Black Nouveau

(bright music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hello and welcome to "Black Nouveau."

I'm James Causey, in for Earl Arms on this special edition.

Many of us learned about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S.

Constitution in school.

The so-called Reconstruction Amendments that guarantee freedom and citizenship to newly freed slaves at the end of the Civil War.

But they aren't just words written centuries ago.

They continue to shape who is considered a citizen, who has a voice, and what freedoms really mean in the United States.

Tonight, we will talk about why those amendments matter, now more than ever.

Joining us are Professor Kali Murray, professor of law at Marquette University, and Dr.

Robert S. Smith, director of urban research and the Harry G. John Professor of History, also from Marquette University.

Welcome to "Black Nouveau."

- Thank you for having me.

- Let's get this started.

First question: Why should African Americans care about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment right now?

- You know, the historical trajectory of those three amendments cannot be overstated in their significance.

They are remarkably important for this fundamental notion of racial democracy, you know?

And that longstanding trajectory stemming from the Reconstruction Era until today has the reverberations of why they're important.

One: the ending and abolishing of slavery, race-based slavery, you know?

In these particular political times, that's critical.

Due process, equal protection, fundamental rights of citizenship.

The Fourteenth Amendment is our contract with the government in so many important ways.

It also informs fundamental notions around human rights more globally.

And then, of course, the Fifteenth Amendment and its statement around voting and how voting cannot be abridged or what can't be allowed in terms of abridging voting rights around race.

That's obviously still very central.

As the quote goes, "If it wasn't so important, why is there so much work being done to undue our voting rights?"

And so those three provisions of the Constitution, those three amendments are critical today because of the centrality of these fundamental notions of democracy and citizenship.

But they also greatly inform Black freedom struggles.

And I know that we'll get to some of that.

- Professor Murray?

- I just wanted to say it's the second founding, right?

That when we look at the Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment, there's two sort of foundational moments in American constitutional history.

And the first is obviously the Constitution of 1789, but in many ways, it was a limited Constitution.

And the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment are the amendments of the second founding.

It is the foundation for a multiracial, multicultural America.

- This is for you, Professor Murray.

If it's so important, why don't we talk about it more in school?

- I think there is sort of two big reasons.

I mean, the first is a story of failure, right?

I think Americans are an optimistic people, and the story of Reconstruction is a story in which we failed, in which the promise of the Civil War and the emancipation of free Black people was squandered through political violence and sort of a wanton destruction of opportunity.

And so it is a story of failure.

And the second is, I think it's been a concerted story of public history, of public memory, of the ways in which the South won the war because, for instance, we refer to it as the Civil War and not the rebellion or the insurrection.

- Right.

- And so there was nothing civil about the Civil War, but it's the ways in which that public memory was shaped in the 1910s and the 1920s in popular media and through school curriculum.

- And if I can add too, the story of Reconstruction is very complicated.

It's not a neat story.

It doesn't get packaged easily, you know?

As Professor Murray highlights, you know, it is a story of failure, but there's also brilliance and promise woven into that story that then results in the vicious violence of the era and those kinds of outcomes.

But there's also some brilliance about it and about the moment in the era that's hard to fully appreciate.

There has been challenges with obviously documenting that time for all kinds of reasons.

A lot of destruction occurred around the history of the moment, and also, in terms of documentation, we don't have a whole lot of documentation about how violent it actually was.

What we do know is, indeed, it was the most violent period outside of a war, domestically, and it was even more violent than that.

- But let's talk a little bit about Juneteenth.

Juneteenth celebrates freedom.

- Yeah.

- And how did these amendments, how did they turn freedom into citizenship?

- Well, I think the first place to start is how Black people defined citizenship on their terms and the meanings of freedom and the ways that Black people defined those meanings of freedom on their terms.

You know, Black people start to express freedom long before the Thirteenth Amendment is ratified, you know?

As soon as there's a glimmer of opportunity for some semblance of freedom to occur, during the Civil War and obviously before as folks are running away and being whatever, expressing whatever forms of freedom they can express under the institution, but as soon as that militarized conflict provides the opportunity for some version of freedom to emerge, Black people seize on it.

And then, of course, with the Thirteenth Amendment, that amendment is interpreted as broadly as possible.

There's no way that a formerly enslaved person, a Black person, would ever think that freedom did not include citizenship.

Of course it would.

- Right.

