Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “My Adopted Hometowns: A Hidden History as ‘Lynchtown’”

As a teenager, Seidule moved with his family to Walton County, Georgia, east of Atlanta, where his father had become a school superintendent. After joining the football team of the local high school, Seidule noticed the abysmal conditions of the field and the putrid smell from a nearby chicken slaughterhouse. The school had been founded only a few years before, on the cheapest land available, with the aim of giving white families an inexpensive alternative to integrated public schools. Such schools emerged as a practical alternative after direct challenges to desegregation failed. Private schools could exclude Black children ostensibly on the basis of merit, while many formerly all-Black schools closed. As a football player, Seidule faced off exclusively against other white kids, and while this spared him from having to play against future Heisman Trophy winner (and later Senate candidate) Herschel Walker, he regrets having been part of a system that maintained de facto segregation.

The city of Monroe had a 50% Black population when Seidule lived there, but he had few friends or even acquaintances in the Black community. This disconnect is in part the legacy of brutal racism in the county, including numerous lynchings and widespread Ku Klux Klan activity. For the better part of a century, those who took part in terroristic violence against Black Americans were practically guaranteed to avoid punishment, and a Black man accused of a crime, no matter how spurious the charges, could readily become a victim of mob violence which the police would either ignore or actively assist. In many instances, random Black men could be killed for no reason other than to satisfy the bloodlust of an angry mob or as a warning to others. The corpses were then refused to the families and instead brought to the nearby medical school for dissections. Such instances would provoke outrage only when newspaper coverage from other cities cast the white citizens of Monroe in a poor light.

Accurate accounts of such crimes appeared only in Black newspapers like The Crisis, while mainstream newspapers glossed over or glorified lynch mobs. There are no public monuments to the victims of racial terrorism in Monroe, but there is a Confederate monument built in 1906, the same year as a deadly racist massacre in nearby Atlanta. By the 1930s, lynching had become less common as the political structures of “Jim Crow” were able to subjugate Black citizens within the formal boundaries of the law. Extrajudicial killings mostly gave way to legal executions, as all-white juries could reliably deliver guilty verdicts for Black defendants. This legacy of violence and legal repression drove a large portion of Walton County’s Black population to flee northward as part of the “Great Migration,” a major drain on its workforce and economic productivity.

There was only one mass lynching after the Second World War, which occurred in Monroe in 1946. A white man had four Black people in his car, one of which had been recently arrested for stabbing his boss. A mob stopped the car at Moore’s Ford, pulled out all four Black passengers, and summarily executed them. The massacre took place shortly after a gubernatorial primary in which the winning candidate worked with the Ku Klux Klan to suppress the Black vote, creating a permission structure for white violence. The massacre brought a flood of outrage, including from a 17-year-old student at nearby Morehouse College named Martin Luther King, Jr. After World War II, the experience of fighting Nazi Germany placed a moral onus on segregationists, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover was dedicated to smashing the Klan, but they struggled to make a case without any local cooperation. The massacre did inspire Harry Truman, the grandson of enslavers, to create a Commission on civil rights.

Racist violence would continue to haunt Walton County, especially when Black Americans protested mistreatment or made social advancements. After the city elected its first Black councilman in 1972, his home was firebombed, and the mayor tried to suppress all news of the incident in the press. In 1981, the body of a Black man was found hanging from a noose, a death improbably ruled as a suicide. The resulting protests prompted a heavily armed Klan chapter to shut them down, but over a thousand people were able to complete the protest march to the Monroe courthouse.

Returning to Monroe as an adult, Seidule noticed a small plaque commemorating the Moore’s Ford massacre, created in 1999, although it pales in size and grandeur compared to the town’s Confederate memorial. Seidule understands that the victims of racial terrorism have suffered far more than those who grew up believing the lies of the Lost Cause, but he is nonetheless angry at not having known so many critically important facts about his adopted hometown, and is dedicated to a more inclusive and accurate understanding of history.

