Tag: Department of History and Geography

(Director’s note: Dr. Abel A. Bartley, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University where he received his BA in History and Political Science, his MA in History, and his Ph.D. in History in African Americans and Urban History, is Professor of African American and Urban History at Clemson.  Author of Keeping the Faith: Race Politics and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940-1970 (2000), Akron’s Black Heritage (2004), and In No Ways Tired: The NAACP’s Struggle to Integrate the Duval County Public School System (2014), which received the Stetson Kennedy Prize for best book on civil rights history.  In 2004 he accepted the challenge of running the African American studies program, then a minor, at Clemson University.  In 2007 he created the new Pan African Studies Program, a major, at Clemson, and served as its first Director.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

I cannot believe that we are here again. It seems as if I am stuck in a bad dream that keeps recurring. I remember my older brother marching in 1980 after a 33-year-old African American insurance salesman named Arthur McDuffie was murdered by police officers in Miami, Florida. McDuffie was accused of committing the grievous crime of running a traffic light. The officers originally reported that McDuffie died when he crashed his motorcycle, but the coroner found that his injuries did not match the autopsy. Eventually, the officers were accused of using their flashlights to beat McDuffie. We all believed that with the autopsy, the officers would be convicted of murder. However, amazingly, the officers were acquitted. African Americans and their white allies protested and marched, but black deaths like McDuffie’s continued.

In 1991 a video surfaced of Black motorist Rodney King being brutally beaten by four Los Angeles policemen. After a change of venue and lengthy trial, the officers were all acquitted. Like my bad dream, this sort of scenario does not end. African Americans get killed by the police or their acolytes, we march, we pray, we cry, we make high sounding declarations and yet the bad dream endures.

As Einstein once stated, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  Why do the juries keep coming back with the familiar refrain, “Not guilty!”

After years of studying this phenomenon, I am convinced that we are aiming at the wrong target. Our anger, though understandable, is misplaced. We are blaming the police for our problem when we should be blaming the courts. Blaming the police for all of the wrongs misses the point. The police are just a part of a systemic racism that has historically oppressed people of color. African Americans were brought to America to serve as slaves and the American courts have never come to terms with seeing us in any other condition other than that of servitude.  Consequently, Black life, progress, and, most importantly, deaths have never been celebrated or properly mourned by most Americans. It is obvious that the courts have never be viewed or treated African Americans as equals under the law.

During Reconstruction many progressive-minded Americans attempted to write equality before the law into American jurisprudence. The resulting 14^th and 15^th Amendments became precedent-setting pieces of legislation that ensured that all Americans are to be treated fairly and equally under the law and courts and provided them a powerful weapon to protect their rights. Unfortunately, the courts quickly undermined the Amendments. Despite the legally sound arguments of lawyer Albion Tourgee in defending Homer Plessy’s right to ride anywhere he could afford on a train in the South, the courts said that African Americans could be separated and subjected to disparate treatment.  Therefore, White Americans were given carte blanche to establish an elaborate system of legalized segregation, now known in the South as Jim Crow, which separated and subjugated African Americans in all social, political and economic settings. The courts allowed the South to establish capricious unfair restrictions on the franchise, unilaterally disarming African Americans of their most powerful weapon.

The nation’s worse period of racial violence ensued. Of the violence Frederick Douglass wrote, “If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven … Alas!, even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven–yet we must still think, speak, and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.”  Since that period, African Americans have been the constant victims of extralegal killings, whether at the hands of the police or their devotees. From Maceo Snipes to Emmett Till, the one constant that keeps these killings going is the assurance that the courts will acquit the accused. Therefore, we continue to get angry at the police, the lynchers, or the ugly racist when what we really need to do is reform a racist judicial system that consistently vindicates the accused if the victim is black and the defendant is white. I suspect that if police, racists, or others really feared that they would be held responsible for their actions, they would think twice about whether it was worth choking a man over a counterfeit $20 bill, shooting a 12-year-old boy over a fake gun, shooting Trayvon because he walked through a white neighborhood, murdering a 26-year-old because he jogged through your community, murdering a woman in her house playing video games with her nephew, or murdering a sleeping EMT.

So how do we reform the system?  Let me suggest a few modifications.  First, we must reform the laws to ensure that police are subject to the same use of force standards as the public. Secondly, the laws have to be changed so that police are no longer allowed to just stop people without a legally defensible reason. African Americans must become much more active on juries. Next, the Supreme Court must remember its role. The courts speak for those who are voiceless. They must maintain their objectivity and protect the unprotected. Lastly, juries have to see the victims as them. Juries have to be able to put themselves in the victim’s shoes. Whites see police officers as protectors, while African Americans see policemen as enforcers of an unjust society. Therefore, when police face juries, the juries have to see both sides.

