Black History Month panel

Our wise and wondrous WHS history department have been sitting down to discuss black history in the past few weeks, in recognition that February is the USA’s Black History month. The first instalment of these panels was sent out to you all in podcast format before half term. If that has slipped your mind, here is a transcript of the whole podcast. Hopefully you find it informative and enjoyable, and it whets your appetite for the next instalment, where we’ll hear the takes of several of our A-level historians.

Dr Field: Hello everyone and welcome to this US Black History Month series, initiated by the sixth formers in association with the history and politics department. On our panel today, we have the incredible brains of Ms. Webb, Ms. Beckwith, and Mr. Turner, with our fab sixth former Lili Kirby, to kick us off, we’re going to be discussing several key questions about black American history, and this will be followed up later on in the series with our excellent sixth formers. so I think we should get started! I’m going to pose the first question: what’s the difference between black American history and black British history?

Ms. Webb: I would say one thing that’s important when talking about the way race relations in America differ when talking about the black experience is that they are not a group of immigrants. That really changes the way in which other groups react to them, because they are a group that was forcibly brought over to America, and so that really changes the dynamic, and it’s why even though race relations in terms of Latinos or Asian Americans is really important, it has a different dynamic because they were a group forcibly brought over. Not only that but the system of slavery relied on white supremacy in order for it to work, because the only way that white Americans could justify it is if they truly believed black people were inferior. Because [African Americans] were such a significant proportion of the population in the south, they could not move towards equality without threatening the position of white Americans, and so it was a level of threat, I think, that was both different to the situation in the UK for example, where Black people have always been a minority regardless of the area. It just changes the way that they react. That being said, while it is different, it is all a part of black British history, because the only reason that black people are in America is because of the British empire, because they took slaves from Africa to the Americas. When we look at black American history, it is also black British history.

Ms. Beckwith: absolutely, I think it’s the interconnectedness that’s important to recognise as well as the distinct nature of those two particular contexts when we’re thinking about black American history compared to black British History; and also I think it’s important to recognise the interconnectedness between European history as a whole and American history. The very roots of this phenomenon come from the age of exploration and the age of adventure, and we’ve got the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire and other European empires that are seeking to compete with them. This is a huge story of the development of capitalism really, and of economics, and the desire for gold, the desire later for what became known as ‘white gold’- cotton. The cotton that was churning through the Lancashire mills came from the plantations in America. It’s those commodities and the need for those that is fuelling this relationship of trade that is using human beings as an essential part of it to gain profit.

Dr Field & Lili: thank you both for your contributions- really well explained.

Dr Field: Now let’s move to our second question, thinking a little bit more deeply about race relations. Why is there a perception that race relations are worse in the south than in the north?

Mr. Turner: I won’t talk at length about the difference between the south and the north, but i think it goes down to what Ms. Webb and Ms. Beckwith said about how America was founded and where it came to in the civil war. One of the really powerful things they highlighted was the way in which the diversity of black history can’t be underestimated. The individual strands of different people and movements, the slavery and the middle passages Ms Webb mentioned, and what Ms Beckwith was saying about economic history, but also the history of movement of people whether it be forcibly or not and their interactions. We really need to think about that in terms of the macro, but also the micro. In terms of where these people originated and how they interacted with those different people that they found themselves forced into being with, and how that melting pot all came together. That’s the idea of America, this idea of a melting pot and it all coming together harmoniously into one idea. The headlines about the south and the north are that the south was all based on that agrarian model of free labour, free slave labour, and couldn’t adapt- its economy was totally built on that premise and it couldn’t adapt to getting rid of that free labour. Whereas the north’s industries were much more reliant on the white workers, and the other American settlers and Americans of different races and classes in the American experiment. Why are [race relations] worse in the south than the north? Because stereotypically the south is about control and slaves and relying on those slaves and things like the Jim Crow laws and segregation that were so talked about in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. And then the north stereotypically is thought to be more enlightened, the economy is less based on the ideas of slavery. But as Ms Beckwith was saying, the interconnectedness of those things, when you burrow down on those ideas and unravel them, is not that simple.

Ms. Webb: I think it’s very much perception that the north doesn’t have the problems of the south. For a long time, the proportion of black people in the north was so much smaller that people didn’t have to confront the issue of something that was very far away. If you look at something like the rates of lynching in the first part of the 20th century, statistically as a black person you were actually more likely to be lynched in the north, because there were so few that the rates are actually higher if you look at it like that. I think also the issue is that there were different forms of discrimination [African Americans in the north] were facing. Normally when we think of black American history, most people think of the civil rights movement in the 1960s- and Martin Luther King- and a large part of that was segregation. I think that was something that’s quite easy for a lot of people to get their heads around, particularly internationally, to think ‘well that’s wrong, to separate people by race, that’s wrong. They should both be allowed to go to the same school, to work in the same places.’ When you move to the north, where segregation wasn’t established in the way it was in the south, a lot of the inequality is economic inequality, which I think is a lot harder for people to recognise as a direct result of systemic racism. So in the north, the issues are things like poor houses, and education: because of the areas they were living in, they weren’t getting access to the well-funded schools in the suburbs that the white kids were going to. And I think that’s why there’s also the problem of people viewing the civil rights movement and segregation as ending in the 1960s and thinking ‘well that’s great, the races are equal.’ It is a lot harder to convince people that the reason that a black teenage boy is statistically more likely to go to prison than to college1 is because of the consequences of slavery and discrimination. Whereas in the south it might feel more obvious. But it’s still very much a problem.

