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I first became exposed to the history of American racism during the peaceful days of my childhood. I spent my school year in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where, to quote a piece I've written before about this subject, "I learned about the Mayflower, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt, but not Benjamin Banneker, Sojourner Truth and Marcus Garvey."

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However, I spent much of my summers at my grandparents' house on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Their home sits on the site of what used to be a slave plantation called Traveler's Rest Plantation. And although the neighborhood's history isn't advertised, its sinister past is easily apparent just by walking through the area.

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Traveler’s Rest Plantation was one of the many slave plantations that populated Maryland’s Eastern Shore (the stretch of farmland bordering the state’s eastern bank of the Chesapeake Bay) during the Antebellum period. Despite its large expanse, Traveler's Rest was far from the region’s largest plantation. In fact, it wasn’t even the largest in the county (the nearby Wye House Plantation spanned over 42,000 acres and housed more than 1,000 slaves). These plantations were the site of inhumane horrors: starvation, beatings, rapes, and the breakup of families. In “The Narrative of Frederick Douglass,” Douglass, a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, spoke about one particular master named Mr. Covey. Covey was known for the cruel, and often violent, methods he employed against his slaves. However, Douglass is relieved to be moved to this plantation just because he would be consistently fed — an upgrade from his previous living conditions. And because slaves like Douglass were seen as the property of their masters, and therefore lacked the rights outlined in the country’s founding document, they had no recourse against this violence. When slaves’ health failed, when food was scarce, and when families were ripped apart, they had no other option but to work through it. The Wye House, just like Traveler's Rest, was not unique in this regard, as similar savagery took place all across the Southern United States.

 

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The American South is perhaps the most diverse region of the country. Its geography ranges from the peaks of the Ozarks to the sweeping shores of the Carolinas; from the bayous of the gulf coast to the tropical wetlands of Florida. Its economy is just as diverse — with the energy, healthcare, transportation, and tourism industries all making a strong showing in the region due to the South’s temperate climate and low cost of living. However, the most diverse part of the South isn’t its terrain or economy, it’s the stories and people who call the region home.

 

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Today, the South is home to the largest concentration of African Americans in the country. In fact, over half of all Black Americans live in the South (despite the region being home to only around one third of the nation’s population), and the region is home to over 100 counties with a majority-Black population. Despite this heterogenous makeup, or perhaps because of it, Southern history is marked by equal parts violence, discrimination, and folklore surrounding the effects of race on Southern life.

 

The most popular of these myths is that narrative of the Lost Cause. Proponents of this myth argue that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery, but instead over protecting a certain way of life that was uniquely Southern — mild-manners, deeply religious, and family-oriented. Supporters of the Lost Cause narrative argue that Southerners fought to protect their homeland from the immoral values of the Industrial North. Pushed in the classroom through revisionist history books and in Hollywood through movies such as Gone with the Wind and the Princess and the Frog, proponents of the Lost Cause narrative have successfully obfuscated the realities of life for African Americans in the Antebellum South. Unfortunately, these misconceptions manifest themselves far past the pre-war era, as past injustices still affect the lives of African Americans today. Therefore, in order to understand current race relations, it’s necessary to understand the truth about life in the South at the time.

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 THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH 

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The American Industrial Revolution was sparked in a small Massachusetts town just 17 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It began with textile manufacturing, but quickly overtook different industries throughout the young nation. However, not all areas witnessed the same mechanical revolution. While Northern factories embraced these changes, the Industrial Revolution hit the South differently — and much less hard. As a result, the largely agricultural region remained immune to many of the societal changes, spurred by increasing mechanization and urbanization, occurring elsewhere.

 

However, that's not to say that mechanization completely left the South untouched. That myth has been debunked by historians, which is important to acknowledge because it radically changed the landscape of Southern slavery.  

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For most of the South's history, cotton was their cash crop. It was easy to grow, it wasn't perishable, and it was in demand across the planet. Due to the South's geography and  climate, the region became the World's Cotton Capital. One of the only limitations on cotton production was simply manpower, because removing the cotton seeds from the cotton was a tough and labor-intensive process. But luckily for cotton growers, one of the inventions of the Industrial Revolution was Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin.  

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The Cotton Gin was small and able to controlled by a single person (read: a single slave). Without getting too deep into the engineering, the design was simple: cotton entered on one side, the seeds were removed in the middle, and seedless cotton (up to fifty pounds per day) left from the other side. Perhaps surprisingly, this simple invention had an outsized effect on the institution of slavery. Instead of needing a large group of slaves to de-seed the cotton by hand, the Cotton Gin allowed slave owners to allocate much less physical-labor for this task. Now, with larger profit margins, slave masters reinvested their profits into their plantations. They grew more cotton, which required more slaves to tend to. The slave population during the time boomed, and it became a crucial component of the Southern economy.

