by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m.
yesterday I watched the remaining two hours of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS
mini-series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The first two hours, shown last week, dealt with
the Reconstruction period itself (1865-1877), when for much of the time the
South was literally occupied by
the U.S. military and, under the rule of a Republican Congress whose leaders
took the rights of African-Americans seriously and used federal troops to
enforce them, Black Americans became landowners, businesspeople and even
elected officials.
Alas, the brave
dream of achieving racial equality in America as an aftermath of the Civil War
faded quickly under the lash of Southern terror — the Ku Klux Klan and similar
organizations were founded, often by former Confederate Army officers, and
their purpose was to destroy Black-owned property and intimidate Black people
into abandoning their dreams of equality and accepting a perpetual state of
servitude almost indistinguishable from slavery — and Northern war-weariness.
By the 1890’s
Blacks had been driven from power and fortune through a series of increasingly
restrictive measures, including voter suppression through poll taxes, literacy
tests and bizarre qualifications (dramatized in the opening scene of the movie Selma in which a would-be Black voter, played in a cameo
by Oprah Winfrey, is obliged to guess correctly how many jellybeans are in a
large jar of them) that had the side effect of disenfranchising a lot of poor
white people as well, along with outright terror — including an infamous
massacre of Black officeholders and their supporters in Wilmington, North
Carolina (the last redoubt of Black political power in the South at the end of
the 19th century) that left 600 people dead and the Cape Fear River literally running red with blood.
Gates makes
powerful points about the persistence and unscrupulousness of white
supremacists in the South and how they’re still operating today — including the
violence in Charlottesville, Virginia two years ago in which gangs of neo-Nazi
and neo-Klan activists tried to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee against the
efforts of a multiracial city government to have it taken down. Gates also
discusses the history of these Confederate monuments in the first place, saying
that they were part of a Southern propaganda campaign to rewrite the history of
the Civil War as a noble “Lost Cause” in what paternal whites enslaved Blacks
with deep kindness and humility and for their own good because these people
simply weren’t as good as us. (Barf.)
The combination
of racist propaganda, spread throughout the country via books, plays, posters,
cartoons, and ultimately movies — including D. W. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece The
Birth of a Nation, both a landmark in the
history of cinema as an art form and a bizarre piece of racist propaganda
(Gates shows the infamous scene in which Mae Marsh, as the film’s second white
female lead, jumps off a cliff to her death rather than allow herself the Fate Worse than Death of being raped by
a Black man — played by a white actor in preposterously unconvincing blackface;
for once Griffith’s racism overpowered his filmmaking acumen) which won the
endorsement of President Woodrow Wilson and became the most popular movie of
the entire silent era.
The racist
propaganda campaign also extended into the halls of academe; not only did
history departments rewrite the history of Reconstruction according to the
Southern propaganda blueprint (as I’ve noted before, if anyone in 1915 had seen
The Birth of a Nation or read about the
controversy surrounding it and gone to a library to research whether the film
was historically accurate, the books they would have found would have said it
was), biologists and anthropologists published elaborate racial typographies to
indicate that Blacks were a lower order of humanity, not fully human but simply
intermediate stages on our evolution from apes. (I remember being startled,
though not really surprised, to read reports at a recent Right-wing convention
that they were presenting speakers denouncing the early 20th-century
anthropologist Franz Boas, the first scientist to take on the scientific
racists and debunk their ridiculous theories.)
Fortunately,
Gates’s Reconstruction is not all gloom
and doom; he also dramatizes the people in the Black community who fought back,
including journalist Ida B. Wells, who traveled the country collecting stories
of lynchings and wrote for a Black paper, the New York Age, after she was driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, her
home town (I encountered her in an earlier PBS documentary on the Black press
and said her story would make a great feature film — I even named Halle Berry
as the actress who should play her) and W. E. B. Du Bois, a professor of such
giant intellect it’s hard to categorize him into any one discipline, who
published sociological studies of Black communities in Northern cities and
“made his bones” in 1903 with a collection of essays called The Souls
of Black Folk that directly challenged the
leading African-American leader of his time, Booker T. Washington.
