How Black Politics Shaped History
It took historians decades to come to terms with Reconstruction’s demise, but they chronicled resistance to the Second Reconstruction almost in real time.
This review is part of New Ideas in American History, an initiative from New American History that features essays by historians about some of the most interesting recent books in the field.
Black politics and American history are inextricably linked. The struggle for African American equality reshaped the sin of omission that once characterized the discipline of United States history.
African Americans have always been political actors — even if historians haven’t always recognized it. We know that slavery informed the Constitution, and that Black people redefined citizenship following the Civil War. They also changed the meaning of representative democracy after 1965. We cannot forget that this history has only recently been told and was hard fought. It’s still deeply contested.
We have Black people themselves to thank for persuading scholars to shed light on our tortured racial history.
Nearly a century after the American Civil War, the freedom struggle began to influence American historiography. Several things happened just prior to and after WWII that dramatically changed the field of American history. As African Americans set out to secure their rights as citizens, they convinced the world that they had not, as white Southerners and their historians often argued, agreed to segregate. In time, historians realized that Southern history, particularly its depictions of enslaved and formerly enslaved people as passive actors, was wrong.
In other words, the American civil rights movement convinced a good number of contemporary historians that the story of race in America needed to be rewritten. Scholars began to question benign depictions of slavery, the portrayal of slaveowners as benevolent paternalists, and representations of Black folks as helpless actors. These scholars also interrogated the manner in which Southern historians affectionately described the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow segregation.
This process of re-evaluating stories we thought we knew is essential to what historians do. The present often shapes the past. When it comes to matters of race, historians of the past half-century have helped us understand how widely America’s democratic principles have diverged from Americans’ lived experiences, going back centuries.
Twenty-five years before the American Civil War, the celebrated French aristocrat and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville made a number of critical observations about the United States in Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s thoughts about American slavery were profoundly revelatory. The presence of millions of enslaved peoples, he argued, was the “most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union.” The choice, for Tocqueville, was simple. The nation could, in the words of a prominent 1960s historian, free enslaved peoples “and treat them with some degree of dignity, or perpetuate their serfdom for as long as possible.” The possibility of Black freedom “intensified rather than alleviated” white prejudices.
The intensification of these prejudices did not just influence American politics and culture; it influenced historiography, too. White supremacists spent a good portion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries writing Black people out of this country’s story. Their version of history is still with us.
Tocqueville may have underestimated Black agency. But he anticipated the perpetuation of Black serfdom and the white reactionaries who arose in its defense. What he couldn’t have predicted was how the perpetuation of Black serfdom and the struggle against it would reshape the discipline of American history well into the 21st century.
Race and racial politics (the process whereby race binds various political actors together) have always been defining characteristics of American life and American history. From the codification of slave laws, to compromises over slavery, through the demise of Reconstruction, and the rise (and fall) of racial apartheid, history has shown us that racial politics matters. These developments, time and again, have influenced historical inquiry.
Well into the 20th century, scholarly accounts of the United States were written by and for white Americans. These stories often emphasized the progress of Western Civilization, colonists’ mastery over nature and natives, and the divine providence of Constitutional republicanism. Racial minorities, when they appeared at all, were often inconsequential and dehumanized figures. Textbooks mandated by Jim Crow legislatures were equally pernicious. Black Americans played no part, these stories held, in fashioning America.
As African Americans activated the machinery of their communities to meet the challenges of segregation in the mid-20th century, their scholars (W. E. B. Du Bois, George Benjamin Arthur Quarles, Washington Williams, Carter G. Woodson, et al.) wrote new histories. These stories emphasized how black folks had a history of their own, both on the North American continent and beyond. The influence that these scholars eventually had on the field cannot be overstated. Eric Foner once said that Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America “set the agenda that still shapes our understanding of that pivotal era.” Du Bois originally published that book in 1935. If works such as this and the Journal of Negro History (established in 1916) led the way, it took white scholars decades to catch up.
