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U.S. Civil War – Reconstruction & The War On Freedom – Kidada Williams
154 Plays1 year ago
Ep 022 - Nonfiction. “If we understand the violence of reconstruction, we can understand the violence of today.” Kidada E. Williams joins me to discuss her illuminating new book, 'I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction.'
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Transcript
The Undeclared War on African Americans
00:00:00
Speaker
This is, it's not as though it's not a formal war where they got together and declared that they were gonna wage war like we see in the Civil War, but it's a small war, it's an undeclared war, and you've got a lot of people involved in it. And so yes, you do have a lot of veterans, but you have a lot of people who set out the war.
00:00:18
Speaker
You know, you've got a lot of planters who are involved. You've got elected officials who are involved. You've got landless whites who were involved. Poor whites were involved. Anyone and everyone who was determined to hoard American privilege and freedom could get in on this violence and did. They didn't need to be a member of a group like the Ku Klux Klan. All they needed was to have an investment in denying Black people freedom.
Introduction to Kadada E. Williams and her Work
00:00:53
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have Kadada E. Williams joining me for her new book, I Saw Death Coming, A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Kadada E. Williams is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University.
00:01:20
Speaker
Sees the author of They Left Great Marks on Me, co-author of Charleston Syllabus, and creator of the podcast Seizing Freedom. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, and multiple scholarly journals. Kadada, how are you today?
00:01:36
Speaker
I'm doing great, AJ. How are you? Oh, I'm wonderful.
Gaps in Historical Understanding
00:01:40
Speaker
It's so nice to, we were just talking about this before we went on. So nice to have a fellow podcaster joining me on the show today. We were comparing microphones just a few minutes, a few minutes ago. So yeah, so great to have you here. So I really loved your book.
00:01:58
Speaker
And I'm always surprised by my gaps in American history. And I feel like in school, learned a lot about the civil war, about the battles and the generals, but don't really remember learning so much about reconstruction and especially how African Americans were affected during reconstruction. So I'm so glad you wrote this book. I guess first, why did you decide to write this book?
Importance of African American Testimonies
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, the reason I wrote the book is because I had been, I studied racist violence and I had seen these testimonies that African Americans had given before Congress in 1870 and 1871. And so, you know, I had been looking at the scholarship on reconstruction and I felt that there was like a gap.
00:02:48
Speaker
and our understandings. And so I wanted to tell a story of African-American families transitioning from slavery to freedom, and then the, you know,
00:03:00
Speaker
how their determination to make the most of their freedom becomes a significant factor in the violence that they endure by groups like the Klan and other vigilantes after the fact. And so that's what led to them testifying before Congress. I wanted to get a sense of that history and to do it from their perspective, from the perspective of the survivors who testified.
Collective Experience of Violence
00:03:26
Speaker
And so that,
00:03:28
Speaker
Spending a lot of time with their accounts helped me understand that these were often seen by professional historians as the accounts of individual, sole elected officials and voters. When I look closely at the records, what I understood was that every witness was very clear in trying to illuminate that these are family histories, that they experience this violence as a family, not as individuals. And so I wanted to tell that story.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, and so your book, it draws on the, so you just mentioned these interviews through the, I think it's the Works Progress Administration, is that right, in the 1930s? Yeah, so that's one record said. African Americans who had lived through slavery and reconstruction, they were interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, and they were often asked questions about slavery and about reconstruction.
00:04:23
Speaker
particularly about Klan violence. And so I was able to use those records, too, to try to get a sense of their memories of this violence. And what's unique about those records, as opposed to those people who testified in 1870 and 1971, is that these people were children during Klan violence. They were children during the war against Reconstruction. And so their recollections are about what it was like to experience this violence as children, but they have the perspective of adults.
00:04:53
Speaker
And so it's a really interesting sort of echo in the historical record back to the 1870 materials, but with the clarity of an adult understanding of what was happening to their families.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's maybe dive into some of the history then.
