American history in black and white

FEW COUNTRIES erect monuments to their failed secessionist movements, particularly those premised on the right to enslave people. But, then, America is an exceptional country. Many American cities and states are debating the propriety of monuments to the Confederacy—the band of southern states that fought a civil war over the right to maintain slaves. In few places is the controversy so searing as in Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama. This had served as the confederate capital before it was moved to Richmond, Virginia, a few months later.

I visited Montgomery to report on poverty in the Black Belt—the fertile region just south and west of the city once filled with vast cotton plantations worked by slaves. After the civil war, which the South lost, things improved only marginally for rural blacks. New forms of subjugation took the place of slavery: sharecropping; the indentured labour of prisoners; lynching; the suppression of black voters; and racial segregation. Alabama was at the forefront of all these. In the Black Belt I interviewed descendants of slaves who were living without proper sanitation, with untreated sewage draining into their backyards.

It is no accident that Montgomery was a focal point of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. It is where Martin Luther King Jr preached, where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat and one of the places where Freedom Riders were viciously attacked when they challenged segregation on buses.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, known as the national lynching memorial, is a powerful testament to the racial brutality endured by blacks well after the civil war. Lynching was tolerated and sometimes abetted by local officials, and watched by crowds of thousands for sheer entertainment.

The memorial documents 4,400 people killed. Their names are etched on large iron steles, some suspended from a roof, others laid on the ground stretching far into the distance. The identities of many more victims are unknown. The site’s museum traces the journey of blacks towards racial equality, often distressingly plagued by setbacks.

So to move on to the First White House of the Confederacy, just a 20-minute walk away, is bewildering. It stands just off the capitol grounds, a few blocks from the church at which King preached. Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, used this as his White House for four months.

It is, in effect, a monument to white victimhood. There is scarcely a mention of slavery to be found among its displays. One room features the Davis family Bible, which was found by a Northern soldier during the “war between the states” (a euphemism for the civil war), and later returned to the family. A docent tells visitors about the conditions of Davis’s imprisonment after the war, describing it as tantamount to “torture”. Two women listening to him coo in sympathy. The elegant armchair sent to him while in captivity sits on display.

An approving full-length obituary from a Mississippi newspaper sits on the wall, subtitled “An American Patriot”. It declares that “No man laboured harder to preserve the union than did Davis. Only when it became obvious that the terrible schism was inevitable did he consent reluctantly to accept the presidency of the confederacy.” The idea of the Lost Cause—that the war was over northern aggression, states’ rights or chivalric duty, not the preservation of slavery—is widely believed. It is given official succour by places such as the Confederate Memorial Monument, on the grounds of the state capitol. Beneath the statue of a Confederate soldier an inscription declares: “The knightliest of the knightly race/who since the lamps of old/have kept the lamp of chivalry/alight in the hearts of gold”.

The memorial had been adorned with four Confederate flags until the massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Thereafter several states, including Alabama, took down the flags from official sites because of their association with white supremacism.

Still, it is surreal for a city to commemorate both the achievements of the civil-rights movement—documenting the white-supremacist rhetoric and violence that attempted to arrest it—while also preserving Confederate memorials that whitewash the underlying cause of the conflict. Some will plead that these Confederate monuments should stand as they are for the sake of historical preservation. But they do not honestly preserve history. They distort it by omitting any mention of slavery and transmogrifying those who fought to preserve it into men of Arthurian virtue.

Other acts seem hard to justify, too. Alabama, along with Mississippi, still jointly celebrates Martin Luther King Jr Day, a federal holiday, at the same time as Robert E Lee Day, a state holiday that commemorates the birthday of the commander of the Confederate army. To this day, there remains a Jefferson Davis high school in Montgomery, even though 94% of its pupils are black.

I am not the first to notice this jarring juxtaposition. But having just witnessed at first hand the long and mournful legacy of slavery—in which poverty, bad schooling and dire job prospects are transmitted from one generation to the next—the contrast struck me all the harder.

Fifty-five years after the passage of landmark civil-rights and anti-poverty legislation, it has become easy and even popular to describe the poverty of black Americans as a consequence of their own bad decisions. Their poverty is a complicated phenomenon—too complicated to reduce to determinism of the historical kind (which blames it entirely on slavery) or of the present-day variety (which blames it on sloth). Even so, for the state to sponsor uncritical and ahistorical Confederate memorials is to deny entirely the historical roots of black deprivation—thereby making it conveniently easy to ignore.

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