The greatest strength of the 2019 PBS documentary Reconstruction: America After The Civil War is its desire to inform contemporary debates. But this may also be one of its weaknesses. Robert Greene II joined editor Bill Black in April 2019 to discuss his review of the first half of this documentary, “A Usable History of Reconstruction.”
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“The Ken Burns Civil War thing” ♦ Reconstruction and periodization ♦ Slavery by Another Name, 13th, and Henry Louis Gates ♦ Reconstruction as “usable history”
Bill Black: Hello, Robert. How are you doing?
Robert Greene II: Pretty good how ‘bout yourself?
Bill: Doing just fine. A question for you, before we dive into things, which is, do you believe “Old Town Road” is country?
Robert: You know, that’s funny you mention that because I’ve had classes this week that have discussed the same subject and they have convinced me it is. I was not even aware of the song itself until two weeks ago, but I think after listening to it several times, I’m pretty convinced it’s country.
Bill: Yeah. Well, how did your students persuade you?
Robert: So, you know, what’s interesting is teaching at an HBCU, I found that my students have some really interesting views on being black in America and being Generation Z and black. And for them, it’s not a question of it being country not. To them, it’s simply about the lyrics making it clear it’s a country song. They say that the beat and everything else – the rhythm scheme and everything – that’s just dressing up of it. But they say it at its core, not only do they think it’s a country song, but some of them even say they listen to other country acts as well. So, to them, the genre thing is not as big of a deal as it is to other groups of people.
Bill: Why do you think that is?
Robert: You know, I think it’s actually – and not to sound like the old man get off my lawn kind of thing – but, all seriousness, I think a big part of it is various streaming platforms. And the fact that we have a generation of music listeners now who can pull up virtually any song they want from any genre they want. Whereas, you know, even when we were growing up, it was more dictated by what radio stations you listened to growing up, what music videos you watched, what channels you watch those videos on. For our students, that’s just a different way of thinking about music. For them it’s more of, Okay, what am I listening to now, what do I feel like listening to next.
Bill: Yeah, I guess that’s, you know, you don’t necessarily care as much what genre it is because genres are more something that makes sense for, you know, record labels and radio stations and now all that’s getting kind of scrambled. I mean, and honestly you listen to a lot of country songs that are on the country stations now and, you know, there is a lot already of the kind of hip-hop-ification of that genre. So I, yeah, it’s a I think the most fascinating that’s happened in the culture in a while. I wish I was an undergrad when this when this song came out. And that the guy who made it, started off as a Nicki Minaj Stan account and he accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers via that and he promoted the song through the reddit sock puppets asking people, Hey, have you heard of this song where the horses are in the back? And, yeah, it’s wild. And then it gets popular on a Chinese lip-synching app which, yeah. . .
Robert: I mean this song really is the quintessential 2019 hit, just based off all those factors.
Bill: Yeah. And you hear this Lil Nas X guy talk, and I get the sense – I know he’s wearing the cowboy hat – I think, though, he’s an extremely online guy and has been for a while. I do not think he’s got any horses in the back. But I don’t think people really seem to care.
Robert: No, I don’t think they did. They just love the song.
“The Ken Burns Civil War thing”
Bill: Yeah. Believe or not, we’re mainly here not to talk about “Old Town Road,” but about this new PBS documentary series they’ve been promoting and debuted a few days ago: Reconstruction: America After The Civil War, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. I want to first ask you, have you watched the Ken Burns Civil War thing? I feel like that always looms in the distance when you talk about anything remotely like this.
Robert: Yes, I’ve definitely seen the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries several times.
Bill: How old were you when you first watched it?
Robert: I was young. I was a kid, probably about seven or eight when I first saw it, and I watched it again with a much more perceptive eye I when I was in college about 10 years ago.
Bill: What changed for you between the first and second?
Robert: Well, I think the first time when I saw it as a child, I was just trying to devour information about the Civil War and about history in general. I mean, I was the kind of kid who, at the age of seven, actually sat down and watched the entire Gettysburg television movie. Which, I think I like to think, at the very least shows how curious I was about the Civil War, even if at the time I wasn’t aware of the things they were leaving out of that story. But I think, looking at it now from an older, more seasoned perspective, it does again bring to light what this current reconstruction miniseries is having to work against, in the sense that the old Civil War miniseries, it does talk a bit about slavery and at times, depending on which episode you’re watching, it does feel as though it’s at the heart of the conflict, but other sections of that Civil War documentary, it’s largely subsumed in the stories about the battles the stories about the heroism of the soldiers. And again, that’s all incredibly important. But what I think this miniseries, Reconstruction has done is try to act as a reminder of, Oh, by the way, this is what the entire conflict was about, even if folks weren’t talking about it day to day, these are the root causes of it. And in many ways, what you saw in the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries, the fact that it ends with the war and only briefly moves to Reconstruction really says more about how Reconstruction is such a complicated story in comparison to the Civil War.
