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Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)
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Robert Bland
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New books network.
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Sullivan Sommer
On January 23, 1883, a group of black citizens convened for the Bethel Literary and Historical Societies weekly meeting at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal AME Church in Washington, D.C. despite the bitter cold, the church's auxiliary building, Bethel hall, was packed and the attendees filled the meeting space to hear and participate in the city's most prestigious lyceum. That night's keynote lecture was on the subject of Reconstruction. The lecturer, William J. Whipper, was the nephew of one of the country's most prominent black abolitionists, a veteran of the United States Colored Troops and a former agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in the South Carolina Lowcountry. In what was likely one of the Lyceum's most controversial speeches of the year, Ripper argued that Reconstruction had been a failure and laid the blame directly on the leaders of South Carolina's Republican Party. Lambasting members of his own party for being venal, corrupt and immoral, Whipper's attack on South Carolina's Republicans angered many in the crowd. What led to this speech and what happened next is the subject of the book Requiem for Black Counter Memory and the Legacy of the Low Country's Lost Political Generation by Assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Robert Bland. Professor Bland, welcome to the New Books.
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Robert Bland
Network Sullivan, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
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Sullivan Sommer
Yeah, me too. So what I read off the top, there was a bit of a condensed excerpt from the very first pages of the book. There are a lot of books out there about Reconstruction. Why this book? Talk about this particular book.
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Robert Bland
Right, right. So there are two answers there. Right. The first, I was trying to think through big questions about Reconstruction, Reconstruction, memory. This project, like many academic books, comes out of a dissertation that examined the story of the Low country broadly thinking about kind of what this place means, and thinking about this is a center of Reconstruction. And that in itself is a very interesting story. But in the revision process, I kind of began bouncing against this idea of what it meant to remember these Reconstruction era figures as a generation. What it meant to think about the kind of passing of specific figures in this Reconstruction generation. And what it meant to kind of have, on the one hand, Right. This is a story that's confronting the myth of the Lost Cause. And much of Reconstruction history grapples with the way the historical profession distorts and warps this story in a way that creates a racist, kind of hollowed out story of Reconstruction, the kind of response to the Dunning School. But Les has examined the ways that black Americans really confronted the living memory, the embodied stories of these Reconstruction figures, and how they built the archives to really retell the story of Reconstruction. And that's the goal and the task I kind of set out in the process of writing this book.
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Sullivan Sommer
Okay, so this book, of course, you mentioned the Low Country. We're talking about the Low country in South Carolina. And you also write in the introduction that more than any other site in late 19th century black America, the Low country had come to represent the zenith of the previous generation's political ambition. Talk, talk about that.
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Robert Bland
Right, right. So, I mean, part of what I'm doing in the title is a riff off Willie Lee Rose's kind of classic work, Rehearsal for Reconstruction. And that work, she's focusing largely on the story of these white missionaries who traveled to South Carolina in the midst of wartime Reconstruction. Right. The kind of Union gunboats have descended on the South Carolina Sea Islands. The former kind of white slaveholding class has fled to the higher parts of the state. Many of these plantations are left essentially abandoned. And you have a kind of large population of black people who are in this in between state of slavery and freedom. And for those who are coming out of the abolitionist movement, who are coming out of the white missionary kind of movements, they see this as a kind of first place to really establish a post slavery society. And a lot has been written on that. West has been written about the specific way that black abolitionists and their children are traveling to the sea islands, traveling to the low country, because they see this as a site of what Michelle Mitchell calls racial destiny. Right. This is going to be not only the place where you're gonna see the destruction of slavery, but for black Americans who are thinking in terms of racial uplift, racial elevation, kind of the future of black America. Right? This is going to be a place where those who had been essential and kind of played a major role in the underground railroad and establishing kind of these northern black churches, black institutions, that you can begin stitching together, right. A broader, more ambitious, and in some ways more radical vision of black American identity. As the kind of slavery is falling, Reconstruction is being established. And so you have a generation, right? And in many ways, this is the 19th century version of Freedom Summer, where you have many kind of figures in the civil rights movement, kind of graduates of Howard and Morehouse and people from across the country. We know about a kind of broader, interracial kind of civil rights movement. But there is also a very specific kind of black radical tradition that kind of sees its genesis, right, in the kind of moments of Freedom Summer 1964 in Mississippi. I see the kind of work that's being done in the South Carolina low country in the 1860s as a parallel to these kind of 20th century black freedom struggles. And obviously, this is a long black freedom struggle that kind of stretches back into the antebellum era into places like Philadelphia, New York, and other northern black communities.
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Sullivan Sommer
And you call them the Reconstruction generation.
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Robert Bland
That's right. That's the term I'm using to frame this kind of cohort. I think about the Reconstruction generation in terms of the social scientific term, a political generation, right? The people who come together as a political cohort around a specific movement, around a specific political moment. And same way we can think about kind of a civil rights movement generation kind of coming together and developing a kind of larger worldview around that movement, also thinking along the terms of other kind of scholars of generation. One of my mentors, Ira Berlin, thinks about slavery in terms of generations. And so this Reconstruction generation are broadly people born between 1840 and 1860, but more broadly, right, These are people whose political consciousness was formed by the Reconstruction years.
