African Methodist Episcopal Church Research Articles

Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook

Reviewed by: Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook Kevin M. Levin (bio) Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865. By Robert J. Cook. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Paper, $24.95.) Few people could have predicted the pace at which Confederate iconography, including battle flags and monuments, have been removed from public spaces following the murder of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015. The toppling of Confederate icons such as Lee, Jackson, Davis, and Forrest constitutes the most sustained challenge to the Lost Cause narrative since its emergence in the years following the Civil War. Robert J. Cook's Civil War Memories tracks this long and contentious story of the nation's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The book is organized into two parts and structured chronologically around four narrative themes. Cook's distinction between the Lost Cause, Unionist, emancipationist, and "reconciliatory" narratives that developed in the thirty years following the war will be familiar to most historians. He relies heavily on recent scholarship of Civil War memory to flesh out these four narratives. No book looms larger in the first part than David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which has dominated scholarly and even popular discussion of Civil War memory. Blight's contention that the "Union cause" and the war's "emancipationist legacy" were eventually overshadowed by the pull of national reunion and reconciliation by the early twentieth century has proved to be a seductive narrative for a nation that continues to struggle with its history of racial discrimination. Cook follows the trajectory laid out by Blight by acknowledging "the flowering of a romantic reconciliatory strain of historical memory that would quickly predominate over its Unionist and emancipationist competitors in the North and in official circles because of its excellent fit with postwar nationalism" (209). At the same time, Cook does not ignore recent scholarship from historians such as Caroline Janney, John Neff, M. Keith Harris, William Blair, and Barbara Gannon, who have argued persuasively that the triumph of sectional reconciliation was never complete. He acknowledges [End Page 735] that Civil War veterans harbored a deep bitterness toward their former enemies and remained steadfast in their commitment to the righteousness of their respective causes well into the twentieth century. Reunion was a fact of Union victory in 1865, but outward signs of sectional bitterness could be found in numerous Blue-Gray events, such as the dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in 1895. In addition, even as Union veterans embraced former enemies on the old battlefields, they remained proud of having taken part in a war that ended slavery and continued to welcome black veterans in many local camps of the Grand Army of the Republic. The memory of emancipation and the embrace of black comrades who aided in saving the Union were not so easily sacrificed at the altar of sectional reconciliation. Of course, this does not mean that African Americans operated on a level playing field. Cook correctly notes that "reconciliation … alongside white-supremacist terror, economic coercion, political disfranchisement, and de jure segregation, pushed African Americans to the margins of national memory" (209). The dominance of reconciliation and the Lost Cause continued through the first half of the twentieth century largely as the result of white southern control of public memory through legal segregation, the erection and dedication of monuments, and the dissemination of other cultural artifacts throughout the region. The second half of Civil War Memories tracks the eventual decline of this narrative, beginning with the civil rights movement and Civil War centennial celebrations. African Americans pushed for civil rights, in part, by reminding the nation of the "unfinished work" of the Civil War with a narrative that highlighted the importance of emancipation and the service of the United States Colored Troops to the Union war effort. Cook's analysis of this watershed moment in Civil War memory is a distilled—though no less compelling—version of his excellent 2007 book, Troubled...

The End of Reconstruction, Again: Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling

The End of Reconstruction, Again:Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling Gordon Fraser (bio) On the night of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed an understandable hopefulness about the future of race relations. "Breaking with our racial past," he predicted, would be the "least" of our problems. Friedman closed his column with words that bridged the troubled past and the hopeful future. "The Civil War is over," he wrote. "Let reconstruction begin."1 Yet by invoking the Civil War and Reconstruction, [End Page 174] Friedman identified a more complicated history than he may have intended. Reconstruction had been a political experiment, conducted between 1865 and 1877, in which the Congress of the United States attempted to enforce legal and civic equality across race in the former Confederate states. For a brief moment, it seemed to work. By 1887, for instance, seventeen African Americans had been elected or appointed to Congress.2 But according to observers as diverse as William Dunning and W. E. B. Du Bois, the experiment failed.3 Thousands were lynched as multi-racial city, county, and state governments were overthrown in white supremacist coups d'état.4 The United States would witness a century of de jure racial apartheid, followed by the lingering de facto segregation of today. Like the civil rights era (1948–1970), Reconstruction constituted what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called a "great [moment] of … mainstream political upsurge." Backlash followed both periods.5 We are witnessing a similar backlash today: an energized racism overlapping with and subsequent to the administration of the first black president and the renewal of emancipatory movements for justice. The emergence of white supremacist militias in city centers has forced all but the most craven to acknowledge that racism is resurgent in US political life. To push Friedman's metaphor just a bit further: If Obama's election ushered in a "reconstruction," then we in the aftermath of the Obama administration should be extraordinarily cautious about what came after the first Reconstruction: Plessy v. Ferguson, the Wilmington political coup, and Jim Crow. I raise the specter of Reconstruction's long aftermath not to conflate its historical particularity with that of the present but rather to suggest that historical parallels might enable us to think about the structural operations of racism. We need to understand, I think, not simply how US society enables racial despotism but how the experience of that despotism by its ostensible beneficiaries enables its reinvigoration. We need a scholarship not simply of race but of racism. Such a scholarship might begin, I think, by reading newly resurgent racisms as structures of feeling. As formulated by Raymond Williams half a century ago, structures of feeling offer an analytic for explaining messy, even incoherent, systems of belief. As lived and expressed, such structures appear more often as "a latency" across and between formal ideologies.6 Williams explains: "The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, … yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its [End Page 175] creative response into a new structure of feeling."7 While social, legal, and political structures might pass from generation to generation relatively intact, structures of feeling, partly articulated and even internally contradictory, are invented anew. I suggest that understanding racism as such a structure would enable us to confront its four primary vectors—racial terrorism, state violence, reactionary politics, and exclusionary laws—not as a coherent project to be contested ideologically but a cluster of latent, even contradictory, potentials. We might begin exploring such structures of racist feeling in Shelby, North Carolina. Dylann Roof, who would be convicted of murdering nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, was arrested in Shelby. When Roof was captured in June 2015, a news report described his appearance in the small community as "unlikely."8 Perhaps it was. But the town, like the AME Church of Charleston itself, offers kinetic depth to an observer with a sense of history. Shelby was also the childhood home of the...

