Indeed the second half of Race and Reunion vindicates Blight from any argument alleging a silencing of African-Americans. Although my doubts from last week were initially sustained as Blight’s credit to Albion Tourgee for supporting the emancipationist memory took center stage, Blight subsequently quickly gave African-Americans their voice in the book. Not only does he emphasize the roles of prominent African-Americans other than Frederick Douglass such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois as Jaclyn points out, but Blight shows that all blacks were participants in the struggle for public memory. While last week I perceived Blight’s approach as a silencing of the African-American masses, I now see Blight’s assertion that:
“Silence of rhetorical condemnation were about the only options open to blacks in 1890” (270).
African-American memory was not only suppressed by the Lost Cause ideology, but also by Northern reconciliationists and many realists such as Ambrose Bierce, who embraced no ideological cause in his narrative of the Civil War. It can be concluded, therefore, that the role of African-Americans is not being silenced in Race and Reunion. Rather, Blight is demonstrating how blacks were silenced in the past. For me, the second half of the book attests to this fact more than the first.
To add to Jaclyn’s point on the du Bois-Washington conflict, the Douglass-Crummell dichotomy as presented by Blight was also very useful in understanding the African-American dilemma. While Douglass believed black memory should not be abandoned, Crummell claimed that blacks could not healthily live in past memories (319). Blight’s insistence that they were both right only confirms the predicament blacks faced when deciding how to remember the Civil War.
Near the end of the book, I found myself asking an interesting question: when did the Lost Cause-Reconciliationist dominance over the Emancipationist memory become inevitable? Was the racial reunion destined to be overshadowing by an economically-fuelled sectional reconciliation ever since the surrender at Appomattox? Perhaps there is no single point in history when reconciliation overtook emancipation for good, but Blight certainly shows how one memory is capable of shadowing another; why a group would absorb the Lost Cause words from Mildred Rutherford instead of the claims from John Mosby, a southerner who upheld slavery as the cause of the War. It is because memory is not a thing of the past, but rather a weapon whose form and functionality is constantly changing so to best serve the present.
It certainly does seem that all memory is prelude to future generations for just as reconciliationism nearly extinguished the emancipation memory, Blight stands here today as part of the effort to revive it. Blight’s purpose today is not to paint Jefferson Davis as a villain or Ulysses S. Grant as a hero, but to exhibit that the realm of public memory is not the fixed narrative grade-school textbooks would have us believe, but rather it is a constant struggle between ideologies and perspectives, between spotlights and silences.