The Racist Past Goes Up In Flames; There Is A New America

In a haunting tapestry a slave woman sits in a rocking chair with a flaming torch in her hand as she watches a plantation house burn to the ground.

The tapestry is an eerie foreshadowing of the fate of Nottoway Plantation, in White Castle, Louisiana. The largest pre-Civil-War plantation house just burned to the ground a few days ago.

Eboni Hogan’s textile masterpiece is a double insult to the White class: she usurped a hobby associated with white bourgeois gentility and made it into a tool of protest. And she might have woven a curse into it as well, with the fabric flames reaching into our dimension and torching the White Supremacy landmark.

Its demise was greeted with applause by the Black community: “Good. Generations of human beings were held captive, tortured, raped, mutilated, and worked to death in plantations. Let the sadistic ghouls who wanna hold their weddings and parties at Nottoway find another concentration camp for their happy occasion.”

For those with an eye to vengeance, here is a one-hour asmr video of the blaze. One vicious suggestion was to make it an annual event; there are evidently still 374 plantations left to go.

Fire Marshalls are still investigating the cause of the blaze. While it is unclear whether the fire was intentional, it is safe to say that many do not care, as long as it’s gone.

As will be apparent in the statistics below, America has transformed itself into a post-racial society.

You would not get that impression from the daily media, but the numbers don’t lie (see below).

There is a new America now – one that would be unrecognizable to the White Masters of the old South.

I would long, for example, to see a time-warp photo of Jeff Davis shaking hands with president Barrack Obama.

In a nod to the evil spirits of racism, the main house caught fire after embers has been put out in another part of the structure; it was the local firefighters who spread the embers that torched the house.

And they thought they could win the Civil War.

It is a metaphor for the history of racism in the South: just as you think you’ve got everything under control, a fire comes from nowhere and demolishes your structure. A fire, say, called General Sherman.

Built before the Civil War in 1859 by sugar magnate John Hampden Randolph, the estate was powered by the forced labor of more than 150 enslaved people.

After the Civil War the Nottoway Plantation rebranded itself as a museum and then as a luxury resort. The place where slaves were once bought and sold became a resort complete with wedding packages, guest suites, and even a tennis court. A house of horrors became a model of Southern charm.

White feeling ran so deep in the 1800’s that the long-haired radical Edmund Ruffin argued that the South was even more oppressed by the North than the early colonists had been by the British before the American Revolution. He was right, in way: the Christian nation that Ruffin and company envisioned for America is totally against the principles in the constitution of the nation’s Founders. To that extent, the Southern constitution invented rules that were more acceptable to Christian nationalists than those in the Constitution of revolutionary America. It is a claim being made by MAGA today about the persecution of the demi-god Trump. And in the amplification of emotions in today’s America of hyper-polarization, MAGA supporters are much more likely to see their opponents as “enemies” than as political rivals.

Back in the day, Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading, thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 US Census listed 440 South Carolina planters and each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district - this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves. The 1860 census found that Louisiana had 111,000 more enslaved people than it did whites; it was, moreover, one of only two states where this kind of imbalance existed, the other being Mississippi.

Together these planters constituted a kind of aristocracy and saw themselves as such. They called themselves “the chivalry.”

They devoured chivalric novels, held jousting competitions, gave themselves military titles and favored elaborate uniforms. Their South Carolina standard-bearer, novelist William Gilmore Simms, wrote eighty-two novels in which chivalry and honor were central themes.

But to outsiders, South Carolina seemed to have fallen out of step with the nation’s great march into what many called the Railroad Age…

The Census Bureau’s tally of occupations counted 364 “railroad men” in the state as of 1860; in New York, by contrast, there were 6,272. In 1800, Charleston was the fifth-largest city in the United States; by 1860, the twenty-second. The mechanical age, feared the South, was a demon of unrest that was a sole disturber of the land. Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.

This resurfaces in today’s electorate, where a lack of education is a marker for MAGA support. If you are a white man without a college degree living in the rural South you are a poster-boy for a MAGA supporter. Education is your enemy.

For such Southern conservatives 160 years ago, the election that led up to the attack on Sumter was doubly disturbing. Lincoln was so hated as a candidate that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot.

On top of that, news about the early electoral returns arrived by telegraph – a very symbol of the age that the South distrusted.

This chattering skein of wires — fifty thousand miles of it by 1860 — had transformed communications. Although telegraphic communication was efficient, the messages carried were themselves questioned, their credibility dependent on the technical novelty of the medium. The same emotional flaw comes through with MAGA today, in its campaigns against early “convenience” voting by machine or mail, which is somehow seen as being anti-conservative.

