The awful imagery of the “Redemption” period still “drifts like a toxic oil slick” through contemporary culture
By Henry Louis Gates junior.skin will the old snake come forth?” The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass posed this question in 1865, a month after America’s civil war ended. Slavery was dead. Hopes soared—and were soon dashed. As another great African-American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, put it: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”The post-war history of civil rights in America was dismal.
The cultural and scientific assault on African-Americans was relentless. They were seen by many whites as subhuman, consigned to inferiority by pseudo-science. Theirs was a “childlike” race . In white literature, blacks were nostalgic for slavery and its supposed protections. A story of 1893 featured a character known as “little Mammy” who “grieved, as she crept down the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer’s block.
Well-to-do black people fought back. But so ingrained were the dehumanising stereotypes, all those Mammies and Uncle Toms, that the only solution seemed to be separating themselves from the impoverished masses. Enter the “New Negro”, a term adopted by the black elite of the late 19th century. Whereas the “Old Negro” was “degraded” or “degenerate”, Mr Gates summarises, the New Negro was sober, classy and sophisticated.
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