A Reactionary History?

Slavery in Alabama: A Call to Action Kelly Kennington (bio) For the entirety of its 200-year history, Alabama has been plagued by racial inequality and injustice. The state gets considerable attention from historians and the general public for its Civil Rights-era history of activism, bravery, and violence. But after two centuries of fighting for equity, Alabama continues to lead the nation in some of its bleakest statistics, including the size and treatment of the prison population, poverty rates, and racial health disparities.1 Few scholars would argue with the contention that one of the significant roots of these problems is the state’s history of slavery. On the eve of the American Civil War, Alabama had the nation’s fourth largest enslaved population in terms of overall numbers and the percentage of enslaved people in the population. The 1860 census lists 435,080 people living in slavery in Alabama, constituting a staggering forty-five percent of the state’s population.2 The enslaved men, women, and children who built the state’s grandiose antebellum mansions [End Page 3] and government buildings, cleared the fields, and toiled to produce the wealth of the early state’s leaders have too often faded to the background of Alabama’s history as it is discussed in schools, in popular culture, and even in historical scholarship. Of course, there are numerous exceptions to this statement, but this potential overgeneralization is necessary, if only to emphasize and encourage our historians, teachers, and leaders to work harder to foreground this inescapable and essential history. Alabama must grapple with its full history to trace the origins of modern problems and seek a way forward. The history of slavery in Alabama is a story worth telling, and much of this rich history is still waiting to be unearthed and elaborated on by the next generation of scholars and students. This essay provides a brief overview of slavery in Alabama by discussing the existing historical scholarship; more importantly, it hopes to encourage future research on the subject. Alabama’s history of slavery has gotten more attention in the past year because of the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery in April 2018.3 Thousands of visitors have toured the new museum’s exhibits detailing the slave trade and slavery in the state’s capital city. This renewed interest and attention provides an opportunity for further research into the many subjects connected to the institution of slavery in Alabama which, to this point, have been woefully understudied. Although scholarly histories of slavery have included Alabama in some of their broad discussions, the last statewide study specifically devoted to slavery in Alabama is almost seventy-five years old.4 In addition, much of the scholarship touching on slavery in Alabama that has appeared in more recent popular and scholarly articles, books, and textbooks relies too heavily on this 1950 account or takes problematic sources, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narratives, at face value.5 It is time for an updated survey of the [End Page 4] state’s history of slavery or, at least, new scholarship focusing on more specific topics on the history of slavery in Alabama. While this brief article cannot accomplish either of these feats, it will lay out some potential topics relating to slavery in the state and suggest possible directions that are worthy of new scholarly treatments and popular interest. ________ Any history of slavery in Alabama must begin with Native American practices because the bulk of the modern state’s territory spent centuries in the hands of Creek and other Indian nations. This article will primarily discuss Creek practices of captivity and slavery, but it also draws on the broader scholarship on Native American slavery.6 In Creek and other Native American societies, slavery was one piece of a collection of captivity practices that originated with taking prisoners after battles fought against neighboring tribes. After capture, the captives could then be symbolically tortured and killed, adopted into Creek families, or enslaved. Some of these captives were used to replace fallen warriors or other members of the town.7 For...

