The recent arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white Cambridge cop has
allowed the mass media to talk about racial and class inequality as if only
blacks or other minorities have reason to be concerned about the former and
whites only have reason to be concerned about the latter. The actual history
of race and class in the deep South shows how wrong this view is.
During the summer break between my sophomore and junior year in college I,
along with several other Dartmouth College students, took a job in Talladega,
Alabama at the black Talladega College as an Upward Bound tutor of black high
school students. It was 1966 and we decided that, on our time off work, we
would join the Civil Rights Movement by registering black people in town to
vote.
I recall walking down a dusty red clay road in sweltering heat, past shacks on
the right hand side of the road, until we got to identical shacks further down
the road on the left hand side. Very poor whites lived in the first set of
shacks on the right, and very poor blacks lived in the second set of shacks on
the left. As we passed the shacks on the right, we would see white people
looking at us, but we ignored them. Day after day during that summer we walked
right past the whites to get to the blacks. The whites never demonstrated any
hostility to us whatsoever, and we reciprocated by never demonstrating the
slightest interest in them. We didn't know if they were registered to vote or
not. It never even occurred to us to find out. It was only decades later that
it occurred to me to wonder why not.
In retrospect, the reason was clear. We had all absorbed the dominant idea:
poor whites in the deep South are racists. We had images in our heads of poor
whites waving the Confederate Flag, lynching blacks, and joining the Ku Klux
Klan. Why would we want to register such people to vote?
But sometimes reality conflicts with the dominant ideas about it. The history
of race and class in the heart of Mississippi during the Civil War
demonstrates this.
On March 8, 1864 Captain A.F. Ramsey of the Confederacy's 3rd Mississippi
Regiment wrote to Major J.C. Denis, the regional provost marshal about an
attack on a Confederate installation in New Augusta, Mississippi. Of the
attackers, Ramsey wrote, "They stated they were in regular communication with
the Yankees, were fighting for the Union, and would have peace or hell by
August. They told the negros they were free."
The attackers were natives of Mississippi, not Yankees. They were whites--the
sort of whites that were called "poor white trash" by the "better" folk of the
Confederacy. They came from Jones County and nearby counties of rural
Mississippi, where they were small "yeoman" farmers who owned no slaves and
were proud of that fact. They farmed small plots of land, and as fugitives who
had been conscripted into and then deserted from the Confederate Army, they
hid in the swamps around their farms.
Sally Jenkins, a journalist, and John Stauffer, chair and professor of the
History of American Civilization at Harvard University wrote a book about
these anti-Confederacy whites of Mississippi. Their book is titled "The State
of Jones" because Jones County, Mississippi, virtually seceded from the
Confederacy during the Civil War. This book tells about an important aspect of
race relations in American history that is unknown by most Americans. Here are
some things I learned from it.
In their attack on the Confederate installation, these "poor white trash"
"surrounded the home in which the local conscription officer, Captain John J. Bradford, of the 3rd Mississippi Regiment, was staying. In broad daylight they called him outside and took a vote on whether to hang him. He was 'pardoned' after he promised to quit the conscription service and swore never again to enter the county or to in any way aid in attacks against them. They took three more prisoners at gunpoint, liberated the local slaves, and seized a dozen horses, government stores, ammunition, and cooking utensils. They issued provisions to destitute families in the neighborhood."
Confederate Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk wrote to President Jefferson
Davis that the Jones Countians were "in open rebellion, defiant at the outset,
proclaiming themselves 'Southern Yankees,' and resolved to resist by force of
arms all efforts to capture them." Polk "ordered elements from two of the most
battle-hardened regiments in the whole of the Confederacy army, the 'Bloody'
6th Mississippi and the intensely loyal 20th Mississippi, to conduct an
expansive sweep of the lower Mississippi, combing the several counties between
the Pearl and Tombigbee rivers for deserters." They arrested about 500 men in
seven counties.
Here's one way the yeoman farmer "guerillas," led by Newton Knight, fought
back against Polk's "rebel" troops:
"Another better-laid trap succeeded. Some of the area farmwives invited the troopers to a dance party at Levi Valentine's. The cavalrymen arrived to find a Negro fiddler sawing on his instrument and friendly local girls eager to waltz. But as they cavorted, the Jones County men crept up on the guards for an ambush. As the cavalrymen realized the trap, chaos erupted. The women fled out the back door, while the rebels bolted toward the front porch, where Newton's men met them with a brace of gunfire. Two cavalrymen and one guerrilla were killed in the exchange."
