Week One Lecture (Part II of II): Welcome to Greenville . . .
This is the rest of our Week One Lecture (part 2 of 2). If you haven’t already read the first part, please do that now. As you take up the following post, please continue to keep this week’s assigned readings in mind (English 585: Assigned Readings).
Do you know anything about this?
From 1921 until 1965, this controversial sign hung over the main street leading into downtown Greenville, Texas: “Welcome to Greenville. Blackest Land. Whitest People” Ever heard of it? Ever seen pictures of it? If so, in what context? What stories do people tell about this sign and its meaning? Who gets to control the narrative about what this sign does and does not mean?
What does the sign mean? Depends on who (and when) you ask.
QUESTION:
Who (do you imagine) said this? When? To whom? To what end? In what context? How often?
“People are always talking about that sign. You know it doesn’t mean what they’re saying it means.”
“‘White’ just means ‘nice.’ Look it up in the dictionary. I don’t know why people just keep saying that about it.”
ANSWER:
So many people–often quite lovely people. Usually long-time Greenville residents tired of people saying such ugly things about their beloved home town. Typically older White women. From time to time, older White men. Twice, the person telling me some variation of this is a Black man–in one case the president of a local chapter of NAACP.
OUR GOAL is not to PROVE what the sign does (or does not) mean. We can’t. Meaning emerges not by decree on high. A dictionary does not prescribe what words mean. Instead, dictionaries are living, dynamic, research, entirely descriptive projects that merely codify the ways in which humans have put the words to use over time. Dictionary definitions of “White”–like every other word–have shifted over time, as some uses drop out of favor and new ones emerge. Given this reality, what are we to make of the fact that the word “White” has been imbrued with definitions like “nice” or “friendly”? In that context, if “Black” is meant to be “White’s” opposite–well, what are we to make of all this?
AN UNANTICIPATED BREAK IN OUR LECTURE TO BRING YOU A STUNNING EXAMPLE OF THE VERY THING I’M TALKING ABOUT. As I’m revising this lecture for next week (Sunday, August 23, 1:30pm), I received the following alert.
Lest we forget, the world seems intent on inflicting racial trauma ad infinitum. At one point in this tread, Santa Clara professor Dr. Fuentes Morgan shares this particularly painful reality: “I am so angry. Academia proves over and over again that it doesn’t love me. I don’t think I love it back anymore.”
Systemic racism persists everywhere, including within academia. I knew this. Remember about a decade ago, when Henry Lewis Gate’s, Jr., Harvard’s most prominent scholar of African American History Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., was arrested for trying to enter his own home. Yet right now, the incredible pain suffered by Black academics is more present for me than ever before. Not because I experienced it, of course (I/we can’t). Not even because I witnessed it (I/we can’t). Friday, August 21, we (about 10K White academics) attended the final panel of this intensive, three-week institute about precisely this pattern of Anti-Black racism.
The racial trauma Black folks experience at every turn is incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t suffered its wrath. I cannot begin to imagine. But I can listen. Learn. Pay attention. Show up. Resist. Reflect. Take action.
This course is about Counterstories. #BlackintheIvory, like #BLM, is a powerful example of counterstorytelling.
Back to our “regularly scheduled” lecture. . .
Our collective project in this course has nothing to do with rooting out racists. What we’re doing is far more significant (and complex!) then that. This is about systemic racism, not individual racists. This is about the ways in which our country’s legal, economic, and ideological infrastructures have evolved (devolved) to the benefit of one group at the expense of others. In such systems, intentions don’t matter. Intentional or not, the consequences of racism are very real indeed, a point to which we’ll return at some length below.
Those responsible for installing the Greenville Sign in 1921 may or may not have meant for it represent race in any way, shape, or form. Those who have defended (and continue to defend) it as “hav[ing] nothing to do with race” probably do, most cases, had/have no (conscious) racist intent. The long-time residents who have shared variations on this theme whenever I’ve been invited to talk about representations of race and local activism in this area–they’re often quite lovely people. Again, our work is not about individual people, though people created and thus can/must dismantle the structures that perpetuate racial trauma like that experienced by Dr. Morgan and her brother on her campus–at her home–in Santa Cruz.
OUR CLASS
Fall 2020, English 585: Forms and Genres will focus on the “forms and genres” of public history–How do we go about writing our histories? telling our stories? What stories are captured in the public record? Which ones are erased from public memory? Who controls the narrative? How can we (re)write that narrative–pushing back against the dominant stories (White) to tell different stories (Black Indigenous, and People of Color, hereafter “BIPOC“)?
OUR FIRST “CASE STUDY”
Greenville is the largest town between our university and the Dallas suburbs where many Texas A&M-Commerce faculty members live (I’m in McKinney, a North Dallas suburb). According to local historian Paul E. Sturdevant, the original intent behind the sign–specifically the use of the phrase the whitest people”–was to define “the citizens of Greenville as friendly, trustworthy and helpful was sincere” (29).
For now, let’s set aside the extremely problematic use of the word “white” = “nice/good” (so then “black” means?) and the fact that dictionary definitions emerge from the way we use language (descriptive) not how we should use language (prescriptive). We’ll get back to the storied history of using the color wheel to categorize people (race is a social construct).