It is a special honor to publish our work alongside rigorous critiques from Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kristoffer Smemo, Eric Schickler, and Devin Caughey. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate our research in the pages of Labor with such an esteemed and interdisciplinary group of labor historians and political scientists. In this memo we will restate our argument, address three common concerns raised by the commentators, respond to specific questions from individual commentators, and reflect on the potential implications of our argument for contemporary American politics.Our article, “Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies,” argues that the CIO's political action committee (CIO-PAC) contributed to an ongoing anti-labor backlash from the Republican Party. The CIO-PAC was founded in 1943 and quickly formed a de facto alliance with the Democratic Party. Although the CIO-PAC repeatedly claimed to be nonpartisan, 94 percent of its endorsements in 1944 went to Democrats. While the CIO-PAC's partisan political engagement helped to attract prolabor support from Democratic members of Congress, it simultaneously pushed the Republican Party further toward anti-labor legislation.The CIO-PAC's opposite effects on the two parties meant that CIO power was associated with increasing polarization; the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on congressional labor legislation was small in districts and states where the CIO was weak, but this difference grew as CIO strength increased. The result was that Republicans were most likely to support anti-labor legislation, such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, when they represented constituencies in which the CIO was at its strongest. As Schickler and Caughey note, this dynamic cannot be explained by most theories of representation, which would expect Republican support for unions to increase with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. In other words, the CIO faced its fiercest enemies in places where we might otherwise expect it to have attracted friends.This polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC, as we stress throughout our article, was not the only cause of the passage of Taft-Hartley. Southern Democrats almost unanimously supported Taft-Hartley on the grounds that the CIO's efforts to unionize the South posed a threat to white supremacy. Around the country, public opposition to the CIO strike wave of 1945–46 encouraged many Democrats and Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. And the rising conservatism of the Republican Party, which had only increased since its late 1930s opposition to the New Deal, made Republicans more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Democrats were. Independent of these important dynamics, we assert that the CIO-PAC's political engagement further galvanized Republican opposition to organized labor in a way that may have contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley.Our argument is therefore as nuanced as it is controversial, and we are excited to see it inspire difficult questions and critiques. Throughout the commentators’ excellent responses, three main issues were raised repeatedly. First, what was the relationship between the CIO-PAC and the anti-labor animus that motivated large parts of the Republican Party? If one caused the other, our commentators point out, then surely the 1943 creation of the CIO-PAC cannot explain a Republican anti-labor backlash that began in the 1930s. We believe that this common critique is based on a misunderstanding of our argument, and we welcome the opportunity to restate and clarify our claim that “the American labor movement's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Republican and Democratic Parties.”Second, how did the CIO-PAC influence Republicans beyond our brief example of New York's 1944 Senate election? While our quantitative analysis does demonstrate a general relationship across the United States, we understand the desire for more qualitative evidence that the CIO-PAC's de facto alliance with the Democratic Party pushed the Republican Party in an anti-labor direction. Below, we briefly discuss how the CIO-PAC's 1946 decision not to endorse progressive, prolabor Republicans in Wisconsin and Minnesota likely contributed to the election of anti-labor Republicans (Joseph McCarthy and Edward John Thye), who voted in favor of Taft-Hartley the following year.Third, was the CIO-PAC responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947? Cobble suggests that we unfairly blame the CIO-PAC for the anti-labor conservatism of the Republican Party and the passage of Taft-Hartley—“mighty weights,” she writes, “for the CIO-PAC to bear.” Schickler and Caughey, similarly, write that our article suggests that the CIO-PAC “cost unions more than it gained them” and therefore represented a strategic mistake by the CIO. However, we have no intention of holding the CIO materially responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley, which was ultimately the result of numerous crosscurrents in American political life. Our hope is merely to draw attention to important negative consequences of the CIO-PAC (increased Republican backlash) that have been overlooked in previous research. Whether or not this negative effect was outweighed by the positive effect of increased Democratic support requires additional research. Similarly, more investigation and debate is needed to determine whether or not an alternative political strategy existed by which the CIO could have captured the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative consequences.We believe that the CIO's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties. This means that (1) the CIO's decisions regarding the PAC were influenced by the labor policies advocated by the two parties and that (2) the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent labor policy positions of both parties.Regarding the first point, our article clearly explains how the labor policies supported by Democrats and Republicans in the late 1930s and early 1940s influenced the CIO's decision to create a PAC and almost exclusively to endorse Democrats. The prolabor legislation supported by President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party during the New Deal of the 1930s made a CIO alliance with the Democrats an appealing option. As we note in the article, the roots of the CIO-PAC's alliance with Democrats can be traced back to the CIO's Non-Partisan League of 1936, a short-lived organization that campaigned for FDR's reelection after realizing that “a willing Roosevelt administration offered labor a chance for a new kind of political advocacy.”Just as Democratic support for prolabor policies attracted the CIO, growing Republican opposition to organized labor made a CIO alliance with the GOP all but impossible. As we note in our article, the CIO's 1942 report on the possibility of creating a political action committee concluded that unions “should not pretend that there is the slightest possibility of our achieving genuine influence in the Republican Party” given that “the Republican Party had reconstituted itself on anti–New Deal grounds, making it an unlikely partner.” We also explicitly noted that before the CIO-PAC, “the GOP joined forces with the business community in an increasingly aggressive backlash against the New Deal in the late 1930s and 1940s. This renewed alliance paved the way for an ideological assault on labor rights in the name of economic freedom.” In these ways, we agree with the commentators and the conventional wisdom that “the conservative counterreaction against labor was already well underway in Congress by the late 1930s, with overwhelming support from Republicans.” As we write, “Of course, the Republican Party's move toward anti-unionism was not solely driven by the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party.”However, the Republican Party's general shift toward anti-labor policies before 1943 is only part of the story of Republican voting on Taft-Hartley in 1947. Most important, this rising conservatism cannot explain the variation that continued to exist among Republicans on questions of labor legislation. As Smemo discusses, the vote on Taft-Hartley exposed a rift within the Republican Party; while some “yearned to gut New Deal labor law,” other members of the GOP “could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor movement.” Yes, the GOP was broadly moving to the right of the Democratic Party on labor issues, but many Republicans still voted against anti-labor legislation throughout the Eightieth Congress (1947–48).This is where the second part of our coevolutionary argument comes into play: the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent voting behavior of both political parties. For Democrats, support for unions (voting against Taft-Hartley) increased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. For Republicans, by contrast, support for unions decreased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. As our interlocutors emphasize, the overall impact of the CIO-PAC on congressional voting was therefore to increase polarization between the two parties.Thus, we fully agree with Smemo that “the anti-labor reaction in Congress began shortly after the 1936 elections” and with Schickler and Caughey that “the CIO-PAC formed in 1943 largely in reaction to the consolidation of this new conservative bloc.” This earlier conservative backlash contributed to the large difference between Republican and Democratic voting on Taft-Hartley; model 4 in table 1 shows that Democrats, on average, were less likely than Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. However, such general partisan differences tell us nothing about why Democrats and Republicans voted similarly to one another in states and districts where the CIO was weak, but voted so disparately in places where the CIO was strongest. We can better understand this polarization, we argue, if we explore the ways in which the CIO-PAC made friends of Democrats and enemies of Republicans.Caughey and Schickler note that the core qualitative evidence for the mechanism presented in our article is an analysis of the New York Senate race in 1944, in which the Republican Party, confronting the CIO-backed Democrat Robert Wagner, decided not to nominate the relatively prolabor candidate Irving Ives in favor of avowed anti-communist Thomas Curran. The reasoning for this decision, we contend, was significantly rooted in the party's reaction to the presence of the CIO-PAC, which had made it difficult for prolabor Republicans to rely on traditional nonpartisan union support and had convinced party leaders to instead shift toward a more explicit anti-union (in this case, anti-communist) stance.As Caughey and Schickler point out, that was not the end of the story, nor did this particular moment signify a permanent break between Republicans and labor. Ives was nominated in 1946 and defeated former governor Herbert H. Lehman in the Republican wave of that year, signifying that the party as a whole was not quite ready to fully commit to a strategy of polarizing the electorate.Yet as Smemo's response to our article makes plain, this partial retreat from a stridently anti-labor platform did not necessarily imply a concomitant shift toward labor. Instead, it reflected a complicated negotiation among the factions of the Republican Party to take advantage of the splits in the labor movement as well as find a way to reconcile hardline business conservatism with the more accommodationist interests in the party. But this move almost inevitably involved shifting the priorities away from explicit alliance with the unions themselves and instead toward making labor legislation more favorable to management.1 After all, despite the endorsement of the AFL, Irving Ives did indeed vote for the Taft-Hartley Act. Similarly, Smemo points out that Ives's Fair Employment Practices Commission was “notoriously weak” and that he championed an “industrial pluralism to keep industrial unions subordinate to management”; by comparing Ives to Curran, our article may have overstated Ives's prolabor credentials.More broadly, however, Cobble points out that the class of 1946 included conservative Republican senators from states without a particularly strong CIO presence, some of whom (like Harry Cain and James Kem) would also vote for Taft-Hartley.2 We do not dispute that the Republican Party as a whole would have “jumped at the chance to eviscerate the Wagner Act in 1947.” What we contend is that in places where the CIO was strong, the Republican response to the PAC was particularly negative. For instance, twelve Republicans either won open seats or beat incumbent Democrats in the 1946 elections; of these, seven were in states with significant CIO membership. At the same time, rather than accommodating labor or moderating their party's pro-Taft-Hartley position, all seven voted for the bill.3 To conventional theories of interest group politics, such an outcome is very puzzling: it appeared that by 1946 in many of those states we would expect the CIO's voice to be loudest and most persuasive, strongly anti-labor Republicans were instead elected. While we agree that a general conservative backlash in public opinion (as well as Truman's more general unpopularity and the onset of the Cold War) partly explains this pattern, we contend that the threat posed by the CIO-PAC to Republicans seems to have played a key polarizing role.Take, as another example, the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who defeated the