The new book on the Reconstruction Era by Henry Louis Gates is reviewed by The Nation Magazine. Here is an excerpt from the review of Stony the Road: Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow:
…Henry Louis Gates has produced a new PBS miniseries, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, and a companion book, Stony the Road, that aim to provide a fresh perspective for a mostly lay audience. Both seek to consolidate this revisionary narrative of Reconstruction, but they also carry it beyond 1865 to 1877. For Gates, Reconstruction was not just those years immediately after the Civil War. Instead, it encompassed a political era that began with the war itself, which opened the door to questions about race, citizenship, and democracy that were previously unfathomable, and then persisted as a moral, social, and political dilemma throughout the civil rights movement.
Gates adds a second argument to this historiography. He posits that Reconstruction was about not just the rise and fall of black political power in the South—although that is still a key element of any history of the era. He argues that it also concerned African American equality in the spheres of civil society, culture, and economics and that black Reconstruction continued in these areas well into the 1920s, even as the Southern revanchists attempted to impose a new white racial order.
Lengthening the Reconstruction era, Gates insists, allows Americans to think more deeply about how the African American experience fits into the longer arc of progress and retreat that has shaped the history of American democracy. His story of the rise of the “New Negro” is a case in point. Traditionally situated around 1920, this idea—of African Americans dedicated to restoring the lost dignity and rights of the Reconstruction era—is traced in Stony the Road back to the mid-1890s, when the first generation of African Americans born emancipated began to question their second-class citizenship. For Gates, this is an important reconsideration of the African American past. “The concept of the New Negro was employed by children of Reconstruction in the grip of Redemption,” he writes, but it has deeper roots and a longer history. The same is true, he continues, for all struggles for freedom in this country, in particular by black Americans but not by them alone. The history of American democracy has been one of constant push and pull, with rare moments of revolutionary triumph for the oppressed—surrounded and threatened with destruction by long periods of reaction.
One of the strengths of Stony the Road is the ample room it gives to showing the racist imagery prevalent in popular magazines, political cartoons, and other cultural products of the era. With so much already written about Reconstruction’s achievements, this may be the book’s most important contribution: drawing links between the political and intellectual racism of the 19th and the 20th centuries and their racist popular culture, and then showing how black Americans struggled against them. For Gates, as well as for many other scholars of Reconstruction, the realms of politics and culture are inextricably linked. One cannot make a study of political power and inequality without looking at the ways they are manifested in everyday life….
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