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Sullivan Sommer
So the book. The book touches on, or I shouldn't even say touches on, talks really in depth about many people from this Reconstruction generation. We'll have a chance to Talk about just a few of them in our conversation today. But one of those people is Benjamin Randolph. And you write that his assassination would become an indelible moment in the Reconstruction generation's counter memory of the era. Talk some about Benjamin Randolph, right?
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Robert Bland
So Benjamin Randolph is born to a free, grows up in Ohio, attends Oberlin College, teaches at a black private school in Buffalo for a number of years. And when the moment of the Civil War arrives, right. He recognizes that this is a kind of again, a moment of destiny, a turning point in kind of black American history. Joins the United States colored troop that's mustered in New York, is a chaplain, goes to the low country, is kind of ministering to people, working with freed people and kind of black Northerners, remains in the low country after the war, helps found a newspaper, gets involved in politics, is at the 1868 Constitutional Convention where kind of this radical vision of kind of post belem southern politics formed kind of ideas like public schools that are universal for both black and white students. The first public schools in the south, kind of modeled after this Constitution pushing for the removal of property qualifications or voters, right? This is what W.E.B. du Bois would frame as abolition democracy, right? The idea that kind of a new, radically kind of expansive vision of democratic politics is possible precisely because of Reconstruction. In many ways, Benjamin Randolph embodies this vision and embodies this larger kind of movement in the reconstruction generation. In 1868, he's campaigning for the Republican Party in the upstate, the northern parts of the state of South Carolina. This is a place where the Klan is powerful, where there's kind of a paramilitary kind of movement that's seeking to undermine and overthrow Reconstruction. And while he's on a train kind of boarding station, right, kind of getting ready to board a train after having just left a political rally, getting ready to another political rally. He's shot down in cold blood, right? And kind of many witnesses are there. The assailants are kind of well known in the community, but no one is prosecuted. And this could be, right, a kind of typical story, right? The kind of thousands of people are assassinated, not only politicians, but everyday black Americans, everyday white Americans are assassinated by white paramilitary violence in the South. But for those who are involved in Republican politics, Reconstruction era politics, Randolph is kind of an embodiment of the kind of highest frequency of Reconstruction. And people take time to memorialize him in the state legislature. There are several mass meetings to talk about kind of his importance. The national black press covers his story and kind of tries to kind of keep his memory alive and Ultimately, a kind of cemetery is named after Benjamin Randolph in Columbia, S.C. and several other Reconstruction era leaders are buried in that cemetery. Right. So in the kind of tragedy, right. Kind of, in some ways a kind of very typical tragedy of Reconstruction, someone is gunned down because they're fighting for a multiracial democracy, but in the way that he's preserved. Not only kind of in the kind of national press that's forming, the national black press that's forming, but also in the kind of specific kind of way that this death motivates, kind of memorial practices. Right. That becomes one of these ways we can understand the grammar of black countermemory to kind of remember these individuals who fought and died for this project. That funeral role practice. Right. That funerary practices of Reconstruction really are the basis for this counter memory that I examined in the book.
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Sullivan Sommer
One of the things that I really was struck by in reading this book and is how many resonances there were with things that are happening today. Political assassination, you know, fraught elections. I want to talk about some of the things in specific that you have in the book, but I'm just, I'm curious for you as the author, you know, as you're writing a book about counter memory and history, like, how are you thinking about like the echoes of past in present, you know? Yeah, talk about that.
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Robert Bland
Right, right. No, it's. It's certainly kind of part of this story. Right. I began this project in the Obama years and kind of completed it during the Trump years. And there is in the history of Reconstruction a kind of a wrestling with the idea that history can go backward. Right. And so there's a certain grammar to the history of Reconstruction that confronts the present time. Right. Steve Ben Woodward famously calls the Civil rights movement the second reconstruction. Right. Kind of. Lerone Bennett Jr. Was writing about black power in the 1960s and thinking in the language and writing the history of the 1860s. Right. In kind of his book Black Power USA right. And there's a kind of ongoing struggle, right. Reconstruction era historians are always. And all historians are doing some work of writing about the past to explain the present. But in Reconstruction, right. Du Bois is writing Black Reconstruction in a way that is confronting the Jim Crow order. Kind of scholars of the neorevisionist turn. Foner and others are confronting the legacy of the civil rights movement when they're writing in the 1970s and 1980s. And right now we're kind of thinking about kind of some language right there. William Barber talks about a third Reconstruction and kind of like ways that we might be living through a third redemption. Right. And kind of the ways that this is always a story that's taken seriously, that despite the kind of ways that American progress, American history can move forward, there's a kind of desire to have a liberal moral arc of the universe bending towards justice story. Reconstruction asks us to take seriously, right. The kind of counter revolution, counter majoritarian, anti democratic forces in American life.
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Sullivan Sommer
So one of these events that you also talk about in the book is the election of 1876 and the aftermath of that election. Can you talk about that?