progressive incumbent Robert La Follette Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary in 1946 and went on to secure one of the state's Senate seats. Cobble is correct that Wisconsin was not the most favorable state for CIO political activism (although it was in the 70th percentile in terms of CIO density among US states) and that McCarthy's conservatism seems particularly ideological. However, the CIO was particularly active in the Wisconsin's urban centers and actively worked to undermine La Follette's campaign by attacking him for being insufficiently committed to the New Deal.Many historians have attributed the CIO's animosity toward La Follette to a communist faction of the union active in Milwaukee, which was ideologically opposed to his stance against the USSR. But historian David Oshinsky convincingly demonstrates that even “the anti-Communists” in the CIO “were committed firmly to the Democratic party and pictured La Follette's return to the GOP as the Waterloo for liberal unity in Wisconsin.”4 Thus, Howard McMurray, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, engaged in a calculated effort to appeal to CIO partisanship by tying La Follette—a consistent supporter of many of the New Deal labor efforts, even though lukewarm at times in his support for Roosevelt—to “‘calculated subversion’ of the liberal forces in Wisconsin.”5 Throughout the campaign, McMurray and the labor press worked in tandem to attack La Follette and shift the labor vote toward the Democrats, a strategy that largely reflected the national CIO-PAC's own priorities.Moreover, the attack was successful. La Follette's vote share plummeted in labor wards (particularly those with strong CIO presence) in cities like Kenosha and Milwaukee during the primary in 1946, while the Democrat's rose relative to 1940, when La Follette had last been on the ballot,6 even though the AFL had directly endorsed La Follette's candidacy. As the New York Times opined in 1946, “The CIO forces contributed to La Follette's as the CIO-PAC the to vote in the Democratic might Joseph McCarthy have from La Follette's at the of the Oshinsky that at the of the Republican a relatively in to even made a to the labor vote that do not blame labor for and and leaders who had that labor unions are as a part of the American way of as some of the on As the campaign however, and he the effect of the CIO-PAC's campaign against La McCarthy seems to have increasingly convinced of the political benefits of tying labor directly to concerns about Thus, he claimed that the union strategy of labor action with the who that their theories will in an of industrial and and he McMurray of being more than a being by the in In other words, though McCarthy was particularly to the interests of organized it that he also no to to the of industrial Instead, he went on the progressive Republicans also from the CIO's shift toward partisanship in the 1946 even when they the direct of the a former of the Party in Minnesota who had to the Republicans in of increasing in 1940, had been a to labor and had been a key of the state's liberal In had voted in favor of the Wagner Act. However, by 1946 the CIO had largely for partisan the way for his conservative Republican Edward to secure the party's and in the general In his Thomas noted that despite the that such as the and the would back in the state's the CIO will vote in the Democratic primary where there is a better for among the CIO, and Democratic In this case, the partisan shift by the CIO-PAC less for Republicans to to labor they increasingly that industrial were willing to in Republican at other words, we agree with our interlocutors that the story did not end with Irving Ives's in But the partisan by the CIO-PAC had a effect on a of Senate in the following and made it in some the Republican Party to shift even further away from an alliance with organized is that the McCarthy and also to a mechanism which the CIO-PAC may have contributed to the Republican backlash against organized labor. In both the CIO-PAC its support from progressive Republicans senators and helped to the outcome of Republican toward anti-labor both of whom went on to general in 1946 and vote in favor of Taft-Hartley in 1947. If the CIO-PAC had supported prolabor Democrats while also prolabor Republicans such as La Follette and the of the Republican Party in may have been less the very it is to imagine that CIO-PAC support for La Follette and could have their primary and general election as well as two Senate against Taft-Hartley. We are therefore grateful to our commentators for us to further explore the effect of the CIO-PAC on Republicans New is for new research on the 1946 election of anti-labor Republicans in and states in which the CIO was well organized Republicans won Senate and voted in favor of Taft-Hartley. whether if how the CIO-PAC influenced Republican and the subsequent labor policy positions of Republicans in these the same time, we that the CIO-PAC played an important and overlooked in the of Taft-Hartley, we do not contend that the CIO be for the of the GOP backlash or the passage in 1947. The argument we in our article is more nuanced and less than the presented by our We that the CIO-PAC to a backlash from the Republican Party that in the passage of As explained we that the Republican backlash against organized labor began before the CIO-PAC, our argument that the CIO-PAC merely contributed to a Similarly, we believe that it was this Republican backlash numerous but not to the that in the passage of Taft-Hartley. To be we do not believe that the creation of the CIO-PAC and its informal alliance on its to the GOP backlash or the passage of being we do that the partisan polarization associated with the CIO-PAC important and questions about the and of The commentators of the CIO-PAC's alliance with the Democratic Party and that the CIO gained more from Democrats than it from Cobble argues that the CIO-PAC the more than the and that “the effect of the CIO than the Similarly, Schickler and Caughey that was only the CIO was so to the Democratic Party that it anti-labor legislation as as it In these ways, the commentators to our main argument about the negative of the CIO-PAC it contributed to the Republican anti-labor while that these were clearly outweighed by the positive But we believe that the debate is not quite this if the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its it that an alternative political strategy could have captured most of these benefits without suffering all of the same As Schickler and Caughey note when our that Republicans were increasingly anti-labor as CIO strength in their the only dynamic in American political is that increasingly when the of the CIO have a way to support prolabor if most of were without a backlash of the of white In other words, the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its does not it was the alternative strategy was the nonpartisan political to our friends and our of their political party. the CIO have continued this nonpartisan in a way that the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative In our article, we offered two to the of the First, a large that the AFL had impact on the or passage of prolabor legislation during the early our own analysis of congressional voting on the Wagner Act that AFL union density was not associated with support or opposition from Democrats or As we the AFL support nor opposition from either however, and for the kind of debate we hope our work will argues that “the AFL to national with a in the early and some with the prolabor the way for the Wagner But if the nonpartisan contributed to such important the CIO could also have support for prolabor legislation without a partisan alliance with the Democratic Party. there a political strategy between the nonpartisan and the CIO-PAC that could have support from Democrats without simultaneously backlash from a debate about the political strategy of the CIO would a debate about the CIO's economic strategy during the 1940s. Schickler and Caughey, and have that the strike wave at the end of to a public backlash against the CIO that contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley in The CIO was the argument and a strategy might have captured important economic without the backlash that in Taft-Hartley. In contrast, argues that organized was driven by a of CIO during than strike for and a better when the opportunity CIO leaders a in for union that the union and large In a this may have the CIO more than it but suggests that an alternative strategy may have many of the same benefits without suffering the same the three common concerns the commentators posed a of questions that This briefly on these additional were very to that Schickler and Caughey our and of CIO density to be both and are correct that the only other on CIO comes from is for only congressional our for congressional The two are relatively for the districts in the with our of CIO density is are also when despite the relative in variation districts as we voting on Taft-Hartley model 1 from table we find a negative and significant between Democrat and CIO. This means that the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on Taft-Hartley increased with the strength of the CIO. The main difference we find the is that the effect of CIO is no positive and when one the CIO density is not associated with Republican support for this in it is that our article may have a for our argument about the CIO-PAC and the Republican we only that the CIO-PAC had negative consequences if it Republicans to support What if the CIO-PAC only in a relationship between CIO density and Republican voting on that (as we the suggests that Republican members of Congress did not respond to the CIO in the way most theories of would Republicans in districts with CIO constituencies were no more likely to vote against Taft-Hartley then were Republicans in districts with CIO Taft-Hartley was supported by the overwhelming of Republicans in Congress, within the party continued to Republican members of the and Republican members of the Senate their support from the vote on Taft-Hartley. In his on the relationship between Taft-Hartley and the Republican Party, Smemo that this between and Republicans into the subsequent Smemo explains that the GOP to gut New Deal labor the party's could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor this welcome for a Smemo the for more research on the dynamic relationship between the CIO-PAC and the Republican Party. Our article demonstrates that in Republicans with strong CIO constituencies were more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Republicans with CIO this relationship into the a between contrast, Smemo suggests that the within the GOP may have been the it could be that in were the of anti-labor legislation such as the by course, this will further research on congressional voting in the If the dynamic we in our article during this then the polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC Democrats but may to explain partisan polarization a of contrast, if Smemo is correct that the relationship in the (as Schickler and note that most theories of would then this would a for did the CIO-PAC from Republicans in to to in the way we would expect organized interest to the CIO from many Republicans from strong CIO states voted in favor of Taft-Hartley) and its political strategy in a way that Democratic support without If such strategic would further about the creation of the CIO-PAC and the passage of the CIO have such a political strategy earlier and the passage of the effects of the CIO-PAC on both the Democratic and Republican as well as the more general consequences of shift away from is to the of in the United Taft-Hartley was not only a for it also a relatively political for the unions as part and of the Democratic we believe it is to organized labor and party in a coevolutionary This us that for one within a party in partisan rather than can have and creating The and engaged of our interlocutors to our argument about the of political strategy on the part of the CIO also the of and the of specific to on work on the passage of Taft-Hartley in may even for contemporary American to be “the most is clearly meant to and the New Deal, when organized labor first began its alliance with the Democratic Party. as in the the Democratic Party is clearly the one with which unions have the our research suggests that labor be with its partisan of the Republican Party inevitably to power in the And while GOP no like the progressive Republicans of the 1930s, there still may be some potential for Republicans to support organized Republican members of the of voted in favor of the the to the most prolabor legislation in Congress in a And while the of the for the increasingly labor there is potential for the party's faction to support labor unions moving a Republican and that Republican senators share his that a conservative labor movement.” Although labor unions would be in to most Republican it is also to imagine that Senate could to Republicans who would then to be enemies of organized with one party can the of prolabor policies to the same other policy in contemporary American life. labor movement be of its of who power in This may only be however, if unions are willing to from a Democratic Party that itself increasingly the of class and among Our story of the CIO-PAC and Taft-Hartley suggests that labor movement would be to find ways to Democrats without potential in the such a it did for the CIO-PAC in the may more to the of the than to on of the labor As their own but they do not it as they they do not it but given and from the

