History - Tracing Center

Exploring “White in America”

Posted December 11th, 2012 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: History, Living consequences, Race and Ethnicity Tags: Douglas Blackmon, Racial discrimination, Racial identity, Soledad O'Brien, Traces of the Trade

Update: On Monday, December 17, our Katrina Browne will appear on “Huff Post Live” at 12:30 ET to discuss the topic of “White in America,” in a segment entitled “Is It Time To Ask What Being White Means?”

This weekend, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien debuted the fifth installment of her provocative series, Black in America. This time, in “Who is Black in America?”, O’Brien explores the nuances of racial self-identification in the United States, as well as the pressures put on individuals by the ways others categorize them.

The episode raises such difficult questions as whether there is a separate bi-racial identity in this country, or whether those of mixed black and white ancestry may, or must, self-identify simply as “black.” (For more, see Cheryl Contee’s essay at Jack & Jill Politics.)

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A sad and sorry continuity: the North in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

Posted November 16th, 2012 by Katrina Browne
Category: History, Popular Culture Tags: 13th Amendment, Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, Fernando Wood, Northern complicity, Steven Spielberg, U.S. Civil War

U.S. House of Representatives passes 13th amendment, abolishing slavery, by two votes I’m one of the jaded ones now.

So it surprised me not to find Fernando Wood rearing his pro-slavery head again, this time as a Democratic Congressman from New York. Here he was on the big screen in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, showing up in 1865 as a vocal opponent in Congress to the passage of the 13th amendment. I knew of him from four years earlier, when in 1861, as mayor of New York City, on the heels of South Carolina’s secession, he proposed that the city should also secede from the Union. He was well aware that New York’s economy was inextricably tied to slavery.

Once you know about the North’s complicity in slavery and racism you see the through-line almost everywhere you look. The winter-spring of 1865 that is the subject of Lincoln thus becomes just one more chapter.

In the popular, white, non-southern imagination, we put Lincoln on a pedestal, but we subconsciously put ourselves on that pedestal too, because he is our symbol of northern determination to end slavery. That was us. The good guys.

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Controversy over remembering integration at Old Miss

Posted October 2nd, 2012 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: History Tags: Civil rights movement, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, University of Mississippi

Fifty years ago this week, James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, marking the university’s integration and a civil rights milestone.

Ole Miss is doing a great deal to commemorate this anniversary, yet it has become mired in controversy about whether it is celebrating while ignoring its own past and its role in desegregation.

The doors were open for 50 years yes, but they’d been closed for a century. We don’t want to talk about that do we?

— Historian Charles Eagles, author of The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss

The integration of the University of Mississippi

The integration of Ole Miss was not an easy one. Meredith’s application for admission was repeatedly refused by the university, and he required the assistance of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Thurgood Marshall, and the support of the NAACP, before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Meredith had a right to be admitted to the university.

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Historian Eugene Genovese, 1930-2012

Posted October 1st, 2012 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: History, Public History Tags: American South, Eugene Genovese, slavery

Eugene D. Genovese

It was reported this weekend that Eugene D. Genovese, Bancroft Prize-winning historian of slavery and the American South, has died at the age of 82.

Genovese was especially well known for his views on slavery in the antebellum South. In books such as Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1975), he redefined master-slave relations, arguing that southern slavery was fundamentally paternalistic.

This system of paternalism allowed masters to profit from slave labor, while slaves, Genovese argued, were able to pursue their humanity through a series of practical compromises with masters, mutual support, and inner strength.

While Edward Ayers praised Roll, Jordan, Roll as “the best book ever written about American slavery,” other historians believe Genovese minimized the horrors and brutality of slavery. Eric Foner, for instance, has argued that “paternalism” hardly seems an appropriate term to apply to chattel slavery, since parents generally do not buy and sell their children.

Genovese always claimed that he was not looking to justify slavery. His work also offered a strong defense of the American South, praising its values and culture as in many ways superior to the North’s.

12th Annual Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage

Posted March 6th, 2012 by Katrina Browne
Category: History

I had the incredible opportunity and honor to participate in the 12^th annual Civil Rights Pilgrimage to Alabama this past weekend sponsored by the Faith & Politics Institute and hosted by Congressman John Lewis. We visited Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma – going to the specific sites of so many defining moments in the Civil Rights movement. The delegation included 17 members of Congress from both parties; civil rights leaders in addition to Congressman Lewis: Dorothy Cotton, Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Bob Zellner; John Seigenthaler (who represented Robert F. Kennedy as intermediary between fed. govt., freedom riders, and segregationist state officials), Ethel Kennedy and Kerry Kennedy; Bill Plante (who covered the events in Alabama and Mississippi in 1965 for CBS); Ruby Bridges (the first black child to integrate a white school). There were c. 240 of us in total on the Pilgrimage – from government, the private sector, the non-profit sector, universities, religious institutions, etc. It was a remarkable group of people (including a youth contingent) to spend 3 days with absorbing lessons from these landmark dates and places.

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Civil War’s dirty secret about slavery

Posted April 12th, 2011 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: History, News and Announcements Tags: Northern slavery, Sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War, U.S. Civil War

We have an op-ed today at CNN.com on how to understand the relationship of the North to slavery and race on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

The essay, written by Executive Director Katrina Browne and Managing Director James DeWolf Perry, builds on our ongoing work around the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the enduring historical myths which blind us to the legacy of slavery and race today.

Here is how the op-ed begins:

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a war that redefined national and regional identities and became an enduring tale of noble resistance in the South and, for the rest of the country, a mighty moral struggle to erase the stain of slavery.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. By April 14, the fort had fallen and the war had begun in earnest.

By the time Fort Sumter was again in Union hands, following the evacuation of Charleston in the closing days of the war in 1865, the war had become the bloodiest in the nation’s history — and has not been surpassed. Yet the relationship of the North to the South, and to slavery before and during the war is not at all what we remember today. The reality is that both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation’s “peculiar institution.”

To read the full article, go to “Civil War’s dirty secret about slavery” at CNN.com.

What you didn’t learn in history class

Posted December 3rd, 2010 by Kristin Gallas
Category: History Tags: Sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War, South Carolina, U.S. Civil War

South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” adopted by the state legislature on December 24, 1860, mentions the word “slave” 18 times. The following passage (emphasis added) from the document clearly makes the case for secession due to the fact that the Federal Government encroached on their rights to own slaves.
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