Professor Murray, did you wanna add to that?

- I mean, I think the best way to think about it from a perspective of law, which you know, as a law professor, I think about, is in English law itself, there weren't that many legal definitions of exactly what freedom was as a legal state of being.

And so what, I think, the sort of achievement of the United States and the achievement of Black people in the United States is to give a sort of set of contours to what freedom is in the law.

And so the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are sort of a discussion of not only what happens when you end slavery, but what are the conditions that must follow.

And the conditions that I think is so fundamental in the Fourteenth is that it's not enough to end slavery.

You have to create conditions of equality in order for people to be full members of a society.

- And James, you see, as Professor Murray highlights, even in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s, Black people are turning to the law to make sure that those constitutional amendments mean and provide what they are intended to mean and provide.

You know, and so we see this rich legal history in those decades where Black people are saying, within the federal courts, "Hey, this is supposed to mean something, and we're experiencing this at the local and state level.

And our federal government has to say and do something about this."

- Well, we know that the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, but what are we missing about that amendment?

There must be something that we're missing from that amendment.

What do people misunderstand about that?

- I mean, I think there's two things that people misunderstand.

The first is that the legal condition of freedom in the United States really begins to emerge in the colonial era.

I've been looking at this in my own work, but it appears the first manumission statute came about in 1752, and we were thinking about conditions of freedom in state constitutions after the American Revolution.

The Northwest Territory or the war that created, for instance, Wisconsin, had a significant statement about freedom.

We had sort of consistent debates in Kansas and Missouri about what the legal definitions of freedom were.

People sued, we had freedom suits.

So we had a long sort of, the Thirteenth Amendment is part of a expanded sort of tradition of freedom.

The second is that it was hemispheric.

I mean, and again, the centrality of the Haitian Revolution and our understandings of manumission cannot be underestimated.

The Haitian Revolution is the first constitution that has a set of provisions.

There's actually three Haitian constitutions, and in those Haitian constitutions, we define what it means to end slavery for a free Black people.

And so I think people tend to underestimate the Thirteenth Amendment as participating in a very long tradition of trying to understand conditions of freedom in the law, conditions on the ground that people are making through their actions.

And we tend to underestimate the power of the Thirteenth Amendment for that reason.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- How has the exception for people convicted of crimes shaped America?

I think that's a good question for you, Dr.

Smith.

- Well- - Professor.

- It's important for us to really begin this question with understanding that the system of slavery was itself a criminalizing apparatus.

So that is born out of any number of global experiences, whether that's out of the British empire or the French empire, other places where carcerality and carceration is used overwhelmingly as a means to control the population, particularly around economics.

And so that crosses the Atlantic as well.

When we get to the Thirteenth Amendment in particular, it's not surprising that we would have an amendment that abolishes an institution called slavery that is indeed slavery, but then also makes room for the continued, some version of that continuing within the framework of our criminal system.

So that has history in other parts of the world and in the Americas and in British mainland North America as well.

So that's race and class coming together under that umbrella.

As we look into the immediate post-1865 era, we certainly see a system emerging where folks who are recently emancipated then are facing a criminalizing apparatus that's looking to control their bodies, control their labor, control their mobility, to reinstate a system that looks a lot like slavery with states being at the helm and at the control and not necessarily an individual slave owner.

So states become the, if you will, the masters of formerly enslaved people through a criminalizing apparatus that's fundamentally based on controlling the most basic functions that human beings would undergo: mobility, reconnecting with family, choosing to work when you want to work, exercising your own forms of independence.

In the immediate post-1865 era, it looks a lot like a system that we had just came out of, but it's the mechanisms by which that system is being controlled and managed is at the state level in a lotta respects.

And so that carries forward into the second half of the 19th century, and it's also why the Fourteenth Amendment is so critical.

- That's very interesting.

But I'm thinking this through, and when I hear you say that, why didn't then government do more to protect Black bodies?

When you really think about it, it's almost like, okay, slavery is abolished, but now what?

I mean, it just seemed like it was a disconnect there.

- Well, this is, I think, heading back to our earlier questions around why Reconstruction is taught or not taught in its fullest.

It is, indeed, complicated.

In fact, the South was militarized in the years after the Civil War.

We don't like to talk about that.

And the reason it was militarized is because the former Confederates remained Confederates.

They didn't give up the cause of the Confederacy just because the war ended.

