Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff makes a sensible argument against Black History Month, echoing calls from an NRO writer. Normally, I’d be at least open to the argument, would sincerely wonder what Shelby Steele would say about it, and would be interested in discussing Mirengoff’s idea that insofar as Black History month can be the earliest American history elementary school-kids regularly get prior to 4th or 5th grade, it skews their overall sense of America.
But not at the moment.
For right now I’m reeling from the impact of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I’m only a third of the way through, but the author Isabel Wilkerson has stunned me with her portrayal of the segregationist South.
God, it was awful.
The sheer weight of that…well within the lived experience of many of us…
Now it shouldn’t be new or surprising to me, as I’ve been captivated by Malcolm X’s speeches, moved by the grit and the border-of-desperation faith pouring into the gospel songs, read life after life on it, experienced art-work after art-work on it, including ones of the James Baldwin and the Richard Wright variety, and gone through the thousands of pages of Taylor Branchs’s civil rights movement chronicles, learning chapter and verse about evil upon evil, well-known or not, dealt out in places like Albany, GA, St. Augustine, FL, and Farmville, VA, but the sheer enormity of it all has never, ever, hit me as hard as it does with this book.
Wilkerson tells the story of the Black migration north through three personal narratives, while also giving the larger history, and the background of thousands of interviews. They are documented and fully lived out–real lives–so it’s not a question of art like Richard Wright’s being too grim in spirit somehow–as it was rightly accused, IMO, by Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, or just generally too framed for literary purposes. And they are everyday lives, so it’s not the (real) “heroes and villains stories” one gets from reading a civil rights movement historian like Branch, but the stories of ordinary folks. In the 80s and 90s the idealistic young man in me gravitated towards the heroic and very political-ideological stories of the likes King, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Bayard Rustin, etc,…and I learned much from them, and not simply idealistic inspiration or left-liberal outrage. But perhaps that political/heroic framework did not allow me to really see what the crimes of the South meant. Now, the older man in me is more deeply struck by how pervasively the oppression of segregation walled in Wilkerson’s three not-terribly political persons in the course of their simply trying to live out their lives, to pursue dreams, have jobs, develop marriages, etc. I see and feel how the system would have worked on any imaginable pre-70s-black me.
To learn anew the old facts about lynching and such (although, yes, Wilkerson has more of them) in this context, the impact is just far greater. As is the impact of perhaps the most damning sentence in American letters…the most damning judgment of the South ever given:
They left.
Wilkerson’s book makes it clear that whatever the particular impact of cotton blights, WWI, the basic reason for the black migration north was simply this: the segregation system got worse and worse from the 1880s on, and simply became unbearable.
Back in Songbook #23, I noted that blacks don’t have very many of the classic “goin’ home” songs that you get in American pop-song, especially in country music. Maybe today, that is slowly beginning to change, and in others of my music posts, I have indicated that all American music, but black music in particular, could benefit from culturally “returning Southwards.”
I’m a conservative educator…the sort of person who likes to remind Americans that America’s history matters to them, who gives friends, and assigns students, Thomas West’s wonderful Vindicating the Founders, and agrees with 90% of West’s argument vindicating them from bad PC-agenda-laden history charging them with self-interested racism. I’m actively working to bring Founderism, rightly qualified by a certain contrary voices, into American classrooms. I’m actively working to get students to consider what their heritage means. And I think I’ve made it evident on this blog that I think America has a good deal to learn from the South in general, especially about its religious roots, certain “alternative” agrarian/communitarian traditions, certain Stoic and manly traditions, and its tragic aspects, and especially today–Founderism is good and necessary, but voices like Percy’s and Portis’s must remain heard.
But man, you read something like this book, and you wonder. You wonder about the nice South you live in now, about singin’ along with Charles Portis to a Johnny Cash tune. You wonder how much you should celebrate America, the entire America that tolerated and made the system possible, or even explore its soul. Even if you know with the likes of West, that without the natural rights philosophy, it all could have gone on much longer. So maybe you should be with Shirley Caeser singing about spiritual combat, about “tearing Satan’s kingdom down,” a kingdom that holds territory in the souls of black folks as much as in any, instead of about how this is the land of the free.
A book like Wilkerson’s brings it home that there was a darkness and coldness in the American heart at times that defies all explanation. Whose evil is made starker by its contrast with the founding principles, with the all the various flourishings of freedom in American society. Things like the mad black-power politics that eventually destroyed Detroit, or even things like 90% of American blacks voting this last time for such an obviously badly governing president, become understandable, and even begin to seem trivial. I’m all for many more movies like Lincoln and for the Founder-friendly scholarly movement inspiring them, and sincerely believe such a movement can teach and can heal, but maybe only the South’s remaining serious about its turn to Christianity (it ain’t New England that’s “Puritan” anymore!), and American blacks really seeing that this culminates in serious repentance that embraces them, can begin to loosen the weight of it all.