Materializing a Gesture of Resistance

Materializing a Gesture of Resistance Sharon Daniel (bio) When the human body, a nation's flag, money, or a public statue is defaced, a strange surplus of negative energy is likely to be aroused from within the defaced thing itself. It is now in a state of desecration, the closest many of us are going to get to the sacred in this modern world. —Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative It is an interesting moment to reflect on the processes, strategies, and tactics through which one, as a citizen and an artist, engages in protest. Because protest always occurs in the aesthetic as well as the political register. Protest is an action or gesture—to occupy, to remove, to destroy—that must have an audience. A protest must be witnessed if it is to change the conversation, the trajectory of thought, the law, or the political context. It is a performance designed to be seen and heard. It was just five weeks ago (as I write) that protests turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists clashed with counter-demonstrators over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate [End Page 285] general Robert E. Lee. A car driven by a member of the white supremacist group intentionally plowed into the crowd of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at least thirty-four others. This occurred at a "Unite the Right" rally that was organized against the backdrop of controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments throughout the country. Campaigns to eliminate monuments to the Confederacy from public spaces began in response to the 2015 mass shooting of nine African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Traditionalists (and white supremacists) objected to "erasing history," even though the memorials targeted for removal were not built during or immediately after the Civil War. They were created during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement as a means of intimidating African Americans and celebrating racism and oppression. These monuments performed their own version of erasure—concealing the violence of slavery and white supremacy under the cloak of a revisionist history. African Americans, anti-racists, and anti-fascists wanted them gone. And when photos emerged of the alleged Emanuel AME Church shooter (an avowed white supremacist) posing with the Confederate flag, civil rights groups fought to end the practice of flying it on the grounds of their State House. Even the conservative Republican governor agreed, but only the legislature had the power to remove it. While lawmakers debated and stalled, in a powerful refusal of the Confederate legacy of racial intimidation and fear, Black civil rights activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and cut down the Confederate flag. It was a carefully choreographed performance. Newsome and other activists designed the optics. They decided that a Black woman should be the one to cut down the flag and that a white man, activist James Tyson, would help her over the fence "as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides"1—a choice both political and aesthetic. Newsome and Tyson were arrested and the flag was replaced. Weeks later, it was finally removed by vote of the South Carolina House and Senate. In his recent book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, Michael Eric Dyson states, "The only way to save our nation, and, yes to save yourselves [addressing so called white folk], is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports."2 The removal of monuments and symbols that represent a deeply ingrained, white supremacist historical imaginary is one small step toward this "letting go." But erasure is not the only aesthetic/political strategy. Last week in Central Park, a statue of Christopher Columbus was defaced—its hands stained with red paint and its pedestal scrawled with the words "Hate will not be tolerated - #somethingscoming." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned what he said was a criminal act of vandalism, but Daily Show host Trevor Noah disagreed: "… honestly, I don't know if you can even call this [End Page 286...

Down with the Southern Cross: Opinions on the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina

A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING IN A BLACK CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina, became the mobilizing force for taking down the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia. In this article, we chronicle disputes over the Confederate flag in the American South and then turn our attention to the case of South Carolina. Using survey data from the Winthrop Poll (WP), we evaluate the opinions of South Carolinians toward the Confederate flag before and after the Charleston shooting. Before this senseless massacre, our findings show, there was a palpable racial divide in opinions toward the Rebel flag and sharp divisions among whites on the basis of certain demographics and sociopolitical attitudes. After the shooting, our analysis indicates, the Charleston tragedy galvanized opinion, black and white, in favor of taking down the Confederate flag. On the evening of 17 June 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof of Eastover, South Carolina, went to the “Holy City” of Charleston to commit an unspeakable tragedy. Around 9:00 p.m., Roof murdered nine black parishioners at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, about an hour after he was welcomed to participate in a Bible study.1 This horrific hate crime was quickly connected to a divisive political issue in South Carolina and other southern states: the Confederate battle flag.2

Discrimination-related Anger, Religion, and Distress: Differences between African Americans and Caribbean Black Americans

The Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) survivors’ forgiveness of the racially motivated shootings prompted our research of the association between religion, discrimination-related anger, and psychological distress among black Americans. Using the first representative national sample of Caribbean black Americans, the National Survey of American Life, we examine if discrimination-related anger produces more psychological distress for African Americans than Caribbean black Americans and if religious emotional support lowers distress from discrimination-related anger. Our findings show discrimination-related anger is associated with less distress for Caribbean black Americans than African Americans. Religious emotional support is associated with lower levels of distress and buffers the mental health of later generation Caribbean black Americans who report anger. African Americans reporting discrimination without anger show lower levels of psychological distress than their counterparts who experience anger. Thus, we have partial support that mercy towards one’s transgressor, illustrated by the Charleston Emanuel AMEC survivors, may benefit mental health.

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Disruptive Silences: The AME Church and Dominican-Haitian Relations

Abstract Often recognized for its advocacy on behalf of African descendants, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has been silent on issues regarding anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. By tracing the historical connection between Black America and Haiti in the nineteenth century and recounting the twentieth-century history of the AME Church in the Dominican Republic, this article explains how an institution created in defense of racial equality could inadvertently facilitate its own silencing. Using archival research, ethnography, and interviews, this article critically analyzes narratives that distance Dominican African Methodists from African Americans and Haitians. It argues that such silences in the AME Church are the result of the church's social marginalization in the Dominican Republic, African American leaders' habitual neglect of the AME Church's Dominican branches, and the assimilation of Black Anglophone migrants into Dominican culture.

Uplift in Schools and the Church: Abolitionist Approaches to Free Black Education in Early National Philadelphia

''Aufstieg durch Schulen and Kirche: Abolitionistische Ansatze fur offentliche Bildung fur Afro-Amerikaner im Philadelphia nach der Revolutions. This contribution provides a case study of how Richard Allen's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church strove to become an autonomous provider of education to the free black community in the late 1790s and early 1800s as a way to avoid the direct influence of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and provide an education tailored to the needs of Philadelphia's black population. By taking education into their own hands, free blacks sought to fight inequalities by dissociating themselves from the system of inequalities represented and supported by the PAS. Though members of the PAS and leaders of the free black community shared the goal of raising the socioeconomic status of blacks and reducing poverty through education, the education provided by the AME Church aimed to provide a practical, moral education tailored to the needs of a black community struggling to obtain work in competition with recent immigrant groups, and not one - such as offered by the PAS - which provided arbitrary measures of success in a white community which disregarded black educational achievements. This case study can be placed into the broader context of blacks' ambitions of social equality with whites despite the structures of inequality - specifically regarding the lack of access to affordable, practical education - in the early republic in Philadelphia designed to keep them in a subjugated social position.

The Many Names for Jarena Lee

Jarena Lee was the first woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She joined the antislavery movement and had her autobiography printed, first in 1836 and then again in 1849. Despite these significant contributions, she faded from the historical record. This essay synthesizes disparate and in cases contradictory archival, published, and digital sources to uncover her place and date of death. This project thus adds new biographical information about Lee, and it also reflects on methodological issues posed by research in early African American women's history.

Days of Jubilee: Emancipation Day Celebrations in Chicago, 1853 to 1877

ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY i, 1863, Quinn Chapel swelled with anticipation as hundreds of black Chicagoans crowded into the church and filed into its pews. Unlike previous years, the crowd had not gathered in the city's African Methodist Episcopal church mark the beginning of a new year. Instead, they had come together give thanks God for the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln was scheduled sign later that day. The congregation filled the church with jubilant song and scripture. Leading the group in prayer, Quinn's pastor Reverend Dare offered up praises to the Most High for the manifestations of Divine interposition in behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed slaves. At another meeting held later that day, the reassembled crowed vowed preserve that momentous date for posterity, resolving that they would ever hold this day, the first day of January, 1863, as . . . the day that four millions of African-Americans were redeemed from the thraldom of American slavery and into the noonday of universal life.1For the next four decades, the city's black community held true the promise expressed in that 1863 New Year's Day resolution. But January 1 was just one of many dates black Chicagoans celebrated as critical moments in the struggle for universal emancipation. The festivities held on these dates came be known as Emancipation Day celebrations or jubilees. Before and even after the Civil War, black Chicagoans observed Emancipation Day on August 1, which marked the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Beginning in 1860s, Emancipation Day festivities were organized around two dates: September 22 and January 1. The former date referred September 22,1862, when President Abraham Lincoln announced that he intended issue a proclamation emancipating slaves held by Confederate states that remained in rebellion against the Union. The latter date referred January 1, 1863, when Lincolns proclamation went into effect. After the Civil War, black Chicagoans also embraced March 30, the date when the Fifteenth Amendment was added the Constitution, as another emancipation. Although slavery had been legally abolished well before it was ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment extended the franchise black men, providing blacks with the tool-the ballot-that would help them defend their freedom.Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, Emancipation Days remained major if unofficial holidays for African Americans throughout the country. In Chicago, Emancipation Day celebrations consistently attracted crowds that numbered in the hundreds or thousands. Black Chicagoans could fill their social calendars with these commemorative festivities, which stretched across entire days and frequently occurred multiple times in a single year. A typical celebration would begin with a grand procession that carried participants through the city's streets and terminated at Quinn Chapel. Once inside, the crowd would offer thanksgiving God for abolishing slavery. Following the early morning service, the crowd would depart from the church a train station where they would pack into passenger cars that transported them a secluded grove in a nearby town. Joined by members of that town's black community, the crowd would be treated oratory, recitations of poems and historical documents like the Emancipation Proclamation, and music. Following a picnic and dancing, the party would return the city and might regroup at a meeting hall. There they would enjoy additional oratory and a formal banquet, and top off the day with more music and dancing. Through these multilayered activities, Emancipation Day celebrations combined the secular with the spiritual, the public with the private, the formal with the festive, and the political with the social.In recent years, Emancipation Day celebrations have begun attract more attention from scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American history. …

