Stony the Road

Starred review from March 11, 2019
Gates (The Annotated African American Folktales), the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, provides an expansive exploration of Reconstruction, Redemption (white southerners’ attempts to reinstate a white supremacist system), and Jim Crow, demonstrating how they informed and engendered one another and sowed the seeds of the modern resurgence of white-supremacist ideas. Gates begins in the 1860s, with the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments providing African Americans basic civil rights, and continues through the backlash of Jim Crow legislation and related cultural trends (including eugenics, stereotypical representations of African-Americans like Uncle Remus, and D.W. Griffith’s KKK-redeeming film The Birth of a Nation). Gates illustrates how this widespread racism and resentment gave rise to the “New Negro,” a rallying of “black intellectuals, creative artists, and political activists” that became the Harlem Renaissance (and whose rhetoric prefigured respectability politics). Gates outlines the ideals and accomplishments of black thinkers including W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, and he insightfully demonstrates how history repeats itself by comparing the emergence of Jim Crow with the rise in white supremacism surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency. This excellent text, augmented by a disturbing collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century racist images, is indispensable for understanding American history.

Starred review from March 1, 2019
The noted African-American literary scholar and critic examines the tangled, troubled years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.From the outset, writes Gates (African and African-American Research/Harvard Univ.; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, 2017, etc.), there was, among whites, a profound difference between being opposed to slavery and advocating equality for emancipated black people. Alexis de Tocqueville, he notes, warned of the latter that since "they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies." Meanwhile, countless enemies emerged among the white population, from unreconstructed Southerners to the architects of Jim Crow laws. Gates argues, with Frederick Douglass, that freedom without the vote is meaningless, and those laws did all that they could to suppress suffrage. Meanwhile, there was the hope that a "New Negro" would emerge to change affairs once and for all--a trope, Gates notes, that emerged anew with the election of Barack Obama, a metaphor "first coined as a complex defensive mechanism that black people employed to fight back against racial segregation." Other mechanisms were born of necessity even as white culture found endless ways to appropriate from black culture while never accepting its authors. In a highly timely moment, Gates discusses the history of blackface, which was put to work in depictions of lascivious, predatory black men advancing the "thought that the ultimate fantasy of black males was to rape white women"--a thought that soon became an "obsession." Reconstruction failed for many reasons, and the ethos that followed it was no improvement: The period under consideration, as the author recounts, marked the rise of "scientific" racism, of "Sambo" images that were "intended to naturalize the visual image of the black person as subhuman," reinforcing the separate-and-unequal premises of Jim Crow itself. Gates suggests that it's possible to consider the entire history of America after the Civil War as "a long Reconstruction locked in combat with an equally long Redemption," one that's playing out even today.A provocative, lucid, and urgent contribution to the study of race in America.

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Starred review from March 1, 2019
Prominent and prolific scholar, writer, filmmaker, and educator Gates has long been compelled by Reconstruction and its rapid and bloody deconstruction. In his signature lucid and compelling approach to history, he tracks the vicious backlash against the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) that abolished slavery, established citizenship for African Americans, and ensured Black men the right to vote?and the resultant election of numerous Black legislators. White southerners retaliated with white-supremacist propaganda, scientific racism, racial violence, including lynchings, and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation laws. Accompanying Gates' illuminating narrative are bold visual essays presenting appalling mass-produced racist images casting African Americans as less than human, weaponized representations accompanied by hoaxes, or fake news, crafted to amplify demeaning stereotypes and heighten fears, especially of Black men as rapists. The parallels to renewed white-supremacist ideology and reactionary politics in the wake of the first African American presidency are staggering. Gates also incisively chronicles the New Negro movement aimed at countering pernicious racist stereotypes, how the Black elite engendered both an artistic renaissance and class divides within the Black community, and the rise of such crucial organizations as the NAACP. This fresh, much-needed inquiry into a misunderstood yet urgently relevant era will appear in conjunction with Gates' new PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, scheduled for broadcast in April. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gates' stature, the subject's timeliness, the airing of his new documentary, and the enormous potential for discussion will make this is a very hot title.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2019

Historian Gates (Alphonse Fletcher Univ. Professor, dir. the Hutchins Ctr. for African and African American Research, Harvard Univ.; Life Upon These Shores) has long been fascinated with the idea of the "New Negro," and how African Americans fought back against white supremacy during the Redemption and Jim Crow periods. In this work (its title a lyric from the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing"), the author asserts that this era is fundamental to understanding the current period of racist backlash following Barack Obama's presidency. Borrowing heavily from historians such as Eric Foner and David W. Blight, Gates covers the basics of Reconstruction, the pseudoscience of racism in the field of anthropology, lynching and racial violence across America, and widespread commercial use of stereotypes such as Sambo and Aunt Jemima, and how African Americans continually strived to disprove this onslaught of bigotry through education, literature, art, music, and political organizing. A large number of photographs and illustrations back up his argument of just how unrelenting white supremacy was in this period. VERDICT An excellent introduction to the Redemption period for new readers and a reminder to experts of why the era is still so crucial to American history.--Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tuscon

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019

Investigating the roots of today's structural racism, Harvard scholar Gates shows how the rights African Americans thought they had secured with the Emancipation Proclamation were batted out of the sky by white resistance. Yet as the Reconstruction Era fell to Jim Crow segregation, African Americans reasserted their humanity with the vision of the "New Negro." With a companion PBS documentary.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.