Reconstruction: Integration and Challenges
00:05:10
Speaker
So maybe just the general history of reconstruction. So this is the period right after the Civil War ends, or really just a few years before it ends, going for about 10 years. What's the purpose of reconstruction?
00:05:25
Speaker
So reconstruction is, it's how the nation tries to figure out a way forward coming out of the Civil War. And so the periodization, the sort of early periodization was about that decade period from 1870, most people started 1865 and they go to about 1877, but more recently historians have looked at
00:05:48
Speaker
the larger process of undoing reconstruction and extended that timeline to a later period in the 19th century. And so the nation is trying to figure out how do they move forward after the Civil War? How do they return the seceded state back to the Union fold? What kind of punishment will there be?
00:06:08
Speaker
how the federal government asserts greater authority and control over the states to avoid secession happening again, and trying to figure out what happens with more than 4 million newly freed people. What's going to be their place in the nation? Will they have equal rights? Does freedom just mean release from bondage? Or does it mean something else? They have to work out all of these other details.
00:06:35
Speaker
And so reconstruction is a process. It's all of these policy initiatives that we see over this period as they try to figure out what to do, how to recover from the war, how to move forward. Yeah. And so generally, what is the reality of how reconstruction is playing out for African-Americans?
00:07:00
Speaker
For African Americans in particular, it is incredibly significant in the sense that Reconstruction includes the Emancipation Proclamation, it includes the 13th Amendment, and so it
00:07:15
Speaker
breaks the bonds of chattel slavery once and for all. And so for African Americans, Reconstruction is this whole new world of possibilities for them being able to live as free people and all that that entails. And for African Americans, the end of slavery isn't just about being released from bondage, it's not just being paid for their labor because slavery wasn't only about that.
00:07:40
Speaker
It's about having access to their families, having their own institutions, having access to schools and literacy and education, and all the promises and possibilities of life in the nation that the larger white majority in the country had taken for granted. And it also means things like land ownership, becoming your own business owner, and the right to vote and serve in office.
00:08:03
Speaker
So African-Americans coming out of the war have all of these things in mind. This is what they want. This is what they believe freedom means. And they've been looking at freedom for all of their lives while they're in slavery. And so when they release from bondage,
00:08:19
Speaker
What they say is we need all of these rights, but all of those rights are contested by the larger white majority, including those white folks in the North and the West who are uneasy about emancipation because they are worried about the prospect of having to share the American pie with Black people, especially those coming out of slavery. And so African Americans have to find allies.
00:08:42
Speaker
in order to fight, who are going to fight that fight. And they will find them in those radical Republicans, those very progressive members of Congress, some of whom were abolitionists before the war, who believe that emancipation represents an opportunity to sort of mete out justice. And what they mean by that is to build a more just world where African-Americans can be free, equal, and secure. And that's where we'll have the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
00:09:12
Speaker
the 14th and 15th amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. And all of those are really designed to bring African Americans more fully into the fold and to make sure that they enjoy the same rights and protections as everyone else in the nation. And so African Americans, this is what they want coming out of slavery. And this is what they get and they're able to enjoy for a period of time.
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think too it's worth noting, it was worth me reading this in your book to be reminded that this is four million people who've got nothing, who are just starting completely fresh. I thought it was good to be reminded of that starting point in 1865 or shortly around then.
Overlooked Narrative of Reconstruction's Failure
00:10:03
Speaker
So it's widely considered that reconstruction was a failure, although you write that it wasn't so much a failure as white Southerners overthrew it. Why didn't reconstruction work and why is the distinction that you make failing versus being overthrown? Why is that important? I think it's important because the language of reconstruction failing is curiously in the past the voice.
00:10:34
Speaker
Buildings don't just collapse. There's a structural issue inside of it. Bridges don't just collapse. There's a structural issue inside of it. Reconstruction didn't just sort of fail because it was destined to not work. And so I think we have to be careful about when we move to history in the past of voice.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I think that matters because Americans are great for saying, we won the American Revolution, but slavery is just something to happen, right? Reconstruction failed. So there's a curious move there.