Religion, Murder, and the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina

Contentious debates over the meaning and appropriate display of Confederate symbols have been waged across the American South for the past three decades (Leib and Webster 2007). While these debates are clearly racialized, they are also imbued with religious arguments and fervor (Webster and Leib 2002, 2012). One major reason is the aggressive religiosity characterizing the South's cultural landscape, in which religion plays a central role in social, economic and political relations (Webster 1997). While less well understood, it is also the case that many white southerners saw the Civil War as a religious conflict against Northern apostasy. As Wilson (1995, 19) states, Ministers and churches. . . insisted that the Confederacy was a crusade against the evil empire of the Yankee. It was a holy war. As a result, Confederate symbols like the battle flag and heroic figures like Robert E. Lee took on religious overtones that continue to exist today among traditional white southerners.1 The debate over the Confederate flag in South Carolina has been waged for over two decades, with particularly vitriolic arguments about the continued flying of the battle flag over the state capitol dome beginning in the latter part of the 1990s. In 2000, a legislative compromise led the state to move the battle flag off the capitol dome to a Confederate soldier's monument on the state capitol grounds (Webster and Leib 2001, Leib and Webster 2004). The compromise was strongly criticized by many on both sides of the issue, with African American legislators supporting the compromise being characterized as weak-kneed and white supporters of the compromise labeled as turncoats (Webster and Leib 2001, 294). The debate over whether the battle flag should remain flying on public space on the South Carolina capitol's grounds remained at a standstill for fifteen years, from May 2000 until July 2015. On Wednesday evening, June 17, 2015, a young white racist enamored with Confederate symbols, including the battle flag, joined a Bible study group of African American worshipers at the historic [End Page 29] Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. At approximately 9:00 pm he pulled a Glock 41.45 caliber handgun from his pack and opened fire, killing nine while shouting racial epithets. The shooter used hollow-point bullets to cause the maximum damage to his victims. The shooter's intention was to start a race war (Smith 2015). On July 10, 2015, twenty-three days after the Charleston murders, the Confederate battle flag was removed from the Confederate soldier's monument on the South Carolina state capitol grounds. In this essay we examine the reasons for the battle flag's removal with an emphasis on the South's religiosity. We argue that religion is a central foundation for why the flag debates in the region have been so fervent. We further argue that the fact that the murders occurred in a church during a Bible study on a Wednesday evening was an important reason why South Carolina leaders were successful in removing the battle flag from the grounds of the state capitol. This paper first provides a brief overview of the South's strong religiosity. We then examine the origins of the religious fervor associated with the Confederacy, major Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee, and Confederate symbols such as the battle flag. The paper then concludes with a discussion of the role of religion in the reaction of political leaders and the removal of the flag from the state house grounds following the Charleston murders. Language: en

