Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow Paperback – Illustrated, April 7, 2020

A revisit of this era in this book was a phenomenal journey and experience. The perspectives of old and new - both of the African American and historical perspectives that highlighted how Blacks in America navigated the social and political landscape of America to become influencers of our time.Gates did a great job in putting this work together. This book will make for a great supplemental read for any history course.

I watched Henry Louis Gates’s new documentary, Reconstruction: Life After the Civil War with great interest. To be honest, I have waited for something like this with anticipation for some time. I’ve often felt like Reconstruction, a profoundly important era in our history, is overshadowed by the war years. Admittedly, the Civil War looms large - but the aftermath is at least as important in terms of defining (or not) the meaning of freedom and citizenship moving beyond the sectional conflict...in a reunited nation. Like many, I would be very much like it if this media event inspired a documentary filmmaker to address the Civil War from a fresh perspective, perhaps dethroning Ken Burns as the reigning documentarian on the topic. In fact, I recently spoke with historian Keri Leigh Merritt, who has been vociferously advocating for such an thing, on exactly this idea. We had plenty to say on the subject.Of course I ran right out and bought Gates’s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. I rather enjoyed the book. It makes for a wonderful companion piece to the documentary and I highly recommend it. Now, I have at times questioned Gates’s judgement. For example, in 2009 he concluded that black soldiers served in the Confederate Army, a myth masterfully debunked over the years by historian Kevin Levin on his blog Civil War Memory and in his recent publication, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. Honestly - I think Gates was mislead by some of the more problematic evidence of the period…while trying to to make sense of the complexity of the Confederate cause. In addition, Gates was charged with violating PBS editorial standards when the program Finding Your Roots - a show he produced - agreed not to air an episode that exposed the slave-holding history of a famous actor. We are all human and thus all flawed. Gates made a mistake, and he apologized. I tend not to hold a grudge, and despite these rather troublesome shortcomings, I still respect Gates, his dedication to scholarship, and his drive to understand the black experience in American history.And so his look at the trajectory and legacy of Reconstruction piqued my interest. The potential of Republican leadership, black self-advocacy temporarily realized, the redemption movement by white supremacists reversing the black community’s gains post slavery, and the depths of racist support for Jim Crow segregation all make for a compelling story - and Gates tells it well. This book is accessible, concise, and beautifully supported by visual resources.W.E.B. Du Bois famously stated in his 1935 publication, Black Reconstruction in America: “The slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.” Stony the Road struck me as an important broad view of how this happened…of how the pernicious racism that informed the latter third of the 19th century - a racism, built on the racist policies and racist ideas that Ibram X. Kendi clearly explains in Stamped from the Beginning - forced black people back into quasi-slavery.Black people - their voices, their aspirations, their actions - take center stage in Gates’s book, and rightfully so. It is often tempting to accentuate the tragic elements of this story and emphasize the victimhood of formerly enslaved people who find themselves facing trials similar to slavery. But simply reducing these narratives to stories of victimization tends to rob human beings of their agency, in essence denying them their humanity - which is precisely what the white supremacists had in mind when they rolled back Reconstruction era Civil Rights legislation. Black people made strides in this era, they redefined freedom, and they created institutions, both cultural and political. I am pleased that Gates chose the framework he did to illuminate the human experiences of the Reconstruction years.Gates also explains the ideology of white supremacist resistance to black agency and the development of Jim Crow segregation by looking closely at the pseudo-scientific foundation of racist ideas and the visual imagery that supported it. This is an especially important aspect of the book. As Gates shows, there was not such a great leap from the “scientific” evidence of black inferiority to the caricatured images used to sell soap and other consumer products. These “race characteristics,” as Gates demonstrates, were the differences that “became the evidence in the argument for de jure (legal) segregation” (56).Students of the early-20th century will find Gates’s chapter on the so-called New Negro instructive, as he unfolds the ways in which black people redeemed the race from the redeemers, as it were. New Negroes - a leadership class created two decades after the end of Reconstruction, as the story goes, saw themselves as best suited to combat entrenched racist policies that had spread throughout the nation. They were “young, post-slavery, modern, culturally sophisticated, and thoroughly middle class and most effectively equipped to combat the mounting injustices that the mass of black people were facing [at the turn of the century]” (186). There is a good deal to ponder here about class as a category of distinction and analysis within a very large (10 million perhaps) group of people, while keeping in mind that the law only knew black people in monolithic terms.My final thoughts on Stony the Road have to do with D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation, which appears frequently in the book as one of the most significant cultural iterations of pervasive racism. I’ve been working for a while now on a book on this film so Gates’s comments have got me to wondering…particularly about his framing of the movie as propaganda. I believe he is correct in that the film empowered racist whites to act. Scholars have long pointed out how the film helped inspire the 1920s incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan and how the Klan used the film as a recruiting tool. In my recent interview with historian and memory scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, she rather astutely pointed out how the film grew in popularity roughly at the same time as black people began to migrate out of the South to northern destinations such as Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The film most certainly inspired (or justified…) racial violence in these northern regions - what folks in groups such as the NAACP, who resolutely condemned the film, feared the most.But we might also look at this film as confirmation bias blown into gargantuan proportions on the big screen - the harnessing of a new medium to confirm for white Americans what they already knew. And if anyone asked, they had their receipts. In an even more pernicious sense that Gates suggests, the racism in The Birth of a Nation was a reflection of the film’s profound connections with academic scholarship. The most distinguished scholars of the era provided the intellectual support for this film (and the novel on which Griffith based the film, The Clansman by Thomas Dixon), and when former Princeton University scholar Woodrow Wilson gladly welcomed a screening in the White House, Griffith had his intellectual endorsement. Propaganda strikes me as the willful manipulation of evidence to convince someone to change their mind. According to Gates’s own evidence, this was certainly not a issue for whites in America educated and well-versed in racist ideas. Neither was it an issue for D. W. Griffith, who claimed to have authored the authentic history of the Civil War and Reconstruction for the movie-going public. He even offered to pay anyone a hefty sum if they could prove his “history” was ahistorical. Honestly, I wish he hadn’t squandered his fortune before he dropped dead. I would love to connect with the executor of his estate and cash in on that offer.With compliments,Keith

