Let's bring this discussion back to Virginia.

There is no question that white terrorists "redeemed" the
South during the years of reconstruction.  What happened in
Louisiana strikes me as similar in magnitude to the terror
inflicted in Memphis in 1866, or in New Orleans that same year.

But what about in Virginia?  To my knowledge, studies of white
terrorism during reconstruction are thin on the ground for
Virginia.  There were several lynchings, and certainly the
fear of lynching described in Suzanne Lebsock's A MURDER IN
VIRGINIA was real enough.  Most studies of lynchings conclude,
however, that while they did occur, they were not anywhere
near so endemic in Virginia as they were in other states
further south.

There was a riot in Danville, described by Jane Daily in an
artcile and also her recent book.  At least as Daily portrays
it, however, that riot was nowhere near so dramatic as the
events in the deep south, nor was it as clearly connected to
underlying organized terrorist groups.

So is it the case that the violence in Virginia was less
organized?  Was there less of it?  Lemann's book is useful in
part because the exceptional epidsode whose story he tells can
stand in for the less dramatic, smaller episodes of white
terrorism that occurred on a smaller scale throughout the deep
south.  But there does not seem to be a corresponding "big"
event in Virginia, whose telling could stand in for the
systemic, far ranging, but less well documented and less
dramatic smaller episodes.

A second comment:

To my mind there is a danger in allowing stories like Lemann's
to dominate our telling of history.  One of the reasons I
admire the scholarship of Rhys Isaac, and especially his
superb recent biography of Landon Carter, is that it
problematizes the narrative of slavery.  An event like the one
Lemann describes is dramatic, and because it is dramatic, it
reads exceptionally well.  But it is dramatic in part because
it has such clear and sympathetic protagonists, and likewise
clear and vile antagonists.  Isaac's biography of Carter is
unsettling because it forces the reader to ask, what would *I*
have been like, and how would *I* have been shaped by the
expectations and values of my society, had I been born into
the station of Landon Carter?  How would I think and act, had
it been *me* who was the owner of slaves?  To put it another
way, it forces the reader to treat the slave owner as
something other than a monster, who exists *outside* of the
course of normal human events.  To my mind, this is the issue
that Hannah Arendt, writing in another context, referred to as
the banality of evil.  Evil is not something that exists
outside of humanity, but rather is a potential within every
one of us.  Isaac's biography show us how that is possible.

Lemann's narrative is powerful because the heros and villains
are so clear.  But the villains are pretty monstrous--there is
nothing banal about them.  My sympathies are with the heroes,
and I can easily imagine myself acting as they acted--or at
least, I'd like to think I would act with the courage that
they displayed.  But what about the villains?  How do we enter
into *their* world, and see what it was that corrupted them,
and led them to act as they did?  What work does it require
from us, to imagine "it was these and these conditions that
had to be in place, to have corrupted *me*, and shaped *me*,
to have acted as they acted."

When I teach reconstruction and Jim Crow, I put up images of
post cards from lynchings from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, taken from the American Memory site at the Library
of Congress.  The images on the front of the post cards are
vivid and horrible--pornographic in their violence and in the
degradation they portray.  But its the words on the back that
haunt me.  Aunt Millie, writing to her cousin, all day to day
and matter of fact.  Saw your uncle today.  Made a pretty
penny selling eggs.  Oh, and by the way, attended the lynching
too.  Now there we see banality, in all its inexplicable
ugliness.  And how do we explain the society that produces
Aunt Millie, and her familiar sensibilities--and her utter
obliviousness to the evil in which she was participating?

To my mind, that's the kind of question that gets obscured
when we allow the big, dramatic, events to dominate the
telling of history.  Hitler's executioners were willing.  So
were the lynchers and so were the KKK terrorists.  If we
demonize them too much, they become monsters, outside of
history, and outside of the potentialities inside each of us.

All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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