Bill: Yeah. I was looking through a transcript of the documentary and trying to find references to Reconstruction in that last episode. Because really the way it ends is with this really long, like, every single character that’s popped up in this in the show, we’re going to give you a brief little what their life was like afterwards. So, you know, Chamberlain goes back to Bowdoin College and all the sorts of stuff. And one of the few things is they say is Alexander Stephens was imprisoned briefly and then re-elected to his old congressional seat from Georgia, as if there had never been a Confederacy. Which of course, that is something that briefly happened but then the Republicans refused to seat him. When I use the Ken Burns Civil War documentary in class – I used it in my Civil War class, sort of a 300-level thing – and the way I used it was I had them watch the last maybe 10 minutes of it where you have the, I guess it was the 1936 Gettysburg reunion. Is that right? Yeah. No ‘38. It’s very elegiac and it closes with this Shelby Foote reading from some nostalgic account of, Oh the Confederate and Union ghosts will one day reunite in Valhalla and be able to just sort of crack jokes and sit around the fire. And then you have the end credits and it’s this black spiritual, “Freedom. . . freedom.” It’s this is really weird, like, not knowing how to end it, not knowing what note to end it on, and trying to have trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Robert: Yeah, I think certainly with the PBS Civil War miniseries from 1990, it is important to note in a partial defense of Ken Burns that when he made that miniseries it was coming at a time when historians were increasingly beginning to argue that the war was definitively about slavery. But what I think he got caught up in with the miniseries was really trying to tell the story of the Civil War from different facets and in a lot of ways trying to call it as far down the middle as he could. So I think that miniseries, if eventually at some point I expect PBS or some other network to create another Civil War miniseries. It’s going to have to happen sooner or later, if only because that’s one of the great historical topics Americans always want to learn more about. And it’ll be interesting if, when that series is made ,what difference they’ll have from, say, the Ken Burns from the 1990, where, you know, I doubt you’ll have another figure like a Shelby Foote, for instance, in a future series or documentary, where Foote has this folksy charm in the miniseries that I have to admit, even I get wrapped up in sometimes when I’m watching it.
Bill: Oh sure! He’s a great storyteller.
Robert: He is! He’s a great storyteller. But then you have Barbara Fields in the documentary basically trying to counter everything he’s saying in a lot of ways.
Bill: I’ve said it would be great if, you know David Blight has a great book, American Oracle, where he has four folks that he uses to look at the American Civil War Centennial. He uses Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin. And I thought it would be it’d be interesting if someone could do a sort of looking at the Civil War series as an event in the memory of the Civil War –which it really is. And use Ken Burns’s Shelby Foote and Barbara Fields and have sort of a capsule biographies of them. Because you have Shelby Foote sort of a more lost lause understanding of the War. Barbara Fields having what Blight would call the Emancipationist memory of the War. And Ken Burns having a more emphasis on Union, reconciliation, you know in many ways the “the narrative” that eventually won out.
I know that Ken Burns often tells a story that he was trying to get some big chunk of money to help finish fund the series and he went to the a big guy at General Motors, I want to say, and this GM hot show, you know asked him to tell him, well, what is the documentary about. And Ken Burn says, Well before the Civil War it was the United States ‘are’ and after the Civil War it was the United States ‘is.’ So it made us an ‘is.’ And that’s actually not exactly true etymologically speaking. But that he thought that that was, you know for him, it’s ultimately story and a nationalist story about creating the strong Nation out of, you know, the War.
Did you find yourself missing, while watching the Reconstruction PBS series, did you find yourself wanting a more of an authorial voice like you get in the Ken Burn show?
Robert: You know, I actually enjoyed the fact that this miniseries did not have that. I actually liked having a variety of historians and other scholars, like Kimberlé Crenshaw for example, a variety of voices in this, at least the first two hours, and I’m sure it’ll be the same for the next 2 hours as well. But I really felt that having those different historians talking to the audience, I think played up the fact that, these four people, who are not in the profession of academic history, it played up the idea there are a lot of historians who work on this topic from different angles. And the hope is that it gives folks who are watching it, who are just lay people who are curious about Reconstruction, might say, I’ve never heard of say Kidada Williams, or I’m not familiar with David Blight, or I’m not familiar with Eric Foner, like I would like to be. It might push them to learn more about these different historians and to wonder well, you know, if they’re in this documentary, then if you’re not having just Henry Louis Gates or some narrator like a Morgan Freeman or Liev Schreiber speaking the entire time, if it’s instead historians trying to tell the story, piece by piece, I think it’s actually a good model for understanding how the profession actually works. That it’s not just one person speaking with the ultimate Authority. It’s multiple historian speaking to help craft a narrative about Reconstruction.
