American Prophet - The Gifts of Frederick Douglass by Adam Gopnik

American Prophet - The Gifts of Frederick Douglass

by Adam Gopnik

     Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. Fredericks father, as David W. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom" (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name — in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers — he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor of a character in a Walter Scott poem. (He added an extra "s" for distinction.)

     What's curious is that this was a completely Southern choice, a tribute to the culture he was escaping. The South, as Mark Twain protested at length, had long been hostage to a, cult of Walter Scott s neo-medievalism, one of the opiates of Southern "gallantry" that justified the concentration-camp culture as a leisurely and gracious one, a myth so durable that it shaped the most successful American movie ever made, "Gone with the Wind." But the choice is also a reminder that the wind in Romanticism, and in Walter Scott, could blow both ways, toward liberal nationalism and self-renewal as well as toward feudal nostalgia and hierarchy. Douglass's new name was as much a rejection of his slave name as was Malcolm X's rejection of his birth name. Little — but in this case the chosen name denoted not an absence but a presence. The name he chose inscribed him within a cultural tradition that he had been forced to inherit and chose to remake. This insistence on seeing past the evils of the Enlightenment in search of the light that was still left there made him one of the most radical readers of the American nineteenth century. No one was ever a more critical reader of the Constitution, or, in the end, a more compelling advocate of its virtues.

     With Douglass, then, we have everything and its opposite — the slave wielding a sword of vengeance against the South who adopted the South's mythology for his own; the militant prophet of the truth that no compromise with slavery was possible who became a central pillar of pragmatic politics in the postwar era. In telling this great story. Blight, a historian at Yale, confronts one great difficulty: Douglass himself wrote his own life three times, each time thrillingly well, though each time with a slightly different purpose. Like the Gospels, each is written with a different ideological agenda. In 1845, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, "was written as a straight forward abolitionist horror story, albeit an exceptionally humane and potent one. Ten years later came "My Bond age and My Freedom," a fuller and more nuanced-novelistic account of the same story. And then, in 1881, when he was in his sixties, he published "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass," in which this man, who had watched the ships go by in the Chesapeake Bay with a desperate sense of disbelief that anyone or anything in the world could be so free, was able to report on his journeys to Cairo and Paris and his reception in both as a man of state and of letters.

     The prose style in the three memoirs alters under the pressure of the changing agenda: the first time pained and urgent, the second subtler and more considered, the last orotund and outward. Yet, as Blight shows, the tale Douglass wove about himself, from the first to the last volume, is remarkably faithful to what can be dug up independently about the facts of his early life. So Blight’s biography, particularly in its early pages, is necessarily a kind of palimpsest: he (fives back and forth beneath Douglass's texts, sifting and sorting and weaving.

     The story, simply told, is that Douglass was largely spared the worst of slavery by inhabiting its more familial edges, at a time when who owned you and where you were owned shaped the course of your life as someone else's property. After he had been passed from his brutal first master to the man's kinder son-in- law, Thomas Auld, the transforming event of Douglass's life was his arrival in Baltimore, at the age of eight, to live with members of Auld's family. City slaves were better treated than country slaves. "A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on a plantation," Douglass wrote. "He is a desperate slave holder who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave." As a child, he had, unusually, been treated more or less as an equal playmate of his first master's son, and soon Sophia Auld, the wife of Thomas's brother. began to teach him to read and write.

     Absolute power, even when well meant, always becomes arbitrary. Sophia first took immense pleasure at Frederick's celerity as a pupil, and then, under the pressure of her husband's disapproval ("If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him"), turned violently against the boy's education. Frederick persisted, trading bits of bread with street urchins for secret reading lessons. Here, as elsewhere in his life, he defeated the expected racism of his fellows by the sheer magnetism of his manner.

He was also able to take advantage of the oppressor's hypocrisy, slavery being a Christian institution, it was important to expose the slaves to the Gospels. This meant that the innocent business of studying the Bible could be turned to the subversive aim of acquiring literacy. Having learned to read by literally buying words, Douglass had an intense sense of the power of language, of the double meanings of individual words; irony was ingrained in him. He heard the word "abolition," for instance, as a mysterious, forbidden incantation; he didn't know precisely what "abolition" meant, but he could tell from the murmur around it that it mattered enormously.

     He loved Baltimore, but was wrenched out of it when he was fifteen and sent a year later to be "broken" in the backwoods by a cruel overseer named Edward Covey. Making up his mind that he would die trying to sustain his manhood, he attacked Covey, with the result, by no means guaranteed, that Covey backed off. Doug lass thought this a proof of the powers of resistance, but he also knew that such resistance usually brought instant death or else shipment down to the plantations of the Deep South—a living death. In feet, he was shipped off to the backwoods, where he tried and failed to escape. Then a remarkable piece of good fortune came his way. Auld, for reasons still mysterious—from humanity or guilt or a buried sense of kinship? — meekly took him back to Baltimore and promised to free him after a seven-year hitch. It was, as Douglass came to recognize, the great salvation of his life. In 1848, he wrote an open letter to Auld, saying, "I entertain no malice toward you personally... There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant... I am your fellow-man, but not your slave." That letter was a kind of propaganda piece, to show the slave's moral superiority to his master, but it was sincere as well as shrewd.

     In Baltimore that second, salvaged time, he fell in love with a free black woman, Anna Murray. It is still a little hallucinatory to be reminded that, in the border states, free blacks, second-class citizens but citizens still, lived side by side with those who were property. Murray emboldened Douglass to escape and he fled to freedom disguised as a sailor. The account of his flight north stops one's heart to read, so near did he come to apprehension. (A worker whom he knew from the docks saw him, recognized him, and kept silent.)

     In 1841, three years after he got a job as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he made a name speaking at the local A.M.E. Zion church, he was brought to an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, a booming whaling port, and made an impromptu speech that changed history. No one had ever heard an ex-slave speak with such precision and eloquence about his experiences. The eminent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his followers pressed him into service as a speaker, and Douglass spent the next fifteen years riding trains from one abolition meeting to the next while Anna, now his wife, who had come north after him, waited in New Bedford and raised an ever-growing crop of children. (They had five in all, including three sons who served in the Civil War, one of them surviving, improbably, the massacre of Robert Gould Shaw's regiment at Fort Wagner.)

     Like many other young and still unformed activists who discover in themselves a gift for oratory, Douglass had to self-educate even as he was speaking. Young orators' tongues are formed before their minds are set. This happened to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to inhabit a leadership position that he was not yet fully prepared to assume, as it did to Emma Goldman, an immigrant who became Red Emma almost before she mastered English. (In a more benevolent manner, it happened to Barack Obama—one eloquent speech turning him from a relatively green politician into a plausible Presidential candidate.) In each case, the challenge is to keep one's independence, and one's head, as others are trying to turn you into their megaphone.