At this time slaves who were able to do so left the plantations and headed
for Union positions. By the end of 1863 about 50,000 former slaves were
serving the Union Army. One slave woman named Rachel, who was owned by
relatives of Newton Knight, remained with her owner.
"Newton's most reliable ally and source of sustenance was Rachel...The young woman knew both the ways of the swamp and the kitchens of Confederates. Rachel ferried food, clothing and information to Newton. She regularly crossed the boundaries between Confederate households, the slave cabins, and the hidden civilization in the swamp, carrying news to Newton and keeping him apprised of rebel movements...For the rest of the war, Rachel would operate as Newton's 'intelligence,' ...she became Newton's spy, his eyes and ears."
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During the fighting, Newton was unable to stay with his wife and family on
their farm, and he and Rachel became, in effect, a married couple who later
raised children and had grandchildren together.
General Polk's determined effort to capture Newton's men failed. "All the
Confederate cavalry, artillery, and crack infantry regiments had done was give
him temporary pause. Nor had they solved the larger problem of desertion in
the ranks: only 20 percent of the five thousand active deserters in
Mississippi had been caught and returned to duty."
Non-slave-owning "poor white trash" deserted from the Confederate army in
large numbers for four main reasons. They hated being treated like dirt by the
slave-owning officers. They hated the Confederate government for allowing men
who owned twenty or more slaves to remain at home with their families while
poorer men were conscripted. They hated the Confederate government for sending
agents to attack their wives--robbing them of food and the means to keep
themselves and their children alive while their husbands were away. And they
were unwilling to risk their lives to defend the institution of slavery. In
fact, they believed in equality of all human beings. Newton Knight and his
followers were Baptists who "practiced foot washing, lay preaching, and
egalitarian worship in unadorned buildings. The central tenet of their faith
was that all humans were equal in God's eyes and infused with God's spirit.
'God is no respecter of persons' was one of their favorite passages from the
Bible. Another was: 'Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and
them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.'"
The "poor white trash" of Mississippi formed an alliance with the slaves
against the Confederate slave-owning elite. As Jenkins and Stauffer write:
"Also, every day more blacks liberated from plantations came into the swamps
to join the struggle."
The poor whites of Mississippi who fought the Confederacy alongside slaves did
so because of working class values that they shared with slaves. The fact that
poor whites may have believed some racist lies about blacks that constituted
the dominant ideas of the day is not nearly as important or significant as the
fact that their working class values led them to ally with slaves to fight the
racist ruling class. Racism came from the upper class, and anti-racism came
from the working class--black and white--in Mississippi during the Civil War.
Knowing about this history of class struggle in Mississippi during the Civil
War makes it easier to understand how, in the 1930s throughout the South,
black and white tenant farmers united in the
Southern
Tenant
Farmers
Union against the large landowners and the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws,
and waged successful strikes for better conditions.
The idea that in a society where blacks are on average worse off than whites,
being poor and white means being racist is simply not true. It is a myth that
the elite loves us to believe, because it causes well-intentioned people, like
me and my fellow Dartmouth students in 1966, to view working class whites as
the enemy. This myth helps the elite to equate "anti-racism" with "anti-white
working class" and thus divide and rule the working class.
The elite is only strengthened when people, in the name of "fighting racism,"
wrongly assert that ordinary white people benefit from racism and are,
therefore, the source of racism. Newton Knight and his men freed slaves while
fighting the upper class of the Confederacy because they were for equality and
opposed to oppression of anybody--black or white. They knew it was worse to be
a slave than a "free" poor white, but they also knew that slavery didn't
benefit them, it benefited those who oppressed them. They knew their fight
against the Confederacy was strengthened by the solidarity they had with the
slaves. Likewise, the slaves who joined with Newton Knight's men knew that the
important thing about those men was not that they were better off than slaves
but that they were fighting against oppression.
The "left" phrase, "White Skin Privilege," with its implication that working
class people with a white skin benefit from racism because they are
"privileged" to live in a society in which black people are on average worse
off than whites, is profoundly misleading. Thank goodness Newton Knight's men
and the slaves they allied with had never heard of that phrase. And thank
goodness they all understood that both racial and class inequality are a
problem for working class people no matter what their race.