This post popped up on my Facebook page last week and I found it so powerful to think about. Mind you, I frequently think about how short our connection is to people and events that seem so very long ago; but was still in awe about the hypothetical connections made in the post.
Take a read!
The full text from this Facebook post is below:
Reconstruction Era National Historical Park
During the Civil War, photographers came to Beaufort County to document the lives of the now formerly enslaved people living and working in the Sea Islands. These photographers often placed young children in the foreground of their shots, perhaps as a way of galvanizing support for emancipation as a war aim in the northern states. But these images also reveal something else - just how close we really are to the Reconstruction era.
In the foreground of this photograph taken on St. Helena Island is a young child, perhaps 3 or 4 years old, which would mean they were probably born around 1860 into slavery. By the time the 15th Amendment was ratified, this child was ten years old. Some of their earliest memories may have been going with their father to vote at Brick Baptist Church, which was a voting precinct for citizens on St. Helena. By the time they were old enough themselves to vote in the late 1870s, Wade Hampton - leader of the Redshirts - had already assumed control of the state government, and Rutherford B. Hayes had already agreed to end military Reconstruction in many southern states. Fortunately for citizens on the Sea Islands in Beaufort County, they were able to hold on to the vote for a while longer. Perhaps if this child were male, they got to cast a vote for Robert Smalls during one of his Congressional terms in the 1880s. By the time this child was fifty years old, they had lost the right to vote through a barrage of literacy tests, poll taxes, and white supremacy. By the time they were sixty, they had seen women's suffrage, the veterans come home from World War I, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. If this child lived into their 80s, they saw World War II. If they lived into their 90s, they may have looked up to the same stars that their parents looked to dreaming of a drinking gourd and freedom, and watched a Soviet satellite fly by. There’s a chance that this child’s life overlapped that of many people alive today. Perhaps somebody following this park Facebook page maybe even met this child as an elderly citizen on St. Helena Island 60 or 70 years ago.
If this child somehow lived into their early 100s, they may have heard Martin Luther King’s speech in Washington, and maybe – just maybe – they they got to cast one more vote again.
I find that understanding the short span of history has helped me out when I was surprised during an exchange I had a year ago with a store employee who was bringing in grocery store carts. I walked past her on the way to my cart and we said hello to each other. We had time to discuss the morning’s downpour; I was in Memphis and dang, it can rain there! I made a comment about living in Oregon and the rain there wasn’t as bad. She said she didn’t know where Oregon was, and that caught me off guard. My first thought was that US maps in her school should have given her a general sense of where it was. Then I caught myself and remembered the book I read a couple of years back, Silver Rights, by Constance Curry. It’s the story of the Carter family’s integration of their school district in Mississippi in the mid-1960s.
This woman was near my age and may have not been able to attend school regularly, especially if her family was sharecropping when she was young. The Carter family had been sharecroppers and attended school periodically. Once they began their fight to integrate, they were kicked off the land they worked.
Or perhaps this woman’s segregated school didn’t have the materials that I was exposed to during my school years?
Regardless of why she didn’t know where Oregon was, I realized I was experiencing the institutional racism that meant white people of my age had maps and books in school, and Black people may not have, especially in the south.
It still surprises me that Black people were sharecropping in the mid-60s. I thought it was something that likely ended by WWII. That’s the short arc of history at work. A woman around my age, that I met and conversed with could have been from a family of sharecroppers. Certainly the children in the Carter family were sharecroppers, and they were about my age.
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But is there also a long arc of history that finds us in a situation where the men and women who fought the Nazis are almost all dead? My father was one of those men, and I suspect that a lot of you had parents who either fought in WWII, or were adult enough to understand what was at risk during that war. We grew up knowing the Nazis were bad, knowing that racism was bad; and hopefully we taught that to our children.
Unfortunately some children weren’t taught that or have fallen victim to the long arc of history. It was 75 years ago, that’s ancient history in too many minds; and now we're running out of the critical mass needed to soundly defeat, and pushback against Neo Nazis.
Hillary Clinton used her large election platform to warn us about the rise in violence and hate and was mocked for it by some in the media, let alone folks on social media.
Granted, there are many reasons for the rise of Neo Nazis and other far right extremist groups, but I think we can't deny that the further we are from when they were considered too evil to tolerate doesn't help.
I hope I’ve given you something to ponder today, and going forward.