Steve Luxenberg: ‘This is Not Black History; This is Our History’
In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Steve Luxenberg joins Roxanne Coady to discuss his new book, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation, out now from WW Norton.
From the episode:
Steve Luxenberg: Think about yourself: If you were a liberated person after the Civil War, with no education since it was illegal, and no marriage. You had children and you had to care for them. You’re not thinking about abstract things like integration; you’re thinking about survival. You’re trying to claw your way to some version of opportunity. It was fine for politicians to be arguing over these issues and passing civil rights legislation. Most people of color were not interested in theater; they wanted a job and not being pressed into peonage due to a trumped-up charge. You can’t pay the fie so you’re pushed into forced labor.
That’s why it’s so distressing because when we’re having a conversation about reparations, whatever your view is on that, to have the majority leader of the Senate say that the conversation should end at slavery, what world is he living in that he doesn’t understand that it didn’t end with slavery? It hasn’t ended yet. It didn’t end with slavery, and it went through Jim Crow and lack of opportunities and lack of education. This is the kind of conversation that we ought to be having.
One of the things that I have learned in doing this book, and why I wanted to do this book, is that after forty years of editing stories at the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post in which race often had a central component to the story or an undercurrent, I really felt that we did not understand the root of our racial conversation. I do think that race is our national conversation. We’re either talking about race or avoiding talking about race. People of color will tell you for them this history is a continuing trauma. They either have parents or grandparents or great-parents that can tell the stories of this era. People that are white don’t know that history, and they don’t understand the conversation. One of my goals was to bridge that divide and to have that conversation. This is not black history; this is our history. This is not white history; this is our history. It’s everybody’s history, and that’s the kind of country that I hope to live in.
Roxanne: Have you gotten pushback for taking responsibility for telling this story as a white person?
Steve: No pushback, but I have gotten questions, and I have received some commentary. I was invited to the first annual Antiracist Book Festival that Ibram Kendi organized.
Roxanne: Let’s add this clarification: His notion that there are racist and there are people who considered themselves not racist. His position is in order to have standing as being non-racist is that you must be antiracist. It falls into the category that I call, “Silence is complicity.”
Steve: That’s a good summary, and I’ll leave it there.
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Steve Luxenberg is the author of Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation and the critically acclaimed Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. During his thirty years as a Washington Post senior editor, he has overseen reporting that has earned numerous national honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes. Separate won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.
