Review by New York Times Review
The inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president seemed to come from some place other than America, as though the white nationalism, the sexism, the meanness of spirit belonged to some hateful foreign country. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s "Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow," an indispensable guide to the making of our times, addresses 2017's mystifications. The book sets the Obama era beside Reconstruction and the Trump era beside the white supremacist terrorism of Redemption, the period beginning in 1877 during which Reconstruction's nascent, biracial democracy was largely dismantled. Gates juxtaposes the optimism of Reconstruction, the despair of Redemption and the promise of the New Negro movement - the effort by black Americans, starting around the turn of the 20 th century, to craft a counternarrative to white supremacy. In doing so, "Stony the Road" presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. Gates takes his title from one of the New Negro's most enduring cultural artifacts: "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," composed in 1900 and still widely known as the "Negro national anthem" (the "Negro" here is historically correct). The song looks back at enslavement and exclusion - at our people's "dark past" and "stony road" - decrying its "chast'ning rod" and the "blood of the slaughtered." It exhorts black Americans to stay "in the path" toward full emancipation, to remain faithful to "our God" and to "our native land." The struggle remains a long way from over. But as Gates's survey of the iconography of white supremacy from the past two centuries reminds us, 2017 represents far from the worst we have faced. "Stony the Road" offers a history lesson on connivance, or, in today's idiom, collusion, by cataloging in words and pictures the white supremacy at the highest levels of American politics, including President Woodrow Wilson's praise for "The Birth of a Nation," a Negrophobic hymn to the Ku Klux Klan that was shown in the White House in 1915. By recreating such potent scenes, Gates makes clear what early-20th-century blacks were up against, and "Stony the Road" seems to encourage us to take hope. The book's devastating inventory of cruel, ugly stereotypes, lynchings and torture puts our current era immediately in context. Gates contrasts the iconography of Negrophobia with the New Negroes' own cultural productions: family photographs and portraits of well-dressed and inevitably light-skinned African-Americans featured in black periodicals. In this matchup, white supremacy wins in volume and pungency over "the vain attempt to confect positive images of noble black people powerful enough to brace against the maelstrom of excruciating images that the white supremacist imagination had spawned." Gates's epilogue explains why. Upstanding New Negroes, no matter how pale, straight-haired, well dressed or impeccably educated, ultimately proved no contest for white supremacy, which had much more than iconography going for it. In the century after the Civil War, when most black men and women could not vote, white supremacy had political power - local, state and national. For all its hopeful eloquence, New Negro cultural expression could not overcome disfranchisement. Then, as now, the ballot held the key to a new Reconstruction. Much of the scholarship Gates cites is not new, including W E. B. Du Bois's 1935 classic, "Black Reconstruction: An Essay of the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880," as well as an abundance of academic articles and books inspired by the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s (an era often termed the Second Reconstruction) and which effectively undermined the prevailing account of Reconstruction as an era of ignorant and corrupt Negro rule. New in "Stony the Road" is a wealth of visual material related to "Reconstruction," a documentary series that Gates produced for PBS and which aired this month. The visual bounty began to emerge in the late 20 th century, thanks to the digitization of hitherto scattered archives. In "Stony the Road," the vicious imagery - postcards, photographs, newspaper cartoons, political broadsides, knickknacks, theater posters, playing cards, children's books, games of all sorts - forms a sickening onslaught that raises a question: Is the book African-American history or American history? The winter of 2017 revealed stark contrasts between a vision of the country held by millions of blinkered Americans who insisted that the president's attitude toward immigrants and minorities was "not the America" they knew and a fuller vision of history and society, including what has so often been buried under the rubric of "African-American history," as though AfricanAmerican history had little or nothing to do with American history. Those familiar with African-American history would hardly say, " This is not the America I know." For in our current politics we recognize AfricanAmerican history - the spot under our country's rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. "Stony the Road" lifts the rug. Now American history is once again at stake. As Gates so usefully phrases it, "Few American historical periods are more relevant to understanding our contemporary racial politics than Reconstruction. Think of the fundamental questions that the study of the period forces us to consider: Who is entitled to citizenship? Who should have the right to vote? What is the government's responsibility in dealing with terrorism? What is the relationship between political and economic democracy?" As essential history for our times, "Stony the Road" does a kind of cultural work that is only now becoming widespread in the United States but that Germans have been undertaking for decades. The German word for this effort is Vergangenheitsbewältigung - coming to terms with the past-and it carries connotations of a painful history that citizens would rather not confront but that must be confronted in order not to be repeated. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essential for understanding the American past as a whole. Treating African-American history as American history in the interest of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, "Stony the Road" explains how the politics of 2017 belong squarely within our trajectory as a nation, another phase in the cycle of Reconstruction (expanded democracy), Redemption (democracy defeated) and the New Negro (black culture's creation of a counternarrative to white supremacy). It is a history that very much needs telling and hearing in these times. So, yes, to the history. But what of the historiographical infrastructure? While Gates rightly cites Du Bois and the historian Eric Foner as the period's core experts, he also names, sometimes obsessively, authors of recent works who are mostly nonblack or foreign-born. The black scholars who laid the historiographical groundwork during and after the Second Reconstruction - call them the New New Negro historians - do not appear in the book. These scholars researched and wrote in the second half of the 20th century, when their scholarship was sidelined as black history. These scholars are many, but one name will stand for them all: John Hope Franklin. Gates cites Franklin's influence on his thinking in his acknowledgments; I