Bertrand Tavernier’s film Coup de torchon (1981) in dialogue with Jim Thompson’s novel Pop . 1280 (1964) and Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) produces an historical echo chamber around racial violence which is rooted in layers of historical practices and discourses with transatlantic ramifications. This article argues that racial violence resonates across historical periods and functions as a metonymic narrative thread between the texts, bringing together the history of slavery, racial segregation, colonial violence and neo-colonial power as an integral part of Western culture and identity. This article analyses this historical convergence as a form of multiple enunciation, creating a metatextual space which allows for the articulation of a strong critique of Western imperial violence and thought systems.

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South Susan V. Donaldson (bio) Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them. —J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history—and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history. . . . Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the [End Page 267] antebellum white South's systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history—in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). Toni Morrison, for one, has seen it as her specific charge to search out those silences "for the unspeakable things unspoken" and finally to retrieve them from the realm of the forgotten and give them voice ("Unspeakable" 210). But there are also issues that have generated furious arguments since the publication of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner: that is, what is it that stories and histories of slavery should say, what narrative forms should they take, who should write them—and for what audiences? These are questions that have provided much of the impetus for new categories of writing about slavery, the most notable of which are novels like Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Morrison's Beloved, often referred to as "neo-slave narratives." Two 2003 novels, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Known World and Valerie Martin's Orange Prize-winning Property, suggest yet another category: that of post- or anti-plantation tradition novels drawing inspiration in part from the tradition of slave narratives, especially those by Solomon Northup, Henry Box Brown, and William and Ellen Craft, but also from the necessity of responding to and writing against the long shadow cast by Gone with the Wind on popular memories of slavery, the antebellum South, and the Civil War era. Indeed these two novels cast their sights farther afield by interrogating mastery itself, and by implication master narratives of history, by exposing the daily operations and limits of power and domination, excavating the counternarratives blocked by those operations, and ultimately revising both the content and the form of the historical record. The Known World and Property, then, are not just historical novels. They are postmodern novels written for a postmodern South and a postmodern age—with all the connotations of a loss of mastery that term "postmodern" carries. For if all of our current debates on slavery reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible...