00:11:08
Speaker
What we know happens with reconstruction is that there is, you know, general support for some aspects of reconstruction, but not necessarily for all aspects of reconstruction, but they get it on the books. And African-Americans are living their lives, they're making the most of freedom. And so as you know, they start with nothing, but that they have everything, right? So they don't have a lot of material goods, but they have their labor.
00:11:35
Speaker
They have their determination to succeed. They have their willingness to bet on themselves and their families and their ability to make it in a fair system, right? And so if they have access, you know, white southerners, the former enslavers, they need labor, desperately need labor. Their labor needs are, some people might argue that they're greater after the war than they were before the war because they have to do all of this rebuilding.
00:11:58
Speaker
So it's not a question for African Americans about whether or not they're going to have to work. They know they're going to have to work. They know they'll have to, you know, do this in order to survive and they're eager to
Economic Deprivation and Exploitation
00:12:08
Speaker
do it. But they are operating with people who are determined to not pay them for that work or determined to sustain slavery as much as possible. And so what we'll see from the former enslaving class
00:12:22
Speaker
It's their determination to limit freedom as much as possible, to undercut African-Americans' possibilities, to undercut their earnings, to undercut the kind of jobs they can have. For the former enslaving class, all they want is Black people to continue working under the same conditions as they had before the war. But Black people have a very clear understanding that slavery is over. And so what we will see is that for a lot of families, it takes about three years for them to acquire land.
00:12:51
Speaker
Now, they're not just sitting at home chilling to get that land. They are working and being paid for their labor, unless their wages are being stolen from them. So it takes them about three years to get on their feet and acquire land. But as soon as they acquire land, they're being targeted. That work is, you know, enslavers and those landless whites before the war are doing what they can to deprive Black people access to their land and all of that opportunity. So we have to be aware of those things, you know.
00:13:21
Speaker
when it comes to Black men voting, rather than just allowing Black men to vote in the South or out-voting them, right? What we see white supremacists do is organize to kill Black men who are voting at the polls.
00:13:34
Speaker
to rather than beat them, right? You know, the sort of American investment in meritocracy, rather than beat them legitimately, what they do is they steal elections and they are quick to assassinate Black men who are running for office and Black men who've been elected to office.
00:13:51
Speaker
So when we talk about reconstruction, failing, when people use that language, what they're doing is ignoring all of that. They're ignoring the violence. They're ignoring the assassinations. They're ignoring all of the massacres and coups that we see during reconstruction. They're ignoring all of the Black people who are driven off their land. They have made it. They're successful. We see those who are opposed to
00:14:16
Speaker
Black people's freedom destroying Black churches and schools, and targeting and assassinating ministers and teachers, doing whatever they can to tear down anything and everything Black people built. And so when we use the language of failure,
00:14:32
Speaker
We conveniently erase, we paper over all African-Americans managed to achieve during that period and the ways that white people, racist whites in particular, that they went out of their way to destroy everything that they built so they had nothing left but to potentially go back to the plantation.
00:14:50
Speaker
So for me, that's the distinction. And that narrative of failure is one that is part of the lost cause narrative that people are familiar with in terms of the Civil War. And the threads of that are that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It was only about states' rights, all of this other stuff. And there's a reconstruction component of that. And the reconstruction component is that Black people were free from slavery. They were given every possible chance to succeed.
00:15:21
Speaker
And a lot of that had to do with white northerners unfairly punishing white southerners for seceding. But the rights and the vote, et cetera, they were all wasted on black people. So reconstruction just failed. It just fell apart.
00:15:36
Speaker
So that's the narrative that lost cause enthusiasts told. And that became picked up by the larger historical profession, by educators, and then it became part of the common way we've been taught reconstruction for a couple of decades now, at least.
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah, first, that's such a good point you make about the passive voice of something failing versus, no, there were people who made it fail. As you wrote, these white Southerners who overthrew it. And then too, about the things that we've learned, I remember in my 20s, one day I just Googled, what was the US Civil War about? And I had gone through,
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, all of my, you know, I feel like I've always loved history too. And like, I really paid attention in school to history. And almost immediately, like the answer Google gives me back is slavery. But you don't learn that in schooling. And so it's, you're so right in what you're talking about in these gaps in what people are commonly taught.