Bill: There are a couple of moments where they try and step back that almost feel like something out of Finding Your Roots where, you know, we had this surreal thing where we’ve seen Gates, you know, just speak to us in a field or something like that. And then we’ve seen Eric Foner talking to us in this room. And then there’s a moment where we have Gates interviewing Foner about how he became interested in Reconstruction. And there’s another moment where we have Gates being shown around by Jim Clyburn – moments where he sort of steps back, you know, the sort, of Andrew Johnson, Radical Republicans, Ulysses Grant 1876 – interrupts that narrative with. . .
Robert: No, I think what you saw out there, especially with the Jim Clyburn part, is they were trying to mix in some public history there. They were trying to show how Reconstruction lives on today through the voices of people in, say, South Carolina. So in that sense, I think what they were trying to do was to branch out just a little bit beyond professional historians to show how even politicians from areas that were most affected by Reconstruction still have to deal with that legacy today, in a lot of ways.
Reconstruction and periodization
Bill: Well, you know, it’s funny because even the Foner thing is, it’s ostensibly talking to Foner about his participation in the Reconstruction Memorial. Where is it? It’s in South Carolina. . .
Robert: Beaufort, South Carolina.
Bill: So it is funny how much, I mean it’s not if you know that history, the documentary doesn’t shy from how important South Carolina is in the story, I guess is one way to put it.
Robert: Yeah, and I think that was actually I think essential for the story because South Carolina has such a unique history, even within the Reconstruction narrative. The thing about Reconstruction as a historical story is that it really does take a different form depending on which Southern state they’re looking at. And if say, we’re making a Reconstruction documentary about each Southern State, then the one about South Carolina will likely be one of the longest episodes of that purported miniseries, so to speak, because so much happens in the state in such a short amount of time. Again, I think part of what the miniseries is being inspired by is how, in a modern-day, there are efforts to try to memorialize Reconstruction in ways to counteract a lot of the lost cause narratives growing for the last century or so. and the Beaufort Memorial is, I think, the Pinnacle of that example. Since it is a National Historic site, it’s meant to really draw visitors into, not only go to Beaufort, but from Beaufort to think, Okay what else can I learn about Reconstruction. I believe it’s supposed to be part of a larger series of monuments and memorials across the South dedicated to Reconstruction because National Park Service will admit that that is an area of history that they have not covered as much at their historic sites.
Bill: I’m trying to think back – I believe we spent one day on Reconstruction in my AP US History class, and this was at Bolton High School in Bartlett, Tennessee. Named after a slaveholder who died in a years-long feud. Basically, the spiel I remember being told was, this is why the South came to hate the North. That was how you know, it was portrayed to me as far as it’s import was concerned. Do you remember learning much about Reconstruction when you were in high school or even earlier?
Robert: You know, going to school in Georgia, K through 12
Bill: Is that where you’re from, Georgia?
Ebony Pictorial History of Black America
Robert: Yes. That’s where I’m from originally: Augusta, Georgia, to be more specific. I remember learning about Reconstruction piecemeal here and there, but I will also admit that my memory of learning what Reconstruction is a bit colored by the fact that when I was a very young boy, my grandmother gave to me a three-volume set of the Ebony Pictorial History of Black America from the ’70s. And that three-volume set, it’s divided into three parts: part one is from African history through the Civil War. The second volume starts with Reconstruction and it’s this lengthy chapter about the Reconstruction Era, and as a kid, I saw all these photographs of black politicians, black leaders during the Reconstruction period, and I got a lot more out of that one book that I can recall learning in any of my schooling K through12. So, for me. . .
Bill: Have you written about that?
Robert: I have. I’ve written a bit about that collection for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, and I’ve also made reference to it in a piece I wrote for Current Affairs last year as well. So, it’s essentially my upbringing in terms of learning history. Some of my favorite moments took place outside of the classroom, so to speak. So, for me learning about Reconstruction was a bit different because so much of it happened outside of the classroom.
Bill: Was that sort of a little Lerone Bennett joint?
