In the summer of 2011, under siege from both the left and the right for his efforts to broker a budget deal to avoid a debt default, Barack Obama defended his leadership with a telling historical analogy. He noted that the Emancipation Proclamation, a copy of which hangs on his Oval Office wall, outlawed slavery only in rebel states while allowing the practice to continue elsewhere in the country. This compromise, Obama noted, was necessary to keep Union-allied slave states like Kentucky and Missouri behind the war effort—and it was the Union’s military superiority that ultimately enabled the freeing of all the slaves. Yet had partisan media outlets like the Huffington Post been around when Lincoln signed the Proclamation, Obama joked, the headline would have read: “Lincoln Sells Out Slaves.”

Obama was making a fair point about the wisdom and necessity of compromise—a point later reflected in a memorable scene in the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, when the president, accused by abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of lacking a moral compass, responds that knowledge of true north is not enough to navigate past the swamps that stand between you and your destination.

Yet if compromise was a vital component of the Proclamation, it is worth remembering who precisely was asked to sacrifice. It wasn’t the abolitionists, whose only real stake in the outcome was their moral convictions. It was African Americans, whose day of liberation was deferred. And the waiting, of course, would continue. For after the glory of emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment came the failure of Reconstruction and, with it, the stripping of black political and economic rights. The brutal reimposition of a white supremacist system under Jim Crow would survive another century and affect the trajectory of black America far beyond that.

On the eve of Obama’s second inauguration, a day that falls almost exactly 150 years after the Proclamation went into effect, we thought it appropriate to devote this issue of the magazine to the subjects of race, history, and the condition of minorities in America today. For while it is true that Obama, as measured by his November vote totals, retains the overwhelming support of Americans of color, that support was accompanied by yet another political compromise. America, it seemed, would reelect its first black president, but only if he didn’t talk about race.

Obama mentioned race fewer times in his first two years in office than any Democratic president since 1961, according to a study by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Daniel Gillon. When he has talked about it, it often has not gone well. When he said last year that if he had a son, “he would look like Trayvon” Martin, the young man who was killed tragically in Florida, he provoked a fierce backlash, not only from the predictable sources—Rush Limbaugh and the National Review—but also from more moderate groups that had previously condemned Martin’s killing. Obama’s simple expression of sympathy became instantaneously polarizing, a political liability both to himself and to those who would advocate for black issues. Perhaps chastened by the experience, Obama has since returned to his tried-and-true strategy of assiduously avoiding the topic of race.

This politically imposed cone of silence around the president makes it all the more difficult for the nation to acknowledge and confront discrimination in our society—and if you doubt such a thing still exists, consider the eight-hour lines this past fall at some polling stations in minority neighborhoods in Ohio and Florida after Republican-led governments narrowed early-voting laws. Or consider the AFL-CIO-sponsored poll showing that nationwide, 24 percent of Latino voters and 22 percent of African Americans waited longer than thirty minutes to vote in November, while only 9 percent of whites did.

The don’t-talk-about-race stricture also makes it hard for the country to have an honest conversation about the many realms of American life in which minorities suffer disproportionately—even if overt discrimination isn’t the driving cause. Nearly all Americans lost significant wealth in the Great Recession, but as a percentage of income blacks and Hispanics lost far more. Modern health scourges like obesity and diabetes are hitting all of America hard but African Americans harder. Our China-like rates of incarceration are slowly beginning to trouble the consciences of the opinion-making class, but they have long been a devastating reality in the lives of black families, where every third father or son is, has been, or someday will be behind bars.

It has never been easy to engage the sympathies of America’s white majority on issues of racial inequality, even in the best of times—and these are far from the best of times. Many whites today are of the view that the civil rights era removed the main obstacles to minority self-advancement, and that whatever disparities remain are largely the result of bad personal choices or unhelpful cultural mores for which contemporary whites cannot be blamed. But it is also the case that many whites, perhaps even most, have a lingering sense that it is not that simple—that our country’s past mistreatment of minorities has consequences that are still playing out, even if the chain of causality is not altogether clear.

One aim of the stories in this issue is to clarify those historical causal chains. Why, for instance, do middle-class blacks today have substantially less wealth than whites at the same income level? It is not a lesser propensity to save. Rather, as Thomas Sugrue explains (“A House Divided“), many working-class white Americans spent the late 1940s through the early ’60s riding the great escalator of upward mobility, building wealth they could pass on to their children with the help of a booming economy and federally subsidized mortgages and college educations. Meanwhile, black Americans were not allowed on board because of various discriminatory laws and practices. When, in the late 1960s and ’70s, the federal government began eliminating these barriers, the great postwar economic escalator was already beginning to break down. Union jobs were disappearing. Wages were stagnating. And the homes African Americans were buying in the inner cities, often from whites who were leaving for the suburbs, were about to decline rather than rise in value. In other words, past discrimination and bad timing, not bad habits, best explain today’s racial wealth disparities.

If whites and minorities were once on different economic and social tracks, they sure aren’t anymore. Downward mobility is now a shared American experience, especially since the Great Recession. Family breakdowns we once associated with poor blacks are now common among working- and middle-class whites (see Isabel Sawhill, “The New White Negro“). This merging of racial trajectories is not exactly good news. But it does provide an opening for the president to lead, even if he doesn’t have much latitude to talk openly about race, for the simple reason that it is now more possible to argue that policies that would help minorities would also profoundly benefit the majority.

The most promising of those policies, moreover, really are color-blind. The best way to reduce minority health disparities, it turns out, is to do something about the broader problems of income and social inequality (see Phillip Longman, “Is Inequality Shortening Your Life Span?“). The surest route to narrowing the black-white wealth gap is to crack down on the predatory lending that threatens the whole financial sector (see Reid Cramer, “The American Dream, Redeemed“). The key to helping more college students of color graduate is to demand more accountability from the entire higher education system (see Kevin Carey, “The Next Affirmative Action“). Our unconscionably high rates of incarceration (Glenn Loury, “Prison’s Dilemma“), could be substantially reduced with parole system reforms that would also lower the overall crime rate (Mark Kleiman, “A New Role for Parole“).

Policies like these should be Obama’s true north, the point toward which he should try to move the nation in the next four years. There are swamps between here and there, among them the public’s conflicted and often virulent attitudes toward race. But great presidents find ways to navigate around the swamps.

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The post Introduction: Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A couple of years ago, speaking to a bipartisan group of college students about the Emancipation Proclamation, President Barack Obama commented, half jokingly, that if the executive order were signed today, headlines would scream, “Lincoln Sells Out Slaves.” His observation spoke not only to our sensationalist news culture, but also to the rocky reputation of the Proclamation itself, a document that has been both praised and damned by politicians, scholars, and activists on both sides of the ideological aisle since Lincoln announced it in 1862 and then signed it 150 years ago this year, on January 1, 1863.

The reasons behind the ups and downs in the Proclamation’s reputation are various. From the outset, it was roundly and predictably condemned by Democratic opponents, who characterized it as a brash and sweeping abuse of presidential power. Perhaps less predictably, Northern abolitionists also condemned it, but for the opposite reason. They argued that it didn’t do enough, didn’t go far enough. Since the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to those slaves in rebel-held territory, abolitionists complained that it abandoned thousands of slaves, including the four loyal slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. Of the four million slaves in America at the time, the Proclamation applied to only about 3.1 million of them. It would take another three years and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 to abolish slavery throughout the United States. Adam Gurowski, a Polish radical working as a translator in the State Department at the time, despaired that “the proclamation is generated neither by Lincoln’s brains, heart or soul, and what is born in such a way is always monstrous.”

Despite Gurowski’s prediction, in the decades following the Civil War, until the middle of the twentieth century, the reputation of the Emancipation Proclamation expanded in most Americans’ estimation, reaching a rather exalted status in the American history textbooks in many of our childhoods. But then, in the 1960s, the Proclamation’s reputation began to shrivel again. Some historians began to find the prose wanting. It irked them that the Proclamation was written in legalese as a military measure, not as an expression of moral conviction—evidence, they thought, that the document was “merely” the product of political calculation and compromise. Lincoln was found wanting, too. Steeped in the realities of the nineteenth century, Lincoln’s racial attitudes seemed out of step with the times.

As the civil rights movement grew, many African Americans bristled at the high regard with which the Proclamation was remembered in American history. It may have promised freedom, they argued, but it left them with a political and economic reality that was far from free. Worse, by celebrating the Proclamation as the moment at which blacks were officially “freed,” it seemed that Americans were able to conveniently paper over the racial injustices that persisted in society. Others took umbrage at the image, immortalized in the bronze sculpture at the Emancipation Memorial in the nation’s capital, of Lincoln as Great Emancipator bestowing freedom upon a kneeling, grateful slave. Crusading young civil rights activists argued that the enslaved won their freedom not because of Lincoln but in spite of him, that slaves were the primary agents of freedom, not the white man in the White House.

More recently, some libertarians, returning to an argument first made by Lincoln’s political opponents in 1863, have again denounced the Great Emancipator as a dictator who exceeded his executive authority and issued the Proclamation not to advance freedom but to exercise power and lay the groundwork for a Leviathan state. The Emancipation Proclamation, contested in its own time, has become devalued in ours.

But like many historical events at the center of heated debate, the Emancipation Proclamation deserves neither the blanket condemnation nor the blind exaltation it has received. Instead, we should use the occasion of the sesquicentennial to take a fresh look at this embattled decree, to examine the historical context in which it emerged and to gain a renewed appreciation for its place in the story of American freedom. Above all else, we should remember Lincoln as a moral and patient politician. His pragmatic and gradual way of proceeding agitated those who wanted immediate results, but time allowed him to build public support for unpopular measures and to win allies through artful and effective compromise. “It is my conviction,” he said, “that had the Proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.”

In April 1864, a little more than a year after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln responded to critics, who decried the document as a weak half measure and its author as a cynical politician, motivated only by military ends. In a letter, Lincoln explained, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”

That statement underscores the complex moral, social, and political reality that led Lincoln, in fits and starts over the course of more than a year, to embrace the need for the Emancipation Proclamation. When the Civil War began, he initially refused to consider a decree freeing the slaves, citing not moral qualms, but constitutional ones. In putting down what he viewed as the Southern states’ unconstitutional rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government, Lincoln would not violate his oath of office, which obligated him to uphold the Constitution. Since slavery was a state institution, governed by state law, Lincoln believed the president had no power to interfere in it.

Beyond his constitutional scruples, Lincoln had other concerns that prevented him from taking immediate, direct action against slavery. He feared that any precipitant action against the institution would deliver Kentucky, Missouri, or Maryland into Confederate hands, a shift in the balance sheet of war that could doom Union efforts. Although he probably never said it, Lincoln’s reputed comment speaks to the significance of the issue: “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” For months, Lincoln urged the border states to adopt plans of gradual emancipation that the federal government would fund, but they spurned his entreaties.

Lincoln also feared that any sweeping emancipation effort would be a gut punch to his soldiers, two-fifths of whom came from Democratic backgrounds. If he turned the war into an explicit assault on slavery, would the troops continue to fight? While they supported the Union, many would not embrace emancipation, in part because of a widespread fear that freed slaves would inundate the North. Such racial anxieties led many Americans, including Lincoln, to support far-fetched schemes of voluntary colonization to Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America as an answer to the problem of what to do with former slaves.

Lincoln’s political problems were not only domestic, but international as well. In the first year of the war, a delicate diplomatic game was afoot as the Confederacy sought aid and recognition from foreign nations, while Lincoln’s administration worked feverishly to prevent European involvement. England, in particular, posed the greatest threat. Some 80 percent of Britain’s cotton came from the United States, so they had an interest in safeguarding the South, and it was well known that the English aristocracy disdained the democratic politics of the Union.

Meanwhile, the war was not going well. The Union’s “Peninsula Campaign,” which had aimed at taking Richmond in the spring and summer of 1862, was a failure, and morale was low. Something needed to be done, or the Union would lose.

