Today's Reconstruction

Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Back with us now, historian Peniel Joseph who's got a brand new book called, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle For Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. It spans the time from Barack Obama's election as president in 2008 to the insurrection on January 6th 2021, and compares this year that he calls the third reconstruction to the original reconstruction after the Civil War and the second one during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and '60s. Some of you know Peniel Joseph has been a guest here many times before.

On everything from his previous history books to the relevance of the NAACP today, to the political meaning of the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament. He is primarily a scholar of the Black freedom movements of the 20th century. He is a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and founding Director there of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, as well as the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity. Peniel, always a pleasure. Welcome back to WNYC. Wow, you are busy down there in Austin these days, aren't you?

Peniel: Yes, it's great to be back, Brian, talking to you.

Brian: Can I start with a little bit about you from the book because you do start that way in the introduction about growing up and what you call pregentrified New York City in the 1980s during the emergence of hip hop groups like Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and others. Where in the city did you grow up? What about it were you using to introduce the ideas in the book?

Peniel: I grew up in Jamaica, Queens. I was born in the city and was in Brooklyn for my toddler years, but I was right in Jamaica, Queens 109th Avenue Springfield Boulevard, Queens Village. I start there because, in a lot of ways, my understanding of American history started out there in that house in Queens, all-Black neighborhood. Racially segregated. Really, I would say a working-class neighborhood, a lower-middle-class neighborhood. That's what gave me my understanding about Black history, American democracy, citizenship.

I talk about my mother and I'm the proud son of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States in 1965. My mother raised me and my older brother who's now a physician as a single Black woman who was an immigrant, but who was very unusual in the sense of, she was somebody who had a deep profound love for Haiti, but also loved the United States, was very interested in Haitian history, but also in Black history but also admired people like John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. She was really all over the place. She was part of a labor union, 1199SEIU at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Labor is how I got my start. I was on my first picket line in elementary school. All those lessons really helped shape me and I wanted to discuss them in the sense of this third reconstruction because, in 2020, so many people started to look towards history to find out why were there 25 million people in the streets. Why was this racial and political reckoning happening? I wanted to understand that too, but really, starting with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I started to get much, much deeper into the histories of reconstruction. I wanted to put all of those things together in one story.

Brian: Now, the first picket line, when you were in elementary school, was that tagging along with your mom on an 1199 strike or was that, "We children will not be asked to do classroom chores without fair compensation"?

Peniel: No, it was definitely the former, it's definitely tagging along. What's so interesting, Brian, I think you would remember those days, but my young daughter who's seven does not. These were the days where, one, everybody was smoking, and nobody said, "Hey, the kids are here. Stop smoking." Everybody was smoking in New York.

Brian: Cigarettes?

Peniel: Cigarettes. They were smoking cigarettes and people had thermoses that were filled with coffee, that they were constantly drinking. It was a different time, but it was a time where people thought that children should be exposed to these struggles for dignity and citizenship. It was also interesting because when we used to go up to Mount Sinai, we saw it was much more multiracial than where we lived in Queens. It got me starting to ask questions of, well, why, because when you went on the picket line, you saw people who were Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish.

People who were from the Soviet Union. People from the Caribbean and Africa and they all got along. That's what was so interesting. These people were friends with my mother. My mom is a fluent Spanish speaker. She was speaking Spanish with folks who were from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and from other places. Then, when we would get home, it was 100% Black and all those things when I went to Saints Joachim and Anne right there in Queens and the teachers were telling us that the Civil Rights movement had won. It had been very successful and we had overcome.

You were just trying to figure all this out as a kid. At one point in the book, I talk about how at Saints Joachim and Anne, they used to have classroom pictures of past classes. The school had started in the 1950s. What was striking is that the school had been overwhelmingly white, 100% white in the 1950s. Then, you could see in the 1960s, by around 1967, you got the first Black students at Saints Joachim and Anne.

Over the next 10 years, you see the white flight from really classrooms that were basically 90% white to classrooms that are going to become about 10% and 5% white till you see no more white kids there at all.

Brian: That really gets you into the heart of the theme of the book with, I guess, what you might call the second reconstruction of the Civil Rights era or immediate post-Civil Rights era. Thinking that you had won, the people had won, and racial injustice was starting to seriously be in the rearview mirror but then the backlash.

Peniel: Absolutely. One of the things I lay out in the book is that since 1865, the history of the country has been this conflict between reconstructionist supporters of multiracial democracy and redemption advocates of white supremacy. What's so interesting about these two different framings of American history is that in some periods, one narrative wins over the other. For instance, at the end of the 19th century, following the white riot in Wilmington, North Carolina in November of 1898, the narrative that wins really for almost the next 70 years is that lost cause narrative.

The narrative that says, you know what? Reconstruction was a bad idea. The clan were heroes and Black people were not ready for citizenship and dignity and things like lynchings and the racial massacres and pogroms were really just white people defending themselves and defending their citizenship. Now that might sound bizarre to our audience, but people really believed that. There was a whole school of history, the Dunning School of history coming out of Columbia University that wrote that in textbooks to the point where even John F Kennedy and I show this.

He believed that and had been taught that at Harvard, it took him becoming president to see the backlash against his efforts to just follow the law and enroll a Black student, James Meredith in the University of Mississippi in 1962. After the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963, for Kennedy to tell his younger brother, Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general that he was wrong and that Thaddeus Stevens was right. That the Confederacy in the south were this morally reprehensible entity and he had been taught this incorrect history.

What's interesting about the second reconstruction is that reconstructionist win the narrative war. Thanks to really at the top level Martin Luther King Jr. At the grassroots level, people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and what that narrative war says is that racial justice is a moral and political good. Really, over the next 50 years from King's, I have a dream speech and John F Kennedy's June 11th Civil Rights address to the nation, all the way to the Shelby Holder decision on June 25th, 2013, there is a racial justice consensus in the United States. It's an imperfect consensus, Brian. It doesn't mean that everything is great and everybody is getting along, but it's a consensus to the point that Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama, George H W Bush, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, all support voting rights. They do that in different ways, but they all support voting rights and none of those people will say, "Hey, this election has been sort of stolen from me," or foment insurrection.

What's interesting about Barack Obama and really this third reconstruction, the four pivot points are, Obama's election, the rise of BLM, Black Lives Matter 1.0, as I call it in 2013, the rise of MAGA and Donald Trump in 2016, and then all that we experienced in 2020. When we look at the January 6th, both insurrection, but also the public hearings because the public hearings, Brian, are part of that narrative war to decide who are we as citizens and what story is going to infuse the shaping of our policies, the shaping of our laws, the shapings of our culture. That's what's so important.

Stories are how we make sense of ourselves, whether we are Black, white, Latinx, Jewish, queer but then, stories are how we make sense of ourselves within the context of America, whether we're indigenous, API, disabled. When we tell ourselves stories that are aspirational and truthful, but talk about the bitter and the beauty of the country, we then are better able to shape policies that confront histories of marginalization, histories of racism, antisemitism, et cetera. When we tell a different story and we start lying to ourselves about our past, those lies actually come and shape our present and our future.

That's why these narrative wars are so important. We can see it with contemporary voter suppression and I dig into this in the book. We can see it with the assaults on so-called critical race theory, which are really just violations of free speech. It's really a battle over what story do we tell about the United States. If we tell specific stories, we can actually get different outcomes. That's what's so interesting. The stories we tell are really about not just self-empowerment, although that's part of it, they're about the collective vision of the country.

When we tell these complex stories about slavery and complex stories about the multi-racial nature of the country and all those people, not just Black folks, but white folks and other groups who fought to make this country a true democracy. When we tell that kind of story, we actually get different outcomes than when we tell a different story.

Brian: Is that the context in which you see your own work because your job title is-- well, your job title is professor, but you are a historian, which of course, contains the word story.

Peniel: Oh, absolutely. I think the more I become a student of history, the less titles degrees matter. I really see myself as just a storyteller and trying to engage really various publics, both my students at the University of Texas at Austin, but wider public about the story of us, because the story we tell each other about us, oh, boy, that matters so much. We can tell a story that provides a context for dignity and citizenship for all of us or we can tell a different story, but whatever story we tell, it impacts our policies.

It impacts the decisions and the neighborhoods we live in. It impacts our religious and non-religious institutions. It impacts our domestic and foreign policy. It impacts where we send our children to school and what they learn in those schools. Storytelling is the number one aspect of all of our lives. Remember, we all start with our families, our families tell us each a story of how we were born, why we matter, and how we came into being. Stories, I'm convinced, are the number one thing that shapes all of our lives.

We are all connected by the stories we tell about ourselves and then how we fit within the larger communities that we live in, whether that's America, whether that's Europe or Africa or the entire world.