00:16:46
Speaker
I want to go back real quick to some of the violence that's being perpetrated during Reconstruction against African Americans, because I think a lot of people think maybe it's just lynchings, which of course is awful, but you're right, it's actually much more than that. What are the types of violence that African Americans are experiencing at this time?
Reprisal Violence and Vigilante Attacks
00:17:13
Speaker
So there are different types, as you note. There's reprisal violence, and some of that we see as African Americans are escaping slavery. And the fact that they have to escape slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation is a testament to how committed enslavers were to holding on to the people they held in bondage.
00:17:33
Speaker
And that kind of reprise of violence is attacking and killing Black people when they leave farms and plantations. That's finding some of the refugee camps that they set up and massacring them if they can't drag them all back to slavery. That's kidnapping Black people from Union Army camps.
00:17:52
Speaker
and dragging them back to slavery. So you see this kind of like incessant violence very early on for Black people who are trying as, you know, beatings, attacks, killings, rapes, as they're trying to escape slavery.
00:18:09
Speaker
After Union forces may move into a region to make sure that Black people have been released from bondage, what you see are different types of bondage. You see economic violence. And some of the economic violence is depriving Black people of occupations. And this is organized. You're organizing to deprive Black people access to any jobs that are beyond the farm or plantation.
00:18:32
Speaker
so that they have no choice for their very survival, but to working conditions very much like they had during slavery. You also have the violence of holding onto their children and trying to put them in apprenticeships under the argument that the former enslavers were in a better position to take care of Black youth than their actual parents and relatives were. So it's a very strategic move in depriving someone of their children is violent.
00:19:02
Speaker
It's also part of the violence that had been common with slavery. So we need to sort of be aware of some of these through lines of the same kind of violence that's used to hold Black people in bondage being used to hold them in slavery. Excuse me, being used to undercut their freedom on the other side of the war. So you have whippings, beatings, attacks, rapes, killings for Black people who are trying to seize their freedom in other ways if they're insisting on being paid a wage for work.
00:19:31
Speaker
if they are refusing sex. And we think about women, for example, who essentially had to endure sexual violence during slavery. But on the other side of it, they sort of understand that I'm a free woman. I do not have to deal with this anymore. And so when they decline and when they fight back, there's a greater chance that they will be more severely raped and maybe even killed for defending themselves.
00:19:57
Speaker
So you've got all of this other kinds of violence that's happening in these day-to-day encounters. And these are one-on-one attacks where it's a Black person. It's a white person assuming to see some kind of authority over Black people, the Black person refusing, and the white person lashing out. What starts to happen, particularly after the 15th Amendment and you've got more Black men voting and running for office, is that the violence starts to become much more coordinated.
00:20:25
Speaker
And instead of attacking Black people one-on-one and risking the chance that they might get beat, what you see is white Southerners organizing into these vigilante squads. And they are often invading Black people's homes in the middle of the night. And the people that they're attacking, and we should be clear about this, are not people who have deliberately attacked or harmed white people. The people they're attacking are Black landowners.
00:20:49
Speaker
black teachers, black ministers, black people who may have a little bit more cash on hand. And so there are these accounts of black men, for example, taking their earnings and they go to the local store and they're buying a lot of goods. And then there are poor white people who may be working in the store or around the store who see them with all of this cash on hand and decide that they want to tear down everything that they built.
00:21:15
Speaker
So you see a lot, so you see like this, it's a constellation of violence or a menagerie of violence that you see, and all of it is designed to undercut black people's freedom, to punish them for resisting subjugation, and to leave them with no choice but to
00:21:34
Speaker
potentially go back to a farmer plantation if they managed to escape this violence with their life. And I think that matters because enslavers, it wasn't financially practical for enslavers to just kill the Black people they held in bondage. But free Black people, Black people who were seizing their freedom are a different story. And so there's like the flipping of a switch.