After high school, Seidule moved again, this time to Mobile, Alabama, another site of numerous historical massacres as well as a gruesome lynching that occurred shortly after his family’s move. It had been the first such instance in 25 years, and after two years the FBI broke the case, and the murderers were convicted, with one of them becoming the first white man to be executed for killing a Black man in over 60 years. Seidule should have been aware of this horrifying episode, as he was in Mobile at the time, but as an 18-year-old, he was done with the Deep South and ready to return to his native Virginia to attend Washington and Lee University.

Chapter 3 Analysis

One of the most enduring myths surrounding race relations in America is that the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year ended institutionalized racism in America. In this view, the end of legal segregation lifted all formal barriers to the country achieving the promise of the Declaration of Independence, wherein all are created equal and possess an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Vestiges of racism may remain, but polite society has pushed it to the margins, and each new generation will prove more progressive and tolerant than the last. Racism is for all intents and purposes a relic of history. Seidule’s own adolescence demonstrates the fallacy of this myth. Once the state could no longer operate on the explicit principles of white supremacy, the task of enforcing the racial hierarchy decentralized and became the work of numerous private and public actors, loosely connected or even independent of one another. Such actors could not reliably stop a Black citizen from voting, deny them service at a lunch counter on the basis of their skin color, or terrorize them without fear of police action, but numerous avenues remained for blocking the social advancement of Black Americans.

The primary instrument for continuing to restrict the rights of Black citizens after the advancements of the civil rights movement was in the realm of economics. Due to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and many other forms of discrimination, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the most significant tactics was ‘redlining,’ where banks would classify Black neighborhoods as a risky investment, and therefore refuse to issue the residents of those neighborhoods with loans to purchase a home. In the United States, a home is the most valuable asset for most people, and the most likely way to build generational wealth, and so the longer Black Americans are excluded from this benefit, the further they fall behind. For all the accomplishments of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, they did little to address economic matters. They affirmed the basic rights of citizenship as expressed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but they do not address the social structures that place many Black people at an economic disadvantage, and therefore limit their social power even without depriving them of legal rights. In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. focused on the economic plight of Black Americans. In April of 1968, he visited Memphis, Tennessee to support the strike of local sanitation workers, and proclaimed that he had seen the “Promised Land” of genuine equality but did not expect to visit it himself. He was assassinated the following day.

Seidule’s life in Georgia reveals the informal barriers, mostly economic, that prevented his Black neighbors from achieving the progress that civil rights had promised. He attended a “segregation academy” which gave white families a private school alternative to integrated public schools. Unable to gain entry to such schools and lacking the resources to create their own alternatives, Black people were mostly left behind in public schools which struggled financially as white families took their tax dollars out of the public school system when they fled to the suburbs. A lack of educational opportunities made it more difficult to attend college or otherwise access traditional paths into middle-class employment. Even the casual summer jobs of Seidule’s teenage years were almost entirely white. For all the formal rights they enjoyed, the Black citizens of Monroe, Georgia were all but invisible to the average white teenager, despite composing roughly half of the town’s population. It is a system that is in some respects more insidious than segregation, which had to constantly and publicly reassert the racial hierarchy. The myth of having solved the problem grants permission to white people to deny The Reality of Structural Racism by asserting that whatever disadvantages Black people still face are simply a product of circumstance rather than social design.

Another way that a more informal system of segregation maintains itself is to conceal the ways in which racism mutates over time. Seidule finds that Jim Crow was just one phase of post-Civil War white supremacy, and unusual in its reliance on sophisticated laws. In the decades following the Civil War, cities like Monroe relied principally on the terrorism of private actors, whether they be vigilantes or mobs who could ignore the law or overwhelm it if they had to. Even as the Jim Crow system took root, and the laws became the principal instrument of social control, private actors could still enforce a behavioral code beyond the reach of the law. This was the case in the Moore’s Ford massacre, where the non-fatal stabbing of a white man served as a pretext for eliminating Black men who were insufficiently deferential to white men or were rumored to date white women. Concealing such instances, of which Seidule had no knowledge until later in life, is important not only because they are gruesome crimes that stain the reputation of the community, but also because it offers a reminder that racism does not need legal sanction. As long as there are people willing to do whatever it takes to hold onto power, they will find new ways either to impose or evade laws in order to maintain the same set of outcomes.