     Douglass passed from slave to celebrity in about a year and remained one for the rest of his life. He began the small list of people who are, in effect, the face of their movement. Gloria Steinem was not the most important feminist thinker of her time, or its most significant organizer, but she was the face of American feminism, for a reason. She embodied the reality, confounding to sexists, that a woman who looked like her could be a radical egalitarian about gender. Douglass embodied the reality, confounding to racists, that a black man could be charismatic, imposing, educated, and a voice for absolute emancipation. Douglass's charisma—along with his good looks— wasn't incidental. He was one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth century, as photogenic as Jack Kennedy a century later. In the photographic portraits (collected and contextualized in a 2015 volume titled "Picturing Frederick Douglass"), he sometimes looks like a fiercer George Washington—Roman nose, intense scowl of virtue, swept-back classical hair. In a new culture of reproduced images, these things counted.

     Douglass's personal charisma involved, too, an unashamed sexual presence. His slave narratives are strikingly frank about the terrible erotics of slavery, and of black-white race relations, in a way that would not be acceptable in progressive discussions of race until the nineteen-sixties. In his first two memoirs, he writes bluntly about forced sexual relations between slave and master, and what perverse family relations they produced, including the fact that rape was turning the black slave population half white:

If the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who—like my self—owe their existence to white fathers and, most frequently, to their masters, and masters' sons. The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master. The thoughtful know the rest.

     His early memoirs find a balance between outrage and subtle irony — those angry, understated phrases: "an unscriptural institution"; "the thoughtful know the rest"—in describing the wrenching effects of slavery on the human soul. Pointing out that one would expect slave masters to be kind to their own children, he coolly analyzes the truth: "Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child's face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence." What would be a buried subject in most American writing about black-white relations was with Douglass overt, in a way that must have intimidated his followers and inflamed his haters.

     Four relationships — three with white American men, one with a European woman — shaped Douglass' mature life and mind. He had a tutelary and then an adversarial relation with William Lloyd Garrison; then an admiring and allergic relation with John Brown; next, a prophet-and-politician relation with Abraham Lincoln; and, finally, a deep, romantic relation with a woman named Ottilie Assing. (Throughout this time he made his living, as best he could, as a miscellaneous Journalist, beginning an anti-slavery weekly first called, poetically, North Star and then, tellingly, changed, for branding purposes, to Frederick Douglass' Paper.)

     The story of Douglass's relationship with Garrison is one of the key stories in American political history. They met and became friends at that 1841 gathering in Nantucket. Garrison, the most famous abolitionist of the period, was the headliner when Douglass was asked to tell the story of his life. Overwhelmed by Douglass's eloquence. Garrison asked the crowd, "Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property or a man?" Douglass went on the road as a Garrisonite.

     Less than a decade later, they broke, bitterly and for life. Some of the bitterness arose from Douglass's uneasy sense that he was not so much being used as being put on display. One wonders if Ralph Ellison was aware of Douglass s relationship with Garrison when. in "Invisible Man," he wrote about his unnamed narrator's relationship with "the Brotherhood," a version of the Communist Party. They're strangely similar: the black man discovers a gift for oratory is instantly pressed into propaganda service by a white radical organization, and has a deeply ambivalent ration with his new white friends, who are just a little too much like his old white masters.

     Douglass's break with Garrison also derived from a decisive intellectual difference, one that still sculpts American politics—with the irony at the white crusader was the more conventionally radical actor, and the black ex-slave seemingly the more "moderate." Garrison was both a pacifist and a moral secessionist. He believed that the Constitution was so deeply implicated in slavery — including its creation of the small-state-favoring Senate — that it could not be salvaged. Douglass came to believe that the Constitution was a good document gone wrong—that, in its democratic premises, it breathed freedom, and that it needed only to be amended to be restored to its first purposes. Douglass most forcefully offered this insistence in his 1852 "Fourth of July" speech in Rochester. It is a masterpiece of startling argumentative twists. He be gins with unstinting praise of the values and character of the Founding Fathers — the only forewarning of dissent being his speaking of the events of the seventeen-seventies in the second person: your Founders did this ... your history says that. Then he makes his thundering turn: "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie." Finally, he makes a still more surprising swerve, back toward the American center: the Constitution is solid, all that needs fixing is our way of reading it. "Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gate way? or is it in the temple? It is neither."

     The constitutional issue was, and remains, epic. All of American liberalism remains at stake in this choice  - it is what divides Obama from Cornel West and his other critics on the left. For Garrison, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to abandon it. For Douglass, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to re-state the aim more forcefully and more inclusively. If the aim was in the document, the arc could yet be completed. He thought the aim was there, and the arc was possible.

     The philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams, an astute reader of Douglass, sees him as drawn to the "possibility of refounding the Union on the basis of a reconstituted practice of citizenship." Douglass's belief in the integrity of the American Constitution made him, ironically, less willing to wait for legislative remedies and readier to use violence against the slave establishment. This became Lincoln's reasoning, too, evident in his legendary speech at Cooper Union, in 1860: the historical evidence showed that the signers of the Constitution considered slavery a national question, up for national debate. It wasn't a local or a states' - rights question. Wrongly decided once, it was still on the agenda of the nation as a whole. In the name of the Constitution, slavery was to be assaulted frontally. (How frontally Lincoln could not decide, until events over took him as President.) For Douglass, this urge to fight for principle, while making sure that the fight could be won, shaped his strange push-and-pull relationship with John Brown, in itself a mini American epic.

     As Blight relates, Douglass was, in the eighteen-fifties, drawn by Brown's courage during the Kansas question the question of whether slavery was to extend into the new territories—and by the implacable nature of his antislavery views. Where even the Garrisonites condescended to blacks. Brown, as the Harvard historian John Stauffer showed in "The Black Hearts of Men" (2002), envied the courage and "manhood" of the escaped slaves, and was almost ashamed of his own whiteness. Yet Douglass was repelled by Brown's fanaticism: morally clear-eyed on the subject of slavery, Brown was crazy on the subject of what to do about slavery, moved by bloodlusts and Biblicism and incapable of reasoning about means and ends. Douglass dallied with Brown and then, abruptly, withdrew his support from the Harper's Ferry raid. Simple arithmetic, he saw, meant that it would achieve nothing and endanger the lives of any slaves who participated. Violent means would be necessary, but violence was justified only when it had a chance to prevail.

    After the disaster of Harper's Ferry, some officials in New York tried to have Douglass arrested as a conspirator, and he prudently fled, first to Canada and then to Britain. It was a mistake on the part of his persecutors to force him into exile, however temporary. A huge hit as a lecturer in England and Scotland, he rallied the already strong antislavery forces there.