00:21:57
Speaker
in terms of the value of Black people's lives and white Southerner's minds changing from emancipation to, from slavery, I should say, to freedom. And so you see a lot more deadly violence on the other side of it.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah. And, um, so you talk about how this violence was really in the South. It was society wide, but, um, once the organization begins, then you get, um, you get the Ku Klux Klan. Um, you get what you, you call what you described the night writers in your book, who are the night writers and what's, what's their role in reconstruction?
00:22:35
Speaker
So Night Riders are white vigilante squads and they attack in the middle of the night. They're armed and what they do is they stage these home invasions. So they're like home invasions. We could recognize them today. So it's armed white men, gangs, and sometimes squads of armed white men who attack black people in the middle of the night where they're not expecting to need to defend themselves. A lot of people aren't even expecting to be attacked.
00:23:02
Speaker
And they're held hostage for what can be hours at a time. And they're subjecting Black families to rape, torture, murder, all kinds of obscene acts. And this is a, what's very clear in the violence is the perpetrators' insistence on conveying to Black people that they don't have any rights that white people are bound to respect.
00:23:25
Speaker
And so this is what that violence looks like. And so it starts in 1867. It really starts to intensify in 1868 with more Black men voting and being elected into office. And it continues through the end of Reconstruction. And it will eventually evolve into lynching. But what we see in these attacks is that, as I noted, people aren't prepared to defend themselves. If someone were to break into your home tonight, are you ready?
00:23:55
Speaker
to need to defend yourself. Can you anticipate how everyone in your household might respond to armed men crowding in and seeking to hurt them? And so it's pure pandemonium in these attacks and black people have to do what they can to try to survive them.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, and also too, it should be noted that these Knight Riders, they're people who all have combat experience. Most of them are veterans from the Civil War. And you actually, something I thought really interesting about your book is you frame this as a war. You call it the war on freedom.
00:24:33
Speaker
And you talk about Knight Riders as paramilitary groups and terrorists. Talk about the decision to frame this in that way.
Framing Violence as War-like
00:24:46
Speaker
Well, I wanted to frame it that way because that's clearly how African Americans understood it. And even in the congressional record, you've got the language in the majority report that this was a reign of terror.
00:25:01
Speaker
even US Army personnel are using that kind of language about terrorism. And it's curious because it's curious to see because it's not a language that we associate necessarily with that time. But there are people at the time, including white people who understand this violence as direct attacks on black people's freedom. And so I wanted
00:25:24
Speaker
to honor their clarity on the situation and to look at it, to sort of zoom out at the violence and to show that this is, it's not as though it's not a formal war where they got together and declared that they were going to wage war like we see in the Civil War, but it's a small war, it's an undeclared war, and you've got a lot of people involved in it. And so yes, you do have a lot of veterans, but you have a lot of people who set out the war.
00:25:51
Speaker
You know, you've got a lot of planters who are involved. You've got elected officials who are involved. You've got landless whites who were involved. Poor whites were involved. Anyone and everyone who was determined to hoard American privilege and freedom could get in on this violence and did. They didn't need to be a member of a group like the Ku Klux Klan. All they needed was to have an investment in denying Black people freedom.
00:26:16
Speaker
And so they acted until they didn't. So they would move into white terrorist activity and then they would move out. And it's very much like the sort of extremists that we may associate with January 6th. People, they showed up, they were at the Capitol, and then they got back on planes and they went back to their lives.
00:26:35
Speaker
That's how this violence historically has worked. And you can see this happening in Reconstruction. And so, as I said, I wanted to honor survivors and some of their allies' clarity on the deliberate targeting of Black people who were seizing their freedom.