Washington (a
name he chose for himself; the “T.” stood for the name of his former
slavemaster, Taliaferro, pronounced “Tolliver”) had become a media superstar in
1895 through a speech he’d made at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in which he
basically said that Blacks should be content to be farmers and manual laborers,
and Black schools should train them for these sorts of jobs and to be teachers
in Black-only schools, and forget about voting or political power or building
businesses or pursuing intellectual careers. Nuts to that, said Du Bois; he
thought the Black community should not only aspire to anything whites could do,
but should develop what he called a “Talented Tenth” — an intellectual elite
who would not only lead the struggle for racial equality but would serve, by
their own examples, as a response to the racist arguments about what Blacks
were and weren’t capable of doing.
Du Bois also
wrote the first major book by a qualified historian challenging the Southern
white-supremacist version of Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — a quarter-century before white historians
like Erle McKitrick, Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner (the last of whom is still
alive and was interviewed for this program, one of the few white people Gates
and the filmmakers cited as a source — in using mostly Black experts for his
talking heads Gates was clearly doing a little Talented Tenthing of his own) —
though by then he had become a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. and he had
adopted a Marxist analysis of Reconstruction for which Adam Gopnik, reviewing
the Reconstruction film and
Gates’s book Stony the Road,
published in conjunction with the documentary, for the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/how-the-south-won-the-civil-war),
rather oddly faults him:
Du Bois tries
strenuously to fit the story of the end of Reconstruction into a Marxist
framework: the Southern capitalists were forcing serfdom upon their
agricultural laborers in parallel to the way that the Northern ones were
forcing it on their industrial workers. His effort is still echoed in some
contemporary scholarship. But an agricultural class reduced to serfdom is
exactly the kind of stagnant arrangement that capitalism chafes against. Sharecropping
is not shareholding.
Not
surprisingly, I think Du Bois got it right and Gopnik got it wrong. The
Northern industrialists, financiers and other capitalists who dominated the
Republican Party in the last third of the 19th century wanted the South
as a largely dispossessed area, a sort of American latifundia that would produce cheap cotton to feed the North’s
highly developed textile industry and would also provide a source of cheap
industrial labor in case Northern white workers got too uppity and started
demanding things like decent wages, limited hours, health and safety
regulations and the right to form unions. That’s why there were huge steel
mills in Birmingham, Alabama (actually in Bessemer, a suburb created especially
to house them and named after one of the inventors of modern steel-making) by
the end of the 19th century.
Nothing sums up
the change in the attitudes of Northern Republicans like the two statements by
Ohio Congressmember John Bingham, the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment,
who in 1871 said he had definitively intended the Amendment to protect the
rights of African-Americans — and in 1881 said equally definitively that he had
intended it to protect the rights of corporations. In the last fourth of the 19th
Century the U.S. Supreme Court swung hard Right on both economic and racial
issues: it was in 1886 that the Court declared that corporations were “persons”
and therefore protected by the equal protection and due process clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendment — a doctrine that for the next 50 years would be used as a
cudgel to strike down virtually any
attempt to regulate giant corporations to protect workers, consumers or the
environment.
It led to a
concept called “substantive due process” which took the idea of “due process”
beyond its surface meaning — that if you are going to be prosecuted or
regulated, it has to be done within a legal process with certain safeguards to
make it fair — and which ruled entire areas of potential government action,
including minimum-wage legislation, health and safety regulation, and limits on
the development and industrial exploitation of public lands, presumptively
unconstitutional as a violation of the “substantive due process” rights of
corporate “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
It was also in
1883 that the Supreme Court, in a series of consolidated actions called the Civil
Rights Cases, ruled that the 1875 Civil
Rights Act, passed by a lame-duck Republican Congress after Democrats swept the
1874 midterms and which was virtually identical to the landmark bill of the
same title passed in 1964, was unconstitutional because government had no
business telling private business owners whom they may or may not serve. This
argument is still heard today; Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said during his
campaign that if he’d been in Congress he would have voted against the 1964
Civil Rights Act for that reason.
