I grew up in Wilmington NC, the site of an actual violent coup. Not that we knew much about it until Philip Gerard's Cape Fear Rising was published. Of course, Wilmington's Black community remembered.
I went to school with a kid named Wade Hampton. Another with the middle name Pickett (direct descendant). And plenty of others named for the coup leaders, like Hugh Macrae.
The South is absolutely full of people who fondly memorialize the Civil War and other atrocities. Some of these people are vicious racists. Some are passively racist and classiest. Some are polite racists. Some, like me, were unconsciously racist. It's easy to be that way when you grow up in a place like Wilmington. I've done a lot of unlearning and learning since leaving there.
I know it's impractical to expect ordinary citizens to be steeped in their country's history, but they should have at least a passing acquaintance with the broad themes of history.
The right understands this fundamental point well enough to have mounted a ferocious attack on schools, on history, on knowledge itself.
The Southern project of an origin myth, the frenzied revisionism of the Civil War (that revisionism pervades the current crisis) began, of course, before the conflict was even over, and has only escalated over generations, boosted by Hollywood and by books like the infamous Gone With The Wind and oozing into the information mainstream during the Reagan years when the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a malignant white supremacist, was imported to create a beguiling alternative news narrative.
In contemporary terms the attack on knowledge gets a massive boost from Jerry Falwell Senior's seg academy movement, launched in the wake of Brown v Board of Education in 1954.
It escalates throughout the McCarthyite 1950s into a generalized attack on "liberal" books, "liberal" professors, "liberal" versions of history, all deemed to be socialistic, communistic, unAmerican, and all around mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
It goes ballistic in the 1980s with the attack on settled science, especially evolution (although this is an enduring theme that goes back to the 1920s).
It has spiraled out of control in the Donald era with attacks on teachers, librarians, books, ideas, the content of textbooks: there has been a sustained, coordinated legislative assault on reality itself, including the complex reality of the nation's past: an effort that by now includes Congressional assaults on educators and the very concept of education at all levels, including the university level.
To fill the void where knowledge once reposed, the right--through useful vectors like Fox, Twitter, and Rumble---pours out a steady stream of invented histories, all of which involve variations on a theme of Glorious Whiteness oppressed by diversity, equity, and inclusion, to be unchained in our time by the Great Leader Trump. White folks are given to believe they'll be free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, etc.: a perverse notion of white martyrdom fueled by sheer ignorance and incendiary and cruel alternative histories.
It's so sad and so wrong you cannot help pitying the poor rubes with their empty lives and their sense of despair, standing around the tent buying what the Republican hucksters are selling, even as you get ready to engage in what is potentially a lethally ugly struggle with them. Ordinary people are pieces on a game board. You cannot win the struggle by hating them or expressing contempt for their malice or ignorance. You have to keep focused on the wealthy, powerful, cynical men who move us all around for their own profit and amusement and who have, over centuries, found race the most useful motivator of them all.
Appreciate the history lesson, Mr. Robinson. It drives me nuts, all of the,
“This is unprecedented!”
screeching, when discussing the Trump admin and 1/6. Really? Trail of Tears, slavery, woman as property, Jim Crow, Japanese internment…I mean, I do love this country! So many amazing human and natural resources here. But it is not healthy to create, and then live within, a fantasy. The inevitable crash with reality ends up being a big mess.
I have someone in my neighborhood who had a plate on his car that was the confederate flag with the legend “heritage not hate”. Since that flag absolutely represents hate (not to mention treason), I wondered if he was just that stupid. I saw him changing it a while back, but now it looks like the flag of imperial Japan during WWII, which I understand is considered by some to be comparable to the swastika. I guess he thought the actual Nazi symbol would get his hunk of junk egged. 🙄
My dad was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I got no problem with Japanese or Japan - neither did my dad at least by the ‘70’s. But Treasonous Fucks (pretending to overthrow the government) that think they are too cute - that’s not right.
Visiting for the Holidays, I was walking around the SC Statehouse grounds the other day. The husband enjoys botanizing; there was even an azalea flower or two. Wade Hampton's political rival, Governor and Senator Ben Tillman, the racist prick with ears who bragged about his skill at stuffing ballot boxes and killing Black folks, both, stands larger than life to the right of the memorial to our Brave, Fallen Confederate Dead. Tillman’s iron statue, where he holds a rolled piece of paper to represent the Jim Crow constitution still in effect that guarantees a weak governor and a strong white legislature, and most of the monuments on the Statehouse grounds, remind us that bravery, political acumen, and publicly funded art hide more than they reveal.