Introduction to the Special Forum on the Charleston Massacre of 2015

Introduction to the Special Forum on the Charleston Massacre of 2015 Hilda E. Kurtz Nine African American church-goers were massacred in the basement of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. This act of racial violence extended and deepened a national debate over the ongoing effects of racial violence on the social fabric of the United States. Rage and anguish over the tragedy abound, as the local community, writers, bloggers, scholars, activists and countless others share insights on how and why such a thing could happen in 2015, and how such tragedy might catalyze positive social change. One relatively immediate response was the revival of political debate over the display of the Confederate battle flag, and its subsequent removal from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol (not once but twice, see Eaves, below). These predominantly symbolic events have the potential to distract public debate from the deep-seated problem of enduring racial bias in American society, but also warrant careful consideration in their own right. New to the helm of Southeastern Geographer, we asked ourselves, what can geographers do to shed light on the massacre and its aftermath? What tools do geographers have with which to ‘make sense’ of such murderous expression of white supremacy? What do geographers have to say about the many possible aftermaths of this tragedy, some enacted, some in progress, others only imagined to date? With this Special Forum in Southeastern Geographer, our intent is to create a(nother) space within academic geographic circles for the important and difficult conversations that are essential to racial understanding and reconciliation. Conversations such as these will not be without missteps, but it is crucially important to continue and deepen geographers’ critical engagement with the racial violence on which the United States was founded and continues to operate. In that spirit, we invited seven geographers at six universities to share their own reactions to and reflections on the Charleston Massacre in a special forum in this issue of Southeastern Geographer. Each of the essays in the Special Forum suggests, either explicitly or implicitly, that it is unproductive to view the carnage in Mother Emanuel as an aberration; indeed none comment on the mental state of the [End Page 6] perpetrator. As historian Heather Richardson noted in an essay for “We’re History,” That a white terrorist murdered an African American politician and African American bystanders in a black church, using language straight out of Reconstruction, is not an accident. It reflects the vital intersection of American politics, race, and religion since 1866. Implicitly starting from the same premise, the geographers contributing to this forum consider the intersection of American politics, race, and religion, with attention to past, present and future transformations of symbolic, economic and cultural landscapes. These essays draw on different positionalities and bodies of thought to reflect on tensions between memory, erasure, and transformation—of places of worship, of the cultural and economic landscapes in which they figure, and of the basis of U.S. society in racial violence. Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood argue for the need to develop relational understandings of the past and the ways in which it shapes the present. The removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol is an important step, they argue, but one that should be encompassed within a long and difficult process of ‘memory work’ that comes to terms with racial violence and its vestiges in the landscape. The next three essays consider the spatial and spiritual geographies of different theological perspectives on racial difference and reconciliation, each in their own way highlighting the central role of religion in the events under consideration. Priscilla McCutcheon invokes spiritual geographies and transformative landscapes to reflect on the significance of Black Church(es) as spaces of uplift that are simultaneously targets of violence. Drawing on a rich array of writers and thinkers, she offers an avowal of black liberation theory as a pivot of radical social change. LaToya Eaves also engages with the potential of transformative landscapes (although without using that term as such), in a reflection on queering redemption. She draws on Black liberation...

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a Start: Toward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a StartToward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America Joshua F.J. Inwood (bio) and Derek Alderman (bio) On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twenty-four hours later in North Carolina. Of the nine killed the oldest was 87 year old Susie Jackson, and the youngest was 26 year old Tywanza Sanders. After his arrest Roof claimed that he assassinated the members of Emanuel AME Church in the hopes of igniting a broader race war. Indeed, photographs later emerged and went viral of Roof engaged in racist exhibitions and hate speech in the past, in particular the flying of the controversial and insensitive Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we saw renewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from across the South’s public spaces, with South Carolina legislators finally voting to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. In addition, the nation witnessed the grace of survivors in forgiving Roof. These were meaningful and symbolic steps that, thankfully, had the opposite effect than the one the white supremacist shooter had intended. While it is undeniably tragic that nine innocent people had to die before political leaders realized what many African Americans have known and lived with for generations, it is also indicative of a nation that whitewashes the connections between the material realities of white supremacy and its grounding in historical memory. The Confederate flag is a highly charged reminder of legacies of racism that have long been employed by racists to intimidate the black community and to oppose those struggling for racial equality. The banner of the secessionist, pro-slavery southern government had largely faded from memory and sight in the years after the Civil War, but it reappeared not coincidentally after World War II as a symbol of [End Page 9] conservative white resistance to what was then the nascent Civil Rights Movement. African Americans who famously protested segregated bussing in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 have vivid memories of being pelted with balloons filled with urine, which were thrown from cars and trucks decorated with Confederate flags. In 1959, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school officials in Fairfax, Virginia named and opened a new high school after Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Shapiro 2015). Many communities carried out similar not-so-subtle strategies of defending white supremacy under the guise of southern heritage and pride. The landscape has retained major traces of these racist symbols and, as a result of the Charleston Massacre, these symbols are being challenged well beyond the removal of the Confederate flag. As activists and others from across the United States recognize, challenging the legitimacy of publicly displaying Confederate flags and other symbols that legitimize the defense of slavery and white supremacy is certainly the right thing to do. Yet these calls should not be mistaken for a solution to structural inequality. In particular, while state legislators from across the South should be applauded for taking down Confederate symbols, that is not the same thing as addressing the deeply entrenched social and spatial conditions that allow white supremacy to permeate not just the Charleston AME church but wider swaths of American life. This contradictory reality—addressing the symbols of a racist heritage without challenging the foundational histories and geographies of racism—raises questions about the relationship between violence, race and memory (Tyner et al. 2014). These questions are seldom discussed in our post-Charleston Nine social world. Recently, Karen Till has argued that progressive change requires a direct engagement with the trauma of “memory work” in which “individuals and groups may confront and take responsibility for the failures of the democratic state and its violences” (Till 2012, pg. 7). In particular, she highlights the place-based practices of local citizens, activists, educators, artists, and even performers in carrying out the physical, political, and...