    Moral consensus can shift with enormous rapidity. Not so very long ago, it was acceptable to cast the American Civil War as a tragic clash between two decent sides. In Ken Burns' 1990 PBS series on the war, Shelby Foote declared, speaking through his soft beard with his gentle drawl, that the problem was that the North and the South somehow couldn't find a compromise. It has since become harder to deny the truth that slavery was the sole cause of the war. What made war inevitable, then, was the election of President Lincoln, a single-issue candidate who had made his name by calling for an end to slavery's extension and by recognizing it as an absolute evil. The one conceivable compromise that might have been tried was a gradual program of subsidized emancipation, but, as Lincoln discovered from his correspondence in early 1861 with Alexander Stephens, the eventual Vice-President of the Confederacy, the Southern ruling class had made up its mind: slavery or secession.

     While slavery was the war's sole cause, however, it was not the war's sole or even its most important rallying cry. To the antislavery cause was added the pro-Union cause, a narrowly nationalist crusade. This aspect of the President's war-making is why Edmund Wilson impatiently compared Lincoln to Bismarck — both seen as iron-hearted nationalists who taught their people to die for the idea of national greatness. And there's no doubt that "We won't let you Rebs walk away with our one country!" was a more motivating cry at Gettysburg than "You must never again keep slaves!"

     Douglass came to see that Lincoln had wrapped the right cause around the wrong cry. The ingenuity of the Gettysburg Address as a forensic argument lies in die way it made the two causes— nationalism and emancipation—seem one. The nation was born in the view that all men are created equal; slavery denies that view; if we lose the war, it shows the world that a nation with that premise cannot survive unfragmented; and therefore fighting for the Union is the same thing as fighting for its first principles. Douglass admired the somewhat sophistic logic.

     During the war years, he spent a surprising amount of intellectual energy opposing what now seems to us an obvious chimera — a plan to resettle exslaves outside the United States, in Central America or the West Indies or Africa. Though Lincoln sometimes seemed sympathetic to this idea, "colonization" was always unrealistic. But it wasn't inherently a racist scheme, and not a few black leaders, including the great abolitionist Martin R. Delany, advocated what was, in effect, a form of black Zionism. Why, then, did Douglass think it so important to battle? It was because Douglass saw culture and civilization almost entirely in what we now call Eurocentric terms. He took his language and his lore and his moral categories from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. He did not see these as the alien property of white people. He thought they were his, to own and to alter.

     Douglass's relationship with Lincoln throughout the war has been beautifully detailed in "Giants" (2008), another book by John Stauffer, and Blight largely follows the same outlines of the dance between crusader and politician. Douglass was at first impatient and mistrustful of Lincoln, became somewhat more empathetic concerning his political struggles, and ended being a fullhearted admirer, enthralled by the intended scope of emancipation. Lincoln, for his part, came to understand that Douglass's moral vision was impeccably correct — and a critical undergirding for Lincoln's increasingly militant dews. At the second Inauguration, Lincoln greeted Douglass at the White House reception not as "Mr. Douglass" but as "my friend."

     It was during these years that Douglass brought his fascination with the European Romantics to a head, by becoming involved with one. Ottilie Assing was a German intellectual who came to Hoboken in the eighteen-fifties. Although her father's origins were Jewish, she considered herself German, and at a time when German in America was what Jewish would be later: the crucial liberal ethnicity. She interviewed the famous ex-slave in his Rochester home in 1856, fell passionately in love with him, even sometimes sharing the home with Anna and the rest of the Douglass family.

     Douglass's biographers, including Blight, are uneasy about this relationship. On the one hand, our feminist principles want to make of Assing a model European woman of mind, a suitable intellectual partner for Douglass, a Harriet Taylor to his John Stuart Mill — which indeed she was, broadening his knowledge of, among other things, German poetry and philosophy. At the same time, the characterization feels unkind toward Anna Douglass, who had taken unimaginable risks in order to help Frederick escape slavery. Though Blight is cautious about drawing firm conclusions, it seems clear that Douglass and Assing had an erotic relationship. She wrote to her sister about how happy she was, even though the "external situation remains less than perfect"; and she wrote also of how it feels "when one stands in such intimate relation with one man, as is the case with me in relation to Douglass." When, later, she went back to Europe, she had his letters burned, and eventually committed suicide by cyanide, at least in part from loneliness.

     She brought poetry into his life in. every sense — with the reading she shared but also through the rich fantasy she created in which they would start a free, itinerant life together in Europe. As Blight writes, "Ottilie almost never gave up on her quest of drawing Douglass off to a new life in Europe; like spring itself, it was her annual recurring fantasy." This plan never seems to have existed at more than the level of fantasy — but then the level of fantasy is one of the most important levels at which things can exist. Elsewhere, she compared herself to another Ottilie, in a Goethe novel, who, Blight notes, "finds a tragic fete due to a form of spiritual adultery." We can overlook how exhausting commitment to a great cause can be, and Douglass had become bound to his. The dream of escape to the Alps with Ottilie was something to be free for.

     Douglass's political life after the war's end and Lincoln's assassination may seem anticlimactic, and yet in many respects it is as important as what preceded it. He became, in one view, a conventional party politician. But there is a more positive way to see this migration from militancy. Stauffer's "Giants" showed us how much Douglass's prophetic force poked and prodded Lincoln toward righteousness, but Douglass himself was deeply affected by Lincoln's example of the power of liberal party politics to make real change happen. He became a proud pillar of the Republican Party — essentially, the same baggy assemblage of minorities and progressives and city people (and neoliberals) that we find in the Democratic Party today. Even as Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow overtook the South — a reality that Douglass spoke up against as passionately as he had spoken up against slavery — he devoted most of his time to the construction of black institutions. He helped build colleges; there was also a Freedman's Savings Bank, which, sadly. failed after he had agreed to run it. He received (to the dismay of many black contemporaries) a patronage post, as the U.S. Marshal of Washington, D.C., and was not above passing along a bit of juice to friends and family.

     Blight has certainly written, in the book's texture and density and narrative flow — one violent and provocative incident arriving right after another — a great American biography. But when it comes to the postwar Douglass he perhaps succumbs to a moral anxiety that seems endemic in American academia, taking an ambivalent tone about Douglass's seemingly more conventional post war path, and about aspects of Douglass's engagement with other kinds of liberation movements.

    This is particularly true of his engagement with women's suffrage. We would have liked the struggles against the subjugation of women and of blacks to swim along in tandem. And to some degree they did. Douglass was one of the few men present at Seneca Falls in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch the modem American feminist movement. "The history of the world has given to us many sublime undertakings, but none more sublime than this," he said later. "It was a great thing for humane people to organize in opposition to slavery, but it was a much greater thing, in view of all the circumstances, for woman to organize herself in opposition to her exclusion from participation in government." (A greater thing, he thought, because it was less self-evidently cruel and more insidiously oppressive.) But, as the war ended and the eighteen-sixties progressed, there were deep differences between them, which, by our standards, were flattering to neither.