00:26:53
Speaker
and to acknowledge all of the casualties in this violence that many people, they don't understand because they've been taught that reconstruction was a failure. They don't understand that this was a war that was declared on Black people, a war against reconstruction, and that it wasn't just a sort of rhetorical war, it was an actual war where people used violence and people lost their lives.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, what do you think framing it as a war, in terms of how we study reconstruction, how do you think that helps us understand what happened to African Americans at this time? I think framing it as a war helps. So I think part of what we need to understand is that wars don't have neat ends, right? I think about Michael Boyle's work, you know, wars don't end as neatly as they appear in history books. They're often followed by new conflicts.
00:27:47
Speaker
And so if we look at the, even the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you know, the war, the wars, both of those wars are over, but they're both followed by new conflicts. And so I wanted to sort of like in using the language of war, I wanted to draw attention to the new conflict created by
00:28:05
Speaker
black people seizing their freedom. And so I'm very clear on the fact that it's not a declared war. And I think that, you know, those of us who study war need to get better at acknowledging the realities of conflict, especially conflict around the globe, not just within the US context. And so there are wars that are undeclared. And so I use the concept by Nancy Shepherd Hughes about the small war.
00:28:28
Speaker
A small war is not a declared war. It's not a war between clashing armies, but it is nonetheless a war in which there are different sides and there are a lot of significant casualties. And so what I wanted to do was to draw in using this language for reconstruction. I wanted to illuminate this new conflict.
00:28:47
Speaker
and these new battle lines and the new terrain that's being fought over Black people being free and their desire to be equal and secure in the American system and the resistance to that by the larger white majority.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting because I think just in history in general with wars, you're right, there's often no clear end. And so you think about the Hundred Years War, there was really four wars in there. And a lot of people say World War II is just an extension of World War I.
00:29:23
Speaker
So that is really interesting. Do you think that one day maybe that this reconstruction period will be considered, you know, a lot of people say the Civil War goes from 1861 to 1865.
Reconstruction: A Separate Conflict?
00:29:38
Speaker
Do you think it should be extended past or do you think we should think of these as two separate wars? I think they're related but different wars. I mean like even within the scholarship there is the language about reconstruction being
00:29:50
Speaker
You know, as Eric Foner calls it, the second founding, right? So the second founding after the American Revolution, there's some people who also call Reconstruction America's second revolution, right? For all of the revolutionary changes that are taking place and the fights over them.
00:30:09
Speaker
Right? You know, the American Revolution, and so again, like part of this is like, what I'm doing is listening to how Americans talk about history and understanding like their blind spots, right? People think that the American Revolution, that, you know, that it was revolutionary, it was wonderful, and apparently no blood was shed. That's not how revolutions work.
00:30:30
Speaker
Right. Show me show me a bloodless revolution in history. Right. Show me one. And so there's a sort of like a refusal to sort of reckon with the realities of our history. You know, even settler colonialism in the United States did not happen without violence. The native peoples of, you know, North America are very clear in their understanding of the violence.
00:30:53
Speaker
that was used to take their land and sovereignty from them. As a historian, I think we have to acknowledge that there is a difference between what's happening in the Civil War and Reconstruction, but that they are related. That's why I said it's a new conflict. It's related, but it's a new conflict. There is a through line, but something does significantly change with the formal end of the Civil War.
00:31:20
Speaker
So can you talk about a few of the stories then in your book about some of the African Americans and some of the families that you read about in your research?
The Tutson Family's Struggle
00:31:32
Speaker
Just who were they? What types of people were they? And what types of things did they experience?
00:31:39
Speaker
Right. So I'll tell the story of the Texans. They're down in Florida, near Waldo, and they are a husband and wife and they have three young children. They do have a set of older children, but those children have left the home. They, at the end of the Civil War, they managed to get a, they work hard. And as I said, it takes people about three years, families about three years in order to earn enough money to get land.
00:32:09
Speaker
And so they are, at the end of that period, so by 1868, 1869, they managed to get a homestead. They are in the process of, they have about 160 acres. They've managed to sort of move into this by virtue of Samuel's work on the land and Hannah's work on the land and as a domestic worker, or she's doing laundry for white families in the community.