I suspect that we would see dramatic reductions in these crimes if those who were horrified by them would mobilize.  If the politicians who are so concerned about law would spend half of that energy on justice, we could solve this problem.  But, as Frederick Douglass wrote, “But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence.” So, I say protest against police violence, make your speeches, say your prayers, remove your statues, change your building names, and make your resolutions. I applaud all of those who have demonstrated their outrage and participated in protest activities demanding change. Nevertheless, until and unless our courts are ready to hold those responsible who wantonly kill our brothers and sisters, we are just experiencing a recurring bad dream. Those in power know that if the law applied equally to all and if everyone had unfettered access to the franchise, it would mean a real realignment of power in this nation and challenge to their power and privilege. So, I suspect we will rearrange the furniture, change the drapes, fulminate and yet nothing meaningful will change. As a historian, I fear that after these rallies and protests end, we will go back to “American normal”—that is, back to this same bad dream.

Please America, reach into your soul and prove me wrong this time!

(Director’s Note: Stephanie Barczewski is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities. She is a specialist in the history of modern Britain. Her most recent book is Heroic Failure and the British (2016); her next book, Englishness and the Country House, is forthcoming from Reaktion Books in 2021.  The title of her essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

The response to the coronavirus pandemic has relied upon academic expertise from obvious sources: medicine, epidemiology, biology and other scientific disciplines. Occasionally, however, historians have been summoned to provide insight, mostly related to the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. For example, they have pointed out that the very name of the pandemic is misleading, because it resulted from Spain’s neutrality in World War I, which meant that its newspapers were the first to report the outbreak. Even today, the source remains unknown: it was most likely the United States but could also have been China, France or Britain. This knowledge is valuable not only for accuracy’s sake, but because it points out the damage that can be done by associating a deadly virus with a particular country. This has been useful for combating President Trump’s efforts to label Covid-19 the “Chinese” or “Wuhan virus,” which can lead to the demonization of people of East Asian ethnicity.[2]

Historians have also contributed to efforts to examine the efforts made to reduce the impact of the 1918 flu through “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs). Academic studies showing that American cities that imposed NPIs more aggressively saw reduced death rates have been frequently cited on social media.[3] But I would like to introduce a counter-example: in Britain, almost nothing was done to combat the spread of the virus, as the Great War was deemed a greater threat to public safety and the national welfare. The general attitude was summed up by Sir Arthur Newsholme in a report compiled for the Royal Society of Medicine in 1919: “There are national circumstances in which the major duty is to ‘carry on’, even when risk to health and life is involved.”[4] We might then assume that the death toll was higher in Britain than it was in the United States. But this was not the case: Britain, with minimal NPIs, suffered around 228,000 deaths out of a total population of around 42,000,000 (or .005 of the total population). The United States, with far more NPIs, suffered 670,000 deaths out of a total population of 104,000,000 (.006). So are we to conclude from this that not introducing NPIs saved 24,000 lives in Britain, or the difference between .005 and .006 of the population? Or conversely that NPIs cost 130,000 lives in the United States? This would be ridiculously simplistic, but it is no more so than the “Philadelphia had a parade and St. Louis did not” comparisons that have frequently been used to justify aggressive NPIs.

I am not attempting here to assess the efficacy of NPIs, a subject on which I am not qualified to offer an opinion, but rather I am trying to make a suggestion about how history can be most effective in helping to shape the response to a present-day crisis. My point is that the past rarely offers simple answers, because the evidence often points in multiple directions. History may be doomed to repeat itself, but this is not because we ignore it, but because of how difficult its lessons are to extract. In 1918, there was a debate over whether wearing masks could slow the spread of influenza. In some large cities, mask usage was widespread, and, as one Red Cross public-service announcement put it, “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask” was seen as “a dangerous slacker.” But other voices argued that masks did not work, were uncomfortable or detrimental to commerce. Some public officials refused to wear them, and in San Francisco there was even an “Anti-Mask League.”[5] A century later, the “science” has not much changed; it is instead the culture of mask-wearing that has evolved in recent months, perhaps to fit people’s political predilections.

If history is going to provide understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic, it must be done in a way that acknowledges the unknowability of the past alongside its knowability; history tells us not only what we do know, but also what we do not. If we fail to acknowledge this, it will mislead more than it will enlighten. As a guide to present-day decision-making, it therefore requires more than facile comparisons between then and now. And with its eye on the long view, it may be better suited to helping to provide the answers to the big, long-term questions about the impact of the pandemic rather than the shorter-term ones such as what measures might be effective. In this moment where we are increasingly recognizing the historical impact of the privileging of certain groups over others, we should be unafraid to acknowledge how the ways in which western societies have chosen to react to a threatening new disease are having an impact on the rest of the world. Is the near-obsessive focus on Covid-19, in other words, yet another embodiment of the elevation of the lives of wealthy westerners over those of people in the developing world? While attention and resources are directed exclusively at Covid, millions may die from other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, the treatment of which is currently being set back for years if not decades, while millions of children will go unvaccinated for diseases like polio that were, prior to this crisis, on the brink of elimination. And this is without taking into account the effects of the massive economic disruption caused by the western response to the pandemic, which will cause widespread hunger and social unrest. This, I fear, and not our failure to achieve the eradication of the virus through lockdowns or universal mask-wearing, is the most dire way in which our current history will take the form of a repetition of the past.