We Wear the Mask

We Wear the Mask Latoya E. Eaves (bio) We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—This debt we pay to human guile;With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise,In counting all our tears and sighs?Nay, let them only see us, whileWe wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our criesTo thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vileBeneath our feet, and long the mile;But let the world dream otherwise,We wear the mask! —Paul Laurence Dunbar For Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Daniel Simmons Jr. and Myra Thompson. Charleston, South Carolina is on a peninsula at the eastern edge of North America, a border zone with the Atlantic Ocean. The massacre of nine people in a church occurred here, at one of the major entry points for the African Diaspora into the Americas. The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, which provides a reminder of the commercial hub built on their backs and with their lives, sits less than one mile from the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Charleston, by its mere existence and geographic history, is a zone of Black death. In this essay, I write about the significance of events that occurred on June 17, 2015, initiated by the massacre of nine Americans who had been worshipping at a mid-week Christian service in Charleston, South Carolina, in relation to the process of forgiveness. This process operates in relation to and is enacted upon the state of everyday violence/everyday state violence that the North American racial landscape has maintained through imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The essay is necessarily embedded in a Black feminist and antiracist standpoint of identity, positionality, and relationality in order to achieve an understanding of place, subjectivity, and temporality. I am particularly interested in critically engaging the role of forgiveness in Black historical memory and in spatial politics that inform Black lives. Finally, I provide current possibilities for moving towards redemption—liberation, racial justice, and healing. [End Page 22] The essay is entitled “We Wear the Mask” after Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1896 poem of the same name. Dunbar communicates through metaphor, in the African diasporic storytelling tradition. Through the poem, he describes the condition of Black life that required a covering of one’s true self—identity, emotions, and abilities—in order to participate in a society that privileged whiteness and upheld white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As I grappled with how to compose this essay, this poem reappeared along with the centrality of forgiveness in the narrative around the Charleston massacre. As such, I use Dunbar’s metaphor to guide my discussion of forgiveness and redemption. on forgiveness In the days that followed the Charleston massacre, intense national attention was paid to the movements and reactions from the nine families affected by the latest act of white supremacist violence. When the families were given the opportunity to address Roof directly at a bond hearing, a refrain of mercy through the suggestion of forgiveness was centralized in media coverage of their interaction. International coverage from CNN, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, ABC, and the Daily Telegraph consistently repeated the families’ words, with an emphasis on the words “I forgive you,” pronounced by Nadine Collier, the daughter of Ethel Lance. President Barack Obama even took to Twitter, retweeting the ABC news story “Dylann Roof Hears Victims’ Families Speak at 1st Court Appearance: ‘I Forgive You,’” with the statement, “In the midst of darkest tragedy, the decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families” (Obama 2015). But forgiveness is at risk of being used as a pacifier rather than for addressing the larger structural problems of white supremacy, racism, and (cis-hetero) patriarchy. The statements from family members must be understood within the broader tropes of power that have long disenfranchised the African diaspora. Given the structural and social ills that form the North American racial landscape, a choice...

Reconstructing the Southern Landscape: The History of Education and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Charleston, South Carolina

The city of Charleston, South Carolina, illustrates how educators can use people- and place-based case studies as pedagogical tools to reconstruct a Southern public and historic landscape. Teaching the Foundations of Education course in the city of Charleston makes the history that frames contemporary educational issues such as (re)segregation more visible. In the wake of the recent tragedy at the historic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston that claimed nine lives at the hands of Dylann Roof, place and local history help make a silent history more pronounced. A history of resistance and an ongoing struggle for freedom is inscribed into Charleston's landscape as much as the colonial and antebellum grandeur that captures the imagination, and dollars, of a thriving tourism industry. The public and historic landscape, in short, is in and of itself an educative space that allows educators and students to disrupt popular narratives by making the invisible more visible.

Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay

In the fifty years spanning the centennial and sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War, much has changed in the way historians think about that cataclysmic event. Indeed, many no longer think of the Civil War as a single event but rather as a series of wars fought on a number of fronts. Not only does the western theater now compete with the eastern theater for historians' attention, but scholars of the war in the West also assert that the nature of warfare in the lower Mississippi Valley, not to mention in Texas and New Mexico, differed considerably from warfare in Virginia, so much so as to perhaps qualify as a different war altogether. Historians today recognize the importance of the home front--both Union and Confederate--where, some argue, what happened in kitchens and bedrooms was just as important as what transpired on battlefields. As a result, the definition of combatants has expanded to include not only partisans and guerrillas but also women, children, and slaves. Perhaps most important, professional historians today generally agree that the political divide over slavery caused the war, even as segments of the larger public still cling to a myth that the institution was a tangential issue at most. Despite these sweeping changes in historians' understanding of why the war was fought, where it was fought, and who fought it, the master narrative of the Civil War in the last fifty years has been remarkably static. The standard syntheses of the period repeat more or less the same refrain: by late 1862, what initially began as a war to preserve the Union with slavery intact became a war for freedom. Although historians continue to disagree about the extent to which emancipation reflected a calculated military necessity or a principled commitment to liberal ideals, if not to flesh-and-blood people who were enslaved, freedom has become the sine qua non of Civil War history. Whether it came gradually and begrudgingly or, as James Oakes has recently argued, perpetually and willfully, freedom was both the Civil War's battle cry and its unfinished revolution. (1) Recent events, however, suggest that the freedom narrative may be ready for a twenty-first-century reboot. In the wake of the June 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, debates about the Confederate flag converged with the larger #blacklivesmatter movement to push national conversations about race in new directions. By exposing how the legacy of chattel slavery continues to infuse the American political economy and culture, activists marked the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial not by celebrating the emergence of a nebulous condition that succeeded legal bondage but by indicting the very notion that such a succession was either clear or complete. Their focus was not on the incremental accrual of civil or political rights but rather on the accrual of dead bodies. The continuum of violence against black people, stretching from the antebellum plantation to twenty-first-century cities and suburbs, and carried out by law enforcement and private citizens alike, raises troubling questions about how historians narrate the Civil War and its aftermath. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance--no matter how improved--as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. (2) This recent grassroots revision of the nation's historical consciousness coincides with a scholarly movement to reframe our understanding of the Civil War and emancipation. For nearly two decades, historians have been grappling with the inadequacies of the freedom narrative for analyzing American history, but their efforts so far have not produced a new, synthetic alternative to the Whiggish march toward greater and more perfect freedom. Nevertheless, significant revisions to the way we interpret the multifaceted changes wrought by the destruction of chattel bondage and the institution of new regimes of labor and political organization suggest that we will not wait much longer for a more comprehensive unwriting of the freedom narrative. …

