by Keith Boykin
It took three difficult and draining weeks for the administration simply to allow the ordinary transition process for a new president to begin. It would take three additional weeks and dozens of fruitless lawsuits before the Republican Senate majority leader would finally recognize the election of the new president. All the while, members of the outgoing president’s party conspired with him to perpetuate his farcical conspiracy theories that the election had been stolen. For those who had thought the election would put an end to the long national nightmare of Donald Trump, they were mistaken. His ego would not permit him to be chastened or humbled in failure.
Trump, the man, had been temporarily defeated, but Trumpism, itself, was far from vanquished. He received more than seventy-four million votes, and he won the majority of votes in half the states of the union. Prior to 2020, no other candidate in history had received even seventy million votes. Yet after four years of chaos, crisis, controversy, scandal, resignations, indictments, arrests, impeachment, bigotry, and division, and after eight months of gross negligence and mismanagement of a pandemic that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, seventy-four million people still felt comfortable voting for him. That, in and of itself, was an indictment of Trump’s America, even in his opponent’s historic moment of victory.
In the same way I knew in my bones as a college student that the old white Southerners I served at the clothing store in Georgia did not miraculously abandon their racist beliefs when legal segregation ended, I also knew that seventy-four million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 would not experience some transformative epiphany when Joe Biden, or any other Democrat, took office. If they weren’t all racists, they were at least racist-adjacent in their willingness to prioritize some other alleged political objective above the offense of Trump’s racism. Those voters and their children and grandchildren would remain a troubling presence in America for decades to come.
Despite the gracious calls for unity and talk of “reaching across the aisle,” there was never a serious possibility to do this so long as tens of millions of Americans continued to support one man’s delusional narcissism and hundreds of lawmakers in his party continued to enable him. That perspective helped me clarify why the overused term “reckoning” felt so woefully inappropriate to describe the drama of America’s racial crisis in 2020. A true reckoning involves a settling of accounts and an obligation to repay the debts of the past. Yet nothing in the behavior of the conquered or the conqueror in American politics indicated that the country was ready to do this. And nothing in the outcomes of the four major crises of 2020 suggested that the nation appreciated the gravity of the challenge before it. At the end of the year, America remained just as divided as it was at the beginning, and the fundamental fault line that separated us was still the same issue that had torn us apart since 1776—the issue of race.
A month after the election, the vast majority of Republicans still refused to recognize that Trump lost the race by an overwhelming seven million votes and lost the electoral college by a decisive 306–232 margin. As the lame-duck president defiantly telephoned Republican government officials in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to solicit their help in overturning the will of the people, one of his former primary opponents—hoping to position himself as the heir to the legacy of Trumpism—even volunteered to represent the president by arguing his case in the US Supreme Court. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was willing to defend the very bully who once called his wife ugly and insinuated that his father had been an accomplice in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It demonstrated a grotesque perversion of masculinity that these tough-talking, self-professed patriots would more willingly fight to disenfranchise vulnerable Black and brown voters in America’s cities than to fight against a white supremacist bully in their own midst.
The Republican-dominated Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees on its bench, rejected the case Cruz would have argued. Trump’s own attorney general was forced to admit that there was no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election. And the Republican governor and secretary of state in Georgia both defended the integrity of their state’s election that their Republican president had lost. But, in an indication of how Black progress has always fueled white backlash, Republicans in Georgia immediately announced a new scheme to change the state’s voting laws to reduce turnout in future elections. The party that once fought to open up the franchise to Black voters after the Civil War now manufactured baseless claims of Black voter fraud to justify voter suppression laws.
As the year ended, ten million Americans who had lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic were still unemployed and nearly twelve million were soon expected to be behind on their rent and utility bills, yet the leaders of the president’s party refused to acknowledge the incoming president who would inherit these crises in just a matter of weeks. Then, just when it seemed the troubling year had produced all the drama it could, two new stories emerged in the criminal justice system. An Ohio sheriff’s deputy, who was searching for someone else, shot and killed a law-abiding twenty-three-year-old Black man in his front door as he returned to his home in Columbus with Subway sandwiches after a dentist’s appointment. Casey Goodson’s grandmother and two toddlers witnessed his grisly shooting near the door. And, in another part of the country, the Chicago Police Department fought to prevent the release of body camera footage showing officers raiding the wrong house and forcing a Black woman to stand naked in her living room while they searched. Anjanette Young had to sue the city to force the release of the evidence. It was as if the nation’s law enforcement officers had learned nothing from the year of protests after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
On December 31, 2020, none of the four crises that defined the year had been resolved. Black people remained hardest hit by all of them. We were still disproportionately hospitalized and killed by coronavirus. We were still more likely to be unemployed from the lingering recession. We were still far more likely to be shot and killed by police or racially profiled by ordinary citizens. And we were still the primary target of an ongoing political effort to disenfranchise voters and throw away legally cast ballots.
