The Black Convention Movement and the Temporal Construction of Southern Politics

• In Event: Varities of Time in Comparative Historical Analysis

Abstract

Charles Maier argues that politics “is based on shared or competing concepts of collective purpose. It envisages a desired future; it invokes a formative past. To act in the political domain is to propose a view of how a society should progress through history.” Moreover, nations are born and they die, and all the while governments exert control over the lives of citizens through a variety of temporal mechanisms – elections, political terms, censuses, taxes, prison sentences, naturalization procedures, welfare benefit requirements, probationary/waiting periods, and military service, to borrow a few from the work of Elizabeth Cohen. Those in power also seek to manipulate the past by crafting historical narratives that bring glory to the nation state and omit unpleasant, delegitimizing details of conquest, oppression, and subjugation. Time is a central theme in the study of American political development (“APD”), and nowhere is this theme more distinct than in Dixie. Three myths reveal the concerted effort by white southerners to control time and history. First, the “Old South” was an attempt to rewrite the history of slavery and minimize the brutality of the antebellum era. Chronologically, the Old South came before the Civil War, but the idea of the Old South came afterward. Second, the “Lost Cause” movement promulgated the idea that the Confederacy was noble and that the men who fought were chivalrous and heroic defenders of states’ rights. Finally, there have been repeated attempts to create a “New South” that has shed its legacy of slavery, oppression, and agrarianism to democratize and industrialize. Black southerners have also long been aware of their place in time, as evidenced by testimony and narratives from enslaved people, African American Newspapers, politicians, activists, writers, and intellectuals. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, African Americans used the past to exert control over the narrative through public celebrations of Juneteenth, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Lincoln’s Birthday, often with parades of African American militias, who by their mere presence offered a contrary view of the many monuments depicting the white Confederate soldier. They also gathered in dozens of state and national conventions to debate policy and advocate for rights and equality. This paper examines the Black Convention movement in the South from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century and shows how African American leaders engaged with both physical and historical time at this critical moment in political development.

Author

• Paul E. Herron, Providence College