The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2019Reinventing Reconstruction and Scripting Civil Rights in Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ Julie Burrell (bio) On February 23, 1968, in what would be one of his final public addresses, Martin Luther King Jr. paid tribute to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth. In the speech at Carnegie Hall, King distinguished Du Bois’s work as a historian, selecting for special praise the monumental work of historical revisionism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which helped overturn nearly a century of white supremacist histories. Such histories, King declared, were responsible for “a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high.” King insisted that the stakes of misremembering and misconstruing African Americans’ role in the drama of Reconstruction was the perpetuation of Jim Crow: “If, as white historians tell it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings.”1 Two decades before King’s Carnegie Hall speech, African American playwright Theodore Ward had argued that the continued success or failure of the civil rights movement depended in no small part on the nation’s memory of the first Reconstruction. Ward’s underappreciated masterpiece Our Lan’ was first performed in 1947, initially at the Lower East Side’s Henry Street Settlement House, before becoming one of the few African American–authored dramas to reach Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Our Lan’ depicts a group of recently freed African Americans claiming their forty acres and a [End Page 215] mule on a disused cotton plantation. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and changing federal policies that were more sympathetic to white former landowners, the freedpeople stage a doomed rebellion in an attempt to keep their land. Ward began composing Our Lan’ in the early 1940s, soon after the film version of Gone with the Wind (1939) had reinforced white supremacist narratives that depicted Reconstruction as a time of farcical yet tyrannical rule over the South by black people and white Northerners. Our Lan’ was part of an upsurge of black-authored, counter-hegemonic cultural texts combatting stage and screen distortions of the era that treated black men as ignorant buffoons or dangerous beasts and portrayed black women predominantly through the sentimental trope of the mammy. Like Ward, African American playwrights including William Branch, Theodore Browne, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes reworked black folk culture and revised popular accounts of the past in an attempt to wrest control of black historical representation away from white supremacists. Moreover, Ward is one of the foremost writers of the civil rights era to suggest that Reconstruction ushered in a re-entrenchment of slavery maintained by white supremacist tactics such as sharecropping and state violence. Ward frames Reconstruction as “the nonevent of emancipation,” Saidiya Hartman’s term for “the perpetuation of the plantation system and the refiguration of subjection.”2 Our Lan’ invites us to consider how “the afterlives of Reconstruction” endure beyond the supposed end point of Reconstruction and align with a broad strand of African American thought that is fundamentally at odds with an imagined break between slavery and freedom called emancipation.3 Recent studies such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, as well as the black feminists and activists of the Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements, have contended that structures of domination have been refigured through chain-gang labor and imprisonment, legal restrictions and Black Codes, and the spectacular terrorism effected through white Americans’ violence against black Americans, including lynchings and police killings. Black emancipatory discourse has frequently resisted the idea of freedom as a fixed point or historical event; the lyrics to “Freedom Is Constant Struggle,” performed during civil rights protests by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-affiliated Freedom Singers, captures this fittingly: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle / O Lord, we...
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Jun 1, 2020
Christopher Breu 
Open Access