Mainstream academic interest in Black history and politics cannot be separated from the social movements of the mid-20th century. Direct action and civil disobedience inspired a generation of young historians to rethink the story of race, slavery, and segregation. These historians also began to think intently about the story of Reconstruction’s demise, how segregation gave rise to a long, drawn-out struggle against racial apartheid, and why the quest for Black citizenship intensified after WWII.
If it took historians decades to come to terms with the demise of Reconstruction, they delineated resistance to the “Second Reconstruction” almost in real time. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), which finally made southern African Americans full citizens, is critical to our understanding of this story.
By 1970, nearly three-fifths of Southern African Americans were registered to vote. This was an era of profound political promise. As African Americans transitioned from “protest to politics,” their elected officials attempted to redirect valuable resources to communities that had been torn asunder by nearly a century of racist public policies. As these were largely local efforts, many post-1965 scholars turned their gaze to more localized histories. What they found was that African Americans’ electoral victories were often hollow prizes. As America sacrificed many of its cities at the altar of sprawl, the suburbanization of resources followed the suburbanization of people. Inner-cities caved under the pressure of public and private retrenchment. Black elected officials not only inherited cities in decline; they were also often blamed for not meeting challenges that their white predecessors created.
Meanwhile, no sooner had the VRA become law than state governments throughout the South began to design rules to dilute the power of Black votes. Elected officials exploited white flight. They annexed predominantly white suburbs, changed electoral rules, and redrew district boundaries, effectively tightening their grip on state legislatures, and, eventually, the House of Representatives. In the 1980s and 90s, racial conservatives then initiated a litigation strategy designed to undermine the VRA itself. They targeted not only mechanisms in the law that supervised southern election systems, but also state laws that had been designed to prevent direct disenfranchisement.
Being explicitly racist in Washington went out of fashion after the 1960s. At the same time, a type of delicate but similarly discriminatory politics supplanted segregation. As political scientist Jesse Rhodes has written, conservative elected officials “opposed the expansion of federal voting rights enforcement, but were unwilling to do so openly for fear of alienating both people of color and moderate white voters and thereby harming their party’s electoral prospects.” Republicans eventually used administrative appointments in the Department of Justice and federal court nominations to undermine the very enforcement mechanisms that gave the VRA and other civil rights laws their power in the first place.
If the first histories of the Black politics after 1965 were rightfully celebratory, the continuity of white resistance to Black political empowerment eventually turned historians sour. By the early 21st century, historians of Black politics, many of whom had personally witnessed Washington roll back the rights revolution after the 1970s, were unconvinced that politics alone could reform racism out of American life. These scholars turned their attention to the rise of the carceral state, the gutting of the Great Society, and the persistence of Black poverty.
Resistance to the VRA not only belies the triumph narrative of the American civil rights movement, but the continuation of this resistance is essential to any understanding of politics in contemporary America. Over the last four decades, conservative strategists and politicians have used racial redistricting, anti-affirmative action litigation, and judicial appointments to build a constituency that still wields disproportionate influence over Washington. We know now that tortured district boundaries lead to predictable electoral outcomes — liberal officials get elected in cities with sizable minority populations, moderate conservatives often represent inner-ring suburbs, and reactionaries assume office in exurbs and rural areas. Histories of Black politics illustrate the extent to which these political trends were forged in the fire of resistance to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tracing this story of backlash challenges the popular understanding of recent American history and its emphasis on progress. We need, more broadly, to reconsider what became of the American civil rights movement. Does the moral arc of the universe, as King held, bend toward justice? How can we explain the re-emergence of open white supremacy in recent years?
The history of modern Black politics is essential to answering these questions. It also demonstrates that the study of history remains a high-stakes political endeavor. The current battles over how we should remember American history and who is essential to the American democratic experiment are inextricably linked to the culture wars that emerged out of this politics. Historians can lead the way as we attempt to come to terms with the perpetuation of Black serfdom that Tocqueville delineated nearly 200 years ago, and to understand why despite decades of remarkable historical research, we continue to mythologize about the American past.