PurposeThe authors describe an original unit plan that draws from local and national concerns for truthful history education about the history of racial violence in the United States. The unit plan contextualizes one impetus for truth and reconciliation in a community with a history of anti-Black violence.Design/methodology/approachThe participants partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative to pilot the unit in their district’s new African American History course. The unit drew on historical research and cultural memory to situate local history within a broader context of racism and violence.FindingsThe teachers identified eight goals for the unit so that students could understand racialized violence, acknowledge racism as the lived experience of many of their students, and participate in a collaborative learning environment with productive discussions. Speaking from their own experiences with racism, and creating opportunities for students to do the same, the teachers aided the community in voicing long-silenced memories.Research limitations/implicationsBesides bridging some of the gaps between local, regional, and national histories, more research is needed to further examine historical trauma and its implications for both the past and present, in order to amplify and humanize experiences of racism. Additional research is a critical step in developing more thoughtful, empathic and holistic discussions of history and racism at the local level.Practical implicationsIn the wake of the recent past, the authors have learned that teaching about the history of racial violence can be enhanced and empowered by reference to relevant current events. The resurgence of racially charged language and violence over the past few years makes this goal more urgent than ever. This unit gives practical guidance to teachers who face this challenge.Social implicationsThe sociopolitical reality of historical trauma and racism must be confronted, and proximity to key events is important in conveying the urgency of racial violence and the need for history education that addresses it. Teachers are making difficult decisions about their options for teaching about race, and they are understandably concerned about any perceived missteps. Nonetheless, inclusive, truthful history education is an appropriate and essential response to narratives of exclusion and silence as the authors help students to develop deliberative skills concerning difficult topics such as racial violence. Teachers and students, together, can do the crucial work of remembering.Originality/valueThe stripping away of narrative agency, identity and history can cover up stories about the stripping away of life and dignity. In the unit plan, the authors recognize truth and reconciliation—especially in the education of people who have relatively little exposure to topics of race and racism—as elemental to a restorative stance against racism.

