(Shamefully) forgotten history

So... this book. Major book, written by a WSJ reporter, reviewed by some national newspapers when it came out. And yet I've never heard anyone mention this part of history before. I'm reading the book now, and it's really disturbing.

Short summary: after the Civil War, white lawmen in the South started arresting black freedmen on the thinnest of pretexts. There would a fine to get out of jail. If they couldn't pay the fine -- and most of them couldn't -- their debt was sold, usually to forced labor mines owned by subsidiaries of US Steel. Thousands died in those camps. The graves are still visible near some of the old dig sites.

I don't know about you all, but when I was in school black history was taught like this: slaves were freed, then nothing more until the 1960's Civil Rights movement. There's a reason for this -- between the camps and sharecropping, African Americans were still essentially slaves until WWII. It's horrible, and it's shameful that this part of our country's history has been swept under the rug for all these years.

Douglas Blackmon -- the author -- had no problems finding evidence from this period of history. The financial transactions were stowed away in the basements of Southern courthouses, basically. There are almost no accounts of the time written by African-Americans, because most Southern blacks were illiterate. But there's plenty of documentation about the lives of the whites who "leased" them, so Blackmon had a lot of material for his book.

I'd like to see more people read this, or at least be aware of it. It's horrible, but I think it's important that people know what happened.

Oh, and of course you can extrapolate from there to today's for-profit prisons... But I've ranted enough for one night.

Epic win, my library has it in epub. Thanks for this, I've always had a thing for pre-WWII black history.

My wife actually got in trouble in high school for vehemently disagreeing with the teacher, who claimed that sharecroppers never existed. My wife's great grandmother was a sharecropper. That sort of thing just boggles my mind.

This sounds depressing but interesting, I'll look for it.

It appears they also made a documentary:

http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-By-Another-Name/dp/B006JN86VW

Short story, "redemption" - the triumph of white supermacist Democrats after a period of Republican-led Reconstruction - was a throughgoing success that wound up winning the battle of the history books as well as the battle of racist-partisan political terrorism.* (There was also a white supremacist false start immediately after the war that produced some "black codes" that got an early start on slavery-under-another-name, but that was prior to "radical," aka properly Republican, reconstruction)

From having this discussion before I was under the impression that US high school history often, if not always, told the modern (no-longer-whitewashed) version of reconstruction, if not always in sufficient detail. Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution is a standard work of the new consensus, also available abridged as A Short History of Reconstruction.

It's upsetting reading.

*The fact that a sordid compromise over a hung election capped off the triumph of terroristic neoconfederates shouldn't obscure the scale of the unrest they were willing to undertake.

Good topic to bring out.I wish it was acceptable to bring up in general. It's typical that it only comes up in closed, mature communities like this.

In pre-dominantly black schools we get a lot more of the dirty details of history, though none of them talked so much about these kinds of grisly details. I can also tell you that most high school level text books gloss over every part of American history, only elaborating on such names as Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, and Corps of Discovery. Few of them talk about the racism of the fathers, of Lincoln, and the populous west that Lewis and Clark met. The disgrace of the record itself is completely out done by the disgrace of pretending it didn't happen and that everything is ok. Blacks and Whites share responsibility for this in modern times. Whitewashing history may have begun with racists, but sometimes black leaders have been too eager to "move on" and have helped bury the past. I can't imagine the psychological trauma of living with that kind of hate daily, so I reserve judging those blacks too harshly. Honestly, it's mind blowing the things that fill the American historical record. It's a lot less glorious than we teach in schools.

Also, this kind of misinterpretation/omission of history is exactly why people today can't seem to understand that racism is still very embedded, very real, and very recent. The whole "post-racial" rhetoric when Obama was nominated was saddening, because in it were statements that slavery was 200 years ago, that racism has been over for almost a century, and that people shouldn't bring up those topics any more because we've arrived. Little do these people know the various guises of slavery that remain in society even today and which enslave far more than just blacks. It never went away; it just took another form just as the book and the documentary noted. It makes it impossible to really confront racism when you have large portions of the population who don't know about these incidents and, worse, wouldn't even believe it if you told it to them. On some level it's just so awful and unbelievable the amounts of hate and destruction we committed ourselves to in the past that it repels the mind.

