[...] Charleston, S.C., had more slaves in the 19th century than any other city. And it was an epicenter of free people of color who were slave owners.
The city was also a center for mixed-race people, thanks to generations of encounters between Charleston's white elite and the legions of slaves who were needed to sustain the opulent Charlestonian lifestyle. (The historian Joel Williamson wrote that the city was "half white and half Negro, and its Negro half was more white than black.") Charleston's wealthy free people of color were often eager slave owners, and many of them shared with whites a derisive attitude toward the darker black masses.
Eager to protect their money and privilege, and the slaves upon which both rested, many free people of color in the Deep South rallied to the Confederate cause at the start of the war. They fought as rebels right up to the time when it became apparent that the South would lose.
The hatred they felt for former slaves was palpable to Union officers who pressed into the South during the war. As one officer wrote to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: "With all their admirable qualities, [they] have not yet forgotten that they were, themselves, slaveholders."
This reality of a socially complex, mixed-race South — with whites and blacks closely related by blood and mutually complicit in slavery — disappeared from public view as the country adopted simplistic formulations of the racial past.
The drama unfolding between the daughter of a black woman born in the shadow of slavery and a white family with deep Confederate roots seems the perfect window through which to revisit the subject. If that is what Ms. Washington-Williams intended, she has served a useful purpose for us all.
| Go back for the rest of Brent Staples' New York Times essay "Strom Thurmond Continued: The Known World of Ms. Washington Williams"
posted in articles on July 17, 2004 5:15 PM | t (0)
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