美国内战与重建美国内战与重建.doc

Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 25 Transcript
April 22, 2008
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Professor David Blight: The last book you're reading in this course is by a great journalist, Nick Lemann. It's called Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. There seems to be a contest right now in writing about and publishing about the violence of Reconstruction. It's really been discovered by American publishers and certainly by American writers. There are no less than three new books out on either the Colfax Massacre, which we'll talk about in a minute, or what Lemann does mostly in his book, which is the story of Mississippi--sometimes called the Shotgun Policy, sometimes called the Mississippi Plan--but, in effect, a coup d'état whereby the white Democrats of Mississippi took back control of that state, largely by terrorist violence, political violence, in 1875. The titles of these books strike me. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Charles Lane's book, a good journalistic popular writer, a whole book on the Colfax Massacre entitled The Day Freedom Died--one day. And there's another book by a young, New York private high school teacher, proof that good books can be written by anyone, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction. Now all those titles are true. It's not the redemption, of course, that you hear about in Bob Marley's Redemption Song, but I might recommend that you put Marley on while you're reading about this stuff. It might be a nice antidote. No, I'm not going to sing it.
But I am going to start with a very brief little poem, one of the best illustrations in poetry I know of, of this idea that revolutions can go backward, that revolutions usually do go backwards, for awhile, that revolutions always cause counter-revolutions. It's a poem by Langston Hughes. He wrote it right near the end of his life, in 1965-- note the date. He entitled it "Emancipation," and then a subtitle: "Long View Negro." Tw