But off the soapbox ....modern books for schools are fighting a decades long battle against states like Texas who have literally taken it upon themselves to write what they want in the books. Truth isn't even important any more, it's all about the greatness of our mythology.

Question though: How would you guys recommend we write the history books? Granted there's a lot that has to be taught and the record is long. What do you think are key moments in history that should be taught in the classroom?

This book has been on my wish list for quite some time!

Jason went into this but I'll add: for the most part (and I'm sure Lizard_King can correct me if I'm wrong), history as an academic field during the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth century was dominated by southerners, which resulted in a quite a lot of whitewashing of the Civil War and postwar era. It's also why U.S. Grant got such a shitty historical reputation as a president; while his administration had its share of corruption it wasn't that much of an outlier at the time. But he's the guy who broke Lee's army, so southern historians did a real number on him. Anyway this is also why you hear a lot of people insist that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

Somewhere in the seventies and into the eighties you had a new generation of historians come up and the entire subject underwent a major reconsideration. Foner's work was absolutely seminal, as was James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Both brought the subjects of race and slavery back into their proper place in terms of historical significance. A couple of years ago I wrote a (rather crappy) undergrad essay that started with the sentence, "[t]he most important single fact of American history is that for the first two hundred and fifty years of this country's existence, it was legal for one man to own another as property." I still pretty much stand by that statement; I think it's difficult to overstate the degree to which slavery (and its legacy) undergirds everything in American history.

Good question. Which classroom? Your typical high-school history class is going to be limited along a variety of axes so it's sort of difficult to present the subject of history in more than the greatest hits style that you discussed. Even university level survey courses fall prey to this pattern. It's not until you get into upper-level electives in a history program that you've got an opportunity to present material in a more nuanced way.

For what it's worth - and I'm a guy who's done precisely zero in the way of formally educating others in his thirty plus year life (though that'll change in a few years!) - were I tasked with teaching an undergraduate survey course I think I'd deliberately focus away from the "important names and dates" approach and try to present American history in terms of various social and political movements. It's going to be similarly limited in the way that the great names and dates approach is limited, but at least it's a somewhat alternative perspective.

The academic version - the differences between Lincolnian and Johnsonian "lenience," the discord between Johnson and Congress, the various phases of Reconstruction, the splits in the Republican Party, the politics of it all, are probably too complicated to beat into high-schoolers very well. But the basic narrative is pretty important. They should know that it was bloody and pitched battles were fought and the bad guys won big. They should know South Carolina had a black Lieutenant Governor and US Congressman who died in poverty in the 1880s after working as a streetsweeper.

My sister is in grad school to become a middle school teacher. for an assignment she had to design a series of lessons around a theme, and she came up with this whole plan to teach a unit on "American history told through rights movements" (or something, I forgot what she called it). So she was talking about blacks, native Americans, women, GLBT issues... I should send her the info on Blackmon's book, actually. she'd probably like to teach it.

American History is upsetting reading once you dig behind the facade that we present ourselves.

Quibble: Neocofederates? Many times these were the guys that raised arms against the state; I'm still not sure if hanging the every officer above lieutenant in the Confederate army wouldn't have been better in the long run for the country as a whole. The fact that America (as a country) didn't even start to resolve the issues that resulted from the failure of Reconstruction until the late 1940's, and really didn't start until the 50's is lost on most people. We really didn't begin true integration until my living memory.

Well, I'm Canadian, but up enough on my US history that I feel comfortable slotting reconstruction into the "history that made me want to throw the book at something." Normally I just find American history - a bit like French history - sort of hilarious/obnoxious/inspirational, compared to the stolid control group of Anglo-Commonwealth history. Before LK swoops in and badgers me for impressionistic nonsense generalizations,

I didn't mean it to refer to new people so much as post-Confederacy Confederates, new or old.

One can build lovely counterfactuals without even needing to strain standards of justice, still less instituting a bloodbath. Which if anything makes it more galling.

I think this is captured by the phrase "unreconstructed Confederates?" I've always assumed that's where the "unreconstructed" cliche comes from.