How can educators confront the history of lynching and racial violence to foster deeper understanding and justice?Content Warning by Rhonda Jones explores African American efforts to heal from enslavement, racial terror, and repression. Many educators struggle to address race and racism in the classroom. With 177 documented lynchings in North Carolina (1880s-1950s), racial violence had lasting effects on families and communities. Using archives and primary sources, this book chronicles counter-stories and resistance movements that fueled African American anti-lynching, desegregation, and restorative justice efforts, emphasizing history’s relevance today.Ideal for educators, historians, policymakers, and students in Black studies, seeking a deeper understanding of racial violence, historical trauma, and resistance movements in American history.

White-supremacist violence; theft of land and resources; the genocide of indigenous peoples and the horrors of violence of stolen and enslaved human beings to build wealth for their colonial overlords, countries, and empires in the United States, the Caribbean, and the Americas; and xenophobic and racialized exploitations of labor produced by people of color are core aspects of US history. The issues, spectacles, histories, and lived experiences of race, racism, and racial, gender, and sexual violence drive the structural oppression of nonwhite communities in the United States and have unique trajectories while also developing unevenly and relationally within shared histories of racial, gender, and sexual violence and economic exploitation. Violence toward people of color started with first contact between European colonizing forces and indigenous communities in the late 15th century. From the late 15th century to the 21st century, the spectacles of lynching; vigilantism; Jim Crow / Juan Crow segregation practices; the imposition of boarding schools and the documented physical, psychological, and sexual violence inflicted on indigenous children; and the extreme anti-Chinese violence of vigilante race riots and xenophobic immigration laws are all legacies continuing into the 2020s. In the 20th century, a range of organized systems and acts of violence continued and emerged, from white-supremacist and patriarchal authority on communities of color; race riots; lynching; massacres; and unlawful imprisonments to the 1943 zoot suit riots, deportation, other acts of state-driven violence, and the rise of mass incarceration. Acts of domestic terrorism by white-supremacist individuals who see Latinx, Muslims, Jews, and other non-Anglo-Saxon communities as threats and invaders to the US body politic are a central feature of the 21st century. Along with vigilante violence toward communities of color, police brutality and deadly force with impunity continue to traumatize communities of color and foments the racial biopower politics of the 21st century, not to mention the ongoing crisis of domestic and gender-driven violence. This article summarizes a range of sources that speak both to empire- and state-driven and vigilante violence in different time frames toward varying communities in the United States and beyond.

Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present Abram Foley (bio) A discourse of timeliness haunts the marketing and reception of recent writing by African American authors. A quick review of a few works shows just how much. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's marketing description for Angela Flournoy's The Turner House (2015), a novel about post-recession Detroit, assured potential buyers that it was "A powerful, timely debut" ("Angel Flournoy"). Blake Butler of Vice praises John Keene's Counternarratives (2015), which collects stories of black life in the Americas from early colonization to present, as "one of the most vitally timed books of the year" (Butler 2015). Jabari Asim's Only the Strong (2015), set in a fictionalized version of St. Louis in the 1970s, bears a front-cover blurb praising the novel's "eerie timeliness" (Bell 2015). In a compilation of reviewer blurbs for Paul Beatty's Man-Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2016), three separate reviewers praise the book as "timely" ("The Sellout"). Ron Charles's Washington Post review of T. Geronimo Johnson's Welcome to Braggsville (2015), a satire on race, lynching, and liberal America, applauds the novel for forcing Americans to confront their "national amnesia" concerning the history of lynchings and racial violence in the U.S. "Welcome to Braggsville," he concludes, "It's about time" (Charles 2015). Charles's idiomatic conclusion suggests that something belated has—at last—come to pass. It's about time, that is, that implicitly white, novel-reading Americans remember the deep history of racial violence in America. And yet, as Charles's review somewhat inadvertently points out, timeliness itself works by way of cultural amnesia, in the operative privilege of forgetting that racial violence has been the status quo since colonization and so this or that book seems particularly relevant just now. This is the bind of the timely: it attempts to make literature relevant by attaching it to cultural events, but the attempt is predicated on a forgetfulness that should remain troubling. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric—a surprise bestseller in 2014 that has made Rankine one of the foremost figures for thinking about race in America—did not escape the discourse of timeliness in its reception. This is hardly surprising, given that Citizen's poems chart the correspondence between the microaggressions of everyday racism and the fatal aggressions [End Page 225] of highly visible police violence and hate crimes in the United States and elsewhere. Perhaps the most famous passage of Rankine's book records the names of those recently killed by hate crimes and police violence, a macabre list that has grown with over subsequent printings of the book, literally keeping time with America's ongoing racial violence..1 Rankine's close attention to racism in America led Dan Chiasson, poetry critic for The New Yorker, to comment that Citizen is "An especially vital book for this moment in time" (Chiasson 2014). Recall, too, that Blake Butler described John Keene's Counternarratives as a "vitally timed" book. Chiasson's remark, like Butler's, adds an important nuance to the timely by drawing a connection between timeliness and vitality, that is, between timeliness and life. While Chiasson's description of Rankine's "vital book" speaks rather straightforwardly to his perception of the book's importance, his word choice also follows Rankine's writing back to a modernist philosopher of life and untimeliness, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his preface to "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," the most renowned of his four Untimely Meditations published between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche characterizes the "untimely" as that which "acts counter to our time and thereby acts on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come" (1997, 60). Following from Nietzsche's definition, does it not seem possible that the supposed timeliness of African American writing has more to do with "untimeliness," in acknowledging an ongoing disjuncture between amnesia and racial memory that continues to take shape along the rift of the color line? I propose over the course of this essay that Rankine's poetry re-envisions Nietzsche's philosophy of life, particularly his notion that life emerges from a...

