Two Places

June 15, 2020

Washington, D.C.

We still are groping with the insidious questions about the Floyd killing: why it occurred and what it represents: “bad apples” among Minneapolis cops or a strain of endemic racial bigotry affecting police forces. As Americans reacted to that nightmare video, local governments, paralyzed by public outrage, faced peaceful demonstrators, also looters and vandals. They sent out the police, then the Guard. Some police officers and Guardsmen knelt with the demonstrators. The anger, eloquent in some places and destructive in others, remains.

Traffic was light as I crossed the 14th Street Bridge into Washington last Tuesday and stayed light as I cruised up 14th. No one was coming into town.  I turned onto Constitution Avenue, then took a left on 11th Street. I parked at the corner of 11th and F. I put on my mask.

I hiked north along F toward 14th. The streets were nearly deserted. Construction workers were erecting plywood barriers to protect storefronts. Bank and hotel windows along F Street already were boarded up. “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM” were spray-painted on the plywood and on the building walls. Peaceful people had been here, but so were the vandals.

Police cruisers and giant vans were parked at intersections, their flashers turned on. Officers had stretched yellow “Do Not Cross” tape across the south sidewalk at 14th and H, but the north side was open. More pedestrians and bike riders appeared, some wearing BLM shirts, all heading across 15th Street to Lafayette Park, and then to Black Lives Matter Plaza at the southern end of 16th Street.

The Park, which fronts the White House to the south and H Street on the north, was inaccessible, closed off by eight- or ten-foot-tall black cyclone fencing put up by the Park Service a day or so earlier (it has since been taken down). It had become an art gallery of protest. Signs conveyed anger, sadness, grief, defiance, along with some crudity and threats. They still were going up. Hundreds of men, women, and some children moved along and past the fence, some painting new messages on the street, others stringing letters as tall as me along the fence, spelling George Floyd’s name, “BLM,” countless other slogans, demands, and prayers. An elderly white man stood in the street holding a BLM sign above his head.

Across the street at St. John’s Episcopal Church, a group was gathering. St. John’s, where Trump revealed himself as a coward while clutching a Bible, had become ground zero.

I walked up BLM Plaza. “Black Lives Matter” had been painted in street-wide block yellow letters, next to “Defund the Police,” a punchy sound bite that, we hope, no one will take literally.

Someone was addressing a group in front of St. John’s. It was hot, but the crowd kept growing. Camera crews were everywhere, reporters interviewed people who stopped and stared at the art fence or contributed to it. I saw no police, no Guardsmen. Unlike last week, democracy was working. The site was calm. Protest was legitimate, peaceful, and powerful.

“Bad apples” can be got rid of. But the overwhelming problem, the origin, cultivation, and proliferation of racial hatred, still simmers. Scholars and politicians with theories are everywhere.

Petersburg, Va.

Petersburg is a good a place to think about racial bigotry. Petersburg ended the Civil War. I wrote about Manassas, which began the war, a couple of weeks ago.

On a bright and warm but silent Friday morning, Sandy and I walked around the earthworks of Confederate batteries at the Eastern Front site of the Petersburg National Battlefield. Petersburg wasn’t a battle. It was a ten-month-long campaign in which Grant’s 122,000-man Army of the Potomac ground down Lee’s 65,000-man Army of Northern Virginia. During the campaign some 90,000 men on both sides were killed and wounded.

Grant and Lee both knew that the rail hub of Petersburg, where five lines converged, was the key to Richmond. In early June 1864 Lee inflicted heavy losses on Grant’s army at Cold Harbor. Grant then attacked Petersburg but in four days failed to capture it. He began his siege, to last 292 days. In twelve bloody engagements from mid-June of ’64 to April, ’65 Grant’s superior forces exhausted the Confederates while taking terrible losses. The rebels were overwhelmed at Five Forks intersection on April 1. The following day the Yankees broke through to Petersburg. A week later, Lee surrendered, ending the war.

In his Personal Memoirs, Grant wrote generously of the Confederate soldiers’ bravery in battle and endurance of great suffering over the four years of war. He adds:

“But the South had rebelled against the National government. It was not bound by any constitutional restrictions. The whole South was a military camp. The occupation of the colored people was to furnish supplies for the army. Conscription was resorted to early, and embraced every male from the age of 18 to 45. … The slaves, the non-combatants, one-third of the whole, were required to work in the field without regard to sex, and almost without regard to age. Children from the age of eight years could and did handle the hoe … The four million of colored non-combatants were equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age and sex for sex, in supplying food from the soil to support armies. Women did not work in the fields in the North, and children attended school.

“The arts of peace were carried on in the North. In the South no opposition was allowed to the government which had been set up … . No rear had to be protected. All the troops in service could be brought to the front to contest every inch of ground threatened with invasion. The press of the South, like the people who remained at home, were loyal to the Southern cause.

“As I have said, the whole South was a military camp. The colored people … were submissive, and worked in the field and took care of the families while the able-bodied white men were at the front fighting for a cause destined to defeat.”

After Lincoln’s death our racial history quickly grew uglier under President Johnson, who ignored Grant’s Appomattox pledge of amnesty for Confederate leaders and ordered indictments of Lee, Longstreet, and other generals. Grant, still commander of the Union Army, forced Johnson to back down. Meanwhile Johnson helped Southern state governments restore former officeholders.

In late 1865 Grant learned from his commanders in the South of increasing white atrocities against blacks. On a tour of southern states he was showered with flattery. He was slow to learn about the motives of wealthy whites, but later regretted believing what he heard from them.

Ron Chernow, Grant’s biographer, writes that “by the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system.”

Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but Congress overrode his veto. Chernow writes that Grant directed his southern commanders to enforce the law, which abolished the Black Codes. Johnson was impeached in 1868 but escaped conviction by one vote.

Violence spread throughout the South. Hooded night riders murdered blacks and burned their homes and churches. In May 1866 Grant said, “Troops must be kept at all the principal points in the South for some time to come.” In June Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.

The story that follows is a hard one. An especially brutal white-against-black riot exploded in July in New Orleans, killing 34 blacks and wounding 160. General Philip Sheridan called it “an absolute massacre by the police, not excelled … by that of Fort Pillow.” In April 1864, at Fort Pillow, near Memphis, rebels slaughtered some 350 black Union soldiers.

Years of violence followed. In May 1921 Tulsa whites attacked a black neighborhood, killing up to 300. Despite federal law, and the crackdowns ordered by Grant, racial bigotry became embedded in Southern politics and culture. We know also the North was not pure.

From the vantage point of Petersburg, where one tragedy ended, another began. The Floyd incident is another in a convoluted, dark history, from Fort Pillow, then to Tulsa, Minneapolis, Louisville, Houston, New York, and countless other places. History stares us down. High time to learn from it.