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October 13, 2020 - July 6, 2021
The net result was an outcome that few opponents of slavery before the war had anticipated, and for which even fewer white Americans in the South were prepared: the permanent presence of nearly 5 million third- or fourth-generation Americans of African descent in the United States, the vast majority located in a region dedicated to their enduring subordination.
Starting as a trickle in the 1890s, what came to be called the Great Migration surged during World War I, when the reduction in European migration created job openings in the urban North, declined during the Great Depression, then surged again during and after World War II.
By 1970 nearly half the black population lived outside the South, and there were more blacks in Chicago than in all of Mississippi.
Here are just a few highly selective examples of second- or third-generation beneficiaries of the Great Migration who might well have languished in obscurity in the Jim Crow South: in literature, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright; in sports, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson; in music, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross. But there was also a dark side to the Great Migration that became increasingly visible in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
The result was Jim Crow with a northern accent, a new kind of structural racism immune to conventional civil rights legislation, and a de facto brand of segregation that produced a class division within America’s black population.
The most intriguing irony within this historical pattern is that the central achievements of Second Reconstruction—full citizenship for blacks, to include voting rights—were merely reaffirmations of legal rights already guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Nothing less than a second American Revolution was necessary to achieve that goal, which in practice would have meant that the planter class of the Confederacy be regarded and treated like Loyalists after the war for independence, their estates confiscated and the land distributed among their former slaves. A few Radical Republicans endorsed such a policy, and a gesture in that direction was made with the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its “forty acres and a mule” agenda.
Without land of their own, the freedmen were effectively marooned in the postwar South, fated to assume quasi-slave status as tenants of their former masters, poised to become victims of Jim Crow policies once federal troops were withdrawn in 1877. In retrospect, what was economically essential to implement a racial revolution was politically impossible, because the vast majority of white citizens, North and South, found the wholesale transfer of property from whites to blacks unimaginable.
was published as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy in 1944, the year after the Jefferson Memorial was dedicated.
As we know, Jefferson had explicitly disavowed such an expansive meaning, and Lincoln had also distinguished between a Jeffersonian rationale for ending slavery, which he embraced, and one for justifying racial equality, which, like Jefferson, he rejected. Myrdal now claimed that the latent meaning of the Jeffersonian promise had always been broad and inclusive, and that by the middle of the twentieth century the truths that Jefferson had declared self-evident in the eighteenth century, and that Lincoln had reaffirmed in the nineteenth, were blooming again with a new biracial flowering.
That anomaly was corrected in 1948, when President Harry Truman signed the executive order desegregating America’s armed forces, which launched the modern civil rights movement. A second surge came six years later in the landmark case of the twentieth century, Brown v. Board of Education, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were inherently unequal and therefore violated the equal rights provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Second Reconstruction reached a crescendo in the mid-1960s, with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, then passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though he spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King declared that he had come to collect on a “promissory note” issued by Thomas Jefferson, thereby linking the goals of the civil rights movement back to the original formulation of the American Creed, which King also described as an expanding mandate that now included the descendants of Jefferson’s slaves.
The dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in 2014 gave iconic status on the Mall to the liberal narrative of American history as an ongoing conversation within the trinity of Jefferson, Lincoln, and King about what “all men are created equal” meant then and means now.
In King’s version, it meant that all explicit forms of racial discrimination as practiced in the segregationist South since the end of First Reconstruction were both illegal and anachronistic. The civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 essentially declared that the federal government was now prepared to enforce these laws in the states of the former Confederacy.
Their reading of the American Creed remained true to the historical Jefferson’s core convictions about black inferiority and the right of states to defy federal laws imposed on them without their consent.
Richard Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, warned President Lyndon Johnson that if he signed the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party would lose the South for the next thirty years, which turned out to be a conservative estimate. Johnson declared that the moral principle at stake was worth the political sacrifice, arguably an act of presidential leadership without parallel in the twentieth century.
King understood the civil rights movement as a chapter in an ongoing national story in which the latent energies of the American Revolution kept radiating out their full implications until they enveloped all people regardless of creed, color, or gender.
First, as in First Reconstruction, there was no economic component to the reform agenda of the 1960s. Over half the black population at the time lived below the poverty line, and the median black household possessed less than 10 percent of the wealth of the median white household.