That politicized violence, the violence of the Reconstruction Era, was in many respects a continuation of the same militarized violence during the Civil War.

In some cases, the same structure, the same regiments, the same military leaders are a part of the Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia and other groups that are specifically intending to impose racial terror.

And the federal government responds how it can, but it's challenging at best for a federal government to keep the political will, keep the political energy in a region where there is an overt and serious commitment to white supremacy.

And that's their words, not mine.

- Mm-hmm.

Professor Murray?

- I mean, I think it's important to understand that, from, say, 1865, April 1865 until about 1868, it was unclear what the status of the Confederate states would be entering into the United States and under what conditions the Confederate states would reenter into the Union.

And part of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was a conflict over this.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment has important provisions as to the types of requirements necessary to reenter the Union.

And part of what happens in 1876, when the federal government, after 10 years, would struggle over this particular question, abdicates its responsibility to formerly enslaved people.

They permit the constitutions that are passed during this era to reenter the Union on certain types of conditions, for instance, the ending of slavery.

They allow Southern constitutions to, in essence, engage in rewriting that initial pact.

So we really have to see the Civil War and the conflict over the ending of enslavement as not ending in 1865.

I mean- - Right.

- If we were really to see the end of the war, we could argue that it was 1876, right?

There's still significant violence.

There's still conflict over the ways in which we see that violence, right?

The part of "The Birth of a Nation" and the problematic aspects of "Birth of Nation" is it depicts the ability of African American to serve as legislatures during this period of time as a, you know, a failure, right?

Like that is an image seared in our mind.

But you have to look at the people who are serving in state legislatures and serving in Congress during that 1866 to 1876 as heroes.

I mean, they were facing enormous political violence.

Their families faced political violence for their service in these types of state legislatures.

So I really think, I mean, I think Dr.

Smith and I are both emphasizing, like, the shear violence of that moment and the ways in which, in many respects, the federal government attempted to intervene in ways that we would think of as fairly radical now.

I always tell people, the question I ask them when they think about the period of Reconstruction, I ask everybody to say, "Do you think that Ulysses Grant was a bad president?"

And I'm like, "And if you do, the reason why, it's because Ulysses Grant was actually trying desperately to intervene in the South, and the tremendous amounts of violence in the South."

And so when people think about his presidency as failed, it's because they have been taught in many respects, he was a failure because he was trying to intervene and to use the mechanisms of federal power to intervene on behalf of Black people.

- Right.

- And so that is what it meant to be a failed president during that time.

And I think that's an important sort of element to understanding how we even engage with and think about that period.

- Yeah, it's interesting that you keep bringing up violence, and that's key here.

And when you think about what's going on today, the elimination of Black history, especially when it comes to that violence that's often missed, is that, you know, it's not talked about.

So that's done on purpose, right?

I mean- - Mm-hmm.

- It's done on purpose, but do you think it would make any difference to most people today, the violence that occurred then?

Does it register and does it make any difference?

If they understood that violence, could it lead to reparations in some way, shape, or form?

- I think the through line is this longstanding commitment to this idea of white supremacy and the way that violence is used as a continual component for those who are committed to that enterprise.

And that doesn't have to only be physical violence.

That can be political violence.

- Right.

- The policy process by which people are harmed or mistreated or denied rights or rights are stripped away.

It could be in the form of economic violence as well.

And so, for the communities of political leadership and their followers who have been committed to that enterprise, we now see it in a very overt, grotesque way, but it's been there the whole time.

And it's emerged in different ways and in different expressions since 1865, but it's been a part of our social, economic, political landscape the entire time.

It's how Black freedom struggles, struggles for Black liberation, have met and been stymied along the way at different levels of government or by anti, voices who are opposed to protests.

We've seen it in various ways.

- Make an argument that the Fourteenth Amendment is the most important amendment out there.

- Citizenship is maybe the most important component of what it means to be part of a political body.

Your rights of citizenship and how they get defined, and the ways in which they ought to be defined in their most expansive approaches stems out of these words like due process and equal protection, birthright citizenship.

Like those ideals really inform our fundamental understanding of what it means to be not only an American citizen, but a global citizen.

And I don't know that we have, and I'd love to hear Professor Murray, I don't know that there's another amendment that has as much of a global reach.

I could be wrong about that, you know?

- Right.

Professor?