It was also the
argument Barry Goldwater made when he did
vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a key step in the historic “flip” of
America’s two main political parties on civil rights that started in the ’teens
but became final in the 1960’s. The Democrats, the party of slavery,
segregation and the Klan, became the party of equal rights for
African-Americans and, later, other oppressed groups; while the Republicans
became the party of white supremacy and racism, still calling themselves the
“Party of Lincoln” but losing all connection to what Lincoln and the other
Republican Unionists had actually been fighting for in the Civil War and ending
up on the other side.
Why Jazz Was Born in New
Orleans
The famous test
case of Plessy v. Ferguson followed 13 years later and basically enshrined
racial segregation into American law. What Gates deserves credit for pointing
out in the program is that Plessy
v. Ferguson was actually a test
case, initiated in 1892 to challenge a law in Louisiana that required separate
railroad cars for white and Black passengers. The significance of the case
originating in Louisiana and the plaintiff, Homer Adolph Plessy, having a
French-sounding last name is that Plessy wasn’t visibly Black at all: he was
one of the mixed-race New Orleans Creoles who, like the mixed-race “Coloreds”
in South Africa during apartheid,
had an ambiguous social position, lower than whites but higher than Blacks.
As the only part
of the United States that had originally been settled by the French, who had at
least a somewhat gentler attitude towards racial mixing and interracial people
than the Anglos who had settled the first 13 colonies that formed the United
States, Louisiana had given birth to a class of Creoles that identified with
white Western culture, specifically French culture, and regarded France, not
Africa, as their true homeland.
Plessy was
selected for the test case, brought by the railroads who didn’t want the extra
expense of having to maintain segregated cars, because he was a New Orleans
Creole who was only one-sixteenth Black, and in order to get himself arrested
so he could start the test case he had to cross over from a Black to a white
car and announce to a train steward that
he was Black and was refusing to leave the white car, so the steward would have
him arrested. Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896 and ruled that the equal
protection clause did not bar segregation as long as the facilities were
“separate but equal” — which, not surprisingly, they never were; the film
contains plenty of photographs of separate white and Black facilities that
show, better than any narration or talking-heads could, how decidedly
unequal the Black facilities were to the
white ones.
Gates doesn’t
mention the cultural dynamics created by the segregation laws, especially in
Louisiana — though his book (albeit not the show itself) argues that, instead
of the elaborate literary and scholarly books published by African-American
intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
but popular music in general and jazz in particular: “There was, in fact, a
genuine renaissance occurring during the Harlem literary renaissance, but it wasn’t
among the writers. The renaissance was occurring among those great geniuses of
Black vernacular culture, the musicians who created the world’s greatest art
form in the twentieth century—jazz.”
What this
ignores is that the creation of jazz was itself a direct result of racial
segregation, and in particular its imposition in Louisiana, where the proud
Creoles were thrown down from their perch midway up the racial hierarchy from
Blacks to whites and forced into the same category as the Blacks. That, I’ve
long believed, is why jazz was born when (the 1890’s) and where (New Orleans)
it was: the Creoles brought their European conservatory training and command of
the Western musical instruments to the mix, while the Blacks brought their folk
traditions and in particular the spirit of gospel music and the blues.
Had segregation
not jammed the Creoles and the Blacks of New Orleans into the same bands and
the same venues, I suspect African-American popular music would have bifurcated
into the sophisticated ragtime of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries on one
hand, and the rough-hewn folk blues of the Black working class on the other —
just as white American pop music split
between the relative sophistication of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway (and,
later, Hollywood) musical scores that have become known as the “Great American
Songbook” on one hand, and the folk traditions of bluegrass, hillbilly and
Western music that became the basis of country music on the other.
Tbe extent to
which the origin of jazz came from a fusion between the Creole and Black
cultures of New Orleans is illustrated by the personnel listings of early jazz
bands, which are full of both Anglo (Black) and French (Creole) names. One can
hear the tension between the great Creole genius Sidney Bechet and the great
Black genius Louis Armstrong on the records they made together with Clarence
Williams’ Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies in 1924.