Sometimes you read a book and walk away shaking your head at the stupidity of people, at the cruelty of humans to-ward other humans, at the selfishness and abuse by those in power against those they want to take advantage of. I’m shaking my head right now at the European Americans of the 1800s and 1900s, ancestors of mine who lived and worked and participated in this atrocity. Shame. On. Them. They say that your character is shown by how you treat a child or a dog when you know that no one else is watching. Well, I point the finger right now at my ancestors. I didn’t know this stuff, the actual history of abuse that occurred after the Civil War, but now I do. Wow! They were horrible human beings! There is no excuse, no justification for how white people treated black people.I learned a lot of things as I read this book for a book club at my Unitarian Universalist church. Yep, we met last night and discussed it. Here are a ten things that I picked up from the book that I want to share with you.ONE…A lot of Northern politicians and leaders were anti-slavery, but they were not pro-Negro. They didn’t like the system of slavery, but they did not view black people as equals. Simply put, they thought that black people were (as a group) unable to think, unable to control their actions, and unable to achieve success without their (white) help. Wow! Schools don’t teach this history. They act like the North cared about morality and ethics while the South simply didn’t want its system of income to be messed with by the North. Hmph! Really?TWO…Cotton production in the South picked up after the Civil War as black people moved from slavery-status to share croppers, a replacement system that kept them working in the fields. I find it telling that money still ruled in the South, and that decisions were made by the North that kept money flowing into and through the hands of those in power (both in the North and South). The rich wanted to stay rich. The leaders wanted to continue leading and reaping the rewards that this brought them.THREE…Southerners promoted the theory after the war that the Civil War was not treason (rebelling from the Union), but was a revolt against the overreaching federal government. They rewrote the story in order to make themselves look good, look like they had the individual’s interests at heart. What. A. Lie. How they treated black people showed the depth of their hatred (for sub-human blacks), the depth of their views of themselves (as superior whites). White supremacy, with whites as the supreme power brokers, the only ones deserving of good and fair treatment. The “I am better than you” view that lies at the heart of -isms (racism, sexism, elitism, colonialism, expansionism, etc.).FOUR…Even though the federal government abolished slavery and gave black people the right to vote, state delegations in the South revised their constitutions to take away those rights. And those in power (President, leaders in the North) let this happen. While the North won the war, within a few years everything was back to the way it used to be in the South. Blacks still couldn’t vote, couldn’t hold public office, couldn’t win a legal battle against a white person, couldn’t achieve success through hard work, couldn’t recreate alongside white people, couldn’t walk freely in the land of the free, etc.FIVE…Haters and elitists used pseudoscience to show how the skulls and brains of black people were smaller and shaped differently than white people, connecting intelligence and rights to false ideas and fakery. Psychologists made up fake diseases to show how black people weren’t sane, like drapetomonia, a disease causing Negros to run away. The suggested treatment was infantilization, treating them like a child. Really? Yes. These were men with formal education, with degrees, with status and reputation, saying this stuff. And they were believed.SIX…In 1907, the Supreme Court ruled that Indiana could continue to sterilize people. Indiana adopted sterilization as a tool against the poor, against minorities, and against criminals. And all but one member of the Supreme Court voted that this was a legal and justified response. Really? How can I ever trust the Supreme Court again?SEVEN…Eugenics was all the rave and taught at schools like Stanford, Yale, the University of Virginia, and Harvard. Yes, the very concept that turned Hitler’s Germany a few years later into a hotbed of killing and burning and horror was widespread across America. Our universities supported this idea and offered numerous classes to its students. If educated people thought that it made sense, then how could the average person in America question it. Just ridiculous. Yet this is our history.EIGHT…Some argue that the injustices against blacks were only a few bad apples. Wrong! The system as a whole, all across America, in big cities and small towns, was filled with people who viewed black people as things, as objects, not as humans. Yes, it was strongest in the South, but people every-where were fooled into believing the lies.NINE…The “black problem” didn’t exist. There never was a black problem. There was a white problem, though. White exploitation of black people. Period! That is what this was. Taking advantage of others. Cruelty. Rudeness. Injustice. It was the whites who were the problem, who cause the pain and death and fear among blacks.TEN…DNA analysis of African American men living today shows that one in three carry the Y-DNA signature from a direct white ancestor. Was that sex consensual? I think not. I suspect that it is there in their DNA due to one and only one factor…the rape of black women by white men. And yet, it was the white man claiming that black men would rape white women if given their freedom. How sad that the very children and grandchildren of rapists would turn the tables on reality.Oh, there was more that made me angry and disappointed in my white ancestors, so much more that I picked up as I read through this book, but I will stop right here and encourage you to read the book yourself. Look, if you want to know real history, then read this book. It will show you that life after the Civil War was just as horrible for black people as life before. Despite what modern day politicians say, the ending of the American Civil War did not turn the lives of black Americans from pain to pleasure, or slavery to freedom of action. The war didn’t solve our problems or create a fair and just America. Those who lost the war chose ignore its outcome and keep causing harm to black Americans for another hundred and fifty years. It’s sad, but you should know the truth. Read this book!

