by Tony Horwitz
Or maybe my focus just shifted. In college I studied black history, tutored inner-city kids, wrote a turgid senior thesis on Southern black workers. It was my thesis advisor, a civil rights scholar from a black college in Mississippi, who urged me to go South after graduation to work as a union organizer. While in Mississippi, I wrote my first newspaper article, on a maimed black logger, and found I liked writing better than agitating. In a way, my childhood fixation on the Confederacy had mutated into an adult preoccupation with the South and with race—and led, in a roundabout fashion, to my choice of careers.
The past year’s journey had given me ample chance to revisit all this. But the South had changed on me, or I’d changed on it. My passion for Civil War history and the kinship I felt for Southerners who shared it kept bumping into racism and right-wing politics. And here I was in Selma, after holding my temper with countless white supremacists, losing it with a black woman whose passion I’d initially admired. Months before, in Mississippi, I’d learned that the union I’d worked for, once militantly integrationist, was now all-black. It had little use anymore for white sympathizers from up North. Nor, evidently, did black activists like Rose Sanders and Richard Boone. To some degree, this was inevitable and healthy. People had to fight their own battles; outsiders tended to get in the way, particularly in the South. Still, it saddened me that I sometimes felt like an enemy on the premises, among both whites and blacks.
DRIVING OUT OF SELMA, I pondered something else. Rose Sanders’s students had offered me a glimpse of what angry young blacks in Alabama learned about the Civil War. I’d also seen a bit of what conservative whites—namely, the home-schoolers I’d met at the state capitol—taught their kids about slavery and secession. I was curious to know what lay between these extremes.
Through the friend of a friend, I contacted a history teacher in Greenville, a town of 8,000 an hour’s drive south of Montgomery. Billie Faulk was about to teach the Civil War to her high school students, and said I could listen in. But the offer came with a curious caveat: the Civil War wasn’t part of the prescribed high school curriculum.
“Alabama’s course of study is pitiful,” Faulk said, sweeping the blackboard clean between classes. A slim, attractive woman in her early forties, Faulk had the frazzled intensity of a twenty-year classroom veteran. In elementary school, she said, students made a high-speed pass at slavery and secession during survey courses covering all of Alabama and U.S. history. They returned to the War in eighth grade, at the tail end of a class covering U.S. history to 1877. “But most teachers fall behind during the year and end up rushing through the War,” Faulk said.
Officially, that was all they got. Alabama had recently changed its curriculum so that high-schoolers studied U.S. history only from 1877 onward. I later called a state official, who explained, “We wanted to adjust the frame to include time closer to the present that’s more relevant to students.” Texas and several other Southern states had done the same.
Faulk bent the rules as best she could, supplementing the textbooks with material of her own and including a review of slavery and the War. But it was Band-Aid work at best. “Most kids simply don’t have a grasp of the basic facts,” she said, “so it’s hard to really probe the issues.”
Her students filtered in. Five blacks sat in a clump by the door. Six white students camped by the window. I sat alone in a row that formed a sort of no-man’s land between the two groups.
“Let’s talk about Southern society,” Faulk began. “What does it mean to be Southern?”
“Country accent,” one boy said. “Country ways.”
“Backwoods, like.”
“We farm more than people up north.”
“We talk different and eat funny foods. Like we have a rattlesnake rodeo and a watermelon jubilee.”
This seemed a rather narrow and self-deprecatory notion of Southern identity. Still, it was refreshingly free of rebel flags. Unfortunately, as Faulk had warned, it was also almost free of facts.
“How long did slavery last?” she asked.
“Until the 1900s?” one boy ventured.
“1940,” another said, with certainty.
Faulk frowned. “Is that what the rest of you think?” The others looked at her blankly. “Well, the answer is 1865.” She paused, then asked, “When did the Civil War start?”
“1812!”
“1840!”
“1816!”
“1861,” Faulk corrected. “How do we know about slavery? What are our sources?”
“Books, like, and movies,” one boy called out. “The Autobiography of Scottie Pippen.”
“Miss Jane Pittman, you dummy!” a friend yelled, thumping him on the back. “Scottie Pippen plays for the Bulls.” The class erupted in laughter.
Faulk asked the students what came to mind when she said the words “Old South.”
“Big Houses.”
“Big dresses, too.”
“Big parties, like in Gone With the Wind and North and South.”
“Hard work, cotton, slaves,” a black student said. He was the only black to speak up during the class.
Faulk explained that the Old South wasn’t very old or very grand in most of Alabama. Less than 1 percent of whites owned 100 or more slaves, and some of Alabama’s finest plantations grew from log cabins built just forty years before the Civil War.
“You mean the one Lincoln grew up in?”
“When they freed the slaves did they all go and kill their old masters?” another boy asked.