Minstrelsy and Ethnic
Humor in General
Gates’s
discussion of Blacks in popular culture in the early 20th century is
the one that’s become typical, presenting the whole minstrelsy tradition as
racist propaganda and denying that the vaudeville and revue stages of the first
20 years of the 20th century contained equally insulting and
stereotypical presentations of white
ethnics. As I wrote in my article on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and the
demands by fellow Democrats for his resignation because he had posed in
blackface during his college years:
One
of the key elements of the Left-wing McCarthyist attack on Ralph Northam is an
hysterical, ahistorical condemnation of the whole idea of blackface. Northam’s
critics are speaking and acting as if Northam actually joined the Ku Klux Klan
or led a lynch mob. To understand what blackface really means you have to look
at it in historical context. It was part of a wide variety of ethnic
stereotypes comedians and entertainers in the U.S. trafficked in from the
mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Look at the products
of classic Hollywood and you will see comedians who specialized in playing
stereotyped Germans, stereotyped Swedes, stereotyped Irishmen, stereotyped Jews
and stereotyped Blacks.
The
Marx Brothers began their careers playing ethnic stereotypes: Groucho was the
“comic Jew,” Chico the “comic Italian” and Harpo, until he gradually got fewer
and fewer lines of dialogue until he stopped speaking on stage at all, was
“Patsy Brannigan,” the “comic Irishman.” Since the Marx Brothers actually were
Jewish, modern audiences watching their movies tend to regard Groucho as the
most “authentic” of them — but the people who went to their vaudeville
appearances, their Broadway musicals and the initial releases of their movies
saw Groucho as just another ethnic comedian playing a Jew.
There’s
evidence that at least some blackface performers regarded their work as a
genuine, heartfelt tribute to authentic Black music and culture. One of the
most interesting documents of this is the 1934 film Wonder Bar, in which Al Jolson — whose star power and status as
the first person who played the lead in a successful sound film kept blackface
and the minstrel-show tradition it sprang out of going for about two
generations after it would have otherwise died out — has two large production
numbers.
On
his whiteface number, “Vive la France” (the film is set in Paris and casts
Jolson as an American entertainer who owns a nightclub there), Jolson sings in
a high, rather whiny tenor with a fast, irritating vibrato. On his blackface
number, “Going to Heaven on a Mule,” he drops his register, sings from the
chest instead of the throat, slows his vibrato and achieves a sound
surprisingly like that of the genuinely African-American concert singers and
Broadway performers of the time. The number itself, directed by Busby Berkeley,
is a conglomeration of just about every racist stereotype you can imagine
(which probably kept this film from being revived in the early 1970’s with
Berkeley’s other major films), but Jolson’s sincerity and soul transcend the
minstrelsy conventions and are genuinely moving.
Indeed, one of
the most annoying aspects of the critique of blackface as ipso facto racism is it ignores the fact that many of the most
prominent blackface performers, as well as the songwriters who supplied them
material, were themselves members of a persecuted minority: they were Jews.
That includes not only performers like Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker
(whose star-making hit, “Some of These Days,” was written by Black songwriter
Shelton Brooks and who, though she didn’t perform in blackface, was advertised
as a “coon shouter” — i.e., a white singer who could sound Black) but
songwriters like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, as well as producers like
Florenz Ziegfeld.
When PBS ran the
three-part series Broadway: The American Musical I argued that the entire Broadway musical tradition was a fusion of
Black and Jewish culture, to the point where Broadway show creators who weren’t
either Black or Jewish consciously tried to emulate those who were. Cole Porter
once said that the reason he became a successful songwriter in the late 1920’s
after a decade of disappointments was “I learned to write Jewish,” and Jerome
Kern’s biggest hit was the faux-spiritual
“Ol’ Man River.”
That’s why I got
annoyed with the 2008 film Cadillac Records, in which Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), real-life co-owner (with his
brother) of a record label which marketed Black music to Black (and, later,
white) audiences, is portrayed as so naïve about racism his Black artists have
to explain it to him. Had I been writing the script, I would have had Chess
respond, “Look, I know all about prejudice! I’m Jewish, and a lot of the people who don’t like you don’t
like us, either!”