Brian: My guest is University of Texas historian, Peniel Joseph, whose brand new book is called The Third Reconstruction: America Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Spanning the time from Barack Obama's election as president in 2008 to the insurrection on January 6th, 2021, but really also going way, way back from there, making connections to the first reconstruction right after the Civil War, the second reconstruction, which might be defined as the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s and just after.

We can take a few phone calls for Peniel Joseph, for whom is this resonating for you to want to say something or ask him a question? 212-433-WNYC, 2124339692 or a tweet @BrianLehrer. I want to go back to one of the older historical events that you mentioned, that most of our listeners probably don't know about. That white riot in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 and one of the many things I found interesting in the book is that you compare this event in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 to January 6th. Tell everybody a little bit about the history of Wilmington in 1898 and why you make that connection to January 6th.

Peniel: Well, Wilmington, North Carolina was one of the archipelagos of freedom during reconstruction that persists long after 1877. Usually, historians look upon reconstruction is just a 12-year period that ends after the election of 1876 and the removal of Northern troops from the south in exchange for the presidency of Rutherford B Hayes in 1877. I really look at it as this three decades struggle that continues really long past that election of 1876, even though the federal government's help is very, very either intermittent or not there in the south during that period.

Wilmington is a place that's about 45% Black. There is interracial political power in Wilmington. You have Black legislators in Wilmington, Black police officers in Wilmington, and there becomes a plot, a really a successful coup by white supremacists to dislodge that Black political power. There starts to become rumors of Black violence that are untrue. They use both state militia, police, but also just organized gangs of whites to kill over a hundred Black people, thousands flee into the woods of Wilmington. Wilmington now 124 years later is only about 7%, 8% Black.

President William McKinley does nothing about this. George C White who's the last Black Congressman representing a Southern State until 1970 after 1901 famously tries to get the president to acknowledge what happened in Wilmington. This full blown massacre. They take their inspiration from Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist, former governor, and senator from South Carolina. Benjamin Tillman before we had MAGA and the red MAGA hats, we had the red shirts, the bloody red shirts of Benjamin Tillman, who committed huge, huge massacres of Black people in South Carolina and other parts of the country.

The 1898 is very important for us to see that kind of violence even before January 6th. It's important to remember, Brian, on January 19th, 1871 and I write about this in the book, the Congress starts an investigation into klan violence in 1871. By March, there are public hearings where both white and Black people are testifying about klan violence and white terror. It's not just called the Klan. The Klan is a catchall name for literally hundreds of racial terrorist groups in the south during reconstruction.

It's important for us to see that these unhappy patterns that sometimes we think to ourselves, "Oh, boy, these are aberrations in our history." They're not, and it's not just George Wallace from the 1960s or David Duke from the 1990s. It goes way, way back but one thing I can tell our listeners is that I also look at Ida B Wells and I make it a point to center Black women across three reconstruction generations, Ida B Wells, Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Tamika Mallory, Stacey Abrams, who have crafted a different story about America. One that's very expansive, one that pushed back against racism, pushed back against at times Black male patriarchy, pushed back against any kind of exclusion. I look at how that really paved the way for the movement for Black lives and the Black Lives Matter movement and that idea that all Black lives matter. I look at both Black feminist theorists during this period and activist, Black queer feminist activism.

I do that purposefully because if we're going tell the story of us, we have to be unbelievably inclusive and we can't leave behind the Pauli Murray's, the James Baldwin's, and the Bayard Rustin's who were Black folks who were queer, who were radically democratic and believed in citizenship rights for all people but who faced discrimination from other Black people as well as white discrimination. It's important for us to think about the story that's so expansive that there's nobody who's left out. King is really brilliant here because King said his whole mission was to help the least of these everywhere globally.

If we can create that story and that narrative, we have it. This is just about us sewing it and knitting it together because it's occurred where we've had all these different groups of people who've tried to turn the United States into that shining city on a hill that Reagan talked about. The only problem is that Reagan and even Barack Obama, when they talk about that, oftentimes they're not willing to admit it. It hasn't been a shining city on the hill for everyone and the why behind.

Brian: It connecting so many dots. In our remaining few minutes before you have to go, let me get a couple of listener questions in for you. Here's [Enmont] in Mount Vernon, you're on WNYC with historian Peniel Joseph. Hello, [Enmont].

Caller: Good morning, Brian and Peniel. I just wanted to say that it was only in my own studying of history that I became passionate about history once I was in college. I attended Howard University. Through my education there, I started to really understand the power of what had happened during reconstruction. When I was in high school, reconstruction was just a blip. It was just like, "Oh," and then we had reconstruction and we went on but that is really telling in the story. I think what Peniel is saying is so the key is that tell the story America tells about itself is not the actual truth.