It was Ben's nephew, James Hammond Tillman, who murdered the local newspaper's editor, one Narciso Gonzales, just across the street. James was Lieutenant Governor while his Uncle was governor. Evidently Gonzalez knew the Tillman's to be a corrupt bunch of thieves, and had written as much in his newspaper. Tillman popped him in front of witnesses in broad daylight and was acquitted; the solicitor who charged him, after a long delay, was Strom Thurmond's father. This is a reminder that everyone in the damn state is related, often in ways that are only whispered about, like they whispered about Strom's black daughter, the product of a Strom’s raping a young women when he was a young man. Gonzales has a monument, too, bearing the legend "Martyr to free speech." So, there is a monument to a fallen newspaper editor. Only in South Carolina. Strom has a moument, too, and the hugely popular gymnasium on the U of SC campus is called "The Strom." That building bears no explanatory plaque; protests about that name (and several others on campus) have happened, but rarely.
Some young people in SC come away from elementary school believing that the Recent Unpleasantness Between the States was all about State's rights. Overhead a mother telling her kids that very thing, one afternoon, in a Columbia restaurant. Black folks in SC know better, of course. Some locals who are more clear-eyed about Souf Cak history want to leave these monuments to death and white supremacy up, keep the ugly visible, and make sure to change the interpretive plaques so that they tell the real story. I tend to agree: the ugly bits, the horrid unspeakable aspects, need to be front and center with clear eyed and honest accounts of what they are about.
I mean, it's all horrible, right? And my heart is crying out all the way through. But what got to me most is that the encyclopedia is allowing him to escape responsibility for his own movement to this day. That's on us. It's now. We can't change the repugnant Hayes compromise or prevent Hampton's governorship or bring the dead back to life, but we sure as fuck can change what the encyclopedia says about Hampton today.
It may do nothing, but I'm sending those fuckers a letter.
This was extremely powerful and painful to read. And this kind of legacy lives on too as you have starkly pointed out.
And that old phrase "we can't do what they do" rings through my head, thinking of the ease in which the racist terrorists are allowed to do this, no matter what the era. Yet if we gathered in a manner considered threatening we would receive stiff response.
political, cultural, economic history: "South Carolina’s “Black codes” required Black “servants” to work from dawn to dusk while maintaining round-the-clock smiles. Black people were forbidden from taking any job other than laborer unless able to pay a $100 fee (almost $2,000 in today’s money). Now, Black people in Greenville, South Carolina, drive on Wade Hampton Boulevard and their kids attend Wade Hampton High School. Although far too many Americans are heavily invested in treating Trump and MAGA as historical outliers, they unfortunately are not."
I grew up in Wilmington NC, the site of an actual violent coup. Not that we knew much about it until Philip Gerard's Cape Fear Rising was published. Of course, Wilmington's Black community remembered.
I went to school with a kid named Wade Hampton. Another with the middle name Pickett (direct descendant). And plenty of others named for the coup leaders, like Hugh Macrae.
The South is absolutely full of people who fondly memorialize the Civil War and other atrocities. Some of these people are vicious racists. Some are passively racist and classiest. Some are polite racists. Some, like me, were unconsciously racist. It's easy to be that way when you grow up in a place like Wilmington. I've done a lot of unlearning and learning since leaving there.
I know it's impractical to expect ordinary citizens to be steeped in their country's history, but they should have at least a passing acquaintance with the broad themes of history.
The right understands this fundamental point well enough to have mounted a ferocious attack on schools, on history, on knowledge itself.
The Southern project of an origin myth, the frenzied revisionism of the Civil War (that revisionism pervades the current crisis) began, of course, before the conflict was even over, and has only escalated over generations, boosted by Hollywood and by books like the infamous Gone With The Wind and oozing into the information mainstream during the Reagan years when the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a malignant white supremacist, was imported to create a beguiling alternative news narrative.
In contemporary terms the attack on knowledge gets a massive boost from Jerry Falwell Senior's seg academy movement, launched in the wake of Brown v Board of Education in 1954.
It escalates throughout the McCarthyite 1950s into a generalized attack on "liberal" books, "liberal" professors, "liberal" versions of history, all deemed to be socialistic, communistic, unAmerican, and all around mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
It goes ballistic in the 1980s with the attack on settled science, especially evolution (although this is an enduring theme that goes back to the 1920s).
It has spiraled out of control in the Donald era with attacks on teachers, librarians, books, ideas, the content of textbooks: there has been a sustained, coordinated legislative assault on reality itself, including the complex reality of the nation's past: an effort that by now includes Congressional assaults on educators and the very concept of education at all levels, including the university level.
To fill the void where knowledge once reposed, the right--through useful vectors like Fox, Twitter, and Rumble---pours out a steady stream of invented histories, all of which involve variations on a theme of Glorious Whiteness oppressed by diversity, equity, and inclusion, to be unchained in our time by the Great Leader Trump. White folks are given to believe they'll be free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, etc.: a perverse notion of white martyrdom fueled by sheer ignorance and incendiary and cruel alternative histories.