Robert: Yeah. Well the thing about the Ebony collection – that was certainly a Lerone Bennett production, so to speak; he was certainly a big part of that getting off the ground. And I think your question about how folks learn about Reconstruction in school is particularly important because I think as the Reconstruction miniseries was running Tuesday night, there were historians on Twitter – the Twitterstorians, of course – were talking about, Well at your University or college, where do you teach Reconstruction? Do you teach it in the first half of the survey or the second have of the survey? And I think that the answers were all over the place because usually if you look at U.S. history surveys across the country, they usually begin and end around 1865. And so you have the situation where if you’re trying to teach American history in college, and you’re teaching, say, up through the Civil War, do you just end with Appomattox? Or if you’re beginning the second half do you just begin with 1877, and you have this weird gap with like, what happened after the Civil War? Why are we starting here with the Great Compromise? So I think your question about schools and Reconstruction and learning about it is important because again, that’s where most people first get their sense of general contours of U.S. history, not the complete story.
Bill: I taught a U.S. History once at the University of Memphis where they’re cut-off was 1877, and I was like, you know what we’re gonna talk about the Compromise of 1877, but we’re gonna go back a little bit so that we understand what was being compromised. So I essentially, probably didn’t spend as much time on it as I have now at Western Kentucky where it’s 1865, but I still spent a few days. I’ve heard some people suggest you could have the first half to 1877 and the second half from 1865. Though I think that that proposal makes some early Americanist kind of itchy.
Robert: I can understand that.
Bill: So, if I’m teaching the first half to 1877, I’m going to want to spend like a third of the semester time of the Civil War era just because – I don’t know, it might depend on where you’re teaching to, as far as what you think is important to the kind of historical imaginations of the students you’re dealing with. I guess that’s the question: Do you factor in, when you’re teaching, what you sense your students are already bringing to the table? What is More relevant to them?
Robert: No, that’s a great question. And I definitely think about that, especially teaching in South Carolina. You know, I think about what have they learned about Reconstruction in their schooling here in South Carolina before to get to college. And I’ve taught about Reconstruction at the University of South Carolina and the public university here in Columbia South Carolina and I’ve also talked about Reconstruction and Claflin University, which is a historically black institution in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Now in both cases, it really does depend on the class in the survey. I try to give as much space as I can to Reconstruction the first week or two, but I’ve also taught classes on the New South and on the History of South Carolina. And the New South actually begins at the end of the Civil War, if your South Carolina covers the entire state’s history. In both of those courses, what I try to do is to emphasize that even though Reconstruction has this demarcation point in 1877, the Reconstruction era reverberates for several decades. So just together day at Claflin I lectured a bit on Robert Smalls being a congressman from the state of South Carolina in 1880s and how black political power didn’t just come to a screeching halt in 1877. So I tried to really play up the fact that even though we have as historians, we have these dividing lines, these markers for good reason, where Reconstruction ends, it’s also important to note that people living on the ground that era it wasn’t just, One day there were black politicians and the next day, they all disappear, like it’s the end of Avengers Infinity War. No, that wasn’t quite what happened. The fact that it was actually drawn out and that the 1890’s become so important in this narrative, makes it all the more incumbent to really teach Reconstruction with the kind of nuance necessary.
Bill: Were you surprised that the second hour of this series – so the first half ends with 1877?
Robert: You know, initially, going into it I would have been, but I got my hands on the companion book, Stony the Road, which is the Henry Louis Gates book that’s the companion to the miniseries, and that book actually makes it quite clear they are going deep in the 20th century. So after I saw the first pages of the book, I thought, Well the miniseries not going to end 1877. With that said, I have to admit, even watching it, I was kind of surprised that after two hours they were basically done with that standard Reconstruction narrative. Which I think actually points to how this is not just about Reconstruction, per se, but it’s about Reconstruction and its legacy too. So I think that second half of the story will be very eye-opening people who just assumed it would be the traditional 1865 to 1877 narrative.
Bill: Yeah, it does make you wonder about using it. I’m not particularly fond of using whole episodes of a documentary in the classroom – there’s only so much time. But I am curious how this will end up being used. I don’t know of really anything like this that tells, in this kind of pretty digestible fashion, the basic contours of Reconstruction.
Slavery by Another Name, 13th, and Henry Louis Gates
Robert: One thing to think about with this miniseries is – I know you mentioned the Civil War Ken Burns miniseries earlier this evening – another series to think about is the PBS production of the miniseries based on the book, Slavery by Another Name, that came out around 2011 or ’12. And the Slavery by the Another Name miniseries, it starts with Reconstruction and goes through the history convict leasing. I think that’s also an interesting comparison with this one because both of those miniseries try to go beyond traditional contours of Reconstruction and what we think we know about southern history and history of race. And, you know, Slavery by Another Name is a much more recent piece of scholarship and a much more recent documentary than the Ken Burns –
Bill: It’s Douglas A. Blackmon’s book?