In the Land Where We Were Dreaming

In the Land Where We Were Dreaming Coleman Hutchison (bio) Summer 2015 was a heady time to be in Columbia, South Carolina, researching proslavery southern literature. As per usual, I arrived a day late—just twenty-four hours after Republican governor Nikki Haley oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds on July 10, 2015. Responding with remarkable speed to the horrific shootings at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, the State Senate voted thirty-seven to three to remove the flag, which had flown over or near the Capitol for more than fifty-four years, since the early days of the Civil War Centennial and Civil Rights Era. By the time I arrived at the South Caroliniana Library, all that remained of decades of fierce debate over this symbol of “hatred” or “heritage” was the concrete base that once held the flagpole. And by Monday July 13, contractors were hard at work replacing that concrete with sod. As a scholar of the Civil War South, I had to go over at lunch and witness in whatever small and belated way what had happened—and happened so quickly—in the “Cradle of Secession.” Having walked the three blocks from the library to the remains of the flagpole, I found that the contractors were more than a bit leery about my interest in their work. While the previous Friday’s six-minute unfurling had drawn a crowd of nearly ten thousand, I was one of a handful of spectators for this much noisier and less ceremonial duty. When some members of the crew finally broke for [End Page 44] lunch, we all walked in the same direction, toward a justly famous sandwich shop just around the corner. One of the workers and I struck up a conversation, first about what to eat—he recommended the “Hambone” sandwich—and then about our respective work for the day. As always, I stammered a bit as I tried to describe why I would spend the summer researching Confederate and proto-Confederate writers—“the bad guys and the losers,” as I call them—especially to an older, African American man. Our awkward conversation turned quickly to his work. After hearing his account of the previous Friday, I asked about the flagpole and concrete removal: “How deep did that thing go, anyway?” Without missing a beat, my lunch line companion put his hand on my shoulder and replied, “Son, it ran pretty damn deep.” His warm laughter and affectionate thumps on my shoulder did as much as they could to ease my embarrassment. ▪ The Oxford English Dictionary takes pains to separate the literal and figurative senses of the adjective “deep.” In asking about how “deep” the State House flagpole ran, I was looking for a simple, literal measure of its “extension” or “dimension downward.” My lunch-mate offered me a more figurative—and thus much more important—measure: “Deep-rooted in the breast; that comes from or enters into one’s inmost nature or feelings; that affects one profoundly” (“deep, adj.” def. 9). Of course I know that symbols of the Confederacy “run deep” for folks on both sides of the “hate versus heritage” debate. Indeed, I had encountered sympathetic forms of deep feeling earlier in the summer, this time a bit closer to home. My office at the University of Texas at Austin looks out onto the South Mall, which features a lovely lawn framed by six midcentury buildings and several imposing live oak trees. UT’s Main Building and Tower perches at the top of the South Mall while the Littlefield Fountain rests at its bottom. The fountain features a dramatic Pompeo Coppini sculpture of a winged Columbia flanked by two World War I soldiers aboard an allegorical ship of state drawn by nymphs on giant sea horses. (Yes, it’s as weird and wonderful as it sounds.) The view looking up from the fountain toward the tower provides the iconic view of the university. Each year thousands of tourists, visitors, and students pose for pictures in front of this impressive backdrop, but very few notice the fountain’s dedication, which is artfully...