Dr Field: Thank you both very much for contributions. Let’s move on and think more about change- Ms. Webb has talked amazingly about how when we talk about race relations in the US our automatic assumption is to think about the civil rights movement. So my question is what have been the key drivers of change for the history of race relations in the US?

Ms Webb: most people probably think of the beginning of change being the emancipation proclamation and the war with the freeing of the slaves. perhaps the one thing you could put before is the invention of the cotton gin which increased cotton production in the US and increased demand for slaves, leading to that kind of boom in the south and increase in population. but in terms of progress for African Americans- the civil war, and a period we don’t talk about so much which is reconstruction, which happened straight after the civil war. And in that period, you have black congressmen, you have back industries and companies and this real push for equality in the beginning. It’s in the 1860s that black people are given the vote. It then however collapses with a compromise in the presidential election, because in order for the Republicans to get the president they wanted, they had to withdraw from the south and let the Jim Crow laws fall into place. That’s another complex issue, perhaps for another time, on how political parties have completely shifted when it comes to their views on race. But there was a huge amount of progress, and then I think a really important moment that changes that was the late 1880s, when reconstruction collapses. Then in 1896 there is the supreme court case of Plessy versus Ferguson, and the decision of that case is that segregation is fine, if it is separate but equal. That decision allows segregation to build up in the south for the next few decades. So you see there’s a glimmer of hope at the end of the civil war, but when you reach the 20th century, there are institutional steps that are put in place to ensure that racism can survive for quite a bit longer.

Ms. Beckwith: That’s given me a lot of things to think about. It’s really important to mention what was happening in America in the 1880s, because I think from a British perspective we think about the end of the slave trade and the turning point in 1804 with the abolition of the slave trade; yet we don’t think so much about what happened in the 1880s over the pond. From 1820 to 1840, cotton production quadrupled, so the use of slaves actually expanded hugely. And you don’t just have the triangular trade that’s responsible for that, you also have people who were born into slavery, and captive for their entire lives as a result. So this period of time in which slavery is gaining its zenith economically is happening at the same time as there are calls to end slavery for moral reasons- but the complication to that are really important to bear in mind. You have campaigners, you have abolitionists, who are calling to end slavery, but they’re not necessarily thinking that the end to that is going to be integration. They are thinking that ‘we want to end slavery but then we’re going to move the black population elsewhere’. So the nuance of those arguments is really important to bear in mind- what is going to happen after that point? I think those difficulties and arguments are continuing in the 1880s- you can then see the patterns and the effects of those as we move through into the 1900s. and the other key driver of change that I would talk about particularly is the role of war and how war catalyses change. Particularly the second world war is often seen as an important catalyst for change in the way in which African Americans were viewed. We’re still within the context of segregation- so in the second world war you have segregated units in the armed forces. So in the short term, we don’t see that much change, but it’s often seen as a long term changer because of the way it forces people to change their attitudes towards the African American population. There are individual stories of war heroes- the Tuskegee Airmen* are often hailed as a very effective group, so that was something important in terms of changing attitudes. There was also Dorie Miller, the cook on board a ship at Pearl Harbour, and he receives an award for using machine guns to defend people and helping the wounded on that day that pearl harbour was bombed by the Japanese. Those examples are evidence to the contrary of those perceptions of the African American population, but it’s also important in the collective consciousness of African Americans: ‘we have fought for the country, and therefore we should be owed something in return’. So the change of perspectives is quite important. The NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] have a campaign in the second world war known as the double V campaign where they link, deliberately, the fight against Nazism to the fight against racism. So they push for the involvement of African American people in the second world war so that they can really gain political momentum after the second world war. And that’s very important for the civil rights movement that gains huge progress in the decades that follow.

Mr. Turner: That’s so interesting- you can think of how change happens, and the de facto change, in the opinion and process, and it’s a very human form of change that is often very slow. And then you have de jure change, change legally, so you think of the civil rights act of 1964- and just because you change a law, can you change how people think? So conflict and those really big schisms are really important in changing the way people think, and change happens slowly. People want to know more about American history and black history in particular, and looking at the 19th century is really what you have to do, because therein lies the rub in terms of where it all started: the ending of reconstruction and that compromise that put in place many of the institutional problems that black Americans still encounter. It really cemented a lot of the stuff that would play out over the course of the 20th century. It’s really important to look at the way that change manifests itself politically, but also at the way people react to things and how even today the pace of that change is so disparate and different across the US. That’s why the idea of America is such a compromise- you only have to look at America today and them trying to get anything done- and that goes back to the idea of America and its founding, in that there are lots of different ideas of what America is, and race relations in America are a huge, huge part of that. 