Robert: Yes, that’s right.
Bill: I guess it’s also probably in the vein of 13th, the –
Robert: Oh, the Ava DuVernay-produced documentary.
Bill: Yeah. It’s on Netflix and something that I gather a lot of my students have watched, they often will cite that and sometimes get a little carried away with it. I think some people have extrapolated from it this almost sort of conspiracy theory about the 13th Amendment, you know talking about?
Robert: No, I know exactly what you’re talking about and I’ve had to deal with this in classes too; this idea that that small clause in the 13th Amendment, except in cases of crime or corporal punishment. I think I think you’re right that some folks have really run a bit too far with that.
Bill: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Yeah. So, the idea of, was this a loophole purposely put in? My sense is this was simply like, Oh, well, you know, we’re abolishing slavery, but obviously we’re not talking about people who are in prison. Like, not so much a loophole as it was just sort of like, Obviously not that. Conspiracy theories, I’ve said, folk historiography and something to be very careful of because much about it is a good impulse you want to encourage you just have to kind of build around it.
I’m curious about what you make of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s involvement in this. Because he seems like someone who has sort of an odd place in the kind of academic media landscape. What do you make of it?
Robert: You know, I think Henry Louis Gates is the kind of public intellectual who’s able to draw eyeballs to really any miniseries. I think he has this kind of place in contemporary discourse, contemporary public discourse about history where you here named Henry Louis Gates, and if you’re not an academic, if you’re not a voracious reader of history, you’ve probably heard that name before. You think, Okay, that’s the guy on PBS. You know, he does the Finding Your Roots documentary series. He does other miniseries. He did Many Rivers to Cross, the African-American history miniseries a few years ago. So I think in that sense, he does draw attention, if you know, he’s involved with the miniseries and you’re not someone who’s really firmly ensconced in the academic profession of history, then you’re going to definitely tune in and check out what he has to say and what project he’s a part of.
Bill: He’s almost like our Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Robert: And that’s actually good comparison, thinking about academics who are publicly well-known, who are essentially used to get eyeballs on television sets.
Bill: I haven’t heard it, but there have got to be some rumblings of jealousy or, occasionally I hear someone be like, Oh, well, you know, he’s not a historian which I always thought was kind of bullshit. It’s like, I know he’s trained as a literary scholar and I guess his sort of big book that made him known originally was The Signifying Monkey. But I mean, I just think that’s pedantic. You can be both a literary scholar and historian. I also know that there are some on the Left who have been critical of him. He’s expressed, you know, doubt about reparations. Oh, and there was and there was a little thing – remember the Ben Affleck, the big Sony leak, you know what I’m talking about?
Robert: I think I remember that, yes.
Bill: Where it was revealed that Ben Affleck was on Finding Your Roots and it came out that one of his ancestors owned slaves and he wrote an email asking that a not be revealed and Gates was like, Sure whatever. And then later Gates said, Well, it wasn’t really that interesting anyway, so we’re not going to talk about it. I don’t know. I just wonder if you ever hear any rumblings about Gates or, typically anyone who ends up in that kind of position, there’s least going to be some people jealous.
Robert: Yeah, I think the critiques I’ve heard about Gates are twofold: one in terms of him being a historian, I think the concern there is not so much having that moniker of historian so much as he’s not the traditional historian that’s typically going in the archives, writing books based on kind of archival research, it’s based more around teams of researchers doing work. I think I agree with you to some extent that he is certainly acting in the vein of a historian who is trying to get information out to a wide audience. It just so happens that he is the person doing it and for our generation. But I think another critique of Gates, it really stretches back – this is again linking to your analysis of his critiques from the Left – it really goes back to those 1990s Arrow Wars about black public intellectuals, about the Henry Louis Gates-es, and the Cornel Wests, Michael Eric Dysons, and so on and so forth, and how Gates was very much at the heart of that, you know assembling the team they had at Harvard in African American Studies in the 1990s. But still, being very much in the public eye for such a long period of time, you think about Gates and then a Cornel West, for example, a Cornel West is someone who is also a public intellectual but is firmly taking sides in these big, boisterous political arguments amongst leftist Liberals. Whereas Gates, if you really look at his career the last 20 years or so, you know, he’ll make the occasional announcement or the occasional analysis of something going on politically, but for the most part, he’s really firmly entrenched in making these PBS specials, producing books and documentaries for public consumption. He is very much what he once referred to himself as the intellectual entrepreneur and I think that’s really the heart of this critique is people in the academy hear that term “intellectual entrepreneur” and think, Oh, wait, what is he trying to do here? What is his end goal? But certainly for Gates it has it has paid many dividends in terms of getting his name out there and not only that, but also allowing PBS to work on a wide range of specials relating in some form or fashion to the black experience in America.
