Grandpappy Was on the Wrong Side of History

I GREW UP in Northwest Ohio, in the house where my dad was born. My mother was from Eastern North Carolina. My dad’s paternal great-grandparents immigrated to Ohio from Germany in the 1870s. My mom didn’t know much about her people, except that they’d always been rural and not well off.

A relative once sardonically expressed thanks that our paternal ancestors left Germany long before they could become Nazis and that our Southern relatives were all probably too poor to have enslaved people. The implication was that the only surefire ways to avoid complicity in great evil are chance and circumstance. History has heroes, resisters, and those who spur and lead wickedness; but many people just get caught up in sheer survival or go along to get along. Sometimes moral choices are made in imperceptible increments, and personal agency can feel elusive.

I’ve been thinking about this because of the push by the Trump administration, Heritage Foundation, and others to rewrite, rearrange, and obscure history in the name of countering the “evil” of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are trying to scrub the record to make straight white males the heroes of an imaginary world where even their most brutal, depraved actions were justifiable means to “greatness.”

President Trump recently pledged to restore Confederate monuments that were removed during fleeting moments of moral clarity over the past few years. The Confederacy were the traitors who lost a Civil War that they started to defend a culture and economy built on the enslavement and terrorizing of other human beings. Many of these monuments date from the post-Reconstruction era, when resurgent white supremacy was rewriting the Civil War narrative to be about “honor” and “state’s rights.” The statues were false idols meant to bolster a myth, pump up white solidarity, and be a warning and rebuke to Black people striving for full citizenship and freedom.

Back to my mother’s family: The record isn’t robust, but her forebears did seem to be poor or working folks. In the census, no one was an enslaver or owned much more than blacksmith tools or a scrap of land. One great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier, and he doesn’t need a monument. I don’t say that out of white guilt or shame, just common sense. Maybe he, like many lower-income white people, helped enforce racist terror, trading his soul for the white supremacist pottage of occasional scraps of work or “respect” from the enslavers. Maybe he was a horrible, brutal person. Or maybe he signed up because soldiers got meals and paychecks. I respect him not with myths but by understanding that no matter what he was like as a person, he was on the wrong side of history. And he is one piece of what made me.

Some people who know their ancestors enslaved Black people are striving to make reparation for how blood-soaked wealth supported generations of their families. My inheritance of complicity is different, but I too have unearned privileges. The way to justice, mercy, and a good life that can be a model for future generations is to keep seeking repair of what is broken. That requires knowing real history — the sordid and the good — and rejecting idols of marble, bronze, or misinformation.