When my bio of Jesse James came out, some were upset at my portrait of a pro-slavery terrorist in the Civil War who seized the role of Confederate hero in Reconstruction politics in Missouri. I besmirched a folk hero!
Why is that? It says something about white supremacy.
1/9
Why is that? It says something about white supremacy.
1/9
I wasn’t making a leap. I just took seriously what he himself wrote & how he was discussed. His family enslaved 7 people in 1860. Proslavery politics was fierce and ugly in western Missouri, & his family was very partisan—hardcore secessionist. So why has that been denied?
2/9
2/9
There are some specific reasons in Jesse James’s case. He was addicted to violence, always in it for the money (well, money plus politics, but money first.) After his gang & Reconstruction both blew apart, he had a 3-year apolitical criminal reprise. It blurred his image.
3/9
3/9
The dime novels and movies made historians reluctant to take him seriously. His first scholarly biographer said politics was just a play for sympathy. (Why did no other bandits try it?) One historian says he was popular just because he was strong. Why, hicks ain’t political!
4/9
4/9
But there’s more. In American history, when there’s a fight to assert white supremacy, racism is usually blatant during the conflict. Once white supremacy wins (or fights back from defeat), race gets written out. Black people disappear. Sometimes they get drafted.
5/9
5/9
Secessionists were not subtle about race & slavery. The Ku Klux Klan and political foes of Reconstruction were proudly racist. As were lynch mobs, the attackers in Tulsa, Dixiecrats, segregationists, etc. But when the guns go silent, the erasers & rewrite pencils go to work.
6/9
6/9
Myths have piled up. Secession was about the tariff and the overreaching federal government! Black men actually fought *for* the Confederacy! (@KevinLevin blew up that myth.) Anti-Reconstruction struggles were about home rule! Jesse James was a Robin Hood! Separate but equal!
7/9
7/9
If there’s anything good in this rewriting of American memory, it’s that the underlying assumption is that racism is shameful. The principle that we’re all created equal haunts white supremacy, especially since the Civil Rights Movement. Can’t be proud of slavery—so erase it.
8/9
8/9
Scholarship matters. But in the past the racism of academic work has been blatant. If you read the Dunning school—turn-of-the-century American historians—you’ll be shocked. Historians responded, eventually, to political struggle. *That* kept alive the ideal of human equality.
9/9
9/9
Just to add: Black historians, journalists, and leaders have been writing the truth about Black history all along. They were often marginalized by the academy—and even now, less by fellow scholars than by political pressure on institutions from donors or legislators.
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