     Douglass insisted that the Fifteenth Amendment and other protections of black suffrage were essential, even if they excluded women. In 1866, he wrote that, with women, "it is a desirable matter; with us it is important, a question of life and death," and he made reference to recent massacres of unprotected "free" blacks in New Orleans and Memphis. Later in the decade, he insisted, "When women, because they are women... are draped from their houses and are hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains bashed out upon the pavement... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own." Northern middle-class white women, in this view, were free riders on the black man's struggle for liberation, with incomparably lower risks. Their "husbands, fathers, and brothers" could already protect them. (Intersectionality having not yet arrived, neither Douglass nor the white suffragists talked much about the special predicament of black women.)

     Stanton, like her fellow-campaigner Susan B. Anthony, thought that Douglass failed to grasp that they were not a minority seeking protection by the ballot but a majority forever excluded from any exercise of political power, and declared that a government with the participation of black men as well as white men would merely "multiply the tyrants." They were incensed by the condescension they detected in him. And both Douglass and Stanton felt free to use the Drunken Pat argument, asking why the feckless, inebriated Irish immigrant had the vote when—depending on who was arguing— black men or white women didn't. None of it is to our taste: Douglass insulted women, Stanton insulted blacks, and both felt free to insult the Irish.

     Yet we need to be charitable about the moral failings of our ancestors—not as an act of charity to them but as an act of charity to ourselves. Our own unconscious assumptions and cultural habits are doubtless just as impregnated with bias as theirs were. We should be kind to them, as we ask the future to be kind to us. To take a small example from this biography: Blight celebrates Douglass's escape from the South to the whaling town of New Bedford, where he first came into contact with the broader abolitionist circles. He doesn't mention the fascinating figures of the black whaling captains, whaling being one of the rare professions in pre-Civil War life where black men were sometimes trusted in positions of command. But the whalers participated in acts of unimaginable cruelty inflicted on creatures capable of feeling pain and fear—and future generations might well become as intolerant of cruelty to animals as we are of cruelty to people. As for the ethnic jolting that pains Blight, it was an assertion of Americanness: no longer an outsider, Douglass could make after-dinner jokes about the Irish, right along with the rest of his countrymen. (To add to the pile of ironies, in 1884, a couple of years after Anna's death, he married another women's-rights campaigner, and a patrician white one at that, Helen Pitts, previously his secretary. Like Assing, she was fiercely devoted to him, and they did the world travelling that had been mere fantasy before.)

     Much of the last two decades of Douglass's long life, before his death, in 1895, was spent on a kind of permanent victory tour, receiving honors while exasperating younger black leaders who, in the time-honored tradition, thought that the grand old man was far too grand and far too old to do the necessary work. But he never became morally inert. In 1877, Douglass sought out Thomas Auld, who was dying, to forgive him. "Frederick," Auld said, "I always knew you were too smart to be a slave, and had I been in your place, I should have done as you did." "I did not run away from you," Douglass replied. "I ran away from slavery."

     That the distinction seems less clear to us — what was Auld but the living face of slavery? — than it did to Douglass is a sign of the complexity of the relationship, and also of the power of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness to penetrate a sensitive mind. For Douglass identified himself as a Christian throughout his life, and his gesture reminds us that slaves absorbed and reimagined the religion of their oppressors in their own morally original terms, as a permanent bulwark against persecution. Even during the reign of white terror that replaced the plantation concentration camps, the black church became the chief reservoir of social capital, and remained so right through Dr. King's time — one more way in which Douglass's life encompassed so much of what was to come.

In the end, Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions of the black experience in America. A case can be made for him as the progenitor of the pragmatic-progressive strain that leads to Dr. King and, even more, to Bayard Rustin and Obama— disabused of illusions, but insistent that with time the Constitution can be realized in its fullness and that democratic politics are the way to do it. This Doug lass is the friend of Lincoln, the man who sustained the necessary relations with institutional power — as Dr. King would do, however guardedly, with Kennedy and then with Johnson. Douglass understood that African-Americans were too small a minority to act without allies. A related pragmatism, prominent in his later writings, became the model of "self-reliance" of the land that inspires one conservative strain of African-American thought, from Booker T. Washington to Clarence Thomas.

     Yet Douglass can also be seen as the father of the most militant strain of resistance, the kind that insists on the uncompromising rejection of racism, with violence as a recourse when necessary. His confrontation with the brutal slavebreaker Covey is still a model of "manhood," of self-assertion in defiance of death. Lincoln remains the saint of American democracy, yet his ascent from the backwoods to the White House was, for all its rigors, a far easier ride. Lincoln read in the midst of farming chores; Douglass learned to read at the risk of his life. He had farther to go, and went wider in getting there. Such are the multitudes he contains; he is far from a nineteenth-century figure alone. In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge.

The New Yorker, October 15, 2018

Is Democracy Dying? A House Divided by Ibram X. Kendi

IS DEMOCRACY DYING? A HOUSE DIVIDED 
By Ibram X. Kendi

     In 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned that America could not remain "half slave and half free." Today, the country remains divided by racism - and the threat is as existential as it was before the Civil War.
     He stood on the outer edge of the sidewalk, hands clasped behind him-handcuffed, perhaps, by the immensity of the moment. He knew the city of Springfield, Illinois, well. But on June 16,1858, Abraham Lincoln was learning his new place in American politics, and possibly dreading what it now demanded. He was about to deliver a speech accepting the nomination as the Republican Party's candidate for the U.S. Senate. In it, he planned to diagnose a malignant divide many of his fellow Republicans believed was benign.
The speech was too radical, his friends had told him, as friends had told American revolutionaries a century earlier. Those revolutionaries had pressed on with their cause. Summoning the courage to press on with his, Lincoln may have reminded himself that ignoring the divide would be more radical still.
     Delegates stared at Lincoln as they made their way to the Illinois state capitol. Patrons stared at him from the nearby dry-goods store owned by his friend John Williams. Lincoln believed that the slave states were staring at him, too-were eyeing the northern states as well as the western territories. With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the election of the expansionist President James Buchanan in 1856, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, all three branches of the federal government had acquiesced to the march of slaveholders across the nation. 
     Lincoln left the solitude of the sidewalk. He walked across the square, entered the House of Representatives, and stood before the more than 1,000 delegates of the Illinois Republican State Convention. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he declared. "I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free... It will become all one thing or all the other." 
     The prophetic speech propelled Lincoln onto the national stage. Three years later, as president, he was commanding an army that battled to keep the house standing. His opponent, the Confederate States of America, was fighting to destroy the house and to build a new one safe for slavery.
     Lincoln saved the old house, with the decisive assistance of black troops. Though he didn't live to see it, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ensured that the United States would be permanently free. But the racism that buttressed slavery remained in the living constitution of American policy and the American mind. The house remained divided, remained separate and unequal.
     It remained divided today. One hundred sixty years after Lincoln warned of the dangers of disunion brought on by slavery, Americans must bear witness to racism's destructive power. This government cannot endure, permanently half racist and half antiracists.