If you’d like to get a head start on that sprawling conversation, here’s a three-minute overview about “How Race isn’t Biologically Real”:
We’re going to talk about the origins of “race” and racism a LOT this semester. First, we should just get our arms around the controversy. Even today, the local story about “the Sign” is hardly settled. Though I have no “people” (to put it in Texas parlance) there, I do have connections to this town going back to the late 1970s. I’ll tell my own story about how and when I learned about the Greenville sign later. First, I want to hear yours. If this is the first time you’ve heard of the sign, share your initial impression/thoughts.
For example, when I told someone about this course recently (in response to their email query about it), they responded thus: “My mom’s side of the family is from Greenville, and I’ve always grown up hearing about the infamous sign. I’m attaching a photo that a family member took (I think maybe my grandmother.) Anyway, the legacy of racism ran deep on that side of family–KKK, slave-owning, etc. . . “
What does/did it mean? Like just about everything else, it all depends upon who/when you ask.
THE FACTS
- The “motto” began with a realtor and beloved “founder” of Greenville. This was his advertising slogan. The card read, “Will N. Harrison; The Land Man; Greenville, Texas; Blackest Land, Whitest People.” (Sturdevant 2004).
- In an article for the East Texas Historical Journal, Paul E. Sturdevant” traces the origins of the sign to then president Woodrow Wilson. While Strudevant doesn’t identify that direct link as deeply relevant to the “meaning” of the sign, I definitely will/do. Here’s that story, excerpted from Paul’s article “Black and White with Shades of Gray: The Greenville Sign“ (East Texas Historical Journal, 2004).
A quick diversion from “THE FACTS” about the Greenville sign to some “FACTS” about Woodrow Wilson. Err, rather the ways in which we understand President Wilson’s story and legacy TODAY. No doubt his story and legacy have meant very different things over the past century and, again, depending on whom you ask.
What’s Woodrow Wilson’s story?
Like the Greenville sign, like everything else . . . it depends on who/when you ask.
FACT: Woodrow Wilson served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. His story . . . well, I won’t go down this rabbit hole now, but I invite you to. Apologies in advance.
Of course you’ve likely heard his name in recent news. In addition to fights for racial justice in the criminal justice system, there has been a new push to rid the nation of a stunningly long and expansive list of memorials to the Confederacy
See what I mean? One of the “facts” about Wilson’s “racist” learnings is his public, enthusiastic support for the Ku Klux Klan. The very first screening of a film in the White House: Birth of a Nation (read “How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Revived the KKK“).
Another rabbit hole. Watch out. You can watch it at archive.org (The Birth of a Nation, 1915). I did some years ago. Three hours. Gruesome. Incredibly instructive, however. Know your enemy, as they say. However, also know that the REAL problem is not individual racists and intentional, unambiguously racist actions and words but the systems that reify racial injustice (see, for example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness and/or listen to her January 2020 interview about it for the New Yorker called “Ten Years After ‘The New Jim Crow“).
First, let’s talk about the more obvious evidence of racism in this local story within this global context of anti-Black racism . . .
. . .
YOU READY??
Are you sure??
Okay, so buckle up. . .
“History is usually written by the winners, explains Alexis Clark in his recent article “How ‘The Birth of a Nation Revived the Ku Klux Klan” (2019).
But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, 1915. In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and immoral freed blacks. The film was an instant blockbuster. And with innovative cinematography and a Confederate-skewed point of view, The Birth of a Nation also helped rekindle the KKK.
Until the movie’s debut, the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1865 by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a regional organization in the South that was all but obliterated due to government suppression. But The Birth of a Nation’s racially charged Jim Crow narrative, coupled with America’s heightened anti-immigrant climate, led the Klan to align itself with the movie’s success and use it as a recruiting tool.
“People were primed for the message,” says Paul McEwan, film studies professor at Muhlenberg College and author of The Birth of Nation (BFI Film Classics). “Hard to argue this was a distortion of history when the history books at that time said the same.”
(Clark 2019)
In a recent article for Vox, Dylan Matthews goes straight for the jugular in his article entitled simply “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time“
Here’s just ONE of the reasons Matthews lists to prove his thesis.
Now, back to Greenville, . . .
The sign commissioned by the Greenville Chamber of Commerce was massive. Perhaps not by today’s standards, but WOW: 24-feet long, four feet high. They even sprung for the electric sign, another incredible novelty at the time. That means–even at night, anyone entering or leaving town could see it, the brightest thing in town.
Of course the sign didn’t just appear in downtown Greenville, workers on their ladders and trucks and pulleys hoisting it across Lee Street while folks went about their days shopping for groceries, getting a haircut, sitting on a bench in front of the local butcher shop shooting the breeze with neighbors Andy-Griffith style.
No, it was a spectacle–a rhetorical event imbrued with layers upon layers of meaning (at the time and, certainly, in retrospect). Seemed that nearly everyone in town was there to witness the sign’s installation on July 7, 1921. They held the celebration right before sundown (8:30 p.m.), no doubt so the unveiling could include the drama of “lighting” we see in town squares across the nation each December when locals gather around a massive Christmas tree, holding their collective breath until someone finally plugs it it into the extension cord (or whatever mechanism they’d have used in 1921 to hook up a permanent structure like this).