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Robert Bland
Right. Right now, this is kind of an important touchstone. We're coming up on the 150th anniversary of 1876. Reconstruction historians want to be careful about overemphasizing a compromise of 1877. Right. Kind of after this 1876 election, it's contested. South Carolina. Both the Republican and Democratic party claim to have victories. There are other Southern states where you see this kind of contestation. There's a kind of emphasis, right. And kind of a kind of a misleading emphasis that this is where Reconstruction ends all at once. Right. The kind of Rutherford B. Hayes has given the White House in exchange for the removal of troops from the South. I am not seeking to emphasize that particular story, but I want to pay attention to 1876 as a kind of high watermark for anti black and anti Republican political violence in South Carolina. Right. The Hamburg Massacre, which happens in July of 1876, is one of these kind of watershed moments of political violence for the Reconstruction generation. Kind of many kind of black militia members are murdered in cold blood. Kind of. It's a mobilizing moment for the kind of red shirt, paramilitary white supremacist forces in South Carolina. And then going into the kind of actual election, right, you kind of see major figures kind of giving speeches and being confronted with violence at their kind of political rallies. You have in counties, kind of election returns that kind of outpace the number of people that are in those counties. So this is again an important moment to understand political violence, to understand political corruption and political irregularity. It is not the end of Reconstruction. Right. It is a moment of deep contestation. But in the low country, right, the kind of political story continues. But this is again a kind of watershed moment for the members of the Reconstruction generation, for people in the low country who are continuing to hold on to political power. They are confronted with the kind of nature of the violence, the way that their northern allies are beginning to abandon them, but they continue to kind of believe and fight for Reconstruction. In the face of this tremendous amounts.
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Sullivan Sommer
Of violence, you just sort of touched on something else that is in the book, which is gerrymandering as well, that comes out of this.
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Robert Bland
Right. Right. Now, this is a kind of. Again, we're in a moment now where we might see section 2 of the Voting Rights act kind of really gutted because of this kind of political gerrymandering decision before the Supreme Court right now. One of the kind of smaller arguments in the book, it kind of highlights that the kind of real origin of political gerrymandering. Right. We kind of understand the long history of racial gerrymandering. In particular, we need to understand what's going on in Reconstruction. And again, political redistricting is kind of constitutional. We see political redistricting happening well through the 18th and 19th century. But the specific effort to kind of concentrate black voters in kind of single congressional districts right in the low country, we see in 1882 the creation of the 7th Congressional District, which becomes known as the black district. It is an incredible. In the kind of macabre, horrific sense of gerrymandering, kind of not only kind of concentrates the low country, but sneaks in and out of the middle parts of the state. It's a. We talk about gerrymandering now with kind of the scientific precision that map makers can kind of find their voters. But we should think about the kind of way that this gerrymandered effort really stretches through back alleys and kind of really kind of takes real pains to kind of concentrate as many black voters in the state, a single district, in a way that, again, South Carolina is a majority black state. Well, until the 20th, mid 20th, early 20th century, until 1930, you take a black majority state and you give only one district the ability to elect a black official. And you have to kind of take a moment to think about the kind of level of racial redistricting. Right. The kind of. This is a cartographic spectacle that really hadn't been seen in American history up to this point. Right. And this is kind of really to understand the kind of level of racial gerrymandering that can happen. Right. This kind of is exhibit A. And people understood this at time. Right. Kind of people are taking the maps of this district and they're talking about in the Congress. Robert Smalls is kind of making his constituents aware of this, or Robert Smalls, the kind of politician that we'll talk about later. This is kind of, again, a kind of real watershed moment. And it's not just in South Carolina. Mississippi creates what they call the shoestring district. North Carolina has a black second district. Alabama is a black fourth district. And many places, like black congressmen, disappear altogether. And a handful of places, black elected officials are still elected well into the 1870s and 1880s. There's obviously racial germaning that's also happening at the kind of municipal level, at the kind of county level for state legislatures, at these like level, congressional district. Right. We see kind of racial gerrymandering happening at a level that we had not seen in American history prior to this point.
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Sullivan Sommer
One of the things I really appreciated in the book was the. Was your maps. There was maybe a half dozen or so maps of South Carolina that I thought were really helpful in the way that things were partitioned to be able to see what was happening, what was going on.
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Robert Bland
Right. Right. Now, this is a story of political geography. I mean, this is a political history that you can see. Right. The kind of. The shifting of the maps is telling a story in of itself of what's going on in the state of South Carolina. But also the kind of ways that this counter memory is spatial.
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Sullivan Sommer
Right.
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Robert Bland
The kind of. To tell the story of the low country, you need to understand what's going on beyond its boundaries and think about. Right. The kind of. I mean, I want to be in conversation with the people who are doing cultural geography. I'm writing at a moment where kind of a field of black geography and black south studies is at an ascendant. And so understanding the spatial politics. Right. The kind of place making politics of the black south is a core part of this book.
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Sullivan Sommer
You mentioned before, Robert Smalls. So talk about Robert Smalls, who he was and his contributions.
