My, How Far We've Come

And how sad it is, all around.

"If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist."

Before you look, guess who said it. Education is expensive.

Post Office Jobs

There's much one could argue with in this analysis of the achievement gap between black and white Americans. But, as has been suggested in the comments elsewhere, it seems to be a problem with more than one source, and more than one answer. It seems to me part of the truth is in here.

This part, the federal jobs that provide good incomes and benefits for a great many black families who otherwise would not find them, is especially interesting to me. I began to notice this informally some time ago, without studying it. Here there seem to be numbers to back it up:

Public employment, more than blue-collar factory jobs, played a key role in lifting African Americans out of poverty. High black poverty rates, that is, did not result from deindustrialization. Aside from Detroit and Chicago, African Americans did not find extensive work in major cities in manufacturing and were denied the best industrial jobs. Even where black industrial work was common, service jobs remained the core of black urban employment. Black industrial workers, moreover, did not earn higher wages or work more steadily than African Americans employed in other sorts of work. ... Overall, the correlation between African Americans’ poverty rate and employment in government was a striking -0.7.

So does that render calls for smaller government and trimmed federal bureaucracy, de facto, racist? Anti-civil rights?

Race Race Race

That Obama speech tickets line was longer than I thought. Some people who saw the end of it said it was more than a quarter mile from end to end. Even some people who got tickets didn't get in to hear the speech, I'm told.

The mayor offered him a change of venue to the municipal minor league baseball stadium, but the campaign refused it. Better to have a guaranteed overflowing tech school gym than risk a half-empty stadium, I suppose. You'll piss off 100 people locally but impress 10,000 nationally.

I think he also coveted the tech school for its name: Thaddeus Stevens, the great abolitionist, who founded it in his will. Never mind that, for all his commitment to anti-slavery, Stevens was a mean-as-dirt hardball politician, who occasionally represented slaveowners against their runaways early in his legal career, bitterly persecuted Masons, and who derailed Winfield Scott at the 1840 Whig convention by -- literally -- dropping a note to the Virginia delegates that suggested Scott just might have abolitionist tendencies.

The stadium is named for the local shopper publication. I think "Obama speaks at Thaddeus Stevens School" probably has more political cachet than "Obama speaks at Clipper Magazine Stadium."

The school is mostly minority students, but apparently no tickets were set aside for them. In exchange for the headache of having to spend the morning trapped in a media event, they didn't even get to see the speech.

This has been a painful election season for my newsroom co-workers, who of course are all Democrats or left-of-Democrat Independents. The two most vocal and persistent anti-Bush, Chomsky-quoting, Michael Moore-worshipping employees split when the campaign began: One went for Kucinich, the other for Ron Paul. For a blessed interval, they weren't speaking to each other. Recently, alas, they've patched it up. Every time some good news seeps into the paper about Iraq, one will drift over to the other's desk, and they'll rehearse the talking points about war crimes, etc., etc., until both feel comforted again, then they'll drift apart.

But for the more mainstream Demos, the frustration over the ongoing Hillary-Obama fight is palpable. For me, as a non-Democrat, it's like watching professional wrestling: "Wow, that looked like it hurt. I wonder if it's real?" I can enjoy the spectacle from a safe distance, popcorn in hand.

Ever since 1840, American presidential elections have doubled as national discussions of issues. Some more than others. This one has that quality, and among the topics necessarily up for discussion is race. Obama has -- sometimes, fitfully (Icepick is right) -- offered a fresh start to that discussion, with a post-Civil Rights perspective and a broad embrace of Americans, including alienated whites.

That, to me, is a wonderful new beginning. The old discussion of race in America devolved into minutia, after its breathtaking charge. In 1940, more than two-thirds of whites believed blacks were less intelligent. Today, less than 6 percent think so. Before World War II, in the North as well as the South, fewer than 40 percent supported any kind of desegregation. Today, between 95 and 100 percent of Americans support the idea of integration. That percentage among whites is actually higher than among blacks.

Then we hit the wall. I'd describe the wall in terms used by Tamar Jacoby in her insightful book "Someone Else's House": "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that. But, as Jacoby writes:

"That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is along, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

As a result, the discussion on race has largely devolved into the kind of things you bicker about when you've given up on real progress: Scrubbing little totems of Confederate imagery off Southern state flags; should "Huck Finn" be banned in schools? Why can't white people use the N-word when rappers use it all the time?

Obama, at times, starts to frame a new discussion that just might break through the deadlock. I was born in the middle of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. I've lived to see one through to a conclusion. I'd like to at least see the other get on track for one.

There will be no pure hero class and no pure victim class in it. We'll have to give that up. That view has been part of the simplified picture sold to us by civil rights hagiography. Reality is more complex. Everyone comes to this discussion with baggage of one sort or another. Everyone with the capacity to be selfless for the sake of patriotism, or to behave otherwise.

So, in the part of this election that is about choosing a president, I am probably not on Senator Obama's side. But in the part that is a national discussion, insofar as it touches on race, I'm on his side, as I see it, all things in the balance, the ugly but unavoidable rhetoric of Rev. Wright included.

Color Words

I was surprised that Obama's race speech garnered such an intense negative reaction among so many educated Republicans who are well left of Pat Buchanan. A lot of that concentrated on the appearance of weaseling out of his church connection, or obscuring the depth of his debt to Rev. Wright, I suppose. And many who slammed those qualities took a line or to to praise the general tenor of his rhetoric when it was purely about race in America. And partly, too, they may fear him as a candidate.

But a lot of my peers also went after his word-painting as enshrining victimhood, or worse things.

So I wonder how they will take to this?

"Black Americans were a founding population. Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding." As a result, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

That's Condi Rice talking, in an interview with the Washington Times.

It seems to me utterly unobjectionable as history, consistent with modern American patriotism (and even with current Republican party membership), and a view any compassionate thinking person could have. It doesn't tell you what to do about it. But it obviously opens that discussion along some familiar lines.

Good enough for you?

Available

"I was convicted because a black man committed a crime against a white woman, and I was available."

And it seems he was right. It's hard to say "the system worked" when a man goes to jail at 20 and doesn't get cleared until he's 47.

Race for Home

How would you like to live in a neighborhood of 30 homes, where 20 houses were home to white families, 4 to blacks, 4 to Hispanics, and one to Asians?

