Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Seidule believes that certain commonly used words help to embed particular meanings of history, and therefore merit examination. A chief example is the term “plantation,” the large farms of the antebellum South. To this day, the term connotes class and elegance, a place for fabulous dinner parties and mint juleps on a wraparound patio. Seidule believes this to be an example of whitewashing the horrors of slavery to highlight the purported charm of the old Southern way of life, and to correct this he insists on calling them “enslaved labor farms” so that their primary association is with the chain and the lash.

“Jim Crow” is the collective name for the laws and customs that Southern states enacted after Reconstruction to negate the rights which Black Americans achieved with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the US Constitution after the Civil War. Legal mechanisms included segregation of public facilities, most notably schools and transit, as well as poll taxes and other methods to discourage voting without formally revoking the right to vote. It also included informal methods, such as the implied terror which groups like the Ku Klux Klan would inflict in Black Americans who dared to violate the social code. The term is commonly accepted, but Seidule finds it insufficient, first because it borrows racist language about Black Americans and also because the name alone does not say anything about its nature. As with renaming plantations “enslaved labor farms,” Seidule calls for renaming Jim Crow a “racial police state” (72) since it denied Black Americans the rights which they should have enjoyed under law, and instead placed them at the mercy of police and mob rule.

This term is most often associated with an extrajudicial killing whereby a group of people hangs a suspected criminal without the benefit of a trial, usually by the branch of a tree. Seidule is helping to popularize a slightly different definition that encompasses any racially motivated killing, whether by private individuals or even the police, by any method that occurs without a trial and sentencing. Although hangings were among the most common methods, and people of all races suffered at the hands of mob justice, lynching has come to define the general category of violence that overwhelmingly targeted Black Americans to ensure their status as second-class citizens.