Q&A with Ely: Current issues of race
For more than a year, Melvin Ely has been touring the region—and the nation—discussing his book, Israel on the Appomattox,
which deals with the relationships between free blacks and their white
neighbors prior to the Civil War. The discussion has contributed to his
understanding of current issues of race. Following are some of his
insights. —Ed. Ely: I think that this ambivalence, this divided
white mind, has existed through much of our history, and that it
definitely does now. For example, the New York Times reported that, when the evacuation
of New Orleans began after Hurricane Katrina, there was a run on gun
stores in Baton Rouge on the part of whites who wanted to prepare for
the "black onslaught" they feared. At the same time, we’ve read about
countless acts of human kindness extended to individuals and families
who were displaced by the hurricane, seemingly without regard to their
race. I think in some ways we’re still acting out attitudes that were
already prevalent in the world I describe in Israel on the Appomattox. A Portrait of Surprising Harmony (Los Angeles Times); I see two things going on here. First,
there’s the “oasis in the desert” approach—a desire to proclaim Israel
Hill unique. The way of life I describe, in which free blacks and
whites could often get along smoothly and blacks could achieve
remarkable things in a white supremacist system, was far from unique,
as the work of other researchers is now proving. But if we say Israel
Hill was unique, and that everyplace else in the Old South oppressed
free African Americans in every possible way, then we’re really
congratulating ourselves for being so much more enlightened today. It
is far easier to look down our noses at those terrible racists in the
past than to clean up the mess we ourselves have made of the present. Then there’s the “hope for the future”
attitude that many readers express. This approach is more optimistic
than the “oasis in the desert.” Some readers seem to be looking in our
own time for a path toward a "kinder, gentler America," and they’re
heartened by a story that seems to show that maybe we can all “just get
along,” as Rodney King, the famous victim of a police beating in Los
Angeles, famously put it. Israel on the Appomattox does suggest that blacks and whites aren’t culturally hard-wired to hate each other. Q: Up to the early 20th century, you find
whites and blacks in Prince Edward County doing together just about
everything we can imagine, up to and including interracial marriage.
Yet Prince Edward is also the only county in the South which, during
the civil rights years, actually abolished public schools for five
years rather than desegregate. How could a place with such a history of
relative good neighborliness do such a thing? Ely: The 1850s and the
1950s in Prince Edward County had at least one thing in common: a
strong, assertive African American community. Before the Civil War,
free blacks on and off Israel Hill took on significant roles in
business and the church, and they won the respect of many whites. A
century later, in 1951, the students at Farmville’s black high school
showed remarkable initiative and courage: they went on strike demanding
school facilities equal to those that whites enjoyed. Some of those
students soon became plaintiffs in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. So you have a formidable black
community in both eras—but Afro-Southerners in the 1950s were demanding
things that free blacks before the Civil War, whatever their other
achievements, could not hope to get: equality, desegregation and
political empowerment. And when blacks made those demands, and the U.S.
Supreme Court began to back them, the whites who dominated Prince
Edward County “circled the wagons” and decided to fight to preserve the
“Southern way of life.” To complicate matters further, in more
recent times the reopened public schools in that county have
reintegrated and become something of a model of good race relations and
academic achievement. In Prince Edward County today, it's private, not
public, education that's struggling. When I speak in rural southside
Virginia, I often attract large, biracial audiences of people who are
all in pursuit of the same shared history; things are still changing
there. The story of Israel Hill and its surroundings is really a story
of race in American life that's still unfolding in 2006—and I’m
fascinated to watch as my book itself, in a small way, becomes part of
the current history of Prince Edward County and of Virginia. 
Q: In Israel on the Appomattox, you show whites who
seemed to have feared and loathed free African Americans as an abstract
mass yet who sometimes had cordial relationships with their own black
neighbors. Does white American society still have this kind of “split
personality” when it comes to race?
Ely: Look at these headlines and quotations from newspaper and magazine reviews and from jacket blurbs:
A Lesson in Hope (Denver Rocky Mountain News);
An Oasis of Freedom Amid Slavery (Boston Globe);
An Oasis of Racial Tolerance (Virginian Pilot);
A Pocket of Promised Land (Civil War Book Review);
A Taste of Liberty (Washington Post Book World);
"[A
story of] hope, strength, endurance, and quiet courage . . . Important
and uplifting" (Rocky Mountain News). "Explores as few others have done
. . . and the role of faith and brotherly love" (Decatur Review).
"Upends traditional assumptions about race in the Old South and, in so
doing, poses striking possibilities for America’s future" (historian
James Oliver Horton). "A remarkable civics lesson" (Rocky Mountain
News).
