CNN
Author's note: "Whitelash
is a new word coined by CNN commentator Van Jones to describe, in part,
why he felt Americans elected Donald Trump as president. But the term
describes an old reality: Dramatic racial progress in America is
inevitably followed by a white backlash, or "whitelash." Reconstruction
in the 18th century was followed by a century of Jim Crow. The civil
rights movement of the 1950s and '60s was followed by President Ronald
Reagan and the rise of the religious right.
Four
years ago, on the eve of President Barack Obama's re-election, I warned
that his presidency could spark such a backlash. In my November 1,
2012, story headlined, "Parallels to country's racist past haunt age of Obama" --
reprinted in full below -- I examined another time when white Americans
nostalgic for an old social order transformed the country. This is what
happened -- and could happen again in the years ahead.
(CNN) -- A
tall, caramel-complexioned man marched across the steps of the U.S.
Capitol to be sworn into office as a jubilant crowd watched history
being made.
The
man was an African-American of mixed-race heritage, an eloquent speaker
whose election was hailed as a reminder of how far America had come.
But
the man who placed his hand on the Bible that winter day in Washington
wasn't Barack Obama. He was Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first
African-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
His
election and that of many other African-Americans to public office
triggered a white backlash that helped destroy Reconstruction, America's
first attempt to build an interracial democracy in the wake of the
Civil War.
To some historians,
Revels' story offers sobering lessons for our time: that this year's
presidential election is about the past as well as the future. These
historians say Obama isn't a post-racial president but a
"post-Reconstructionist" leader. They say his presidency has sparked a
white backlash with parallels to a brutal period in U.S. history that
began with dramatic racial progress.
Some
of the biggest controversies of the 2012 contest could have been ripped
from the headlines of that late 19th-century era, they say: Debates
erupt over voting rights restrictions and racial preferences, a new
federal health care act divides the country, an economic crisis sparks a
small government movement. And then there's a vocal minority accusing a
national black political leader of not being a "legitimate" U.S.
citizen.
All were major issues
during Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the former Confederate states
back into the national fold and create a new era of racial justice. And
many of the same forces that destroyed Reconstruction may be converging
again, some scholars and historians say.
Ruha Benjamin points to this as proof that change is fragile -- and reversible. The backlash that swept aside Revels lasted nearly a century.
"When
white Americans helped put this African-American in the Senate, it
seemed that they were really welcoming African-Americans and they wanted
them to have full equality," said Benjamin, an African-American studies
professor at Boston University. "We know in hindsight that it was about
to get worse."
The notion that the
country is poised to enter a new post-Reconstruction era may seem
outlandish, even offensive. That period, known as the Jim Crow era, saw
the establishment of American apartheid: segregated public facilities,
race riots and white racists murdering blacks and their white allies
with impunity.
Today, too many
white Americans are "militantly anti-racist" for the country to return
to the post-Reconstruction era, said Mark D. Naison, a history professor
at Fordham University in New York City.
"You
hold a racist demonstration in this country and the anti-racist
protesters will have as many whites and blacks in their group, maybe
more," Naison said. "We are definitely not post-racial, but we aren't
going back to the days of legal segregation."
Yet
there is another slice of white America that seems stuck in a time
warp, as if it never left the post-Reconstruction era, other historians
argue. While not calling for the return of Jim Crow segregation, some
white Americans are recycling the same political rhetoric and legal
strategies that snuffed out Reconstruction, these historians say.
They are also resurrecting some of the most racist images from the post-Reconstruction era, some black commentators say.
While
it is no longer acceptable to call a black person the N-word publicly,
people do it all the time in social media, video games and in the
comment sections of online news stories, said Nsenga Burton, a writer
for The Root, an online news site with an African-American perspective.
Much
of this racism is aimed at Obama, she says. Among examples, he's been
called "tar baby" and "the ultimate Affirmative Action N******" and
depicted as a chimp. People are not shocked anymore by overt displays of
racism, she says.
Burton said in a Root essay entitled, "It's a Great Time to be a Racist,"
that Obama's presidency didn't inaugurate a post-racial era. "Try
post-Reconstruction," she said, "because the harmful slurs and images
being tossed around the public space hark back more to a racist past
than to a racially ambiguous future."
A recent Associated Press online poll
concluded that racial prejudice in America has slightly increased since
Obama's election. The survey said that a majority of Americans, 51%,
express explicit racial prejudice toward blacks, compared to 48% in
2008.
While the poll on its own
doesn't prove the country has become more racist in the last four years,
it does offer evidence that the "post-racial" world some thought
Obama's inauguration would bring has yet to materialize.
