"The Contact of Living Souls": Interracial Friendship, Faith, and African American Memories of Slavery and Freedom

One of the leading American radicals of the early twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois had few kind words for whites of the post–Civil War era. He repeatedly indicted them for their failure to incorporate African Americans into the nation. The years after the Civil War were a tragedy, he maintained, but not because African Americans lacked grit, heart, or ability. Whites were at fault. North and South, they preferred to hold blacks down as an inexpensive workforce, rather than lift them up as brothers, sisters, and friends. "God wept," Du Bois concluded his Marxian-influenced Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America (1935). Money and the quest for power drove the hearts of white men.¹ But not all whites received Du Bois's censure; one group he praised—the more than three thousand northern men and women of both races, but mostly white, who traveled south to teach in schools for African Americans. Yankee missionaries carried the cross and the school primer into the postwar South, and Du Bois considered them heroes of the age. He concluded one chapter of Black Reconstruction by applauding their efforts at interracial friendship: "through it all has gone a thread of brave and splendid friendship from those few and rare men and women of white skins, North and South, who have dared to know and help and love black folk."²

Teachers from the North were not the only white spiritual forces in African American memories of slavery and freedom. Along with the schoolmarms was Jesus Christ himself. An incarnated Christ too resided in the memories of some African Americans. Speaking to an anthropologist in the 1920s, one southern black preacher remembered of the age of enslavement, "I saw the Lord in the east part of the world, and he looked like a white man. His hair was parted in the middle, and he looked like he had been dipped in snow, and he was talking to me." The arrival of this white Jesus and his words encouraged this slave to become a minister and to challenge the structures of his oppression.³ Du Bois acknowledged these memories in Black Reconstruction. As he wrote of the end of the Civil War, "to most of the four million black folk emancipated by civil war, God was real. They knew Him. They had met Him personally."⁴

What are we to make of these memories of interracial interaction from slavery and Reconstruction in the early twentieth century, the time often termed the Age of Jim Crow, when racial segregation had become the dominant structure of the South, if not the nation? Why did Du Bois find memories of interactions with God and with white teachers so powerful and important? What do these encounters and narratives of encounter tell us about the importance of memory, of religion, and of interracial friendship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What do these memories reveal about the idea of interracialism in the minds and hearts of many women and men of color? And finally, did memories of education and religion—two factors rarely associated with radicalism—have any radical or subversive meaning for African Americans in the early twentieth century?⁵

Studies of historical memory, particularly of slavery and the Civil War, have shed new light on just about every facet of American history. David Blight demonstrated how memories of the Civil War influenced politics and race in the decades following the war. Kathleen Clark's Defining Moments examined the role of social and political commemorations among African Americans in the process of postwar community formation and debate. In The Southern Past, W. Fitzhugh Brundage traced clashes of race and culture in the South from the Civil War to the late twentieth century. Before these studies, Nina Silber and Grace Elizabeth Hale detailed how constructed memories of an idyllic plantation past led southern whites of the early twentieth century to rationalize their cultures of segregation and exploitation.⁶ [End...