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Robert Bland
Right, right. And this is a figure who, well known in South Carolina, well known in Civil War era history, should be a national figure, should be known by everybody. But unfortunately, maybe is not kind of risen to that level of kind of national public memory. But Robert Smalls is born into bondage, makes a living in Charleston as a stevedore. At the. During the onset of the war, he is kind of unloading ships and kind of working as a laborer for the kind of broader kind of Confederate army in a way that many enslaved people are not soldiers, but are kind of being used as enslaved kind of labor to kind of can keep the Confederacy going in a kind of really ingenious, really heroic effort. Stores himself and his family on a Confederate kind of vessel. But the CSS planter wears a jacket up to his kind of face and has a heavy hat that kind of covers his Eyes so he can't be recognized in the dark of night. It takes this script and he kind of has this piloting experience and pilots the ship to passed a series of Confederate checkpoints. It's a kind of a story that's kind of made for a movie. Manages to kind of with his family hidden below deck and himself kind of hidden, but understanding kind of how to navigate through Confederate waters. Delivers the ship to the Union Navy. Spends the rest of the war assisting the Union war effort, Both kind of militarily, but also kind of traveling up and down the east coast, kind of talking about the cause of the emancipated. I'm talking about the cause of those who are fighting for freedom after the war. Becomes a central figure in the formation of the Republican party in South Carolina. Is going to be elected to five terms in the US Congress from the 1870s through the 1880s. Is going to develop a really powerful political machine in the low country. And his political power is going to really kind of represent the kind of continuing legacy and the continuing life of Reconstruction. Right. This is why I make the case. We don't want to stop at 1876. Robert Small is still serving in the Congress in the 1880s. In the 1890s, he's going to serve as a federal appointed official for the House of Customs. Well, these are very important kind of appointed positions that allow people to work at ports, kind of collect customs for the federal government. They're also places where allows people to kind of have a lot of political power. You can appoint people below you. You can have kind of a kind of deeper connection with the federal government, with the kind of current Republican administration. And in this way. Right. Robert Smalls is both a major figure in the story of emancipation. He's a major story in the story of Reconstruction. But he's also keeping the memory of Reconstruction alive in a way that makes him a hero. Right. And kind of one of the stories I want to tell in the book is the way that he becomes a political celebrity. Right. He moves through kind of black society during the kind of Gilded Age that kind of allows him to make friends with Frederick Douglass and his family. And he's going to kind of move in places like the Bethel Literary Society and be someone who's well recognized by Washington's black elite while at the same time. Right. Kind of embodying the Gullah, Geechee kind of community in South Carolina. Right. He's kind of very much a product of the place that he's from in a way that sometimes makes Black elites uncomfortable. Right. He is rough around the edges. He's a kind of lowercase P, populist in a way that some people think is kind of more close to a demagogue. But he is one of the few people that's keeping the legacy of Reconstruction alive well into the 20th century. And in that way. Right. I think his story often gets flattened to just the kind of war hero. But he's a complicated figure, and I want to kind of emphasize the heroics, but also kind of think about the kind of ways that power and community and history kind of come together in making memory and making counter memory.
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Sullivan Sommer
One of the complications of that memory, encounter memory, that you get into in the book is this discussion by the Republicans, black Republicans, about how much one should align with white Southern Carolinians around the party. Can you talk about that? That, to me is always. It's. It's fascinating and again, resonant, those sort of discussions.
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Robert Bland
Right, right. And again, it's an interesting story in that politics is coalitional. Right. And while South Carolina is the only Southern state that has a majority black state legislature at the time of the Grant administration, that is something that doesn't persist into the 1880s, certainly into. Not into the 1890s. And people who want to hold on to power, Republican political power in the south have to make decisions. One of those decisions is, do you join with the kind of white elite. This is often called fusionist arrangements, where kind of. This is the type of arrangement Robert Smalls argues for, where the kind of best men, and it's this a gendered language here, work with the best men of the black race, work with the best men of the white race for good government. You see versions of this happen in Wilmington, and kind of Wilmington is another one of these places where black Republicans can kind of share offices with kind of white political elites well into the 1890s. The Low country is another one of these places where Robert Smalls is arguing at the local level to work with white leaders, to share offices, to kind of show that this is not the myth of black domination, where black leaders in black majority areas want to kind of rule over and oppress white leaders, even though that's. They know that's a myth, but they. They want to kind of work with and build kind of political power, maintain political power on the other side of the story and have a figure, George Washington Murray, who shows up here. This is a populist arrangement where kind of can kind of working class black farmers work with working class black white farmers. This is Again, a kind of common story in Southern history. Kind of. Where do you see kind of interracial working class solidarity? And in low country, people are working towards that? In many places. Right. Kind of the scholars who write on the populist movement, who write about kind of the knights of labor in the south, are examining kind of various efforts where black and white workers are working together to kind of challenge the kind of hold that the white elite has. Right. Kind of often. Right. This is the kind of where you see the kind of arguments for white supremacy where white elites say you have more line with white rich people than you have with or black people. This is a contested arrangement. Not everyone agrees with this kind of political arrangement. Not everyone agrees with Robert Small's arrangement. But this is again, one of these complicated stories of Southern history where people often think Reconstruction is immediately followed by Jim Crow. And one of the stories I want to tell in this book is that the 1880s and 1890s, certainly African American political leaders are losing political power. The ground is shaky, but they are imagining third ways, kind of alternate routes, kind of other opportunities to hold political power, whether that's working with white elites or working with the white working class. And you do see that right before you have the final fall of the Jim Crow curtain.
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Sullivan Sommer
So I feel like we. We have to talk about the black press at this time. Talk about the black press. Both. I'm curious, both their involvement. But I'm also interested in your experience in your research with periodicals as it relates to the research of this project.
