February is here, which means that it’s Black History Month. Black history is an integral part of U.S. history, with African Americans making important contributions to the lifeblood of this country in all fields of endeavor. But there are many misconceptions and mischaracterizations when it comes to the public’s general understanding of black history. They say that the truth will make you free. Well, here at theGrio, we thought we’d kick off February the right way by debunking the 10 biggest myths about black history.
1. The Civil War was not fought over slavery
If you want to know whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, just read the words of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America in 1861:
The prevailing ideas entertained by…most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically…. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error…Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.
Most historians agree that slavery was one of the primary issues leading to the Civil War. South Carolina seceded from the Union because of the clash between slave states and free states over the expansion of slavery. The Republican Party, then a new political party, made the fight against slavery in U.S. territories a key issue.
Historical revisionists have tried to whitewash history and improve the image of the Old South by eliminating slavery from the mix. And groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans insist the war was fought over self-governance and states’ rights. The war was about states’ rights, the right of Southern states to own black people.
2. The civil rights movement was inherently Communist
Martin Luther King’s inspiration for his philosophy of nonviolence and strategy of civil disobedience came from Mahatma Gandhi. The civil rights movement was not inspired by Communist beliefs or rhetoric, but the two biggest foes of the civil rights movement — FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the Klu Klux Klan — were fervently anti-Communist and characterized the civil rights workers as such.
It was the middle of the Cold War, and Hoover investigated any group that adopted the similar positions on civil liberties, racism, economic and peace as the Communist Party. Hoover thought the movement was a target of Communist infiltration, which is why his COINTELPRO program went after so-called subversive causes deemed Communist or socialist — including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Black Panther Party and others.
3. The modern Democratic Party is still the party of the Klu Klux Klan
During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the Democratic Party ruled the South, and their reign of terror was made successful thanks to groups like the Klan, which provided the muscle that kept black people down, subordinated and ‘in their place’. As historian Eric Foner noted in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, “In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy.”
Meanwhile, the Republican Party was a diverse party, a true “big tent” with liberals and moderates in their ranks. Following the Civil War during Reconstruction, blacks were overwhelmingly Republican. Even President Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote in 1956, while Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote in his loss against Kennedy. Moreover, greater majorities of Republican lawmakers voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. In fact, Democrats and Republicans outside of the South approved the bills in the face of a filibuster from Southern Democrats.
Things began to change in the 1960s, when Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, and Southern conservatives began to take over the GOP by appealing to white Southern resentment over civil rights. As a result of a Southern Strategy based on states’ rights, white Democrats flocked to the Republicans. In today’s South, the Republican Party is a mostly white conservative party, and the Democratic Party is disproportionately African-American. The parties switched places.
4. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, and would today be aligned with conservatives
Conservatives point to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — in which he said he wanted his four children to be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character — as proof that King opposed affirmative action and was a conservative Republican. But that is wishful thinking. First of all, the Republican Party of King’s days was quite different from the party of today. Although King’s father was a lifelong Republican, which made sense since the Democrats supported segregation, this does not mean the son was a Republican. Second, as PolitiFact notes, Dr. King was not a Republican, and historians and Martin Luther King III agree there is no proof of it.
In fact King spoke out passionately in opposition to conservative GOP 1964 nominee for the presidency, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. King said of Goldwater:
While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.
King also wanted to spend billions of dollars to fight poverty and was vilified for his stance against the Vietnam War. And he fought with striking Memphis sanitation workers when he was assassinated. He also said that America “must undergo a radical revolution of values” and “must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” That doesn’t sound very conservative. Today’s conservatives would likely brand him a socialist.
5. There were other ways to end segregation besides a civil rights movement (Rand Paul saying the free market would have ended it. Chris Christie says a referendum could have.)
Presidential candidate Ron Paul opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it infringed on the right of business owners and threatened privacy. Paul believes that we should have left it to the free market to end segregation. Paul ignores the historical circumstances surrounding Jim Crow. The free market at that time supported segregation for African-Americans, and slavery before it, which was backed up by state officials, state laws and local ordinances, and a regime of violence by the Klan and other terrorist groups. These forces had no intention of budging from their position, as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
It took a civil rights movement to apply pressure on Congress and President Johnson and force the Southern states to change their ways. This meant legislation by the federal government forbidding discrimination in public places, schools, the workplace and the voting booth.
6. Black Americans are better off (versus Africans) because of slavery
We will never know what Africa would have been today without the disruption of slavery and colonization. To argue, as conservative David Horowitz claims, that African-Americans are better off because of slavery — and should be thankful they are the most prosperous blacks in the world— is to ignore the high price that black people have paid. And perhaps that is the point for some people.
One cannot begin to put a price tag on what the separation of families, loss of cultural ties and lost wages has cost the black community.
