America In Context

One Problem, Many Solutions, Few Successes

If there is one difficult part of American history & society, it is that transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War period (which, in actuality, is still going on today). I’m not talking about the actual sequence of events from the Emancipation Proclamation to Kanye West’s recent Grammy speech, I’m talking about the larger social, political, and even philosophical problem: how does an entire population, almost 4 million strong, make the transition from slavery to freedom, without crushing the economic and social status of the formerly enslaving nation? Oof, that’s a toughie, a heady question with so many facets, from the technical to the ethical to the theological.

I can say this with absolute certainty: it’s a question that America failed to answer satisfactorily. Yes, I said it: America failed one of the greatest challenges a nation ever faced.

It’s obvious that America failed in this regard: Jim Crow, the Klan, Plessy v. Ferguson, police dogs in Birmingham, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Watts riots, the continued concentration of poor blacks in America’s inner cities. These are not good results. The only part we really got right was freeing them in the first place (although even that was almost a hundred years too late — surely the Great Teacher in the Sky took points off for lateness on that one).

Sure, things have gotten better for African-Americans since 1865. But is it really better because America made it better, or is it better in spite of America’s efforts? As time has gone on, we have become more integrated. Black culture and music has woven itself into our society, creating art forms (like the Blues, rap music, urban wall art, and others) that could only incubate in a cauldron of pain, suffering, and intolerance that post-slavery America provided. But I don’t call that a “success”, we’ve simply accepted the failure and tried to move on with our lives.

Oh, to be able to take a time machine back to the late 19th Century and advise our leaders — both white and black — on how to do it right. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would be like telling the diners in Pompeii to leave the city; telling the Middle Age clerics to let the cats kill the plague-infested rats; warning post WWI Germany to leave Adolph in Austria. We could go back and fix everything, and none of those traumas I mentioned earlier would happen!

Unfortunately, even today, 145 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, we still have no idea how we could have done it any better. So we would hop out of our little time machine, look President Andrew Johnson and the U.S. Congress square in the eye, and go: “duhhhhh……”

The problem back then (with certain similarities today) is how to take an entire population, uneducated and entirely dependent upon a ruling class, and transform it into an independent, productive, successful body, without correspondingly bringing ruin upon that ruling class. Do you give them their own territory so they can develop their own society? Do you work to integrate them into your own society, so your success is their success and vice versa? Or do you simply transform from slavery to something almost as bad, keeping them a chronic underclass forever?

In the post-Civil War days, many African-American leaders came forward with their own ideas. Booker T. Washington was one such leader.

Washington was a man after my own heart. He strongly believed in teaching freed slaves and their children about the real world: science, technology, engineering, agriculture. I’m a big fan of science and engineering and their real-world applications. In my view, as was Washington’s, if you can teach a person a real trade, you can set that person up for life. If you’re skilled, it doesn’t matter who you are, it matters what you do. Yes, it’s a pie-in-the-sky ideal, for you always have that personal element in everything, but your odds are much better if you have something real and tangible to offer society. And if society doesn’t want it, at least you can use those skills and have some semblence of autonomy. That was Booker T. Washington’s modus operandi: teaching blacks how to do. It was also the genesis of Washington’s great achievement: the Tuskeegee University (also part of the National Park Service, a topic for a later post).

The reality of the times would sadly tarnish Booker T.’s reputation. In order to create such a university, Washington needed funding. Funding he received … from wealthy white elitists, some of whom were former slaveholders themselves. Labelled an “accommodationist”, Washington was far too mum on the subject of segragation for many other African-American leaders. He would eventually speak out more and more against segregation, but for many of his contemporaries, it was too little, too late.

As I stated earlier, I’m not very good with African-American history. But I do know that no one in that era, including black leaders like Booker T. Washington, had all the answers for the freed slaves and their descendents. Those (black and white) who had the best of intentions did the best they could, based on their knowledge of humanity and the condition of the times. Their efforts may or may not have been successful, they may or may not have been right, but it has to be acknowledged that the simultaneous release of millions of men, women, and children from bondage created a problem vaster than mankind’s ability to solve. These people did the best they could, and at least they acted, and didn’t wait the required couple hundred years for the problem to solve itself.

Booker T. Washington National Monument restores the boyhood home of a man who did what he thought was right. It has been restored to resemble what it might have looked like during that time. The place itself is unremarkable, but the place in context with the most difficult part of American history truly makes one think.

[All photos on this post are my originals. See my other Booker T. Washington National Monument photos here.]

Links:

Booker T. Washington National Monument

The Negro Problem (essays from Booker T. Washington & others)

Google map to the monument

Some damned fool let the chickens out!