Lili: Do you think the recent events of the Black Lives Matter movement has changed the perceptions of people- not just in America but around the world- and we’re in a moment of change right now?

Ms. Beckwith: I think it’s important to recognise the current movement as being really long term in its roots, which is what this episode is exploring. This is something that is gaining momentum particularly through social media, but has been a part of American society for a very long time indeed, and that’s an important context with which to begin an answer to that question.

Mr. Turner: I think it’s a really interesting question. I love talking about the way in which you change people’s minds. I think it’s too early to tell whether it’s a moment in time or not- it’s certainly something that’s starting a conversation. what I’d like to suggest is that if you look back to 1878 and the introduction of the 19th amendment (which was basically about women’s rights and gender equality)- if you think back to that now- and of course there’s lots of advocates for the 19th amendment- it’s a seminal part of the US constitution. But what I would say is that there are two types of people- those who think that there needs to be more change and that change has to be enshrined in law to maintain that change; and those who argue ‘well, the original constitution refers to ‘people’, and women, black people, Asian people, Caucasian people are all people. And if a person’s rights are enshrined in the constitution then why do we need something like the 19th amendment?’. So I think the BLM movement is giving us important moments to have conversations, and I think it’s those conversations and the way they start to rub people against each other is what changes people’s minds. The route I don’t want to go down is making more laws or looking into that- what we have to do is develop people’s understanding of things and that’s why conversations are really important.

Ms. Webb: I’d add that what’s important about the BLM movement is a broader acceptance that inequality still exists. whether you’re talking about feminism or racism, the only way you can encourage people to make any change is if they accept that the current situation isn’t perfect yet. For a long time, a lot of people felt that yes, America did have a racist past, but now it’s addressed that and the laws are there to protect any race. For me, the most interesting conversations that came out last year were the ones about structural inequality, and the things that are harder to see immediately, and perhaps can’t just be fixed by passing legislation. Mr. Turner was talking about the importance of de facto discrimination as well, and the fact that more people do seem to acknowledge that this is a kind of unfinished journey will drive further change.

Ms Beckwith: There’s a big argument here too for the importance of the role that popular culture has to play, and the things that you are exposed to onto day to day. If you go into a bookshop there are far more examples [than there used to be] of literature written by black authors that are telling us something of their experience. I think that is going to be quite important in shaping- as Ms Webb has said- a broader perspective and understanding of what has been said before.

Lili: from my personal experience on social media, in the last at least 2 years there has been a massive increase in political activism from everyone. Your feed is flooded with really useful bits of information and I think that that is a change, that people are using social media in that way to spread more political ideas, which I think in this case is a really, really good thing.

Mr Turner: I think that’s a good thing too- the easy access to those things. But the dissemination of those ideas is not new, and that’s what I think gen Z needs to see- as Ms. Webb is saying, these ideas are not new, they’re unfinished. What needs to be provided by social media is continued action and focus. I think one of the ills of social media is that echo-chamber- that confirmation bias- of what we’re already thinking. It’s fine to be liking things, but it’s about getting out there. Really meaningful de facto change is in the groundwork, in really understanding. We have to recognise that we will always, as humans, congregate to what feels familiar, and to what we are comfortable with. And I think that’s just a fact, without blame or judgement. I will gravitate towards what feels familiar, and that might be ethnicity, or sexuality, or personality type- any kind of categorisation you tend to put on things. We need to wrestle with that discomfort, and the unfinished representation of some of the inbuilt inequalities, and think: ‘this has been the status quo now for X amount of time, these are the reasons why it exists, but what does that look like in the future and what does more equality- institutional, societal, cultural- look like?’. That means having conversations revisiting ideas of perhaps affirmative action, maybe positive discrimination- and I’m not going to argue for or against that now- but how do we address some of those imbalances? Lots of people in our community would believe in equality of opportunity, getting everyone to the starting line at the same time. Equality of outcome is definitely something that’s controversial, and not everyone is going to advocate for that. But it’s that equality of opportunity that all the things we’ve talked about today are restricting. You can see that in terms of conversations on the news everyday about who’s affected by the cladding debate- it’s mainly the black and ethnic minority community- and also white working class communities, we can’t forget that.

Dr Field: thank you so much everybody for your contributions- so many interesting and important strands of debate were being picked out across all these questions. We have loads of amazing things to pick up on next time, where we might look at some stories of individuals, stories of music, and perhaps our sixth formers will come with some of their questions and ideas as well. so thank you everybody.

1: This might be shocking. It paraphrases a statement by Obama during his presidency. Take a look at this article to hear the factual proof for this claim, but also to see the nuance like the increasing number of black men in American colleges, what kind of colleges admit most black men, and a further comment on the criminal justice system’s racial bias. 

2: here is an article explaining the feats, significance, and legacy of the Tuskegee airmen. There is also a 1995 TV movie about them if you are interested