There had been no reckoning.
Despite the groundbreaking election of the nation’s first Black vice president in November 2020, there had been no fundamental or structural change to improve the lives of Black people in the course of the long, historic, and exhausting year. There had been no effort to eliminate the persistent racial disparities in economic conditions, health outcomes, policing, or voting. And, as some leaders called for yet another return to normalcy, I knew there would be a steep price to pay. I knew that we would one day soon find ourselves in yet another crisis of racial upheaval that would prove far more violent and divisive than the last. I knew that the actual day of reckoning was yet to come. I knew that the fragile truce that kept the peace would not last forever. And I knew that America could never fully embrace the richness of the diversity of the twenty-first century until it revisited its dark history and finally came to terms with the unresolved battles of a conflict that many thought had ended in the nineteenth century.
PART TWO
THE FAITH THAT THE DARK PAST HAS TAUGHT US
“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.”
—James Weldon Johnson,
“Lift Every Voice and Sing”
3
THE NEVER-ENDING CIVIL WAR
Aside from good barbecue, the Gateway Arch, and the Cardinals, there were few things in my youth that gave Black St. Louisans as much pride as Homer G. Phillips Hospital, Sumner High School, and the annual Annie Malone May Day Parade. I was born in the hospital exactly two months before the Gateway Arch was completed and would have attended the high school had my family not moved. I also participated in the parade for several years performing motorcycle stunts with the Black Shriners youth group on a Harley Davidson built for kids. But despite my person
al connection, I spent the first fifteen years of my life in St. Louis never fully understanding why these Black institutions were so revered.
I grew up never being told that the hospital name on my birth certificate belonged to a Black lawyer born in post-Reconstruction Missouri in 1880. Even in my twenties and thirties when I lived in Washington, DC, I had no idea that Homer G. Phillips had lived just a mile away from me when he attended Howard University Law School nearly a century earlier. He lived in the home of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” Dunbar wrote in a famous poem that I had often quoted. After graduating from law school, Phillips returned to Missouri to practice in St. Louis, joining thousands of other Blacks who had moved to the city during the Great Migration.
One summer night in 1917, across the Mississippi River from the St. Louis courthouse, where Dred Scott had sued for his freedom from slavery seventy years earlier, howling screams and piercing gunshots could be heard. White men, already angry at what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called “an influx of Negro laborers from the South, taking jobs in industrial plants,” began attacking Black people. “Get a nigger!” a reporter from the paper heard them yell. Black residents were “pulled from streetcars, burned out of their homes, stoned in the streets and hanged in broad daylight,” the paper reported later.
As one Black man emerged from a burning building, the mob yelled, “Get him!” A man in the crowd “clubbed his revolver and struck the Negro in the face with it,” according to Hugh L. Wood’s account in the St. Louis Republic. “Another dashed an iron bolt between the Negro’s eyes. Still another stood near and battered him with a rock.” After the man fell to the ground, “a girl stepped up and struck the bleeding man with her foot,” Wood reported. “The blood spurted onto her stockings and men laughed and grunted.”
In another moment of violence, three white men came upon a Black man lying in a gutter after dark on Fourth Street near Broadway. They flashed a lamp in his face and discovered he was still breathing, the Post-Dispatch reported. “Look at that,” one man exclaimed. “Not dead yet.” Each of the three men then “fired a bullet into the dying man’s head, put their revolvers back in their pockets and went on,” the paper reported.
Throughout the massacre, the local police appeared absent or complicit. “The only thing that I saw policemen do was to keep the fire line,” Post-Dispatch journalist Carlos F. Hurd reported from the scene. Officers who tried to check on Black people lying on the pavement received a sharp rebuke from their sergeant, Hurd reported. “They were not supposed to bother themselves about dead Negroes.”
When the massacre ended after three days, more than six thousand Black residents of East St. Louis had been forced to leave their homes, at least one hundred were killed, and numerous others were wounded or injured, according to a report in the September 1917 issue of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. Outraged African Americans protested as far away as New York City, and W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson marched with hundreds of other Blacks in a silent demonstration down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
More than 140 people, mostly white, were charged for their role in the race massacre, including East St. Louis mayor Fred Mollman, although the charges against him were later dropped. A few Blacks were also charged, and it was attorney Homer G. Phillips who defended some of them.
Phillips was a prominent member of the Republican Party, like most politically active African Americans at the time, and he went on to run for Congress after the East St. Louis cases. He also cofounded the Mound City Bar Association, the first Black bar association west of the Mississippi River, and was elected president of the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest national network of predominantly Black attorneys and judges. Then one morning in 1931, while he read a newspaper and waited for a streetcar to take him to work, Phillips was shot and killed. He died before he could see the results of a major development project that he worked on with other African American leaders—a hospital for Black St. Louisans. A generation later, I was born in that hospital, which had been named in his honor.
