Posted: 2/7/2019
Is this just a case of baseless journalistic sensationalism or is this an article (dated 9/18/2018) fit to further stoke racial tensions in the U.S.? I only became aware of this old article, because it was recently posted by Smithsonian Magazine on my Facebook page.
Already the introductory paragraph contains the fantastic accusation that 53,000 black Americans were killed. No matter what an amazing Civil War hero or accomplished ante bellum politician Robert Smalls was, such an accusation should be treated very carefully and ought to be thoroughly vetted by any author.
The article does not contain any facts or evidence to corroborate such a fantastic claim. The article does not even proper cite exactly where and when Smalls gave the speech nor is there any reference to a transcript of that speech. Who actually is the author Douglas Egerton? His bio at the end of the article is extremely short: “Douglas Egerton is a professor of history and the author of five books, including The Wars of Reconstruction”. Does not even say professor at what institution. Anyway, the reader is left to presume, based on this article, that this fantastic number of killed black Americans happened roughly between 1865 and 1895.
Here is probably the most salient quote from this article regarding this fantastic claim:
“To evaluate his number, I combed through sources that would have been available to him. I quickly learned one thing: Those sources lack basic information, such as victims’ last names, making it unlikely that anyone will be able to establish a precise number of people targeted for assassination by Southern whites. Gradually, though, I came to another conclusion: Those sources clearly demonstrate that white Democrats, an electoral minority in every Southern state after the war, engaged in racial terrorism to restore the prewar social order. Despite the imprecision in the records, I found Smalls’ figure to be entirely plausible. … Which brings us back to Robert Smalls’ assertion of 53,000 African-Americans murdered. Unhappily, little survives of his personal papers, so they don’t provide much help in determining how he arrived at that number. But other sources do.” (emphasis added)
All we learn from this very tendentious article is that there were several incidents where individual black Americans were murdered, but it does not add up to 53,000. This implausible, wild conjecture is coming from a professor of history! This is truly scandalous!
Given the fact that the total number of verified lynchings of black Americans comes to less than 4,000 in all southern states between 1865 and 1950 (c.f. my blog post), it also makes this claim sound all too fantastic.
The venerable Smithsonian Institution should be ashamed to have published such an ideological, biased pamphlet. It behooves this well regarded institution to retract it immediately before unsuspecting high school children across the country are indoctrinated with the content!
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