OLD TIMES THERE ARE NE’ER FORGOTTEN

Jerry Harkins

In the aftermath of the horrendous massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the Republican Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, led a courageous and successful campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the State House.  The next day, Congressional Republicans from the South introduced a bill to allow the display of the same flag in national cemeteries and permit the sale of souvenirs printed with its image by the National Park Service.  As they pointed out, it would be legal at gravesites only one day a year on  Confederate Memorial Day which was instituted in Georgia one year after Appomattox and is still celebrated in ten of the eleven rebel states.  The bill would have passed but for the embarrassment already suffered by the party over the racist rants of Donald Trump who is running first in the run-up to their presidential race.

Anyone who thinks the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse should pay a bit more attention to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln six days later.  Nor did it end with the implementation of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution in 1865, 1868 and 1870 respectively.  As soon as the Federal troops withdrew from the South, the confederate states began to pass a variety of Jim Crow laws which gained acceptance with the decision of the Supreme Court in Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896 legalizing the infamous doctrine of “separate but equal.”  Fifty-eight years later, the Court reversed itself declaring in Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.  For years after that thousands of southern billboards proclaimed “Impeach Earl Warren.”  The fact is the Civil War continues to this day.

America has come a long way toward the ideals expressed in its Declaration of Independence but it still has a long way to go.  The fierce resistance to Brown in the South led a frustrated but unanimous Supreme Court to approve the use of busing to force integration in 1971 (Swann v. Board of Education).  It was dealing with state mandated segregation in the public schools of the South—in other words de jure segregation—but the same remedy was later approved for de facto segregation in the North.  The reaction was spectacular.  Boston didn’t like forced busing anymore than Montgomery did and there was rioting in Southie, the Irish and Italian enclave of Beantown.  Busing was not perfect but it improved things enough so that it gradually waned in the North and the more rational precincts of the South.  In less sensible precincts such as the suburbs of Atlanta, there arose new forms of resistance.  Parents who had fled to the white suburbs to avoid integration in the cities now sent their children to all-white “Christian” academies.  If that didn’t work, they turned to home schooling.  The Lost Cause, after all, is well worth a generation or two of poorly educated children.

As recently as 2011, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who represented those same Atlanta suburbs mentioned above) denounced another unanimous Supreme Court ruling that required the city of Little Rock, Arkansas to obey court rulings on desegregation (Cooper v Aaron, 1958).  Since he was running for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, a spokesperson quickly claimed that was not what he meant.  Of course that raises the question just what he was thinking of when he said he would send the police to drag the justices before Congress to explain their criminal behavior.

No, the Civil War is not over in Dixie.  The Lost Cause is alive and well, not everywhere in the South but probably among a majority of white folks in most places.  Several states have active secession movements endorsed by many of their elected officials including former Governor Rick Perry of Texas who thinks Texas should secede again and he should become President of the United States.  He is not the first Southern politician to hold such a self-contradictory fantasy.  In the immortal words of three-time presidential hopeful Governor George Wallace of Alabama, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”  It is often said Wallace recanted his racist views in the years before his death but what he was really saying was he regretted that the media never understood the difference between his political philosophy and his social beliefs.  It probably did not occur to him that both were depraved.

I love the South.  I have often enjoyed its legendary hospitality and its sense that life should be enjoyed.  On one memorable occasion I was visiting rural Alabama on a fact-finding mission for a huge paper-making company.  I was invited to play softball with the factory team which was fully integrated and was welcomed by the players, their wives, children and sweethearts.  The barbecue after the game was the best I ever experienced.  I bow to no man in my love of fried green tomatoes.  I think of racism not as a character defect but as an historical inevitability.  Slavery was America’s original sin.  Fittingly it was an economic sin first brought about by the fact that cotton was a labor intensive crop just at the time when cotton fabric was enjoying spectacular growth in demand.  Once the cotton gin was invented in 1793, the slave economy began a long decline.  As it did, the status of the slaves became an increasingly thorny problem first recognized by the northern abolitionists.  What next?  For slaves and masters both, what next seemed unanswerable.  Most Southerners opted to ignore the problem and war came.

Shortly before the end, Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address.  Speaking of the opposing sides, he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”  It was a noble but impossible dream.  Slavery was an evil that had to be judged as such.  But not in the South where instead it was explained away.  The former slaves were said to be ignorant, childish, devious, lazy and, of course, frightening.  We cannot be forced to associate with them or expose our women and children to them.

Such primal hauntings exist in the deepest recesses of the subconscious.  They are preverbal but subject to access by unscrupulous politicians and preachers who master catalytic code words.  One master of the form was George Wallace.  Mark the rhetoric and the cadences of that “Segregation Forever” speech:

…this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland

…the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man

We intend, quite simply, to practice the free heritage as bequeathed to us as sons of free fathers.

…the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation.

States rights.  Freedom of association.  Crime in the streets.  Welfare reform.  Teenage pregnany.  Gang warfare.  Slums.  Absentee fathers.  Be afraid:  the vomitus of racial hatred.  As we gear up for the 2016 presidential race, you will hear a whole dictionary  of code words employed mostly by Republicans seeking their party's nomination.  Not a single one of them – not Mike Huckabee and not even Donald Trump – will admit to holding any untoward thoughts about race but if you add up their stated positions you'll find 75% of them are threatening to the interests of all minorities but especially to black people.

This too shall pass.  Slowly perhaps. Too slowly.  But it has been passing ever since Brown.  The massacre at Mother Emanuel and a rash of individual black deaths at the hands of police have nudged it further toward the dust bin of history.  But before it can receive a fitting burial, the South and especially Southern politicians must concede that the Civil War is over.  The issue was settled in blood and treasure 150 years ago.  The South fought well against tremendous odds but it fought not in defense of liberty but in support of one of history’s greatest evils.  We can not re-write history or re-live it.  It is hard enough to live with the contemporary consequences of slavery which include poverty and the fragility of black family life.

The South lost the war.  No amount of political claptrap or academic pettifoggery can change history.  No amount of noxious nostalgia can convert the sow’s ear of racism into a silk purse of folk wisdom.  There may have been a time when the white people took refuge in such nonsense but it was always fantasy.  “All up and down de whole creation / Sadly I roam, / Still longing for de old plantation, / And for de old folks at home.”  Don’t believe it.

The Old South is literally gone with the wind and good riddance.  The New South has been proclaimed several times but until recently always on the wings of some variation of the right wing creed, first Jim Crow, then anti-unionism, then as a congenial corporate headquarters location.  Industry, shameless as always when confronted with the prospect of higher profits, fled to the South because it attracted companies with low wage, anti-union policies.  The politicians got away with it because things had never been different.  The South, since the days of slavery, has been a stronghold of David Ricardo’s Iron Law of Wages which holds that companies naturally and properly pay wages just sufficient to keep the workers’ bodies and souls together.  There have been exceptions of course but Southern DNA is structured to promote the interests of the Jeffersonian freeholding class which are invariably at odds with those of the working class.  In this regard, Southern blacks are disadvantaged by class and race both.

The South will rise again.  So proclaimed the slogan of the Redeemers, an unholy alliance of landowners, businessmen and professionals formed during Reconstruction to suppress or banish the freed slaves and their allies, the northern carpetbaggers and southern scalawags.  Less violent than the Ku Klux Klan, they were nonetheless the primary force in ending the federal presence in the South and inaugurating the Jim Crow era.  But they were right about the South.  It has risen several times in 150 years and it will do so again as soon as the politicians realize they are pandering to a dying breed of rednecks.  As Congressman John Lewis said during the debate on displaying the Stars and Bars, “Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.”