Since 2011, the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize has honored the author of the U.S. nonfiction book published in the previous year that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Though there have been many moments in the past decade that have reinforced for us the importance of this work, the announcement of the 10th annual book prize occurs as the novel coronavirus creates myriad new challenges to community cohesion, not least the need for social distancing.

This year we honor historian William Sturkey, for his extraordinary portrait of a community in his latest book, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

Sturkey has produced a meticulously detailed study of the historical, cultural, and economic roots of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction “New South.” Through personal profiles of black and white citizens of Hattiesburg over multiple generations, Sturkey weaves a moving narrative that exemplifies the purpose of the Zócalo Book Prize.

Our judges found in Hattiesburg “a finely woven microcosm of American society as a whole [that] points to the immense work still ahead to make it into a more perfect and just union.” The judges particularly recognized Sturkey’s achievement of “a rich and deeply nuanced account of the development of the white and black communities of Hattiesburg, Missisippi, under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.”

One aspect of the book that struck many of them was its seamless melding of cultural and economic history. Another was the nostalgia of many of Hattiesburg’s African American residents for the community that disappeared with the victories of the civil rights movement.

Why would people miss a time when they had fewer rights? Sturkey’s book describes the ways in which the African American community of Hattiesburg found strength in one another and the institutions they built. This is the subject of Sturkey’s Zócalo Book Prize Lecture: “How Do Oppressed People Build Community?” He will deliver the lecture and accept the prize, which includes a $5,000 award, during a live event streaming on Zócalo’s YouTube channel on May 20 at 5 PM PDT. Jai Hamid Bashir, winner of the ninth annual Zócalo Poetry Prize, will deliver a public reading of her poem “Little Bones” prior to the lecture.

Previous book prize winners include Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, and Jonathan Haidt.

We had a chance to speak with Sturkey, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian, about the research, themes, and structure of Hattiesburg.

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Finally coming face-to-face with Bertonneau’s image, I was shocked. I had been reading about Bertonneau for book research. But while Bertonneau fought valiantly for the rights of black Americans, he didn’t look “black” himself. In the photo, his skin was fair, his eyes were light, and his hair was wavy. In contemporary America he might read as Latino, with a complexion somewhere on the spectrum between Pope Francis pale and Marco Rubio tan. Looking at the late great Bertonneau reminded me that the way passersby perceive a stranger’s race on the streets of America doesn’t necessarily match their actual background. Indeed, one’s own ethnic background may not even be what one assumes it is—as genetic testing has recently made clear to millions of Americans.

The leading civil rights litigants of the Reconstruction era, including Bertonneau, lived these complex racial realities—and it led them to challenge racism by challenging the concept of race itself. Most were openly mixed-race Creoles from New Orleans with roots in both Africa and Europe. This gave them a piercing perspective on American white supremacy and a unique legal arsenal for attacking it.

The most famous civil rights plaintiff of them all, Homer Plessy, who challenged railcar segregation at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, was described in the African American New Orleans Crusader newspaper as being “as white as the average white Southerner.” To launch his case, he had had to out himself to the train conductor as mixed-race to get ejected from the whites-only car. Plessy’s ethnic background was estimated to be seven-eighths European and one-eighth African but it was impossible to pin down for sure. That was the whole point. As Plessy’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court justices, “Is not the question of race … very often impossible of determination?” Plessy’s case was an attempt to resist not merely segregation but binary racial labels like “white” and “colored” altogether.

It was only after Plessy, Bertonneau, and the other leaders of the first civil rights movement had been defeated—and indeed because of their defeat—that the black-white binary solidified. Even on the Census, multiracial options dwindled and then died out. Tellingly, on the 1910 Census, Homer Plessy was black but, in 1920, white.

These early Creole civil rights activists who fought against the constricting racial categories of “black” or “white” defined themselves not by color but by culture—much as Latinos in the U.S. do today. Creoles came in every shade and had no pretense to racial purity. What bound the community together was their linguistic roots in a Romance language—French and its Caribbean Kreyol off-shoots—and their Mediterranean-influenced mindset.

