William McKee Evans - Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America

OPEN WOUND

THE LONG VIEW OF RACE IN AMERICA

WILLIAM MCKEE EVANS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS URBANA AND CHICAGO

The publication of this book was made
possible, in part, by a grant from the
Center for Community Action in
Lumberton, N.C.

2009 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States
of America
C 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on
acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging
in-Publication Data
Evans, William McKee.

Open wound : the long view of race
in America / William McKee Evans.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references
and index.

ISBN 978-0-252-03427-5
(cloth : alk. paper)

1. African AmericansHistory.

2. African AmericansSouthern
StatesHistory. 3. African AmericansCivil
rightsHistory.

4. RacismUnited StatesHistory.

5. United StatesRace relations.

6. Southern StatesRace relations.

I. Title.

E185.E93 2009

973.0496073dc22

2008032904

When I was doing research for To Die Game in the Reconstruction records of the National Archives, I was thrilled to come across a reference to an individual whom I had actually known. The Union Army in 1867 was organizing the first elections ever conducted in North Carolina according to universal manhood suffrage. One Radical officer, in a letter to another, marked for your eyes only, recommended a certain Danl McNeill, a youth of firm Union convictions, who could be trusted as a Republican poll watcher.

McNeill was a distant relative of mine. As a youngster I thought that he looked like Santa Claus because of his long white hair and beard. When he came to visit, he would arrive carrying a fiddle case in one hand and a jug of homemade whiskey in the other. I remember him saying to my father, Now I shall play for you a tune that was played at your great granddaddys enfare [wedding feast], Bonapartes Retreat Bonapartes Retreat! To me he was like an ancient bridge to some twilight world of the past.

In 1861, McNeills father had been expelled from the Presbyterian Church, on charges of heresy and immorality, after he had publicly opposed secession. In 1867, McNeill himself had also been expelled from the same church on the same charges, after he had begun work for the Freedmens Bureau. He was later re-admitted to fellowship, only to be kicked out again in the 1890s after he joined the Populist Party. This time he did not return.

My father used to chide him for his stubbornness. He should be thinking of the hereafter and become reconciled with the church to which his family had been long devoted. McNeill replied that, though his religious views were not orthodox, he did not worry about the hereafter, because, he added curiously, I am the son of a believer. He seemed to think that his father, who had once rescued him when he had fallen into the hands of the Confederate Home Guard, would always stand by him.

He died at age eighty-seven, and his grandnephew came to bring us the news. He said that his uncle may have overexerted himself the week before when he had been planting an apple orchard. When asked why, at his age, he was planting so many trees, McNeill had replied, Things have gotten to the place where there is hardly a man left in this county who can sit you down to a decent cup of cider.

I dedicate this book to that unrepentant scalawag Danl McNeill, who celebrated the music of his ancestors and who planted trees that some new, unseen generation might enjoy their fruit. And to those genuine Southern rebels who stood by him.

Like all books, this book has its own history. As World War II drew to a close in Europe, I was a twenty-one-year-old soldier on the Rhine. A group of us were listening to the radio one night and we heard Lord Haw Haw, a Nazi commentator with an elegant British accent. He reported on some race riots in the United States and gave them a white supremacist spin. In our Jim Crow army, his words hit home with some listeners and we started arguing. Some said that blacks were getting out of hand. Harmony was restored when we tuned to an American commentator who said nothing about race and gave an upbeat version of the news. But it was the argument that I remembered.

Later, when I was a student and aspiring historian, the question of race somehow informed everything I wrote. It seemed the dark counterpoint to the traditional narrative of American history. By the late 1960s, the book of record on the subject was Winthrop D. Jordans White over Black. To me it said that racial prejudice, like sin, was a part of human nature, certainly the nature of white people.

I did not believe this. But I had already discovered that it is easier to shoot down somebody elses argument than to come up with a better one. I rashly decided that while Jordan and others had described racial prejudice, I would explain ithow historically it came about.

If racism was indeed a universal human flaw, as some writers seemed to think, I would have to look for manifestations of it in ancient times and worldwide. The literature was staggering, much of it in languages I could barely read or didnt know at all. Fortunately, my son, Daniel G. Evans, strong in languages, helped me. Still it seemed that I was trying to drink the ocean.

At one point, I was about to give up when Edmund S. Morgan sent me an encouraging response to some rough writing that I had showed him. I also received early encouragement from Immanuel Wallerstein, Moses Finley, and Charles Verlinden. But the project only took real shape in Timothy Breens National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in 1978. In 1980, the American Historical Review published an early part of my project as an article, From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the Sons of Ham. That gave me momentum. Later, I presented a paper to the Southern Historical Association, a rough projection of how I thought the racial system developed in the Americas. The comments of the panelists, David Brion Davis, George Fredrickson, and Carl N. Deglar, were sharp and insightful, and I came away smarter and encouraged. My project further matured in Orlando Pattersons National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at Harvard.

My student assistant, Todd Menzing, later a history professor himself, read several generations of the manuscript; and my student Ursula Markham, later assistant editor of Central European History, gave valuable criticism. The faculty and students of the Cal Poly, Pomona, chapter of Phi Alpha Theta allowed me to try out fragments of my project at our meetings. My colleagues David Levering, Anthony Brundage, David Smith, John Moore, Joseph Block, Ralph Schafer, William Smith, John Lloyd, Lydia Gans, and Saul Landau read parts or all of the work and offered suggestions. Our history department arranged my teaching schedule so as to give me unfragmented time to write, and it also allowed me more than my share of the departments travel funds.

In order to make the project more manageable and reduce it to a more publishable length, I eventually accepted the advice of Otto H. Olsen, who over the years kept up with my project, to restrict it to the American racial system. Later, I also took the advice of Brian Kelly, who thoroughly critiqued the manuscript, to compress the chapters dealing with the Old World and Latin America.