Settling Accounts? An Americanist Perspective on Historical Reconciliation

Abstract

Some years ago, a student of mine wrote a paper about white resistance to Freedom Summer, the Mississippi voting rights campaign launched in 1964 by activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality. The goal of the campaign, which brought more than eight hundred northern college students into the state, was to cast a national spotlight on the violent repression that African Americans and their allies faced in the last great citadel of Jim Crow. My student's goal was to examine white reactions, to make sense of the wave of violent assaults and bombings that greeted the volunteers. What she found was the ostensive definition of state-sponsored terrorism: elected officials spouting defiance; the Jack son Police Department posing in Newsweek in front of the new armored car the city had purchased to repel the invaders; agents of the Mississippi Sovereignty Com mission, a shadow state government, feeding surveillance reports to local police, including the license plate number of the car driven by three civil rights workers who were later murdered outside the town of Philadelphia. The most eloquent evidence, however, came from a political cartoon in a local newspaper, depicting three War-era soldiers. A caption labeled them Civil Rights Workers, but their tattered fatigue blouses and forage caps clearly marked them as Union renegades. One held aloft a noose. We'll larn them Rebels some Rights, he declared. There is much to ponder in the cartoon. Obviously it illustrates the political cli mate of that bloody summer, as well as the enduring American penchant, on matters of race, for turning reality inside out, for projecting onto African Americans and their allies the violent rapacity routinely directed against them. (A civil rights lynch mob?) But the cartoon also speaks, in a more general way, to the use and abuse of history, to the ways in which narratives of the past—and narratives of collective victimization, in particular—are used to license atrocious conduct in the present. The men who committed the Philadelphia murders, and the vastly larger number of people complicit in their crime, had all been steeped in the historical narrative that the cartoon evoked—a twice-told tale of victorious Yankees, driven by greed and racial fanaticism, placing a proud but prostrate white South under the boot heel of Negro domination. The result was the agony of Reconstruction, an orgy of tyranny and unbridled corruption that persisted until courageous Redeemers fi nally rose up and expelled the invaders. Ninety years later, their descendants en