00:32:39
Speaker
And so they get on their land, and as soon as they get on their land, their white neighbors start pestering them, trying to drive them off the land, saying, oh, this land isn't yours. This land belongs to someone else. You can't have this land. And so what the Tutsons know, Hannah and Samuel both know, is that they have the land. They're free and clear to have the land. They are in rightful ownership of the land. So of course they're not leaving. Why would they leave their own land? And so they continue to be pestered.
00:33:04
Speaker
they continue to refuse and the sort of temperature gets turned up each time the white men come back trying to get the family off the land. And Hannah and Samuel are both clear and they refuse to leave. And so because they can't convince the family to abandon their prospects,
00:33:23
Speaker
What the white neighbors do is they stage a raid, but they have a deputy sheriff along with them. And so when we talk about who's involved in this violence, anyone and everyone who's invested in white supremacy and denying Black people the prospects of making the most of freedom can be involved in this.
00:33:42
Speaker
And so they stage a nighttime raid. They storm into the home. They drag out the adults, Hannah and Samuel. They take them to two completely separate areas on their property. And they tie them both to trees. They whip Samuel until he's senseless. They whip and sexually assault Hannah. And then they tear down their home.
00:34:08
Speaker
They knock down all of their fences, they destroy what crops they have in the ground. And with the young children, they've got three young children under, I believe, 10 in the house. And the older daughter, she manages to grab the youngest.
00:34:26
Speaker
and she takes them out to a wood pile and we know that she plies the baby with like blackberries in order to stop the baby from crying out and drawing the men to them where they might harm them. And so it's not until the next morning when the men leave Hannah alone, she tries to go and get assistance from any of their neighbors and no one will help them.
00:34:48
Speaker
no one will allow the battered, bloody woman into their home. And so she wants help looking for her family because she believes they've all been killed. So she continues searching for them and she eventually finds her husband's annual tied to the tree. Their children don't make it home until the next morning after the sun has risen and they know it's safe to go back.
00:35:11
Speaker
And so the couple, they report what happened to them immediately. And they go and find a white judge. And the judge says, no, this is your land. Do not let them drive you off their land. Defend yourselves if you have to. And what Hannah and Samuel know is that they barely survived the raid as it was. They understandably don't think that they can live through another one. But they're being told that they should rebuild and stay on their land.
00:35:42
Speaker
And so they continue to try to get justice. They go from county to county to county, authority to authority, trying to get justice, including for the fact that there's a deputy sheriff who was in the raiding party and who sexually assaulted Hannah.
00:35:59
Speaker
And so they are not confident that they will get justice and they will eventually test, both of them will eventually testify before Congress about what happened to them. And when they testify, it is not clear whether or not
00:36:14
Speaker
they will be able to get justice and safely live on their land. And so I lose track of them for a period of time, but then I find them again, because I tracked all of the families in the census, I find them again in St. John's County about a decade and a half later. So they've left the original county and they're in a new county and they don't have land.
00:36:37
Speaker
but they are together and they do appear to be holding on. So that's one family. So they're not attacked for doing anything that they had done to white people. They are not being accused of any crime. What they did was make the most of their freedom and they were being penalized and punished in the most horrific way for their success. So that's just one family.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah. And you write about how, so this is very typical of many African-American families in the South at this time.
Collaboration with White Supremacist Groups
00:37:12
Speaker
You write that families would, if they lived in, in Knight Rider areas, they would often sleep outside their home because they knew their home is where they would come to attack them.
00:37:23
Speaker
in the middle of the night, and they often felt safer sleeping under the stars. And also too, very common with what you were just talking about, that judges and the police, the local authorities, all of these local institutions that are supposed to be the arbiters of justice, they're often in cahoots with
00:37:49
Speaker
the Knight Riders or the Ku Klux Klan or these white supremacist groups. And then to the federal institutions, you write about are either underfunded or they're not given a lot of attention. So that story I thought was very powerful.
