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The 2015 massacre at a black church in South Carolina, the 2017 white supremacist rally in Virginia, and the murder of George Floyd last year in Minnesota each spurred an effort to dismantle the lingering stench of Confederation. After each tragedy came a wave of deletions of flags, monuments and signs across the South. But these were small steps, and two powerful new books, How the Word Is Passed and Forget the Alamo, argue for giant leaps: rethinking and fundamentally overhauling the way public schools and tourist sites present our. deeply flawed story.
When I visited plantations on school trips with school as a child, they only talked about the beauty of the house and the fine china, recalls Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is. Passed who grew up in New Orleans near Robert E. Lee. Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Highway. In a history lesson, secession from the Union was discussed in terms of state rights and taxes. No one spoke of slavery.
Echoes of these experiences, as well as more recent events, inspired Smiths’ book. He visits Thomas Jeffersons Monticello and lesser-known sites like the Whitney Plantation, Blandford Cemetery, and Angola Prison to examine how each presents or ignores its deep connection to slavery and the implications for understanding America.
Smith traces this willful oblivion to the lost cause, the highly successful Southern whitewashing of the Civil War that prompted the Confederates to fight for freedom as opposed to slavery. He always sees it in the way some whites, overjoyed at a parade of WWII films, moan and start over when a series like Barry Jenkins Underground Railroad takes center stage.
We don’t have enough public conversations about slavery, says Smith, we’ve had slavery for 250 years and we haven’t had it for about 150. And the residue has shaped every part of our social infrastructure, political and economic, such as redlining, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. To suggest that this story has nothing to do with our contemporary inequalities is morally and intellectually dishonest.
Clint Smith, author of Comment le mot est passe.
(Carletta Girma)
Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford also resurrected a long-suppressed slavery saga in Forget the Alamo. Home to one of America’s most famous battles, the Alamo is sacred ground for White Texans and central to the awe-inspiring origin story of Lone Star States, another lost cause. As a founding myth that belongs to the whole country, it is high time that it was reassessed. It’s one thing to remove a statue of Jefferson Davis, but it’s a national monument at Gettysburg, Burrough says.
The authors argue that college kids in Texas have long been given a twisted version of the story: William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davey Crockett were die-hard heroes who bravely fought to the death against Santa Anna and the other villains. men. It is totally inaccurate and terribly incomplete.
There is the neglected role of the Tejanos, Mexicans living in the region. But the most surprising thing we found, Burrough says, was the central role of slavery in the revolt. The only constant in Stephen Austin’s negotiations with Mexico was his insistence on slavery, something abolitionist Mexico firmly resisted.
It’s hard for Americans, who grew up seeing Mexico as that backward and corrupt country, to realize, Burrough says, that Mexico had the highest morals.
Forget the Alamo pierces many misconceptions and explores the insidious ways they entered popular culture, from Disneys Davy Crockett in the 1950s to John Waynes The Alamo in 1960 and beyond.
Overall, even as a radical reassessment of the nation’s racial past began within Confederate circles, Texas got a pass, Burrough says. It’s odd considering that there was about 30 years of academic reassessment of Alamo and the Texas Creation Myth. Almost none of this has seeped into mainstream discourse. With Latinos on the cusp of being the majority in Texas, it’s high time there was a constructive debate about what this all means.
Bryan Burrough, one of the authors of Forget the Alamo.
(Amy Pfluger)
These two books are measured in their outrage, but they differ in their approach. Forget the Alamo is written as a traditional reporting and analysis of the underlying causes, the heroes, and the battle itself, with a few flashes of humor and steel.
Bowie was a murderer, slave owner and con artist, the authors write. Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and a syphilitic lech; and Crockett was an old self-promoting fool who was a prisoner of his own myth. … They fought for freedom, but not for everyone’s freedom.
The authors also tell the battle to tell the story, revealing how many politicians, most recently George P. Bush, capitulated to public pressure (read: white) and returned to the Anglo-heroic narrative. And for good measure, they shredded the bundle of lies surrounding Alamo’s fraudulent artifacts purchased by rock legend Phil Collins, a dubious collection that inspired Texas to spend millions of taxpayers to build a fancy new museum. .
While Forget the Alamo is an in-depth investigation into a quintessentially American myth, How the Word Is Passed travels across disparate sites not only in the South but also in New York to show how the North was complicit in the pursuit of profit and of Africa. Stop by stop, Smith weaves a tapestry of willful ignorance before leading the way to improvement.
It exposes the lies still being peddled in places like Angola, the infamous Louisiana Jail, and the Old Plantation with a museum and tour that not only seems indifferent to the history of the place but seems to mock it.
In Blandford, he discovers a Confederate cemetery that boasts Tiffany windows honoring the valor of its soldiers, as well as a Memorial Day commemoration full of hypocrisy and distortion. (Speakers argued that Confederate soldiers who kill Americans should be honored as American veterans.)
(Petit, Brown and Company)
Smiths’ book has a more intimate tone than Forget the Alamo. While facts and interviews with academics underpin her work, the emotional texture comes from conversations with ordinary people visiting the sites. He also deftly uses sensory details, such as when he puts the reader with him in a plantation hut, listens to a crunch from the ground, and reflects on how the board must have moaned under people’s bodies with no choice but to sleep. directly above.
Smith is also finding signs of progress. Monticello has evolved in telling its story; The Whitney Plantation was founded on the principle that plantation tours should be about the evil of slavery, not about the beauty of the grand houses. A chapter on the roots and current significance of the annual Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, TX is downright cheerful in places.
The two stories are aimed at different readers. Burrough says changing the way Texans think means getting the government to change the way it teaches students. Right now, Alamo’s great narratives are replacing reality because the largely Anglo elite ignores the Latino perspective without fear of repercussions. We wrote this hoping, perhaps naively, that there are thoughtful people in the state power structure and in the media who just hadn’t given much thought to this.
Smith agrees with the education review. It’s important that we start young, he says. Right now we were asking young people to unlearn so much that they have learned. Why not just teach them the right thing from the start?
However, its target is not the people in power. He wrote the book he wanted both as a high school teacher and as a teenager himself. When I really learned about the history of this country, which only really happened in college, it was so liberating, he says. It was empowering because I realized that much of what this country has told you about people like you is not true. Back then, I wanted something that gave me the ability to name and understand so many lies this country told me.
Even as the waters rise in reassessing the past, as Burrough puts it, the forces of reaction are turning. There are people here who say that even raising questions about the Alamo means you are trying to bring down the government, he says.
Indeed, states like Texas and Oklahoma are scrambling to turn the tide, passing bills legislating against a new analysis of slavery and racism in their schools. The irony of publishing books in this environment is not lost on authors.
State legislation against critical race theory is yet another iteration of the lost cause, Smith says. The insidious nature of white supremacy and racism is that it takes an empirical statement and turns it into an ideological statement. If I say that Confederation was an army of betrayal based on the maintenance and expansion of the institution of slavery, some whites interpret this to reflect my ideological and political disposition. In fact, that’s just what’s on the historical record. Say this in your classroom and you will see that you are doing something radical and political.
And so for all the incremental progress, there is still no larger calculation with the facts, as there was in Germany after WWII. Without it, Smith finds it difficult to hope for systemic change. Understanding the past can help us decide what policy needs to be created to right the wrong, Smith says. And we still have a long way to go.
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