The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS283 carried little weight with most South Carolina legislators, moreover, receives ample evidence in the absence of strong civil rights and labor legislation. Surprisingly, Holt occasionally ignores his own evidence, applauding black leaders in South Carolina for embracing the very class-structured politics which he argues undermined any efforts to achieve significant change. After examining the entire legislative record, for example, Holt claims that black Republicans achieved greater legislative success than their white Republican colleagues. In addition, he writes, blacks controlled within the legislature the key committees, and within the state the Republican party apparatus. But these were bourgeois successes, and they contributed little to the more radical black attempts to reshape South Carolina society. The book's title, too, rests on these misconceptions , for as Holt demonstrates clearly black domination of South Carolina's politics during Reconstruction constituted at best a numerical majority rather than a power reality. Indeed, Holt emphasizes throughout his book that the bourgeois element which dominated these socalled successes contributed more to the failure of black Reconstruction in South Carolina than to its success. Overall, however, Holt's work stands as a significant revision of South Carolina's Reconstruction historiography. His delineation of the factionalism which existed among South Carolina's blacks opens new avenues of research for other Reconstruction scholars. Perceiving also what W. E. B. DuBois noted in 1935, that Reconstruction was for blacks a movement "back again toward slavery," Holt has reminded us that even in a state with a black majority racial prejudices and class antagonism prevented South Carolina's blacks from achieving the freedom and justice they anticipated in 1865. Philip J. Avillo, Jr. York College of Pennsylvania The Trouble They Seen: Bfock People Tell the Story of Reconstruction. Edited by Dorothy Sterling. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1976. Pp. 491. $7.95.) Ms. Sterling, author and editor of numerous books on the black experience in America, has with this work allowed black people to tell their side of the Reconstruction story. Without downplaying the atrocities committed against blacks, this book demonstrates the courage, hope and tenacity of a people who would not submit to racist notions of their identities but instead through their everyday activities demonstrated their dignity and self respect. Using letters, government documents, newspaper articles and speeches, Sterling has portrayed a picture of Reconstruction that is far too often absent in discussions of the black experience after the Civil War. 284CIVIL WAR HISTORY Through her meticulous use of primary sources Sterling is able to refute many of the misconceptions or stereotypes deriving from this period, most notably the idea that blacks were frightened by the costumes of the Klan. Sterling demonstrates through the use of eyewitness accounts that blacks were not frightened; that they saw through the disguises with one black witness to a rally noting that he had known some of the participants for twenty years. When reading the book one is forcefully reminded that some of the problems black people had a hundred years ago are still very much with us. Obviously, racism and discrimination are still present but on another level one is struck by a real sense of deja vu when reading the letters of black college students immediately after the Civil War. Is it in 1867 or 1967 that black college students in Northern, predominantly white, schools are writing their parents complaining of theloneliness and sense of isolation they feel in these "alien" environments? And is it 1867 or 1967 when their parents write back that they must persevere, not only to help themselves but to help their people? Ms. Sterling has annotated and edited a fine collection of documents which not only describe "the troubles they seen" but also how those troubles were overcome. Mindful of her selected topic coverage (Sterling does not discuss the fight between Congress and PresidentJohnson, blacks in the North, or the impact of sympathetic whites), this book makes an excellent contribution to histories of the period and would be invaluabke in supplementing even those histories written from the black perspective such as Cruden's The Negro in Reconstruction. Kenneth W. Goings College of Wooster Stonewall in the Valley: Thomas J. 'StonewaW Jackson...