February 5th, 2013 | 3:10 am
And now for the most part they are coming back to the South. The North has made zero racial progress in forty years; indeed, it is likely that the false hopes fed to blacks by northern leftist have if anything worsened race relations north of the MD line. Basically the North has nothing to teach the South about racial relations because the South operating under conditions imposed from above largely by Northerners has created a racial environment far more stable, open, and less bitter than what prevails in those states were blacks left to. Indeed, the Northern exodus facilitated a change in Black denominational patterns that largely forestalls the likelihood of religion playing a role in a historical healing. The liberal churches blacks drifted into are bastions of liberationist theology that is basically completely missing from Black Christianity in the South.
February 5th, 2013 | 5:05 am
[...] Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff makes a sensible argument against Black History Month, echoing calls from an NRO writer. Normally, I’d be at least open to the argument, would sincerely wonder what Shelby Steele would say about it, and would be interested in discussing Mirengoff’s idea that insofar as Black Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 5th, 2013 | 9:37 am
As someone else who argues for Founderism in academic circles, I agree with what you say here. The reality of the evil of segregation means three things for me, practically:
1) I try not to get to cute with constitutional arguments about Brown v. Board, since the ruling (though poorly argued) was absolutely necessary. Bussing is a whole different matter.
2) I will argue against Conservative who disagrees the 1964 Civil Rights act.
3) I stress how terrible it was for our history that the 14th Amendment was effectively read out of the Constitution by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson and even more blatantly in the 1883 “Civil Rights Cases”
February 5th, 2013 | 9:41 am
To me, the greatest argument for things like the Marshall Plan isn’t even Germany after WWI, but the American South after the Civil War.
One wonders whether Lincoln could have upheld the sentiments of his 2nd inaugural address against those looking for retribution. Maybe. Perhaps not.
February 5th, 2013 | 9:45 am
^Correction: “against any Conservative who disagrees with the 1964 Civil Rights Act”
February 5th, 2013 | 9:57 am
“…. there was a darkness and coldness in the American heart at times that defies all explanation.” Really Carl, is that what you believe?
My impression of you is that you’re a better scholar than that.
Americans, including white southerners, are the most generous of people.
You should, as a scholar, be asking yourself why (many/most) southern whites hated the Negro so much following the War Between the States and wanted to keep him ‘down’?
Robert Penn Warren mentions a few reasons, do any other Southern writers, academics (Dr. Genovese?) or anthropologists discuss the subject? It’s a shame you didn’t examine the question in toto before you wrote this blog.
February 5th, 2013 | 1:23 pm
Having grown up in the 1950s and ’60s, my perception of Southern whites in the heyday of segregation is that not all of them were full of bigotry toward blacks, but they tolerated the worst bigots among them, much as the German people allowed the extremists in the Nazi Party to do their worst, and much as most modern American Muslims do not actively condemn the religious bigotry of the Jihadists.
February 5th, 2013 | 2:52 pm
Brian: I agree. It may be significant that General Marshal had a relative who surrendered at Appomattox with Robert E. Lee and that he grew up south of Pittsburgh before returning to his family’s roots in Virginia for military training.
February 5th, 2013 | 4:23 pm
Well, Robert, I’ll ask you why.
I have been wanting to read E. Genovese’s stuff on the planter class…and as for the R Penn Warren, you’ll have to steer me.
I grant with Herbert Storing that it was a fairly rational position to think, circa 1700-1865, that while multi-racial empires, or national kingdoms, whether slave-holding or not, had worked in history, but that there was simply no precedent in all human history for a multi-racial republic or democracy. Americans were already pushing the limits of the possible by combining republicanism with physical extension, after all. They couldn’t load experiment upon experiment. So, it made basic sense to think you either a) had to keep slavery in place, or b) had to resort to colonization schemes if you were to get rid of it, even gradually. Those who know U.S. political history from 1820-1860 know the dynamics that did not allow this “basic sense” to keep the peace.