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as Latin American Nouvelle-Orléans/Nueva Orleans was turned into Anglo-American New Orleans, the Creole community was racialized by outsiders. Anglo-Americans, who were wary of influential free-born Creoles and who were increasingly making “whiteness” a prerequisite for citizenship, obsessed over who among the Creoles had family-tree roots in African soil. The Anglo-Americans began revoking rights, including suffrage, on the murky basis of “race.” Soon after the purchase, they passed an “anti-miscegenation” law requiring whites to marry whites, blacks to marry blacks, and biracial people to marry one another.

Activists like Bertonneau and Plessy, who descended from this third group, fought against all racial categorizations. They were skeptical of the Anglos’ concept of race and their arrogant presumption to assign it on sight. After all, Plessy had had to explicitly tell the train conductor that he was mixed-race to launch his test case.

For nearly 30 years, Creole activists brought a series of cases that needled the Anglo-Americans’ binary view of race. This legal tradition was launched at the height of Radical Reconstruction when the light-skinned newly elected Orleans Parish sheriff, Charles St. Albin Sauvinet, was refused a drink in a French Quarter bar in 1870 and responded by suing for “violation of his civil rights.” In court, the Creole Sauvinet explained that his roots were in the Caribbean, where race was no black-or-white matter. “Whether I am a colored man or not is a matter I myself do not know,” he told the court. And he pointed out that no one could know anyone’s race for sure. Of his two drinking buddies, he remarked, “Finnegan and Conklin who were with me are said to be white men. I do not know. To all appearances they are.” But, of course, as Sherriff Sauvinet himself proved, you couldn’t necessarily ascertain people’s backgrounds by sight.

Sauvinet’s line of argument was seconded by Creole civil rights plaintiff Josephine DeCuir in her challenge to riverboat segregation. In 1872, she’d bought a first-class “ladies’ cabin” ticket for a journey upriver from New Orleans only to be asked to move to the inferior “colored cabin.” The ship’s crew cuttingly referred that section as “the Freedman’s Bureau,” which DeCuir took as a grave insult since she’d been born free into a wealthy slave-holding family. In court, DeCuir, who had roots on the European, African, and North American continents, was described as being the color of a “law book.” To problematize the whole concept of race for the jury, her attorney called to the stand a light-skinned French Quarter resident of Caribbean descent, one Mr. Duconge. In New Orleans, where his Creole heritage was widely known, Duconge explained, he was considered a person of color but in the rest of America, where he was a stranger, he was considered a white man. Hoping to show the jury how absurd the American racial system looked—and, indeed, still looks—to the rest of the world, he offered the statement: “the difference between a white man and a colored man is that the colored man has a darker face than the white man, but you can find a quantity of colored men reputed to be colored men who have white faces.”

Creoles then, like Latinos now, accepted that in the New World—in the U.S. no less than the Caribbean and Latin America—people from different continents have been mixing for centuries. Ultimately, in this view, New World people have become a race unto ourselves—referred to as la raza in Spanish. But Anglo-Americans rejected this reality by engaging in the dastardly fool’s errand of retroactively sorting New World people back out into definitive races, a practice that continues to this day.

Unfortunately, the brilliant Creole legal strategy to challenge racism by challenging race did not win in its time. While Sheriff Sauvinet’s civil rights victory was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices overturned DeCuir’s state court victory and Homer Plessy lost his precedent-setting case 7-to-1.

Learning of their defeat, the Creole Citizens’ Committee that had planned Plessy’s civil disobedience and funded his suit put out a statement: “Notwithstanding this decision … we … still believe that we were right.” Indeed, they were. The Supreme Court could permit the states to draw stark lines between black and white but that didn’t make actual Americans any less mixed.

An older Cuban-born gentleman illustrated this point precisely when he raised his hand after I presented at the Miami Book Fair last November. Recounting his introduction to race in America, he explained that he’d moved to Miami as an 8-year-old boy, in 1960, and at the neighborhood supermarket encountered his first segregated water fountains. Florida had lived under Jim Crow for more than half a century but to the boy it was brand new. Flummoxed, he asked his mother which fountain he should drink from. To the child, the people on the streets of Florida with their full range of skin tones didn’t look much different from the people on the streets of Cuba. But while Cubans acknowledged that they had mixed roots on different continents and thought of themselves, even in the same families, as lighter or darker, the Americans insisted that everyone was distinctly either “white” or “colored.” While Cubans considered “Cuban” to be an ethnicity, Americans refused to see “American” that way—even though they too were a New World melting-pot society.

