Call me crazy, but I’ve hung on to my college history textbooks. Half a dozen, they don’t take up much space on the shelves of tomes I’ve collected in the intervening half century. Sometimes they come in handy. Sometimes they teach a very useful lesson.
I’ve been digesting the behemoth biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow over the past several weeks. Today, the Civil War over, the author paused to break through the waves of hate roiling postwar Reconstruction America and in two and a half pages described the horrific afternoon of July 30, 1866 in New Orleans.
That day, a group of freed Black residents convened at the city’s Mechanics’ Institute to consider revisions to Louisiana’s constitution and secure Black voting rights. Inflammatory newspaper accounts and an ex-Confederate mayor goaded a white mob, and shortly after the Black residents arrived, violence erupted…