HISTORICAL
MEMORIES OF SLAVERY IN THE AFTERMATH OF RECONSTRUCTION
Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American
Identity. By Ron Eyerman. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. viii + 302 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth);
$23.00 (paper).
Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony.
By Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York University Press, 2001. xvi +
205 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $50.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).
Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography. By
William D. Wright. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2002. 244 pp. Notes,
bibliography, and index. $64.95.
Julie Saville
University of Chicago
The onset of civil rights demonstrations in Mississippi prompted the editor
of a black newspaper, the Jackson, Mississippi, Advocate, to turn to Reconstruction
for a historical lesson. The newspaper had vigorously endorsed an NAACP-sponsored
voter registration drive in the 1940s. However, violent responses to that
1940s mobilization probably helped fix the editor's memory on terrors
of the aftermath of Reconstruction as he sounded a cautionary warning
regarding the 1960s demonstrations: According to the historians and students
of the south, the ill manners and the intemperate conduct of Negroes,
urged on by the carpetbaggers and other adventurers who had entered the
south to exploit the Negro issue, largely for their own benefit without
any regard for the Negroes future, was largely responsible for the tragedy
of the Post Reconstruction Era. The Era which saw the Hayes-Tilden Deal
and the Unwritten Compromise, which brought about the withdrawal of the
Federal Troops from the south, took away all the gains that had been made
by Negroes, made possible the oneĀ party system of politics in the south,
and put upon the Negroes all of the handicaps of segregation and discrimination.…
It is important for us, the Negro citizens of the state, in the light
of the above brief sketch of southern and Negro history that we make sure
that nothing in our conduct and manners, and in our attitude and relations
with our white neighbors will contribute to another tragic era.… [T]o us
this is the challenge of history.
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