"We're
in a racist renaissance," Burton said. "It's a rebirth of the oldest
forms of racism. It's not new, not different. It's like the 1800s, the
most archaic abusive terms are applied to black people every single
day."
Some conservatives have a
different take, on history as well as current events. Everyone who
criticizes the president is labeled a racist, they say. And describing
Obama as a post-Reconstruction president is absurd.
"It's
race-baiting of the highest order; it's bunk," said Niger Innis, a
black conservative and son of civil rights activist Roy Innis who has
defended the Tea Party movement against accusations of racism.
"The
America of today is not the America of the 1870s," Innis said. "When
the American people voted for their first black president, the Union
Army didn't occupy the country."
Some
conservative commentators also say Obama isn't a victim of racism, but
to the contrary has inflamed racial divisions to advance his political
agenda.
"Obama was falsely
portrayed in his campaign as a post-racial president who would bring
healing to the nation's racial divisions," said Larry Schweikart,
co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States."
"Obama
has done everything he can to ensure that there were stark racial
differences. ... Obama has focused his entire administration around
racism, a sort of reverse racism on his end," Schweikart claimed.
It
is a view that has been reflected by conservative talk-show hosts such
as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh's brother David, author of "The Great
Destroyer." David Limbaugh would not talk to CNN for this story.
Hope and change in another time
Reconstruction,
which lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877, was filled
with dueling perceptions of race as well. The political changes
unleashed by the Civil War unnerved many white Southerners: As blacks
achieved positions of power that previously had been reserved for
whites, historians say, many whites felt like their country didn't
belong to them anymore.
After the
Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th
"Reconstruction Amendments" that abolished slavery, granted citizenship
rights to blacks and prohibited denying the right to vote to newly freed
slaves.
The term "civil rights" was coined during Reconstruction, said Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution."
A century before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated
bus, Congress passed the 1866 and 1875 Civil Rights Acts, which banned
the discrimination of blacks in "public accommodations" such as
streetcars and theaters.
The reforms provoked what some historians say was white Southerners' greatest fear: "Negro Rule."
During
Reconstruction, at least 2,000 blacks were eventually elected to
political offices throughout the South. They included congressmen,
judges, tax collectors, sheriffs, even a governor, said Philip Dray,
author of "Capitol Men," which examines Reconstruction through the lives of the first black congressmen.
"Expectations
were high," said Dray, who has also written books about the rise of
labor unions and lynchings in America. "People felt like there was
change, and they were going to be part of it."
Revels
rode that wave of optimism into high office. In 1870, he became the
first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate when the Mississippi
legislature appointed him to fill a vacancy left when the state seceded
from the Union.
Opponents initially
insisted he wasn't a legitimate U.S. citizen because the Constitution
required a senator be a citizen for at least nine years. He also had an
unusual background, having been born to a free black family in North
Carolina when slavery was legal.
"He
wasn't radical or over the top," Dray said of Revels. "He was a
minister, a conciliatory figure. The idea was that it would be easier
for him to weather the scrutiny."
Revels
himself would anticipate the white backlash that would follow when he
told the Senate early in 1871: "I find that the prejudice in this
country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the
increase."
Obamacare, 19th century style
Beyond Revels, there are other parallels between today and the post-Reconstruction era, according to some historians.
The
most commonly cited link revolves around the debate over voter ID laws.
Since Obama's election, 34 states have considered adopting legislation
requiring photo ID for voters, according to the Brennan Center for
Justice at New York University. Seven have passed such laws, which
typically require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the
polls.
During the
post-Reconstruction era, many white Southerners viewed the onset of
black voting power in apocalyptic terms. They created a thicket of
voting barriers -- "poll taxes," "literacy tests" and "understanding
clauses" -- to prevent blacks from voting, said Dray.
"The idea was to invalidate the black vote without directly challenging the 15th Amendment," Dray said.
Many contemporary voter ID laws are following the same script, he said.
"It just goes on and on. They've never completely gone away. And now they're back with a vengeance."
Some
opponents of the voter ID laws note that these measures
disproportionately affect the elderly and the poor, regardless of race.
Supporters of voter ID laws say they're not about race at all, but about common sense and preventing voter fraud.
"That
is not a racial issue and it certainly isn't a hardship issue," said
Deneen Borelli, author of "Blacklash," which argues Obama is turning
America into a welfare nation.
"When
you try to purchase over-the-counter medication or buy liquor or
travel, you present photo ID. This is a basic part of everyday
transactions."
