Department Statements

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY STATEMENT ON CAMPUS RACISM
March 18, 2021

As social justice movements swept the nation in the summer of 2020, the History Department issued a statement condemning the systemic and violent racism that continues to plague our nation.  Racism takes many forms – some are intentional, while others are symbolic.  All forms of racism are harmful and damaging.  In light of the 2014 photos that have recently re-surfaced of the Dean of the Mitchell College of Business and two faculty members wearing costumes that contained the Confederate uniform with a Confederate flag affixed, a noose, and a whip, we are again compelled to respond.

It remains vague as to when the University administration became aware of the photos, but its initial inaction is unacceptable.  The outrage that students feel is not directed solely at the photos, but is instead indicative of their frustration with a campus climate that enables such symbols to be displayed with little to no thought of their deeper meaning or their impact on our students.  This can be seen in the way the administration handled the nooses found hanging in trees in 2018, the lack of equity, inclusiveness and diversity in university structures, the perceptions of bias found in variety of forms that have no place in our communities, and the glorification of the Confederacy and Jim Crow South in place names across campus and the wider Mobile community.

Students of color are hurt, angry, fearful and traumatized—we hear them and believe them.  They are, as civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer said in 1964, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and frustrated by apologies followed by little action.   

As historians, we know that we must look backward in order to understand the present and to move forward to make meaningful change.  The best way to understand in the present the power of these symbols and objects, like the Confederate flag or noose, is to put them into historical context.

The South seceded from the Union in 1860-61 to defend the institution of slavery. Secessionists exploited widespread fear among white southerners that Republicans, led by President Abraham Lincoln, would move to abolish slavery where it existed. During the Civil War that ensued the Lincoln government made emancipation of the enslaved in Confederate states a war aim; the 13th amendment emancipated all enslaved Blacks. Over the next ten years of Reconstruction, Black Americans secured political, legal, and property rights that whites had claimed as a privilege of the superior race. If Black Americans possessed equal political and legal rights, white southerners worried, then the idea of white superiority meant nothing.  

White southerners, then, struggled for two decades to reverse the gains emancipated Black Americans made during Reconstruction and reestablished unambiguous white political, social, economic, and cultural supremacy. Driven by a naturalizing ideology of white supremacy, white political leaders, supported by majorities of citizens across the South, would establish the system of legal marginalization of Black Americans commonly known as Jim Crow segregation. The Mitchell College of Business photographs evoke one theme, the veneration of the Confederate soldier, and one tactic, the lynching of Black Americans who challenged the restoration of the white republic, which were typical features of white supremacist campaigns to create a legal system of Black subordination.  In this revised history of the Civil War, which became known as the “Lost Cause,” the Confederate soldier fought to defend the Constitutional principle of states’ rights. Obscured in this narrative of the “Lost Cause” is that the South seceded to defend enslavement. The imposition of Jim Crow segregation then became part of this narrative, framed as a longer southern struggle to defend the Constitution against the centralizing tendencies of a federal government dominated by northern radicals.  In reality, Jim Crow segregation was a strategy for completing the counterrevolution that had begun with the redemption campaigns that ended Reconstruction. Statues of Confederate soldiers went up across the South in the 1890s as state after state approved laws disenfranchising Black Americans and imposing a degrading system of legal segregation. These statues and other celebrations of Confederate soldiers were cultural expressions of the ideology of white supremacy intended to intimidate Black Americans into acquiescence. And if someone dared to challenge white domination, they risked death by hanging, or lynching. As was true of the system of slavery, violence was the ultimate sanction for Black Americans who resisted the Jim Crow system. Lynching surged in the 1890s, as vigilantes revived the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan years in support of the political, economic, and cultural restoration of white supremacy that had begun during Reconstruction. 

Black Americans never accepted Jim Crow segregation. Their struggle to realize the promise of the 14th and 15th amendments through legal action and protests began to bear fruit in the 1930s as federal courts chipped away at the legal foundation of de jure segregation. By the 1950s, multiple Black organizations--the modern civil rights movement--led protests across the South demanding the enforcement of federal court decisions that abolished legal segregation in schools and public accommodations and struck down laws designed to suppress Black Americans’ voting rights.  In reaction, southern whites formally and informally engaged in “massive resistance” to what they framed as a continuing southern struggle against federal tyranny. Just as their ancestors had denied that Confederates fought to defend slavery, these neo-Confederates denied that they fought to maintain the domination of the white race. Not surprisingly, White Citizens Leagues, the Ku Klux Klan, politicians, and much of the southern white public appropriated Confederate symbols and the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederate defense of the states’ rights. Political rallies featured the one or more versions of the Confederate flag, men dressed as Confederate soldiers, and women dressed as “southern belles.” Some whites, seeking to intimidate Black Americans, again resorted to terrorism, including in 1981 the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama.  Such terrorism exists in the present.  Confederate icons and the whip and noose constitute a statement of support for white racial supremacy and the willingness to employ violence if necessary to defend white domination.   (For additional exploration of Confederate symbolism and historical context, see the Documentary Short Film Confederate Flagrant (2010) produced, directed and written by USA Alums Daniella Werner, Michael Winters, Brendan Davis and Josh Harlan).

The History Department reaffirms that these dynamics and realities are harmful whether on campus or in our society. Through our teaching, research and service to the university, the History Department provides a safe learning environment so that we may confront the painful and damaging elements of our past in order to make meaningful change in the present and future. Such change encompasses concrete action to promote social justice and equity within our Department, College and University.  In our Department public statement of July 2020, we set out concrete ways that we, as a Department, can help make desperately needed changes.  The list is long and our goals not yet fully realized, but we continue our work to connect words with action so that statements such as this one are not meaningless, but instead serve as a reminder of why we are here and why we do what we do.  We invite you to read our July Statement below.