Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era, published in 2017 by Louisiana State University Press, edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker, with an introduction by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, is a collection of ten essays by historians of the Reconstruction era who examine the different collective memories of different social groups from the time of Jim Crow through the post-Civil Rights period.
Summary of essays Part I. White Supremacy and the Memories of Reconstruction 1. Jim Crow Memory: Southern White Supremacists and the Regional Politics of Remembrance This essay by K. Stephen Prince covers the years 1890-1910, the period when Jim Crow was established. During this period, Prince writes, not only were lynchings and race riots carried out to deny rights to the formerly enslaved people in the South, but white supremacist propaganda was also directed toward white people in the North, to actively promote the Jim Crow version of Reconstruction, in order to prevent federal government action to protect the rights of Blacks in the South. According to Prince, rewriting the memory of Reconstruction by white supremacists was the necessary companion strategy to Jim Crow.
In his essay Prince relies on writings of the period, including Why the Solid South?Library of Congress record (1890) by Hilary A. Herbert; Studies in the American Race Problem (1908) by Alfred Holt Stone; The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905) by Thomas Dixon Jr.; Red Rock (1898) and The Southerner's Problem (1904) by Thomas Nelson Page; and Myrta Lockett Avary's memoir, Dixie After the War (1906); as well the influences of Joel Chandler Harris, James K. Vardaman, and Clifton R. Breckinridge. Prince also discusses efforts during this period to overturn the right to vote granted by the Fifteenth Amendment, by activities of Alfred Holt Stone, George T. Winston, and Alfred Moore Waddell, who was a leader of the Wilmington massacre in 1898.
Prince concludes his essay with this observation:
2. Causes Lost and Found: Remembering and Refighting Reconstruction in the Roosevelt Era This essay by Jason Morgan Ward examines the use of Reconstruction memory by white Southerners from the 1930s to the 1950s to protect Jim Crow practices from federal intervention. Examples in this essay in which the memory of Reconstruction was invoked in policy debates include the 1933 establishment of the Southern States Industrial Council to oppose standardized wages and working conditions by the National Recovery Administration that would disrupt the South's segregated 2-tier labor system; the 1937 anti-lynching bill debates; and the 1942 filibuster that killed a bill to outlaw the poll tax. He also discusses rhetoric of Martin Dies, Joseph P. Kamp, and the Constitutional Educational League, linking racial equality policies to Marxism and Communism; and the Dixiecrat movement.
As examples of proponents of the white Southerners' Reconstruction memory, Ward references the writings of William Watts Ball and Dixon's final novel, Flaming Sword, as well as statements of Southern politicians such as Josiah Bailey, Ellison Smith, Frank M. Dixon, and Theodore Bilbo. He also quotes white Southern moderates such as Virginius Dabney and Howard Odum who invoked that Reconstruction memory.
Part II. Black Counter Memories of Reconstruction 3. T. Thomas Fortune, Racial Violence of Reconstruction, and the Struggle for Historical Memory In this essay Shawn Leigh Alexander points to the role of Black writers and journalists from the 1880s through 1910 to articulate the Reconstruction memory of the Black community during this period. Special attention is given to T. Thomas Fortune, his personal knowledge of racist violence during Reconstruction in Florida, and his book Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884). Alexander demonstrates how in that book Fortune relied extensively on firsthand testimony from the victims of racist violence included in the Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States,text at the University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan hearings, to present a counter-narrative to white supremacist Reconstruction memory.
Alexander also cites Reconstruction in MississippiLibrary of Congress record (1901) by James Wilford Garner, Essays on Civil War and ReconstructionLibrary of Congress record (1898, rev. edition 1904) by William A. Dunning, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabamafull text online from Project Gutenberg (1905) by Walter L. Fleming, and Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandmentfull text online from Project Gutenberg (repr. 1905) by John C. Lester and Daniel L. Wilson; and includes Fortune's poem "Bartow Black."text of poem at the Poetry Foundation
4. Facts, Memories and History: John R. Lynch and the Memory of Reconstruction in the Age of Jim Crow In this essay Justin Behrend examines John R. Lynch's autobiographical critique of Reconstruction, The Facts of Reconstructionfull text online at Project Gutenberg (1913). After describing the background of the author (born into slavery fourteen years before the Civil War, serving as a Republican Congressman during Reconstruction, and publishing his book 31 years after leaving office), Behrend distinguishes Lynch's writing from that of T. Thomas Fortune (discussed in the previous essay), in that Lynch downplayed the political violence and instead focused on the successes of Reconstruction. The book also challenged the scholarly writings of William A. Dunning and the Dunning School, which "argued that carpetbaggers and scalawags tricked illiterate and inexperienced African American men to vote with the Republican Party.Emberton 2017, p. 85.
Behrend discusses at length several major themes of Lynch's book, including: the benefits of Reconstruction in establishing true democracy in the South debunking the myth of "Negro Domination" by describing the manner in which Black political power was expressed during Reconstruction debunking the myth that Black politicians drew the color line and shared the blame for racial segregation
Behrend also relates Lynch's descriptions of meetings he had with people during his political career, including with President Ulysses S. Grant and Lucius Q. C. Lamar.
In the last section of the essay Behrend speculates on why Lynch's 1913 book did not include memories of violence during Reconstruction, and observes that Lynch's later autobiography, published in the 1930s, did include memories of political violence.
5. The Freedwoman's Tale: Reconstruction Remembered in the Federal Writers' Project Ex-Slave Narratives In this essay Carole Emberton describes an approach to using narratives of formerly enslaved people collected by the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s for historical research, and applies that approach to memories of Reconstruction recorded in those narratives. She begins by relating the narrative of Hannah IrwinLibrary of Congress PDF document: VOLUME I ALABAMA NARRATIVES (Hannah Irwin's narrative is at pages 218-19, at PDF document pages 224-25) in which Irwin recalls events from her childhood during Reconstruction involving the Ku Klux Klan.
After discussing issues on the use and usefulness of these narratives and contrasting them with "official" counter narratives by leading black intellectuals such as those examined in the previous two essays, Emberton proposes using a technique of "triangulating" NWP narratives with other sources in order to draw conclusions from the narratives. Next she applies this technique to Irwin's narrative by comparing elements of that narrative with 1870 US Census entries for people in the narrative, the events timeline, struggles over land control during this time period, and using references and quotes from other recent historical writings relevant to the time of events in the narrative. Emberton then sums up her case for the value of this resource to historical research:
In the rest of the essay she uses additional narratives from the collection and applies her triangulation technique to the set of narrations.
Part III. Reconstruction and the Creation of American Empire 6. The Lessons of Reconstruction: Debating Race and Imperialism in the 1890s In this essay Mark Elliott examines the Lake Mohonk Conferences on the Negro Question of 1890First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, held at Lake Mohonk, Ulster County, New York, June 4, 5, 6, 1890. Reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows and 1891,Second Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, held at Lake Mohonk, Ulster County, New York, June 2, 4, 5, 1891. Reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows during which the process of reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners was advanced. Elliott says a study of the conferences "provides a unique window into the process of public memory in formation."Emberton 2017, p. 140. Elliott describes the debates over memories of Reconstruction, following the election of 1888 in which Republicans won the Presidency and both chambers of Congress for the first time since President Grant, in which legislation was proposed to protect Black voting rights in the South and to fund Black public education. During those debates Congressional debates, the first Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question was held in June 1880, attended by former slaveholders, abolitionists, members of both political parties, and veterans from both armies of the Civil War.
Elliott states that to understand the import of what happened at the two conferences, they must be seen in relation to the westward expansion into Indigenous lands and imperialist ideologies of "civilization" and "uplift," and discusses their historical context, such as the earlier Lake Mohonk Conferences on the "Indian Problem" in the 1880s, the Dawes Act, and the "civilization" policies of both, which were now being advanced as a model for answering the "Negro Question."
Of the consequences of the conferences, Elliot observes:
The essay then discusses the debates at the conferences and how those debates shaped the changing memories of Reconstruction and resulting policies. Among the legacies of the conferences, Elliot identifies the abandonment of seeking federal legislation to protect the rights of Blacks in the South, replacing it with a policy of uplift, and the future application of uplift and civilizing policies to new territories brought under control of the United States following the Spanish–American War.
7. A New Reconstruction for the South Natalie J. Ring opens this essay by discussing articles published in The New Republic in 1915 about the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia and comparing conditions in Georgia with those in Haiti, which had recently been invaded by the US Marines following decades of US expansion that included taking control of the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. There follows an exploration of the parallels between federal policy in the South and in US Imperialism. The shared policy foundation, Ring contends, was uplift and readjustment. Uplift policy was based on sociocultural evolutionary theory; readjustment was conceived of as a new kind of reconstruction, a social and economic restructuring.