“There’s something I don’t get,” a third boy said. “If slaves were so cruelly treated, why do they always have pretty teeth in the movies?”
Faulk lectured for the remaining twenty minutes until the bell rang. “As you can see,” she said, smiling wearily, “I’m competing with Hollywood. It’s almost a let-down when they learn that the antebellum South wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes.”
The same mythic gauze overlaid their notions about the Civil War. “They think it’s all glory,” she said. Faulk tried to dispel this romance by talking about the horrors of the War. Her own forebears had fought for the South; one went to war at fourteen, another in his sixties. “They were poor men fighting a rich man’s war,” she said. “I don’t think there was much glory in that.”
We headed for the cafeteria and piled our trays with fried steak nuggets, turnip greens, pickled beets and cornbread. Again, the kids separated loosely along racial lines. The same was true of the break period that followed, during which students milled outside in neighboring clumps of white and black.
Faulk’s next class was world history, so I went to the school library to look at the textbooks she’d given me. “Like most people in the South, Alabamans held a strong belief in states’ rights. Alabama joined the secession movement and fought against the Union in the Civil War.” Those two lines were all the ninth-grade primer had to say on the subject.
Still, this was better than the apologias of old, which I’d read at a Montgomery library. “It was only a question of time when the slaveholders would have freed their slaves,” claimed a ninth-grade textbook from the 1940s. A 1961 textbook showed kindly mammies and obedient field hands flashing “bright rows of white teeth.” The pages were also filled with wicked Yankees, vicious scalawags, and venal carpetbaggers.
I poked my head in another classroom and found Ruby Shambray, a heavyset black woman who had taught history in Greenville for thirty-five years. “When I started here, the Civil War was my favorite subject,” she said. “You just taught what happened and kids were interested.”
Back then, her students were all black. Then, when schools integrated in 1969, many middle-class white parents began sending their kids to new, all-white private schools—known colloquially across the South as “seg academies.” This drained energy and resources from Greenville High, which was now mostly black and working-class, like many other public schools in the region. Shambray said the school’s library was poorly stocked,
its computers few, its labs antiquated. Alabama spent less on public education than any other state in the nation.
Integration had also turned the Civil War into a minefield. “Suddenly, whatever I said was wrong,” Shambray said. Blacks accused her of soft-pedaling slavery while whites thought she was vilifying their ancestors. Shambray found herself dreading the subject. “For a few years, I would take a running jump from about 1855 to Reconstruction,” she said.
Then, from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the atmosphere improved and Shambray learned to ease her students into the Civil War. “I’d preface the whole issue by saying that none of us here today were responsible for what happened. It’s history, and we need to discuss things in an open, intelligent fashion.”
But like others I’d spoken to across the South, Shambray sensed a hardening of attitudes from about the mid-1980s onward. Both blacks and whites became contentious and less interested in facts. “I’ve taught two generations now, and this one is different,” she said. “They’re much thinner-skinned than kids used to be, but at the same time more insensitive to others.”
Each year, she asked for a special report on an historical subject. “There’s always a white student now who wants to report on the Klan. I’ve had a few claim they’re members.” Blacks, meanwhile, seemed intent on tuning out the nineteenth century. “They feel like it’s someone else’s war, history that belongs to someone else,” she said, echoing what I’d heard in Selma.
The split extended to school trips to Montgomery. Black kids perked up at the civil rights sites, whites at the capitol and White House of the Confederacy. They also kept their distance in the classroom. “I don’t seat students. The classes just segregate themselves. They’ve all just got used to it this way.”
Shambray had taken a step back as well, feeling queasy again about teaching the Civil War. The new curriculum let her off the hook, since she wasn’t required to teach events before 1877. “I have to talk about slavery and the War—it’s too important,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on it.”
The bell rang and I returned to Faulk’s classroom for her eleventh-grade advanced placement history class. These students, at least, had a basic grasp of the facts and the discussion quickly turned to the War’s causes and legacy.
“The Civil War’s relevant because the effects are still obvious,” one student said. “A lot of people are still poor and prejudiced in the South, and that basically goes back to the War.”
“I think the racism is worse now than then,” another girl said. “Back then, blacks and whites both farmed and often worked close by, even if they weren’t equal. Today, we’re so much more separate.”
Another student stroked his peach fuzz and said, “The North deserves some blame. They talked a lot about emancipation but didn’t do much for blacks after the War. And when blacks started moving North, whites weren’t much better than here in the South.”
A black student blamed parents for the persistence of prejudice. “The racism, it’s generational. It gets passed down,” she said. “It’s like church. You don’t choose which one you go to. You just do what your parents did.”
The conversation had become free-flowing and I raised my hand. Why, I asked from my lonely perch in the middle aisle, were all the whites sitting on one side of the room and blacks on the other?
