Waking Up: Christianity, White Privilege, and the Dark Side of American History
By: Joe Forrest
Tags: Religion, White Privilege, History, Christianity, Racism

A [Censored] History

Ever since the first slave ship made landfall in Virginia in 1619, an entirely separate — yet linked — narrative has unspooled from what some refer to as “America’s original sin.”

For example, while many schoolchildren in America are taught the apocryphal fable that President George Washington’s teeth were made from wood, the truth is far grimmer: It’s very likely our first President’s dentures were made from the teeth of his slaves (imagine how much the world would change if we taught that fact in first-grade history class).

The purpose of the next couple of sections isn’t to generate pity for black Americans. It’s to inspire deep lament for the generational sins that continue to haunt America to this day.

Our country tore itself apart and fought a war over a person’s right to own other people, but we’ve gently massaged the Civil War into a conflict over “states’ rights.”

In the infamous “Cornerstone Address,” Alexander Stephens — the Vice President of the Confederate government — said:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

And here’s another gem from William Thompson, the designer of the Confederate Battle Flag that some people seem so eager to display from their trucks, storefronts, or flagpoles:

“As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heavenly ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.”

And, unfortunately, the South’s adherence to the institution of slavery was driven by a particular reading of the Bible.

In Believe Me, theologian John Fea writes,

“Evangelicals thought the South’s social order, and its identity as a Christian culture worthy of God’s blessing, was grounded in a proper reading of the Bible. In other words, the people of the South — and eventually the Confederate States of America — believed that they were living in a Christian society precisely because they upheld the institution of slavery.”

Our history also scrubs any incidents of “white rage” — violent and often deadly reactions to any form of black progress — from our textbooks.

In one of the vilest episodes of white rage in America’s history, the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War triggered what can only be described as “slow-motion genocide.”

Thousands of recently freed slaves were brutally murdered, raped, disfigured, and assaulted during the era known as Reconstruction. Between 1889 and 1929, someone was lynched in the United States every four days.

For example, we don’t hear about the Louisianan Colfax Massacre of 1873, in which 150 black men were shot and executed while trying to defend their right to vote at the county courthouse. It happened on an Easter Sunday.

Following World War I, many black veterans returned from fighting overseas expecting equal rights for serving their country. This led to the “Red Summer of 1919,” in which 25 “anti-black riots” erupted all over the United States. More than 200 black men, women, and children were hunted down and killed.

In September 1919, more than 200 Black men, women, and children were murdered in Elaine, Arkansas in what was considered “by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States.”

In June of 1921, a raid on “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, resulted in the deaths of more than 300 black men, women, and children. Bodies were dumped in rivers and mass graves in an event that was largely stricken from the historical narrative.

In January 1923, the all-Black community of Rosewood, Florida was burnt to the ground and its residents hunted down in the swamps following a riot initiated by the hanging of a mutilated Black man in public.

Lynchings were viewed as public spectacles, attracted small crowds and picnics, and were even featured on postcards.

Confederate veterans serving as Southern politicians enacted “Black Codes,” or laws specifically designed to target and restrict the freedom of black Americans. In some states, Black Codes forced recently freed slaves back into “unpaid contract labor” on plantations.

One of the most shameful episodes of American history, the “convict leasing” program effectively re-legalized slavery in the South until the program’s dissolution in 1928.

And, because black convicts weren’t considered the property of the plantation owner, they were often worked harder and treated with more brutality than slaves prior to the Civil War. Recently, a mass grave of black prisoners from the convict leasing program was discovered outside of Houston, Texas.

Black Codes eventually gave rise to “Pig Laws” and “Jim Crow Laws,” or legislation that enforced so-called “separate-but-equal” policies between whites and nonwhites.

For nearly 100 years, these racist policies were the law of the land in several states — even while the U.S. fought in two world wars. “Sundown Towns” — all-white municipalities where Black people were not welcome after sunset (and could be arrested or killed) — dotted Route 66 and could be found in both the North and South.

And while we like to depict the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a “joyful march toward progress,” it was actually a violent era of history packed with bombings, riots, assassinations, public beatings, murders, and state-sanctioned torture and abuse.

In I’m Still Here, Black Christian author Austin Channing Brown writes,

“We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King, Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from jail doors. We don’t want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought — from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run.”

It’s not good enough to teach students sanitized facts about slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement. Only by transferring a holistic history to the next generation do we have any hope of tackling the issues that plague modern society.

It’s not a coincidence that the same people who turn a blind eye to the injustices of America’s past are usually the same people who don’t think there’s a problem now.