The Annie Malone May Day Parade was another venerable institution that I knew little about. It had already been going on for sixty-five years when I put on my bright red jumpsuit and my shiny red helmet and rode my kid-sized red motorcycle in the parade in the late 1970s. At the time, I did not know that Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone was an African American entrepreneur who became a millionaire by selling Black hair care products in the early 1900s.
Like Homer G. Phillips, Malone was born in the Reconstruction-era Midwest and moved to St. Louis in the early 1900s. She hired sales agents across the country, and her most famous protégé was a woman ten years her senior named Sarah Breedlove Davis, who would later become known to students of Black history as Madam C. J. Walker. At the same time that Phillips was trying to raise financing to build a Black hospital in 1922, Malone bought a new building for the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home, and eventually it was renamed in her honor. Unbeknownst to me, the parade that I had participated in all those years in St. Louis was the biggest annual fundraiser for the Annie Malone Children’s Home.
The other famous Black institution was my mom’s high school. Over the years, I listened in disbelief as my mom told stories about the school’s famous graduates. The first name I remember was Julius Hunter, the local Black TV news anchor in St. Louis. He graduated from Sumner High School in 1961, along with tennis star Arthur Ashe. There was also a young woman named Anna Mae Bullock, who graduated from the school in 1958. She would later become known as the singer Tina Turner. The long list of the school’s alumni included rock star Chuck Berry, opera singer Grace Bumbry, Congressman Bill Clay, and comedian Dick Gregory. I heard a lot of names over the years, but the one name that no one explained to me was Sumner. Who was Sumner? And why was this person connected to this school?
I learned years later that Charles Sumner was a US senator from Massachusetts who served from 1851 until his death in 1874. Unlike Homer G. Phillips and Annie Malone, he was white. That surprised me. Why was this famous Black school named after a white man? I knew a family member who graduated from Jefferson Davis High School in Montgomery, Alabama, but that Confederate name was adopted in 1968 as a racist response to Black empowerment. Naming a Black school in St. Louis after a white man in Massachusetts was different.
What I realized after I left St. Louis and grew older was that all three of these famous institutions were, directly or indirectly, the products of the Reconstruction period in America. Historians define Reconstruction as the time from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops that protected African Americans in the South in 1877. But the needs of African Americans after the Civil War did not end when the troops withdrew.
The Homer G. Phillips Hospital was necessary in St. Louis, Missouri, because the city remained racially segregated throughout most of the twentieth century, and African Americans needed access to health care in their own community. Were it not for another institution of Reconstruction, Howard University Law School, Homer G. Phillips might not have received the law degree that enabled him to help the people of his community.
The children’s home that bore Annie Malone’s name was also a testament to Reconstruction. It had originally opened in 1888 as a refuge for African American orphans. It, too, reflected a reality in which Black St. Louisans were separate but never equal—a reality that worsened with the collapse of Reconstruction after 1877.
Sumner High School also had a history connected to Reconstruction. Opened in 1875, just ten years after the Civil War ended, it was the first Black high school west of the Mississippi River. The school’s name was a tribute to the famed Northern abolitionist and prominent white Republican senator who fought against slavery and supported the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, giving freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to African Americans. It was a compelling story that seemed to merit recognition by a Black public school in Missou
ri. But the deeper story of Sumner, like the story of America itself, was a story of disappointing racial compromise and willingness to sacrifice the needs of African Americans for partisan political expediency.
From the very first day Black Americans were freed from slavery, fearful white Americans began a race against time to stop the people they had once enslaved from becoming too powerful. It would not take long before the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln would eventually retreat from its commitment to Black people, but it would take nearly a century before Black people would finally abandon the Grand Old Party (GOP). During that ninety-nine-year span from 1865 to 1964, the racist Democratic Party of the nineteenth century slowly evolved into the party of civil rights, while Lincoln’s Republican Party very gradually began to transition into the party against those rights. Not surprisingly, the realignment of the two major political parties focused on the one core issue that had divided the nation from its founding in 1776 to the Civil War in 1861 to the civil rights movement of the 1960s—race.
The story begins in 1856 in a bitterly divided young country. With sixteen free states and fifteen slave states, the nation’s leaders struggle to strike an agreement to admit new states to the union. A small but bloody civil war breaks out between abolitionists and slave supporters in Kansas, and an uncivil battle erupts in Washington as Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina ambushes Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate and bashes his head with a cane. It is in this contentious climate that the new Republican Party adopts a platform urging Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories, and Democrats respond with a dire warning that efforts to interfere with slavery could lead to “the most alarming and dangerous consequences.”