Historians say there
are other ways the post-Reconstruction script is being dusted off and
that some of them appear to have nothing to do with race on the surface.
Consider
the debate over "Obamacare," the nation's new health care law. The
controversy would be familiar to many 19th-century Americans, said Jim
Downs, author of "Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction."
The
notion that the federal government should help those who cannot help
themselves wasn't widely accepted before the Civil War. There were a few
charities and municipal hospitals that took care of the sick, but most
institutions ignored ordinary people who needed health care, said Downs,
a Connecticut College history professor who studies the history of race
and medicine in 19th-century America.
Reconstruction
changed that. Post-Civil War America was marked by epidemics: yellow
fever, smallpox and typhus. Freed slaves, who were often malnourished
and had few clothes and little shelter, died by the "tens of thousands,"
he said.
The federal government
responded by creating the nation's first-ever national health care
system, directed at newly freed slaves. It was called the Medical
Division of the Freedmen's Bureau. The division built 40 hospitals and
hired hundreds of doctors to treat more than a million former slaves
from 1865 until it was shut down in 1870 after losing congressional
funding, Downs said.
"It absolutely
radicalized health care," he said. "You can't argue that government
intervention in health is something new or a recent innovation. It
originated in the mid-19th century in response to the suffering of freed
slaves."
Critics at the time said
the new health care system was too radical. They said it would make
blacks too reliant on government. The system was expanded to include
other vulnerable Americans, such as the elderly, children and the
disabled. Yet some still saw it as a black handout, Downs said.
"The
whole notion of the modern day "welfare queen" can be traced to the
post-Civil War period when people became very suspicious of the federal
government providing relief to ex-slaves," Downs said. "They feared this
would create a dependent class of people."
A campaign to 'save' America
Economic
fears in the post-Reconstruction era also fueled the white backlash, a
pattern that some historians say is repeating itself today.
A
national economic collapse took place just as freed slaves were gaining
political influence. The Panic of 1873 started with a banking collapse
and a stock market dive. The result: Tens of thousands of workers, many
Civil War veterans, became homeless. People lined up for food and
shelter in cities across America.
"It
made it more economically competitive for everybody," Dray said. "You
saw whites become even less generous to African-Americans [than] they
might have been."
Some white Southerners channeled their economic anxiety into a systemic attack on the federal government, historians said.
Before
the collapse, Southern states controlled by Northern politicians and
their allies had built hospitals and public schools and created social
services to help freed slaves as well as poor whites, said Jerald
Podair, a historian at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
But
the notion of an activist federal government helping blacks amid tough
times created an opening for Reconstruction opponents. One group that
took advantage of that opening was the Redeemers, a popular movement led
by conservative, pro-business politicians who vowed to "save" the
South, said Podair, who is writing a book on Bayard Rustin, a close aide
to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The
Redeemers gained control of most Southern statehouses and pledged to
reduce the size of government. They defunded public schools, closed
public hospitals and halted road construction, Podair said, all while
cutting taxes for the wealthy plantation owners, the 1 percenters of
their day.
The Redeemers cloaked their rhetoric in the need for more government efficiency, but their goals were also racial, Podair said.
"The
Redeemers were interested first and foremost in power," Podair said.
"If freed slaves received education and medical care, they were that
much closer to economic and, eventually, political power. And if the
federal government had a major role in the South, that also meant less
economic and political power for the Redeemer class."
Podair
said some contemporary governors are recycling the same talking points
used by the Redeemers. They are invoking the need for austerity while
cutting government jobs that employ a high number of blacks and reducing
public services that help the poor, a disproportionate number of whom
are black.
"There may well be a new
post-Reconstruction era of slashed federal budgets and policies that
transfer power and resources to state and local governments," Podair
said. "Once again, initiatives that sound race-neutral on their face
will have a devastating racial impact."
Innis has a different take.
He
said state and local governments can't afford to keep the same number
of jobs because of generous benefits negotiated by unions. Race has
nothing to do with it.
"If you have a government job and the pay and benefits is more than a private sector job, something is wrong," he said.
Government cutbacks are designed to help the economy, not inflict pain on any particular group.
"Until we get our economy on track, black and brown people are going to suffer," he said.
'White Girl Bleed a Lot'
The
primary weapon white Southerners used to halt Reconstruction was
violence. Mobs attacked and killed blacks gathering to vote. They
assassinated black officeholders and their white allies. Newspapers
sparked race riots and warned of race wars by printing false accounts of
black-on-white attacks.