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Robert Bland
Right now. That's a fantastic question. And this is one of the things that came together later in the project, the idea that part of this counter memory is being stitched together in the pages of the black press. And so early on in a kind of earlier chapter in the book, I would kind of encounter these discussions of black newspapers or discussions of places like the Bethel Literary. And I just kind of said, okay, that's interesting. Certainly there's a story there. But I didn't recognize the fullness. And as I kind of examined some of the black press in the 1860s, the Christian recorder, the official newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, you see these calls for black northerners to come to the south. And you see these reports of what's going on and kind of what progress is being made. And obviously there's an elite kind of tinge here. And part of the story here is a story of class formation, the kind of rise of a class conscious, talented 10th. But the kind of pages of the black press Are beginning to shift. Right. You have kind of a black press that imagines itself as speaking to a larger black audience. In the Annabella Mirror, the North Star, Freedoms Journal, Any number of black newspapers are emerging and kind of telling big stories about what's going on black America. But there's a shift that's happening in the 1860s and 1870s where you can see an intentional and deliberate framing around a national black community. Right. I think of Frederick Douglass's new national era in the title. Right. Thinking about this as a kind of different moment in black place making and black identity, a different kind of framing of racial destiny. And so you have at the one hand, the black newspapers who are deeply invested in the kind of story of Reconstruction. They're sending reporters to the south. They're trying to gather information. And at the other end, you have these newspapers often kind of speaking to audiences of northern black elites about the kind of failures, so to speak. Right? The kind of idea that, yes, Reconstruction is on the back foot, but it's not completely defeated yet, but it needs the best men. It needs the educated elite. Figures like Robert Smalls are not the right figures to be leading reconstruction forward. And these debates lead to kind of a response from a southern black press. Right? So obviously you don't have southern black newspapers in the antebellum era. By the time you get to the 1880s. And the 1880s is kind of this high water mark of kind of the growth of black newspapers. T. Thomas fortune is kind of the dean of black journalism at this time. But there are kind of black newspapers spreading all across the country and all across the South. And at the moment that again, some northern leaders are challenging and criticizing the black press, Black southern papers are making the argument, right? Robert Smalls allies are creating newspapers that kind of respond and rebut the kind of challenges that are being made in the northern press. And leaders in the national black press in places like New York and Washington, D.C. are learning that there's a real appetite for political journalism. Some of it's gossip, some of it is kind of highlighting lurid details of Reconstruction. But there's also a kind of political consciousness, a counter memory that's emerging, a first draft of African American history, if you will, that's being formed and kind of being shaped in the pages of the black press.
- [32:06]
Sullivan Sommer
We spoke before about contemporary resonances throughout another place where I found this. And it was something that I really personally knew very little about, almost nothing about was the 1893 Sea Island Storm and the politicization of a Natural disaster. Talk about that.
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Robert Bland
So this is in many ways the genesis of the book. Right. I was in graduate school working on a paper for a kind of writing seminar. I'm in the National Archives. I begin to discover there's a really rich paper trail around this hurricane. And again I'm thinking that I'm going to write a history of black response and natural disaster thinking about the kind of ways that kind of black America is thinking in ecological, environmental terms confronting kind of the man made and kind of racial aspects of disaster relief. But I keep on countering. Right. The kind of ways that this disaster becomes a flashpoint for the Democratic party and white supremacist leaders in that Democratic Party to attack the disaster relief as a kind of return of the Freedmen's Bureau, the return of Reconstruction. This hurricane hits the South Carolina Sea Islands which is the kind of center of Robert Smalls political machine. And they argue that Robert Smalls is going to return to Congress with the kind of sympathy that the Sea Islands are receiving from northern donors and the American Red Cross which has a kind of national network. And so I'm beginning to see that the kind of debates around Reconstruction and the memory around Reconstruction are taking a particular shape in the 1890s. Right. And kind of, I mean two years later you're going to have a South Carolina state convention that's going to undo the 1868 Reconstruction Area Constitutional Convention. So seeing this disaster relief as kind of something that hypercharges a new chapter in southern political history. Right. Kind of have a kind of shrouded in white. A specific type of white supremacy that's responding to the memory Reconstruction and the ways that many of these Reconstruction era leaders are still involved in politics, are speaking to national audiences, trying to kind of give an accounting of the white supremacy and the kind of political backlash that's happening and trying to get the record set straight. There's a lot swirling around here that kind of exposed and kind of highlighted there's a broader kind of political world that was under threat and under danger. And this Sea island hurricane really kind of made that visible.
- [34:39]
Sullivan Sommer
You just mentioned the constitutional convention in 1895, which was two years after the hurricane. Talk about that Constitutional, the convention.
- [34:51]
Robert Bland
Right, Right. So again, white supremacy was a kind of unfinished project in South Carolina well into the 1890s. You have a governor by the name of Benjamin Tillman who is kind of campaigns on being involved in the redemption era violence, kind of brags about killing kind of black people during the kind of pogroms of the 1870s, serves two terms in the Congress, is elected to the U.S. senate, and kind of one of the final measures in 1894, kind of as the kind of relief campaign in South Carolina, the hurricane relief campaign is coming to a close. Tillman is encouraging the leaders in his party to come together and pass a new constitution that fully disenfranchises the state. Again, you've had this gerrymandering effort that we talked about earlier that happens in the 1880s. They pass an eight boxes law which essentially is a literacy test. And much, again, much of the black vote has been diminished. But in this last corner of the low country, you still have black congressmen going into the Congress. You still have black leaders being elected to the state legislature. And you have Robert Smalls, who, not a elected leader, but an appointed leader with a kind of audience of the President and the US Congress and the black press, who can kind of continue to make the call that the United States needs to pass a federal law that protects black voting at the state level. Right, kind of. You need federal observers in Southern elections. And in order to kind of prevent this kind of what Benjamin Tillman says, this frozen snake of Reconstruction from being reanimated, you need to pass this new constitution. This is going to have the old tax, it's going to have these literacy tests, it's going to have a grandfather clause, which is the back wig, to kind of allow these southern white kind of voters, who again are going to also be disenfranchised by poll taxes and literacy tests. But you have these kind of backdoor mechanisms that allow them to kind of continue to hold political power, but also highlight that this is a kind of measure of explicit white supremacy. Robert Smalls and five other political leaders who are all from the low country go to this convention. They know it's kind of a lost fight, that they are up against insurmountable odds, but they make a case for the historical record. Right? They're not speaking just to the kind of white conventional delegates who are going to kind of easily pass this kind of new constitution which undoes the kind of universal manhood suffrage of Reconstruction, but they're speaking to the national press. Right? They're speaking to national audiences. And the daughter of Robert Smalls and daughter of Thomas E. Miller, two of these black low country delegates, write out these kind of and publish the convention speeches of these black leaders. And these get circulated around the black world, the black press, and they become. Right, these kind of historical markers of the story of Reconstruction. Right, the kind of, again, this is not something that ends at this day. Right. The certainly the political kind of regime that Robert Smalls and others had built is now kind of defeated and kind of lost to the tides of history. But the kind of historical story, the counter memory of this story is being produced at the very moment that the political nails in the coffin are being hammered.