But then one of
my problems with a lot of modern-day social criticism from African-Americans
and their white supporters is they tend to lump everyone with fairer skin into
an amorphous “white” category and ignore the often fierce ethnic and social
prejudices between Euro-Americans depending on which part of Europe they came from. I was grimly amused
when many of the white supremacists who protested in Charlottesville in 2017
had names that sounded Italian, Slavic or Celtic — i.e., they were people who
wouldn’t have been considered “white” by previous generations of white
supremacists in the 1890’s, the 1930’s or even the 1960’s.
One good thing Gates’s Reconstruction program did on the cultural front was mount a fairly
long segment on the Black minstrel performer Bert Williams, who started out in
a comedy team with George Walker and became a huge star on his own — he was the
first Black performer featured in a Broadway musical and he joined the Ziegfeld
Follies (where W. C. Fields met him and
called him “the funniest man I’ve ever seen on stage — and the saddest man I’ve
ever seen off stage”).
Gates argues that
Williams was the pioneer of the “double act” a lot of Black performers trying to cross over to white
audiences have done: played up to the stereotypes of the white audience while
also giving his Black fans what Gates called “the wink,” the acknowledgment
that he knew he was playing a
stereotype that didn’t reflect what Blacks were really like, but he was also
making fun of the stereotype and the whites who believed it was what Blacks were really like.
Williams took on
the insulting designation of many Black performers, and characters in songs
about Blacks, as “coons” and turned it on its head by advertising himself and
Walker as “The Two Real Coons” — driving white minstrelsy performers up the
wall with their bold claim that essentially said, “Don’t watch them pretending to be us. Watch the real deal!”
Gates compared
them to the rap group N.W.A. (whose name stood for “Niggers with Attitude”),
though I loathe rap — especially the so-called “gangsta rap” N.W.A. pioneered
and personified, with its relentless glorification of murder, rape, crime in
general and acquisition of material goods (including the horribly tasteless
jewelry known as “bling”) — so much I get cold chills at any documentary that has anything nice to say about it.
Still, the point is that Williams paved the way for a lot of Black performers (including Louis Armstrong, Cab
Calloway and Richard Pryor) who built huge white followings by at once
superficially depicting and actually lampooning racist stereotypes.
Reconstruction:
The Sequel(s)
Gates races
through the last parts of his story — perhaps someday he will be able to do a
follow-up about African-American civil-rights activism in the first half of the
20th century, both the relatively sedate legal kind practiced by the
NAACP (whose founding is depicted here as part of the segment on Du Bois, who
moved from the Black-led Niagara Movement — so called because it had its
inaugural convention at Niagara Falls — to the largely white-led National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 and of which
Du Bois was the only Black member of the
founding board; instead of taking the group’s presidency he picked the role of
what was essentially its information minister, editing and writing a great deal
of its flagship magazine, The Crisis)
and more upfront activism that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidating racial segregation in
education in 1954 and creating what I’ve argued elsewhere was a sort of
“hunting license” to the African-American community.
Brown didn’t grant civil rights immediately but did spark the most intensive decade of African-American
activism in U.S. history — even though, as I said when I wrote about the first
half of this program, we shouldn’t make the easy assumption that Martin Luther
King, Jr. was right when he said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends
towards justice.” One could read the reaction of America under President Trump
and the resurgence of white supremacism and ethnic nationalism in general not
only in this country but through much of the world as a temporary setback in
the arc of history bending towards justice — or one could read the possibility
that the gains of the 1960’s civil rights movement, which then and since has
often been called “The Second Reconstruction,” will turn out to be as
evanescent as the first, as the forces of white supremacism regain control of
both America’s politics (which they’ve come close to achieving) and its culture
(from which they’re a lot farther away) and make the idea that there ever was
an African-American U.S. President as inconceivable as it was 100 years ago
that there had ever been an African-American U.S. Senator.