We are not
seeing anywhere near the level of violence toward black people that
followed Reconstruction. But some people fear that the inflammatory
rhetoric that helped trigger racial violence in that era is returning.
A
Google search of the phrase "black mobs attack white people" yields
tens of thousands of hits. Conservative bloggers and columnists say a
"wave" of black mobs attacking whites at random has spread across the
nation in places such as shopping malls, downtown tourist spots and even
"Beat Whitey Nights" at Midwestern fairs.
Syndicated conservative columnist Thomas Sowell -- himself African-American -- wrote in a May 15 column
for National Review Online that "race war" has returned to America
because black gangs are "launching coordinated attacks on whites in
public" across America. A Republican state legislator in Maryland,
Patrick L. McDonough, warned earlier this year in a letter to the
governor that "roving mobs of black youths" had been attacking white
tourists in Baltimore.
One author, Colin Flaherty, wrote a book about this alleged wave of racial violence called, "White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America."
The various accounts follow the same pattern: Black "flash mobs"
suddenly attack whites in public, followed by a media cover-up.
Flaherty,
also a talk radio show host, said he first noticed the attacks in 2010.
Since then, he claims he has seen "thousands" of videos of black mobs
attacking whites.
People have called him racist, but Flaherty said he's just a "guy standing on a corner" reporting what he sees.
"White
liberals go nuts on this," he said of his book. "When people use names
like 'racist,' they're using it to shut down conversation, not engage in
it."
The return of race war rhetoric has disturbing historical echoes, said David Godshalk, author of "Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations."
Godshalk
said neither Sowell nor Flaherty have offered any statistical evidence
that reports about "black mobs" are anything more than isolated cases.
Sowell did not respond to interview requests.
Scores
of blacks died during the post-Reconstruction era because newspapers
spread false or grossly exaggerated reports of blacks as predators,
particularly accounts of black men raping white women, Godshalk said.
Some whites used those reports to justify violence and political oppression against blacks, he said.
"Longstanding
notions that African-Americans were criminals were used to argue that
they shouldn't be leaders in society because they didn't have the same
capabilities as whites, and they weren't trustworthy enough to hold
positions of authority," said Godshalk, a history professor at
Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania who has also written about
Reconstruction and lynchings.
Those notions of black inferiority eventually infected the legal system during the post-Reconstruction era, historians say.
The
post-Reconstruction Supreme Court played a major role in destroying
what Congress had created through its racial reforms. The court
delivered a series of decisions that nullified the Civil Rights Acts of
1866 and 1875 as well as additional laws designed to protect blacks from
mob violence at the voting booth, said Peter Irons, a civil rights
attorney and author of "A People's History of the Supreme Court."
In
1883, the court imposed a judicial death sentence on Reconstruction in
the "Civil Rights Cases" decision, which allowed private individuals and
businesses to discriminate against blacks. Associate Justice Joseph
Bradley wrote in the decision that freed slaves should stop being "a
special favorite of the laws."
The
most notorious post-Reconstruction decision involving race took place in
1895 when the Supreme Court legally sanctioned Jim Crow laws by
enshrining the "separate-but-equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. The
court upheld a Louisiana law requiring that federal rail cars provide
different facilities for white and black passengers.
By
the late 19th century, the Supreme Court had "turned its back on the
claims of blacks and opened its arms to those of corporations," Irons
said. It was the onset of the Gilded Age, an era of widening income
inequality that saw the court first introduce "corporate personhood,"
the concept that a corporation has the legal rights of a person.
"People
were getting tired of concerns about racial minorities," said Irons, an
activist whose book on the Supreme Court was partly inspired by the
late liberal historian Howard Zinn and his book, "A People's History of
the United States."
"The court is generally a mirror of the broader society, and that was the way most people felt at the time."
Irons
and other liberal observers fear the current Supreme Court is drifting
in a similar direction and anticipate that it will overturn or weaken a
key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as affirmative
action in college admissions.
The
court is expected to hear a challenge from Shelby County, Alabama, to
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires nine Southern states
and parts of others to "pre-clear" with federal officials any voting
measures that could potentially restrict black voters.
The court is also due to rule on a case on affirmative action in college admission policies in Fisher v. University of Texas.
Irons
said the conservative majority on the contemporary court would be doing
what their counterparts did during Reconstruction, avoiding a frontal
assault on civil rights laws and other measures that protect women and
workers, while eviscerating the laws.
