Cartoon decrying the Hamburg massacre of July 1876
As people raise a hue and cry, for a media minute, about yet another police murder of an unarmed black man—this time Walter Scott in
North Charleston, South Carolina, who was riddled with bullets by a white cop who must have seen too many reruns of
The Deer Hunter—and as news and endless video loops of his death leave the headlines, just remember this: #Blacklives (still) matter to black people and our allies but
nothing has changed in the systemic racism of America.
Who's it gonna be next week? Oh, wait ... next week has already happened. Spell it "Freddie Gray." Will it be my (or your) son-father-cousin-nephew-godson-husband-neighbor-student ... or me next? Sistas get murdered too.
They don't kill us in bunches anymore. Now they just murder us one by one.
Slaughtering black folks en masse was part of an agenda of open terrorism to end any possibility of black political and economic power, or successful black and white "fusion" during Reconstruction. History books dub them "riots" because riot evokes images of scary black people runnin' wild, but they were massacres. South Carolina is no stranger to murdering black folks. I've written here about a more recent one, in "Orangeburg, SC, 1968: The massacre of students you may not have heard of." But we need to dig deeper into the past to understand the rot at the roots of what we face today.
Follow me below the fold for the history of the Hamburg Massacre and others that took place during the same time period, perpetrated by white terrorist "Red Shirts" and backed by elected officials whose names are engraved on shrines and monuments to white supremacy.
Harper's Weekly cartoon from October 1874 depicting White League and Klan opposition to Reconstruction.
BlackPast blog describes the
Hamburg Massacre as follows:
On July 8, 1876, the small town of Hamburg, South Carolina erupted in violence as the community's African American militia clashed with whites from the surrounding rural area. Hamburg was a small all-black community across the river from Augusta, Georgia. Like many African American communities in South Carolina, it was solidly Republican and with the GOP in charge in Columbia, some of its men were members of the South Carolina National Guard (the Militia)...hundreds of armed white men, including many who were members of various rifle clubs, descended upon the small black community. Militia members retreated to a stone warehouse which they used as their armory.
Sometime during the afternoon a battle ensued. Surrounded and outnumbered, twenty-five militiamen and fifteen Hamburg residents fought back from the armory. By mid afternoon a white attacker and a militiaman lay dead, and a few more members of the militia were wounded. A cannon was brought over from nearby Augusta and aimed at the armory. As cannon fire blew a hole in the armory, some black militiamen and Hamburg's Town Marshal, James Cook, attempted to flee. Cook was shot and killed.
The rest of the militiamen and towns people were captured in the armory. Four of the militiamen were brought out and immediately executed by the white mob. The rest were allowed to escape, though as soon as they began to flee, the whites trained their guns on the escaping men, shooting as many as possible. Seven men died that afternoon. Six were black militiamen or civilians and one was a white farmer killed in the attack on the armory.
Although blacks were the majority of victims, Wade Hampton, an ex-Confederate general who would run for governor as a Democrat in the fall election, used the Hamburg Massacre to remind the mostly white voters across the state of the racial danger of Republican-controlled government. Hampton and the Democrats won the election and ended Reconstruction in South Carolina.
The
Wikipedia entry gives other details:
Although 94 white men were indicted for murder by a coroner's jury, none was prosecuted.
The events catalyzed parties to the volatile 1876 election campaign. There were other episodes of white violence in the months before the election, including an estimated 100 blacks killed during several days in Ellenton, South Carolina, also in Aiken County. The Democrats succeeded in "redeeming" the state government and electing Wade Hampton III as governor. During the remainder of the century, they passed laws to establish single-party white supremacist rule, impose legal segregation and "Jim Crow," and disenfranchise blacks by a new constitution in 1895. This exclusion of blacks from the political system was effectively maintained into the late 1960s.
