STONY THE ROAD – Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a Harvard historian and PBS television host. In this book, he describes what WEB DuBois called the “brief moment in the sun” experienced by African Americans during Reconstruction. It also shows how racist opponents revolted against Reconstruction. With its end, they were able to put black Americans back into semi-bondage.  This book is a useful corrective to the ideas that I still remember reading in textbooks in the early 2000s. My high school textbooks argued that Reconstruction was a failure on its own merits. It treated it as an invasion by uppity carpetbaggers from the North into the South. It claimed liberated black citizens didn’t know how to exercise their new power. Instead, they were often corrupt or incompetent. 

Henry Louis Gates demolishes that narrative. His work shows the achievements and promise of Reconstruction. In this view of history, it may have been our best hope of a second American revolution to repair the damage slavery had done to our national soul. Yet as you probably know, it wasn’t to be. A series of terrorist attacks, coups and corrupt actions wracked the South. The perpetrators were Redeemers, white racist elites determined to prevent Reconstruction’s success.  Gates shows how these terrorists destroyed Reconstruction both systematically and chaotically. Still, many black Americans who did not want to lose their “brief moment in the sun” resisted their schemes. 

The book goes further than Reconstruction and the so-called “Redemption” of the South. It also illustrates the post-war propaganda campaigns by racist whites, in gruesome detail. These forms of media promoted the idea that black citizens were less than human and alien to American society.  Gates traces the roots of the racial caricatures and stereotypes that linger today. These grace everything from our television programs to bottles of crappy pancake syrup.  Finally, the author investigates the origins of a new conception of black American life. This one was, fashioned by black Americans themselves, and took root in Harlem. Artists and activists conceived of a “New Negro” to fight back against these stereotypes and assert their dignity.

The book is well written, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as Gates knows the material better than about anyone. He includes pages of advertisements and other print media to help illustrate this era and its prejudices. They are haunting in a way I expect, and appreciated.   I read Stony the Road shortly after Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. While I thought the latter was more useful as a broad history of racist ideas, this had plenty of value on its own.  It’s also a shorter book than Kendi’s opus.  If you’re looking to get into the history of anti-black racist ideas in America, keep this on your list.