It was during this time that Lincoln found a way to sidestep his constitutional reservations about emancipating the slaves. As president, he felt he could not act constitutionally to intervene against slavery, but as commander in chief, he could act on the grounds of military necessity. Since slave labor helped the Confederacy wage war, freeing the slaves could be interpreted constitutionally not as an act of meddling in states’ rights, but as a blow to the Confederate war effort. Lincoln would later defend the Proclamation on those grounds, reminding Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase that “the original proclamation has no Constitutional authority or legal justification except as a military measure.”

Lincoln also overcame his earlier anxiety about the border states, believing that while they might initially condemn the Emancipation Proclamation, the time for a possible secession had passed: Union military presence was simply too well established to permit it. Emancipating the slaves in the Confederacy would serve to isolate the border slave states, leaving them no choice, Lincoln believed, but to eventually abolish the institution on their own.

Lincoln also eventually became persuaded that acting against slavery would win more support than condemnation abroad. Several days before issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln told a Chicago delegation, “Emancipation would help us in Europe and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.”

On July 22, 1862, Lincoln informed the cabinet of his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, later explaining, “I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operation we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game.” In the ensuing discussion, Secretary of State William H. Seward recommended that the Proclamation be deferred until a Union military victory so it would not be seen as a desperate measure taken on the retreat. Lincoln agreed. Victory came on September 17 at Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American history.

Five days later, on September 22, Lincoln publicly issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It stated his intention to authorize the emancipation of slaves in any area still in rebellion as of January 1, 100 days away. That period would serve as a testing ground for the decree, a volatile time for the Union that easily could have shaken Lincoln’s resolve.

On October 1, 1862, Lincoln traveled to Antietam to visit the troops. Charles Fessenden Morse, an officer with the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, guided Lincoln’s party and afterward wrote a letter to his family in which he praised the Emancipation Proclamation: “It gives us a decided policy, and though the President carefully calls it nothing but a war measure, yet it is the beginning of a great reform and the first blow struck at the real, original cause of the war.” The soldiers would fight not only for the goal of preserving the Union, but for emancipation as well.

Some soldiers also recognized the decree’s international import. A private in the 72nd Pennsylvania wrote to his father that “foreign nations will now have to come out flat-footed and take sides; they dare not go with the South, for slavery, they will all be ranged on our side.” The private may have been overly confident, but the delicate diplomatic game did begin to tip in favor of the Union. While some members of the British aristocracy were troubled by the Proclamation as an unwarranted assault on Southern rights to property, they did not act on behalf of the Confederacy. Any threat of intervention passed in October when the British prime minister announced that his government would “continue merely to be lookers-on.”

Domestic, not international, politics took center stage with the fall congressional elections. Many thought the contests would serve as a referendum on the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. When the results were tabulated, Lincoln’s Republican Party suffered heavy losses, losing twenty-eight seats in Congress as well as the governorships of New York and New Jersey. Even the president’s home district in Illinois went to the Democrats. In response, correspondents implored Lincoln to abandon his plans for emancipation, but he refused. Lincoln chose instead to interpret the elections as a referendum not on emancipation but on the stalled progress of the war. When a group of Kentucky Unionists visited him in November, he stood his ground, proclaiming that he would “rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.”

Not only did Lincoln hold to his plan despite intense political pressure, he also made the final document more powerful. While the preliminary decree had expressed continued support for publicly popular efforts “to colonize persons of African descent,” the final Proclamation made no mention of colonization at all. In addition, Lincoln authorized the enlistment of blacks into the armed services of the United States, a radical move he had opposed just a year earlier. By war’s end, nearly 180,000 black men served in the Union Army, and more than 18,000 served in the Navy. Their efforts not only helped to win the war, but also played a crucial role in African American self-empowerment and the struggle for civil rights in years to come. In March 1864, Private Thomas Long, of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, told his comrades, “If we hadn’t become sojers, all might have gone back as it was before . . . but now tings can never go back, because we have showed our energy, our courage & our naturally [natural] manhood.”

Lincoln also added a clause to the drily legalistic final version of the Emancipation Proclamation that lifted it toward moral grandeur: “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

January 1, 1863, the day the Proclamation would be signed, was to be a banner day, the Day of Jubilee. The night before, at a contraband camp for escaped slaves in Washington, hundreds gathered to pray and sing through the night. At midnight, one man began to weep, and when asked why he was crying he answered, “Tomorrow my child is to be sold neter more.”

On the morning of January 1, Lincoln went to his office to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, but noticed an error in the formulaic superscription and returned the document to be corrected. After spending three hours at a public reception, he withdrew again to his study to sign the corrected copy. Frederick Seward, the assistant secretary of state, recalled that Lincoln’s hand quivered—perhaps from the exertion of the day, perhaps from the magnanimity of the moment. He remembered Lincoln pausing before he signed and saying, “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. . . . If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” Later, Frederick Douglass spoke for many when he announced, “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, is incomparably greater.”

Emancipation, however, must be understood not as a moment—not as merely the first of January, 1863—but as the beginning of a long process. In the years following that first Day of Jubilee, Lincoln continued to defend the Proclamation and began working for a constitutional amendment that would abolish slavery throughout the United States forever. That amendment, which Lincoln called a “King’s cure for all the evils,” finally won congressional approval on January 31, 1865, and was transmitted to the states for ratification. The president was so excited that he signed the joint resolution, even though his endorsement was not required by the Constitution. Lincoln began to think past emancipation and toward a more holistic life for former slaves. What would freedom look like? How would meaningful progress be achieved? He talked about the importance of wage labor and education, and in his final public speech he countenanced limited black suffrage. He acknowledged that measures would have to be adopted and support given, so that “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other.”

But if the Emancipation Proclamation freed most slaves and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery as an institution, both stopped short of providing a viable path toward equality. The failure of Reconstruction led to nearly a century of crushing oppression, with freed slaves and their children mired in poverty, disfranchisement, racial violence, legalized segregation, and, in many cases, labor conditions that amounted to little more than de facto slavery. Only after World War II, with the rise of the civil rights movement, did these conditions begin to change.

In 1963, 100 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and praised the decree. King did not share young civil rights leaders’ willingness to criticize the document or demean Lincoln. Instead, King said that Lincoln’s “symbolic shadow” reached far and the Proclamation “came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”

But all was not optimistic that day. King went on to offer a searing indictment of American society. “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free,” he said, his voice booming across the Mall. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”

The Emancipation Proclamation now stands alongside the Declaration of Independence as a foundation of freedom in America. Given the unprecedented pressures that he faced, Lincoln should be remembered for doing all that he could, for overcoming virulent political and social opposition, for balancing political compromise with military realities, and for advancing what he believed to be a moral and pragmatic path forward, despite, at times, his own misgivings. And while his work ended more than a century ago, our own work must continue today.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

The post Thenceforward and Forever Free, Mostly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Wars have often unleashed forces the warring parties hadn’t expected and couldn’t control. The Thirty Years’ War began as a struggle between religions but gave birth to the modern system of secular states, while World War I profoundly undermined the legitimacy of the British aristocracy and the stability of that country’s global empire.

The U.S. Civil War, University of Illinois historian Bruce Levine argues in his new book, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South, was no exception. Southerners launched the war to preserve slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln responded to save the Union. Ironically, the stresses and necessities of a near-total war quickly began to corrode the Confederate slave system from within and pushed an ambivalent Union to embrace emancipation to ensure victory in the field.

“A war launched to preserve slavery succeeded instead in abolishing that institution more rapidly and more radically than would have occurred otherwise,” Levine writes. “[The] ideology of white supremacy, which had always provided critical support for slavery, inhibit[ed] the slaveholders’ government from doing what it needed to do to survive.”

Many hundreds of books have been written on the Civil War in the century since it began, but Levine feels too many of these have concentrated on the movements of armies, and too few on the effect the war itself had on the societies that were fighting it, and on the slave system in particular. The Fall of the House of Dixie is intended “to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory,” tracing how a “great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite.”

The result is a compelling, readable, and informative account of perhaps the war’s most significant accomplishment and how it came about. While U.S. history buffs may find many of the details familiar—William Freehling has covered much of this terrain in various volumes, and Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln shares its theme—it’s clarifying to have them assembled in one place. Those less familiar with the conflict will profit from starting their education here.

Levine’s title is a play on Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, which features an outwardly intimidating edifice concealing a fatal structural flaw that brings its collapse. He shows that while the Deep Southern plantation system that had appeared impregnable in the 1850s—producing staggering wealth for the autocrats who built and defended it—turned out to be so riven with deep, structural cracks that it proved too brittle to survive a protracted military conflict.

Firstly, much of what was thought of as “the South” did not wish to go to war to serve the interests of aristocratic slave lords, many of whom held poor whites and the rough and rugged people of the hills and mountains in more contempt than their slaves. West Virginians seceded from Virginia in order to stay in the Union, and the people of eastern Tennessee, northern Alabama, and swaths of North Carolina tried to follow them out of the Confederacy. Kentuckians never left at all. By late 1863, anti-Confederate guerillas had taken over large swaths of the Arkansas and Georgia hill countries. “The condition of things in the mountain districts,” Confederate Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell warned, “menaces the existence of the Confederacy as fatally as either of the armies of the United States.”

Lowland whites rallied to the Stars and Bars in 1861. Like their Appalachian neighbors, they generally had few qualms about slavery and had internalized the white supremacist ideology that sustained it. But they also lived in regions where the enslaved comprised a third, half, or more of the population. “The great mass of non-slaveholders in the South, and especially in the cotton States,” Texas secessionist W. S. Oldman argued, shared the planters’ “interest in social order and domestic peace, which were threatened to be destroyed by the emancipation of slaves [who would] … riot without restraint.” The belief that the Yankees would be quickly routed fueled early enthusiasm.

But the war dragged on for years, with much of the fighting taking place within the Confederacy. Long before Appomattox, this fighting had dealt slavery, and the underpinnings of lowland Southern society, several mortal wounds.

Levine makes clear both that the South seceded to protect slavery—as anyone who wades into the primary sources knows—and that the Union at large fought to save the Union. That said, he also shows that “a war to save the Union was necessary in 1861 only because a political party that denounced slavery and menaced its future in the Union had won the support of a clear majority of northern voters in 1860. If secession had caused the war, therefore, it was the sharpening conflict over slavery that had caused secession.” Nor were “northern” concerns centered only on whether slavery would be allowed to expand to new territories. It had become a threat to democracy throughout the United States. Slaveholders came down hard on any Southern whites who criticized slavery—those who did were driven from pulpits, classrooms, and newsrooms—but they also worked to ban both the distribution of abolitionist materials by the U.S. Postal Service and speaking against slavery in the U.S House. Slavery was coming to threaten liberties of free people in the free states.

Still, federal forces initially had no intention of freeing slaves when they invaded Southern territory, but military expediency pushed many commanders in that direction. Some seized human “property” as contraband, effectively freeing slaves from bondage by declaring them federal property. This drew thousands of slaves to flee to Union lines, weakening Southern production and filling up federal forts and encampments with people often eager to provide intelligence, build fortifications, or even take up arms when allowed to do so. Lincoln pushed back, fearful of upsetting the fragile political coalition of “border state” slaveholders, Yankee abolitionists, and pro-slavery, pro-Union patriots the war effort depended on. But as the war went on, most members of the coalition came to accept what Frederick Douglass had called the “inexorable logic of events.” As Union lines expanded southward, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people had tasted freedom. Returning them to bondage would be morally questionable and practically impossible. From 1862, captured and runaway slaves were emancipated and even welcomed into the Union army.

For Confederates, the increasing military burdens tested public commitment to the war. Slaveholders were insulted when the government tried to force them to provide slaves to support the war effort or to join the army even if they felt they had more important things to do. Such policies—which grew more draconian as the South’s position deteriorated—”violated political, social, and other cultural imperatives and taboos.” This included “keeping government small and weak, extolling local and state sovereignty over that of a national government, and keeping black people firmly subordinated and strictly excluded from many spheres of life.” Planters refused to grow food for the army instead of cotton for profit. Critical fortifications were left unfinished because they refused to loan slaves to accomplish the task. Morale in Confederate ranks was eroded when well-connected plantation owners passed laws giving their families special exemptions from conscription.