Sounds good to me. Sound good to you? Or not? The answer might depend on what race you are And it might not break the way you expect.

Reynolds Farley and his students did studies on black and white preferences in the 1990s. Most black and white Americans would like to live in an integrated neighborhood. The most common African-American preference would be for the neighborhood to be 50% black. Most white Americans would prefer their neighborhood to be no more than about 15% black. You can see the problem -- neighborhoods passing the 15% black threshold are more attractive to African Americans, but less attractive to whites; such neighborhoods tend not to stabilize at 50% black, but keep going to nearly all black.

Since the Farley studies were published, the nation has gotten more diverse, so much so that most researchers would not limit their studies to just black/white integration. This is a good development. The more people see that the options are not just black and white, the harder it is to think of a single tipping point that would make a neighborhood head to all one group or another.

[Hat tip]

But it might be more complicated than that. The sociological study reported on here "found that race and class may be more important than the actual levels of disorder in shaping how whites, blacks and Latinos perceive the health of a neighborhood."

As the proportion of black residents in a neighborhood increased, white residents' perception of disorder also soared -- even in neighborhoods that the raters had judged to be no more ramshackle than others with a smaller proportion of black residents. The researchers found the same thing when they looked at the percentage of families living in poverty: In neighborhoods with more poor people, residents perceived more disorder, regardless of the objective condition of the neighborhood.

Much to the researchers' surprise, they saw the same patterns when they looked at the perceptions of black residents. As the percentage of African Americans in the neighborhood increased, the percentage of black residents who judged their neighborhood to be in disarray also rose -- out of proportion to the neighborhood's rating. In fact, the perceptions of blacks were no less likely than those of whites to be negatively affected by an increasing number of black residents.

Among Latinos, the pattern was even starker. They were far more likely than either blacks or whites to be negatively affected by the increased presence of black residents, the researchers found.

What explains these reactions? For Latinos and whites, the answer might seem obvious: racism. Researchers have known for years that new immigrants quickly learn on their arrival to the United States that blacks are a stigmatized group and are to be avoided at all costs. "Latino immigrants therefore may draw too heavily on the presence of blacks as a proxy for disorder," Sampson and Raudenbush wrote.

But racial bias is not the whole answer, claim Sampson and Raudenbush. If it were, why were blacks as likely as whites to see more disorder than was really there?

The answer, they argue, seems to be that blacks had bought into the same negative stereotypes as whites, and have come to associate black neighborhoods -- any black neighborhood -- with decay and dysfunction, regardless of the objective condition of the area.

This stuff can make your head spin.

The Artificial Honkey

Shaun Mullen calls Clarence Thomas a white man:

Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, nominees of Bush père and his son, are all conservatives except when it comes to their judicial activism, the very outrage that conservatives decried when Bill Clinton was president. And with O’Connor, the great equalizer, retired, these four white men (yes, Thomas, too) will be imposing their agenda on all of us for many years to come.

"Race" is an artificial idea, biologically. However, it is an ironclad reality in American life, past and present. To pretend it can be changed by a person's statements and political votes is, frankly, one of the ugliest, stupidest things anyone every typed into existence.

We've now gone completely mad in the way Orwell warned. Language has become unmoored from reality. Barack Obama, who has better claim to the literal sense of "African-American" than most modern American blacks, is denied the label. But while racial identity has become something bestowed (or withheld) by some self-appointed sanhedrin of social purists, gender is a personal choice and nobody can call you anything but what you decide to call yourself.

Exaggeration? Not where I work. According to the Associated Press stylebook, the newspaper copy editors' bible:

transgender Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.

If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.

Blackface

[posted by Callimachus]

Blackface haunts the fringes of political discourse. The authentic historical images of it -- like the one above -- shock us today. But really they shouldn't. As the Wikipedia article notes:

Blackface minstrelsy's groundbreaking appropriation, exploitation, and assimilation of African-American culture—as well as the inter-ethnic artistic collaborations that stemmed from it—were but a prologue to the lucrative packaging, marketing, and dissemination of African-American cultural expression and its myriad derivative forms in today's world popular culture.

... Despite its racist portrayals, blackface minstrelsy was the conduit through which African-American and African-American-influenced music, comedy, and dance first reached the American mainstream. It played a seminal role in the introduction of African-American culture to world audiences.

When Elvis Presley or other white acts took songs by black performers and spun them into commercial hits (such as his inferior and muddled "Hound Dog," which properly is a woman's song), that could be seen as blackface without the makeup.

The historical reality of the blackface phenomenon (rooted in America but immensely popular worldwide) is a compelling image that can be adopted to political situations where someone is perceived to be grotesquely pandering to an inappropriate audience, or pretending to be something he or she is not.

In a notorious recent case, a liberal blogger used the image against Joe Lieberman. It used to be here, but it seems to have "disappeared" like a purged Politburo member from a Stalin photograph. The picture is helpfully preserved here, however.

There really was no race component to the argument over Lieberman until this blogger introduced it, which I suppose is why it struck many observers (left and right) as odd and offensive.

The blogger probably wanted to paint Lieberman as a kept clown for the Republicans, who certainly do find in him their only Democratic ally these days. Why not a clown suit, then? Why the blackface treatment?

The undertones of it were revealing, I think. In that a progressive would instinctively identify her political faction with a repressed, exploited, victimized racial group. Which is pretty unnatural, given the social status of a great many progressives. There is no implied insult to blacks in her caricature. It is vicious for what it suggests about Republicans, and creepy for what it suggests about how progressives perceive themselves and others. But that's nothing new.

More recently, Chris Muir, the creator of the conservative "Day by Day" Internet comic strip, portrayed Hillary Clinton in blackface after a string of incidents in which Hillary was exposed adopting black idioms and speech patterns when addressing black audiences. The falseness of it was painfully evident, and I imagine it made many of her friends cringe. Such behavior is fodder for political opponents, and Muir was hardly alone in parodying it.

Unlike the Lieberman case, race clearly was an issue here. But one could question whether the blackface image was appropriate. After all, historical blackface was done for the approval of white, not black, audiences. And historically it was black American leaders who became skilled in both racial idioms, and were able to step from one into the other for effect and expedience. Even in front of the same audience, as the preacher does so wonderfully at the end of "The Sound and the Fury."

[The fact that it is now white politicians who perform this trick (and not terribly well) is a delightful illustration of how far we've come since the blackface days.]

Most of the "Day by Day" Strips dispense conventional pokes at the hypocrisies and ideological blind spots of Democrats and what we mis-call "liberals" in modern America. The sort of obvious observation that nowadays gets dismissed as "talking points," as though one could notice it only when instructed to do so by party leaders. It's mostly gentle poking, more "Doonesbury" than Ted Rall.

The blogger Jon Swift, however, finds that, unlike "Doonesbury," "Day by Day" is "rarely funny at all." That's a common critique of conservative humor, which liberals profess to find an oxymoron.

I agree that it's nowhere near as witty or sophisticated as the liberal version often is. But for conservative audiences, I think, the mere idea of seeing their worldview expressed in these mediums -- newspaper-style comic strips, stand-up comedy, Hollywood movies, what have you -- is so novel as to be entertaining in its own right, whether it's objectively "funny" or not. Horses who could read might pronounce "Black Beauty" the greatest novel ever written. It would be foolish to try to tell them it's sentimental trash.

As to whether all conservative humor is intrinsically unfunny or not, that depends on your point of view. Most politicized humor is, at bottom, cruel and based on twists and libels. If you find one political cartoon amusing and not the other, my guess is it may be mostly a matter of whether you're on the side being laughed at or the side doing the mocking.

Don Imus's recent tumble into infamy strikes me as another case of blackface. That is, he slipped into a blackface act 60 years after such behavior stopped being broadly approved. He was a white man adopting a black man's idiom to entertain a white audience.

Is blackface imagery ever legitimate? I think it can be, as a political image, but it ought to be handled like old dynamite (which it is). Frankly, I wish we stopped hiding things like "Song of the South" from ourselves. Who are we trying to kid? You can't make a better future by censoring the past. You only set yourself up to fall into pits you didn't realize were there.



Some images fall into the gray area, where the audience has to use its judgment to determine if the artist has crossed a line or not. And that judgment will be based in part on the artist's prior record on such matters. When a conservative magazine uses an octopus as a negative image for a mayor who happens to be Jewish, or a German America-phobic magazine uses a mosquito to represent American businessmen, many of whom happen to be Jewish, some people cry foul.

Certainly the octopus and the blood-sucker figure in the filthy historical literature of anti-Semitism. Yet they also are useful images that have been employed widely in art untinged by hatred. Evoking such things does not automatically disqualify you from decency. An audience has a duty to think, and you can't excuse yourself from that by applying blind rules.

Bird Got Pipes

[posted by Callimachus]

Shay, at Booker Rising, has a question:

[W]hy do white females from Britain (Dusty Springfield, Lisa Stansfield, Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse, etc.) do a significantly better job overall than their American counterparts - with Teena Marie being a notable exception - on the soul music front?

Any suggestions?

I Write the Songs

[posted by Callimachus]

Interesting AP piece about the backlash against rap and hip-hop from the genres' fan base:

[A]fter 30 years of growing popularity, rap music is now struggling with an alarming sales decline and growing criticism from within about the culture's negative effect on society.

... Though music sales are down overall, rap sales slid a whopping 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and for the first time in 12 years no rap album was among the top 10 sellers of the year. A recent study by the Black Youth Project showed a majority of youth think rap has too many violent images. In a poll of black Americans by The Associated Press and AOL-Black Voices last year, 50 percent of respondents said hip-hop was a negative force in American society.

I'm in the wrong age category anyhow, but I never got the appeal here -- beyond the wordplay, which at its best is wicked clever and the closest thing going to Old Norse poetry.

None of this is really new, of course. Remember C. Dolores Tucker? Until her death, the black activist waged a lonely one-woman protest against hip-hop and its images of black women.

Her crusade was all the lonelier because her few allies were people like Bill Bennett, the "virtues" Republican. People who normally would listen to Tucker ran from her like a live hand grenade when they saw who was with her.

Now, of course, there's a change of heart:

In retrospect, "many of us weren't listening," says Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, a professor at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book "Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip-Hop's Hold On Young Black Women."

"She was onto something, but most of us said, 'They're not calling me a bitch, they're not talking about me, they're talking about THOSE women.' But then it became clear that, you know what? Those women can be any women."

But that reversal of the usual flow of reality is what makes this an interesting social issue -- in addition to being perhaps a terrible self-inflicted social injustice. White conservatives attack popular consumerized entertainment; black activists defend minstrel show antics as authentic street culture.

The article interviews a rapper who goes by the name David Banner (like the Hulk's alter-ego), who makes a lot of sense defending rap from its swelling army of critics. His defense, though he doesn't say this in so many words to the AP: It's a free market, and that's the kind of music you want to hear.

"Look at the music that gets us popular — 'Like a Pimp,'," says Banner, naming his hit.

"What makes it so difficult is to know that we need to be doing other things. But the truth is at least us talking about what we're talking about, we can bring certain things to the light," he says. "They want (black artists) to shuck and jive, but they don't want us to tell the real story because they're connected to it."

... Banner says there's a reason why acts like KRS-One and Public Enemy don't sell anymore. He recalled that even his own fans rebuffed positive songs he made — like "Cadillac on 22s," about staying way from street life — in favor of songs like "Like a Pimp."

"The American public had an opportunity to pick what they wanted from David Banner," he says. "I wish America would just be honest. America is sick. ... America loves violence and sex."

Different strains of "conservative" can live peaceably in the same body for years, then suddenly react against one another and send the patient into a fever. How do you conserve the social norms in a free market society where what is most appealing to the libido is most likely to sell?



It's why true social conservatives like Russell Kirk were no fans of untrammeled free markets. Kirk believed that an objective universal moral order exists and that it ought to be defended from ideologues of the left and right. He disliked unbridled free-market capitalism, which fuels "the dream of avarice."

The weakness in "David Banner's" argument is that the market driving the success of one rap number or another is not equivalent to the segment of the population suffering from the alleged ill effects of the music style.

While the AP blandly characterizes rap's fans as "the youthful audience ... which was enraptured with genre that defined them as none [sic] other could," it elsewhere lets the reality slip into print:

While rap has been in essence pop music for years, and most rap consumers are white, some worry that the black community is suffering from hip-hop — from the way America perceives blacks to the attitudes and images being adopted by black youth.