[1] The title of this essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”

[2] See https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304645.

[3] The most-frequently cited study is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291356/.

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52564371. See also https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/spanish-flu-britain-how-many-died-quarantine-corona-virus-deaths-pandemic/.

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/06/mask-protests-flu-san-francisco-coronavirus/.

(Director’s note: Orville Vernon Burton is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute.  A recognized expert on race relations and the American South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton served as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, 2009-2017.  In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois.  Elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.  Burton received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council in 2017.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

On June 9, voting in Georgia was frustrated and infuriating.  Long lines, some with five hours wait time, and malfunctioning machinery were only part of the problem.  Because of the pandemic, fewer precincts were open for the election, and the problem was more pronounced in minority neighborhoods in the metro-Atlanta area.  Absentee-mail in ballots also went awry.  According to Stacey Abrams, “voter suppression has gone beyond Jim Crow to these labyrinthine administrative rules that trip up anyone who doesn’t have a law degree and a phalanx of lawyers at their side to help them get through the process if they are one of the intended targets.”  Official Jim Crow may have ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But that legislation has been misinterpreted and unenforced as of late.

Two things have changed the modern South:  air conditioning and the Voting Rights Act.  Sadly, Americans understand better how air conditioning operates than how the Voting Rights Act works.  Partly this is due to the better science education than the Humanities in our public schools.  The Voting Rights Act is especially interesting for Historians of democracy and public policy because it was enacted to address a specific evil in our history, that is the evil of slavery, segregation, the lingering effects of racism and discrimination, and especially the abridgement of the franchise to African Americans.  The Voting Rights Act began as a non-partisan measure, pushed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

When South Carolina, first in nullification and first in secession, challenged the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1966.  Chief Justice Earl Warren explained the new departure:  “Congress felt itself confronted by an insidious and pervasive evil.”  The Supreme Court dismissed the complaint, “Hopefully, millions of non-white Americans will now be able to participate for the first time on an equal basis in the government under which they live.”  The Court summarized the history of disfranchisement, including disfranchising constitutions, grandfather clauses, and white primaries, all accompanied by wholesale fraud and violence.  The Chief Justice noted the long history of racial discrimination in the voter registration process in South Carolina, directly quoting some of the more outrageous remarks of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. Tillman had declared, “The whites have absolute control of the government, and we intend at any hazard to retain it” and “the only thing we can do as patriots and as statesmen is to take from them [black voters] every ballot that we can.”

The new Act was precision-targeted at the worst-behaving states.  In those states, the chief dirty trick was the bad-faith use of the literacy test to reject African Americans no matter what the test result was –  just as intended.  For example, in 1940, one local registrar in South Carolina explained to a newspaper reporter, “If a coon wants to vote in the primary, we make him recite the Constitution backward, as well as forward, make him close his eyes and dot his t’s and cross his i’s.  We have to comply with the law, you see.”

The heart of the new law, therefore, stripped away from those states their right to use literacy tests at all.  The Act contained an objective formula to identify these states, which were called “covered states.”  Under the formula, the covered states turned out to be seven of the eleven states of the former Confederacy (as well as certain counties throughout the nation).  In other words, the Act accurately singled out states that were guilty of the most egregious voting discrimination.

The Voting Rights Act went into effect on August 6, 1965, and was effective from the start.  More than a million African Americans registered to vote in just two years.  Black registration doubled in Georgia and Louisiana, tripled in Alabama, and multiplied by almost ten times in Mississippi – from 28,000 to more than a quarter of a million.

White officials did not sit idly by; they shifted tactics.  Unable to keep African Americans from voting, they manipulated the rules and election machinery to maintain control and to keep African Americans from exercising influence or winning office.  In heavily black counties, offices were changed from elective to appointive. In Charleston County, South Carolina, for example, the school board of trustees changed from elected to appointed positions, but only in predominantly African American districts.  White school districts continued to elect their board members.  Majority black cities suddenly annexed white suburbs to keep white residents in the majority.  Gerrymandering was rampant.  A Mississippi legislator introduced one of these bills with the words, “This is needed to preserve our southern way of life.”  These methods went by the collective term “vote dilution,” i.e., making black votes worth less.

The Voting Rights Act, however, recognized that the tactics would change.  The “preclearance” remedy of the Voting Rights Act was Congress’s way of trying to anticipate future discriminatory tactics.  The covered jurisdictions had to get prior approval of changes in their voting procedure.  Over the next 45 years the pre-clearance remedy enabled African American voters to elect candidates of their choice and to be a real part of the political process in states where they had for so long been kept away from the ballot box.

In 2013 the Supreme Court took it back.  Shelby County v. Holder struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, ending the pre-clearance remedy.   That very day, Texas instituted a voter ID law that had previously been declared discriminatory.  Now we are back to old tricks like closing precincts in minority districts and tactics we have not yet even seen.  We have to ask if Georgia’s election debacle is part and parcel of the new plan to keep minorities from voting.