Bill: I think it’s great to have someone like him. I mean even just Finding Your Roots, I know, has, I think, really been helpful. They do a decent job of showing some of how the actual, you know, archival digging around is done and sort of contextualizing people’s stories. Basically, it’s a little micro histories. I know just your kind of casual PBS watcher, anecdotally, will learn a thing or two. I feel like you’re talking about he was building the African-American Studies program at Harvard in the 90s – was there something about his position versus someone like Cornel West or what was going on in the 90s?
Robert: So really what you see happening in the 1990s is that was roughly 25 years after you start seeing the first real African American Studies programs growing across the country various universities. But what set Gates apart at Harvard was that, by around 1993, ’94, ’95, you have the rise of this new generation of black public intellectuals, of folks like Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Uncle Eric Dyson, bell hooks, and several others who are –
Bill: John McWhorter
Robert: Oh! John McWhorter, certainly. They’re all taking these positions of authority talking about the black experience, talking about race, and really doing so against the backdrop of things like The Bell Curve, for instance, that was released around 1995. And really, the rise of the black public intellectual coincides with this era in recent American history where debates about race and racism were heavily influenced by the post-, for instance, society backlash 60s and 70s, really influenced by the rise of the new Right in the 70s and 80s, and also this move by the Democratic Party in the 90s more towards the center. So they were finding there were still some space for more liberal African Americans to talk about issues of race. But really it was, again, those folks like Gates and West especially who were firmly at the center of those black public intellectual debates in the 1990s. For example, Gates and West released a book together in circa 1996 called The Future of the Race that Gates and West co-wrote. You have Cornel West releasing Race Matters in 1993, which was a best-seller talking about his analysis of race relations in the U.S. in the early 90s. But certainly I think what Gates did the 90s, was he provided a home at Harvard for numerous black public intellectuals, that people refer to it as sort of a “dream team” of African American Studies that he had assembled at that time. Many African American public intellectuals now, if you think of say, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Brittney Cooper, they are still writing very much in the shadow of those 90s black public intellectuals. I would argue. They’re trying to craft a narrative of black public analysis that is speaking to race relations in a Black Lives Matter era, certainly in the era of Donald Trump, and they’re having to confront, in a lot of ways, what Gates, West, and others wrote about the 1990s, but how the inability to fully grapple with these questions of race, of crime, of law and order in the 90s have really led to the problems we have today. Take for instance, thinking about this broadly for a second – and this all, I think, links back Reconstruction too if you think about how Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign was heavily criticized for her comments in the 1990s about super predators. Well that those comments were being made at a time when black couple intellectuals – like Gates, like West, like Michael Eric Dyson, like bell hooks – they were all talking about issues of race and broken windows policies and things like that in the 1990s in a certain context, that I think public intellectuals today are still trying to grapple with. There’s almost a sense of, Why didn’t they do a better job of changing these debates in the 1990s? In a more favorable light? But again, we have to keep the context in mind and think back to this Reconstruction documentary as well. There is an interesting parallel in terms of intellectual history, of how in the Reconstruction period we saw in the first two hours and documentary, you do see a devolution of thought on race in political cartoons; how, for example, there’s famous example of Thomas Nash, how draws African Americans in 1865 and 1868 and how it changes to where they’re more childlike and barbaric by 1872, 1876. In a similar light, I think what this Reconstruction documentary is also reminding us of is how, in our own lifetimes, in the last 40 years or so, debates about race and racism have changed dramatically. The documentary itself actually mentions at the very beginning talking about the Charleston Massacre and backlash and modern American politics things like that.
Reconstruction as “usable history”
Bill: If I remember right from Dylann Roof’s manifesto, which I read, he said that it was the killing of Trayvon Martin, or rather the backlash to the killing of Trayvon Martin, that radicalized him. He said that that’s what woke him up, essentially. And I do think often people will blame the election of Obama for sort of this white backlash, this sort of second redemption, you might say, the first redemption being the period when white Southerners quote-unquote redeemed the south from what they regarded as this abomination that was Reconstruction. But at least what I have seen anecdotally, just family members, high school friends on Facebook, you know, hearing people at the barbershop, it wasn’t so much the election of Obama as it was Black Lives Matter happening soon after the election of Obama. And I’ve compared it to how, you know, when you had riots in like Watts and Newark and Detroit shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, many white people sort of thought, Oh, I thought we were over this now. I guess nothing will make them happy. Does that make sense to you?