Southerners had long claimed that black people liked being enslaved because many of them realized they were incapable of providing for themselves. Serving whites was supposedly their “manifest destiny” and the best fate any of them could have. This ideological holding always stood uneasily alongside the slave lords’ oft-expressed fears of a slave uprising and the draconian measures they took to keep their property compliant. But the war laid bare this lie. As Union forces approached, house servants and field hands who’d outwardly expressed loyalty to their masters suddenly abandoned them. Levine quotes one disillusioned Southern belle, Honoria Cannon, saying she sometimes wished “there was not a negro left in the country,” although “learning to do our own work would be hard.”

If having their slaves abandon them was a hard blow to planter ideology, seeing many of them return as brave and disciplined Union soldiers was the knockout punch. Black volunteers served bravely in unit after unit, belying the notion that they didn’t want the freedom and were incapable of fighting for it. General Robert E. Lee thought Lincoln’s arming of the slaves a “savage and brutal policy,” as it would consign “our social system” to “destruction” and a “degradation worse than death.”

Reeling from these shocks, white Southern unity began to collapse. Poor soldiers abandoned their units in droves and made their way home to help their families grow food. Anti-Confederate guerilla bands spread across the uplands. Some political leaders did the unthinkable—suggesting blacks be armed and encouraged to defend the Confederacy in exchange for freedom. Clearly a war to defend slavery had lost its central aim.

By war’s end, Congress had passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery and various Northern states had begun dismantling some of the laws that made blacks second-class citizens. This “second American Revolution” would be substantially rolled back, of course, with the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow laws, which would last another hundred years, supported by more or less the same white supremacist ideology that had sustained slavery. Still, the House of Dixie would never be fully restored.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

The post Dixie’s Enemy Within appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Children in elementary school often come home with the idea that the purpose of the Civil War was to end slavery—but if that were true, then why did it take Abraham Lincoln so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and why was it less than universally popular in the Union states? If you see the movie Lincoln, you get a much fuller picture of the contingency of emancipation, and of the difficulty of passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery completely—but why didn’t Lincoln and the Congress think to address at the same time the obvious question of what status the freed slaves would have after that? After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress and the state governments settled that matter by passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave the former slaves full civil rights and voting rights—but why was it necessary for exactly the same rights to be reenacted, after enormous struggle, nearly a century later, during the civil rights era?

The answers to all these questions are essentially the same: for most of American history, white America has been highly ambivalent, or worse, about the idea of full legal equality for black Americans. Emancipation itself was a forced move, an obvious consequence of the war only in retrospect; it happened because in war zones in the Confederate states, slaves left their plantation homes and appeared at Union army encampments (they were known at the time as “contraband”), and somebody had to decide what to do about them; sending them back to their owners would be both morally suspect and a form of material aid to the enemy. There has always been a debate about what kind of Reconstruction regime Lincoln would have instituted after the war, had he lived; his racial impulses were generous, but he was not an abolitionist until he actually abolished slavery. Reconstruction—the tumultuous decade or so that followed the Civil War—was an enormous shaping force in American history, and not just in the area of race relations. It’s worth recounting in basic outline, because it’s a far less familiar story than that of the Civil War itself, but far more relevant today.

The word “Reconstruction” is somewhat misleading in the American case, because it implies that the main challenge was managing the tension between punishing the South for seceding and getting it back on its feet economically and politically. In this instance the more pressing question was what the lives of the millions of freed slaves in the South would be like. Would they be able to vote? To hold office? To own property? To sue white people? Would government undertake an active, expensive effort to educate them and put them on the way to economic self-sufficiency? Merely to say that former slaves were now free turned out to resolve remarkably little.

In the period just after the Civil War, Lincoln’s vice president and successor, Andrew Johnson, was impeached for moving too slowly on these matters, and for being too lenient with the South. Then the fiercely antislavery “radical Republicans” took power, rammed through the Fourteenth (civil rights) and Fifteenth (voting rights) Amendments, maintained the presence of federal troops in the South to enforce those laws, and ran a proto-War on Poverty through a new federal agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to help the freed slaves. Just as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment were enormously controversial, in the North as well as the South, so too, only more so, were these “radical Reconstruction” measures.

The freed slaves never got “forty acres and a mule,” a land-reform idea that has resonated through the years but wasn’t enacted (see “Rumors of Land“), but they did get the basics of citizenship—most importantly, the right to vote. One of the most amazing achievements in the history of black America was the creation, in just a few years, of an elaborate political machinery—Republican, of course—that produced far higher (in fact, pretty close to 100 percent) voter turnout among freed slaves in the South than the United States as a whole has now. One result of this was that the South elected dozens of black officials to national office, and another was that state and local governments delivered, at least to some extent, what the freed slaves wanted, notably education at all levels.

None of this was especially popular in the North, and it was wildly unpopular in the white South. Most of the rest of America chose to understand black political empowerment in the South in terms that are still familiar in conservative discourse today: excessive taxation, corruption, and a power imbalance between federal and state government. These arguments were more presentable than simply saying that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and they built sympathy for the white South among high-minded reformists in the North who were horrified by the big-city political machines that immigrants had created in their own backyard. Good-government reformers hated the idea of uneducated people taking over the democratic machinery and using it to distribute power and patronage, rather than in more high-minded ways. Liberal northeastern publications like the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly were reliably hostile to Reconstruction, and their readers feasted on a steady diet of horror stories about swaggering corrupt black legislators, out-of-control black-on-white violence, and the bankruptcies of state and local government.

The Ku Klux Klan, which began in the immediate aftermath of the war and was suppressed by federal troops, soon morphed into an archipelago of secret organizations all over the South that were more explicitly devoted to political terror. These organizations—with names like White Line, Red Shirts, and White League—had shadowy ties to the more respectable Democratic Party. Their essential technique was to detect an incipient “Negro riot” and then take arms to repel it. There never actually were any Negro riots; they were either pure rumor and fantasy that grew from a rich soil of white fear of black violence (usually entailing the incipient despoliation of white womanhood) or another name for Republican Party political activity, at a time when politics was conducted out of doors and with high-spirited mass participation. The white militia always won the battle, if it was a battle, and nearly all the violence associated with these incidents was suffered by black people. In the aggregate, many more black Americans died from white terrorist activities during Reconstruction than from many decades of lynchings. Their effect was to nullify, through violence, the Fifteenth Amendment, by turning black political activity and voting into something that required taking one’s life into one’s hands.

All of this was known at the time (the movie Birth of a Nation can be seen as an extended brag about the effects of these techniques during Reconstruction), and there was no mystery about what the remedy to Southern political terrorism was: federal troops. Just as in every “Negro riot” the white militia won, in every encounter between the U.S. Army and a white militia, the Army won. The Army was in the South to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments, and it became increasingly clear that without its presence, the white South would regionally nullify those amendments through terrorism. But the use of federal troops to confront the white militias was deeply unpopular, including in the North. Remember that in the 1870s, despite the Civil War, few Americans thought of their national government as properly occupying an ongoing active presence in their lives. The country had never been entirely for full rights for African Americans in the first place, and it wanted to put the Civil War and its legacy behind it. In January 1875, troops under the command of General Philip Sheridan, the great Union cavalryman, marched onto the floor of the Louisiana legislature to ensure that representatives elected by black voters would be seated. This incident was denounced by virtually every respectable liberal voice in the North; at a public protest meeting in Faneuil Hall in Boston, most of the leading white former abolitionists demonstrated that they had turned against Reconstruction. It’s a clear example of the idea that the past is another country—it is hard for us to imagine today how abolitionists could support emancipation but not full black citizenship, but many of them did.

President Ulysses S. Grant, perhaps out of conviction and perhaps out of political calculation (black Southern voters were a big part of the Republican electoral base), placed himself close to the pro-Reconstruction edge of white opinion. Every member of his Cabinet was more hostile to Reconstruction than he was. But he did not feel confident that he could empower federal troops again and again to enforce black voting rights until the South finally accepted those rights. The crucial moment came in the fall of 1875 (election dates were less standardized then than they are now), when Mississippi and Ohio held state elections. White terrorists in Mississippi made it clear, by arming themselves and disrupting Republican political activity, that they intended to suppress the black vote to the point that the Democrats would win. A group of Ohio politicians visited Grant and told him that if he had federal troops enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in Mississippi, it would be so unpopular in Ohio that the Democrats would win there. Grant tried to compromise by sending a negotiator to Mississippi to broker a peace treaty between the Republicans and the White Line organization, but the Democrats immediately violated the treaty, there was a wave of electoral violence in November, and the Democrats swept back to power (while the Republicans held Ohio).

The next year, militia organizations across the South copied “the Mississippi plan” for black vote suppression, and this was one reason the 1876 presidential election ended in a tie—which was resolved by the Republicans promising to withdraw federal troops from the former Confederacy, in return for the presidency. From that point on, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South grew increasingly lax. Whites with guns “called upon” politically active Republicans, black and white, and urged them to move to the North or drop their political activities—and the advice was frequently taken. By the 1890s the Southern states were able legally to institute the Jim Crow system, which formally rescinded black civil rights and voting rights, without challenge from the federal government. Through at least the first half of the twentieth century, most white Americans, North and South, understood Reconstruction to have been a miserable failure on its own terms, and even most liberals regarded Jim Crow as an impregnable fortress. In 1957, Congress passed a civil rights bill, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to the South to ensure black Americans’ rights (specifically, the right to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas)—the first time either had happened since 1875.

Once your ear is tuned to hear them, echoes of Reconstruction are all around us today. The distinctive voting patterns of the South are a product of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and the dramatic switch in the South’s political loyalties beginning in the 1960s is a direct result of the Democratic Party’s aligning itself with the original goals of Reconstruction. Reconstruction was the beginning point for most of our debates about the proper size and extent of the federal government; the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were the first important measures directing the national government to do something affirmatively, rather than forbidding it to do something. It’s no accident that African Americans are consistently the group with the most favorable view of government; essentially all of their progress toward full legal equality came as a result of government—specifically, federal government—action. Periods of greater state and local power were periods of at best no progress, and at worst more terror. And psychologically, the yawning gap that still exists between the way whites and blacks understand Reconstruction—which, unlike the Civil War and the civil rights movement, has had almost no depictions for popular audiences since the days of Gone With the Wind, but gets communicated privately inside family homes in very different ways—must partly account for what remains of the profound gaps between the races in their perception of the essential nature of the national project.

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The post Deconstructing Reconstruction appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In January 1865, the famous General William Sherman met with Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, and twenty black church leaders in his quarters in Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of the meeting was to decide how to provide for the thousands of freed slaves—known as “contra-band”—following the Union army in its slow march across the South. A few days later, Sherman ordered that forty acres of land along the coast, from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. Johns, Florida, be given to each family of former slaves trailing in the army’s wake. The army would also loan draft animals to those families to use on their farms.

As winter turned into spring, a rumor that all freed slaves had been promised “forty acres and a mule” spread like warm weather through the Southern states. In the years to come, the phrase came to represent first a promise of a better society for blacks in the South and then a fading memory of what might have been, preserved in the stories of elderly former slaves, in textbooks, and eventually in the riffs and rhythms of modern black pop culture.

But it was only a rumor. The government never actually promised anyone forty acres and a mule. Sherman’s order was explicitly temporary, pending a final decision from Congress on the status of the land, and even then it applied only to a small fraction of freedmen.

He wasn’t the only Union army officer to look for a way to settle the former slaves. Meanwhile, in the North, some radical Republicans, including the vociferous Thaddeus Stevens, representative from Pennsylvania, supported the idea of giving all freed slaves land in forty-acre plots, which had been the standard division of land in the rural United States since the Northwest Ordinance. They believed that “black men and black families needed an economic stake, if freedom was going to be real, if freedom was going to be maintained in any meaningful way,” says Roy Finkenbine, a history professor at the University of Detroit Mercy.

While these proposals were never seriously considered, the rumors still flew. “I picked out my mule. All of us did,” Sam McAllum, a freed slave, said later, looking back on the end of the war. Plantation owners reported seeing former slaves walking the fields with stakes and balls of twine in anticipation of the Union army’s arrival, marking their claim on their piece of the land they’d spent their lives working.

