “ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are suppose to rule nature and man.” Ideologies create imaginary environments, mental projections as it were, forming screens between the world and the people who believe in those ideologies. They are “a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces of nature.” Ideologies seem natural to those who believe in them, seem something given, taken for granted, in the same way as the natural world is given, taken for granted. For example, in his June 1896, review of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Majors and Minors,” in Harper’s Weekly, William Dean Howells described Dunbar in this way: “The face of a young negro, with the race traits strangely accented: the black skin, the wooly hair, the thick outrolling lips and the mild, soft eyes of the pure African type”, he writes. “I suppose that a generation ago he would have been worth, apart from his literary gift, twelve or fifteen hundred dollars, under the hammer.” Meant, apparently, as praise. It is a striking example of the insidious power of the racist ideology that Howells, a self-consciously progressive intellectual in that era, reached for racist, slave-trading tropes even while praising a Black poet. “This ideology of race entered deeply into the consciousness of white Americans to poison the wellsprings of national life. Out of it came that fatal infatuation with color that has blighted countless lives.” Racism in the United States is the reification, in another mode, of slavery itself.

Howells was writing during the second period of American imperialism, that of the Spanish American War, with the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.* “At the very time [c. 1898] that imperialism was sweeping the country, the doctrine of racism reached a crest of acceptability and popularity among “respectable” scholarly and intellectual circles . . . [They] gave support to the doctrine that races were discrete entities and that the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Caucasian’ was the superior of them all.” The situation was made worse by the appearance of a second Ku Klux Klan. “Racism in regimented form was spread over the whole country in the ‘twenties by the new Ku Klux Klan.

"Organized in Georgia in 1915, the new Klan did not reach its peak of membership, reported to have been five million, until the mid-twenties. Directed against other racial and religious minorities, as well as against the Negro, the Klan attained a larger following outside the South than within."

“Being white conferred privilege in the US North as well as the South. It opened the way to better jobs and better pay,” 18 or to a better school for a White family’s children.

Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the brief period after Emancipation in the south when African-Americans could vote, hold political office and otherwise enjoy the rights and privileges of American citizens.19 It can be dated either from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 or from General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 of January 16, 1865. Or, finally, from Major General Gordon Granger’s General Order Number 3 of June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth—See Appendix B): “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.

"This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor."

However: The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."

In this way Emancipation was immediately limited to something less than full citizenship: chattel labor exchanged for wage, then bondage, labor. Frederick Law Olmsted had reported that, before Emancipation, in response to his question “Suppose all the black people on your plantation, or all the black people in the country were made free at once, what do you think would become of them?” one of his enslaved informants said:

“What would de brack people do? Wouldn’t dey hab to work for dar libben? And de wite people own all de land—war dey goin’ to work? Dey hire demself right out again, and work all de same as before.”

Except, interestingly, in Oklahoma, where the slave-holding Cherokee and other tribes were required to provide each adult Freedman head of household with 160 acres of land.22 Melinda Miller’s paper, “The Righteous and Reasonable Ambition to Become a Landholder,” provides a useful case study. “Racial wealth gaps fell in the [Cherokee] Nation relative to the rest of the South, and educational outcomes of the next generation also improved.

"Black farmers in the Cherokee Nation were more likely to plant fruit trees, a more lucrative crop choice than staples like corn, but which have a longer gestational period. This difference in investment choices is suggestive of their greater sense of secure property rights compared to farmers outside the Nation."

This is an example of what might have been. It did not last.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in March, 1865, to provide “provisions, clothing, and fuel . . . for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children.” But then “the provisional legislatures established by President Johnson in 1865 adopted the notorious Black Codes” and a violent resistance organization, the Ku Klux Klan, was founded in December 1865, by former Confederate army officers. This was the group glamorized by the film “The Birth of a Nation.” The first Klan was suppressed during the following year by the U.S. Justice Department under President Grant with prosecutions leading to jail sentences for hundreds of its members. In 1867 the recalcitrant governments of the states of the former Confederacy were replaced by federal military districts and placed under martial law. For a few years it may have seemed, it may have been hoped, that the freed slaves would be given the same opportunities, such as they were, as, say, those European immigrants spending their thereby abbreviated lives in the mines, smelters, and factories of the northern states.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was abolished in 1872 and Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the last United States Army units were withdrawn from the southern states. The Civil Rights Act, 1875, which had outlawed discrimination, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883 as Jim Crow* and legal segregation took hold. At the same time, the pre-war oligarchy resumed control of the former Confederate states.

The typical free White adult male in the slave states in 1860 did not own any slaves, was, as likely as not, laboring with his wife and children in the fields as a subsistence farmer or side-by-side with enslaved Black people in the cotton fields of the rich White planters. Some other White residents of the slave states enslaved four or fewer people. Just over 5% held 10 or more enslaved people and of those only 2,300 held 50 or more people enslaved. Those 2,300 were the members of the ruling class of the slave states, with a smaller aristocracy—an aristocracy in terms of wealth, if nothing else—keeping 100 or more people enslaved.26 They did not only legally and by force keep nearly all the Black residents of those states enslaved, but also often held the impoverished White southerners, men and women, in virtual bondage as well, both before and after the Civil War.