Robert: Yeah, I think it does and actually, you know, to bring us even closer to home in terms of the documentary, there have been some pundits and journalists who have argued that if you look at Obama’s poll numbers from the very beginning of his presidency going forward, the first time he suffers a dip, a significant dip in especially white support, was when he commented on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in 2009. So actually, I think we’ve kind of forgotten that even happened.
Bill: I wonder like, how many people watch like, I love him on Finding Your Roots and don’t even remember or realize that he was part of – I sort of remember that as being on a continuum with Trayvon Martin, like it seemed like that began this national discussion, that that dissolved into Black Lives Matter. And yet often people don’t begin it with that anymore. They began with Trayvon Martin.
Robert: I think that’s a good way to put it because I’m actually reading –I found a story from the Pew Research Center from July 30th 2009 that talks about – it’s titled Obama’s Rating Slide Across the Board – and two of the three reasons they point to are the economy and the healthcare reform debate going on at that time. But the third thing they found was his handling of the Henry Louis Gates situation. That he had taken a hit amongst white Americans and the polling never fully recovered from that, but I do think you’re right that once the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict occurred and once you have the rise of Black Lives Matter, that really plays a significant role in, not only the backlash we saw from 2013 onward, but also looking at Donald Trump’s numbers in 2016. I mean there’s still some debate about ultimately why Donald Trump won the election, but I think historians would be remiss if they left out the presence of Black Lives Matter, both on the campaign trail and then also just as a national phenomena.
Bill: Yeah, I remember people saying things like, oh now that Trump’s president, you know, our police officers will be respected again. Like that was something that I would hear a lot, you know, a lot of that kind of rhetoric and I think that often sort of was under the national radar, wasn’t something that coastal media folks necessarily always noticed. But yeah, it was like when Obama – reading here – said that the Cambridge – for the folks back home who don’t even remember this, it was that Henry Louis Gates had come home from a trip to China and he couldn’t get into his own home. And so he had to, like, break into his own house. Someone saw this and called 9-1-1 and then there was just sort of an argument between Gates and the police officer who came and then, you know, then the charges were dropped. Then Obama said that the Cambridge Police quote “acted stupidly.” And this was a bridge too far for many an American. and then there was the Beer Summit and I always remembered that Obama had a Blue Moon. It was this weird thing that feels like it was 30 years ago.
Robert: Well, when I was watching the documentary a few nights ago, I did briefly remember the whole Beer Summit controversy and I couldn’t help but laugh thinking about that because what this documentary is really trying to do in an explicit way is to tie the events of Reconstruction in 1860s and 1870s to concerns about race, public memory in 2019. And you know Gates himself played a small role. I mean, if you ever get a Rick Perlstein version of the Obama years as a book, there’d be a few pages about that Beer Summit and folks 30 years from now may read that and say, Wait, that actually happened?
Bill: You did say that the documentary’s concern for the present day, trying to make this a usable history, something to be relevant to its audience, that you thought that that was one of its greatest strengths. But you also said this might be a weakness and I was curious if you could elaborate a bit on what why you thought that might be?
Robert: Sure. What I meant by that was, I was a bit concerned about how the miniseries was really sticking with a particular version of Reconstruction that, understandably, I want to emphasize, understandably emphasize the South and race relations amongst blacks and whites in the post-civil War era. But what I was a little surprised by was that we didn’t see more of what you’re seeing now in Reconstruction historiography where historians like Heather Cox Richardson, for instance, who’s in the miniseries, how they’re making ties between what’s going on in the South in the 1860s to what’s going on in the rest of the country. That for some historians there’s this idea of a Greater Reconstruction that the entire country was basically being rebuilt and being reformed, taking lessons not just a Civil War and race, but also Westward Expansion in the West, Industrialization the North. Now again, it’s difficult to try to synthesize all of that into two hours. And what the makers of the documentary are trying to do, and I think this is absolutely understandable and crucial, is they are trying to get the audience to make those important ties between what happened in the Reconstruction period and what’s happening now. For instance, how else can you explain what he spent so much time talking about the rise of the Lost Cause and Confederate memorials. They know that folks today who are watching the PBS documentary will be interested to learn about the long history of those memorials and why they’re are so many of them dotting the entire nation. So a miniseries like this – it’s always important to critique documentaries and say what they’re leaving out, what they could emphasize. But it’s also important, I believe as historians to understand, well the filmmakers, they have a certain job they’re trying to set out to do. And in the case of this miniseries, it’s clear to me that what Henry Louis Gates and his team are trying to do is, they’re trying to make Reconstruction only come alive for viewers in 2019, but they’re trying to basically put up a huge sign saying, Hey, this is why this matters. You know in the academy we ask the so what question. This documentary is telling you, Hey the so what question we’re going to answer from the very beginning by showing you footage of the aftermath of the Emanuel Massacre in 2015. We’re going to tell you that this matters by talking about Dylann Roof. I’m going to tell you this matter for talking about Confederate memorials and the Laws Cause ideology. And we’re all also going to tell you it matters by talking about things like Land Reform and Land Redistribution and some of the more radical ideas that were birthed during the Reconstruction period.