But in the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson began giving parcels of land that had already been distributed to former slaves back to their previous owners. It was a disheartening turn of events for freed slaves and was motivated, most likely, by a simple political calculus. As a Democrat with little support in the North, says Steven Hahn, the author of A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Johnson needed Southern white votes to build a working electoral coalition. The former slaves’ advocates, for their part, were largely silenced by economic concerns. “They thought if the southern states did not continue to produce cotton for the world market, that this would be a massive blow to the American economy,” Hahn says. Since freed slaves would have been working small plots of land and would not have had access to a cotton gin, they probably wouldn’t have cultivated cotton.

As Reconstruction continued, some former slaves did manage to hold on to small parcels, especially in the area governed by Sherman’s order. For the most part, though, former slaves became sharecroppers, trapped in continual debt. They depended on white farmers and merchants “for the horse, the mule, the seed, the equipment, as well as living until the crops came in,” Finkenbine says. In addition, surviving store ledgers show that freed slaves, many of whom were illiterate, paid interest rates as high as 70 percent—a preview of modern-day predatory lending practices.

A century after that fateful January meeting in General Sherman’s quarters, the apocryphal promise lived on in living rooms, street protests, and jazz clubs during the civil rights movement. In 1965, the musician and activist Oscar Brown Jr. released an album including a song called “Forty Acres and a Mule.” Brown chanted,

We had a promise that was taken back,
And when we hollered, it was, “Hush, be cool.”
Well, me, I’m being rowdy, hot, and black.
I want my forty acres and my mule!

In the background of Brown’s recording, the audience can be heard laughing ruefully, the promise of meaningful economic opportunity having become, for them, little more than a bad joke.

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The post Rumors of Land appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.

The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.

Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful white people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken—a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No white official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a black teenager.

A cry for help: Having exhausted all other options, a desperate young woman named Carrie Kinsey wrote this letter directly to President Theodore Roosevelt asking him to help her brother, who had been taken to a forced labor camp nearby. “Let me have him,” she writes. “He have not don nothing for them to hase him in chanes.”

Confronted with a world of indifferent white people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on a speech by Roosevelt promising a “square deal” for black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States to help her brother.

“Mr. Prassident,” she wrote. “They wont let me have him.… He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.”

Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken. Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.

As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking—as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. It is the same in the next box on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and grimly bureaucratic responses—altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material—chronicle cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end of the Civil War.

“i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me … and i cant get her out,” wrote Reverend L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist church in Morganton, North Carolina. “i want ask you is it law for people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave without a pass.”

A farmer near Pine Apple, Alabama, named J. R. Adams, writing of terrible abuses by the dominant landowning family in the county, was one of the astonishingly few white southerners who also complained to the Department of Justice. “They have held negroes … for years,” Adams wrote. “It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes.”

A similar body of material rests in the files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the one institution that undertook any sustained effort to address at least the most terrible cases. Dwarfing everything at those repositories are the still largely unexamined collections of local records in courthouses across the South. In dank basements, abandoned buildings, and local archives, seemingly endless numbers of files contain hundreds of thousands of handwritten entries documenting in monotonous granularity the details of an immense, metastasizing horror that stretched well into the twentieth century.

By the first years after 1900, tens of thousands of African American men and boys, along with a smaller number of women, had been sold by southern state governments. An exponentially larger number, of whom surviving records are painfully incomplete, had been forced into labor through county and local courts, backwoods justices of the peace, and outright kidnapping and trafficking. The total number of those re-enslaved in the seventy-five years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II can’t be precisely determined, but based on the records that do survive, we can safely say it happened to hundreds of thousands. How many more African Americans circumscribed their lives in dramatic ways, or abandoned all to flee the South entirely, to avoid that fate or mob violence? It is impossible to know. Millions. Generations.

This is not an easy story for Americans to receive, much less accept. The idea that not just civil rights but basic freedom itself was denied to an enormous population of African Americans until the middle of the twentieth century fits nowhere in the triumphalist, steady-progress, greatest-generations accounts we prefer for our national narrative. That the thrilling events depicted in Steven Spielberg’s recent film Lincoln—the heroic, frenzied campaign by Abraham Lincoln leading to passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery—were in fact later trumped not just by discrimination and segregation but by the resurrection of a full-blown derivative of slavery itself.

This story of re-enslavement is irrefutably true, however. Indeed, even as Spielberg’s film conveys the euphoria felt by African Americans and all opposed to slavery upon passage of the amendment in 1865, it also unintentionally foreshadows the demise of that brighter future. On the night of the amendment’s passage in the film, the African American housekeeper and, as presented in the film, secret lover of the abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, played by the actress S. Epatha Merkerson, reads the amendment aloud. First, the sweeping banishment of slavery. And then, an often overlooked but powerful prepositional phrase: “except as a punishment for crime.”

It began with Reconstruction. Faced with empty government coffers, a paralyzing intellectual inability to contemplate equitable labor arrangements with former chattel, profound resentment against the emancipated freedmen, and a desperate economic need to force black workers back into the fields, white landowners and government officials began using the South’s criminal courts to compel African Americans back into slavery.

In the first years after the Civil War, even as former slaves optimistically swarmed into new schools and lined up at courthouses at every whisper of a hope of economic independence, the Southern states began enacting an array of interlocking laws that would make all African Americans criminals, regardless of their conduct, and thereby making it legal to force them into chain gangs, labor camps, and other forms of involuntarily servitude. By the end of 1865, every Southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws outlawing vagrancy and defining it so vaguely that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime. An 1865 Mississippi statute required black workers to enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African Americans could not legally be hired for work without a discharge paper from their previous employer—effectively preventing them from leaving the plantation of the white man they worked for.

After the return of nearly complete white political control in 1877, the passage of those laws accelerated. Some, particularly those that explicitly said they applied only to African Americans, were struck down in court appeals or through federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures on black life quickly replaced them. Most of the new laws were written as if they applied to everyone, but in reality they were overwhelmingly enforced only against African Americans.

In the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida passed laws making it a crime for a black man to change employers without permission. It was a crime for a black man to speak loudly in the company of a white woman, a crime to have a gun in his pocket, and a crime to sell the proceeds of his farm to anyone other than the man he rented land from. It was a crime to walk beside a railroad line, a crime to fail to yield a sidewalk to white people, a crime to sit among whites on a train, and it was most certainly a crime to engage in sexual relations with—or, God forbid, to show true love and affection for—a white girl.

And that’s how it happened. Within a few years of the passage of these laws, tens of thousands of black men and boys, and a smaller number of black women, were being arrested and sold into forced labor camps by state officials, local judges, and sheriffs. During this time, some actual criminals were sold into slavery, and a small percentage of them were white. But the vast majority were black men accused of trivial or trumped-up crimes. Compelling evidence indicates that huge numbers had in fact committed no offense whatsoever. As the system grew, countless white farmers and businessmen jostled to “lease” as many black “criminals” as they could. Soon, huge numbers of other African Americans were simply being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

The forced labor camps they found themselves in were islands of squalor and brutality. Thousands died of disease, malnourishment, and abuse. Mortality rates in some years exceeded 40 percent. At the same time, this new slavery trade generated millions of dollars for state and local governments—for many years it was the single largest source of income for the state of Alabama. As these laws and practices expanded across the South, they became the primary means to terrorize African Americans, and to coerce them into going along with other exploitative labor arrangements, like sharecropping, that are more familiar to twenty-first-century Americans.

This was the terrifying trap into which Carrie Kinsey’s young brother had been drawn. After a trip through the counties near Kinsey’s home, W. E. B. Du Bois, who was then teaching at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, described in 1905 one such convict farm. “It is a depressing place—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil—now, then, and before the war,” he wrote. He described black farmworkers who never saw wages because charges for rent and food always exceeded any compensation. “A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants,” Du Bois wrote. “And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.”

Du Bois could easily have been describing Kinderlou, where Kinsey’s brother was taken. Encompassing 22,000 acres, it was an enterprise that dwarfed any antebellum definition of the word “plantation.” Owned by state Representative Edward McRee and his brothers, Kinderlou was an unparalleled center of economic and political power in Georgia. By 1900, the siblings had inherited the enterprise from their father, a noted Confederate officer named George McRee. Each lived in a lavish mansion within a square mile of the center of the plantation, basking in the subtropical warmth of the Gulf Coast.

Between them, an empire bustled with enslaved laborers. Consuming the bulk of an entire county, Kinderlou included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy loam, and thousands more of dense pine and hardwood. On a private spur of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens of boxcars waited at all times for the hundreds of thousands of bushels of tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and cotton. The McRees owned their own cotton gins, compresses to make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A five-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation’s sugarcane to make syrup. Five eighty-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco, and a factory produced thousands of pallets, wooden crates, and baskets for shipping produce. Deep in the forests, McRee turpentine camps collected rosin for their naval stores distillery.

Initially, the McRees hired only free black labor, but beginning in the 1890s they routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from the state of Georgia to perform the grueling work of clearing land, removing stumps, ditching fields, and constructing roads. Other prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over the course of fifteen years, thousands of men and women were forced to Kinderlou and held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. After the turn of the century, the brothers began to arrange for even more forced laborers through the sheriffs of nearby counties in Georgia and Florida—fueling what eventually grew into a sprawling traffic in humans.

A black worker in 1904 described to a journalist how he arrived at the farm at age ten as a free laborer. A few years later, he attempted to leave to work at another plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure, one of the McRees and “some kind of law officer” tracked him down. The new employer apologized to the McRees for hiring the young worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known “this nigger was bound out to you.”

“So I was carried back to the Captain’s,” the man said later. “That night he made me strip off my clothing down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my bare back, and stood by until it was done.”

When his labor contract finally expired after a decade, the man was told he could leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his accumulated debt at the plantation commissary—$165, the rough equivalent of two years’ labor for a free farmer. Unable to do so, of course, he was compelled to sign a contract promising to work on the farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict.

He and other “prison laborers” slept each night in the same clothes they wore in the fields, on rotting mattresses infested with pests. Many were chained to their beds. Food was crude and minimal. The disobedient were tied to a log lying on their backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank of wood. After a slave was untied, if he could not return to work on his blistered feet, he was strapped to the log again, this time facedown, and lashed with a leather whip. Women prisoners were held across a barrel and whipped on their bare bottoms.

In the summer of 1903, the assistant U.S. attorney in Macon, Georgia, began a brief investigation into Kinderlou’s army of black laborers held against their will. He discovered that the brothers had arrangements with sheriffs and other officers in at least six other Georgia counties. These law enforcement officials would seize blacks on the grounds that they were “committing crimes,” often specious and sometimes altogether made up, and then sell them to the McRees and other businessmen, without ever going through the regular processes of the criminal courts. When the McRees learned of the investigation, they hastily freed the workers being held involuntarily. At least forty fled immediately.

James Robinson, the brother of Carrie Kinsey, may have been one of them, though federal officials never connected her allegations to the Kinderlou investigation. Even if Kinsey’s brother’s case had been investigated, her letter misspelled the name of the plantation.

In November 1903, a grand jury indicted the McRee brothers on thirteen specific counts of holding African American men and women illegally. Many of those enslaved had never been charged or tried in any fashion. Several public officials were indicted for conspiring to buy and sell blacks arrested on trivial or fabricated charges and then turning them over to the McRees. Sheriff Thomas J. McClellan, resorting to an audacious legal defense employed repeatedly in the handful of slavery cases brought by federal officials in the early twentieth century, argued that since no federal law specifically made slavery a crime, he could not be guilty of violating it. In effect, he claimed slavery was not illegal in the United States.

A member of the U.S. Congress submitted a legal brief in support of the sheriff, and prominent state officials sat at the defendants’ table during a hearing on a challenge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators of lumber camps, where thousands of other men were being held under similarly dubious circumstances, watched the proceedings closely. Appearing with his brothers before a Savannah courtroom, Edward McRee assured the judge that while his family had held many African Americans in the four decades since slavery’s abolition, they had never intended to enslave anyone or break the law. “Though we are probably technically guilty we did not know it,” he told the court. “This custom has been [in] existence ever since the war.… We never knew that we were doing anything wrong.”