On his mother’s advice, the boy chose the whites-only water-fountain—after all, he was light-skinned and it was clearly the superior appliance. His decision echoed E. Arnold Bertonneau’s in the previous century. After losing his federal case challenging school segregation and the racial binary, Bertonneau moved out to California and he, too, became “white.”

Americans long ago abolished the segregated water fountains but the binary racial mindset survives both in the American psyche and in American outcomes in health, wealth, education, and criminal justice. But the Latino concept of la raza has the potential to again take up the torch of challenging American racism by challenging the idea of race itself. Through this lens, America is not a society of warring tribes but a dysfunctional family. Warring tribes can only make peace treaties; dysfunctional families are better adept to reconcile and heal. At the dawn of Jim Crow, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” The question of the 21st century may be whether we continue to see ourselves divided by race or unified as la raza.

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Wilson rode home alongside the winding Mississippi River, where he was confronted by a group of armed white men on horseback. He was aware that freed people had been killed the day before, but wrongly assumed that the carnage had ended. The men ordered him to dismount, and one of them struck his jaw with the butt of a shotgun. Wilson was thrown into a wagon with other captive freedmen and transported to a makeshift prison.

Later that evening, Wilson and a few others were dragged out of their cells, lined up, and blasted with shotguns. Everyone was killed except Wilson, who somehow crawled into a nearby cane field and waited for three days until he felt safe. Over the next few days, white men tore through the parish, attempting to eliminate any further threats, leaving behind them a trail of black corpses. Estimates of the massacre range from 35 to more than 100 murdered.

Historically, this event has usually been labeled “the St. Bernard riots.” It should be termed the 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre—one of the most brutal episodes of racist violence in U.S. history, as well as one of the most forgotten. I first came across it while working as a Louisiana history teacher in St. Bernard Parish, looking for events that my students would be able to relate to their own lives.

What I discovered was that a murderous rampage had occurred in my hometown, and almost no one knew. The perpetrators never discussed their atrocities. Local records were lost due to numerous floods, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I researched these events for years, driving to and from work, down roads and past former cane fields that were once the bloody battleground of Reconstruction.

Not only did I live in the very parish where the massacre took place, but the surnames of the assailants and the victims matched those of some of my students, both black and white, who worked together, played sports together, and shared lunches. As I delved deeper into U.S. Congressional archives, I uncovered investigations commissioned by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Louisiana State Legislature, and correspondence with then-President Andrew Johnson. But my most startling discovery was that several of my students were the descendants of those involved, victims and perpetrators alike.

The racial tension that sparked the massacre was not unique to St. Bernard Parish. By 1868, the South had lost the Civil War and was struggling to rebuild its battered economy, which had depended heavily on an enslaved population. Louisiana was under federal military occupation during Reconstruction, and black males had obtained the right to vote.

The stakes were high for Southern elites in the presidential election, the first since the end of the war. If they could solidify a win for Horatio Seymour, a “Copperhead” Democrat who had promised to roll back Reconstruction policies, they might regain some of the power they had lost. Seymour railed against “Negro supremacy” and proudly painted himself as the “White Man’s” candidate. Whites believed that a victory by Seymour’s Republican opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union Army, would pave the way for racial equality, leading to the collapse of economic and political systems that favored whites in the South.

After the Civil War ended, many impoverished whites faced increased economic hardship. Wealthier whites exploited their fears and blamed freed blacks as the cause of their ills. Newspapers owned by these elites were full of anti-Republican and racialized propaganda. Many poor whites perceived Reconstruction as a form of government occupation that disadvantaged them while favoring freed people. Conditions were ripe for dangerous rhetoric to turn lethal.

Violence in St. Bernard Parish started a pre-election pro-Seymour rally on Sunday, October 25, 1868. As white marchers passed by Eugene Lock, a freedman, they yelled for him to “hurrah” for Seymour. Lock refused. Someone grabbed Lock to intimidate him into submission, but as Lock remained steadfast, the crowd grew increasingly agitated. One white man tried to stab Lock with a knife, while another shot at him, narrowly missing his target. Lock drew his own pistol and fired back, hitting the shoulder of the man who had fired at him. Outnumbered, Lock tried to escape, but was shot in the head and mortally wounded before finally being stabbed. As news of the altercation sped through the small community, men grabbed their arms and prepared for battle.