The optimistic title of Booker T. Washington’s classic memoir, Up from Slavery (1901), remained a fond hope a full century after slavery ended, and once the opportunity to redistribute the estates of the planter class was missed during First Reconstruction, the prospects for economic reparations disappeared forever.
the last decade of the twentieth century, it was misleading to speak of black Americans as a homogeneous whole. There were middle-class and working-class blacks who stood to benefit from the opportunities created during Second Reconstruction; then there was the black underclass, trapped in urban ghettos of forced confinement where gangs, guns, and drugs defined a social agenda in a nightmare version of the American Dream.
The climate of opinion created by Second Reconstruction did not permit explicitly racist language in mainstream American politics, so the race card needed to be facedown in the new game, and the players could only wink and nod in silent recognition when coded terms like law and order and voter fraud entered the conversation.
Social scientists coined the term structural racism to describe the new stealth strategy, which put a premium on duplicity, deniability, even self-deception, all modernized versions of the more ignoble Jeffersonian values.
Consider the war on drugs, first declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982. The decision to make the prosecution of drug dealers and users a national priority had two unfortunate consequences: first, an exponential expansion of the prison population in the United States from 300,000 in 1980 to over 2 million in 2010, an incarceration rate nearly ten times higher than that of any industrialized nation in the world; second, the impact of the new drug war fell disproportionately on the black population, chiefly black males in America’s inner cities, where imprisonment became the presumed fate for a
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In addition to the sheer size of the black casualty rate in the war on drugs, Alexander made two arguments to support her case that a self-conscious racial strategy is at work: first, penalties and sentences for using or distributing crack cocaine, the drug of choice for blacks in the inner cities, are much more severe than for powder cocaine, the drug of choice for suburban whites; and conviction rates for black defendants in drug cases are several times higher than the rates for whites.
Many whites regard the term structural racism as a euphemism for welfare programs they are supposed to fund. Many blacks regard the term law and order as a euphemism for state-sponsored terrorism.
Wilson first attracted national attention as a young scholar at the University of Chicago with a book whose very title, The Declining Significance of Race, provoked criticism from the black community. His point, it turned out, was that there was no such thing as a “black community,” because a class division separated middle- and working-class blacks from inner-city blacks. The former were beneficiaries of the civil rights movement and affirmative action programs. The latter were a category unto themselves, mired in zones of concentrated poverty beyond the reach of liberal legislation, a
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Although he recognized that the black ghetto generates racist reactions, Wilson insisted that economic and demographic conditions are the root causes of the racial problem. And he therefore proposed that race-neutral economic reforms are the only viable solution to the most recent and virulent version of the American Dilemma.
As a result, only a biracial approach that addresses economic equality as a class rather than a racial problem has any hope of succeeding; therefore he advocated a robust jobs program, a kind of Marshall Plan for American cities, designed to target poor blacks and whites alike.
As Baldwin succinctly put it, “The people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
Baldwin declared. “They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected.” For good measure, he added that “the black man” was “as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him.”
The answer to that question, Baldwin insisted, placed a burden on every white citizen “to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” In Baldwin’s view, the belief in white supremacy was just as delusional as the belief in black separatism. “It is only now beginning to be borne in on us,” he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “that this vision of the world [i.e., white supremacy] is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless.” What Myrdal called the American Dilemma was really the White Man’s Burden, which was to face the fact that “this world is white no
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“My Dungeon Shook,” the introductory section of The Fire Next Time (1963), all racial stereotypes demean their authors, not their victims. “The details and symbols of your life,” he told his black readers, “have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear….You can only be destroyed by believing that you are what the white world calls a nigger.”
As we grope about for guidance on our pockmarked racial landscape, perhaps his most disarming advice is to read more fiction in order to expand the range of our imaginations.
The most eloquent defender of that legacy at the founding was Jefferson, who insisted till the end that the true “spirit of ’76” was incompatible with federal authority over domestic policy. Jefferson went to his grave believing that the United States was a union of sovereign states, a coherent confederation, not a nation-state.
The passionate and at times vitriolic debate in the 1790s between Federalists and Republicans exposed the deep disagreements between the two sides of the revolutionary generation. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and John Marshall led the Federalist pro-government side against Jefferson and the recently converted Madison for the Republican opposition.