The judge, hoping to avoid inflaming the anger of local whites, dispensed symbolic punishments. The McRees were allowed to plead guilty and pay a token fine of $1,000. In the wake of that trial and other failed prosecutions in the first years of the century, the U.S. Department of Justice turned a blind eye to such practices for the next forty years. Only the advent of World War II, a declining need for low-skill laborers, and a new era of federal prosecution would finally bring a true end to American slavery.

More than 100 years after Carrie wrote her letter, I received an unexpected call from a man who identified himself as Bernard Kinsey. He believed he was one of Carrie’s cousins.

Her letter had haunted me through years of research for the book I wrote on re-enslavement. What those few lines conveyed—the seizure of a teenage boy and his sale to a powerful businessman, the abject refusal of authorities to assist her, the brutalization of thousands of other blacks on the same plantation, the heroism of Carrie in seeking the aid of President Roosevelt, and, finally, the futility of her letter—captured the entire epic tragedy of black life in the rural South in the time between the Civil War and World War II. Even to this day, I find myself turning back to her story, resifting census records and cemetery records, looking for the fate of her brother. Did he escape? Did he die at Kinderlou? The answer still eludes me.

Bernard Kinsey represented the counter story. He told me that the Kinsey family fled to Florida not long after the McRee trial of 1903. Bernard’s father opened one grocery store. Then more. Bernard graduated from Florida A&M University in 1967, and a few years later he became one of the first black employees of Xerox Corp. Twenty years later, he retired as a senior executive, one of more than 10,000 African Americans at the company. He then became a major civic leader in Los Angeles, a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist, and one of the leading collectors of African American art and artifacts in the U.S.

Here was the valiance of African Americans who persevered against immeasurable odds. Here was the miracle that American society survived its sweeping betrayal of its own values, its collective dishonoring and debasement of Lincoln’s achievement, the euphoric crowds of 1865 and all those who had died in the Civil War. Ultimately, it is only in a full revelation of all three narratives—of Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment, of re-enslavement and the failure of American character, and of the slow ongoing resurrection of our values through the struggle of citizens such as Bernard Kinsey—that we can begin to understand the progress we have made, and the progress we have yet to achieve.

A few weeks after the publication of my book, the great-great-granddaughter of a white industrialist and enslaver of thousands in Atlanta wrote me to describe her pain at discovering a personal connection to these events—and the importance of not looking away from them. “We did not know of any of this before,” she wrote. “But I believe that the ghosts of slavery and racism and the terrorism inflicted within our own country must not be hidden away but brought out into the open.… Without the whole truth, we live only in illusions.”

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In October 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy took an after-lunch stroll through the elegant hallways of the White House residence. Their meeting that day was not official: it was not in the White House’s appointment book, and King had not been formally invited to discuss any sort of business. It was instead a guarded and rather stilted introduction for leaders of professed goodwill, in a political climate that remained extremely sensitive about race.

When the men passed the Lincoln Bedroom on their tour, King noticed the Emancipation Proclamation framed on the wall, and took the opportunity to raise, ever so delicately, the pressing issue of civil rights. King suggested something radical: a second Emancipation Proclamation, a proposal that would become the centerpiece of King’s lobbying campaign for the next year.

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights scholar and biographer of King, recently sat down with Washington Monthly editor Haley Sweetland Edwards and explained this idea, what happened next, and how Kennedy’s choice on the matter altered King’s thinking and the course of the civil rights movement.

How did the off-the-record meeting between King and Kennedy come about that October evening?

The administration had summoned King to Washington for a meeting that day at the Justice Department, where officials insisted that one of his advisers was a dangerous communist subversive and that King had to get rid of him. King was still shaken by the demand when he went into the residence, not the West Wing, for his private meeting with the president. An appointment with the president would have been too controversial—King was still a radioactive figure then. He had gone to jail in the South; he’d been indicted and tried for violating segregation laws embedded in the constitutions of the southern states; and he’d been denounced by the same governors who’d supported the president. King’s White House visit was deliberately made intimate but hidden, and social. He was led upstairs to the residence for a private luncheon with President Kennedy and Jackie.

Jackie’s presence was a signal to King that he couldn’t say anything political that would ruin the moment—nothing about segregation or the sit-ins or the Freedom Rides that shook the country that year. They talked politely about their educations in Boston, their children, and that sort of thing.

Why, of all things, did King suggest a second Emancipation Proclamation?

When they were walking down the hallway, King saw the Emancipation Proclamation hanging on the wall in the Lincoln Bedroom. It provided an excuse for him to bring up politics in a positive way—to talk about the historic glow of Lincoln’s decision. King suggested that perhaps the president would consider issuing a second Emancipation Proclamation for January of 1963, on the 100th anniversary of the first one. Just as Lincoln had used an executive order to abolish slavery in the Southern states, King said, Kennedy could outlaw segregation.

King loved the idea of a second Emancipation Proclamation. He thought it would be easier for Kennedy than passing legislation—southerners had strangled every significant civil rights proposal in Congress for a century. At the same time, King hoped for an initiative by the president to make things easier for a struggling civil rights movement. King had not joined the Freedom Rides himself, nor yet accepted the personal sacrifice of a determined campaign to end segregation. He deeply hoped that if the president issued an executive order, there could be an easy way out for both of them.

What happened after that conversation outside the Lincoln Bedroom?

For the next six months, King and his lawyers drafted a second Emancipation Proclamation in Kennedy’s name. Then in May of 1962, when King was in Washington for a meeting to launch his Gandhi Society for Human Rights, he delivered a copy to the White House personally. It was a very fancy draft, bound in leather for the president, with copies for all the lower-level officials involved in civil rights. The cover letter said, “We ask that you proclaim all segregation statutes of all southern states to be contrary to the constitution, and that the full powers of your office be employed to void their enforcement.” The idea was to get the president to issue this second executive order on September 22, 1962—the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued after the Civil War battle of Antietam.

How did Kennedy respond?

He didn’t. Not even by private letter. A while later, when King received an invitation to a White House luncheon for the archbishop of Cyprus, he declined. The standoff turned into an understated duel of manners. Kennedy was trying to keep things social, and King, by turning down the luncheon, was trying to signal that he could not be bought off. He had very real business that required attention.

For Kennedy, addressing segregation was a hornet’s nest. Because he knew that no Democrat could hope to be elected without the support of the solid South, it was never quite the right moment to become politically exposed on the issue of segregation.

During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had promised action to reduce segregation wherever the powers of the federal government reached. He’d said he could end segregation in federally subsidized public housing “with the stroke of a pen”—in other words, without getting it through Congress. Once in office, however, he stalled. Supporters of civil rights actually mailed thousands of pens to the White House in a publicity campaign with a rare touch of humor, saying the president must have misplaced his pen.

Meanwhile, excruciating dramas over segregation continued after the Freedom Rides in the summer of ’61, which Kennedy said were embarrassing the United States. When Kennedy met with Premier Krushchev in Vienna, he said he had to endure criticism—from the Soviets, of all people, who had no freedom!—that America could not be free, judging by the way it treated its black citizens. By September of 1962, it still took a lethal riot and a year’s occupation by 20,000 U.S. soldiers to secure the token integration of Ole Miss by its first black student, James Meredith.

So the September anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation came and went without note from the White House?

This was a big disappointment to King, and a shock to King’s allies in Congress. King actually got them to write a letter saying that they’d understood the president was going to come to an event on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on September 22. Their fallback plan was to goad the White House into action on January 1, 1963, the 100th anniversary of the New Year’s Day on which the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Toward that end, after months of lobbying, King delivered another draft of the second Emancipation Proclamation to the White House on December 17, 1962. It was much shorter. By this point, he’d backtracked on asking the president to proclaim all the segregation laws null. Instead, this draft called only for the nation to celebrate the spirit and example of the Emancipation Proclamation throughout 1963, invoking Lincoln’s legacy behind President Kennedy.

How did Kennedy react to that draft?

It bounced around the White House for a bit—but remember, this was December ’62. Kennedy had just weathered the global threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his administration was preoccupied with efforts to free the Bay of Pigs prisoners still in Cuba. He just didn’t respond to the draft proclamation, and missed the January 1 deadline, too.

After that, the White House announced a plan to host a social event for Lincoln’s birthday. From Kennedy’s point of view, it was a good solution—he could avoid the risk of issuing an executive order in a way that emphasized how much the emancipation tradition belonged to Republicans, not Democrats. He used Lincoln’s birthday as the occasion to invite many black dignitaries into the White House, which had been mostly off-limits except in token ways. The White House endured a great deal of negative press for inviting Sammy Davis Jr., who had a white wife. The idea of a mixed-race couple in the White House was still very controversial in 1963—which in itself is a pretty good sign of how blighted and benighted people were about race.

Did King go to the White House event for Lincoln’s birthday?

No. When Kennedy blew the New Year’s Day anniversary, King realized he could no longer count on Kennedy to take leadership on civil rights. Nor could he bear any longer to let young people—that is, college students, the Freedom Riders, the ones going to sit-ins and to jail—bear the whole burden of raising the issue of segregation. King was worried he was losing his window in history. He believed every movement was about political timing: you only get so much capital to spend, you only get so many chances. He thought the issue of desegregation was beginning to recede. He said southerners were rallying to the defense of segregation more strongly than supporters of the Brown [vs. Board of Education] decision were rallying to freedom. King felt they needed to change the climate of public opinion in their favor—and that meant taking a risk.

It was after Kennedy blew this second deadline that King realized he had nothing left to wait for. He had to “go for broke,” as he called it, and head down to Birmingham, Alabama, which was considered the toughest bastion of racism in the South. It’s hard for people to understand what a big leap that was for him, but one way of understanding it is that he didn’t tell his own father, or the board of his protest group, that he was going. He didn’t want them to try to stop him.

Would it be fair to say that Kennedy’s failure to embrace the second Emancipation Proclamation catalyzed a turning point in the civil rights movement?

King knew that Lincoln had issued the original Emancipation Proclamation in the middle of a war with lots of people dying. I think he realized that in order to get the president, or anyone, to act, what he had to do was go to Birmingham and essentially recreate those conditions—not a full-fledged civil war, but something that dramatized the moral imperative of the segregation issue in America.

In the end, King authorized not only high school students, but also elementary school students as young as six years old, to participate in a huge wave of demonstrations beginning May 2. That’s when Birmingham brought out the dogs and fire hoses and shocked the world. That’s when the issue of segregation really broke through people’s emotional barriers, not only in the United States but around the world. Up until that point, people had always found ways to evade the problem, to say it was someone else’s responsibility or that time would solve the problem. King had always known on some level that he’d have to join the students in the street, but like all of us who are human, he looked for an easier way until every door was closed and his conscience wouldn’t let him avoid it anymore.

Did Kennedy miss a major moral opportunity to do the right thing?

It’s historically accurate to say that Kennedy was not the vanguard figure in civil rights that popular history makes him out to be. It’s also true, however, that his fears were probably justified. Had he issued an executive order against segregation through a second Emancipation Proclamation, it probably would have weakened his administration without accomplishing anything. The southern states would have declared it illegal. They would have said he couldn’t declare a war measure since there wasn’t a war going on. And that would have made Kennedy look ineffectual, reduced his prestige, and perhaps cost him the next election. And then the next president would be even less likely to take on the entrenched power of the southern states. So unless you expect your political leaders to give up the prospect of holding office, you have to acknowledge that he had pretty good reason not to act on a second Emancipation Proclamation.

Kennedy did finally go on television and propose a civil rights bill in June of 1963, but by that time demonstrations of sympathy for what had happened in Birmingham had broken out in hundreds of cities across the country. At that point, Kennedy didn’t have any choice but to calm the fires of protest before they consumed his government.

King succeeded in getting Kennedy to act, just not in the way he’d intended.