But once the war was lost, what kind of rationality could think, that with railroads, modern communications, the explicit repudiation of Dred Scott, etc., that a whole class of legally free persons could be subjugated and perpetually terrorized into an only semi-constitutional and in every way lawyerly-finessed status of half-citizenship (really much less than half)? If you were worried, for example, as Jefferson was in the “wolf by the ears” letter, about a gathering resentment/vengeance-seeking of freed blacks, if they were to remain in America, clashing with a long-bred racism of the whites, what system could possibly generate more of these feelings, on both sides, than the segregationist one? If you couldn’t win a vote then and there authorizing massive colonization, or a separate American state for blacks, didn’t you have to admit that you and your descendants logically had to try the multi-racial democratic republic, had to give it the best shot you could? Which meant the black vote, desegregated schools, black interest groups (sharecropper unions included), and yes, miscegenation, all logically followed, could only be put off by illegal and mob-empowering means, could not be put off indefinitely anyhow, and so must be legally set under way from the get-go? What kinds of corruption did white Southerners invite into their own politics, society, religion, mores, and very souls, in the absurd attempt to maintain (or as, Raymond suggests, to merely tolerate) this system?
And economically, segregation and the labor-flight it eventually drove was disastrous for the South. Not the initial reason for Southern impoverishment, but we can say that Booker T. Washington’s voice simply wasn’t heeded by those, the Southern whites, who needed to heed it most.
So I say the white South was in spiteful wound-nursing denial about the realities of their situation, as were those short-term political actors in the North who gave up and let segregation spread. (To some extent, I’m speaking crudely, as a historian like C Vann Woodward can show you that what happened was due to certain political coalitions of whites in South losing, and others winning.)
I’m with CJ. Even if I recognize that Jim Buckalew may be right about the some of the ironies the entire situation has bred. (Jim, whatever evidence you’re aware of about a trend of black return to the South, please pass that on.)
And my complaint about the reconstruction is that it wasn’t radical enough.
February 5th, 2013 | 5:23 pm
Carl, you are magnificent here. I’m going to get hold of the Wilkerson book. Maybe Founderism ultimately founders, at least to some extent.
Heading for my turntable (still got one) for Randy Newman, with “Sail Away” and “Rednecks”, and maybe Buffy Sainte-Marie with “My country tis of thy people you’re dying”.
February 5th, 2013 | 6:04 pm
Carl’s here’s a review of Genovese’s later books that critiques the Southern ‘divines’ prewar and postwar positions:http://are.as.wvu.edu/genoves.htm
There’s, of course, more by him.
There’s a essay in “First Principles” by Steve Ealy on the Agrarian’s “I’ll Take My Stand,” and Penn Warren’s contribution on the Southern Negro circa 1929, titled “The Briar Patch.” Both are well done. Warren’s position is that the Southern Black missed an opportunity following the War Between the States to unite with the defeated Whites (Rebel soldiers) and rebuff the Yankee authorities and carpetbaggers both white and black. Instead they enjoyed the time when these ex-Confederates were forced by the Yankees to “sit at the end of the table.” As you know that only lasted until Reconstruction was over then the White Southerns got their revenge. Human nature (Lockean?) and less Christian, it appears, on both sides.
I’d like that essay for you but I’m too stupid to link two things without screwing up the works. Also, you should know, that Warren’s daughter told me that “he’d grown” with regard to race relations following his 1929 “The Briar Patch” essay. Personally, I kind of think he told the truth of stuff, as he knew it. Also, I think the ground of “racism” is economics (see the New York Draft Riots), Lincoln violated the Constitution in ordering his armies to invade the South, who were merely exercising certain legal rights, and your last sentence reveals your heart, and that’s sad, very sad.
February 5th, 2013 | 6:12 pm
Here’s the Ealy piece:
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1611&theme=home&page=5&loc=b&type=cttf
February 5th, 2013 | 8:14 pm
I’m with HT and I’m getting the book too. And I agree with Carl on Reconstruction.
February 5th, 2013 | 8:57 pm
Not sure what you guys are getting at with your Reconstruction cracks, but it’s quite clear that there was tons of malice and very little charity towards the defeated South, and one hundred years of horror followed quite naturally from there.
February 5th, 2013 | 9:42 pm
Brian, you should blog here. You are the voice of reason.
February 5th, 2013 | 11:38 pm
What malice? And what charity?
Southern whites could no longer hold southern blacks in servitude. Were southern whites under Reconstruction subjected to slavery themselves, or what?
February 6th, 2013 | 3:21 pm
Carl: the work by Warren to consult is “Who Speaks For the Negro?” (1965). There is also an earlier interview with Ralph Ellison, circa 1957.
February 8th, 2013 | 8:04 am
[...] at First Things’s Postmodern Conservative, Carl Smith posted a soul-searching review of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great [...]
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