“It’s just always been that way,” one of the whites said. A black student nodded. “When we were younger we were all friends,” she said. “You didn’t think about black and white. But you get older, you hear things on the news. You look around. You hear the little things people say. Things change. We’re still friends but it’s different.”
There was no animosity to this observation. It was just the way things were. At least the students were occupying the same classroom and talking to each other, unlike Rose Sanders’s students or the home-schoolers I’d met in Montgomery. Or, for that matter, most students in the North. Washington, D.C., where I’d been educated, now had a public school system that was 97 percent black.
After the day’s last class, I asked Faulk about the school’s informal apartheid and the fact that white students seemed far more outspoken and self-assured than blacks. “We had an exchange student from Macedonia,” she said. “He told me, ‘You know, blacks are in the majority here but they’re afraid of you.’ He was right. Blacks have grown up with whites being dominant and they seem to tolerate it.”
Like Ruby Shambray, Faulk was also bewildered by what she called “a blip of good ol’ boyism” in recent years. “Before, kids really wanted to get along and understand each other. Then the urge just withered.” She paused. “I graduated from a segregated high school here. I knew black kids got educated somewhere, but I didn’t really think about it or stand up for change. Somehow, I’d hoped these kids would think more about these things, but I’m not sure they do.”
I SPENT TWO MORE DAYS at Greenville High and left with mixed emotions about what I’d seen and heard. Clearly, the Lost Cause was close to being truly lost in the minds of young Alabamans. Only the advanced students grasped even the dimmest outline of the War’s history. Nor were these teenagers unusual. I later read a survey about Southerners’ knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor.
This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them.
But Alabamans seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King’s famous speech. “I have a dream,” he said, of an Alabama where “black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Alabama, like Mississippi, appeared to have made much greater strides than places less seared by the civil rights struggle, such as southern Kentucky. Even so, the past-tense rendering of King’s quote in Selma seemed a sadly apt commentary on most of the 1990s South I’d visited.
On my last evening in Greenville, I went to see a retired teacher named Bobbie Gamble who taught for many years both at the public high school and at one of Greenville’s private academies. “We really believed that if you started kids together from first grade, the whole racial attitude would change,” she said. Gamble recalled staging a production of Hello Dolly! in the early 1970s. She cast black kids in many of the white roles, and parents of both races mingled comfortably in the audience. “Given what it was like here before, that was a small revolution,” she said.
But viewed with twenty-five years’ hindsight, the revolution appeared limited, and seemed to have turned reactionary. “No one really talks about true integration now,” Gamble said. “Now, the goal seems to be separatism with everything equal. Not just in terms of facilities, but in terms of how we present society. Black history and white history. Black culture and white culture. We should be teaching all this as our culture, our history. But no one’s trying to do that anymore. It’s Plessy vs. Ferguson extended to everything.”
Nor was separate really equal when it came to education. At first, Gamble said, white parents who sent their kids to private academies “were people with money who didn’t want their kids sitting next to blacks.” But as public schools deteriorated, the academies began to attract middle-class families who simply wanted their kids to have a better chance. The academies cost $150 a month, straining budgets and deepening resentment of blacks, whom many whites blamed for the decline of public schools. “It’s a vicious cycle and the whole South is caught in it, the whole nation, really,” she said.
On my way out of town, I stopped at Fort Dale South Butler Academy, whose sign proclaimed, “established 1969”—the year Greenville’s sch
ools integrated. The trim brick building was ringed with trailers to accommodate the school’s rapid growth. There wasn’t a black face among the hundred or so kids I saw running to buses as school let out. I wandered past an outdoor play area and saw a large Confederate battle flag painted on the pavement. Like the rebels of old, the seg academies had effectively seceded from the changing society that surrounded them.
Leaving Greenville, shadowed by the same melancholic cloud that hung over my visit to Selma, I kept replaying Bobbie Gamble’s parting comment. “Remember, Bloody Sunday was only thirty years ago and school integration’s even younger than that. Maybe we’re just asking too much. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.”
Winding out of Greenville behind a long line of school buses, I hoped she was right.
15
STRIKE THE TENT
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
—GEORGE ORWELL
I was midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder when I realized my Civil War Odyssey had come to an end.
Rob Hodge marched beside me through the tidy farmland of southern Pennsylvania. Not that we could see much scenery. It was 3 A.M. “This is it—Nirvana,” Rob said, pointing at the silhouette of a barn dimly visible in the midsummer moonlight. “Not one sign of the twentieth century.”
Rob had pomaded his long black curls and greased his mustache in an upward twirl. He looked like a downmarket Pickett, clad in the still-unlaundered butternut he’d worn during our Civil Wargasm the summer before. In the year since, Rob had sought out new frontiers of hardcore reenacting. Forty other rebels trudged behind us, some of them barefoot, recruited by Rob for a twelve-mile forced march to a battle reenactment at Gettysburg.