RACISM - Trace the issues rending American politics to their root, and more than often than not you'll find soil poisoned by racism.

     Divided the nation in two, politically and geographically. The threat racism poses to the contemporary United States is more insidious for being more diffuse and more veiled. But trace the issues rending American politics to their root, and more often than not you'll find soil poisoned by racism. None of these issues is likely to tear down the republic as slavery nearly did, but the danger is no less existential. 
     Some of the assaults that racism has mounted on American society are well known and recall Lincoln's era in their brazenness. "I do, not regret what I did," Dylann Roof journaled six weeks after killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. America may not be on the precipice of civil war, but the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year revealed that there are white nationalists who are prepared for violent conflict, convinced that demographic shifts will deprive white Americans of their power and privilege. They came out into the public square chanting, "You will not replace us!" and "Blood and soil!" 
     The racism motivating other divisions in American democracy is only somewhat more subtle. Racist resentment propelled to the presidency a man who seems intent on jackhammering the unfinished foundation of the house Lincoln risked everything to save. Donald Trump's administration has encouraged the incarceration, deportation, or exclusion of astonishing numbers of nonwhite people. On Trump's watch, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are being pushed to deport undocumented immigrants. The president regularly whips his followers into a frenzy by calling for a wall along America's southern border, threatening to shut down the government if he does not get his way. For a brief moment a few years ago, politicians on both sides of the aisle at least feinted toward criminal justice reform. But those energies have largely faded, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest possible charges and sentences in all cases. 
     And yet it is the least recognizable of racism's assaults that are most portentous-and their beginnings predate the Trump presidency. Those people of color not imprisoned or deported are robbed of their political power by other means. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts justified a rollback of federal voting regulations by writing, in Shelby Counry v. Holder, that "our country has changed" since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But by Election Day 2016, 14 states had instituted new voting restrictions. Our country has changed-but only in the way votes are suppressed. In the old days, before the Voting Rights Act, states and counties suppressed voting by men and eventually women of color through property requirements, literacy tests, and poll taxes-while tacitly condoning employer intimidation and Ku Klux Klan violence. Now states and counties suppress votes through early-voting restrictions, limits on absentee and mail-in ballots, poll closures, felon disenfranchisement, and laws requiring voter to have a photo ID. 
     Voters of color who can't be kept from the polls are herded into districts where their ballots, in effect, don't count. As the percentage of white Americans has declined, 
Latino and black populations have been manipulated on maps to keep white Republicans in positions of power. In emails sent in 2010, Texas map drawers used the abbre­viation OHRVS, or "Optimal Hispanic Republican Voting Strength." The map drawers were seeking to create districts that would appear representative of the state's growing Hispanic population but would nevertheless continue to safely elect white Republicans. In 2011, GOP operatives in North Carolina secretly schemed to alter the makeup of the state's congressional delegation, which at the time was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The goal was to get to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, in part by incorporating "all the significant concentrations of minority voters in the northeast into the first district," as one map designer, Tom Hofeller, wrote at the time. (The state's delegation soon became 10 Republicans and three Democrats.) In 2016, when a federal court deemed the maps discriminatory, state Republicans unabashedly tapped Hofeller to draw new "10-3" maps, assuring the public that this time race would not be "among the criteria." 
     Such chicanery robs Americans of their franchise. It also robs American democracy of its health. Civic engagement and collaboration are the lifeblood of any republic. Racist policies inhibit dialogue and undermine efforts at bipartisanship. They pit citizens against one another. Rather than locating the real sources of economic hardship and inequality, for instance, racist politicians encourage Americans to blame their struggles on neighbors who don't look or act like them, who are supposedly stealing their jobs or subsisting on their hard-earned tax money. 
     How long will Americans continue to believe in the ideal of equality and freedom while their nation's racist policies maintain inequality? How long will nonwhite Americans be willing to live as "second-class citizens" (to borrow Malcolm X's phrase), deprived of basic rights like the franchise? At some point, the victims of such policies and their allies will lose faith in their government, if they haven't already. They will come to see the American experiment as a failure-a house irrevocably divided against itself. 

     When he delivered his speech in 1858, Lincoln admonished his audience, and the North as a whole, for imagining that free states and slave states could continue to cohabitate peacefully. In 2018, many Americans imagine that a similar neutrality between racism and antiracism is possible. But only an embrace of antiracism can save the union. Antiracist ideas are built on the bedrock of racial equality. They recognize that any observed disparities between groups are the product not of hierarchy among races but of racist systems that create and perpetuate inequities. Antiracist policies seek to close the gaps in rights, resources, and opportunities that racist policies have opened and maintain. 
The Voting Rights Act was once a paragon of antiracism. For decades, segregationists had disenfranchised southern black voters through measures cleverly disguised to hide their racist intent. Legislators came to regard these measures as discriminatory because of their inequitable outcomes. Congress banned the measures and required all changes to voting laws in specific states and counties primarily in the South-to be approved by federal officials. Unlike so many failed civil-rights bills in American history, this provision placed the burden of proof on the policy maker to show that a policy wasn't racist, and not on the victim to show that the policy maker intended to be racist. 
     When the Supreme Court stripped federal preclearance from the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it removed one of the last major antiracist policies from federal law. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified 150 years ago, is no longer antiracist, if it ever was. That amendment was supposed to guarantee equal protection under the law for all Americans. Yet, to ensure its passage in 1866, congressional Republicans refused to define equal protection-or privileges or immunities, or due process of law-and thus left both racists and anti­racists a claim on their meaning. 
     The racists have secured much of the Fourteenth Amendment's inheritance, from the Supreme Court's first interpretation of it in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, which limited its protections, to the modern cases that have upheld racist policies and struck down antiracist ones. In 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court curtailed affirmative action. In 1987, in Mccleskey v. Kemp, it sanctioned the racially ­disproportionate impact of the death penalty in Georgia. In 2007, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Court placed new restrictions on school-desegregation programs. 
     Justice Harry Blackmun would shudder to see how the Fourteenth Amendment is interpreted today. "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race," he wrote in his opinion in Bakke 40 years ago. "There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot-we dare not-let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy." But that is precisely what has happened, and the result has been every bit as dire as Blackmun foresaw. 
     Today, only a renewed commitment to antiracist policies can save the endangered American project. The alternative is a governing system that becomes all racist and wholly illegitimate. The result may not be an 1860s ­style civil war. But, if allowed to proceed far enough, racism will ultimately destroy the American idea. And it will lead to contentiousness and resentment and, yes, violence that will make today's polarization seem quaint by comparison. 
     I believe, as Lincoln did, that we can repair our divided house. "I do not expect the house to fall," Lincoln said. "But I do expect it will cease to be divided." Even at the height of slavery's power, Lincoln believed that Americans could make the nation free. We can and must believe in our ability to make the nation antiracist despite the ascendancy of a racist president who pursues a racist agenda. Did we brave all then to falter now?