Which seems to me as much a problem for all of us as the direct effect on black youth of being aswim in such dreadful role models.

Ezra Klein catches the Catch-22:

There's a frustrating correlation/causation issue with gangster rap sales. Studios have decided gunplay sells, so they put money, promotion, and killer beats behind rappers like 50-cent or Young Jeezy, and then we're all shocked when those albums sell and younger rhymers emulate their most obvious characteristics. But as the solo success of beat-smith Kanye West shows, you can rhyme about blood diamonds, dress preppy, and still go platinum. The music matters, much more so than the lyrics. It's just that we've senselessly wrapped up a certain street aesthetic with a particularly bumping bass line, a gruff, masculine delivery style, and the money to make the whole package work.

Reminds me of the '80s in Chester County, where the loveliest landscape in the East was being plowed under for tens of thousands of McMansions and plywood palaces. The developers all insisted "this is what people want," but since all the materials came pre-cut and colored to that style, so that building anything else would have been inordinately expensive, what alternative was there?

And is it "classism" or a fetish for social engineering to even yearn for something better?

One of the out-of-the-mainstream rappers mentioned, but not quoted, in the article was Talib Kweli. Sounds like he would have made an interesting interview:

Of course, BET – the people running things over there are very limited in what they feel appeals to black youth. They’re like, “The gangster stuff was popular, so anything that deviates from that must be unpopular and must not be worth giving a shot.” As far as mine, the particular song in question was a song I did with Mary J. Blige and Kanye West, called “I Try.” What I was told by my inside person was that it was just “too conscious." I couldn’t really care less whether BET plays my videos or not. I was more upset for people like Little Brother and De La Soul and any of those that have been told their stuff is too intelligent for BET. And the kids don’t even have a choice.

And yes, I wrote this whole piece for the sheer pleasure of putting pictures of David Banner and Russell Kirk in the same post under a title from Barry Manilow.

Tragedy by Numbers

[posted by Callimachus]

If you're white or Hispanic in America and you get sent to state prison, your life expectancy goes down -- you're more likely to die in the slammer.

If you're black in America, however, prison is statistically safer than home. According to "the first truly detailed analysis of death in U.S. prisons," released earlier this month, "Black Americans are significantly more likely to survive in prison than in their own neighborhoods ...."[1]

While white and Hispanic inmates were slightly more likely to die from disease or violence behind bars, the mortality rate among black state prison inmates was 57 percent lower than their counterparts of similar age on the outside, the study found.

Julian Bond has some pointed comments on it: "It doesn't say anything good about prison. It says everything bad about the neighborhoods." But later he does say, "It's also about the fact these guys have access to health care in prison that they don't have at home."

Typically he focuses on failing schools and lack of jobs, rather than social and cultural factors, or even the pop culture glamorization of drugs and violence in the ghetto from a safe distance (I've seen "Hustle and Flow" showered with accolades and awards, and I've seen the reality around me, which could make a movie called "Rot and Die"). Really its pointless to try to disentangle them, and the conservative and liberal views of why life is so routinely awful for black Americans don't conflict so much as describe different aspects of the same disaster.

[1] "The study examined the deaths of 12,129 inmates over four years, but did not include data from federal prisons or local jails."

Life of Bryan

[posted by Callimachus]

Bob Moser of The Nation, who often has written perceptively of the new Democrats' problems in the New South, does it again.

The South has long amounted to little more than a swirl of stereotypes in the national mind (see Gone With the Wind; please do not see Forrest Gump). Many non-Southern progressives still see the region as a dank, magnolia-scented Otherworld where the cultural obsessions of race, religion and rifles hold white voters together in an unbreakable sway, making it hopeless terrain for planting any politics to the left of Jefferson Davis or Jerry Falwell.

He homes in on one of the moments when Howard Dean got it exactly right, and the week or so when I thought I wanted him to be the next president:

Stating his intention of competing for the votes of "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks" in November 2003, Dean set off howls of protest among party leaders and his rivals for the presidential nomination, who said he was simultaneously stereotyping white Southerners and offending blacks. But few of the complaints originated in Dixie. As they "stand on their soapboxes to castigate Dr. Dean's remarks," wrote the Rev. Joe Darby, vice president of the Charleston NAACP, "Democratic candidates and party leadership should bear in mind that black voters think for themselves." The previous February at a hamburger stand in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Dean had been applauded by black listeners when he said, "You know all those white guys riding around with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks? Well, their kids don't have health insurance either."

The way Dean's campaign derailed after that may be proof that God is real and he does, in fact, love Republicans. Because Dean had hit on a winning formula before he fell over in the swamp and sank.

Moser even hits on the right historical antecedent, the Southern Farmers' Alliance led by Georgia's Tom Watson in the 1890s, which forged -- for a time -- a common cause between poor whites and blacks.

Though the Populists had their share of two-faced politicians and race-baiters, the movement as a whole made a remarkable call for trans-racial solidarity, based on an equality of want and poverty, a common grievance and a common oppressor. "They are in the ditch just like we are," as a white Texas Populist put it. Watson had the vision of "presenting a platform immensely beneficial to both races and injurious to neither," and "making it in the interest of both races to act together for the success of the platform." The success of the party overall hinged on black cooperation, and Watson promised blacks that, if they succeeded at the ballot box, the Populists would "wipe out the color line and put every man on his citizenship irrespective of color."

In its short life the movement produced scene after scene that is simply not supposed to be possible in the conventional political-liberal narrative of Southern, and American history: In the 1892 campaign, for instance, a black Populist had made 63 speeches for Watson. He was threatened in one town and fled to Watson for protection. Watson called for aid, and some 2,000 white farmers showed up, some of them after riding all night, and remained on armed guard for two nights at his home to prevent violence to this man.

[Always a great introduction to this topic is C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," first edition 1955, which is still in print. Martin Luther King Jr. called it "The historical Bible of the civil rights movement."]