(Dictionary.com bears this out

un·re·con·struct·ed

[uhn-ree-kuh n-struhk-tid] Show IPA
adjective

1.

stubbornly maintaining earlier positions, beliefs, etc.; not adjusted to new or current situations: anunreconstructed conservative.

2.

U.S. History . (of Southern states) not accepting the conditions for reinstatement in the Union afterthe Civil War.)

Apparently this word has made its way into British English as Cambridge Online has it as "having opinions or behaving in a way not considered to be modern or politically acceptable in modern times")

I love regret nothing chicken sooooooooo much

More from the book: it wasn't just the US Steel camps. Convicts were leased to the railroad companies, iron foundries, white farmers, you name it. And the death rates among convicts were higher than the average rate for slaves had been in some places. 25% was common. In Alabama one year, it was 45%. Jesus motherfucking Christ.

Guess what still happens?

Jesus. They know that selection bias is a potential problem, but they don't bother structuring the study to compensate? Hello, where are the sidebars? Where's the information that discusses proportions of people in different programs in terms of socioeconomic status / other subdivisions?

I'm also not sure how much real information they're gonna get out of a sample size of only 6,464 shared among all of the groups and only taken from five states. We have a huge and highly socially/geographically variable prison system in the US and I really don't know what you're going to glean from such a small sample when we have over a million and a half people in that system.

Assuming there are a hundred meaningful permutations of sets of individuals, a sample set of on average 64 individuals is actually enough people to draw meaningful statistical inference. Basically, anything above 10 is.

Recidivism rates seem to vary wildly pretty from state to state -- at least, from what I can glean from the incomplete studies at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. I haven't dug up any recidivism stats drawn up by race yet.

However, I did catch an unrelated statistic I've never seen. Knowing as we all do the disproportionate number of blacks in the prison system, in 2007 the percentage of white adult parolees was actually higher (41% white/38% black), and the percentage of whites on probation even greater (55%/28%). So we not only incarcerate black folks quicker, we make sure they stay there.

Based on that, it wouldn't be the worst leap of logic to assume that access to paid work programs while still incarcerated is equally as biased towards whites, but that's just a wild assumption.

It's not at all a wild assumption. The study is fatally weakened by a failure to address the problem of selection bias, and you've just outlined one of many plausible scenarios in which selection bias would occur.

Of course it was. Slaves have resale value.

I liked my high school history syllabus (UK 13-15 year old) It was a mix of teaching history, and teaching History (or rather histography) We did 1919-1939 European history, with special topic the Spanish Civil War, coupled with a marked project (mine was on an Indian freedom fighter). A typical exam question would be a contempory newspaper article, or even cartoon, with specific questions about it to test your knowledge of the context/ facts, and then a longer question on interpretation, as well as more open "write an essay on the origins of the Spanish Civil War"

Actually the syllabus was 1914-1945, but our history teacher decided that was too much scope to cover, so we only did the interwar bits, which limited our question selection in the public exams, but the school had a habit of teaching what it thought important, not what exam boards did. My practise project was on Kursk though... because, well, tanks.

We did a course called Facing History and Ourselves about the holocaust when I was in 8th grade. It was super, super interesting, especially when I went to college and most of my fellow history students thought America entered the war because they were so horrified when they found out about the concentration camps.

Hahaha. Ha. No. I was surprised that course wasn't mandatory everywhere.

I don't even know how we'd rewrite the history books--I don't know much about educating small children, but maybe teaching them "we weren't always right about everything and here is a non-whitewashed version of events" would be helpful. Also having textbooks that didn't say things like "most slave owners were very nice to their slaves." Cause what. WHAT!

Er, my US History class, which I took last year (at a public US high school), included all of that and most of the stuff mentioned in this thread. Not to be argumentative, but, I just wanted to bring in some evidence that yes, there are high schools out there that don't teach history in a rote-memory format. Was it still relatively a survey course? Yes, but the class still was able to cover this topic to some degree of specificity. And despite opposition, I think that overall there is a motion to present US History in a more multifaceted and meaningful way (though standardized testing is impeding this a lot...).

As I said, though, my impression was that HS history did actually teach the post-correction history of reconstruction, however hard it might be to guess at a "quality average."