The ceremony began promptly at 8:30 p.m. We know local officials and leaders spoke, but no record survives to tell us what was actually said that night. We can imagine. Alas, Harrison wouldn’t live to see his beloved slogan up in lights. He passed away shortly after returning from Kansas City following his meeting with President Wilson in 1916.
What do you image happened that night? What was said–publicly, during the official ceremony, before darkness fell across Lee Street, before the massive sign sparked to life to an explosion of applause and excitement? What might people be saying in the audience that night? to one another? in whispers? Do you think people from the historically segregated neighborhoods in town attended the ceremony? What might happen if they did? How might the White residents respond if a Black family showed up to witness this spectacle along with everybody else in their hometown? What stories to folks tell one another about it in the days leading up to its installation? The days following the ceremony? How did the stories morph or shift or take on new elements over generations?
Race and Racism in 2020
We will come back to the numbers, a horrific story amplified to challenge the dominant narrative by sheer force of undeniable, quantitative evidence that 2020–as horrific as it has been for everyone . . . 2020 is far, far worse for BIPOC. By every measure. These numbers didn’t just happen. This is not new. This moment of crisis with a global pandemic, uprisings across the world in response to systemic, anti-Black racism, massive unemployment, evictions, an economy in free fall has just made this injustice far more visible than ever before.
Confederate Monuments are Symbols NOT History.
A recurring theme throughout this course will be representations of race and racism throughout history. This is not an abstract, purely academic project. The Greenville sign is one manifestation of this challenging conversation about who (should) control the narrative (and even the nature of the narrative).
Greenville’s saga surrounding the sign did not unfold on a national/international stage. Residents did not fight to keep the sign. At least not en mass. This history does not bring pride to Greenville residents. Quietly, without fanfare, the Greenville Sign was removed from where it hung for decades and tucked away in the attic of a local museum, where it remains to this day (Audie Murphy Cotton Museum). It was there. And then it was gone.
Not so for the stock stories/counterstories clashing loudly and often violently across the nation in 2020. That fight has taken hold everywhere, including in a small town not far from Greenville, as well discuss at some length in the coming weeks (hint: Weatherford, Texas, July 2020).
Humans are inherently storytelling creatures.
Our goal in this class is not to prove what those who installed the sign originally meant when they used those particular words. We can’t do that. No one can. You simply can’t “prove” intent. The real issue here is that “intent” doesn’t matter. What matters is consequence not intent. We can’t fix racism by rooting out all the racists. That question “racist intent” isn’t terribly interesting, anyway. The “intent” doesn’t matter. The effect of one group of people’s actions and words upon another group–THAT’s what matters. To see the consequences of systemic racism in a country built upon the backs of one group and the genocide of another, we need only take a look at the above charts comparing the cumulative experiences of White people in the US with those of BIPOC. The difference is stunning.
The sign didn’t make Greenville “a racist town.” However, like everywhere else across the nation and, indeed, the world, White citizens of Greenville have perpetuated acts of racially motivated terror against BIPOC. Black residents of Greenville have suffered racial trauma for generations–way before the sign was installed and for decades after. That includes today.
We’re going to come back to the incredibly problematic nature of arguments that align “White” with “good” and “honorable” and “trustworthy” a few times over the course of the semester. Here’s a hint: We’re still doing it.
Remember this?
If you don’t, just Google “racist Dove ad.”
This is deeply reminiscent of a long tradition, not just in advertisements for soap products but more broadly. Still, the problem here is hard to deny, especially when placed side by side.
There’s more. Much more, as you’ll find over the coming weeks.
Here’s a preview:
You won’t be surprised because Greenville exists in a world of humans and patterns of racial violence persist everywhere: (1) On December 7, 1921, a KKK rally took place, starting right under that same sign just months after it’s installation (600 members participated in their Klan robes; 30K spectators came from across the region). (2) In that very same spot less than 20 years earlier, a mob of white citizens lynched Ted Smith–another case of vigilante justice against a Black man (merely 18 years old) for a crime he didn’t even commit (think of the more recent pattern of White women we call “Karens” like Amy Cooper).
We’ll turn to those next two events soon, taking them up within the larger context of the dominant narrative’s tendency to distort and misrepresent the actions of Black folks to favor the actions of the White people involved. These stories perpetuate systemic racism. The only ones who notice anything beyond everyday, ordinary life is happening are those whose lives are adversely affected by it. For the rest of us, the dominant narrative just makes sense. It’s the air we breathe. (As so many others struggle to breath at all).
Our refrain over the coming weeks:
Humans are inherently storytelling creatures.
The challenge: those who’ve been well served by the the “stock stories” that shape the everyday, ordinary life unfolds across America are hard pressed to give up the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Next up . . . Racing Greenville: A Texas Counterstory (AVAILABLE BEFORE THE END OF THE WEEK (AUGUST 31), IN PLENTY OF TIME FOR WEEK TWO (English 585: Week Two Lecture).
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