- [38:12]
Sullivan Sommer
The book's final section takes us through the turn of the century. And you open that section with a discussion about the industrial school movement and talk about the industrial school movement.
- [38:26]
Robert Bland
Right, right. This is something that might be familiar to many scholars of African American history. One of the major figures of early the 20th century, late 19th century black life is Booker T. Washington. And Washington is trained at Hampton Institute, now Hampton University. And Hampton sees the kind of educational institutions that are created during Reconstruction to emphasize a liberal arts education as misguided, as kind of ill fitted for the kind of real kind of future of black America and a segregated south. And instead kind of trains a generation of teachers at Hampton and later Tuskegee to build miniature Tuskegee's and miniature Hamptons that will train black Southerners in agricultural arts and industrial skills and kind of the vocational skills that will allow people to make a kind of working class living. And there's kind of again a lot of revisitation around Booker T. Washington. Jarvis McInnis has written a really fantastic recent book examining kind of the way that we might want to understand Booker T. Washington as having a more nimble and ambitious kind of ecological imagination, understanding the Southern landscape in a way that we have kind of under theorized in the past. But there is a kind of way that Booker T. Washington is confronting right in his own education, a backlash to Reconstruction. Samuel Armstrong Chapman, the founder of Hampton, is a virulent opponent of Reconstruction and has kind of really hostile things that I say about Reconstruction. When you read Booker T. Washington's biography From Slavery, he's got a real hostility towards Reconstruction. And so part of the Industrial school movement is to kind of erase the legacy of Reconstruction in the southern landscape. In the low country, the kind of Hampton trained teachers are traveling to redo the curriculum of the Penn School, which is found by two white northern teachers who come to South Carolina as part of the royal experiment that we spoke about earlier. It's a school that was founded by women who have real radical abolitionist sympathies, have a real kind of loyalty to figures like Robert Smalls and the kind of Reconstruction era project that Robert Smalls is building. And when Laura Towne, one of these founders, dies, her nephew and Kind of allies begin to kind of turn this into industrial school. Right? Kind of. Rather than kind of emphasize the kind of specific kind of liberal arts training that was kind of common in schools during the Reconstruction era, it begins kind of emphasizing agricultural training, industrial training. But these teachers who travel there are confronting and kind of having to kind of find a middle ground, right? They don't simply impose a kind of anti Reconstruction thought. They are also encountering former Reconstruction politicians. They're meeting veterans of the kind of United States colored troops. Even Booker T. Washington, who travels to this region, has a number of teachers who are appointed at other industrial schools in the region, is in conversation with Robert Smalls, wants to learn about the history of Reconstruction for Robert Smalls. Robert Smalls is keeping a public school in the region alive that he's kind of using a textbook that kind of teaches the children of this school real history of Reconstruction, history of leaders from Reconstruction. So again, there's always a kind of complicated legacy, right? The Booker T. Washington in my book is not simply someone who is stamping out Reconstruction and kind of imposing a conservative vision here. The legacy, right. Even though kind of the political world has been kind of hollowed out, the kind of legacy of this politics, it continues to live in this industrial school movement.
- [42:10]
Sullivan Sommer
I'm reflecting, you mentioned new work about Booker T. Washington, which I have not read. I'm excited to read it, but I'm reflecting on this. What feels like this continuous pendulum swing over time of maybe a generation of scholars that will think one thing or espouse one thing about certain. Certain people that is maybe less nuanced, perhaps. I mean, Booker T. Washington, you know, the. The what? Perhaps I learned about Booker T. Washington at one point in time. I'm thinking about, you know, Phillis Wheatley. It goes back to, you know, 18th century is another, I think, one that pops into my mind. I'm curious, as someone who thinks about memory, encounter memory in history a lot, what do you make of these, the sort of reinterpretations of not just the record? Because we're, I guess, I mean, we're always reinterpreting the record. But. But these people specifically.