Before the Civil War, Olmsted wrote in his Journey in the Seaboard Slave States:

“The slaveholders have, as far as possible with their capital, secured the best circumstances for the employment of that slave-labor which is the most valuable part of their capital. They need no assistance from the poor white man: his presence near them is disagreeable and unprofitable. Condemned to the poorest land, and restricted to the labor of merely providing for themselves the simple necessities of life, they are equally indifferent and incompetent to materially improve their minds or their wealth."

Ellora Derenoncourt and her colleagues observed that after the Civil War “The elimination of slave wealth had but a temporary effect on the wealthiest slave-holding families of the South. Through social connections and marriage, these families re-consolidated their position as economic elites one generation after the Civil War.” The situation of the poor Whites did change somewhat after Emancipation: the former slaveholders needed the votes of “the poor white man,” which they secured by deploying the ideology of racism. The White poor in the former slave states might possess little or nothing more than the formerly enslaved Black laborers beside them in the cotton fields with one exception: their White skins, which they were assured was a treasure beyond price. Robin Blackburn observed that “the vast majority of white yeomen in the Confederate states had favoured secession And the vast majority still seemed to be satisfied with the old leadership when the war ended and the Confederacy collapse . . . The distinct white southern identity was, if anything, stronger after than before the war. Moreover, the solidarity of whites was powerfully reinforced by emancipation and the evident threat to the racial caste system."

When slavery’s legal standing in the United States was terminated by the Thirteenth Amendment, it was replaced in the southern states by laws enforcing racial discrimination, in effect, bondage, laws that were to remain in place for almost a century. In Mississippi, for example, one of the post-Civil War “Black Codes,” ironically entitled “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes,” included the provisions that “every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto* who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service without good cause ”30 [Emphasis added.] This is what Douglas Blackmon called “Slavery By Another Name,” documenting the way in which debt bondage was created and used, often by northern investors, during the post-Civil War partial industrialization of the southern United States, to force “Freedmen, Free Negros, and mulattos,” that is, anyone who was identified as Black, into quasi-slave labor.31 Twenty-five years after the “Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen”, it was observed by an anonymous contributor to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that “The chief special object of the . . . [Mississippi] constitution, adopted on the 1st of November 1890, was to preserve in a legal manner the supremacy of the whites over the ignorant [sic] negro majority.”32 This was a system, at one level, of laws, at another level, of a reign of terror, of night riders, of the Klan, of White men in pick- up trucks with gun racks in their cabs.

Outside of the Cherokee Nation, the land-owning ruling class of the former slave states replaced slave labor with sharecropping, which was a system much like serfdom in the old world. Sharecroppers and their families farmed parts of the owners’ plantations, often receiving seed, farm tools and instructions from the plantation owners, perhaps their former “owners”, which they repaid in kind from the crops— repayments that inevitably did not cover their debts to the owners, binding the sharecroppers to the land. It was not uncommon for the sharecroppers, especially the Black sharecroppers, to go from one harvest to the next without receiving any money at all, just subsistence goods from the plantation store.* The system did not keep only the Freedmen in bondage. It also applied to those White laborers, who, before 1865, had been virtually enslaved themselves. As Charles Crawley related:

“Did you know poor whites like slaves had to git a pass? I mean, a remit like us slaves, to sell anythin’ an’ to go places, or do anythin’. Jest as we colored people, dey had to go to some big white man like Colonel Allen, dey did. If Marster wanted to, he would give dem a remit or pass an’ if he didn’t feel like it, he wouldn’t do it. It was jest as he felt ‘bout hit. Dats what made all feared him. Ol’ Marster was more hard on dem poor white folks den he was on us niggers . . . Yes de poor white man had some dark an’ tough days, like us poor niggers; I mean were lashed an’ treated, some of ‘em, jes as pitiful an’ unmerciful."

Both before and long after Emancipation.

Writing about the end of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois admonished:

“It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation.The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination. This program had to be carried out in open defiance of the clear letter of the law . . . The lawlessness in the South since the Civil War has varied in its phases. First, it was that kind of disregard for law which follows all war. Then it became a labor war, an attempt on the part of impoverished capitalists and landholders to force laborers to work on the capitalist’s own terms. From this, it changed to a war between laborers, white and black men fighting for the same jobs. Afterward, the white laborer joined the white landholder and capitalist and beat the black laborer into subjection through secret organizations and the rise of a new doctrine of race hatred." (Emphasis added.)

The “new doctrine of race hatred” was racism.

Michael Holzman

#racism #equity #inequity #slavery