00:38:12
Speaker
Why do you think that stories like this and the other ones that you have in your book, why are they important for us to learn about today? I think they're important for us to learn about because they
00:38:32
Speaker
illuminate what was really happening on the ground. I think that in terms of US history, what we often get is history from 30,000 feet, right? So you know reconstruction happened. You may not know all of the details, but you know that there's something that follows the Civil War. The stories bring us into like the snail's eye view, right? Or the ant's eye view. So you can have a really good up close and personal understanding of the dynamics that we're describing.
00:38:59
Speaker
So if people they hear that I talk about reconstruction failing or excuse me, reconstruction being overthrown and not failing, they can look at a story like the attack on the Tutsons as an example of this larger freedom denying enterprise that we have. And, you know, the very fact that you've got a deputy, you've got a deputy sheriff who's involved in the attack.
00:39:23
Speaker
sort of helps people understand like all the specific actors who are involved in this. You would have judges, lawyers, lawmakers, and law enforcement involved in this violence because they have been involved in the violence of slavery, right? And they are invested in doing what they can to sustain their privileges in the system. And so they will whistle past and maybe not pay that much attention to even reports, very clear reports of the violence, which we know
00:39:50
Speaker
are going, not just, they're not circulating, they're not just circulating locally, they're being sent to Washington DC, they're going to the president, they're going to members of Congress, they're going to US Army personnel. As people are trying to make clear about, they're trying to make clear the fact that in their minds,
00:40:09
Speaker
ex-Confederates are not respecting the terms of the peace, right, to stop fighting in order to sustain the system. The truth of the matter is that they stopped fighting the US Army. They just shifted their focus to Black people who are seizing their freedom.
00:40:25
Speaker
I think the other thing is that in the historical records, there are also a lot of families of white loyalists who experience similar kinds of violence. These are white veterans who served in the US Army during the Civil War. They're subjected to this kind of violence too, but a lot of it is much more in retaliation, in punishment. So you don't have the same kind of racial component
00:40:54
Speaker
but you do have the determination to exact vengeance. And so these people who are veterans of the U.S. Army are often acting in support of Reconstruction. And so this is why they are attacked. And so I think that war on Reconstruction, I focus on the Black victims of the war on Reconstruction.
Understanding Historical Violence for Today
00:41:14
Speaker
Stephanie McCurry and other people are looking at the white victims of this war on Reconstruction. And so you,
00:41:22
Speaker
and understand what's actually happening on the ground when you've got these firsthand accounts like the ones that I have. Well, Kadada, this has been such a wonderful interview. And thank you so much. My last question here, what lessons are you hoping people take away from your book? Oh, that's a great question. I think, you know, so I think one of the main points that I wanted to raise is that the arc of our history doesn't always been toward justice.
00:41:51
Speaker
And I wanted readers to see how investments in white supremacy play a role in that. I think the other thing I wanted readers to understand is how committed black people were, black families were to securing their people's futures.
00:42:07
Speaker
to trying to build a new world after slavery where they could live upright, a more morally just world after slavery, and the price that white southerners made them pay for their efforts to build this more just world. And so I want
00:42:25
Speaker
What I hope readers can do is understand that some of the reasons we're still dealing with and living with racist violence from either police or from vigilantes is because of this violence that we see during this period of reconstruction. There's not an exact through line. It's not exactly the same. But if we understand this violence of reconstruction, we can understand the violence of today and maybe we can play a more active role in bringing it to an end.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. History does not just live in the past. Exactly. For sure.
Kadada E. Williams: Social Media and Podcasting
00:43:01
Speaker
Well, if people want to, if they want to follow you, if they want to find you, Kedato, where can people stay in touch with what you're doing?
00:43:08
Speaker
So I'm most active on Twitter at Kadatta E. Williams. And so that's generally where you can find me. You can also listen to my podcast Seizing Freedom at seizingfreedom.vpm.org. It tells the story of African-Americans seizing their freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction and afterwards. Wonderful. Well, Kadatta, thank you again.
00:43:31
Speaker
Kidata E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming, A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. It's a story worth reading and sharing, and, Kidata, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, AJ, for having me. It's been such a pleasure.