I'm not surprised, though that many of Moser's intended readers would be made uncomfortable by his argument. They have married themselves to a historical view that Southerners are historically incapable of achieving racial harmony without Northern intervention. And it gives the lie in a big way to the notion that Southerners are historically incapable of achieving racial harmony without Northern intervention, that federal pressure on conservative cultural bigotry is the only agent of positive social change in the nation, and that the dinosaurs of the Civil Rights era must never relax their iron vigilance. The received wisdom is that Southern whites (if not American whites overall) are incapable of lifting their benighted selves out of the crudest collective racism without the Better Angels of the elite Democratic judiciary to guide them.

"For beleaguered Southern liberals ...," Moser writes, "the Democrats' misunderstanding of what appeals to the South and to Middle America falls somewhere between a bad joke and a tragedy--and Kerry's win looked like the perfect example." After 2004, however, he writes, things only got worse. He quotes Thomas Schaller's 2005 book, "Whistling Past Dixie": "[T]he Democrats should be able to run outside the South by running against the conservative South." In essence reduplicating Lincoln's 1860 strategy. But this time the numbers are against them.

And more than numbers. To forge a new Southern Democratic progressive majority, Moser advocates an "emphasis on the "value" of economic fairness (along with other Democratic issues popular with moderate evangelicals, including environmental stewardship)." He goes on to quote William Jennings Bryan, the great champion of Watson-style populism on the national scale.

"Today the Democratic Party stands between two great forces. On one side stand the corporate interests of the nation, its moneyed institutions, its aggregations of wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless .... On the other side stands the unnumbered throng which gave a name to the Democratic Party and for which it has presumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls."

Can't you just feel the power in it? "When they heeded Bryan's populist call," Moser writes, "the party began its transformation into the progressive force behind Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal--both more enthusiastically supported in the South than anywhere else."

Ah, well. Until my co-workers stop citing "Inherit the Wind" as their favorite movie and "the only thing that got [them] through the Reagan years" I don't think Bryan is going to be back up on the pedestal. Even The Nation devotes half its mentions to him to painting him as a George W. Bush-style anti-scientific Christian fundamentalist bully.

But his deep-rooted Christianity was one reason his progressivism worked so well in the nation (if not "The Nation"). Can you have one without the other and still turn in a performance on election day? Perhaps. Can you have one while actively despising and disparaging the other? I doubt it.

The Greatest March

I've been thinking about this since the Martin Luther King holiday. What was the greatest Civil Rights march of all time?

My pick is the hundred-thousand-strong March on Washington of July 1, 1941. It broke down more doors for black Americans than any single event in modern history, and it reversed two generations of hardening racism in the United States.

Because it never happened.

It all begins with Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979), a Florida native who moved to New York in hopes of being a Shakespearean actor but ended up a full-time civil rights agitator. He paved the way for Martin Luther King Jr. in every important regard.

In 1925 Randolph was chosen to head the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, a union of Pullman car workers. If you're familiar with the America of those times, you'll realize that this was an all-black union. Randolph never worked on a Pullman car a day in his life. That's why he was chosen to head the union: He was someone the company couldn't punish by firing him.

In 1940, America was gearing up for war. People today tend to forget this; we have been taught to think of Pearl Harbor as a sneak attack against a nation slumbering in peace. But Roosevelt had already begun to build up the military, and he had instituted a draft. What made Pearl Harbor such a surprise is that the war we expected to fight was against Germany.

Yet pacifist and isolationist tendencies ran deep in America, as did antipathy to the British and the Soviets -- the two powers then in the field against Hitler. Roosevelt knew he would have a difficult time selling the coming war to the American people, as Wilson did in 1917. He would have to frame it as a moral crusade, a clash of civilizations, or rather, a contest between democracy and despotism (pay no attention to those Soviet purges).

Enter Asa Randolph. As the federal government began to spend millions on defense, in a nation still crippled by the Depression, Randolph went to work to end racial discrimination in the defense industry and the armed forces. Perhaps it was his theatrical background that led him to the notion of a mass march on Washington, D.C., which was booming in the build-up to war. He proposed such a tactic in December 1940. The NAACP and the New Negro Alliance and the black churches got behind it, and soon there was talk of 100,000 black Americans demonstrating in front of Congress and the White House against discrimination on government-financed jobs.

There never had been such an event in American history. It was the idea of it that sparked fear in Roosevelt and his cabinet. What would happen? One thing was certain; it would be reported around the world, at just the time America was building its case for being a society superior to the totalitarian Nazi order that Jesse Owens had humiliated in 1936.

"What will they think in Berlin?" government officials asked.

Randolph was summoned to White House and asked to call it off. He refused. Roosevelt called him back and asked him what it would take to change his mind. Randolph asked for an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in defense plants. Roosevelt agreed, and the march was called off.

Executive Order 8802 was issued June 25, 1941. It forbid discrimination by race, creed, color, or national origin in any defense plant with federal contracts. "[I]t was the first presidential order protecting blacks since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863" [Gregor Dallas, "1945," p.217]. Roosevelt created a new agency -- the Fair Employment Practices Committee -- to see that it was enforced.

The defense jobs were open to black Americans. This helped spark the mass exodus of blacks out of the South that changed America. It not only directly led to the birth and growth of a black middle class, but it also sparked a severe white backlash in Northern and Western states that had till then kept their black populations small and dispersed. Within a few years, brutal race riots had broken out in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities. The Civil Rights Movement became a national crisis and a national cause.

Six years later, after the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1947, Randolph demanded that the government integrate the armed forces. He founded the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation and urged young men, both black and white, to "refuse to cooperate with a Jim Crow conscription service." Threatened with widespread civil disobedience and needing the black vote in his 1948 re-election campaign, President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, ordered an end to military discrimination "as quickly as possible."

Eventually, threats were not enough, and the civil rights leaders began to march and protest in fact. At first, presidents like Kennedy panicked and tried to stop the marches. But eventually they realized they could survive them. The marches led by King were the high point of the movement, but it seems since then that each one has been less effective, less feared. They've become almost as toothless as annual holiday float parades.

The power of the threat turned out to be greater than the muscle of the reality. But the marches continue. Marching and protesting is a fixed fact, but to what end? Too many of the people who claim King's mantle seem to regard marches as goals, not tactics. Randolph never seems to have forgotten to keep his eyes on the prize, not the march.