Ibram X. Kendi is the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, and the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. His next book, How to Be an Antiracist, will be published in 2019. 
The Atlantic, October 2018

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law - How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law
How Plessy v. Ferguson shaped the history of racial discrimination in America

by Louis Menand

     White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” the Iowa congressman Steve King inquired of a Times reporter last month. After the remark blew up, King explained that by “that language” he was referring to “Western civilization.” He also said that he condemned white nationalism and white supremacy as an “evil and bigoted ideology which saw in its ultimate expression the systematic murder of six million innocent Jewish lives.” (It’s unclear whether King thinks of Jews as nonwhite.)
     However, to answer the congressman’s original question: only after a long struggle. Seventeen states had laws banning interracial marriage, which is pretty much the heart of the doctrine of white supremacy, until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. From the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American race relations were largely shaped by states that had seceded from the Union in 1861, and the elected leaders of those states almost all spoke the language of white supremacy. They did not use dog whistles. “White Supremacy” was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, until 1995.
     How did this happen? How did white people in a part of the country that was virtually destroyed by war contrive to take political control of their states, install manifestly undemocratic regimes in them, maintain those regimes for nearly a century, and effectively block the national government from addressing racial inequality everywhere else? Part of the answer is that those people had a lot of help. Institutions constitutionally empowered to intervene twisted themselves every which way to explain why, in this matter, intervention was not part of the job description. One such institution was the Supreme Court of the United States.
     The case of Martha Lum is typical. She was the daughter of Jeu Gong Lum, who came to the United States from China in 1904. After being smuggled across the Canadian border by human traffickers, he made his way to the Mississippi Delta, where a relative ran a grocery store. In 1913, he married another Chinese immigrant, and they opened their own store. They had three children and gave them American names.
     In 1923, the family moved to Rosedale, Mississippi, and Martha, then eight years old, entered the local public school. According to Adrienne Berard, who tells the Lums’ story in “Water Tossing Boulders” (2016), nothing seemed amiss for the first year, but when Martha returned to school after the summer the principal relayed the news that the school board had ordered her to be expelled. Public schools in Mississippi had been racially segregated by law since 1890, and her school educated only whites. The board had decided that Martha was not white and, consequently, she could not study there.
The Lums engaged a lawyer, who managed to get a writ of mandamus—an order that a legal duty be carried out—served on the school board. The board, which must have been very surprised, contested the writ, and the case went to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which ruled that the board had the right to expel Martha Lum on racial grounds. That part was not so surprising.
     The court acknowledged that there was no statutory definition of the “colored race” in Mississippi. But it argued that the term should be construed in the broadest sense, and cited a case it had decided eight years earlier, upholding the right of a school board to expel from an all-white school two children whose great-aunts were rumored to have married nonwhites.
     That decision, the court said, showed that the term “colored” was not restricted to “persons having negro blood in their veins”—apparently since the children involved were in fact white. Martha Lum did not have “negro blood,” either, but she was not white. She could attend a “colored” school. Mississippi’s separate-schools law, the court explained, was enacted “to prevent race amalgamation.” Then why place an Asian-American child in a school with African-American children? Because, according to the court, the law was intended to serve “the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race.”
     The Lums appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868. The first clause of that amendment is the most radically democratic clause in the entire Constitution, much of which was designed to limit what the Founders considered the dangers of too much democracy. It decrees that any person born in the United States is a citizen, and that states may not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor deprive them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny them the equal protection of the laws. The United States has two founding documents: the Constitution, which is a legal rule book, and the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto with no force of law. The Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the Declaration.
     The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case, Lum v. Rice, was handed down in 1927, three years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed immigration act, which barred all Asians from entering the United States. Was Martha Lum a citizen? The Supreme Court said she was. Was she being denied the equal protection of the laws? The Court said that she was not, and cited a series of precedents in which courts had upheld the constitutionality of school segregation.
     It was true, the Court conceded, that most of those cases had involved African-American children. But it couldn’t see that “pupils of the yellow races” were any different, and the decision to expel such pupils was, it held, “within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Even though the Mississippi court had stated that the purpose of the school-segregation law was to preserve “the purity and integrity of the white race,” it was not a denial of equal protection to nonwhites. The Lums, of course, knew from firsthand observation what it meant to be classified as “colored” in Mississippi, and they did what a lot of African-American Mississippians were also doing—they left the state.
     The decision in Lum v. Rice was unanimous. The opinion of the Court was delivered by the Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, a former President of the United States; among the Justices who heard the case were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis. One of the precedents the Court quoted prominently in support of its decision was a case it had decided thirty-one years earlier—Plessy v. Ferguson.
     After Dred Scott, Plessy is probably the most notorious decision involving race in the history of the United States Supreme Court. It is the case identified with the principle of “separate but equal”—the theory that segregation is not per se discrimination. Plessy is the decision the Supreme Court had to overturn, in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, to declare that school segregation violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
     From our perspective, therefore, Plessy looks huge. So it’s revealing that, as the journalist Steve Luxenberg tells us in “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation,” little note was taken of the decision at the time. Even when principal figures in the case died, years later, their obituaries made no mention of it. It’s revealing because it suggests that Plessy should never have been brought in the first place. The decision did not create a new justification for racial segregation; it locked an old one into place.
     Plessy was a test case. It challenged a law that Louisiana passed in 1890, the Separate Car Act, requiring railroads to maintain separate cars for white and “colored” riders—in order, according to the act, “to promote the comfort of passengers.” The penalty for breaking the law was a fine or a short prison sentence. Transportation had been segregated in parts of the country, both North and South, since long before the Civil War, and many cases had been brought by passengers complaining of discrimination, with mixed success. But in those cases segregation was a matter of company policy. In the Louisiana case, the constitutionality of a state law was at issue.
     When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1888, and Texas, in 1889. When Louisiana passed its separate-cars law, a New Orleans lawyer and newspaper editor named Louis Martinet—his mother was born a slave; his father, a Belgian, bought her freedom—formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, and set about building a case.
     First, Martinet approached the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which agreed to act as a silent partner. It did not do so out of altruism. From a business point of view, segregation represented a cost—the cost of providing separate facilities for black customers. It would have been cheaper for the railroads if the state had mandated integration instead.