wish that he had cited Franklin's scholarship and that of his peers in "Stony the Road." The devastating inventory of lynchings and torture puts our own era immediately in context. NELL IRVIN painter is the author of "Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction" and "Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Prominent and prolific scholar, writer, filmmaker, and educator Gates has long been compelled by Reconstruction and its rapid and bloody deconstruction. In his signature lucid and compelling approach to history, he tracks the vicious backlash against the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) that abolished slavery, established citizenship for African Americans, and ensured Black men the right to vote and the resultant election of numerous Black legislators. White southerners retaliated with white-supremacist propaganda, scientific racism, racial violence, including lynchings, and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation laws. Accompanying Gates' illuminating narrative are bold visual essays presenting appalling mass-produced racist images casting African Americans as less than human, weaponized representations accompanied by hoaxes, or fake news, crafted to amplify demeaning stereotypes and heighten fears, especially of Black men as rapists. The parallels to renewed white-supremacist ideology and reactionary politics in the wake of the first African American presidency are staggering. Gates also incisively chronicles the New Negro movement aimed at countering pernicious racist stereotypes, how the Black elite engendered both an artistic renaissance and class divides within the Black community, and the rise of such crucial organizations as the NAACP. This fresh, much-needed inquiry into a misunderstood yet urgently relevant era will appear in conjunction with Gates' new PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, scheduled for broadcast in April. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gates' stature, the subject's timeliness, the airing of his new documentary, and the enormous potential for discussion will make this is a very hot title.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gates (The Annotated African American Folktales), the director of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, provides an expansive exploration of Reconstruction, Redemption (white southerners' attempts to reinstate a white supremacist system), and Jim Crow, demonstrating how they informed and engendered one another and sowed the seeds of the modern resurgence of white-supremacist ideas. Gates begins in the 1860s, with the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments providing African Americans basic civil rights, and continues through the backlash of Jim Crow legislation and related cultural trends (including eugenics, stereotypical representations of African-Americans like Uncle Remus, and D.W. Griffith's KKK-redeeming film The Birth of a Nation). Gates illustrates how this widespread racism and resentment gave rise to the "New Negro," a rallying of "black intellectuals, creative artists, and political activists" that became the Harlem Renaissance (and whose rhetoric prefigured respectability politics). Gates outlines the ideals and accomplishments of black thinkers including W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, and he insightfully demonstrates how history repeats itself by comparing the emergence of Jim Crow with the rise in white supremacism surrounding Barack Obama's presidency. This excellent text, augmented by a disturbing collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century racist images, is indispensable for understanding American history. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Historian Gates (Alphonse Fletcher Univ. Professor, dir. the Hutchins Ctr. for African and African American Research, Harvard Univ.; Life Upon These Shores) has long been fascinated with the idea of the "New Negro," and how African Americans fought back against white supremacy during the Redemption and Jim Crow periods. In this work (its title a lyric from the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing"), the author asserts that this era is fundamental to understanding the current period of racist backlash following Barack Obama's presidency. Borrowing heavily from historians such as Eric Foner and David W. Blight, Gates covers the basics of Reconstruction, the pseudoscience of racism in the field of anthropology, lynching and racial violence across America, and widespread commercial use of stereotypes such as Sambo and Aunt Jemima, and how African Americans continually strived to disprove this onslaught of bigotry through education, literature, art, music, and political organizing. A large number of photographs and illustrations back up his argument of just how unrelenting white supremacy was in this period. VERDICT An excellent introduction to the Redemption period for new readers and a reminder to experts of why the era is still so crucial to American history.-Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tuscon © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The noted African-American literary scholar and critic examines the tangled, troubled years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.From the outset, writes Gates (African and African-American Research/Harvard Univ.; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, 2017, etc.), there was, among whites, a profound difference between being opposed to slavery and advocating equality for emancipated black people. Alexis de Tocqueville, he notes, warned of the latter that since "they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies." Meanwhile, countless enemies emerged among the white population, from unreconstructed Southerners to the architects of Jim Crow laws. Gates argues, with Frederick Douglass, that freedom without the vote is meaningless, and those laws did all that they could to suppress suffrage. Meanwhile, there was the hope that a "New Negro" would emerge to change affairs once and for alla trope, Gates notes, that emerged anew with the election of Barack Obama, a metaphor "first coined as a complex defensive mechanism that black people employed to fight back against racial segregation." Other mechanisms were born of necessity even as white culture found endless ways to appropriate from black culture while never accepting its authors. In a highly timely moment, Gates discusses the history of blackface, which was put to work in depictions of lascivious, predatory black men advancing the "thought that the ultimate fantasy of black males was to rape white women"a thought that soon became an "obsession." Reconstruction failed for many reasons, and the ethos that followed it was no improvement: The period under consideration, as the author recounts, marked the rise of "scientific" racism, of "Sambo" images that were "intended to naturalize the visual image of the black person as subhuman," reinforcing the separate-and-unequal premises of Jim Crow itself. Gates suggests that it's possible to consider the entire history of America after the Civil War as "a long Reconstruction locked in combat with an equally long Redemption," one that's playing out even today.A provocative, lucid, and urgent contribution to the study of race in America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