The threat of a domestic civil rights protest was especially potent when America was on the brink of war, and was wrapped up in its sense of itself as a morally superior nation -- confronted with the Nazis under Roosevelt or the Soviet empire under Kennedy. In fact, the periods of history when America takes its virtues most seriously are those when it is most ripe for social justice movements to effect change. Progressives, rather than pooh-poohing Americans' sense of exceptionalism, ought to be encouraging it -- then encouraging us to live up to the ideal.

They would take a tip from Asa Randolph if they knew what was good for them or cared about results more than marches.

Chaos or Community

Almost half a century after the event, many people are still familiar with the Little Rock desegregation picture of a neatly dressed young black girl walking to school with a white girl following her, her face twisted into a mask of spitting hatred, shouting, "nigger, nigger, nigger!" Americans who weren't even alive then have seen it in their school textbooks and on PBS specials. How many have seen the photo taken years later, by the same photographer, of the same two women, now matronly? They are chatting cordially on the high school steps about mutual friends. Apologies, on the one hand, and forgiveness, on the other, have long since been exchanged. They embraced, and they live together in the same city.

Both pictures are true. It says something that we cling to the earlier one.

The Civil Rights movement, from, say 1949 to 1969, was a process of tearing down. It tore down legal and institutional barriers that kept black Americans from participation in society. It tore down the "whites only" signs from water fountains. It tore down the rotten trappings and symbols of injustice as well as the legal machinery of it.

In reading memoirs from the '60s, and in the movies, the music, the books, you get a sense of the thing called "the movement." It was self-conscious good (mostly young) fighting evil (mostly mature). People seemed to feel they could tell truth from injustice, freedom from repression. And the "good" side seemed to be winning. Hunter S. Thompson writes about it as a wave cresting -- a sensual, urgent metaphor.

The world clarified. On one side, little Rosa Parks. On the other, police dogs and burning crosses and burning men.

So much was accomplished; it was fast and amazing work, and by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.

And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. One wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant these new mantras of separationism?

Some people are still trying to push America. Others are waking up to the fact that it's not going to be that simple, and that what is needed now is not the activists' pushing but the quieter, unglamorous work of building communities.

When you've torn down something decrepit and dangerous, you've only done half the job. You have to build something to replace it. And the tactics and organizations that did the tearing down are not usually suited to building up. You don't call the wrecking crew when you want to add a deck to your house.

Government can encourage it from the sidelines, but it can't pass laws to force people to sit down and get along. The good thing is, people tend to do that on their own, if left alone. They do it one by one, as individuals, not as demographic blocs, not as census statistical brackets. They go to school together and they work together and they meet in public places and hash out respect for one another amid their differences. That's what people do, unless they're sociopaths. It happens on the level of a neighborhood -- the 5,000 or so people who live within walking distance of some public swimming pool or library.

* * *

May 17, 1954, is supposed to be the day everything changed in the South. That's when Earl Warren delivered the unanimous opinion in Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, and destroyed all the legal foundations of segregation.

In fact, it changed nothing. The court took its time in writing the decree of implementation, which did not come until May 31, 1955. And that decree set no deadlines for compliance, was sympathetic to local issues, placed responsibility on local school authorities, and put federal district courts in charge of assuring "good faith implementation."

Segregationists rejoiced, because those district court judges were in many cases home-grown men who might easily decide a "reasonable time" for desegregation was 200 years.

But they didn't. By January 1956, in 19 decisions, the lower courts upheld the end of segregation and stressed the need for a "prompt and reasonable" beginning to the process. In Louisiana, for example, J. Skelly Wright, New Orleans born and bred, shot down the state legislature's plan to circumvent Brown and save segregation. And the work of desegregation began in ernest in school districts in many place.

That's when the mass segregationist backlash began: After the white Southern courts and white Southern school boards began to work (without a National Guardsman in sight and Ike all but publicly saying he wouldn't use them), not after the Brown decision itself. All that's left out, along with the fact that more than 1,000 black students were admitted to formerly all-white colleges and universities in the South without a hint of violence before the University of Alabama riot of Feb. 6, 1956.

Yet as the story is told now, the entire white South was dragged into the Civil Rights movement by the Freedom Riders, the Supreme Court, the NAACP, and federal bayonets.

A few years ago I had the honor to work with the family of one of the central, if relatively unsung, heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. Frances Freeborn Pauley, whose lifework was mostly done in Georgia, happened to die up here in Lancaster, Pa., where her daughter lives. I helped them put together the obituary notice for the local newspaper. I confess, I had not heard of her before.

Her daughter gave me a copy of Pauley's autobiography, and it's delightful reading: direct, positive, determined. Pauley grew up in segregated Georgia and became a champion of civil rights. Friend of Martin Luther King Jr., consummate political organizer and activist. She had already been at it for more than a decade by the time Julian Bond, former NAACP head, got to know her. Bond was the source of the quip that became the title of her autobiography: "Everybody's Grandmother & Nobody's Fool."

Among the things that impressed me about Pauley: after desegregation was achieved, she didn't go to work dragging down Confederate symbols wherever she found them; she devoted the last decades of her life to battling poverty, AIDS, and the other real scourges of the families of poor Southerners.

I picked a passage from her book, literally at random, to show you the Civil Rights movement through her eyes. It is in the chapter where the struggle to integrate schools has moved from Georgia to Mississippi.

I always used to say they had three Mississippis. They had one Mississippi in the Delta, and they had another Mississippi on the coast, and another Mississippi around Jackson. You can't summarize something as being typically Mississippi, and I had cases throughout the state. There were various kinds of superintendents and various kinds of school boards.

The coast was always the easiest place. They were the most tolerant of each other, and you'd find real desegregation. You'd find some places where blacks and whites would really be living on the same street. It seemed to me that the southern part of the state was much less rigid and much less prejudiced than the Delta. The Jackson area was a lot more like Georgia; it was pretty much the same as integration in Georgia -- some powerfully mean segregationists, and also some other people that were trying really hard to have the situation smooth and that weren't really prejudiced.

I found Mississippi better than Georgia, by the way. Usually they didn't want conflict; they wanted everything to be smooth. It wasn't that they weren't dedicated to integration or segregation; they just wanted a good school system and they wanted it to move smoothly. In Mississippi I found fewer of what I call the armchair liberals. Very liberal in their talk, but they weren't going to get out of their chair and do anything. In Mississippi it seems to me that more people, if they felt that way, were apt to try to put it into motion. It was easier to work with white people in Mississippi, because you knew what side they were on.

