Sandwich Book Review - Wall Street Journal

[johnkarls]

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/holiday-gi ... os1&page=1


Holiday Gift Books: History
A collection of new books—and a reissued classic—that examine and illuminate the black American experience.

By W. Ralph Eubanks - a faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
Nov. 18, 2022


(1) In his 1970 classic “The Omni-Americans,” cultural critic Albert Murray argued persuasively that the United States is not a nation of black and white people but a nation of multicolored people. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black,” Murray wrote. “They are all interrelated one way or another.”

(2) Despite his belief in the interconnectedness of American life and culture, Murray remained puzzled by the preoccupation of white America with the folklore of white supremacy. Writing at the height of the Black Power movement, he was also critical of black writers who aimed to elicit fear and guilt from whites rather than constructive action. Fear and guilt may effect short-term gains, but real progress can only be born of truth and reason. And, as Murray would say, a writer who would tell the truth about race in America should never claim more on the page than his words can make self-evident.

(3) In a spirit of inquiry connected to Murray’s “Omni-Americans,” David Hackett Fischer’s “African Founders” explores the ways that enslaved Africans contributed to early American culture. Mr. Fischer argues that people of African descent played a central role in defining, fighting for, and even saving the American experiment.

(4) Yet for all the empirical evidence that he presents here, from forgotten slave rebellions to Afro-Seminole warriors struggling to maintain their freedom, Mr. Fischer fails Murray’s test by claiming more than he can make self-evident. For example, he writes that abolitionist Frederick Douglass identified with the “culture and values in his native slaveholding region.” As a man who was introduced to the terrors of slavery by the screams of his Aunt Hester while she was being beaten, Douglass had little regard for the slaveholders of his native Maryland. Of course, Douglass believed in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; that does not mean that he also identified with Thomas Jefferson. Further, when Mr. Fischer notes that the primary object of the Code Noir, the 1724 law regulating slavery in colonial Louisiana, was to “stabilize an entire religious, social, and political system on a Roman Catholic and absolutist French model,” he neglects the way the law’s very name suggests a desire to connect slavery with race, thus tightening the association of whiteness with freedom.

(5) Mr. Fischer concludes “African Founders” with a meditation on W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903) and its focus on spiritual striving. It might have been more apt to mention a later Du Bois text, one that exposes the ways that Americans still live in a world shaped by slavery. As Du Bois notes in “Black Reconstruction,” now reissued by the Library of America, “one is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.” While Mr. Fischer never forgets the evil of slavery, reading “Black Reconstruction” would have brought into focus what he here distorts or skims.

(6) Reconstruction is a historical period too often ignored, particularly in the American South. Du Bois’s study dramatizes how, in 1865-80, formerly enslaved people took the first steps to build a truly interracial democracy. This is a book that is relevant—I would argue essential—to the study of the modern civil-rights movement, sometimes called America’s Second Reconstruction. It also informs the thinking of Matthew F. Delmont in his World War II saga “Half American,” an examination of the aims of the so-called Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. With historical distance, the Double V campaign seems an unobjectionable idea, but, as Mr. Delmont shows with a historian’s precision and a storyteller’s verve, it was in its time regarded as radical by many blacks and whites. Mr. Delmont takes readers beyond the life and times of the Tuskegee Airmen and weaves an engaging story that involves figures from the period that we should know but do not.

(7) There are villains and war heroes in “Half American,” including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Chicago Defender publisher John Sengstacke. Hoover argued that Sengstacke’s accusations of racism in the military were seditious and could be used by the enemy as propaganda. But this book not only details historical wrongs committed against the black press, it ardently honors the sacrifice of black Americans who served in World War II. “If we tell the right stories about the war,” Mr. Delmont writes, “we can finally honor the sacrifices of the Black veterans, defense industry workers, and citizens who fought on foreign battlefields.”

(8) Many black veterans eventually brought their push for victory over racism to the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Thomas E. Ricks even argues that the movement adopted military-style strategies in its efforts of nonviolent resistance to segregation. In “Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,” Mr. Ricks says of the movement: “In conducting their campaigns, activists made life-changing decisions with inadequate information while operating under wrenching stress and often facing violent attacks,” much as soldiers do at war. And as in a war, many in the movement dodged bombs and bombings. Some died, many more shed blood, and thousands were put behind bars as if they were prisoners of war.

(9) Mr. Ricks provides a fresh framework for examining the civil-rights movement, one that goes beyond charismatic leaders and personalities. At the famous Highlander Folk School, the training ground of movement figures like Rosa Parks, each session began with the strategic question “What do you want to do?” Discussions always ended with a tactical discussion of how to reach that goal: “What are you going to do?” Without overemphasizing military tactics, Mr. Ricks reveals how it took thinking like a tactician for peaceful people to pursue peaceful ends in a way that did not do violence to others.

(10) Both Messrs. Ricks and Delmont reveal to their readers how style is associated with strategy, whether in the military or the civil-rights movement. Style is, as Albert Murray reminds us, “a way of sizing up the world, and so, ultimately, . . . a mode and medium of survival.” In the end, these two books show how the quest for human dignity is about the freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life, as well as to survive and thrive.