February 22, 2023
Page 9
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o piNioN
Readjusting Our Historical Perspective Can Guide Us Today
By Ben Jealous
Governor Ron DeSantis continues to try
to elevate his Presidential chances while
doubling down on banning Black history.
Meanwhile, the rest of us would be better
served by reading more of it. We should go
even further by mining American history to
find what’s been hidden from us by previ-
ous political opportunists that can give us
blueprints for how to create a national pol-
itics of unity rather than division.
I decided to start by digging into my own
family's history. What I found shocked me.
At the end of the 19th century, my ma-
ternal great-great-grandfather, who had
been born into slavery, helped build a po-
litical party called the Readjusters that took
control of the state of Virginia. Here’s what
got my attention – it was a multi-racial
populist party led by a former Confederate
general and a freedman that was pro-work-
ers’ rights, pro-civil rights, pro-voting
rights, and pro-public education.
Stop here if anyone taught you that 15
years after the Civil War, Johnny Reb and
the freedmen came together to form a new
party that won elections for local, state,
and federal offices.
How could people who had been en-
slaved come together with people who had
fought a war to keep them in slavery? They
Ben Jealous
all wanted a better future for their kids and
to hold on to the new public schools their
children attended.
At the time plantation-class oligarchs
were using the state’s Civil War debt as
a wedge issue to anger Whites. But their
class bias pushed them too far. They said
they would shut down the newly created
public schools to pay for the debt.
In response, many White men (remem-
ber only men voted in those days) whose
families relied on and supported the schools
fled the Democratic Party. They launched
the Readjuster Party. Their name came
from their demand: readjust the terms of
Virginia's Civil War debt to save the pub-
lic schools. My grandmother's grandfather
Edward David Bland led the state’s Black
Republicans into the Readjusters. It was
an easy argument to make; after all Black
Republicans had created the state's public
schools a little over a decade before. In the
process, they became the majority of its
new party’s base.
In less than five years, the Readjusters
saved Virginia's public schools, expanded
Virginia Tech, and created what is now
Virginia State University, the first publicly
supported college for training Black teach-
ers. They raised taxes on corporations and
the property they owned, reversing a defi-
cit into a budget surplus. They did away
with the poll tax and with the public whip-
ping post.
White men who rented their farms or
were otherwise too poor to own land had
only had the right to vote since the 1820's.
Black men had only had it since the 1860's.
And by the early 1880's large numbers of
both groups had united in multiple states
and were winning major political victories.
To break up a thriving coalition of Black
and White farmers and workers, the old
plantation owners turned to a tried-and-true
playbook. They spread vile disinformation
to make other Whites fear the loss of polit-
ical superiority. They accused Black men
of fictitious crimes. The disinformation
sparked violence in Danville where there
was a majority Black city council and a ful-
ly integrated police force. Two White men
responded to the propaganda by murdering
Whites and Blacks in the streets.
With the Readjusters defeated, White
supremacist politicians went on to pass
an annual poll tax (equal to $50 today). It
slashed the Black vote by 80 percent and
the White vote by 50 percent and it eventu-
ally was enshrined in the state constitution.
By denying the vote to so many Blacks
and low-income Whites, White suprem-
acists essentially outlawed the kind of
multiracial coalition that had beat them in
Virginia and was chalking up victories in
other states.
Even when students learn about the
poll tax, that’s not the story most are
taught. It's truly a lesson in the promise
of the power of coming together. It's also
a lesson in the lengths to which wealthy
special interests will go to divide us.
Meanwhile, that's a lesson that DeSantis
and his wealthy donors are teaching us
again. After all, it's the history we forget
that is most easily repeated.