Monthly Archives: August 2020

The lives of Frederick Douglass and Andrew Johnson tell the story of Reconstruction.Two conflicting visions of America confront us, then and now. Our ancestors planted the seeds of those conflicts when the first slave ships docked, but they bloomed in Reconstruction, How does one person become a Black abolitionist and one person become a whiteContinue reading “No Friend of Our Race”

The back porch has become my spiritual and intellectual home during these days of isolation. On the intellectual side I am writing a comparison of two figures of the Civil War/Reconstruction era that I believe represent the conflicting images of what America is and what it should be. I want to understand fully the livesContinue reading “Remembering why I am doing this”

Reconstruction Part Two “Every revolution has its counterrevolution – that is a sign the revolution is for real.” C. Wright Mills The issues “central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic and as contemporary as the inequalities that still afflict our society”. Eric Foner Reconstruction:America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 Recently I spoke with aContinue reading ““I Feel Limited””

In 1907 a statue was erected on the courthouse lawn of a college town in North Mississippi. A Confederate solder gazes south across the town square, down South Lamar Avenue toward the countryside of Lafayette County, Mississippi. It stands less than a mile from William Faulkner’s home. In the middle of a pandemic that hasContinue reading “Reconstruction Part One”

I am deep into the topic of Reconstruction. The events, personalities, and issues speak loudly to us today. In 1871 the U.S. Congress took testimony to document the KKK’s violent response to Reconstruction. I want to share the words of those who suffered that violence. Black legislators made some inspiring speeches at the state andContinue reading “So much to study on Reconstruction”

The South is my home even if I don’t always feel at home in it. The voices and experiences that stamped me were within a lopsided geometric shape connecting Memphis /Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. All of these states were members of the Confederacy and slavery was deeply embedded in the economy and cultureContinue reading “The Ladder Part Two”