- Well, I think, so this is an interesting question to me, 'cause I'm a Thirteenth Amendment scholar (laughing).

So I tend to rep the Thirteenth Amendment.

And I think the way I see it is it's actually a triad.

It is the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment- - Sure, yeah.

- That are the center of the second founding.

I think what the Fourteenth Amendment, what makes it a global and an important amendment is that previous manumissions had not done a very good job of guaranteeing equality for Black citizens.

So if we see emancipation as occurring in South America, Central America, and North America, what would happen is, we would emancipate slaves, and there would be a second-order discussion about whether or not they could be political citizens.

And what the Fourteenth Amendment does for us all is to say that formerly enslaved people in the United States, when they are freed, they're going to be equal.

Now, this was not a question that was answered very well in the emancipations that, for instance, we see in Brazil or in Cuba or Puerto Rico, is that people were freed, but they weren't freed on a equal basis.

And that is what makes the Fourteenth Amendment such a profound amendment.

And then the other thing that the Fifteenth Amendment adds to that discussion is that it makes voting a right and not a privilege.

- Right.

- And that serves as a model for how we think about voting going forward, for instance, in debates related to the Nineteenth Amendment.

And so it's a really important set of amendments that speak to each other, and they speak to each other in ways that are important for us all to understand in terms of, as Rob notes, the Fourteenth Amendment, this question of what makes people equal and that modern political democracies should be concerned with that question, that's what the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly raises.

- James, I wanna make sure to add this.

- Yeah.

- Professor Murray's been doing a really brilliant job of giving us the hemispherical approach, and for our listeners and our viewers at home, it's important for us to state these numbers.

Somewhere between five or 6% of all African-descended people who were a part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended up in what becomes the U.S.

95% of them end up in other parts of the Americas.

And so the reason it's important to think about all this hemispherically is because the overwhelming majorities of African-descended people who are facing similar kinds of systems of enslavement and emancipation and abolition is happening in different ways at different times across the Americas.

The action is in all these other places as well.

And so we have to have this hemispherical, and indeed, global diasporic conversation about these very issues around rights and citizenship.

- Make this argument for the listeners out there.

If you're talking to a 14- or 15-year-old listening to this right now, how can you explain to them how important it is for them to understand this?

Because a lot of 'em are like, you know, "It's not gonna make a difference."

Explain to them why this makes a difference to understand.

- Well, I think the way to explain this is to not tell the story from only the notion of suffering.

The suffering is important.

We've talked a lot about violence.

But what we, I think, owe our young people is, we can talk about the suffering, but let's also talk about the pride.

Let's also talk about the love.

Let's also talk about family.

Let's also talk about all the ways that folks were able to try to eke out some versions of that, some versions of dignity, the resistance, you know, the sense of identity that folks were desperately clinging onto.

Those stories are equally as important, you know?

And I think if we're gonna talk to our young people about Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendment, institutions of slavery, we have to also make sure they understand all this other power and brilliance that comes outta that experience that continues for generations and generations.

Because, as a young person, you don't wanna hear only that you were in that destitute situation.

- One of the things that I'm always, when I talk about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment, is that I talk about the fact that there's two ways in which it's so important for Black Americans to be proud of what they did.

The first way is that Black Americans always understood the struggle to be a struggle for all people of all color.

And I think, you know, if I had to guide a young person to read anything right now, I'd read Ketanji Brown Jackson's, her concurrence in the birthright citizenship case, where she walks through the ways that African American citizens said, "When we are free, everybody's free."

- Right.

- And that was not a message that, and we see very important statements, for instance, of Black solidarity with Asian Americans in their struggle to be understood as citizens in the 1870s and 1880s.

And so that's a tremendous political achievement for Black Americans.

And the second thing I would say is something that Rob pointed out, is that Black Americans built a unique political identity through struggle and through emancipatory struggle that shaped American popular culture in ways that are profound and serve as an example for the rest of the world.

Our music, our culture was shot through with political messages that were used by other Black and diasporic communities all over the world, including in Africa in its own colonization struggle.

- Yeah.

- Well, I appreciate that.

- And that includes styles of protest and using the law and, you know, like it reverberates in brilliant ways.

- Well, I thank you both for joining us.

This is a great conversation.

And that wraps up this special edition of "Black Nouveau."

For the "Black Nouveau" team, I'm James Causey, reminding you to check us out across all our digital platforms.

Have a great evening.

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