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With this rise in the number of slaves came the growth and normalization of their inhumane treatment. Seen as property, most Black slaves were subject to unimaginably cruel punishments. If you’re having trouble thinking how that type of treatment is possible, consider the following. When computers are working too slowly, or remotes aren’t connecting to the TV, many people instinctively hit them to get them working properly. No one apologizes to their remote for lashing out at it — the remote had a job that it isn’t doing. Besides, there’ve been studies showing that shaking a remote does actually help. And finally, even if it didn’t actually help, none of that would matter. It’s your remote, and you can do whatever you want with it. It’s with through that mindset that many owners saw their slaves. Of course some may have genuinely cared, but the vast majority felt that they could treat their slaves however they see best. The law was on their side, and oftentimes, this “best treatment” involved mental, physical, and sexual violence.

 

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Typically, masters were advised to treat their slaves as follows: ‘Create a sense of personal inferiority, so slaves “know their place”; Instill fear in the minds of slaves; Teach the servants to take interest in the master’s enterprise; and Ensure that the slave is uneducated, helpless, and dependent by depriving them of access to education and recreation." It was believed that this treatment would keep slaves from gathering the courage to start an uprising. It happened before — most famously by Nat Turner in an uprising that formed the storyline for Nate Parker’s 2016 film “The Birth of a Nation.” This form of legal brutality only added to the horrors of slavery by enshrining these abuses in law.

 

The laws that governed this type of treatment were known as slave codes, and these codes were designed to ensure that slave masters followed the above guidelines. For example, the codes stated that “slaves were prohibited from reading and writing, and owners were mandated to regularly search slave residences for suspicious activity. [Other] codes prohibited slaves from possessing weapons, leaving their owner’s plantations without permission, and lifting a hand against a white person, even in self defense.” While these may seem unnecessarily wicked today, the logic is simple. Slaves who can’t read can’t organize, and slaves who can’t own weapons can’t fight back against their oppression.

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In reality, however, the worst effect of such slave codes were that they helped legitimize the institution of slavery, and cruelty and inhumanity were written into the law. The same government that represented “liberty and justice for all” systematically failed to guarantee those rights to a large subset of its population. And, as we know, once something is written into law, it often becomes the norms of society. As a result, these slave codes were much worse than simple laws dictating the lives of a slave in the Antebellum South — they set the precedent that it was morally and legally acceptable to treat Black Americans with such brutality.

 

That is why it’s important to fight back against narratives such as the Lost Cause, because we must remember that Confederates fought to continue the savage oppression of an entire race of people. There was no room for chivalry or Southern hospitality within the institution of slavery; there was only pain and suffering.

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 WAR & RECONSTRUCTION 

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Another popular myth about the Old South — which complements the Lost Cause Narrative quite nicely — is that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery. The most popular of the alternative reasons given is the issue of “state’s rights” — a topic I remember being taught about in my 7th and 8th grade American history classes. To be fair, the argument has some merit. Local autonomy had been a hot-button issue since the days of the Revolution, when the thirteen colonies fought against the British crown for the right to legislate themselves. A similar thought process was popular in the South at the time leading up to, and immediately following, the Civil War.

 

By the time war broke out in 1860, the differences between the North and the South had become much more stark since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The North was now synonymous with modernity — trade boomed, cities grew, and slavery was outlawed. The South, however, was viewed as backwards and immoral. Where the North had dense cities filled with factories, the South had spread out farms and slave-fueled plantations. Naturally, this led the North to a population increase, but as long as the balance of Northern and Southern states stayed even, the South would never have to worry about losing their autonomy. However, many Southerners could see the writing on the wall, and knew eventually they’d be outnumbered in the legislature — which is why they‘d always championed “state’s rights” and a small federal government. That was the only way, they believed, to guarantee that they could set their own rules.

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In that sense, perhaps the Civil War was truly fought over state’s rights. However, a necessary caveat must be added that invalidates this entire approach as an alternative to slavery being the reason behind the Civil War — the war was fought over a state’s right to continue its practice of slavery. Even secession documents agree with this point of view.

 

Georgia’s document read, “The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution.”

 

Missippi’s declared, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

 

South Carolina’s prognosticated, “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

 

Texas’ spoke about the power imbalance between the North and the South and this imbalances effect on its right to own slaves. “They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance. They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State,” it read.

 

And Virginia’s, a state bordering the nation’s capital, claimed the federal government was abusing its power “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.”

