Southern Pines has renamed a road to honor Felton Capel, one of its quiet champions of racial justice. It left me marveling, again, at how much heavy lifting has been done, collectively, by people whose efforts drew little attention outside their communities.
It also left me wondering how they feel about hearing the civil rights movement referred to in the past tense.
I've never met "most people," but most of those I know subscribe to a narrative that neatly disposes of slavery and all things racial: There was slavery in the South, then the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, then came Reconstruction, then Jim Crow laws as whites struggled to reassert themselves, followed by the civil rights movement, followed by a new era of equal rights and nondiscrimination.
What if someone told you that the whole thing was wrong - except, of course, the part about who lost the war?
In the beginning there was slavery almost everywhere: from North to South, from sea to shining, um, wilderness. The South later made war to perpetuate slavery in the Territories; but the typical U.S. soldier or sailor was more concerned about preserving the Union than he was about freedom and the equality of men. The whole country had received a measure of indoctrination - Lincoln and some of his more famous generals not excepted. His proclamation ignored slaveholding in states other than those "in rebellion."
Efforts to subdue blacks and ensure white dominance were ongoing before, during and after Reconstruction. And they succeeded - not in some poetic or hyperbolic sense, but in actual fact. The time in which a black man could seek public office with a realistic hope of winning was a mere flicker before the candle was snuffed out. For most, the vote was held beyond their reach.
When I say that those efforts were successful, I don't mean they were successful merely in reminding blacks who was boss. I mean that thousands of African-Americans were shopped for, bought, chained, enslaved on plantations and in mines without pay, beaten and worked (literally to death, in many cases), right up until a few years before I was born. I know: You don't believe me. Read Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name," and dicker with the primary sources.
By the way, night-riding goons didn't make any of that happen. The Klan was a bit player compared with the institutions of state and local government.
Where are the lines?
A year ago, we had a Racial Justice Act. It exposed profound and pervasive racial bias in jury selection. The General Assembly - your elected representatives and mine - hastily gutted it.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weaken or overturn the Voting Rights Act's preclearance provision. What, if anything, will it make of the fact that in recent decades the Justice Department has approved thousands of voting changes but refused to clear thousands of others? Were the thousands that it rejected turned down due to clerical errors, perhaps? Did the department misread every scrap of evidence?
With a former Republican Florida governor openly saying that Republican lawmakers labored to suppress the presumably Democratic-leaning black vote, should we rush to declare the act obsolete?
Now, about the civil rights movement, and the two great laws that trailed Brown v. Topeka by almost a decade: Show me those sharp, bright lines. When was the lore abandoned? On what famous date, known to every schoolchild, did the hatred end?
The movement is not in our past. It's all around us. It's in us. It lies ahead of us.
America's great unfinished business awaits us. What are we teaching our children?
Gene Smith is the Observer's senior editorial writer. He can be reached at 486-3581 or firstname.lastname@example.org. You can discuss this column online by going to fayobserver.com/opinion.