The African American civil rights movement of the 1960s spoke outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Didn’t President Abraham Lincoln abolish black slavery in 1863? Historian Howard Zinn recalls that in 1858, Lincoln had declared that “a physical difference between the races” prevents “social and political equality”. Was it the American Mystery?
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) believes that the source of the mystery is the “Southern mystique”, that of the Confederacy of Southern States of the country, which supported slavery and which separated from the northern states, in principle hostile to it, during the Civil War (1861-1865) won by the North. He concludes with lucidity: “The specificity of the Southern mystic disappears as soon as one sees that Whites and Blacks behave like human beings, that the South is only a distorted mirror of the North. »
This reflection dates back to 1963 and can be found in fight racism, collection of unpublished essays in French “on the emancipation of African-Americans”, translated from English by Nicolas Calvé and prefaced by the black intellectual Cornel West. The book is the result of Zinn’s experience as a history teacher from 1956 to 1963 in Atlanta, at Spelman College, an institution of higher education for young black girls. In 1963, the college will fire him because of his fight against racial segregation.
Share of paradox
Despite his lucidity, Zinn, born in New York to Jewish parents, was not insensitive, he wrote after working there, to the “mysterious and terrifying Deep South, steeped in blood and history, the setting for William Faulkner’s novels”. Even if he recognizes that slavery in the South is “at the origin” of the Civil War, his deep analysis leads him to establish that, despite the “inhuman aspects” of this practice, the causes of the war are above all politico -economic.
The South antagonized the powerful, says Zinn, with “its rejection of tariffs, its opposition to banks, its anti-capitalism” and its anti-centralism. He gives reason to the president of the defunct Southern Confederacy who, in 1861, had affirmed that “the motivations of the North had nothing to do with humanitarianism and rested rather on the desire to control the Union”, that is to say the whole of the United States.
The essayist vividly recounts the desegregation in the Southern states during the 1960s of libraries, snack bars at retailer Woolworth by sit in non-violent. Zinn notes that unlike the North, which is much more cosmopolitan, the South remains culturally more Anglo-Saxon among the whites and, ironically, also among the blacks, as if the ghosts of the abolition of slavery, in despite their legendary antagonism, end up resembling each other in everyday life.