The message from the telegraphs was plain, however: Lincoln won more of the popular vote than any candidate, more in fact than any president had ever won — nearly 1,866,000 votes — but this was only 40 percent of the national total.

The Republican Party was America’s first successful sectional political party, its members living almost exclusively in the North. Lincoln took only 2% of his vote from the South.

Southerners tried to argue slavery was a beneficent system that protected the enslaved from the vicissitudes of the free market. In fact, opponents countered, the slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness.

Southern White ladies were as vicious towards their slaves as their men were. One young Black girl was punished by her mistress by having to place her head under the rocker of the White woman’s chair; as she rocked, she cracked the girl’s skull. The girl suffered brain damage for the rest of her life.

It was a system of cruelty, and bred a desire for more cruelty.

But in fighting a war to preserve their slaves, the South forgot that revolutions never go backward…and that is what the South was asking the nation to do.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, 79, who loved the South and feared for the survival of Southern civilization, made a decision that Blacks could not be citizens; they were slaves and property that could be moved at will, and, further, that Congress could not bar slavery from any territory.

I am pleased to report that he did not die until a year after the Emancipation Proclamation destroyed both his claims.

After the war came the period of Reconstruction, and then a type of informal re-enslavement known as the Jim Crow era. Laws were passed in Southern states that withdrew a Black person’s right to vote, and took away property access. The fight for Black liberty continued throughout the 20th century, with organizations like the NAACP and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement challenging Jim Crow laws and fighting for voting rights, integration, and desegregation.

The struggle for voting rights was a central theme of the Civil Rights Movement, with landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensuring greater access to the ballot box. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were pivotal in dismantling legal segregation and discrimination, marking a significant turning point in the struggle for Black liberty.

The path to racial justice in America has had fits and starts, but is inexorably moving towards an acceptance by Whites of Black equality. Beginning in the 1940s, deep demographic and economic change, accompanied by a marked shift in white racial attitudes, started Blacks down the road to much greater equality.

In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white-collar jobs.

In 1958, 44 percent of Whites said they would move if a Black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1 percent.

In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of Whites claimed to have a friend who was Black; today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of Blacks assert they have White friends.

More than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white.

Almost a third of the Black population lives in suburbia.

These are facts the media seldom report.

They are facts that would drive Donald Trump bat-spit crazy, if he knew how to read.

But as usual, he has been pushing back against the tides of history.

If you want to drive a MAGA supporter nuts, remind them that Trump has never won against a male opponent. He lost to Hillary Clinton in the popular vote (by 2.9-million). He only beat Kamala Harris (by 77-million against her 75-million) because the usual Democrat supporters stayed home rather than participated. Even then, she added 10-million votes to Hillary’s count.

American voters were becoming comfortable with the thought of a woman as president, but the combination of Black + Woman was not enough to get some Democrats out of their house on election day.

Just to be clear, as we are now facing the consequences of that inaction, we would not be in a economic doom-loop feeding the rich from the pain of the poor today, if another 3% of Democratic voters had put down their popcorn and toddled off to vote.

WTF! You lazy swine!

But I’m over my rage now… Doctor says the pills are working…

The way trends are moving anyway, I have no doubt that I could live long enough to see a woman as President.

Trump’s vote did increase, but in proportion to an increase in the size of the voting population. There was no massive swing of voters to his camp.

In the meantime, he continues to try to drag America back into the days of the Civil War. Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation, a former plantation-turned-museum that teaches the truth about slavery, has just had its funding pulled by the Trump government. This is in addition to gutting state and federal initiatives supporting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Trump has demonized minority groups and sought to return America to a segregationist past. The Whitney Plantation project and others like it were targets from the start for Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as the president used an executive order to call for such work to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

Executive Director Dr. Ashley Rogers of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) said “We can look at the past and see that changing our narratives about our shared stories never leads to anything positive. It’s really important to tell those stories, and it’s especially important now because there’s a real concerted effort to change our national narrative of American history.”

Trump will pass; his racist agenda will be thrown out and America will resume its strong march towards equality. MAGA is dust on the history books. Or ashes from the fires of Nottoway - once a White owner’s picture-perfect dream home, and now the reviled and unmourned relic of a terrible past.

All Trump knows is fear; he delights in it. It’s a bit of a pity for him that the majority of people have a stronger positive urge - a desire to get to destinations that they want to reach, and not terrors that they want to avoid.

So Nottoway is gone…gone with the Wind. Scarlett Ohara has given way to Rihanna and Whitney and Aretha and Diana… the list goes on.

Unlike Nottoway, which does not go on.

America has found a new way.

Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. I am also a feature writer on the environmental site, Job One For Humanity, and work on community development programs. Each week a summary of a topical book helps full subscribers stay ahead of the conversation. Next week will be Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

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