It's so sad and so wrong you cannot help pitying the poor rubes with their empty lives and their sense of despair, standing around the tent buying what the Republican hucksters are selling, even as you get ready to engage in what is potentially a lethally ugly struggle with them. Ordinary people are pieces on a game board. You cannot win the struggle by hating them or expressing contempt for their malice or ignorance. You have to keep focused on the wealthy, powerful, cynical men who move us all around for their own profit and amusement and who have, over centuries, found race the most useful motivator of them all.
Appreciate the history lesson, Mr. Robinson. It drives me nuts, all of the,
“This is unprecedented!”
screeching, when discussing the Trump admin and 1/6. Really? Trail of Tears, slavery, woman as property, Jim Crow, Japanese internment…I mean, I do love this country! So many amazing human and natural resources here. But it is not healthy to create, and then live within, a fantasy. The inevitable crash with reality ends up being a big mess.
I have someone in my neighborhood who had a plate on his car that was the confederate flag with the legend “heritage not hate”. Since that flag absolutely represents hate (not to mention treason), I wondered if he was just that stupid. I saw him changing it a while back, but now it looks like the flag of imperial Japan during WWII, which I understand is considered by some to be comparable to the swastika. I guess he thought the actual Nazi symbol would get his hunk of junk egged. 🙄
My dad was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I got no problem with Japanese or Japan - neither did my dad at least by the ‘70’s. But Treasonous Fucks (pretending to overthrow the government) that think they are too cute - that’s not right.
Visiting for the Holidays, I was walking around the SC Statehouse grounds the other day. The husband enjoys botanizing; there was even an azalea flower or two. Wade Hampton's political rival, Governor and Senator Ben Tillman, the racist prick with ears who bragged about his skill at stuffing ballot boxes and killing Black folks, both, stands larger than life to the right of the memorial to our Brave, Fallen Confederate Dead. Tillman’s iron statue, where he holds a rolled piece of paper to represent the Jim Crow constitution still in effect that guarantees a weak governor and a strong white legislature, and most of the monuments on the Statehouse grounds, remind us that bravery, political acumen, and publicly funded art hide more than they reveal.
It was Ben's nephew, James Hammond Tillman, who murdered the local newspaper's editor, one Narciso Gonzales, just across the street. James was Lieutenant Governor while his Uncle was governor. Evidently Gonzalez knew the Tillman's to be a corrupt bunch of thieves, and had written as much in his newspaper. Tillman popped him in front of witnesses in broad daylight and was acquitted; the solicitor who charged him, after a long delay, was Strom Thurmond's father. This is a reminder that everyone in the damn state is related, often in ways that are only whispered about, like they whispered about Strom's black daughter, the product of a Strom’s raping a young women when he was a young man. Gonzales has a monument, too, bearing the legend "Martyr to free speech." So, there is a monument to a fallen newspaper editor. Only in South Carolina. Strom has a moument, too, and the hugely popular gymnasium on the U of SC campus is called "The Strom." That building bears no explanatory plaque; protests about that name (and several others on campus) have happened, but rarely.
Some young people in SC come away from elementary school believing that the Recent Unpleasantness Between the States was all about State's rights. Overhead a mother telling her kids that very thing, one afternoon, in a Columbia restaurant. Black folks in SC know better, of course. Some locals who are more clear-eyed about Souf Cak history want to leave these monuments to death and white supremacy up, keep the ugly visible, and make sure to change the interpretive plaques so that they tell the real story. I tend to agree: the ugly bits, the horrid unspeakable aspects, need to be front and center with clear eyed and honest accounts of what they are about.
Thanks for writing, Stephen!
BTW Historic Columbia https://www.historiccolumbia.org/events/2019/2019-12/sc-statehouse-monuments-tour does a nice job telling stories that you won't find on the plaques. They helped me remember that it was Tillman's nephew, not Ben, who killed that Cuban newspaper editor. I'm to blame for stupid typos, though.
I mean, it's all horrible, right? And my heart is crying out all the way through. But what got to me most is that the encyclopedia is allowing him to escape responsibility for his own movement to this day. That's on us. It's now. We can't change the repugnant Hayes compromise or prevent Hampton's governorship or bring the dead back to life, but we sure as fuck can change what the encyclopedia says about Hampton today.
It may do nothing, but I'm sending those fuckers a letter.
This was extremely powerful and painful to read. And this kind of legacy lives on too as you have starkly pointed out.
And that old phrase "we can't do what they do" rings through my head, thinking of the ease in which the racist terrorists are allowed to do this, no matter what the era. Yet if we gathered in a manner considered threatening we would receive stiff response.
And that's America.
political, cultural, economic history: "South Carolina’s “Black codes” required Black “servants” to work from dawn to dusk while maintaining round-the-clock smiles. Black people were forbidden from taking any job other than laborer unless able to pay a $100 fee (almost $2,000 in today’s money). Now, Black people in Greenville, South Carolina, drive on Wade Hampton Boulevard and their kids attend Wade Hampton High School. Although far too many Americans are heavily invested in treating Trump and MAGA as historical outliers, they unfortunately are not."