 

History is not on the side of those who claim that the War was fought solely for state’s rights. It’s important to acknowledge slavery as the inherent root cause of the War, because only then can we fully understand how the dynamics of life in the South shaped up when the Confederates surrendered at Appomattox Court House five years after the first bullets were fired. While slavery eventually gave way to discrimination, many people don’t know that for a short time after the Civil War, life dramatically improved for Blacks in the South. This period of history is called Reconstruction, and this part is normally glossed over and written off as the limbo period between the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. However, that interpretation couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

At the end of the war, over 4 million Black Americans were freed from the bondage of slavery. Initially, though, Southern states, acting on the premise of “state’s rights,” passed restrictive laws governing what these now freedmen can do. Andrew Johnson, the president at the time and a suspected Confederate-sympathizer, simply looked the other way and allowed these laws to be passed. This injustice stoked furor in the North, and the task of rebuilding the region was transferred to the “Radical Republicans” in Congress. These Republicans — who are noticeably different from today’s Republicans, who mobilized around anti-Civil Rights measures later in the 20th century — first passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which enacted martial law in the South. Effectively, this stripped the Southern States of their claim to state’s rights, as life in the region was directly controlled by the federal government from thereon out.

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Next, Congress passed the 14th Amendment — which granted citizenship to former slaves — and the 15th Amendment — which said that, regardless of race, all male citizens, including former slaves, had the constitutional right to vote. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment was the large participation of African Americans in civic life. 16 African Americans were elected to US Congress, 600 to state legislatures, and many more to local offices. Reconstruction was so radical that in under a decade, people went from the bondage of slavery to drafting legislation.  Other accomplishments of the era included “the South’s first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).”

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These unprecedented advancements continued until the 1870s. Fueled by an economic downturn and a lessened interest in Reconstruction, Democrats took back control of Congress from Republicans in 1874. Two years later, during the election of 1876, Reconstruction came to a swift end. The Democratic-controlled congress promised to support Republican presidential-nominee Rutherford Hayes, who’d lost the popular vote, only if he pulled federal troops out of the South. With this compromise, the era of Reconstruction came to a close. With that, the rest is history. The Ku Klux Klan grew stronger, states suppressed Black voting, and African Americans were once again banished to the lowest rung of our societal ladder. As we all know, this oppression came to a head during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s — but not all of the issues these activists fought to address have been resolved.

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 THE PRESENT & THE FUTURE 

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Despite that fact that many of the events detailed on this website occurred generations ago, their legacies and impact are still being felt today. As a result, disproving these myths (and understanding reality) is the only way we can accurately understand the current state of American race relations.

 

Perhaps the most popular of these myths is the idea that racism ended with the abolition of slavery. More mild versions of this thought-process include that it ended with the Civil Rights Movement, but both of those assumptions are incorrect. Proponents of those points of view share an underlying assumption that the horrors of such oppression happened long in the past — so far ago that anyone alive today is untouched. “I’ve never seen a ‘White Only’ sign,” they rationalize “so that must mean we’ve moved on past that type of discrimination.” However, my grandmother is a living testimony to the opposite. Born in a small town near the Virginia-North Carolina border, she was forced to attend an all-Black school, use separate bathrooms, and drink from “colored only” water fountains. This system of legally and socially enforced white supremacy caused her to accept her treatment as a second class citizen with little explicit protest because, in her words, “it’s what was expected.”

 

As a child, those experience shape your sense of identity. Luckily for my grandmother, she moved to Philadelphia as a young teenager, where she became socialized in a more equitable — but still very racist — society. But there is currently a generation of people, both Black and White, who weren’t fortunate enough to experience a change from the social norms of the South. For Black Americans, this meant only attending the underfunded schools designated for students of color. College, therefore, was out of the question. As a result of this educational injustice, many were robbed of the opportunity to climb the economic ladder. For the Whites who participated in this system of oppression, this means it’s possible that some still hold these prejudices views. Only now they’re our judges, police officers, and teachers.

 

This process of social reproduction has helped ensure that the effects of discrimination are still being felt today. Study after study has shown that Black children are punished more often and more severely than their white classmates, Black borrowers are much less likely to be granted a loan than their white counterparts with similar credit scores, and employers prefer applicants with “white”-sounding names over those with “Black”-sounding ones. None of that is a coincidence — the institution of slavery and legalized oppression has created a society where it’s acceptable, and perhaps even expected, to be discriminatory. This manifests in very concrete results, outlined in the previous sentences, that have serious results.

 

Additionally, those realities work together to create a vicious cycle. Take the first example, that Black children are punished more often and more severely than their White counterparts. Even if a Black child acts the same as their White classmates, they’re labeled as “troublesome,” and they’re treated differently by subsequent teachers. Overtime, this drastically affects the quality of their education for no fault of their own. For the second example, home ownership is one of the best ways  for someone to build wealth. Yet when Black families are denied the opportunity to purchase a home, they’re robbed of that opportunity.

 

Over the past fifty years, we’ve seemingly replaced “Whites Only” signs with more subtle, but equally dangerous, forms of oppression. Even when it seems we’ve taken two steps forward (say, the election of Barack Obama), we immediately take two hundred back (the election of Donald Trump). The only way forward is acknowledging and rectifying our country’s many flaws, and we can only do so by knowing our history. In that sense, if this website enlightens even one person, it’s fulfilled its purpose.

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