This is an article on the diverging memories of the Civil War, in which I feature historian David Blight's Race and Reunion.

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" ...[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory."

Toni Morrison

I sometimes feel like an exile in Wisconsin. Born and educated in Chicago, the political, social, and cultural milieu makes me think of James Baldwin, walking streets alone among Scandinavians" Here in America, I was having one of those conversations with the medical van driver, on the way to my oncology appointment in Milwaukee. The 30-minute drive between Kenosha and Milwaukee, when the driver is Black, seems much too short a time, particularly when we talk about living while Black in Wisconsin. America, for that matter.

On one of these rides, the driver recalled an encounter he had with an older white man who happened to be sitting at the entrance of a grocery store. As the driver was about to enter the store, the white man looked at him. He told my driver about this fear of his, this fear of a future America because it looked so unreal . And that was it. The man had spoken.

In the silence between the driver and I, we both looked on at the trembling of many in fear.

It's a fear that has never receded but has always been the back bone of this nation. Fear of contamination, fear of that "one drop" of Black blood, fear of an imagined reverse of the racial hierarchy. What if they do to us what we did to them ? Standing on the side of that imagined narrative favoring the supremacy of hatred and the justifying no-holds-barred violence against Black American, has been in an effort to steady the collective trembling"

In the 1870s, Southern "Redeemers" felt the trembling of the ground beneath them. It's was the era of Reconstruction, of Black senators, Black landowners, Black business owner, Black pastors, Black educators, and educated Blacks. However rational it might appear to some to see the progress of a people once enslaved, white fear of "imagined racial equality," writes historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory , "coupled with economic insecurity and increasing hostility toward the activist state," halted the momentum toward a truly democratic society.

In fact, writes Blight, activists white supremacists encouraged Americans to feel the unnatural order of things, for the reality of jubilant Blacks simply made the narrative of a white Christian nation for white only nonsensical. But the activist knew how to appeal to the fears of their fellow Americans, who, Blight writes, shared in the feeling that "the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have." Little by little, the "activism" of the Republican Party, waning since the end of slavery, trickled to a halt. "Memories of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism."

What was good for Black Americans was a nightmare for America's white supremacists.

In January 2009, Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44 ^th president of the United States. Liberal and supportive of the capitalist regime, nevertheless, his race was seen by some white Americans as a brazen insult to white supremacy. In a way, one could say that the Redeemers of the 19 ^th Century went underground only to return as members of the Tea Party. In 2009!

In an interview, in which he discusses American's individual and collective memory surrounding the memory of the Civil War, Blight writes of his disappointed that memory supersedes history. "Memory," he continues, "tends to be more powerful than history." While "history gets revised," memory, on the other hand, doesn't. We receive our memory from family, institutions such as schools and churches, popular cultures, images, and political rhetoric. Ultimately, "memory is what people want to possess." We need only think of Trump, Blight explains, the populist who uses "collective" memory to evoke the image of a once great America and, further, to believe that this memory is being denied by others (Democrats, Blacks, LGBTQ members) who reject the ideology of white superiority.

For these Americans the Civil War conjures up memories of white supremacy. America was all things good: prosperous and, above all, innocent. Until the Civil War. And free Blacks! Who could blame the Southerners for organizing the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of that disastrous war? White supremacy was lost but now found! And the result of this use of the imagination ironically to create what actually never was, provided the South with a remarkable story about white bravery.

If blame is to be attributed to any one group, then Americans should look to the Blacks who desired to be free.

The desire to be free was a desire to be free of tyranny. For Black Americans, as Blight notes, the Civil War is the memory, above all, of emancipation from the tyranny of enslavement, the tyranny of exploitation. Cruelty. It's the memory of movement toward an America, as Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. has stated, that, "one day [will] rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed." What's submerged at the end of Reconstruction is the memory of a resisting and resilient Black people. In place of this memory is an imagined one in which Blacks are portrayed as "rapists," all-around criminals who were once the enslaved, "happy and content." Until the agitation of Northern abolitionists. Today, propaganda masquerading as history, suggesting that the capable District Attorney Alvin Bragg can't hold a thought unless the billionaire George Soros whispers one in his ears.

