The Past is Never Past

The release of the Equal Justice Initiative’s report documenting southern white supremacist terror and the lynching of at least 2,000 Southern blacks during the Reconstruction Era highlights the fact that history is not an eternally objective record of the past. (“Report Documents Over 2,000 Lynchings in 12-Year Period After Civil War,” New York Times, June 17.) Instead, it is something that is deliberately constructed, which is what the South did after the Civil War. The South may have lost the Civil War, but it won the peace. For a hundred years or more after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Southern version of Reconstruction dominated our history books and popular culture. “Reconstruction was a failure,” that version said. This new report makes clear how political that constructed history of Reconstruction was. Reconstruction didn’t fail. Reconstruction was lynched by white supremacy. And that racist legacy is still with us. As Southern author William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”