To understand the terror wreaked by the Red Shirts and other white racist groups, I suggest you read
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War by Stephen Budiansky, which is described at Amazon as follows:
A gripping look at terrorist violence during the Reconstruction era
Between 1867, when the defeated South was forced to establish new state governments that fully represented both black and white citizens, and 1877, when the last of these governments was overthrown, more than three thousand African Americans and their white allies were killed by terrorist violence. Drawing on original letters and diaries as well as published racist diatribes of the time, acclaimed historian Stephen Budiansky concentrates his vivid, fast paced narrative on the efforts of five heroic men, two Union officers, a Confederate general, a Northern entrepreneur, and a former slave, who showed remarkable idealism and courage as they struggled to establish a New South in the face of overwhelming hatred and organized resistance. The Bloody Shirt sheds new light on the violence, racism, division, and heroism of Reconstruction, a largely forgotten but epochal chapter in American history.
From William Grimes' review of
The Bloody Shirt in the
New York Times, titled
A Long Surrender: The Guerrilla War After the Civil War:
In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.
“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.
Monuments to the perpetrators of the outrage in Hamburg still stand in South Carolina, as silent, proud, and tall witnesses to murder rewarded and unpunished, reminding black folks just where we stand, and where we'll wind up of we are uppity and don't stay in our place. One by one, as we are murdered by red shirts in blue, the message is re-enforced by bullets in the back, and chokeholds around our necks, no different than the nooses hung from trees. The audience is now on Fox News, rather than standing around the bonfires of death. As long as monuments to white supremacy are as American as apple pie—it will keep on happening.
I have been to Germany. The avenues there are not lined with statues of Adolph Hitler, nor are there buildings and streets named for other exterminationists. Why then must we live in a nation where a majority of black people must be confronted daily by shrines to killers like Ben Tillman?
If Tillman's name wasn't a part of your education in American history, check out the book, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy by Stephen Kantrowitz, described as follows:
Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow.
As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South.
Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.
Some other
reviewer comments include:
Kantrowitz has not written a conventional biography. . . . In describing Tillman's political maneuvers, Kantrowitz thoughtfully deals with many of the issues that concern historians today: the ideological construction of whiteness with all its privileges, the importance of gender and the complex nature of class relations in a biracial society less than a generation removed from slavery. Remarkably, he manages to do so without retreating into the mind-numbing jargon that often accompanies such studies.--Washington Post Book World
This is state-of-the-art political history. . . . Kantrowitz's biography of South Carolina's leading political figure in the age of populism, disfranchisement, and lynching is exceptional for the depth of its understanding of the period, its ever more nuanced interpretations, and especially its intricate narrative about the changing meanings of white supremacy. . . . If this book is indeed state-of-the-art, the art of political history today is in good shape.--North Carolina Historical Review
White supremacy and patriarchy created Ben Tillman, a son of the Old South who went forth to create the New South. Stephen Kantrowitz's meticulous research breathes life into Pitchfork Ben and rebuilds his world. And a meaner, rougher world it is. Kantrowitz's skillful analysis of the connections between gender, race, and the polling place represents the best of the new southern history. His eloquent narrative will make everyone who reads this book stand in awe of hatred's power.--Glenda E. Gilmore, Yale University
Lest you think this is all in the past, there is an online
application form to join some modern-day Red Shirts.
There is push-back, and protest, which needs support, such as this article, Ben Tillman's shameful legacy is now Clemson's:
Ben Tillman was a horrible, horrible man. A traitorous paramilitary leader, a domestic terrorist, and a murderer. And he was instrumental in founding Clemson University. But Clemson didn't honor him with a building in his name until 1946, nearly three decades after the man known as "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman died and 54 years after the structure was built. Up until then, Tillman Hall was named the Main Building or Old Main.
At the time, Clemson's leaders knew exactly what they were doing. Not only was Tillman a former South Carolina governor and a former U.S. Senator, the one-time "officer" in the paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts spoke fondly of his murderous past, often celebrating his lead role in the slaughter of several African-American men — some militia members, others National Guardsmen — at the 1876 Hamburg Massacre. He also famously bragged about assassinating an African-American state legislator. Clearly, Tillman was proud of his role as a villain. Sadly, this knowledge did not dissuade Clemson from honoring a clearly dishonorable man in the days after the Second World War.