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Decoration Day was actually a thing. Blacks remembered celebrating the event since the newly freed people of Charleston, SC came together to plan and organize a memorial for the 214,938 lives lost in the Civil War. The "May Day" ceremony, writes Blight, known as the First Decoration Day in the North, had in attendance ten thousand people. "At nine o' clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this special cemetery began as three thousand black school children (newly enrolled in freedmen's schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of roses and singing 'John Brown's Body.' The children were followed by three hundred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to distribute clothing and other goods among the freed people."

Decoration Day was the first Memorial Day in America. The event gave meaning to memorializing the sacrifices of the dead while rejoicing in the resistance against tyranny. It was the beginning of a tradition. Of sorts. As Blight explains, Decoration Day was acceptable either and Southerners, looking to give the event new meaning, replaced Decoration Day with the familiar Memorial Day. And the Confederacy! The first Decoration Day was lost "in a grand evasion" of history.

A "wronged and outraged" people surfaced and became far more vocal than the Republican radicals or the free Blacks. The Southern white Democrats charged the Republican's with "misrule"! The Republican leadership, they claimed, had "stolen the rights of whites and disrupted the natural place of blacks in society." Memorial Day went on to serve as a memory of the Civil War where the Confederacy fought bravely. The image of these brave heroes fighting back against the memory of Emancipation is reinforced by statues of Confederate heroes appearing all across the Southern landscape.

In Richmond, Virginia, in 1875, "a standing statue of Stonewall Jackson sculpted by the British artist T. H. Foley," is the unveiled, representing "the first significant monument to a Confederate hero." Some fifty thousand people attended the parade and ceremony. The white supremacist narrative permits Confederate soldiers to once again take to the battlefield and now, once and for all, erase the memory of free Black people from the American landscape. Legalized segregation is marching forward!

Frederick Douglass declared Americans "destitute of political memory," writes Blight. Blacks were now asked to believe there was something corrupt about their emancipation from slavery. They, as Black people, were corrupt, if not criminal, for desiring to be free. "Freedom" is reserved for white Americans to make of it anything other than as a reference to the desires of free Black people! "May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that" bloody conflict"" said Douglass in a Memorial Day speech in 1871.

Black leaders, as Blight notes, pointed to the truly "wronged and outraged," the once enslaved and now free and still struggling to live safely among white Americans. Many, warned the Republicans and Northerners in particular "about declining radicalism" and "the ascendant white counter-revolution in the South." Blight cites one AME bishop Daniel Alexander Payne who called for Black "political vigilance," for "'in no portion of the Southern states where the whites are in the majority is the life of a colored person safe, unless he or she exhibits both in word, and in deed, the spirit of a slave" the heel of the oppressor is still upon the neck of the colored American.'"

In our era of Trumpism, Redeemers, fascists, claim the law is being weaponized against them when, in fact, justice has been weaponized in an attempt, once again, to erase the history of our existence in America.

I've referred to this encounter I had in 2007 with a professor emeritus, a white woman, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We had been talking, off and on, for a few months. I realized then, this talk was permissible as long as I refrained from referring to "race." That is, as long I had didn't bring up anything having to do with "colored" people, Black people, racism""a big, no, no""and slavery. No slavery! I was okay as long as I remained in that place assigned to me in this fascist narrative. If I violated this rule, I would lose the privilege of having these talks (about nothing) with this professor.

Until one day" I was tired of being on a university campus where I felt muzzled. I was tired of playing by her rules, the rules she inherited to protect her and her rights.

I mentioned slavery. My subject mater, in part. She became upset, as if I had dared to tell her she had no right to exist!

" No wonder they don't want you!" she yelled. The "they" referred to the university. It's administration, cow-towing to the narrative of white supremacy.

Stirred up by their populist leader, American white supremacists, today, are in a frenzy to ban any remembrance of white supremacy's culpability with slavery and its legacy.

One hundred and fifty-eight years since the Civil War, the spirit of democracy still prevail.

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.