My statement in the quoted passage had more to do with my expectation of high schoolers' ability to retain a complicated narrative of political history. It takes several sharp turns, and there's both inter- and intra-party politics of some complexity.

My private, Jewish middle school taught me that Indians scalped the peaceful settlers who were just trying to make farms out of wilderness, and besides there weren't that many people there anyway. Hurray for for the Manifest Destiny!

It's ... eerily familiar.

My last HS history class was 17 years ago. So, uhh, I guess things have changed (and I'm so old...)

My high school US History course taught the American Civil War as one waged primarily over states' rights. Not too long ago, either.

In junior high (or possibly elementary school), I read a book called Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. It was basically an unflinchingly grim look at how awful it was to be black during the Great Depression, and how ghastly sharecropping was, especially if you were picked on as a troublemaker. In high school, I was told some of the evils of the Reconstruction Era, but unfortunately got a lot of the standard nonsense about carpetbaggers as well.

In hindsight, it came off as an attempt by the textbook authors to present a balanced view where no real balance existed, a fundamentally cowardly way to tell people that their great-grandparents did some evil things without materially challenging their assumptions.

I'm a teacher like some of you here. Most textbooks I've surveyed for high school level history material hold mostly the same agenda; it's very much a survey of American greatness and it skips over as many of the shameful episodes as possible and the majority of names to commit to memory are white men. Most of what's actually defined our country is not actually taught at the public high school level. It's very much American mythology, which isn't to say there isn't truth in there. But it's more akin to national indoctrination, less teaching the lessons of our history or using our failures as a point of reference in our progress.

I applaud the many teachers and associations which work hard every year to change this. Until the charter school fame of recent times, the public wasn't getting a good look at potential curricula to employ as alternatives to rote survey courses. Many teachers care about this, as well as families and students. But we're up against state congresses with partisan agendas and over two centuries of white washing. In fact looking at states like Florida and Texas in the past few years show that some parts of the country are trying to turn back the clock on education, to go further into myth and away from the actual record.

Personally I think we have to re-think all of education so I'm not really of the opinion that changing high school (or any) curricula in history will help. Education has to become about nourishing our minds, not just teaching surveys which is what it's become. I think we have to use history as a means to apply past lessons to today's progress. But on the topic at hand I think it's disgraceful how we shrink from our past and even deny it. The way we deal with it is more tragic than the record itself. It's one way in which we prevent ourselves from learning anything about anything.

I'm kind of mad at myself, and feeling guilty. I haven't read any more of Blackmon's book since the day after I last posted about it. I just haven't felt up to facing descriptions of fellow humans being treated like animals. Worse than animals. I want to know the history, but... maybe I should just watch the documentary. Sigh.

You could try Foner, long or abridged versions. Reading about Reconstruction's false dawn and failure is depressing but not quite in the same way.

I took an AP class in American History in Las Vegas in 1992, a public high school classroom made up of 90% white faces. Although it was a broad survey class that had to cram everything from about the founding of Jamestown to Carter/early Reagan into the one class, we spent a goodly amount of time on tracking Dred Scott through the well-intended failures (at best) of Reconstruction through Brown v Board through 1964.

I'm only posting this because the when/where of someone's high school may reflect those radically awesome "community values" that we keep hearing so much about, and some communities may not place much value on teaching truth concerning the additional hundred years of oppression meted out to Niggegros after the War of Northern Aggression.

"Well intentioned failures of reconstruction" sounds a bit like a summary of the older historiography of "reconstruction as boondoggle that didn't work out," as opposed to "reconstruction as political revolution that was crushed by angry white supremacists." Or something partway between the two. Don't mean to over-interpret a short summary.

That's fair but I included the "(at best)" bit to indicate that that would be the most charitable interpretation possible given what I recall of that class as it surveyed black American culture from post-Jacksonian democracy through 1964; certainly far away from the complete exclusion of the topic mentioned by the OP. Nevermind me, I was just carpetbagging an already petering thread.

eta: Actually as I was writing that I thought it would be interesting to compare that experience in, uhm, "self reconstruction" in the US vs lead-lease in Europe after WW1 vs rebuilding Japan post-WW2 vs what we're doing now in Iraq. </separate thread alert>