Gates contrasts the iconography of Negrophobia with the New Negroes’ own cultural productions: family photographs and portraits of well-dressed and inevitably light-skinned African-Americans featured in black periodicals. In this matchup, white supremacy wins in volume and pungency over “the vain attempt to confect positive images of noble black people powerful enough to brace against the maelstrom of excruciating images that the white supremacist imagination had spawned.” Gates’s epilogue explains why. Upstanding New Negroes, no matter how pale, straight-haired, well dressed or impeccably educated, ultimately proved no contest for white supremacy, which had much more than iconography going for it. In the century after the Civil War, when most black men and women could not vote, white supremacy had political power — local, state and national. For all its hopeful eloquence, New Negro cultural expression could not overcome disfranchisement. Then, as now, the ballot held the key to a new Reconstruction.

Much of the scholarship Gates cites is not new, including W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 classic, “Black Reconstruction: An Essay of the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880,” as well as an abundance of academic articles and books inspired by the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s (an era often termed the Second Reconstruction) and which effectively undermined the prevailing account of Reconstruction as an era of ignorant and corrupt Negro rule.

Image

New in “Stony the Road” is a wealth of visual material related to “Reconstruction,” a documentary series that Gates produced for PBS and which aired this month. The visual bounty began to emerge in the late 20th century, thanks to the digitization of hitherto scattered archives. In “Stony the Road,” the vicious imagery — postcards, photographs, newspaper cartoons, political broadsides, knickknacks, theater posters, playing cards, children’s books, games of all sorts — forms a sickening onslaught that raises a question: Is the book African-American history or American history?

The winter of 2017 revealed stark contrasts between a vision of the country held by millions of blinkered Americans who insisted that the president’s attitude toward immigrants and minorities was “not the America” they knew and a fuller vision of history and society, including what has so often been buried under the rubric of “African-American history,” as though African-American history had little or nothing to do with American history. Those familiar with African-American history would hardly say, “This is not the America I know.” For in our current politics we recognize African-American history — the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. “Stony the Road” lifts the rug.