"It's
unlikely that the court would render any decisions that would be
totally reactionary on issues of race," said Irons, "but what they're
doing in the current court is whittling away and cutting back very
gradually on things like racial, gender and wage discrimination."
From post-racial to most racial
Some conservatives, though, have a different perspective on Reconstruction and any modern parallels.
Most
historians say Reconstruction ended with the disputed presidential
contest of 1876. An election too close to call was resolved when
candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull Northern troops out of the
South in exchange for the presidency.
Schweikart,
co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States," said the
United States abandoned Reconstruction because the nation could not call
itself a democracy while keeping half its population under military
occupation.
"Reconstruction ended,
pure and simple, because the North could not afford economically,
politically or socially to maintain a standing army in a part of the
U.S. for an indefinite time and still call America a democratic
republic," said Schweikart, a history professor at the University of
Dayton in Ohio.
Borelli, author of
"Blacklash," does see one contemporary link with 19th-century America.
She argues that Obama is actually encouraging a new form of servitude to
what she calls the "Big Government Plantation."
Since
Obama became president, a record number of Americans, at least 46
million, now receive food stamps. And one in six Americans receives some
form of government aid as the nation struggles to recover from the
worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
"There
are a lot of people who are relying on government for their basic
everyday needs: food, clothing and shelter," said Borelli, who is
outreach director for FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group that
advocates for smaller government and lower taxes. "When you rely on
government, your liberties are reduced."
Another conservative said Obama has tacitly endorsed reverse racism.
"You
can't have a legitimate disagreement with the president if you're white
without being called a racist," said Stephen Marks, creator of
FightBigotry.com, a Super PAC that produced a television ad accusing
Obama of not standing up to racism.
Marks
said Obama said nothing when Vice President Joe Biden recently told an
audience of black and white voters that Republicans were "going to put
y'all back in chains."
"They're the
ones who play the race card, 100% of the time," Marks said of Obama and
Democrats. "The Republicans don't have the gonads to respond because
they're so afraid of being called a racist."
What happened to Revels?
There's
little disagreement among contemporary historians about what happened
to the South when the nation abandoned Reconstruction. The region became
a divided society where race filtered into everything, said Dray,
author of "Capitol Men."
"It had a
paralyzing effect. Business interests didn't want to invest there.
Immigrants didn't want to go there," Dray said. "The South became this
tainted place. Instead of moving into the 20th century, it stayed put in
the 19th century."
The Jim Crow
laws that marked the end of Reconstruction stayed put for at least 60
years. It would take a century before the contemporary civil rights
movement restored the political and civil rights of blacks. Some
historians argue that the United States did not actually become a
democracy until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Black
pioneers like Revels disappeared from the history books. After serving
his Senate term, he didn't seek reappointment and returned to
Mississippi, where he eventually became president of Alcorn State
College and pastor of a church.
He
lost much of his black support for not speaking out against the abuses
that ended Reconstruction, said Benjamin, the Boston University
professor.
"He was an
accommodationist," Benjamin said. "He was in the Senate standing up for
white folks and telling people not to be so hard on Southern plantation
owners. He didn't use his platform to represent African-Americans."
In
1901, Revels collapsed and died during a church meeting in Mississippi.
That same year, the last black member of the House of Representatives
finished his final term. Congress resumed being an all-white
institution. Blacks had been driven out of office by beatings and
assassinations.
Revels' death
barely got a mention in the Southern press. His fellow black congressmen
received the same treatment. Revisionist historians were already
depicting Reconstruction as a fatal example of government overreach and
Northern "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" coming South to profit off of
the regions' misery, said Dray, author of "Capitol Men."
"When
some of them passed away years later, the Southern press barely
mentioned it," Dray said. "It was a part of American history that people
did not want to remember. No one wanted to talk about it or think about
it."
One group of Americans, however, never forgot what Revels represented.
During
the Great Depression, Dray said, the federal government dispatched
interviewers from the Works Progress Administration to the South to
collect oral histories from former slaves.
The
interviewers noticed a curious sight as they walked into the shacks of
the former slaves. They saw faded copies of an 1872 lithograph depicting
the first seven black members of Congress, including Revels.
The image is still haunting.
Revels
and his fellow racial pioneers are posed together, dressed in vested
suits and bow ties. They exude pride and determination, even though only
several years earlier they weren't even considered fully human by many
Americans.
Revels sits in the front
row of the group portrait. He stares forward in the picture, a man who
seems confident in what the future would bring.
What would he think of Obama if he could somehow see him today? Would he be delighted at what America has become in 2012?
Or would he think the future he embodied still seems far away?
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