Michael Wood on the civil rights movement
Watching the Black Lives Matter movement unfolding in the States takes me back to the turbulent days of 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the demonstrations that led up to Richard Nixon’s election as US president. I was a student then, and that December in Virginia I was introduced to a woman who as a young person had met someone born enslaved in the antebellum south. It’s not so long ago, is it?
History is always there, even when unseen, under the surface, running along like water under ice. And sometimes, like now, it just bursts out. My generation thought that the civil rights movement would signal the inevitable progress to more just and equal societies. But this year’s events in the US (and in Britain too) suggest progress has been slower than we hoped. And that, ultimately, is because of the legacy of slavery.
In history, it’s always worth going back over the story. After the discovery of the Americas, for the first time in history, people from one continent took over another, killing or enslaving its inhabitants and taking their land and natural resources. Most of the indigenous peoples were wiped out by disease. The father of environmental history, Alfred Crosby, estimated that as many as 90 million people died. (Incidentally, Crosby’s great books, The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism, are of even more relevance now, in the year of coronavirus.)
The slave trade from Africa had begun even before that demographic collapse, to replace the decimated workforce. Of 12 million Africans forcibly transported to the Americas between 1502 and 1866, the bulk were taken to Spanish and Portuguese territories, and about 400,000 to the United States. Today, 13 per cent of Americans are the descendants of those Africans. That’s the root of what’s been termed ‘America’s original sin’.
In the 1860s, the American Civil War was fought over slavery. But the Reconstruction still imposed de facto servitude on black people, setting up an apartheid state in the south that gave rights only to whites. Then came the Jim Crow laws, in force till 1965, along with lynchings and segregation. Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal politics were only pushed through by accepting the status quo in the south.
Prejudice continued after the Second World War in law, policing, housing and the use of incarceration as a means of social control. The civil rights movement brought greater representation, but there was still discrimination in work, jobs, health, justice. America’s first black president was unable to push through real change, and now Trump’s presidency has set the clock back on race relations in America. One-hundred-and-fifty years on from the Civil War, the legacy of slavery is still at work in American society.
I’ve rehearsed this potted version of the US story because stories are how history works. But there are, of course, countless ways of telling the same story. You can find them all out there in today’s frenzied, social mediadriven world, including untruths masquerading as ‘alternative facts’. That’s equally true for British history: after all, it was the British who founded America, the British who colonised the Caribbean, and the British who operated a slave trade financed by people such as Edward Colston, whose statue in Bristol fell in June – decades after it should have gone.
Before he was murdered in 1968, Martin Luther King spoke of four great looming catastrophes: militarism, poverty, racism and materialism, the latter of which he saw as a narcissistic addiction to money, fame, spectacle and conspicuous wealth and consumption. (You could hardly find a better symbol for that than Donald Trump). How prescient he was. Vietnam may be over but, 50 years on, America is still in that place, steeped in a wilful cultural amnesia, a blindness to the everyday injustices bequeathed to African-Americans by their history.
And in a Britain likewise afflicted by historical myopia and exceptionalism, the fate of Colston’s statue has suddenly become a symbol of these huge historical events. But it is only a statue. Bigger things are at stake here, that affect the futures of us all. For history is here, even when we don’t yet see it, a powerful current running under the ice, waiting to burst out.