ready for freedom, the vote, or holding high office. Black citizenship proved a costly failure. Mitchell’s characters complain of “illiterate negroes in high public office” as the “final degradation.”60 Scarlett describes African Americans “in legislature where they spent most of their time eating goobers and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes.”61 It’s a lie, a racist argument through and through, and Mitchell stokes it in every possible way. In reality, African Americans served with distinction in high office. By 1877, about two thousand Black men in the former
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