In 2010, Kara Walker produced a black and white drawing entitled “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.”
In “I Saw Death Coming,” Kidada Williams – a professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of “They Left Marks on Me’’ – applies this perspective to the transition from bondage to freedom of African Americans after 1865.
Drawing on Congressional testimony in 1871 and 1872, and interviews conducted for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, Williams documents the “bottomless pit of transgressions” against newly emancipated slaves by Ku Klux Klan vigilantes and racist local law enforcement officials; the courageous attempts of Blacks to defend themselves against overwhelming odds; and the failure of the federal government to protect the rights granted to them by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution.
This interpretation of Reconstruction is consistent with the analysis offered by many other historians. What is distinctive and important about “I Saw Death Coming” is its intimate, inspiring, and heart-wrenching depiction of Black men, women and children who lived through “the war after the Civil War.” Or didn’t.
Night riders’ “visits” to the homes of Black families, Williams reminds us, resulted in psychological as well as physical pain. Victims had to confront the reality that they could not protect their loved ones—or trust neighbors who failed to help them.
Three weeks after she had been tied to a tree, whipped and sexually assaulted, Hannah Tutson washed and washed herself, but could not remove the smell of the liquor her assailant had poured over her. Fearing another attack, Edward Jones, who knew that exercising his right to vote put him and his family at risk, could not sleep at night, “and if there had been a stick that cracked very light, I would have sprung up in the bed.”
Some Blacks reported that individuals who testified at Congressional hearings were murdered when they returned home.
Bleeding profusely, naked, and freezing in the cold after he was castrated, Henry Lowther staggered more than two miles to a doctor’s office. The doctor did not respond to his call, Henry later learned, because “he was off on this raid.”
‘Little things’ abandoned
Forced to abandon their homes, Williams points out, Blacks left behind “little things,” including clothing and mementos, “the wealth that could have put them on the path to multigenerational prosperity,” and parents, siblings, spouses, children and lifelong friends. After killing his son, attackers told Augustus Blair he had to pack up and get out in two weeks, “crop or no crop.”
Another survivor “could save nothing except what I could haul away.” Dispossessed individuals often had no cash to secure a new place to live; some had disabling injuries that made it impossible to work.
The subjects of “I Saw Death Coming” were among more than four million African Americans who had great expectations when the Civil War ended. Many of them, Williams notes, achieved their dreams or were on their way to doing so when Southern racists stole their freedom and ended the lives of some 50,000 of them.
During the long Jim Crow era, their stories and the truth about Reconstruction faded from “national memory and to some extent African American memory.” But Black historians, especially W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, and a burgeoning civil rights movement, kept them alive.
Now, Williams has amplified the voices of survivors and taught us that their stories are “essential to understanding why, more than a century and a half later, our struggle continues.”
Dr. Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He wrote this review for the Florida Courier.
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