     Then Martinet recruited a plaintiff, Daniel Desdunes, a young mixed-race musician whose father was on the Committee. On February 24, 1892, Desdunes boarded a train in New Orleans with a ticket for Mobile, Alabama, and sat in a car reserved for whites. He was duly arrested and charged, his case set to be heard by the criminal-court judge in New Orleans, John Ferguson. All had gone as planned, but then, in another case, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the Separate Car Act did not apply to interstate passengers. Because Desdunes had been going to another state, he could not be required to use a separate car, and the prosecution dropped the case.
     The interstate-travel issue was a persistent wrinkle in the Jim Crow era, and it inspired some impressive judicial contortions. In 1878, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Reconstruction-era Louisiana statute requiring integrated facilities on steamboats. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Because riverboats stopped in many states, the Court said, they could not be bound by the regulations of one state.
     You might assume that a state law requiring segregated facilities on interstate carriers would be subject to the same prohibition. In 1890, however, the Supreme Court held otherwise. It declared that an interstate train was subject to a Mississippi law requiring separate cars for “colored” and white passengers for as long as the train was in Mississippi. The Court somehow parsed its way around its own earlier decision.
     But now, because of the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling, Martinet needed another volunteer scofflaw. Fortunately, he had one at hand: Homer Plessy. Like Desdunes, Plessy was light-skinned—“fair-skinned enough to cause confusion,” as Luxenberg puts it, suggesting that Plessy might have been accustomed to passing, as many nominally “colored” people in New Orleans did. He was twenty-nine years old, married, and in the shoemaking business. Like Desdunes, he followed the script. On June 7, 1892, he boarded a train, one travelling only within the state of Louisiana, and sat in the car for white passengers. When the conductor asked if Plessy was colored, he said yes, and was removed from the train and booked. (Train conductors were in a ridiculous position: even if the law required trains to have separate cars, riders could still sue the conductor for misclassifying them.)
     Plessy came before the same Judge Ferguson, who ruled that, since there had been no claim that the cars for white and black passengers were not “equal,” there was no constitutional issue. The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed, adding that, if the Separate Cars Act were declared unconstitutional, many other state laws—on separate schools, intermarriage, and so forth—would be affected. The U.S. Supreme Court finally heard the case four years later, and on May 18, 1896, it issued its opinion.
     As Luxenberg points out, the concept “separate but equal” (the phrase the Court used in Plessy was actually “equal but separate”) was hardly a novelty. It had been a customary way to throw out complaints about segregation since before the Civil War. In Plessy, the Court added a gloss that became almost as famous as the phrase itself: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” it said. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” As Charles Black, a Yale law professor, wrote of these sentences many years later, “The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”
     The assumption that separate facilities for blacks—railroad cars, steamboat berths, schools—were not inferior is a good example of the Supreme Court’s formalism in that period of American law. Everyone knew the assumption was false. The Jim Crow train car was sometimes called “the dirt car,” and “colored” schools were often shacks. It was also absurd to claim that the “badge of inferiority” was a black person’s construction. In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
     In Brown v. Board of Education, the Warren Court would cite psychological studies showing that black children are harmed by segregation. That’s not something a nineteenth-century court would have considered appropriate (and some people did not consider it appropriate in Brown). In cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court looked to the text of the statute. If the statute did not prescribe unequal conditions, then, legally, conditions were not unequal.
     The Justices in the Plessy case were aware of the repercussions that a robust interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would have, of course. Political realities, as always, put a constraint on judicial reasoning. The Supreme Court in the early twentieth century did decide cases in favor of African-American and Asian-American plaintiffs, but it mostly kept its hands off state racial regulations.
     When Louis Martinet formed his Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, he wrote to Frederick Douglass and asked for his support. Douglass refused. He said he could not see how the case could help things. Douglass was proved correct. The decision was the worst possible outcome, and the one Plessy’s lawyers had feared. It stamped a constitutional seal of approval on state-mandated racial segregation. The case may not have received much press attention at the time, but over the next fifty years it was cited in thirteen Supreme Court opinions.
     It’s true that in 1890, when the Separate Car Act was passed, Southern race relations were still somewhat in flux. Blacks voted and were politically active. The Louisiana legislature that passed the act had sixteen African-American members. And the composition of the Supreme Court is subject to change; the lawyers for Plessy might have hoped that they would draw a winning hand.
   By 1896, though, the endgame was clearly in view. Six years earlier, Mississippi had become the first state to contrive laws to disenfranchise black voters, rather than rely solely on terror and fraud. Other states followed, although extralegal methods remained in use, and, by the end of the century, the work of disenfranchisement was complete. There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.
     As for the Supreme Court, it had already made the character of its commitment to civil rights clear. In 1873, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to most state laws. And in 1883 it struck down the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875—Congress’s last attempt to address civil rights until 1957.
“When a man has emerged from slavery,” the Court said in 1883, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” Slavery had been abolished for just eighteen years, but the Court felt that that was enough time for African-Americans to get on their feet.
     As Richard White tells us in his excellent volume on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, published as part of the also excellent Oxford History of the United States, between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899. It was the height of wishful thinking in 1896 to imagine that the Court would undergo a conversion in the case of Homer Plessy. The only consolation Plessy’s advocates had was that, when they brought their case, there were a hundred others also challenging segregation laws in the courts. If it hadn’t been Plessy, it would have been someone else.
     Luxenberg has chosen a fresh way to tell the story of Plessy. “Separate” is a group biography of three figures in the case: Albion Tourgée, one of Plessy’s lawyers; Henry Billings Brown, the Justice who wrote the majority opinion; and John Marshall Harlan, who filed the lone dissent.
     Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore” (1962), his book on the literature of the Civil War, describes Tourgée as “an obstinate man, physically and morally courageous, with bad judgment in practical matters and possessed by an intransigent idealism,” and Luxenberg’s portrait is much the same. Tourgée fought in the Union Army and was badly wounded. After the war, he moved with his wife and daughter to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was active politically and as a writer and speaker on behalf of Republican policies. He called himself “a carpet-bagger of the very worst sort.”
     But by 1877, the year the Army was pulled out of the South and Reconstruction ended, he had come to believe that the whole effort was an exercise in hubris—which would be the line on Reconstruction for decades afterward, and the line taken in two of the most popular Hollywood movies ever made: “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone with the Wind” (1939). In 1879, Tourgée published a novel whose title expressed his judgment on Reconstruction—“A Fool’s Errand.” The book was compared with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and became a big best-seller. It made Tourgée famous and, for a short time, wealthy.
     Tourgée’s empathy for the Southern point of view did not erode his commitment to racial justice. After leaving North Carolina, he moved to upstate New York and began writing a column under the name Bystander, advocating for racial equality. At Martinet’s invitation, he served as an adviser on the Plessy case, and was instrumental in devising the legal strategy. He presented the case in oral argument before the Supreme Court.
Luxenberg is kinder in his treatment of that argument than other commentators have been. Instead of the standard claim that segregation was a denial of equal protection, Tourgée argued that it was a denial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. A person’s reputation is property, he said, like an inheritance; and “the most precious of all inheritances is the reputation of being white.” In being denied seating in the white car, Plessy was deprived of his property without due process of law.