We currently inhabit a second Gilded Age in which the active interplay within that dialogue has almost completely disappeared because belief in a prominent role for government has been placed on the permanent defensive, in part because one side enjoys the advantage of a very large and expensive megaphone that amplifies its message.
As a result, mainstream politics is trapped in a one-sided conversation, a muted version of the American Dialogue bereft of the energy and conflict-driven dynamism possible only with full engagement of both sides of our founding principles.
Until some semblance of balance is restored, there is no realistic hope for reducing our unacceptable levels of economic inequality, which are certain to increase as technology makes most forms of manual labor anachronistic and globalization deepens the divide between winners and losers in the global marketplace.
Without a role for government, the American Dream becomes a realistic prospect only for the favored few.
“Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederations.” It was a boringly repetitive little essay, because the same thing happened over and over again: whether it was one of the Greek, Italian, Dutch, or Germanic confederations, they all came together against a common enemy, then eventually dissolved into civil wars, anarchy, and political oblivion.
It happened in the crucible of specific crises: the states had refused to honor their tax obligations during the war and their pledge to fund veterans’ pensions after the war; they had refused to cooperate on internal improvements like roads and canals and had even imposed domestic tariffs on one another; they had encroached upon federal authority to sign separate treaties with various Indian tribes, essentially stealing Native American land; the Confederation Congress had failed to pass a 5 percent duty on imports, in effect deciding to renege on the $40 million foreign and domestic debt; and
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Two congressional debates in late 1782 and early 1783—the failure to pass the impost and the refusal to fund pensions for veterans—carried him over the line.
In the fall of 1786 two unrelated events occurred that, taken together, provided a solution to Madison’s dilemma, though both in richly ironic ways. The previous spring the Confederation Congress had endorsed the calling of a special convention in Annapolis to consider commercial reform, presumably to end the current state-based system in favor of a more unified trade policy.
But then, in an act of utter audacity, the commissioners issued a statement—drafted by Alexander Hamilton—recommending that the Confederation Congress call “a future Convention which would enlarge the mandate beyond commerce,” with the goal of “rendering the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”
What changed the political chemistry in the late fall of 1786 was an outbreak of violence in western Massachusetts that came to be called Shays’s Rebellion. The Shaysites were farmers, many veterans of the Continental Army, who were protesting mortgage foreclosures and tax increases imposed by the Massachusetts legislature in Boston, which they linked to the arbitrary taxes imposed by Parliament twenty years earlier. A generation of historians has tended to describe Shays’s Rebellion as the earliest manifestation of the Populist movement, but subsequent scholarship has more persuasively seen
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The watchword for those predisposed toward apocalyptic scenarios was anarchy, the collapse of the American confederation leading to civil war between the states and then, as Madison himself predicted, the breakup of the union into two or three regional confederacies.
For we need to remember that the American colonies had declared their independence as sovereign states, so that any shift in sovereignty from the state to the federal level was a repudiation of “the spirit of ’76.” Madison made the opposite case, arguing that such a shift in sovereignty represented a rescue of the revolution rather than a betrayal of its core principles: We can no longer doubt that the crisis is arrived at which the good people of America are to decide the solemn question, whether they will reap the fruits of that Independence and of that Union which they have cemented with so
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Put simply, Madison recognized that the Constitution would have stood no chance whatsoever of being ratified if his radical vision of unequivocal federal sovereignty had prevailed. And this recognition then led him to a counterintuitive insight every bit as provocative as his argument for the greater stability of a large or extended republic; namely, there was no single source of sovereignty in the new Constitution. What he had initially regarded as the great failure at the Constitutional Convention—the coexistence of federal and state claims to authority—was, albeit inadvertently, in fact the
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This was an interpretation of the new Constitution with far-reaching political and philosophical implications, for it not only defied the classical assumption—as old as Aristotle—that every government must have one supreme and final source of authority, but also transformed the Constitution from a clear blueprint for a nation-size republic to a framework for debate in which arguments about federal versus state sovereignty would continue forevermore. Indeed, argument itself became the abiding solution, and ambiguity the great asset that ensured the argument could never end, making the
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The watchword for the new Constitution, he insisted, was not “consolidation” but “diffusion.”37