I remember one man who was on a school board who helped us work out a plan for his district. He had sent his children to some kind of integrated summer program with black and white teachers. His son had some words, got into some trouble, and came back. This man took his son back to find out what happened. He found out his son had been rude to a black teacher. He went back home, and he said, "We're teaching our children to lie, and we're not teaching our children the truth. My child is going to apologize to that teacher and my child is going to the integrated school." This man's whole sense of values was good and honest. Lots of people were like that, and some of them were brave enough to stand up, like he did, and work for it. And his community desegregated schools smoothly.

You see, everyone had been brought up under "separate but equal," and that was the law. If you were a law-abiding citizen, you'd been taught that the blacks eat here, and sit there, and drink out of this fountain. You didn't think about it in any moral, or immoral, way. At least I didn't as I came up. You just hunt for the restroom that says, "White Women," just like you hunt for something that says, "Restroom." It doesn't have any moral effect on you until you begin to think about it and work on it. And then you see how crushing it was. The man who was just a good citizen obeying the law, going along, and then all of a sudden he saw, with a flash maybe, that segregation was wrong. A lot of them helped to change it.

Now, this woman is no apologist for anything. She went toe-to-toe with Herman Talmage and the hardest of the hard-core racists, and she didn't flinch. But so much of this book is stories just like those told above. Native-born Southern white woman working with native-born Southerners, black and white, reasoning together with a shared sense of decency to accomplishing the work of desegregation. Not a Freedom Rider in sight. Not a bullhorn or a German shepherd or a firehose water cannon in the chapter.

Where is this side of the story in the textbooks? Where is it told in the museums or the PBS specials? How many times did it happen like that, for every time it exploded in bombs and blood?

In the interest of historical truth, I'm for telling Pauley's stories of thousands of decent, average white folks in the South who did they part in the transition from segregation to integration. Just like I'm for telling more about the role of blacks in the Underground Railroad, which has been historically over-weighted on the side of the white folks of the North (including at least one of my ancestors) who took a hand in it.

* * *

Too many of the Americans who who defined themselves in the tearing-down phase of the Civil Rights Movement, who found identity and purpose in it, find ways to prolong it. Maybe for some it's a cynical attachment to a well-evolved fund-raising machinery. Maybe others are old soldiers who can't give up the intoxication of fighting a good fight. Still others, perhaps, just can't believe the enemy is gone. The injustices had stood for so long, far older than the Confederacy, far older than the Constitution itself, that some people are suspicious whether they're really gone. Just like the Cold Warriors who will go to their graves believing the Soviet Union is just playing dead.

America has awakened. The evidence is in the majority shifts, not in the radical fringes. In 1940, more than two-thirds of whites believed blacks were less intelligent. Today, less than 6 percent think so. Before World War II, in the North as well as the South, fewer than 40 percent supported any kind of desegregation. Today, between 95 and 100 percent of Americans support the idea of integration. That percentage among whites is actually higher than among blacks.

But the activists persist, finding more and more that needs to be torn down, going over and over the ground they purged 30 years ago, seeking something they overlooked. They find increasingly dubious examples of repression and prejudice to mobilize against. Thus the perverse importance of the KKK. Miniscule in numbers, politically powerless, the Klan yet exists. As long as there are pictures of white-robed men to be published, those who insist on tearing down more and more will publish them to galvanize support.

This not only retards the rebuilding, it prevents it. Another generation is raised to hate, to see the other color as the enemy. The wheel of resentment consumes another graduating class. Inner cities more devastated than those Sherman left behind stay that way another year.

So where do you want to live? Do you want to build cities and towns where whites and blacks can live together as they choose to live, where all races, white included, feel involved, respected, at home. Or do you want to stir the pot, keep anger alive, keep whispering to blacks who will listen, "they don't like you; they're out to get you; you can't trust them." Keep the wheel of resentment turning. Rub salt in old wounds in the name of fostering color consciousness. Teach people what to hate about each other.

Black paranoia about the criminal justice system, which shocked a lot of white folks who saw the reaction to the first Rodney King verdict and to the O.J. Simpson acquital, is not going to be helped by misguided white impulses to win blacks' favor by encouraging them to dwell on their alienation. A people who are alienated and convinced that they need special help are going to be angry. Anger is what we don't need. It doesn't heal, it doesn't help. It tears down. It burns.

Since the '70s, Whites of good-will, reacting with compassion and indulgence, have reached out to make allies with black community leaders, and ironically often met hard-core race men. The sort of constructive, gradualist black leaders who would have helped foster true integration had little credibility with the black public. Patronizing white elites who don't know the difference between appeasement and compromise have left ugly stand-offs wherever they've stepped in.

As a result, we have a different kind of white bigotry in America today. It's not segregationist screaming; it's quiet resentment. There's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder." Rap singers shout the "N" word everywhere, while "Huck Finn" is yanked from library shelves, and a man is rebuked and punished at his job for using the innocent adjective "niggardly" in conversation. Now the same people who made "intolerance" anathema had to invent a new phrase, "zero tolerance," to cover the intolerance they approve of. Resentment builds.

"Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Newsweek reporter Tamar Jacoby in "Someone Else's House," a study of race relations in modern America, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense.

Far more damaging today than the old bigotry is the condescension of well-meaning whites who think that they are advancing race relations by encouraging alienation and identity politics. After three hundred years of unfulfilled promises, it's not surprising that even the most successful blacks mistrust whites and that many hesitate to cast their lot with the system that held their people back for so long. But no one is served by a mainstream culture that spurs this estrangement, encouraging blacks to believe that the system is inherently racist and that all responsibility for change lies with whites. Well-intentioned as such deference is, it will not lead to inclusion. It will not empower blacks or make them feel more welcome. On the contrary, it can only delay the kind of push that is still needed to bridge the gap, particularly for the poorest blacks with the fewest chances and the most meager skills.

What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that. But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is along, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?

Slaves in the Attic

In Black History Month, I want to tell you a family story.

The ancestors who gave me my name hacked farmsteads from the Virginia pinelands when John Smith and Pocahontas still lived. They settled on the fingertip of Delmarva, and over the generations they worked their way up that sandy, flat neck of land, into what is now Dorchester County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. There, by the time of the Revolution, they owned large plantations of nearly 1,000 acres.

