Doing History in the Face of Tragedy

I was working on a post that referred to a debate that Eric Muller has been carrying on at Is That Legal? with the University of Wisconsin's Tim Tyson. When UNC, Chapel Hill, chose Tyson's book, Blood Done Signed My Name, for its Summer Reading assignment for incoming students, a local columnist drew an analogy between manifestations of black violence in the civil rights movement and Palestinian violence in Israel. He suggested that violence may play a larger role in getting us to do the right thing than we care to remember. It's a worthy discussion and I recommend that you look it up. Tyson's work represents a current trend in civil rights historiography that insists on our taking account of black violence, arguments for self-defense, and the widespread presence of weapons in the African-American/civil rights community. Despite a strong bent to sloppy sentimentalism about the civil rights movement's non-violence, my own current work on Vernon Johns is of a piece with the current that insists that we not exaggerate its achievement. But, really, I had nothing to add to the discussion, other than a recommendation that Eric, Tim, and the columnist -- all -- could benefit from reading Tim Burke's essay on historical analogies,"One of These Things is Just Like the Other."

I put that post aside for a better reason, though. I'm just overwhelmed by the tragedy that has played out on the Gulf coast and in New Orleans. If you go over to Kevin Drum's Political Animal, you'll see that a computer modeler at LSU estimates that Katrina will have killed fully 1/3 of the 250,000 people who remained in New Orleans when the hurricane struck. I pray that he's wrong about that and I'll resist believing him until every body has been counted. But, the fact is that we probably won't find every body. Some, for example, may have been washed out to sea. Given the poverty of the city and the magnitude of other recovery tasks, if that computer modeler is anywhere near being correct, it seems unlikely that we'll ever account for everybody or every body. Just the thought of that overwhelms me because I assume that everybody and every body counts.

I hope that the computer modeler's estimates are as wrong as the policy visionaries' projections about what could happen in New Orleans were empty of practical implementation. I hope that we hold public officials accountable for failing to give New Orleans either better protection against or adequate emergency plans for a worst case scenario. How could they both know the city's poverty and order a mass evacuation without making any provision for transporting those who had no means of leaving the city? Both David Brooks and Jack Shafer say what we've avoided -- that poor people and black people are the victims of that. Dead or alive, we'll have to transport them now. In addition to paying my taxes, I'll make a voluntary contribution to the relief efforts and I hope that you will, too. Choose your own agency.

The activist side of me recognizes how pitifully small my taxes and philanthropy are, in comparison to the need, and I'm comforted only a little by the fact that they add up when joined to those of others. What, further, can I do? I have no useful skills to put into the relief effort. I'd only get in the way of it. I can't even envision what a New Orleans might be like. What I can do, in the face of tragedy, is to resolve to be a better teacher and a better historian – to better fulfill the role in life to which I'm called. At our best, historians have done that. We've been spurred by tragedy to be more engaging teachers and to produce more thoughtful history than we'd done in the past. The pioneers in the Annales School looked in the face of central European tragedies and conceived of history that was not merely a function of nationalist ambitions. C. Vann Woodward saw the South's tragic history and told its story in ways such that its endings might be other than what they had been. Their examples assure me that, when I've paid my dues and done my mourning for the loss of life, of memory, of spaces, of records, it can spur me to be a better historian than I have been.