People are always tempted to say that presidents and leaders should supply all the initiative, but in fact what worked in the civil rights movement was the combination of an aroused citizenry, which claimed rights and changed the political mood, and responsive national leaders. President Johnson later said that if, at the right time, King and the priests and ministers who were risking their lives down in Selma changed the political climate enough, then I can and will propose the voting rights bill. And he did. And that was really the pinnacle of cooperation between citizens taking responsibility for their government and government leaders responding to a political climate—a political climate created by the citizens themselves.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

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The first boy is Emmett Till, who was fourteen years old in the summer of 1955 when he walked into a local grocery store in Money, Mississippi, to buy gum. He was later roused from bed, beaten brutally, and possibly shot by a group of white men who later dumped his body in a nearby river. They claimed he had stepped out of his place by flirting with a young white woman, the wife of the store’s owner. The second boy is Trayvon Martin, who was seventeen years old late last winter when he walked into a 7-Eleven near a gated community in Sanford, Florida, to buy Skittles and an iced tea. He was later shot to death at close range by a mixed-race man, who claimed Martin had behaved suspiciously and seemed out of place. The deaths of both boys galvanized the nation, drew sympathy and disbelief across racial lines, and, through the popular media, prompted a reexamination of race relations.

In the aftermath of Martin’s death last February, a handful of reporters and columnists, and many members of the general public, made the obvious comparison: Trayvon Martin, it seemed, was the Emmett Till of our times. And while that comparison has some merit—the boys’ deaths are similar both in some of their details and in their tragic outcome—these killings must also be understood as the result of very different strains of racial tension in America. The racism that led to Till’s death was embedded in a virulent ideology of white racial superiority born out of slavery and the Jim Crow codes, particularly in the Deep South. That sort of racism hinges on the idea that blacks are an inherently inferior race, a morally null group that deserves both the subjugation and poverty it gets.

A tale of two teens: After their tragic and premature deaths, both Emmett Till, 14 (left), and Trayvon Martin, 17 (right), became symbols of the unique challenges that have faced young black men in America.

The racial prejudice that led to Trayvon Martin’s death is different. While it, too, was born of America’s painful legacy of slavery and segregation, and informed by those old concepts of racial order—that blacks have their “place” in society—it in addition reflects the urban iconography of today’s racial inequality, namely the black ghetto, a uniquely urban American creation. Strikingly, this segregation of the black community coexists with an ongoing racial incorporation process that has produced the largest black middle class in history, and that reflects the extraordinary social progress this country has made since the 1960s. The civil rights movement paved the way for blacks and other people of color to access public and professional opportunities and spaces that would have been unimaginable in Till’s time.

While the sort of racism that led to Till’s death still exists in society today, Americans in general have a much more nuanced, more textured attitude toward race than anything we’ve seen before, and usually that attitude does not manifest in overtly hateful, exclusionary, or violent acts. Instead, it manifests in pervasive mindsets and stereotypes that all black people start from the inner-city ghetto and are therefore stigmatized by their association with its putative amorality, danger, crime, and poverty. Hence, in public a black person is burdened with a negative presumption that he or she must disprove before being able to establish mutually trusting relationships with others.

Most consequentially, black skin when seen in public, and its association with the ghetto, translates into a deficit of credibility as black skin is conflated with lower-class status. Such attitudes impact poor blacks of the ghetto one way and middle-class black people another. While middle-class blacks may be able to successfully overcome the negative presumptions of others, lower-class blacks may not. For instance, all blacks, particularly “ghetto-looking” young men, are at risk of enduring yet another “stop and frisk” from the police as well as discrimination from potential employers, shopkeepers, and strangers on the street. Members of the black middle class and black professionals may ultimately pass inspection and withstand such scrutiny; many poorer blacks cannot. And many blacks who have never stepped foot in a ghetto must repeatedly prove themselves as non-ghetto, often operating in a provisional status (with something more to prove), in the workplace or, say, a fancy restaurant, until they can convince others—either by speaking “white” English or by demonstrating intelligence, poise, or manners—that they are to be trusted, that they are not “one of those” blacks from the ghetto, and that they deserve respect. In other words, a middle-class black man who is, for instance, waiting in line for an ATM at night will in many cases be treated with a level of suspicion that a middle-class white man simply does not experience.

But this pervasive cultural association—black skin equals the ghetto—does not come out of the blue. After all, as a result of historical, political, and economic factors, blacks have been contained in the ghetto. Today, with persistent housing discrimination and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, America’s ghettos face structural poverty. In addition, crime and homicide rates within those communities are high, young black men are typically the ones killing one another, and ghetto culture, made iconic by artists like Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, and the Notorious B.I.G., is inextricably intertwined with blackness.

As a result, in America’s collective imagination the ghetto is a dangerous, scary part of the city. It’s where rap comes from, where drugs are sold, where hoodlums rule, and where The Wire might have been filmed. Above all, to many white Americans the ghetto is where “the black people live,” and thus, as the misguided logic follows, all black people live in the ghetto. It’s that pervasive, if accidental, fallacy that’s at the root of the wider society’s perceptions of black people today. While it may be true that everyone who lives in a certain ghetto is black, it is patently untrue that everyone who is black lives in a ghetto. Regardless, black people of all classes, including those born and raised far from the inner cities and those who’ve never been in a ghetto, are by virtue of skin color alone stigmatized by the place.

I call this idea the “iconic ghetto,” and it has become a powerful source of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination in our society, negatively defining the black person in public. In some ways, the iconic ghetto reflects the old version of racism that led to Till’s death. In Till’s day, a black person’s “place” was in the field, in the maid’s quarters, or in the back of the bus. If a black man was found “out of his place,” he could be punished, jailed, or lynched. In Martin’s day—in our day—a black person’s “place” is in the ghetto.

If he is found “out of his place,” like in a fancy hotel lobby, on a golf course, or, say, in an upscale community, he may be easily treated with suspicion, avoided, pulled over, frisked, arrested—or worse.

Trayvon Martin’s death is an example of how this more current type of racial stereotyping works. While the facts of the case are still under investigation, from what is known it seems fair to say that George Zimmerman, Martin’s killer, saw a young black man wearing a hoodie and assumed he was from the ghetto and therefore “out of place” in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, Zimmerman’s gated community. Until recently, Twin Lakes was a relatively safe, largely middle-class neighborhood. But as a result of collapsing housing prices, it has been witnessing an influx of renters and a rash of burglaries. Some of the burglaries have been committed by black men. Zimmerman, who is himself of mixed race (of Latino, black, and white descent), did not have a history of racism, and his family has claimed that he had previously volunteered handing out leaflets at black churches protesting the assault of a homeless black man. The point is, it appears unlikely Zimmerman shot and killed Martin simply because he hates black people as a race. It seems that he put a gun in his pocket and followed Martin after making the assumption that Martin’s black skin and choice of dress meant that he was from the ghetto, and therefore up to no good; he was considered to be a threat. And that’s an important distinction.

Zimmerman acted brashly and was almost certainly motivated by assumptions about young black men, but it is not clear he acted brutally out of hatred for Martin’s race. That certainly does not make Zimmerman’s actions excusable, but Till’s murderers acted out of racial hatred.

The complex racially charged drama that led to Martin’s death is indicative of both our history and our rapid and uneven racial progress as a society. While there continue to be clear demarcations separating blacks and whites in social strata, major racial changes have been made for the better. It’s no longer uncommon to see black people in positions of power, privilege, and prestige, in top positions in boardrooms, universities, hospitals, and judges’ chambers, but we must also face the reality that poverty, unemployment, and incarceration still break down largely along racial lines.

This situation fuels the iconic ghetto, including a prevalent assumption among many white Americans, even among some progressive whites who are not by any measure traditionally racist, that there are two types of blacks: those residing in the ghetto, and those who appear to have played by the rules and become successful. In situations in which black people encounter strangers, many often feel they have to prove as quickly as possible that they belong in the latter category in order to be accepted and treated with respect. As a result of this pervasive dichotomy—that there are “ghetto” and “non-ghetto” blacks—many middle-class blacks actively work to separate and distance themselves from the popular association of their race with the ghetto by deliberately dressing well or by spurning hip-hop, rap, and ghetto styles of dress. Similarly, some blacks, when interacting with whites, may cultivate an overt, sometimes unnaturally formal way of speaking to distance themselves from “those” black people from the ghetto.

But it’s also not that simple. Strikingly, many middle-class black young people, most of whom have no personal connection with the ghetto, go out of their way in the other direction, claiming the ghetto by adopting its symbols, including styles of dress, patterns of speech, or choice of music, as a means of establishing their authenticity as “still Black” in the largely white middle class they feel does not accept them; they want to demonstrate they have not “sold out.” Thus, the iconic ghetto is, paradoxically, both a stigma and a sign of authenticity for some American blacks—a kind of double bind that beleaguers many middle-class black parents.

Despite the significant racial progress our society has made since Till’s childhood, from the civil rights movement to the reelection of President Obama, the pervasive association of black people with the ghetto, and therefore with a certain social station, betrays a persistent cultural lag. After all, it has only been two generations since schools were legally desegregated, five decades since blacks and whites in many parts of the country started drinking from the same water fountains. If Till were alive today, he’d remember when restaurants had “White Only” entrances and when stories of lynchings peppered the New York Times. He’d also remember the Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Million Man March. He’d remember when his peers became generals and justices, and when a black man, just twenty years his junior, became president of the United States. As I am writing, he would have been seventy-three—had he lived.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

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If you chose to be born white, your chances of dying of Parkinson’s disease would be twice as likely as if you chose to be black. Your chances of dying from cirrhosis of the liver or Alzheimer’s disease would be 25 percent higher. As a white person, you’d also be two and a half times more likely to commit suicide.

Based on those facts alone, the decision to be born white might sound like a pretty bad idea. And sure enough, life doesn’t work out well for many millions of white people in America. But you might also consider that everyone has to die of something, and dying from these particular causes has some advantages.

As terrible as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are, for example, almost no one dies of them unless they they’ve previously managed to escape death from other causes for seventy years or more. Cirrhosis of the liver tends to kill at younger ages, but you can still spend many decades of hard drinking before it catches up with you. Even for the chance to commit suicide, one typically has to have survived at least until one’s teens, and suicide is more common among those who have succeeded in growing old than it is among those who are still young.

By contrast, consider the pros and cons of choosing to be born black, based on life tables alone. To be sure, opting to be black would reduce your chances of dying from diseases caused by risk factors that rise with age. But it would also severely reduce your chances of living to even your first birthday, let alone growing old enough to retire.

This would be particularly true if you chose to be black and male.

To start with, your chances of dying before your first birthday would be roughly 2.3 times greater than if you were born white. If you managed to make it to age one as a black male child, your chances of dying before your fifth birthday would be 80 percent greater. If you survived to age fifteen, you’d have a 60 percent greater chance of dying within the next ten years. If despite these elevated risks of premature death you nonetheless managed to get to your forty-fifth birthday, you’d still be 80 percent less likely to live long enough to collect Social Security than if you had chosen to be white.

If you were black you would also, of course, substantially elevate your chances of growing up in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood, and the health consequences of living in that kind of environment are extremely adverse. If your neighborhood were, say, New York’s Harlem during the 1990s, as a young man you’d have only a 37 percent chance of living to see sixty-five. By contrast, according to a seminal study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, if you’d chosen to be white and wound up living in the unremarkable, predominantly white middle-class Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, your chances of still being alive at sixty-five would be above 89 percent.

So what would you choose? It may be that longevity is not the only measure of the good life. You might also, with enough luck and fortitude, be able to overcome the highly elevated health risks of choosing to be born black. Indeed, it is a curious fact that among African American males who live to an advanced old age (eighty-five years or older), the chances of living for another year are actually greater than for white males of the same age—presumably because the few African American men who have survived that long have remarkable constitutions.

Yet who would ever choose to face this pattern of competing health risks across their life course? It’s far more important to have a good chance to become elderly in the first place than to embrace the tiny chance of becoming a centenarian in the unlikely event you’re not already dead by sixty-five.

The vast disparities in health and longevity that exist between the races in the United States violate a fundamental idea of justice that we all carry with us at least to some degree. It is the idea of justice as fairness, of what kind of world we would choose to live in if, as the philosopher John Rawls framed it, we were all impartially situated as equals before being born and did not know what our station in this life would be. A society that resists ending the preventable causes of these racial disparities in heath is a society resisting justice.

But what are those preventable causes, and what could or should be done about them? To answer that question, let’s consider another thought experiment.