But over the years, Tillman's words, and more importantly, his deeds were forgotten and the reasons for the building's name disappeared. Then last year, City Paper columnist Will Moredock launched an ambitious plan to get the Tillman statue removed from Statehouse grounds in Columbia. Not long after Moredock began causing a public stir, Clemson University began looking at the issue of whether to change the name of Tillman Hall.
For a time there it looked like it might have happened. Clemson faculty roundly supported the change and many students spoke out against the Tillman name. As the debate over the hall raged, the university found itself in the middle of campus-wide unrest following a racially offensive party by a white fraternity, a fete that was tame compared to a previous "gangsta" party that embarrassed the university in 2007. To this day, race relations on campus are at their worst in decades.
Another great read is
Clemson’s Tillman Hall and the Tragedy of Southern Tradition:
Whether you are from the South—as I am, approaching my 54th year in the area where I was born—or not, here is how you can come to understand the South: Read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” James Baldwin’s “Faulkner and Desegregation,” and M.E. Bradford’s “Faulkner, James Baldwin, and the South.”
In the shocking ending to “A Rose for Emily,” the town (that community and place so sacred to Faulkner, as Bradford emphasizes) and the reader discover that Emily has spent much of her life sleeping with the corpse of her mysteriously vanished lover. Not to be overly simplistic, but in that scene, Emily is the South and her act is the cancerous core of what best captures that region’s ideological commitment—cling to the corpse of tradition no matter what.
It is the steadfast clinging that matters, not the thing itself.
Baldwin’s response to Faulkner’s call for Southern blacks to be patient about integration at mid-twentieth century deftly dismantles the inherent contradictions, the incessant paternalism, and the disturbing lack of awareness embodied by Faulkner himself. While Faulkner seems oblivious to the message in his own work, Baldwin, a black man from Harlem, the North, echoes the warning of “A Rose for Emily”:
[S]o far from trying to correct it, Southerners, who seem to be characterized by a species of defiance most perverse when it is most despairing, have clung to it [emphasis added], at incalculable cost to themselves, as the only conceivable and as an absolutely sacrosanct way of life. They have never seriously conceded that their social structure was mad. They have insisted, on the contrary, that everyone who criticized it was mad.
Clemson student A.D. Carson, who posts here at Daily Kos as
AyDeeTheGreat, has written about
Ben Tillman, white supremacy,
racism on campus, and about his provocative video,
See the Stripes, with the full text
here.
The site of “the most exciting 25 seconds in college football”
was made possible by profits from the most shameful centuries in America’s history,
but come to the campus of Clemson University,
and you’d hardly be able to tell it from looking around.
Solid Orange, you’ll see.
The grounds are perfectly manicured—alluring—
and monuments to the greatness that creates such institutions
stand as reminders from whence we came,
and since we gain so much from what we see,
we smile,
proud of the great tradition of which we have the benefit of saying we are now a part.
Solid Orange, we are.
And it’s easy to buy in—
it starts with “The Song that Shakes the Southland”
and a sea of solid orange—‘Tiger Rags’ that kind of grab you and say,
“You are now a member of this family!
You are now a Clemson Tiger.
Wear your orange proudly.”
but
it’s a pretty well known fact that tigers have stripes,
and almost as well known is the reason they do,
yet, Clemson University—home of the Tigers—
doesn’t do much acknowledging of
those dark marks it knows to be so integral a part
of its existence.
“Solid Orange,” we say…
at this university that was once a plantation,
slavery being “a positive good” according to Master Calhoun,
whose house sits, still,
on a plot atop a hill
overlooking the football field
—open seven days a week,
and I can even enter through the front door.
What I cannot do, however, is depend on the tour guide to give me the whole history
of the foundations of my university, because—
for some reason or another—
it’s uncomfortable for some people to talk about
slave owners, supremacists and segregationists on those terms,
or
it’s unknown to the individual responsible
for the dissemination of that information
about this place,
but
twenty score
and many more years ago
our forefathers brought forth on this continent
our forefathers and our foremothers
and exploited them for hundreds of years,
which led to our being
conceived in captivity
and “dedicated to the proposition”
that history is a matter
of telling the story that makes us look best.
“Solid Orange,” I think,
and that forces me to confront my active participation in
not only the crime, but the cover-up—
the whitewashing, with orange, of the dark parts of a
history meant to be instructional, lest we repeat it,
and
I repeatedly walk past the
Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs
and wonder, “Was it there that our ancestors were whipped?”
Because it happened.
Slavery was big business,
and
being black meant
you made profits to keep your master in the black,
and
if the master went into the red,
he’d see red and you’d be likely to wear
red stripes across your back—
fact.
And if that
is an uncomfortable truth for the institution, so be it.
These are the stripes we bear,
so see them.
Slavery, sharecropping and convict labor
paved the streets and sidewalks of this “high seminary of learning,”
and earning a degree from here tethers me to the legacy of that
and John C. Calhoun, Strom Thurmond, Thomas Green Clemson and
“Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, who,
with his henchmen, killed black members of a militia,
never to be convicted, but elected to public office—Governor—
to have statues and buildings erected in his honor, eventually.
The one on this beautiful campus houses the Calhoun Honors College
and the School of Education.
So be it, if it’s uncomfortable to bear those stripes...
I've chosen today to look at history, because what is happening today, and tomorrow, and next month, is rooted in that history. Racism and its ugly tendrils are not the sole purview of the South. So don't come in here and start South-bashing, because Cleveland and Chicago, New York and San Francisco, are all steeped in it. Just ask the families of the dead.
Then there will be the people who come here and say, "But ... but ... but ... aren't things better now?"
Mychal Denzel Smith answered that two years ago when he wrote Yes, America Has Gotten Better About Racism, but It Really Doesn’t Matter:
Because I write about race and racism in the United States, I’m often asked some variation of this question: are things better now?
I don’t mean to be condescending when I answer, but usually my response is frustrated laughter followed by a firm “no.” It’s the most polite thing I can think to do in the moment. At least, it’s more polite than saying, “That’s a stupid fucking question.” But that’s how I actually feel. It sounds harsh, but I truly believe “Are things better?” is one of the most useless questions in a discussion about racism. It’s another in a repertoire of rhetorical tricks we use in this country to avoid the hard work of addressing racism in its modern form. By reframing the conversation around how much progress has been made, we further the false narrative that racism is a problem that belongs to history. While we pat ourselves on the back for not being as horrible as we once were, we allow racism to become further entrenched in every aspect of American life.
Toni Morrison recently said she knows when it will be over:
The Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison has delivered a frank assessment of race relations in America, declaring that until racial disparities in the criminal justice system are resolved, the conversation about racism will never be over. Morrison, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved, which told a story of racism and slavery in 19th-century Kentucky and Ohio, drew on a recent spate of high-profile killings of unarmed African Americans by law enforcement officials to illustrate the ongoing struggle.
“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race’,” Morrison told the Daily Telegraph.
“This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.” She added: “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
For me, it isn't just about the shootings and the police. They are only symptoms and enforcers of the problem.
As Ta-Nehisi-Coates stated in The Myth of Police Reform:
Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It's avoidance. It's a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.
Ultimately, until white America takes collective responsibility for its inequity, it will be same shit, different day.
And that ain't gonna be anytime soon, as long as a huge chunk of that populace—including young white people—doesn't even see systemic racism and think black people are lazier than, or less intelligent than, whites ... Houston we got a problem.
That ain't gonna happen as long as the present reality is denied of what living in a black skin is like, and the past is buried as unconnected or ancient history.
It ain't gonna happen as long as the few gains we have made by law are unraveled day by day by a Supreme Court and legislatures turning the clock back as fast as they can.
Oh, they kill us softly in prison cells for life, tucked away so as not to offend the white gaze, and we still have the worst health outcomes, and we still have housing segregation and de facto separation in schools.
The New York Times finally got around to noticing 1.5 Million Missing Black Men—numbers that we've been aware of for a long time. Those are the empty seats at our tables, not just the brothers buried in cemeteries. They are buried alive.
White America ... the ball is in your court. Whatcha gonna do?
Continue to serve bullets, or lend us your ballots?