Blight, pp. 210 – end
To my understanding, Blight has redeemed himself in the eyes of our arguments from last week. Not only do a series of important black intellectuals join Douglass in Blight’s narrative struggle for the emancipationist legacy of the war, but he presents other strands of black collective memory, most notably in the Washington-Du Bois conflict.
As Blight outlines on p. 364:
“The Du Bois–Washington conflict over social and political strategy should be seen not only as a division over philosophy and leadership methods, but also as a dispute over how and if blacks should embrace the American reunion to which their rights were increasingly sacrificed.”
Washington was a darling of the North-South reconciliationist camp, delivering in 1895 his “Atlanta Compromise” speech which “gave all those who wished it a license to forget the war” (325). This fit nearly perfectly into the intersectional reconciliationist ‘politics of forgetting’ that spent decades after the war marinating in public Memory.
His philosophy took root in “social accommodationist” foundations, touting uplift and the industrial progress of blacks. Du Bois, on the other hand, urged the building of a “positive history” (362) which would encourage black self-respect, and an opposition of a reconciliation “marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men,” whose “mistreatment caused the war” (363).
In this conflict, and among the other strains of black collective memory competing for the ultimate public legacy of the Civil War, the question of forgetting the past plays a central role. Should slaves forget they were slaves as part of a dark and empty past? Or should the reality of their past mark a specific period of time in the larger narrative of black history showing the ultimate progress of the ‘race’? As Blight offers, “One of the burdens of black memory was that progress and horror had to occupy the same narrative” (336). If the silencing (or non-silencing) of blacks’ slave past were the means, what ends was the nebulous ‘black collective memory’ hoping to achieve?
My final thought on Blight’s highlighting of the archive-silencing of blacks’ narratives comes halfway through the chapter on black memory:
“It was America’s national tragedy that the memories of slavery that were popularized and sold in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the romantic fantasies of dialect writers, not the actual remembrance of the slaves themselves” [emphasis added] (313).
Once again, we see Blight nodding toward the commodification of (black) history, which apparently becomes salable in the first decades of the twentieth century (367). Now that intersectional reconciliation has taken place, and the whites of America have eased their mutually heroic minds, they can turn to the ‘other’ narrative that has been fighting for recognition, and decide whether or not to give it collective national attention.
As we will hopefully see in our discussion on Wednesday, this topic merits a continuation of in-depth, thoughtful analyses, but I would like to raise a new topic Blight gives us in the second half of the book: the intergenerational conflict of memory.
Blight tells of the conflict between southern black generations, but also that of national white generations. How thoroughly entrenched did the UDC’s memory-making efforts become with the passing of time? How would postbellum generations (both immediately and over time) understand, reflect upon, and ultimately accept or reject their ancestors role in their country’s past?
I like Blight’s closing thought enough to use it as mine: “All memory is prelude” (397). Prelude to the generations to come, who will rewrite and reshape the past according to their needs in the present? Prelude to the “post-game” analysis of professional historians who will incorporate it into their scholarly historiography? Perhaps here we can understand Blight’s argument on memory versus Memory: the former is the prelude to the latter.