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

Abstract: The largest massacre in modern Los Angeles history and the largest mass lynching in the United States occurred in downtown Los Angeles in 1871. In 2023, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung were selected to design the memorial to its victims. The violence erupted in Los Angeles’s original and later destroyed Chinese quarter and rapidly surged across downtown streets. The Memorial to the Victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre will be distributed over several sites—the primary initial site, where the violence began, and surrounding satellite sites, where the violence spread. Sculptural trees, trunks, stumps, and roots, with engraved poetry, make up our design for the memorial, and these elements evoke the complex overlapping experiences of immigration, belonging, rootedness, uprooting, and racial violence. The 1871 Chinese Massacre was part of a larger history of xenophobia in the United States that arose in the mid-1800s and lasted into the mid-1900s. In these decades, hundreds of Asian American communities, primarily Cantonese, were uprooted and destroyed through violence and legislation in an effort to “cleanse” the country of people of Asian descent. We refer to this period of violence and destruction as the Driving Out. Because the principal goal and tactics of the violence were expulsion and erasure, little or nothing remains where the Asian American communities once flourished. To reveal this forgotten history, we present our preliminary concept for a Driving Out memorial with sculptures and poetry that relate formally and thematically to the elements of the 1871 Memorial, suggesting a network of trees, trunks, roots, and words that grow out of a shared history of migration, expulsion, and violence. These related artworks will unite the 1871 Memorial and Massacre with the wider history of the Driving Out, and reveal the mostly unknown geographical and temporal extent of anti-Asian violence that defined a significant part of US history.

The International American Studies Association is dismayed to see the explosion of anger, bitterness and desperation that has been triggered by yet another senseless, cruel and wanton act of racialized violence in the United States. We stand in solidarity with and support the ongoing struggle by African Americans, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and the marginalized against the racialized violence perpetrated against them.
 As scholars of the United States, we see the killing of George Floyd and many before them as acts on the continuum of the history of the powerful committing racialized violence against the powerless in the United States from before the birth of that country to the here and now of the present day. This continuum stretches from the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous population, the denial of rights and liberties to women, through the exploitation of American workers, slavery and Jim Crow, to the exclusion and inhumane treatment of the same migrants who make a profit for American corporations and keep prices low for the U.S. consumer. As scholars of the United States, we are acutely aware of how racialized violence is systemic, of how it has been woven into the fabric of U.S. society and cultures by the powerful, and of how the struggle against it has produced some of the greatest contributions of U.S. society to world culture and heritage.
 The desperate rebellion of the powerless against racialized violence by the powerful is in turn propagandized as unreasonable or malicious. It is neither. It is an uprising to defend their own lives, their last resort after waiting for generations for justice and equal treatment from law enforcement, law makers, and the courts. In too many instances, those in power have answered such uprisings with deadly force—and in every instance, they have had alternatives to this response.
 We are calling on those in power and the people with the guns in the United States now to exercise their choices and choose an alternative to deadly force as a response to the struggle against racialized violence. You have the power and the weapons—you have a choice to do the right thing and make peace.
 We are calling on U.S. law makers to listen and address the issues of injustice and racialized violence through systemic reform that remakes the very fabric of the United States justice system, including independent accountability oversight for law enforcement.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to redouble their efforts at teaching their students and educating the public of the truth about the struggle against racialized violence in the United States.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to become allies in the struggle against racialized violence in the United States and in their home societies by publicizing scholarship on the truth, by listening to and amplifying the voices of black people, ethnic minorities and the marginalized, and supporting them in this struggle on their own terms.
 We are calling on all fellow scholarly associations to explore all the ways in which they can put pressure with those in power at all levels in the United States to do the right thing and end racialized violence.
 There will be no peace in our hearts and souls until justice is done and racialized violence is ended—until all of us are able “to breathe free.”
 