Imagine if, before you were born, you were told that you could choose to be born either black or white in America, but if you chose to be white you would live in poverty and if you chose to be black you would be in the lower-middle class. In this thought experiment, you wouldn’t know anything about what our world is actually like except for estimates of life expectancy for different categories of people.

Those estimates would tell you that choosing to be white would bring you very little, if any, advantage to health if you were also poor. For example, according to data developed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, approximately 35 percent of whites living below the poverty line report themselves to be in only poor or fair health. This is quite close, after we adjust for age differences, to the 32 percent of poor blacks who report fair or poor health. (See chart above.)

Meanwhile, the health status of both blacks and whites improves dramatically with higher income while the gap between them remains small. Among blacks and whites living at just four times the poverty rate, for example, the percent who report poor or fair health drops to 8 percent and 6 percent respectively. Your race per se, in other words, plays little role in predicting your health compared to your income.

What explains the residual difference in the health status of blacks and whites who have the same-size pay check? Researchers suggest it may reflect in part the reality that at any given income level, blacks tend to have fewer assets than whites, such as home equity and financial savings. A black family earning, for example, $50,000 in income is less likely to own its own home, less likely to have received an inheritance, and more likely to be encumbered by debt than is a white family with the same income. (See Thomas J. Segrue, “A House Divided.”) Middle-class black families are also more likely than middle-class white families to bear the health consequences of having lived in poverty in the past.

The gap in health status may also reflect the fact that among families with similar levels of income, as well as educational attainment, blacks are more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of crime, poverty, pollution, liquor stores, “junk food” outlets, and inferior health care. (See “To Live Longer, Move to a New Zip Code.”) Conscious or unconscious bias among health care providers may also be at work in explaining the racial health gap, though your chances of receiving substandard health care in the United States vary far more according to where you live than according to the color of your skin. (See “Color-Blind Medicine?“)

Yet even if they remain remarkably small at any given level of income, racial disparities in health do exist. And these disparities are large enough to make it rational (if health and life expectancy are the only criteria) to prefer being born a poor white American than a poor black one. But the differences are also far too small to make it rational to prefer being born a poor white to being born a rich, or even lower-middle-class, black. Again, the health status of blacks who live at just above the poverty line is substantially better than that of whites who live below it.

There is a reason why, in English, we use the word “poor” to refer to both a lack of money and a lack of health. Both historically and still largely today, poor people are likely to have poor health, almost regardless of other circumstances.

That poverty is deadly is not hard to understand, at least at the extreme. To be very poor means not having enough to eat, being exposed to the elements, and living in areas where homicide and addiction are leading causes of death or where your access to appropriate health care is minimal or nonexistent. In addition, both historically and today, getting seriously sick is likely to make you seriously poor even if you weren’t before.

But if our goal is to overcome the vast disparities in health that exist in the United States, especially for African Americans, we have to absorb two more difficult facts. These facts are noncontroversial among epidemiologists, even if they remain unfamiliar to most Americans.

First, it’s not just extreme poverty that is bad for your health; so is having less autonomy and status than others, regardless of your income. Among people who have plenty to eat, have equal access to quality health care, live in safe neighborhoods, and hold down jobs, health and life expectancy declines with socioeconomic position. While it is not hard to understand why truly impoverished people of all races die younger than middle-class people, it’s also true that middle-class people die younger than upper-middle-class people, and that upper-middle-class people die younger than rich people, even though none but the very poor are wanting for the basic necessities of life.

The second fact is just as strange, and equally radical in its implications, both for individuals seeking to maximize their personal health and for societies intent on creating just institutions. It is that the wider the disparities in status and power that exist between people within a given workplace, city, county, state, or country, the more premature deaths happen. Crudely put, inequality kills.

It’s a pattern that’s found, in greater or lesser degree, under all forms of government, within rich countries and not-so-rich countries, in the East and in the West. It also holds true in countries with universal health care and those without, and among different U.S. states.

The first place researchers rigorously documented this pattern was in the United Kingdom. There, starting in the 1960s, a team headed by the epidemiologist Michael Marmot began a long-term study of the health of British civil servants. These bureaucrats had much in common with one another. None lived in poverty; none were rich. None had jobs that posed any clear physical danger beyond the risk of paper cuts. All had equal access to the fully “socialized” British health care system.

Yet as the study went on it became clear that these bureaucrats were vastly different from one another in their health and longevity. Specifically, among employees of the same age, those who occupied the bottom of the organization chart as typists, clerks, and the like were four times more likely to die over the next twenty years as were administrators at the top of the hierarchy. Moreover, the differences in death rates did not just exist at the extremes of the organizational ladder. At every step in between, health and life expectancy was better one rung above and worse one rung below.

At first, researchers suspected that this social gradient of disease must be related to lifestyle. People at the bottom of the organization tended to smoke more, for example. But it turned out that if you were an administrator and smoked two packs of day, this was far less dangerous to your health than if you were a clerk who did the same. Similarly, if your blood pressure or cholesterol levels were high, or if you rarely exercised, being higher in the organizational chart made these conditions less threatening to your health than if you were lower. This was true even though people at the bottom of the organization tended to see doctors more frequently.

Since then, similar correlations between health and social rank have been observed just about everywhere researchers have looked. To take just one of the more curious examples, it turns out that Hollywood actors who win the Academy Award live four years longer on average than their costars in the same movie. And they also live four years longer than actors who were nominated for the award but did not win. This four-year difference in life expectancy may not sound like a lot. But to keep the implications for population health in perspective, consider that if all deaths from heart disease were magically eliminated while deaths from other causes remained the same, the improvement in life expectancy for the population as a whole would come to just four years.

One way researchers have tried to explain these and similar findings is to posit that the losers in our society have become losers because they have poor health. This is no doubt true in some cases. Clearly, if you’re in the hospital for months following a car crash, lose the ability to walk, and go through life thereafter with hideous facial scars, it is bound to negatively affect your career prospects. The same would be true if you were born already addicted to narcotics or positive for HIV.

Or to take a less extreme but far more common example, say you are a low-level employee working a dead-end cubicle job and find yourself afflicted at age thirty with prolonged bouts of depression, insomnia, and more than an occasional hangover. It is possible that these conditions will make it less likely that you will rise to the top of the ladder than if you bounced out of bed each morning feeling like the picture of health.

But to conclude in this instance that your lack of upward mobility is because of your poor health is to beg the question of why you have developed these afflictions in the first place. Maybe you would drink in any event. Maybe you’d describe life as stressful regardless. But would you drink as much, and feel so bad about it in the morning, if you also felt (like that famous, highly effective, long-lived alcoholic Winston Churchill) that you were in command and getting important stuff done?

To continue this thought experiment, what if you did not feel slighted and powerless at work; if your boss didn’t make eight times your income but only double; if he didn’t seem to look down on you and “your kind”; if losing your job didn’t mean losing what little control you have over your life; if you didn’t feel variously envious, intimidated, and infuriated by coworkers, neighbors, and people you see on TV who seem to have it all; if you could point to some way of keeping score in this life by which you were a winner and life had meaning?

The specific biological mechanisms that lead from feelings of relative powerlessness and low status to specific diseases are not well understood at the molecular level. Some researchers have pointed to the role of cortisol, a steroid hormone released by the adrenal gland in response to stress that has the effect of suppressing the immune system. Among people who are overweight, those with high levels of cortisol are more likely to contract diabetes than those with low levels. More than 200 laboratory studies have also shown that the highest cortisol levels are found in people required to perform tasks outside their control that involve, as the epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson puts it, “threats to self esteem and social status in which others can negatively judge your performance.” A hard-charging executive may use the word “stress” to describe his reaction to the burdens of command, but it is his cowering subordinates who are most likely to feel the kind of stress that literally changes body chemistry.

The negative effects may be compounded if those subordinates must also endure the stress and humiliation of either perceived or real racial or class discrimination. And the effects may be further multiplied if they have also internalized feelings of inferiority based on these or other negative stereotypes or social constructions.

In an intriguing study at Emory University, researchers found, for example, that black men who reported being victims of racial discrimination experienced an increased risk of heart disease. But a much greater risk of heart disease was found among African American men who agreed with negative statements about blacks. Indeed, the highest rates of heart disease were found among African American men who said they were not personally victims of racial discrimination but still viewed their own race as inferior. Put another way, being or believing yourself to be the victim of racial discrimination is not good for your health, but what’s really bad is to absorb a social belief system that says you are at the bottom.

Cross-country comparisons also establish a clear link between poor health and social stratification. Among developed countries, for example, there is no correlation whatsoever between per capita GDP and life expectancy. But there is a strong correlation between countries that have low levels of inequality and those in which long lives are most common.

Sweden and Japan, for example, are very different countries, but both have extremely low levels of income inequality and the lowest rates of premature death in the developed world. Sweden achieves its egalitarianism through a large welfare state that massively redistributes income and opportunity; Japan has a comparatively small welfare state, but, according to custom, bosses refrain from paying themselves too many multiples of what workers earn. For the purposes of maximizing public health, Wilkinson observes, it does not seem to matter how a nation achieves relatively equality, only that social and economic stratification is somehow kept to a minimum.

A similar pattern emerges when we compare how long white people live in different parts of the United States. To better see what happens, consider one last thought experiment.

Suppose, before you were born, you were told that you had to be a white man, but you could choose whether you would live out your days in Mississippi or Minnesota. If you could not know anything else about these states except their life tables, what would the rational choice be?

The life tables would tell you that if you wound up a white man in Mississippi, your chances of not dying before age sixty-five would be little better than 74 percent, and that if you did live to that age, you could expect to be dead within 15.35 years. But if you were a white man in Minnesota, your chances of living to age sixty-five would be better than 83 percent, and your remaining life expectancy at that point would be 17.49 years.

The choice would seem clear, but what explains how stark it is? One big difference between Mississippi and Minnesota is the number of black people in each state. But unless you think that blacks in Mississippi are responsible for the deaths of huge numbers of white males—and they aren’t—that can’t be the reason why white men in Mississippi live shorter lives than white men in Minnesota. Nor are differences in median household income between whites in Mississippi and Minnesota large enough to explain such a large disparity in health: few whites in either state are poor enough that their health is threatened by lack of food or shelter.

The key factor may be how these states differ in their degree of social and economic stratification. Mississippi is among the states with the highest inequality of income. Moreover, throughout most of the last two decades Mississippi has led the nation in the growth of income inequality, whether as measured by the difference between those at the very top and those at the very bottom or by the gap in income between the middle class and the very rich.

Minnesota, by contrast, has much lower disparities of income, and is much more egalitarian in many other dimensions as well, including educational attainment, access to health care, and even, dare we say, cultural style. Garrison Keillor’s joke about all the kids in Lake Wobegon being “above average” contains an important truth: Minnesota is not a place where invidious distinction is typical, or kindly looked upon. And perhaps because of that, it is also not a place where stress and insecurity about social standing and loss of face is very common.

Within the United States generally, disparities in health among different segments of the population have increased in lockstep with growing disparities in income and education. By now it’s to the point that poorly educated white Americans, for the first time ever, are experiencing an absolute decline in their average life span. White males with fewer than twelve years of education now have a life expectancy of just 67.5 years—just six months longer than the standard Social Security retirement age set under current law for today’s middle-aged and younger Americans. The gap in life expectancy between white females who go to college and those who don’t widened from 1.9 years in 1990 to 10.4 years in 2008.

Meanwhile, for all but those at the very top of the ladder, and perhaps even for them, life is shorter than it likely would be if we lived in a more equal, less socially competitive and status-driven society—including one that was less obsessed with status distinctions based on race, education, and profession or that paid less notice than Americans have since the 1980s to who has the biggest McMansion, the most designer clothes, or the latest, snazziest smartphone. Inequality may not be an equal-opportunity killer, but few escape its mortal consequences.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

The post Is Inequality Shortening Your Life Span? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s cinemythic portrait of the sixteenth president features President Abraham Lincoln seated on a stage, half cloaked in darkness, and observing the Union forces he is sending into battle. It’s an apt metaphor for the man himself—both visible and obscure, inside the tempest yet somehow above the fray. Lincoln was released in early November, just in time to shape our discussions of January 1, 2013, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet with its themes of redemption and sacrifice, Spielberg’s film could seem less suited for an anniversary celebration than an annual one. Here is a vision of a lone man, tested by betrayal, besieged by enemies whom he regards without malice, a man who is killed for his convictions only to be resurrected as a moral exemplar. Spielberg’s Lincoln is perhaps less fitted to January 1st than it is to the holiday that precedes it by a week.

