07/01/2020
The failed rebellion of 1861 stands apart as perhaps one of if not the only major conflict in the historical narrative not written by the prevailing side.
I grew up in the Lost Cause narrative. Reconstruction was never more than a subchapter in textbooks, focusing on military occupation which concluded, inexplicably, once there was no longer a former 'Union' General in the white house (ask yourself why you don't refer to the United States soldiers as "United States soldiers", instead as "Union", this is all part of that postwar narrative). I was certainly never taught that Black people held elected office in the years immediately following the war.
Jim Crow was minimized to water fountains and building entrances. Historical violence, when discussed, was placed entirely at the feet of the Klan.
I was never taught about the Massive Resistance movement and how the busing I received, to a centralized magnet school, was part of the perverse way my county had avoided mandatory integration after losing multiple court battles spanning decades after Brown.
I grew up in a Black neighborhood, and went to a primarily Black school before I was chosen to be bused to a school for the 'gifted', always being told that gift was my superior intelligence compared to the other children at my neighborhood school. After a change in parental custody, I attended highschool in an affluent White suburb, where, to the very last days of the 20th century a handful of students were bused across the county in a pathetic show of compliance with integration mandates.
My family immigrated to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I was always told we were not part of the sins of the American past nor the sins of the 20th century Teutonic regimes. My name Donald 'Andreas Hoefer' is an homage to an Austrian ancestor who rose up and fought for freedom against the Napoleonic Empire.
I knew the South was filled with racists, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized I was one.
History is often seen as a detached narrative; and it's not until you can see your place in it, that you can truly learn from it and hope to change the future so you won't repeat its lessons.