- [43:13]
Robert Bland
No, I mean, that is, I think, one of the most important things that historians do. Kind of how do you reframe the past broadly, but also how do you think about the specific experiences of these people who lived through the past? Right. Kind of. In what ways can we think more complicated about kind of simple narratives? And again, Booker T. Washington does sit at the helm of this Tuskegee machine that does real damage to people's lives. Right. And also. Right. With that power, he kind of keeps alive many kind of periodicals in the black press and kind of establishes schools in places where there would not be schools. Any number of kind of important kind of black figures in American life owe their intellectual foundation to, if not Tuskegee, an institution modeled after Tuskegee. Right. The kind of agricultural, mechanical schools that spread across the South. Right. Kind of we can think about kind of the conservative vision that kind of the leaders and the donors and the board of trustees had at Hampton and the kind of hidden curriculums. Right. I'm thinking of Jarvis Givens fugitive pedagogy. And kind of ways that there's kind of always something that we can visibly see on the surface in the Jim Crow south. And then there's the kind of way that the Jim Crow south actually works. Right. And kind of. That it's complicated. That is negotiation not only among black and white leaders. Right. Kind of, again, white supremacy is never total. It's never kind of a kind of undefeated juggernaut that can't kind of have holes or kind of have negotiation points, but. But also in the black world. Right. The kind of ways that kind of you develop power. Right. Is sometimes there is placating in negotiation that looks conservative, that looks accommodationist, and it can also kind of open vistas and opportunities. I mean, the story I'm telling about Robert Smalls is a complicated story. And I'm making him. And the views of some people, I imagine, a villain. Right. But I think of him not so much as a villain, but as an important, thoughtful, complicated figure who knew how to exercise political power. And. Right. Sometimes you use political power in ways that are damaging to people. But again, power is. Is dangerous, even when good people have it.
- [45:24]
Sullivan Sommer
One of the things I reflected on in reading the book is that every person you talk about in the book is done with a. A certainly amount of detail, but a certain amount of reverence. Like, I couldn't help but come away but feel that every single person here is important. You know, regardless of the complexity of what they did or their legacy, they are all incredibly important. And one of those people you talk about towards the end of the book is Hastings Gantt. Can you talk a bit about Hastings Gantt?
- [46:01]
Robert Bland
Yeah. I mean, I think that is a kind of accurate reading of the book's tone. And in that way, I'm trying to capture the urgency of this kind of specific kind of practice of counter memory, that this is a world where people die young. Right. People who did great work are left impoverished at the end of their lives and forgotten or kind of made objects of ridicule in the kind of Southern press and the national press. They're not appearing in these major histories except as kind of caricatures. And so the kind of effort to kind of capture and remember these stories is, I think, motivating many of these journalists and later, right, the kind of people like Auruthius Ambush Taylor and Carter G. Woodson who are trying to capture and encapsulate and preserve some of these stories. Hangstein's Gantt is an important figure. He is, I guess, in the broad sweep of history, someone who gets lost, right? He serves as a figure who serves in the South Carolina State General Assembly. He's an ally of Robert smalls in the 1870s and 1880s. Born into slavery, works as a farmer, as a landowner, in many ways embodies the promise, the grassroots promise of Reconstruction, right? Someone who kind of, in any other time in history would have been imagined as someone outside of kind of the political order and kind of become someone who is, in many ways, right, a representative of St. Helena island, this kind of Gullah, Geechee center of the Low Country. He turns against Robert smalls in the 1890s, right? And kind of Robert Smalls again, as he kind of embraces this fusionist politics, so kind of where he wants to embrace good government, begins to back away from some of his allies who are perceived as outside the proper political order. Hastings Gantt is never someone who kind of formally attends school, does not have a formal education, is ridiculed in the Southern press as someone who's the embodiment of the excesses of Reconstruction and giving political power to people who didn't go to proper schools in the 20th century, right? Kind of there's a visitor who kind of visits St. Helen island and kind of encounters Gantt, who's driving a Draymond's cart, right? Kind of serving as a taxi driver from Beaufort County's train station to St. Helen Island. And this is kind of one of these kind of common Reconstruction kind of tropes, right? The kind of person who served in the State House is now kind of a bricklayer or a drayman. And so, on the one hand, kind of, this is someone who's been cast aside, who's been kind of forgotten by history, and yet, right? This is someone who gives money, gives land back to the Penn School, right at the moment that it's becoming an industrial school, an embodiment of the earlier Reconstruction era. It's critical, right. It's friends with Lower Town, but remains allies with the new kind of board of the Penn School, which is now an industrial school. He gives even more land upon his passing to the school. And on that land is built the Gantt Cottage. And this is kind of one of the school's kind of major buildings. It's a place where guests who are visiting the Penn School often stay. And in the summer, before Martin Luther King Jr. Gives the I have a Dream speech, the kind of the speech on Washington for the March for jobs and justice, he stays in the Gantt cottage. And so in some ways, right, kind of this is kind of a figure who's been discarded in this Reconstruction history. It's not a figure who is going to appear in the kind of early 20th century accounts, except maybe as kind of stand in for a larger arbitrary ridicule. Won't appear in a project like Du Bois Black Reconstruction, but kind of his legacy again, is part of this kind of broader counter memory, part of this kind of way that local communities are seeking to preserve and archive their own experience with Reconstruction in kind of very clear and kind of identifiable ways.
- [50:17]
Sullivan Sommer
So you touched on this at the beginning, and I feel like now we've come full circle in the book. But you write the passing of the Reconstruction generation coincided with a new chapter in the long arc of sectional reconciliation, a phase that saw a dramatic increase in the scale and scope of the lost causes cultural reach in American life. Talk about that passing of the Reconstruction generation.