7. Slavery was not a dehumanizing institution – it was just work for free, so blacks should get over it.
See number 6. Slavery was brutal and dehumanizing. To say that torture, kidnap, rape and murder are not dehumanizing is to live in a world of make-believe. As the master’s property, blacks had no rights under the law, and could be beaten, raped or otherwise abused without recourse. As Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a slave owner, wrote in the Dred Scott case, blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write, and were forbidden to legally marry. They had no parental rights regarding their children, and separation of families occurred without recourse. Further, black folks had to work the fields six days a week from sun-up until sundown, from “can’t-see morning” until “can’t-see night.”
We haven’t even discussed the Middle Passage, the dreaded transatlantic slave ship journey from Africa to the Americas. An estimated 10 to 16 million Africans were stolen and transported against their will across the Atlantic. Although we will never have an accurate count, according to conservative estimates, for every 100 Africans that reached the New World, 40 to 50 percent died either during the death marches to the slave forts following their kidnap in Africa, or during the disease-ridden 60-90 day journey in the bowels of slave ships.
And speaking of working for free, slavery created an enormous wealth advantage for whites. Moreover, the badge of slavery continues to haunt African-Americans today in the form of economic discrimination, higher interest rates for mortgages, redlining and employment practices. Public policy has prevented blacks from accumulating property and wealth, and the federal government reneged on its promise to compensate blacks by giving every freedman 40 acres and a mule.
Moreover, blacks continue to suffer disproportionately in the bad economy. The wealth gap between whites and blacks >more than quadrupled from 1984 and 2007. In addition, the slashing of public sector jobs has plunged many blacks into poverty, and the recession wiped out black wealth and with it the black middle class.
8. The founding fathers worked to end slavery (according to Michele Bachmann) or were opposed to slavery
In a bold act of historical revisionism, former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann declared that the founding fathers worked “tirelessly” to end slavery. During the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, the founding fathers included the Three-Fifths Compromise into the U.S. Constitution, which allowed Southern states to count three-fifths of their slave population for the purposes of representation and taxes. 25 of the 55 delegates at the convention — nearly half — owned slaves. Of course, these slaves had no rights and were unable to vote.
While some in the Tea Party members want to rewrite history to be nicer to the founders, the fact remains that many of these founders owned slaves. Twelve presidents owned slaves, 8 of them while serving in office. For example, George Washington owned over 200 slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned over 100 and fathered children with his slave, and James Monroe owned up to 40. James Madison and Ben Franklin had them as well, though the latter freed his slaves and then fought against the institution. It is hard to imagine someone fighting against slavery while they kept people kidnapped and chained in their backyard, but anything is possible, right?
9. American innovation was exclusively white
Despite Pat Buchanan’s belief that “this has been a country built, basically, by white folks,” African-Americans have made invaluable contributions to this country through inventions, exploration, and all fields of endeavor.
As Randall Robinson noted in his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, the U.S. government requested 100 slaves to construct the Capitol in Washington. Masters who agreed to lend their slaves to the government received $5 per month per slave. Subsequently, forced labor helped clear the land for the rest of the District of Columbia.
But black people helped build America in other ways as well. Benjamin Banneker, an African-American inventor, astronomer, mathematician, urban planner and farmer helped survey what would become the city of Washington, DC. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open heart surgery operation, while Dr. Charles Drew was a pioneer in blood banks and the storage and processing of blood plasma. George Washington Carver was a renowned scientist and educator who reportedly found hundreds of uses for peanuts, soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Lewis Latimer worked with Thomas Edison, and invented carbon filaments for incandescent lamps. Garrett Morgan invented the traffic light and sold it to General Electric, with his design becoming the basis for modern traffic lights. He also invented the gas mask. Marie Van Brittan Brown invented the home security system. Black explorer Matthew Henson was the first person to reach the North Pole, and the list goes on and on.
10. Blacks didn’t fight in America’s wars until World War II
Black people fought in every American war, including the Revolutionary War. Washington allowed black soldiers to enlist due to troop shortages. At least 5,000 blacks fought for the patriot side of the war, according to the National Park Service, and between 75,000 and 100,000 slaves escaped to the British side, with at least 20,000 fighting for the Crown. In 1779, over 500 free Haitian blacks fought for American independence at the siege of Savannah, Georgia. During the War of 1812, most Naval ship crews were 10-20 percent black, and as many as one-quarter of the Navy seamen were black.
According to the National Archives, 179,000 black men served during the Civil War in the Union Army — 1 in 10 soldiers — and 19,000 in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died in the Civil War. Further, more than 350,000 African-Americans fought in World War I.
Black Americans, like other Americans, have served their country and left an indelible mark on this nation. Black history is part of American history, and our contributions should be celebrated.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove