Full Description
Investigates how Americans have remembered violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments, historical markers, college classrooms, and history books.
George Floyd's murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been 400 years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systemic racism that already existed among European colonists but transformed with the arrival of the first enslaved African Americans in 1619. The violence needed to enforce that systemic racism for all those years, from the slave driver's whip to state-sponsored police brutality, attracted the immediate attention of the protesters. The resistance of the protesters echoed generations of African Americans' resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their opposition to violence soon spread to other aspects of systemic racism, including a cultural hegemony built on and reinforcing white supremacy. At the heart of this white supremacist culture is the memory of the Civil War era, when in 1861 8 million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard the enslavement of 4 million African Americans.
The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first section, "Violence," explores systemic racism in the Civil War era and now with essays on slavery, policing, and slave patrols. The second section, titled "Resistance," shows how African Americans resisted violence for the past two centuries, with essays discussing matters including self-emancipation and African American soldiers. The final section, "Memory," investigates how Americans have remembered this violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments and historical markers.
This volume is intended for nonhistorians interested in showing the intertwined and longstanding connections between systemic racism, violence, resistance, and the memory of the Civil War era in the United States that finally exploded in the summer of 2020.
Contents
Foreword: Telling the Story: George Floyd and the Legacy of Black Truth
Andre E. Johnson xiii
Preface xxi
Introduction
Hilary N. Green 1
Violence
1 White Supremacy, the American Militia, and the Legacy of the Civil War Era
Barbara A. Gannon 13
2 African Americans and Native Americans in North Carolina During the Summer of 2020:
The Struggle for People of Color to Find a Shared Civil War-Era Memory
Jaime Amanda Martinez 20
3 Witnessing Ned Scott's Coffin: Spectacular Police Violence in the Age of Emancipation
John Bardes 28
4 Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery
William Horne 38
Resistance
5 From Eagle Buttons to Face Masks: The Dangers of Expressing Racial Equality
Emmanuel Dabney 49
6 "Give Me My Rights": Patriotism and Protest Among Black Civil War
Soldiers and Black Lives Matter Activists
Jonathan Lande 57
7 A Lens Through Which We Can View Society: Sports and Race in America
Daryl A. Carter 66
8 Slave Agency, the Emancipation Monument, and History's Reckoning
Karen Cook Bell 74
9 Fighting for Black Humanity: Political Action of Post-Emancipation Black Christians
Nicole Myers Turner 81
10 Jim Crow Then, Jim Crow Now: Police Violence, Tort Law, and Black
Resistance in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Myisha S. Eatmon 90
11 "How wonderful a country": Black Lives Matter and the Long History of Aboriginal Resistance
Samuel Watts 97
Memory
12 Carpetbagging the Colfax Riot Marker
LeeAnna Keith 107
13 "Moving History": The Life and Afterlife of Louisville's Confederate Monument
Anne E. Marshall 113
14 Goodbye, Calhoun. What's Next?: The Future of Charleston's Commemorative Landscape
Adam H. Domby 122
15 "Back at Bragg": Civil War Memory and the US Army
Beau Cleland 131
16 There's still no balm in Gilead: The Fatal Costs of Traumatic Memory
Scott Hancock 140
Acknowledgments 151
List of Contributors 153
Index 157
