In “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” Kidada E. Williams takes aim at “the ‘failure’ narrative of Reconstruction.” What she offers instead is an account of the era as a merciless “war on freedom,” waged on newly freed Black people by White people intent on denying their aspirations to personal security and meaningful equality. Reconstruction did not fail, she insists; it was overthrown by violence.
Williams offers a horrifyingly detailed picture of the ways Black people were attacked, often in their own homes, in acts of depraved violence, by people they knew, in a campaign of terror that started under slavery and acquired a new aspect with emancipation. The brutality took on an organized paramilitary form in the attacks by the Ku Klux Klan after 1867, when Black men earned the right to vote and hold office. It’s impossible to reliably calculate the number of people murdered — the Black politician Robert Smalls put the figure at 53,000 African Americans. To date the U.S. government has offered no estimate. What is clear, Williams insists, is that there were too many to count and that “the successive violence [White Southerners] used, rejecting newly freed peoples’ rights to any rights, was genocidal-like in nature.” She concludes: “Black Reconstruction didn’t ‘fail,’ as so many are taught. White southerners overthrew it, and the rest of the nation let them.”
What is most powerful here is not the forensic analysis of the violence, though it is devastating, but the way Williams conveys the experience of the victims. As in her excellent first book, “They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence From Emancipation to World War I” (2012), Williams, a historian at Wayne State University, centers the story on first-person accounts by Black survivors, the people who lived to give witness. Drawing primarily on testimonies offered in an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan by Congress in 1871, and on narratives of formerly enslaved people gathered by the Works Project Administration in the 1930s, she offers a riveting picture of the hopefulness and energy of freed people as they began their lives after slavery. She captures the strides they made toward family security and independence, even prosperity, in the first five years of freedom, and then the tsunami of violence that came at them as unrepentant enslavers turned into bitter defeated Confederates.