Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post expresses very well how we feel about the revival of the memory of the Civil War, in many places including Missouri, as its Sesquicentennial approaches. Robinson reminds politicians who would promote the memory of that war that Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect “vile, unthinkable practices” such as “state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape.” Good luck finding a commemorative costume for that.
Robinson, whose entire column may be read on A3 of today’s American, was writing from Washington about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican who proclaimed a “Confederate History Month” without even mentioning slavery. We are writing in St. Louis about a divided city and state with their own legacies of violent, virulent racism.
The Missouri Legislature includes three Republican representatives who have joined a “birther” lawsuit against President Obama, a thin legal pretense for racist outrage that a black man runs the White House. Our Republican Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, the hit of Tea Party rallies, has joined the nominally states’ rights legal effort to undo Obama’s health insurance reform legislation.
Missouri’s Democratic Governor Jay Nixon has not done anything quite so insensitive or racist lately, though in convening a commission to discuss how Missouri should commemorate the Civil War he is treading on dangerous and bloody ground. Secretary of State Robin Carnahan does the same when she opens an exhibit of state documents on the Civil War with not one statement that would resonate with the party’s African-American base that is critical to Democrats’ success statewide. Some of us have not forgotten that her father, Mel Carnahan, performed Kiwanis minstrel shows in blackface decades before he was elected governor.
As we watch Missouri Democrats for their next move on this bloody battlefield, we reflect on another legacy of slavery that is timely in 2010: the U.S. Census. A routine recount of our nation’s population was something Southern slaveholders wanted written into the U.S. Constitution. At the time, they were sure that slaveholding states were going to increase and their populations expand, compared to the North (whose cold climate and growing merchant and industrial classes did not favor plantation slavery). The Census was one of many concessions – the perpetuation of slavery first and foremost among them – that the mercantile North granted to the slaveholding South when hammering out our founding national documents.
This is a reminder that Constitutional fundamentalists are swearing on a document that enshrined slavery in law and made many concessions to slaveholders. These tentative deals gradually unraveled and a Civil War was the result. The memory of the U.S. Constitution, for African Americans and all lovers of human equality, is partly the memory of deals done with slaveholders. The memory of the Civil War is the memory of violence brought by the South to preserve a heinous institution. If there must be a commemoration, there had better not be a celebration.
And as for the Census, the only thing a black person alive in 2010 can to do to thwart the motives of the slaveholders who pushed for the Census in 1776 is to participate in the count. For every black person counted, there will be political representation and federal funding apportioned for one black person. For the descendents of those who were counted (as two-thirds of a person) for the Census while enslaved, and whose population count gave slaveholders’ representation when slaves themselves were owned as chattel, it is a tiny but real retaliation.