In fairness, this narrative of Lincoln’s Civil War, equal parts cavalry and Calvary, did not originate with Spielberg. The legend of the Great Emancipator began even as Lincoln lay dying in a boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theater that night in April 1865. (In the same way that JFK’s mythic standing as a civil rights stalwart was born at Dealey Plaza in November 1963.) In the wake of his assassination, Lincoln the controversial and beleaguered president was remade into Lincoln the Savior, an American Christ-figure who carried the nation’s sins. Pulling off this transformation, this historical alchemy, has required that we as a nation redact the messier parts of Lincoln’s story in favor of an untainted, morally unconflicted commander in chief who was untouched by the biases of the day and unyielding in his opposition to slavery. We have little use for tainted Christs. Through Lincoln the Union was “saved” in more than one sense of the word.

History is malleable. There is always the temptation to remake the past in the contours that are most comforting to us. In a nation tasked with reconciling its democratic ideals with the reality of slavery, Lincoln has become a Rorschach test of sorts. What we see when we look at him says as much about ourselves as it does about him. And what we see, or choose to see, most often is a figure of unimpeachable moral standing who allows Americans to gaze at ourselves in the mirror of history and smile. If the half-life for this kind of unblemished heroism is limited—we’ve grown more cynical across the board—it has remained resonant enough for our politicians today to profit from their association with it. The signal achievement of Spielberg’s Lincoln is the renovation of that vision of Lincoln, a makeover for a nation that had elected its first black president to a second term just three days before the film hit theaters.

In 2007 Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, deliberately conjuring comparisons to that other lanky lawyer who spent time in the state legislature there. There is no shortage of politicians claiming an affinity with Lincoln—George W. Bush saw himself as a Lincolnesque figure when he was prosecuting the war on terror—but rarely have the parallels been as apparent as they are with Obama. The candidate played up that angle, visiting the Lincoln Memorial just before his inauguration, carrying a well-thumbed copy of Team of Rivals on the campaign trail, slipping sly riffs on Lincoln’s second inaugural address into his own first one, and taking the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible.

Beyond the obvious, though, lies a deeper theme between Obama and Lincoln: the identities of both men are inextricably bound to questions of both disunity and progress in this country. It’s worth recalling that Obama’s rise to prominence was a product of his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in which he offered a compelling, if Photoshopped, vision of a United States where there are no red states or blue states, where neither race nor religion nor ideology can undermine national unity. Obama walked onto that stage an obscure state legislator; he left it a virtual avatar of American reconciliation, the most obvious brand of which was racial. Implicit within his subsequent campaign, particularly after the flashpoint of controversy over Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, was the possibility of amnesty for the past. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia in March 2008. Delivered at a time when the campaign was virtually hemorrhaging hope, the speech was a deft manipulation of the very human aspiration to break with the messy past, to be reborn in an untainted present.

In the wake of the release of Spielberg’s Lincoln it was common to see pundits remark with amazement on the enduring public fascination with the sixteenth president. The biopic grossed $84 million by the beginning of December—a grand haul for a historical drama with no special effects and an ending we’ve known since grade school. But viewed from another angle, the question becomes not why we are still intrigued by Lincoln but how we could not be. His life contains epic themes: genius, war, personal loss, a narrative arc in which a barely schooled young man goes on to produce some of the most elegant prose in the American canon and a role in ending the wretchedness of slavery. The capacity of his life to inspire and intrigue is rivaled only by its capacity to exonerate. It is this last element that takes center stage in Spielberg’s film. The director’s artistic choice to focus on the last four months of the president’s life is simultaneously a choice to focus on his finest hour and to not focus on the troubled, torturous path he traveled to get there. There is no Frederick Douglass here goading the president toward the more humanitarian position, no whites rioting at the prospect of being drafted to fight for Negro freedom.

On the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, we see unwitting testimony to our ongoing racial quagmire in the reductive ways we discuss the author of that document and the reasons for slavery’s end. We speak volumes about our impasses in the glib, self-congratulatory way we discuss the election of the president most ostensibly tied to Lincoln’s legacy.

It’s important to note that Spielberg’s film about the death of slavery all but ignores the Proclamation. That choice allowed the director—and his audience—to avoid both Lincoln’s support for the mass colonization of free blacks and also the fact that the now-hallowed Proclamation left nearly a million slaves in chains. It also made unnecessary any discussion of the uncomfortable truth that the Proclamation was devised in part as a war measure to ensure the loyalties of border states and deprive the Confederacy of its labor force, while leaving open the question of the South getting those very slaves back, should they return to the Union.

Instead, Spielberg’s Lincoln centers on the comparatively clean moral lines surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment. But like a great deal of the popular ideas about Lincoln, the film confuses the president’s strategic ideas with his moral ones, and in so doing shifts the landscape toward redemption. At issue here are not just Lincoln’s actions, but the context for those actions and the motives behind them. The film highlights that Lincoln, in fighting for a constitutional amendment, freed four million enslaved blacks, as well as untold generations yet to be born. The film does not highlight that by 1865, Lincoln would have known very well that permanently ending slavery would also deprive the readmitted Southern states of the labor force that had allowed it to nearly tear the country in half. The amendment was no less strategically motivated than the Proclamation had been. Arguing that the end of the war gave Lincoln leeway to strike the blow against slavery he’d patiently waited for overlooks the fact that Congress had attempted to pass the amendment in the previous session—when the outcome of the war was far less certain. After the amendment passed Lincoln referred to it as a “king’s cure for all the evils,” but in his annual address given months earlier, in December 1864, he spoke of it as a prerogative of preserving the nation:

In a great national crisis like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable, almost indispensable. And yet no approach to such unanimity is attainable unless some deference shall be paid to the will of the majority simply because it is the will of the majority. In this case the common end is the maintenance of the Union, and among the means to secure the end such will, through the election, is more clearly declared in favor of such Constitutional amendment. (Emphasis added.)

The strategic and moral benefits of Lincoln’s actions are not mutually exclusive, but the need for a redemption figure makes us behave as if they are. The fact that black freedom occurred because a particular set of national interests aligned with ending slavery doesn’t diminish the moral importance of it. Indeed, the moral high ground here is that Lincoln, unlike millions of Americans in both the South and the North, was able to recognize that slavery was not more important than the Union itself. This seems somehow insufficient to the definition of heroism today, but it shouldn’t. The by-product of our modern, mythical Lincoln is that he allows us to shift our gaze to one American who ended slavery rather than the millions who perpetuated and defended it. By lionizing Lincoln, we are able to concentrate on the death of an evil institution rather than its ongoing legacy. The paradox is that Lincoln’s death enabled later generations to impatiently wonder when black people would cease fixating on slavery and just get over it.

When Obama cast himself in the mold of Lincoln in 2007, he could not have known how deeply he would find himself mired in the metaphor. As a recent Pew Study revealed, our country is more divided along partisan lines today than at any point since they’ve been conducting studies. Basic demographic divisions—gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and class—do not predict differences in values more than they have in the past. Men and women, whites, blacks, and Hispanics, the highly religious and the less religious, and those with more and less education differ in many respects, but those differences have not grown in recent years, and for the most part they pale in comparison to the overwhelming partisan divide we see today. This is only partly because of the growth of cable news programs offering relentless blue-versus-red commentary and a la carte current events. It’s also because party identity has become a stand-in for all the other distinctions the study explained.

That chasm is the stepchild of the sectionalism of Lincoln’s era. Today, we are another House Divided, though the lines are now drawn more haphazardly. And this is where Obama and Lincoln part ways. In future feature films about the current era, it won’t be the details of the president’s life that will be redacted, but the details of our own. More specifically, it will be the details of those Americans who greeted Obama’s reelection with secession petitions; those who reacted to the 2008 election by organizing themselves and parading racially inflammatory banners in the nation’s capital; those who sought solace from demagogues and billionaire conspiracy theorists who demanded that a sitting president prove his own citizenship.

The heralded “Age of Obama” began with a sugar high of postracialism, but four years later the number of whites subscribing to explicitly racist ideas about blacks had increased, not diminished. The vision of a black person executing the duties of the nation’s highest office was supposed to become mundane; we were supposed to take his identity for granted. Somewhere there was a little-voiced hope among black people that his simple existence as president would be a daily brief for our collective humanity, that we would be taken to be every bit as ordinary as the man occupying the Oval Office. At points in the last four years, it seemed as if we could live in a poetic moment, as if our founding documents could be taken at face value. But the numbers tell us it’s not true. Many Americans have reacted to the promise of the Obama era as a threat, as a harbinger of the devaluing currency of whiteness. The problem is not that these people want to take their country back, it’s that they were loathe to share it in the first place. The recalcitrant racism of the Obama era will be as vexing to the story of American virtue as Lincoln’s racial failings were to those of his era. Lincoln was not as flawless as we’ve been told, and we are not as virtuous as we’ve begun to tell ourselves.

To be clear, though, something in the nation has changed. At no point prior to 2008 could a presidential aspiration have been so effectively yoked to this yearning for a clear racial conscience. But beneath the high-blown, premature rhetoric of postracialism lies the less inspirational fact that those changes were as much about math as they were about morality. Depending on your perspective, we have either reached a point of racial maturity that facilitated the election of an African American president or we’ve reached a point where a supermajority of black voters, a large majority of Latino and Asian ones, and a minority of white people are capable of winning a presidential election. Again, these ideas need not be mutually exclusive, but the need for clean lines and easy redemption makes us behave as if they are.

Lincoln’s apotheosis inspired self-congratulation among whites and a backlash of doubt and outright disdain among blacks. Among many African Americans, a justifiable skepticism of Lincoln as the original Friend of the Negro has morphed into a broader dismissal of him altogether. But however conservative and incrementalist his policies seemed to them, and to many of us today, they were still far too radical for John Wilkes Booth and the millions who sympathized with him. Lincoln’s death is further evidence that men who are ahead of their times have a tendency to die at the hands of men who are behind them. It is also proof that the simple sentiment that the Union was more important than slavery was, in its own right, radical. However far Lincoln was from advocating racial equality, his second inaugural address stands as a monument of national conscience:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Indeed, the real problem is not that the nation has so consistently sought balm for its racial wounds, and drafted Lincoln—and Obama—for those purposes; it’s the belief that we could be absolved from the past so cheaply. No Lincoln, not even an unfailingly moral one who was killed in service of a righteous cause, could serve as an antidote for ills that persisted, and continue to persist, for a century and a half after his demise. We find ourselves now in circumstances where actual elements of racial progress are jeopardized precisely because we’ve smugly accepted the idea of ourselves as racially progressive.

The Thirteenth Amendment states that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” We are a nation in which a black president holds office while more than half a million duly convicted black men populate the prisons and county and municipal jails hold hundreds of thousands more. The symbolic ideal of postracialism masks a Supreme Court that may undermine affirmative action in higher education and the preclearance clause of the Voting Rights Act. Our most recent election saw both unprecedented black turnout and efforts at black voter suppression that resound with echoes of bad history. Black unemployment, even among the college educated, remains vastly higher than it is for whites. (Among the more hideous hypocrisies of the recent election was Mitt Romney’s cynical appeals to black Americans, pointing out that blacks have suffered disproportionately in the Obama economy. The black president, we were to believe, is now also responsible for racism in the labor market.)

Obama himself was wise to these contrasts as far back as 2008, when he gave the speech in Philadelphia that saved his political career.

[W]ords on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part—through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk—to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

The election of an African American president is a watershed in our history. But the takeaway is that what we do during these moments is somehow smaller than what we do between them, that our heroes are no better than we are, nor do they need to be. Harriet Tubman is often cited as saying she could have freed more blacks if only she’d been able to convince them they were slaves. In our own era, the only impediment to realizing the creed of “We Shall Overcome” is the narcotic belief that we already have.

Click here to read more from our Jan/Feb 2013 cover package “Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term.”

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