Accessing Early Black Print

Accessing Early Black Print Eric Gardner My contribution to the 2014 mla roundtable from which this forum grew centered on the word “access,” treating it capaciously and moving from questions of digitization and the preparation of editions to broad questions of praxis. In this Legacy forum I reiterate some of my arguments, update others, and emphasize how those arguments apply especially to Black women’s histories, texts, and places in print culture studies. Now as then, much that I have to say expresses worry and sometimes anger, but, as I did at the roundtable, I want to open with a moment of joy. Drafting the original piece, I snuck time to read the Legacy tributes to Frances Smith Foster and was especially enriched by Elizabeth Engelhardt’s “Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain: Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster.” “Lesson #3” is “The stakes are too high for us to be bored or boring.” “At the end of … [Foster’s] classes,” Engel-hardt writes, “the lesson was becoming clear. This stuff matters too much to waste time. And we have to do it together” (233–34). This moment remains my primer on access—a broad and expansive “we,” a real sense of duty, and a recognition that with access comes immense responsibility. Digitization has, of course, changed not only the approaches and some of the focal texts of African American literary study but also the very concept of “access.” The North American Slave Narratives project (nasn) on the Documenting the American South website (one of William L. Andrews’s greatest gifts to the field) remains a beacon. It is free, usable with even a slow Internet connection, carefully planned and executed, and rich in rare resources. It makes selective images available and provides some limited apparatus. Further, what might simply seem a massive collection is actually a powerful argument for the diversity of the genre.1 But “digital” does not mean accessible, and far too few of our resources are available even through venues like the nasn project. Try, for example, to find a single early issue of the Christian Recorder online without a subscription to Accessible Archives. If you are at a Research I institution, visit the database page of a regional comprehensive university or a small liberal arts college and imagine doing your work—our work—with the resources many academics actually have. Better yet, visit a handful of public libraries in diverse neighborhoods [End Page 25] and see how many make available the Black Abolitionist Papers, the Black Biographical Dictionaries project, or the Chadwyck-Healey African American poetry collection, to say nothing of the newer historical Black newspaper projects from vendors like ProQuest and ebsco. I submit that if we rediscover wonderful texts and only twenty or even two thousand individuals can access them, we have failed—especially if those twenty or two thousand are only at locations that still have significant library budgets. These issues are particularly important to African American women’s literature. Even as we are beginning to understand that Black and/or abolitionist periodicals often provided the best and sometimes only venues for early Black writers, we have barely begun to confront the fact that such venues were all the more important for Black women, who were generally denied print participation even more than Black men were. Even the small number of Black women able to create and/or find opportunities for book publication often relied heavily on periodicals. Consider, for example, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s single novel originally published between boards and her three novels serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper. Or think of exciting rediscovered writers like Lizzie Hart and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, who seem to have published only in periodicals. While select projects have allowed scholars to begin to consider such writers, their work will never be widely accessible until we honestly explore alternative recovery and distribution methods and learn the lessons that the nasn project has been teaching for years. Similarly, almost all of the ongoing “big data” projects tied to nineteenth-century American literature will continue to ignore or dismiss Black voices (especially Black women’s voices) until their data sets have wider and...

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago

The Independence, Diversity, and Vitality of Early Black Chicago Ian Rocksborough-Smith (bio) Christopher Robert Reed. Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 390 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Margaret Garb. Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 306pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00. These recent books by Margaret Garb and Christopher R. Reed explicitly treat the history of Black Chicago’s formative years leading up to and including the first Great Migration years of World War I. In both books, which overlap in the treatment of the twentieth-century’s first two decades, we get rich vignettes of some of Chicago’s earliest African American political elites and prolific community leaders, sites, and institutions. Some of these are already well known, while others less so. We learn of the influential John Jones, who became the city’s first elected black official in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, and of the city’s first black alderman, Oscar DePriest, elected in 1915. DePriest’s political ascendance demonstrated Black Chicago’s critical support for the famously corrupt yet relatively beneficent administration of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson and the GOP machine that dominated civic politics in those years. We also learn about important clubwomen, activists, and reformers such as Fannie B. Williams, Ida B. Wells, and the Reverends Reverdy C. Ransom and Archibald J. Carey with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. The latter two competed to influence congregations of black Southerners newly moved to the city within the local community. We learn especially about how long-time black Chicago residents worked in coalition with newcomers (mainly recent Southern migrants) to the City of Big Shoulders to engage with and impact Chicago’s infamously corrupt machine-driven civic politics. As these two studies show, black Chicagoans became vital constituents and political activists for both local Democratic and Republican politicians and party organizations (not just the party of Lincoln affiliates). Such engagements set the stage for important models of independent black civic politics sustained [End Page 665] elsewhere in urban America in later decades. Moreover, each book offers compelling analysis of Black Chicago’s earliest labor, commercial, cultural, and religious institutions and organizations as the city’s African American population grew exponentially through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Black Chicago’s history through the middle of the last century is, of course, now well examined. From the signal contributions of pioneering urban sociologists like Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (Black Metropolis, 1945), to the prolific and contemporary writings of novelist Richard Wright, to the manifold studies of the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology, Chicago—for better or worse—has long acted as a critical “laboratory” and/or site for the study of black community formation and strivings. There is now a vast scholarly literature on Chicago through the mid-twentieth century, much of it extended well beyond the formative insights of these authors. Indeed, recent scholarship on Black Chicago has taken exciting new directions from examinations of migrant consumer and religious cultures to local studies of housing; neighborhood politics; labor, educational, and cultural activism; and related issues. Many of these newer studies uncover complex histories of community formation mainly rooted in the years from World War I through World War II, when the Great Migrations of African American Southerners occurred, thus shaping many contemporary and scholarly understandings of urban America.1 However, fewer scholars have specifically examined the years prior to these watershed moments of mass migration to the urban North before World War I. Read together, both Garb and Reed show how African Americans from Chicago, many of them long-time residents (descendants of the “old settlers”—or the first resident black families whose roots went back to the antebellum period in the city) worked to form diverse, vital, independent, and influential cultural and political networks, especially on the city’s South Side. These patterns of community engagement occurred many years before the city’s African...

Huck Finn's America

Huck Finn's America