Bill: Yeah, I think it does a very good job of that. I think it’s just important that this exists. I also want to say they do this interesting thing where they have, like reenactments, or like, dramatizations, but it’s animated in this weird way that makes it almost look like a like a – what’s her name? – Kara Walker, you know what I’m talking about?
Robert: Oh! Yes. The artist, Kara Walker. Yeah that’s actually a great comparison there.
Bill: It’s sort, of it’s not exactly like that, but it seems to be drawing on, sort of, tableaus, silhouettes, but I don’t know if it’s kind of rotoscoped onto. . . They’ll have that and then cut to you know, vintage photographs and it’s not a jarring – it feels like it’s of a piece which often when they try and do those dramatization things, it just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Robert: It’s interesting you bring it up because when I was watching the documentary, I didn’t really think much about the animations, beyond I thought they were very well done. But now that you mention it, it is great they’re done the way they are because they minimize, like you said, being jarred out of that era by suddenly seeing some sort of dramatic recreation or something of that nature that might not look as, for lack for better term, fitting into that time period. Whereas I think with this, it’s almost like when you see the recreations, the animated recreations, it’s almost like you’re experiencing a national fevered nightmare. That you’re seeing this representation where you can’t quite see everything. It’s cloudy. It’s shady. In a lot of ways it represents, what I think for most Americans Reconstruction represents, which is this era that they don’t entirely understand, they don’t entirely learn much about in school, and for them, it’s a cloudy, hazy post-Civil War period.
Bill: Well, I don’t have a whole lot else to ask you, but if anyone’s ever in the Orangeburg area, what do you recommend that they do?
Robert: Well, the first thing is they should swing by and visit me at Claflin University, but you know actually beyond that, in all seriousness, you know, Orangeburg also has a unique history due to the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, which is another –
Bill: I’m actually not familiar with that.
Robert: This is an event where three African American youths were shot and killed by the police, protesting a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg. And the Orangeburg community is still grappling, over 50 years later, with the result of that tragedy. And to give you a sense of how important the Orangeburg Massacre was 1968, the African American radical magazine, Freedom Ways, in the spring of 1968, the cover portrays Martin Luther King, because it came out of his assassination, so it was devoted to him. But the first thing you see when you open the magazine is an advertisement that says a tribute to the martyrs. And it has the names of five men who were killed in Rhodesia by the white supremacist government there. And then the names of the three young men who died in Orangeburg as well, seeing them all as part of this worldwide struggle against white supremacy and imperialism. And so Orangeburg has its own unique place in the history of Civil Rights and Black Power in America that if you come to Orangeburg, you’ll see Snippets of here and there, but both South Carolina State University and in Claflin University where I work at, both universities are really trying to remember to remind folks of that tragedy and trying to help the community move forward as well.
Bill: Orangeburg has two HBCs?
Robert: Yes.
Bill: That’s remarkable.
Robert: It is! And again, this is all back to the Reconstruction, Claflin was found in 1869 as a result of the Reconstruction Era government in South Carolina. South Carolina State was founded in 1896 or so, ‘95/‘96, and that was because the state was required to create a Land Grant college for Negroes. And that was South Carolina State, which was on land that once belonged to Claflin University. So again –
Bill: Is that why a lot of public HBCUs are Land Grants? I’m pretty sure Tennessee State and Kentucky State are that way.
Robert: Yeah, if you look at when they’re founded, it often links back to –basically there was a second round of congressional funding for Land Grant universities in the South, you know, the what we think of is Land Grant schools in the Midwest and the Big Ten school places like that. But there was a second round the 1890s where they were telling Southern governments, We’ll give you money for Land Grant colleges, but you have to make sure you also build Land Grant schools for blacks as well. So SC State was the result of that legacy, for example.
Bill: Oh like a Prairie View A&M or, well, I don’t know what they actually call it, Southern University A&M College in Louisiana? Okay, that’s interesting. Would you care to chat about the second half once it comes out?
Robert: Oh sure. Definitely. I would love to.
Bill: All right. Well, we look forward to that and thanks for chatting with us and we’ll talk later.
Robert: Thanks for having me on.
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