It's some sort of fairytale that is not the full story and by just glossing over the rough parts, leads people to say really interest untrue things and have more importantly untrue beliefs. I was watching MSNBC last night, had on Civil War documentary last night, and they were getting to a lot of the same points that people just have these feelings about what America is or what the Confederate flag means. It's not rooted in any fact or truth because it's not taught.

Brian: Thank you very much. I'm sure that Peniel, you agree with all of that. Let me get one more listener question in for you via Twitter. The question is, "Please talk more about the textbooks, the Columbia guy, you know the reference that he is making to something you said before."

Peniel: The Dunning School of history, which really is the history, the fake history that informs gone with the wind, informs birth of the nation which is the 1915 DW Griffith, Black and white film that has white actors and Black face playing Black men who are trying to repeatedly rape white women. The klan comes in as heroes and Woodrow Wilson said that this was brilliant history written lightning, and it was shown in the White House. The history is what matters.

Those textbooks are very important because the K through 12 textbooks, this is the kind of history that John F Kennedy got at Harvard University that Dunning school, that racist school of reconstruction history. That's why the controversy over the 1619 project is so important here. All the sweeping legislation in Virginia, Texas, and Florida. The reason why it matters is that this is the suppression of our story as Americans. They argue that telling the real story somehow is going make white kids feel bad and make us lose our patriotism and hate the country.

I would argue the exact opposite. Telling the full story of American history, which includes racial slavery, Japanese internment camps, citizens being in turn, huge histories of antisemitism, that continue to this day and hate crimes against Blacks, against Jews, what we've done to indigenous folks and this idea of settler colonialism and what we did to there's still 2 million indigenous folks in the United States, but what we've done and not acknowledge that, this is all hugely important, the hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islanders.

When we tell that story, we're also going to tell the beautiful parts of that story, which is those of us who rallied around in solidarity with each other to transform the country into this multi-racial democracy. [crosstalk]

Brian: And so to finish--

Peniel: You don't have to to tell the bitter but there's beauty there, too, Brian.

Brian: Well, that was what I wanted to ask you about to close out anyway, because there's a glint of optimism, at least to my eye at the end of this book, despite these not being optimistic times and all the regression and all the horrors that you document and just refer to some of, you do write that the third reconstruction offers a new opportunity to forge national policies that could lead to the beloved community that Martin Luther King referred to free of racial, injustice, poverty, and violence. What gives you that hope considering recent events and recent trends.

Peniel: It really becomes the lens that you have to look at these things through. We have to be realistic and look at the challenges, but also we have to be optimistic and look at the opportunities. The people that give me hope are the Black Lives Matter movement, Stacey Abrams, and the voting rights campaign in Georgia, the work of so many different Black women across generations, which I cite to end domestic violence, to provide aid to those who have HIV and AIDS, especially queer kids and trans kids.

What gives me hope is justice Ketanji Jackson and becoming the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. There's many, many aspects of the way we live now that people focus on the pessimistic part and what's happened in the backlash. That's understandable, but we also have to look at the progress that's been made even within that backlash. That continues a specific pattern. I argue that if we finally can tell a cohesive, complex story about America and American history in American democracy, we actually become stronger and we're able to build that beloved community.

All around us, just two years ago, 25 million people were in the streets, demanding social justice and racial justice. We had the largest white demonstrators in support of social justice in the history of the republic. All of that is very, very positive and optimistic. We have to connect that sentiment to institutions and to our politics and our policies. One of the things I remind us here, and James Baldwin said it where he said we could finally achieve our country if we told a different story, is that that storytelling resides in each of us because we are the institution.

Sometimes we say there's systemic racism but we're part of the system. Sometimes we say there's institutional racism. We're part of the institutions and the structures. We have to share a different story with our children, with our grandchildren, with the people who were part of communities all across the country if we want to see the change. That's what makes us so powerful each of us, it's more than just the vote. The vote's very important but it's the stories we tell each other about this country, that's going eventually be impactful enough to change and transform this country for the better.

Brian: University of Texas History Professor Peniel Joseph, his new book is called The Third Reconstruction: America Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Thank you so, so much. I can tell from our calls and our tweets that our listeners really, really appreciated you. Thank you.

Peniel: Thank you, Brian. It was great to be back here with you again.

 

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