Ola Larsmo: Bison Man Remembers America’s Racist Past

It is almost impossible to understand that the images describe the same reality. But they do.

On Wednesday, we saw a roaring, half-naked man dressed as a bison take a seat in the Senate rostrum where the vice president had just been. Outside in the hallway, the southern state flag was fluttering, and in the courtyard, Trump supporters had erected a gallows with traps – symbols that all African Americans know what they mean. At the same time, news came that Georgia reelection had been decided: the southern state had elected its first black senator, civil rights activist and Baptist pastor in the Church of Martin Luther King, Raphael Warnock. Along with Jon Ossoff, a film director with a Jewish immigrant background, he will portray Georgia in the same chamber as “bison man” Jake Angeli, a state with a history of lynching both blacks and Jews.

The division in the country is deeper than ever and takes the form of two completely antagonistic stories about the United States. But the second story, that of the “new south” and a new civic spirit, was almost obscured by all of Trump’s actions. Still, it is becoming increasingly visible, especially in popular culture and historical writing.

Many of us follow Damon Lindelof’s daring reinterpretation of “Watchmen” and was struck by the brutal scenes of the first episode when white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma set fire to the neighborhoods of their black neighbors. The dramatization of Alan Moore’s superhero series from the 1980s got its start amid a historic reality of racist murders, provoking some viewers. But it is even more shocking that the Tulsa massacre is one of the historical events that has disappeared from public historiography.

In Tulsa, a rumor spread that a black man had “raped” a white woman. By the night of June 1, 1921, 35 blocks had been burned and probably up to 300 blacks had been killed. No one knows for sure; the police did not want to intervene and the official death toll stood at 36. For two days, armed and masked members of the Ku klux clan went from house to house, killing people and black neighborhoods were bombarded by aircraft fire. Similar massacres took place in the years after the Civil War, for example in New Orleans in 1866, when supporters from the recently defeated southern states attended a rally for black suffrage and about 40 were killed. But the Tulsa massacre took place 55 years later and was unique in its scope.

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Yet for a long time there was nothing in the history books. When journalist Don Ross began investigating the matter in the late 1960s, many wanted to stop him, including the survivors and relatives of those killed; Those who raised the matter had a hard time, and the responsible clan leaders still had political and economic influence in the area. But Ross’s work prompted a public commission to present its results in 2001.

What’s interesting is how the legacy of slavery and civil war, as well as earlier attempts to grapple with racism, are now becoming part of the mainstream narrative in film, television, and books. We see it in the long series of films by African American directors and writers that led to a revival in Hollywood.

As Susan Neiman said in her important book “Learning From Germans” (2019), there was a gap in her textbooks when she grew up in the United States in the 1960s, and it contained what happened to black rights after the civil War. Slavery ended in 1865 with the end of the Civil War and blacks obtained civil rights through amendments 13, 14 and 15 to the constitution, where the last one in 1870 declared that the color of the skin should not prevent anyone from voting. . But after World War II, the Civil Rights Movement again had to fight for exactly the same rights. The way they backed off was what many of those unaffected remained ignorant of.

Tubman would have graced the new five-dollar bills until the Trump administration stopped him

When you read the debate closely on slavery and racism in the United States, as played out in the years leading up to the Civil War and the decades after, feels very contemporary. The arguments against racism are the same as they are today. But history was blurred for a long time. Some names in the anti-slavery movement are perhaps well known, such as that of John Brown, who led the guerrilla raids against Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in the hope that it would be the starting point for an uprising among southern slaves. Other names that appear occasionally are Nat Turner, who started a major slave uprising in 1831, and Harriet Tubman, who managed to escape slavery and became one of the most important “conductors” of the Underground Railroad, the escape route. northward. (Tubman would have graced the new five-dollar bills until the Trump administration stopped him.) But how the issue of equal civil rights was already at the center of political debate in the United States had long been forgotten from the public consciousness.

In recent years, however, a host of works have paved the way for the “second story” that is now making its way once again on a broad front. One historian who played an important role is Nestor Eric Foner, a professor at Columbia, who in a series of well-documented books portrayed the fight against slavery and “Reconstruction,” the darkly remembered period after the Civil War when the idea of ​​the equal rights was a real force in politics. as well as the moral quagmire that followed after 1870.

Foner’s most famous book it is probably “The Trial of Fire” (2010) that follows Abraham Lincoln’s development as a politician. Lincoln has been constantly subject to reinterpretations: that he has long been associated with the idea that it would be better for black Americans to “recolonize” Africa is on his plate. But what Foner shows is how Lincoln and many with him are driven by historical developments during the war to adopt exactly the attitudes that the most radical slave opponents claimed ten or twenty years earlier, attitudes that were later dismissed as extreme. Foner paints the picture of a living intellectual politician who is slowly becoming the radical opponent of slavery that he became.

That image is reinforced in James Oake’s “The Radical and the Republican” (2007), which shows how the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who himself escaped from slavery, and an originally “moderate” politician like Lincoln grew closer. What from the beginning is fierce controversy, especially on Douglass’s part, turns to consensus, and Douglass is invited to the White House a couple of times. As Lincoln takes the perspective that the war can only end with the immediate abolition of slavery, Douglass begins to view the Constitution of the United States as a weapon in the fight for the civil rights of blacks, rather than just a document. written by despicable slave owners. Here the lines are drawn for the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

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To the list of masterpieces In the same spirit must be added Ron Chernow’s robust biography of General and President Ulysses S Grant (2017). As president, Grant had to clean up after Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson’s pathetic concession policy against the southern slave aristocracy and devote vast military resources to crushing the first generation of the Ku Klux clan terrorizing blacks to avoid to exploit their citizenship. Grant had experienced Lincoln-like development and saw the creation of equal rights for all as the only way forward: If development stopped, America would fall apart again.

Chernow’s book also forms the basis of an ambitious new three-part dramatic documentary on the History channel, which follows Grant beyond the battlefields, into the anti-racist work that marked his first term. In addition to Chernow himself, the documentary also features a brilliant critic of racism as Ta-Nehisi Coates, who agrees with Grant’s image of political endeavors. As many historians say, the betrayal of blacks was based on the majority white opinion abandoning them, not politicians like Grant.

But wherever you look, the stories of what should be forgotten now appear

The forgetfulness of the modern The debate during and after the Civil War has been devastating to the recent political climate, especially due to the new age ignorance of how costly freedoms could be deliberately, methodically, and consistently dismantled by well-organized and undemocratic forces.

But everywhere you look, now the stories of what should be forgotten appear. This fall, the television series “The Good Lord Bird” premiered on HBO. The series (which is very uneven) is based on a novel by James McBride and here Ethan Hawke plays a deeply confused John Brown, who, struck by religious insanity, shoots his way through Kansas and ignores who attacks whenever he stands. allow you to dedicate yourself. ate your righteous search for slave owners. (Daveed Diggs makes a funny Frederick Douglass.) The original grip is that everything is portrayed from the eyes of the slave boy Henry: the fight of the whites for his holy justice is the most important thing, and he has to keep his head down the whole time to save it. It is a liberating and disrespectful way to portray the entire era.

But a completely different story is conquering the “main groove” in film, television and literature, which now contains more and more of what was supposed to be silenced. When an inventory is made of these collective silences about their content, it is a sign that entire societies are changing. But those who survived the Tulsa massacre in 1921 were also right: When such things surface, one can be sure of a backlash. Like the Flag of the South on the Capitol, which must have been Abraham Lincoln’s worst nightmare.

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Amat Levin: If they were black, they wouldn’t even have passed the outer Capitol barriers.