I wanted to read a history of the reconstruction and Jim Crow and this book is not a history so in one sense I was disappointed.Instead this book examines the intellectual basis of the Jim Crow South or redemption as it is referred in this book. Some sections are very hard to follow (the first 1/4 of the book) but where this book is excellent is its study, with the shocking pictures, of the intellectual basis behind Jim Crow justified racism. Reading this book you will realize how racist pictures developed to justify "Jim Crow" seep into our society.Reading this book made me realize that growing up white in the 1970s in the Midwest, I was fully exposed to the images used to justify Jim Crow in the 1880s. Its an example of how powerful the pen is, and how repugnant and far reaching it can be. In this sense, the book is excellent, and the books sections describing this should be required reading.

The disrespect was REAL! Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, Elmer Fudd & Bugs...all these famous cartoons, national anthem, capitalism, democracy, the entire country.. all built off of the hard working back breaking forced brutal labor of African Americans and all the anti black racism we had to navigate & still do today. Read this book!!!

Prof. Gates provides the context for white supremacy’s rise in US history. Gaslighting is a policy, not a new phenomenon, in the white supremacy tool box. Don’t think it will work this time; the educated and the exposure provided by the media, should be able to mitigate against the sickness of white supremacy. Read, read, read.

Interesting read for all

This is an excellent history of the destruction of reconstruction following the US civil war and the long, incomplete recapturing of the initiatives at a new, permanent reconstruction.