They acquired other things as well. Beauchampe Harper (his name was pronounced “Beecham” and occasionally spelled that way in old records) was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was born the same year as George Washington. If you open up the 1790 census, you'll see his name, and under "no. of slaves," the figure 7.

Beauchampe married twice and had eight children. Among them was William Smith "Col. Bill" Harper, a justice of the peace and a captain in the 11th Maryland Regiment in the War of 1812.

Beauchampe died in September 1795. He had valuable property, including land and slaves, and he had two families to distribute it among — his older children by his first wife, and his second wife, Ann, and some young children that probably were hers.

To Ann, Beauchampe left “my bed and furniture, one gray mare called Liberty, one mare colt called Spring, one cow and calf,” and “her choice of all that I have,” presumably from among the personal property that was not otherwise distributed in the will.

Col. Bill got “all my wearing apparel excepting one fine hat,” though who got the hat he never stipulated. Other children got various sums. The two youngest sons, Beauchampe and Edward, were the main beneficiaries. The family lands were to be rented out by his executors until Edward came of age (21), then the land was to be divided equally between the two boys.

The will also distributed the human property. “One negro boy called Jacob” was given to Beauchampe’s youngest daughter, Sarah, for life, although Jacob was to be set free if Sarah died. If Jacob died, Edward and Beauchampe Jr. were to give Sarah £10 a year for the rest of her life.

Beauchampe's other slaves were set free, though not at once. “One negro woman called Liddy, one negro man called David and one negro woman called Tagmar” were to be freed as of Jan. 1, 1799. A boy named Thomas was to be freed on Jan. 1, 1815; a boy named Stephen was set free as of Jan. 1, 1817; and a boy named Jonathan was to be set free on Jan. 1, 1820.

Probably this progression of emancipations followed the ages of the slaves; the older slaves would have been set free first, the younger ones as they reached a certain age, possibly 28, which was a common age for a slave to be set free.

Slavery everywhere in America was in decline. The cotton industry had not yet risen in the Deep South, and while the economics in favor of slavery were weak, the moral considerations against it weighed heavily. Manumissions rose sharply across the Upper South, though this fact seems to escape modern histories. The free black population of Maryland was 1,817 in 1755 and 8,000 in 1790. By 1800, it stood at nearly 20,000, and a decade later nearly a quarter of the state's black population was free.

Beauchampe's wife made some trouble about the will, but I have no evidence that the manumissions were not carried out according to Beauchampe's plan.

But when Col. Bill Harper tried something similar 40 years later, the results were tragically different. Bill and his wife, Nancy, lived in the old Harper Mansion, known up and down the Marshyhope Creek as “Red House.” The building stood in a bend of the river, and it was a well-known navigation landmark. When I went down there to do genealogical research in 1988, I found their gravestones, badly deteriorated but still readable, on the grounds of a state police barracks a mile south of Eldorado on the eastern bank of the river.



Having no children of his own, Col. Bill took the extraordinary step of leaving all his property to his slaves.

Bill owned no slaves in 1800 and 1810, according to the censuses of those years. He may have used hired hands or tenants to work his property. By 1820, however, he owned five slaves: a boy and two girls under age 14, and one man and one woman between 26 and 45. It is possible this group of slaves was a family. By 1830, Col. Bill owned nine slaves. In 1840, the year before his death, Col. Bill owned 10 slaves who took care of his house and worked his plantation. He had a boy and two girls under 10, two males and three females between 10 and 24, one man over 55 and one woman between 24 and 36.

When Col. Bill died, he directed that his slaves be freed and given certain grants of land. [One slave was not freed, however, and Col. Bill’s will reads, “I hereby give my colored boy, William, if he can be apprehended, to my good friend William Rea, and I hereby set aside $100.00 to be spent in apprehending him.”]

Among Col. Bill's slaves, Harper’s Henry was given a farm to live on. He married after receiving his freedom, and he bought his wife a sewing machine as a present. It was one of the first such devices on the entire Eastern Shore, but apparently Henry pledged his farm as surety for the machine, and somehow in the transaction he lost his land.

Harper's Pauline must have been a favorite, since she was given Red House in Col. Bill’s will. Pauline married Samuel, a slave owned by Benjamin Rhodes. Rhodes immediately claimed Pauline's land on the premise that what she owned belonged to her husband, and her husband belonged to Benjamin Rhodes. Shortly after this coup, Rhodes encountered Samuel in a store and taunted him over this maneuver. A fight broke out, and Samuel killed his master. He was hanged for the crime.

Richard Rhodes, Benjamin's brother, then claimed the Harper property. He immediately cropped the land (moved the crops off to his own farm, which stood nearby), then returned and took everything off the land, including Red House. His claim to the land was sketchy, so he acted on the assumption that the best way to get clear title to the improvements on the farm was to move them to his own property.

The land that Col. Bill willed to his other slaves likewise passed quickly into other hands.

Among Col. Bill's siblings, the younger Beauchampe seems to have abandoned, renounced, or sold his interest in the inheritance and gone to Ohio. His sister Sarah followed him, settling in Ross County, where the family became noted for anti-slavery activity. Edward sold his inheritance as soon as he hit 21, never saw the money, married poorly, took to drink, and lived in poverty.

One of his sons, William, went to live with his Ohio relatives, and apparently imbued their abolitionism. He settled in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he married into the Quaker gentry and took part in Underground Railroad activities. But his connection with the Eastern Shore was broken clean. We have no pictures of them, no letters, not so much as a crested tarnished teaspoon.

My ancestors built up wealth, in part with their sweat, in part with the bought labor of African slaves. In a bid to free their human chattels and set things right, they lost everything. The next generation of Harpers started over, and we've been modest and middle-class, at best, ever since. Whose side were we on, in the saga of that old America, the one that blew apart in 1861 and never returned? When I stood on the land my ancestors -- and their slaves -- once owned, breathing the tang of pine pitch beside a shattered gravestone, beside a tidal river too slow to sound, no breath of an answer came up.



Did they do right, or do wrong? When I hear people ask why Washington, Jefferson, and Madison didn't live up to their principles and free their slaves, I think of Henry and Pauline. And when I read proposals for reparations, I wonder if I'm in line to pay, to receive, or whether I get a by on the whole thing.