Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta

CHAPTER 1. Lessons from Thomas Dixon to The Klansman

chapter 1 Lessons from Thomas Dixon to The Klansman No African American author writing in the post-Reconstruction era— beyond the obvious example of W. E. B. Du Bois—examined the issue of race and the status of blacks in the United States with an emphasis on the South more assertively, persistently, and prolifically than Charles Chesnutt . The founding of numerous historically black colleges; the rise of the black church as an institution; the election of black officials in proportions that even to this day remain unmatched in the nation’s political arena; and substantial increases in rates of marriage, literacy, and property ownership, including businesses, were among the capstone achievements that bespoke the promise and hope of Reconstruction for many African Americans. If the Civil War and Reconstruction meant one thing for most blacks living in the 23 South, it meant another for the vast majority of whites. Increasing resentment and disquietude among whites, including poorer ones who had much to gain by such major reform initiatives as the Freedmen’s Bureau (primarily designed to promote education, fair labor, and equitable land distribution in the region), meant that opportunities for black progress were drastically curtailed by the last decade of the nineteenth century. An age of reaction arose by the 1890s, marked by an upsurge of lynchings and a notable increase in caricatured images of blacks in American material culture in trade cards and other media. These representations frequently recuperated and romanticized images of the plantation South. They revealed the prevailing view of the black body in the white southern imagination, demonstrated the abject status of blacks within the nation more broadly, and served as reinforcement for minstrel characterizations that had already begun to gain widespread popularity during the antebellum era. It is also important to recognize that the inclination to caricature blacks in the post–Civil War era was already well established in journalism through portraits designed to discredit and malign blacks in and beyond politics. The achievements that blacks had made during Reconstruction did little or nothing to deflect the racist historiography after the turn of the century of such figures as William Archibald Dunning, who depicted the period as a colossal failure in which corrupt and ignorant black politicians, carpetbaggers , and scalawags violated the rights of a noble and dispossessed white, Anglo-Saxon South. Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905) epitomized this view in fiction. In film, D. W. Griffith reinforced it in the epic Birth of a Nation (1915), which was based on Dixon’s novel. It was also endorsed, if more sanguinely and romantically, by the 1939 epic film Gone with the Wind and the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell on which the film was based. While the ideological and political agenda of the latter film was by no means as bold and flagrantly racist as that of Birth of a Nation in endorsing the mythos of the Old South and the ideology of white supremacy, both films share common ground where they sanction lynching. Even in the present day, many critics of Gone with the Wind primarily view the film nostalgically and empathetically, as the film’s original audiences were led to do, rarely considering the full implications of the “political meeting” of Ashley Wilkes and his other white male compatriots, who go to the shantytown at the Old Sullivan Place to defend Scarlett O’Hara’s honor after her attack there. Several people are killed, and Scarlett’s second husband, 24 Chapter 1 Frank Kennedy, is a casualty. As the “Yankee” patroller cautions the remnants of this band, “It’s about time you rebels learned that you can’t take the law into your own hands.” Though it is not said, they are members of the Ku Klux Klan, as Mitchell’s novel ostensibly acknowledges. In film, as in a literary work, there is a risk in reading too much into the text or falling into the fallacy of analyzing characters as real people. Still, I want to suggest that this group may have conceivably lynched Big Sam, the black man who saves the day for Scarlett by rescuing her, and would have likely thought their actions entirely appropriate and justified had they presumed him to mean her harm in any way or if she had not recognized him as a “friend” and servant aware of his proper “place.” In this film, Big Sam...