For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry.
#Battle cry of freedom sparknotes professional#
The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design.
Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property. But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. We knew, of course, about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In fact, when I recall all the attempts to inculcate my classmates with some sense of legacy and history, the gaping hole of Gettysburg opens into the chasm of the Civil War. But as for any connections to the very history I was regularly baptized in, there is nothing. I remember cannons, and a display of guns. I remember stopping at Hardee’s for lunch, and savoring the respite from my vegetarian father’s lima beans and tofu. I remember riding in a beautiful coach bus, as opposed to the hated yellow cheese. But when I look back on those years when black history was seen as tangible, as an antidote for the ills of the street, and when I think on my first visit to America’s original hallowed ground, all is fog. Given this near-totemic reverence for black history, my trip to Gettysburg-the site of the ultimate battle in a failed war to protect and extend slavery-should cut like a lighthouse beam across the sea of memory. Even our field trips felt invested with meaning-the favored destination was Baltimore’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, where our pantheon was rendered lifelike by the disciples of Marie Tussaud. At my middle school, classes were grouped into teams, each of them named for a hero (or a “shero,” in the jargon of the time) of our long-suffering, yet magnificent, race.
Morgan, the words of Sojourner Truth, or the wizard hands of Daniel Hale Williams. Each February-known since 1976 as Black History Month-trivia contests rewarded those who could recall the inventions of Garrett A. It enlisted every field, from the arts (Phillis Wheatley) to the sciences (Charles Drew). And so it was thought that a true history, populated by a sable nobility and punctuated by an ensemble of Negro “firsts,” might be the curative for black youth who had no aspirations beyond the corner. The stratagem of these shadow forces was said to be amnesia: they would have us see no past greatness in ourselves, and thus no future glory. Conscious people were quick to glean, from the cascade of children murdered over Air Jordans, something still darker-the work of warlocks who would extinguish all hope for our race. Black people talked openly of covert plots evidenced by skyrocketing murder rates and the plague of HIV. It was the mid-’80s, when educators in our inner cities, confronted by the onslaught of crack, Saturday Night Specials, and teen pregnancy, were calling on all hands for help-even the hands of the departed. I n my seventh-grade year, my school took a bus trip from our native Baltimore to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the sanctified epicenter of American tragedy. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the war broke out, lost nearly 300 men. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort Lincoln, in Maryland.
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