Yet there was no battle, only a one-sided rampage by marauding whites. Throughout the week, armed white militias hunted freed people like Louis Wilson, as if for sport. In his testimony to an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau shortly after the tragedy, Wilson said of the parish that he once called home: “This is such a cold place, I am afraid I will die here.”

According to an 1868 report by the Freedmen’s Bureau and an 1869 report by the Louisiana General Assembly, white mobs broke into homes and shot residents at close range, conducted executions in the streets, and killed those who tried to intervene. They plundered former slave quarters and stole items they found useful, most notably registration papers. A black pregnant woman was hacked to death by men with bowie-knives next to the courthouse. A white police officer was murdered by mobs for trying to keep the peace. It was 19th-century terrorism.

And it succeeded. While countless numbers of freed people fell victim to the violence, one white man, Pablo San Feliu, was killed by freed blacks in retaliation. Any legitimate supervisor of the presidential election was jailed, executed, or fled. Grant received only one vote in St. Bernard Parish as Seymour swept the state. According to historian John C. Rodrigue, “Republicans captured the presidency in 1868, but white terror carried the day in Louisiana.”

Despite the federal investigation, no one was arrested for the killing of the freed people. Black survivors identified white neighbors as their assailants, but no justice was sought. Instead, more than 100 freed people were arrested by local authorities and vigilantes for the killing of Pablo San Feliu. Over time, the massacre faded into obscurity. To this day, its only physical reminder is the tombstone of Pablo San Feliu, located in St. Bernard Cemetery, which reads:

The inaccuracies on San Feliu’s tombstone misrepresent the circumstances surrounding his death. The incorrect date suggests that it was erected a significant amount of time after the massacre, perhaps memorializing his death as if he were a martyr. The engraver referred to the freed people as “slaves.” Most importantly, by placing blame on carpetbaggers, the derogatory term applied to Northerners and other outsiders who had migrated to the South during Reconstruction, the inscription implies that San Feliu was an innocent murder victim.

Headstone of Pablo San Feliu in St. Bernard Cemetery. Photo courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.

Nearly a decade after the massacre, Reconstruction officially ended. By 1877 Louisiana had returned to “home rule,” which meant that the black population was no longer protected by federal occupation. The new state government focused on suppression of black voters. The new state constitution allowed for arbitrary literacy tests and issued poll taxes, while also granting grandfather clauses that allowed white people to circumvent these obstacles to voting. By 1898, the black voting bloc had declined from 164,000 to a mere 1,342. By 1910, that number dropped to 730, less than a half-percent of eligible black men. Their political voice was silenced throughout Louisiana.

A massacre of this magnitude deserves a place in history. In researching a book on the incident, I sought the assistance of locals who were aware of the ordeal, some from oral histories. Subsequently, I incorporated the story of the St. Bernard Parish Massacre into my teaching curriculum, so that students could be made aware of their community’s history and its relevance today. Other teachers also have the book in their classroom and discuss it with their students, examining how dangerous rhetoric can lead to deadly actions and the dire consequences of racist scapegoating.

My students are often shocked when they learn about this chapter of their community’s history. But it provides opportunities to have open dialogue with one another about their roots, and to bring these conversations into their own homes.

I have been criticized by some in the community for unearthing buried history. Some have claimed that the timing was inappropriate, that it would worsen existing racial tensions. However, the overwhelming majority of people in the community have been supportive and eager to know more.

The progress that has brought my students closer together in the classroom can only be honored through a deeper understanding of history. These relationships epitomize how far race relations in Louisiana have advanced due to people pushing against barriers, from that lone man who voted for Grant in St. Bernard Parish to those who waged the nation’s first major bus boycott in Baton Rouge nearly a century later.

However, the reversal of many gains made by black Louisianans after Reconstruction reminds us that these advances are not inherently linear or permanent. The continuing problems of mass incarceration, police brutality, and educational inequity underscore the effects of the disenfranchisement of huge swaths of the black population.

Understanding complex historical events like the St. Bernard Parish Massacre shows how we can continue to bridge racial divides today. Communities should not hide from such history, but embrace it.

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