 Dr Manpreet Kaur Kang, President of the International American Studies Association, Professor of English and Dean, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, India;Dr Jennifer Frost, President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland, New Zealand;Dr S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Associate Professor, Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Turkey;Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico;Dr Paweł Jędrzejko, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland;Dr Marietta Messmer, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Dr Kryštof Kozák, Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague;Dr Giorgio Mariani, Professor of English and American Languages and Literatures, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Università “Sapienza” of Rome;Dr György Tóth, Lecturer, History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom;Dr Manuel Broncano, Professor of American Literature and Director of English, Spanish, and Translation, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, USA;Dr Jiaying Cai, Lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China;Dr Alessandro Buffa, Secretary, Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy;

Anti-racial vilification legislations exist on a wide range and are supported by civil organizations as well as the two major political parties in the United States. As Public concerns about expressions of racial hatred exacerbated lately, racial derogatory comments and racial violence were evident in several areas in the U.S and became part of daily rhetoric. It seems that these legislations consolidated counterproductive effects and gave rise to racial differences rather than encrypting them. Furthermore, hate discourse was encumbered by the residue of long history of slavery and racial segregation. The American president who is supposed to be the role model for the common American man and woman failed to take the lead and proved to lack commands of leadership as well as initiatives of healing the nation in the midst of the present state of unrest and confusion. He has been abusive and having no commands of domestic policy. His discourse failed to live up to the expectations of the American people in suppressing racial and discriminatory remarks. On the contrary, he brags of being racist and bluntly uses hate expressions. In addition, he tries to systematize and institutionalize racism and discrimination. By using racist hate speech utterances as well as hate-speech acts, the president appears as a person with modest linguistic commands as his poor knowledge of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of his utterances is prevalent. The analysis of Donald Trump’s hate-speech-acts can be identified as raising validity claims which enact discrimination and support inequality in society.

The Strange Career of Judge LynchWhy the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century William D. Carrigan (bio) The systematic reporting and analysis of lynching began as a way to shock ordinary white Americans, both northern and southern, to reconsider the system of racial oppression and segregation that dominated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The impact of such antilynching work on the lives of African Americans in the South is open for debate, but there is no doubt that the efforts of early lynching specialists shaped the scholarly study of lynching all the way to the turn of the twenty-first century. While applauding this foundational work, this essay nevertheless argues for a broadening of lynching as a field of study. The history of mob violence in the United States is for not only those interested in race relations in the postbellum South but all historians interested in the evolution and transformation of ordinary people's attitudes toward crime, punishment, the law, and the state over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The role of discrimination and racial prejudice remains central to any understanding of this history, but there is much to be gained from disentangling the history of lynching from the relatively narrow framework that gave birth to the field. In 1955, in the introduction to his iconic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote that southerners should understand more than all other Americans that social institutions are not fixed and immutable. In echoing Woodward's title, I hope to underline an irony at the heart of the study of lynching in the United States. Historians of the nineteenth-century United States should be the ones leading the exploration of the subject, because the mid-nineteenth century was the key period in the history of mob violence in the United States, the period that proved pivotal in creating a culture that nourished extralegal violence and defined racial minorities as perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet, relatively few historians [End Page 293] of nineteenth-century America have published monographs on the history of lynching and mob violence; instead, they have largely left the field to historians of the early twentieth century. This essay has two goals. First, I argue that the history of lynching should occupy a greater space within the larger body of work on the history of violence and crime in the United States. In particular, I suggest that the study of lynching in the mid-nineteenth century holds great promise for historians interested not just in American race relations but in fundamental issues such as the history of law, crime, and the development of the state. Second, I want to try to explain why the literature itself has been part of the problem, one of the reasons the study of lynching was for so long the domain of journalists, sociologists, and historians of the early twentieth century. Understanding how the field developed should give clarity as to why there are still many opportunities for historians to study mob violence as a means for understanding the nineteenth-century United States. ________ Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate the value of the study of lynching for a longer history of violence is that of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, a topic I know well from years of research with my co-author Clive Webb. Historians of the border have long known about violence against Mexicans in the Southwest, and they have made this violence an important element of their history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest. Yet, these historians did not make connections to existing scholarship on lynching, while historians of lynching paid scant attention to extralegal violence in the Southwest. Webb and I saw clear advantages to a comparative approach; from our research, we drew four conclusions that we think illuminate the history of racial violence across regions. First, we found evidence that the chronology of lynching varied greatly by ethnic group and followed no standard timeline. Second, murder remained the most frequent charge of lynch mobs across time and space, but secondary justifications varied greatly; Mexicans were rarely charged with...

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a smaller world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels. Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field. As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3) Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. …

Americans have long recognized the central importance of the nineteenth-century Republican party in preserving the Union, ending slavery, and opening the way for industrial capitalism. On the surface, the story seems straightforward -- the party's labor ethos, embracing the opportunity that free soil presented for social and economic mobility, and condemning the danger that slavery in the territories posed for that mobility, foreshadowed the GOP's later devotion to unfettered enterprise and industrial capitalism. In reality, however, the narrative thread is not so linear. This work examines the contradiction that lay at the heart of the supremely influential ideology of the early Republican party. The Paradox of Progress explores one of the most profound changes in American history -- the transition from the anti-market, anti-monopoly, and democratic ideology of Jacksonian America to the business-dominated politics and unregulated excesses of Gilded Age capitalism. Guiding this transformation was the nineteenth-century Republican party. Drawing heavily from both the pro-market commitments of the early Whig party and the anti-capitalist culture of Jackson's Democratic party, the early Republican party found itself torn between these competing values. Nowhere was this contested process more obvious or more absorbing than in Civil War-era Michigan, the birthplace of the Republican party. In The Paradox of Progress, a fascinating look at the central factors underlying the history of the GOP, Martin Hershock reveals how in their determination to resolve their ideological dilemma, Republicans of the Civil War era struggled to contrive a formula that wo uld enable them to win popular elections and to model America's acceptance of Gilded Age capitalism.