Why we needed a Civil Rights Act 100 years after the Civil War, and other reminders

We’ve been asked why we are devoting not one but three editorials to the commemoration of Black History Month.

It’s because most of us – especially those of us who are not African-American – are vastly under-educated about why, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, we have yet to fully overcome anti-black racism. And the older we are, the more likely we are to have attended schools that left us with half-truths, outright lies, and vast blank spaces in our understanding of American history.

That’s why, in spite of traditional Black History Month spotlights on the achievements of individual African-Americans, we still need remedial education. If we ever hope to heal the wound of racism, we need to know how, since our nation’s beginning, we got the relationship between blacks and whites so disastrously wrong.

The U.S. Constitution started with a key contradiction: It enshrined the ideal of equality, but accommodated the enslavement of people based on their race.

But following the Civil War and emancipation, there was a bright dawn of hope, especially following the 15th Amendment to the Constitution that gave black men the right to vote. For the next few years, a wave of African-Americans won election to local offices, state legislatures, and Congress. White resistance was checked by federal troops sent to the South to enforce black rights and protect them from white violence. The 1875 Civil Rights Act even required equality in public accommodation such as transportation, hotels and restaurants.

But the white southern backlash to equality was powerful. And when a contested presidential election was left to Congress to decide, the result was a deal that traded retreat from federal enforcement of equal rights for the presidency. In 1877, Reconstruction crumbled and federal troops left southern black people undefended.

Within the next few years, southern states rewrote their state constitutions to end black access to the ballot, re-segregate the South, and terrorize black people. Black men and women were arrested for “crimes” such as standing on a street corner. Those arrested were commonly leased as convict labor, often to the same plantation owners who had enslaved them. That is the origin story of the mass incarceration we are only now working to end.

Had the effort of Reconstruction been sustained and successful, we would live in a vastly more equitable nation today.

If many of us weren’t taught this version of Reconstruction, it’s because history is typically written by the winners — and schools often end their history units before encountering the ugly truth. Fortunately, there is a growing movement to teach these truths, and to explain why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a necessary do-over of the one passed in 1875.

Some may wonder why, in Thurston County, which is 84% white, this is important. One reason is that our county is becoming more diverse with every passing year. Another is that knowing and spreading the truth makes us better parents, grandparents, and citizens.

Without a doubt, most people in our county want to be allies of those who still struggle for equality. Learning the full and accurate story of black history – which, as many others have noted, is American history – could make us all more effective in that struggle.

Bishop Lorenzo Peterson, pastor at New Life Baptist Church in Lacey, talks about African-Americans’ need for “a sense of belonging, acceptance, and being fully a part of the American family.” Black history, he says, “needs to be told over and over, so no one ever forgets.”

Here in the Pacific Northwest, he says, unlike his native North Carolina, “many would prefer to move on rather than dwell on the past. But it’s like the Holocaust; if we don’t remember and remind ourselves, it’s as if it never happened.”

It did happen. And learning from history is both a way to preclude repeating it, and a way to bend the arc of the universe towards justice a little bit faster.

So it’s wonderful to see signs of progress in attention to our history. On March 1, New Life Baptist Church will celebrate the establishment of a local Black History Library.

Attention to history is also central to the current conversation about white privilege. That term makes a lot of white people uncomfortable and defensive. But when you compare white and black family histories, whites can begin to see that even the least well-off have historical advantages over their black neighbors.

Redressing those disparities is the work of all of us, in the Pacific Northwest no less than in the South.