Du Bois's trenchant criticism of racist mythology that denied African Americans agency in history and justice in the present. in white Civil War memory.' How, and even more importantly, why, should African Americans remember the war? Blight takes this question up in chapter 9, 'Black Memory and the Progress of the Race.' Frederick Douglass's struggle to keep the freedom flame burning was aided by W. By the 1880s, 'many a speech flowed with reconciliation as it honored the dead.' Blight notes that African Americans increasingly occupied a 'marginal place. In the late 1860s, Decoration Days proliferated throughout the country. On this occasion, African Americans celebrated the progress that had been made by the war, and the progress that they hoped would come with Reconstruction. Mindful of the sacrifices that both black and white people had made so that freedom could be nationalized, the participants enthusiastically embraced the trappings and symbols of citizenship. On May 1, 1865, ten thousand ex-slaves participated in ceremonies that commemorated fallen Union soldiers. Chapter 3, 'Decoration Days' (later called Memorial Day) traces the origins of the day of remembrance to the activities of African Americans and former abolitionists in Charleston, South Carolina (p. Two of Blight's chapters particularly illuminate this process. To my mind, the heart and soul of Race and Reunion lie in Blight's examination of just how the 'Emancipationist Vision' of the war articulated by Frederick Douglass and others was obscured and even obliterated from national history. The 'Union Cause' had transfigured into the 'Lost Cause,' lending credence to the saying 'The North won the war but lost the peace.' Blight's argument, written in densely packed prose, is simply put: in the four decades after the Civil War southern and northern whites agreed that the deepest meaning of the conflict was to be found in commemorating the valor and courage of the soldiers of both sides. Blight places this story back at center stage, where it belongs, and in doing so provides a stunning examination of how Civil War memory was created and sustained. One of those narratives was the story of slavery, emancipation, and freedom. Competing narratives were diminished or erased. By the early 1900s, Blight contends, sectional harmony had emerged as the dominant motif in many histories, commemorations, reunions, monuments, novels, and plays. David Blight, the Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College, demonstrates that a national memory based on reconciliation triumphed over at least several other competing and equally important 'memories' of the war. Reviewed by Joan Waugh (Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles)Ī long-awaited book by one of the finest historians of the Civil War era, Race and Reunion lives up to high expectations. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.Ĭambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Race and reunion david blight summary