     The theory is less cockeyed than it sounds. It turns on the absence of a definition of “colored” in Louisiana law. Tourgée was saying to the Justices: Louisiana law gives state officials complete discretion in determining racial identity. Homer Plessy looks a lot like you. If someone with authority to do so classified you as nonwhite, would you view the situation with equanimity? No, you would think that you had been deprived of something without due process of law.
     This is basically the situation the Lums would complain of three decades later. In both cases, the argument was both an appeal to the racial prejudices of the Justices and essentially a racist argument in itself. Whatever the calculation, it went over the heads of the Court. Justice Brown, in his opinion, expressed bafflement. Plessy was colored, he said. How could he be deprived of something—“the reputation of being a white man”—that he never had?
     Richard Kluger, in his landmark history of Brown v. Board of Education, “Simple Justice” (1975), called Justice Brown “one of the Court’s dimmer lights,” and nothing Luxenberg tells us suggests that this was unfair. Brown was from Lee, in western Massachusetts. He went to Yale, then pursued a legal career in Detroit. Like most Northerners, he was a Unionist, not an abolitionist, and he paid a substitute to take his place in the war rather than be drafted, as was perfectly legal. He married a woman with a large inheritance and cultivated a high style of living. He campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 Presidential election. Grant gave him a federal judgeship in 1875, and he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Benjamin Harrison in 1890.
     Brown’s goals in life, Luxenberg says, were “ascent, dignity, money, stature.” He almost certainly saw his opinion in Plessy as a routine disposition of a familiar challenge. What gave his opinion significance was its sweeping justification for segregation laws, and its timing, right at the moment that Jim Crow descended like a cage on the South.
The establishment of Jim Crow was not simply a matter of laws suppressing African-American voting and segregating schools and transportation, or of a pattern of social practices that became ingrained. Jim Crow was a regime that was created over and over again. In 1930, the city of Birmingham made it illegal for a black person and a white person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Atlanta prohibited amateur baseball clubs of different races from playing within two blocks of each other. In 1935, Oklahoma required the separation of races when fishing or boating. In 1937, Arkansas segregated its horse-racing tracks. Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separatism was insatiable.
     Harlan, the dissenter in Plessy, came from a family with a long history in Kentucky politics. His father was a U.S. congressman; his grandson, also John Marshall Harlan, became an Associate Justice on the Warren Court. Kentucky was a border state—it allowed slavery but did not secede—and Harlan began his career as a pro-slavery Unionist. He led a regiment against rebel forces in Kentucky, but he and his family had owned slaves, and he condemned the Thirteenth Amendment as “the overthrow of Constitutional liberty.”
     As Luxenberg shows us, Harlan built his reputation mainly by following the political lead of others, but after he was appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1877, he became more independent. He was the only card in the judicial deck that Martinet and Tourgée could count on. He had filed the sole dissent in the so-called Civil Rights Cases in 1883. He had dissented when the Court upheld the Mississippi law mandating segregated cars on interstate trains, in 1890. He would later dissent, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the Court’s pro-business ruling in Lochner v. New York (1905).
     Harlan’s Plessy dissent seems unequivocal. “In the eye of the law,” he says, “there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He saw as well as Douglass did the long-term effect of the Court’s ruling, warning, “The judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.” When John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights from the Oval Office, in 1963—the speech that initiated the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he quoted from Harlan’s dissent.
     Harlan’s conception of color blindness had limits, however. “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States,” he wrote in his dissent. “Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” It seemed to him a blatant example of how arbitrary the Louisiana separate-cars statute was that it would permit “a Chinaman [to] ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens,” while forbidding African-Americans to do so. This head-spinning obiter dictum about the racial status of the Chinese helps explain why Holmes once compared Harlan’s mind to “a powerful vise the jaws of which couldn’t be got nearer than two inches to each other.”
     “Separate” is deeply researched, and it wears its learning lightly. It’s a storytelling kind of book, the kind of book that refers to Albion Tourgée as Albion and John Harlan as John, and that paints the scene for us (“On a bright and beautiful night in late October 1858 . . . ”). Luxenberg does not engage in psychological interpretation. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that Brown’s Yale classmates called him Henrietta because they thought he was effeminate—which might have contributed to Brown’s eagerness not to appear like a man who didn’t belong. And he dismisses in a footnote speculation that Robert Harlan, a man of mixed race who grew up as a member of John Harlan’s family, might have been a half brother. Even if he wasn’t in fact related to John, however, it might have mattered if John believed otherwise.
     Luxenberg skillfully works the military and the political background into his narrative. Still, despite ample quotations from letters and diaries, the three principals retain a sepia quality. They seem stiff, earnest, florid—Victorian. And there is a lot of biographical backstory. It takes four hundred pages to get to Homer Plessy; the argument and the decision are over after just twenty pages, and then the book abruptly ends. The afterlife of the case gets no real attention. Brown v. Board of Education receives a passing mention in a brief epilogue summarizing the post-Plessy lives of Brown, Harlan, and Tourgée.
     And it does seem a misjudgment to tell the story of an important civil-rights case as the story of three white men. The temptation is understandable. Tourgée, Brown, and Harlan left large archives; Martinet left nothing. Even Tourgée’s letters to Martinet working out their legal strategy are lost; we only have copies of four of them that Tourgée kept. Little is known about Homer Plessy outside his role as a test-case plaintiff. But, if we are trying to understand the Plessy case as a human story, Martinet and Plessy, and millions of other African-Americans, are the ones who took the risks and suffered the consequences.
     “Separate” is a different way to tell the story, but it does not give us a new story. It doesn’t help us with the big historical questions about the persistence of Southern racism after the Civil War. Those questions are central to David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski’s “Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction,” a fine-grained and valuable scholarly analysis. The authors argue that “rendering the South as peripheral to the history of the United States minimizes the extent to which the South was ‘co-creator of the nation’s history’ and obscures the ways in which the ideas and practices underpinning this racial order were projected across the United States.”
     As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five-per-cent bump. They also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-American residents, then got full representational credit for them.
     But where was the political will in the rest of the country? Separation of the races did not originate in the slave South. The nature of the institution made that impractical, if not impossible. As Luxenberg says—repeating one of the main points of C. Vann Woodward’s classic study “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” first published in 1955—segregation began in the North, where it was the product not of the practice of slavery but of Negrophobia. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” This helps explain why the majority opinion in Plessy was by a man from Massachusetts who had no experience with slavery, and the dissenter was a man from a slave state who had once owned slaves himself.
     After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separatism, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quota and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district. De-facto discrimination—we now call it “institutional racism” or “structural racism”—is much harder to address. It requires more of people than just striking down a law. ♦

Louis Menand, a New Yorker magazine staff writer since 2001, was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016.
The New Yorker magazine, February 4, 2019. This article appears in the print edition of the February 4, 2019, issue, with the headline “In the Eye of the Law."