- [50:45]
Robert Bland
Right? Right. So it happens in fits and starts, right. Kind of some of these figures, the older figures, again, kind of having these accounts of people passing in the 1880s at the turn of the century, Frederick Douglass, Blanche K. Bruce and John Mercer Langston all pass away from between 1895 and 1900. And that is kind of seen as this real turning point, this real shift in this kind of memory of Reconstruction. But the real turning point, right, this real shift in kind of this passing of the Reconstruction generation happens around 1910 to 1915. And I don't want to give away too much of the book, but kind of some of the major lights kind of really began to kind of phase from this realm of kind of life, right. The kind of. You see a kind of rapid kind of passing of kind of members of the Reconstruction generation. And this is also happening at a moment where in 1915, birth of a Nation kind of is premiered and becomes this kind of not only kind of signature moment in American cinema history, but kind of this turning point in kind of lost Cause memory. You see the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan at this moment. You see this radical expansion of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Now you see this kind of precipitous expansion of Confederate monuments across the Southern landscape. And so we are very kind of familiar with this story of the Lost Cause of kind of the interwar period, 1915, 1920 to 1930, as this kind of consolidation of the solid south, right? This is a moment where white supremacy becomes kind of the law of the land in a radically new way, in the south, becomes a completed project. This is kind of one of the story I try to tell on the maps. And kind of you see that kind of really, there's kind of no kind of Republican presence in the Southern landscape anymore. But you also kind of see this shift in the kind of countermember. Right. That these kind of figures of the Reconstruction generation are passing is noted upon in the black press in places like the New York Age and places like the NAACP's official magazine, the Crisis. Those who had kind of lived and experienced and understood the story of the Reconstruction generation are kind of deeply concerned that the passing of this generation means that their memory will be lost. And one of these figures who's doing this work is Monroe Work as a social scientist who's working at Tuskegee. I mean, he works with the Journal of Negro History, the kind of academic journal founded by Carter G. Woodson. And he's beginning this process in 1917, 1918 through the early 1920s, of writing letters to people who are either affiliated Reconstruction or know someone who's affiliated to Reconstruction. And he's beginning to kind of develop an archive of Reconstruction's history. One of the figures who writes to him, Helen James Chisholm, says that, again, this work is important. It's an important, interesting moment in history, But I'm afraid that the next generation is not going to have any interest in it. And so you see a number of people in the black world who are interested and kind of concerned that kind of the major lights, the major figures of the Reconstruction story are beginning to pass away. There's an effort to begin collecting these stories. There's an effort from this collection to actually build a broader history of kind of how do you tell the story of Reconstruction beginning to end while highlighting and kind of capturing a true accounting of who these black politicians were? This is kind of, in many ways the birth of black history.
- [54:36]
Marshall Po
Right?
- [54:37]
Robert Bland
The kind of African American history that we know and recognize today is kind of emerging out of this kind of counter Memory, this moment of the passing of the Reconstruction generation.
- [54:47]
Sullivan Sommer
One of the things I'm fascinated by whenever I speak to an author whose book is like yours, very grounded in a place, in a geography, and it's a geography where you don't currently live. I'm always interested in that. Talk about how you approached this book as someone who does not, at least right now, and maybe you did when you were writing it. I mean, just talk to me about how you negotiate your own physical place versus the place that you're writing about.
- [55:20]
Robert Bland
Oh, that's a. That's a great question. I'm not from the Low Country. I have kind of friends and kind of have built community with people who are deeply engaged and have kind of roots in that place. And it is one of these sacred places. If I were speaking those terms of African American history. Right. This is, again, a kind of important region for understanding the history of slavery. The kind of responses and resilience to slavery. Right. The kind of. This is a kind of, again, the Ellis island of black America. Charleston is the kind of hub of the Low country, kind of the Gullah Geechee culture, which kind of is this place, this kind of identity that's kind of grounded in preservation of African folkways and culture ways and food ways. To understand kind of the presence of Africa and Africa and black America, you need to understand this region. Kind of activists and kind of political leaders are doing important work about preserving that culture. To understand kind of Southern food culture and African American food culture, you need to understand the Low Country. And so I did not initially think that this was going to be a solely regional or micro history or county history. But the kind of history that I'm writing is deeply engaged with kind of generations of scholars who've kind of turned their eye to the Low country and said, this is a site that tells an important story of African American history. The kind of work of public memory and public history is work that's preserved by the descendants of the Reconstruction generation. Right. The kind of African American history museum that emerges, the International African American History Museum in Charleston, the kind of national park site that preserves the history of Reconstruction. The first national park site that do so is based in Beaufort county, where my own project begins. Right. This is, in some ways, right. All of this was happening as I'm finishing the book. And that is me being in the right place at the right time in some ways. But there's also. I am building on traditions and generations of scholars and activists and community members who understood the importance of this place and did a remarkable job of preserving this history not only in academic archives, but also in local communities and institutions and families and any number of kind of places.
- [57:54]
Sullivan Sommer
The book is Requiem for Reconstruction, Black Counter Memory, and the Legacy of the Low Country's Lost Political Generation by Robert Bland. Find Professor Bland online at Robbland on Threads, Blue sky and Twitter, and I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. Find me online at SullivanSummer.com on Instagram at the SullivanSummer, and over on substack Ollivansummer, where Professor Bland and I are headed right now to continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to the New Books Network.