The Haitian Revolution casts a long shadow in the story of Milliken’s Bend.

On the podcast, “It’s Been a Minute” from NPR, a recent episode featuring scholar Leslie Alexander discusses the power and influence of the successful Haitian Revolution of 1791 – and what that meant to white slaveholders and policy makers in the U.S.

Host Brittany Luse (listen at 21:21 in podcast): ” Leslie, you said that by the 1700s there had been this longstanding fear that enslaved Black people would revolt against their white enslavers. But the successful Haitian uprising of 1791 turned that fear into a reality…”

Indeed, in Louisiana, with its many close ties to France, including numerous white refugees from Haiti, who fled with some of their human chattel, that fear may have been even more pronounced. The German Coast uprising which occurred in Louisiana a decade later, kept the fear and threat of a slave uprising alive in the minds of white Louisianans.

No wonder then, that the arrival of Union troops in northeast Louisiana in the winter of 1862-1863, just as the Emancipation Proclamation went in to effect on January 1, 1863, struck fear and panic in to many slaveholders and white residents in the region. Lincoln’s policy of enlisting black soldiers, including former slaves, into the Union army was nothing but a thinly disguised effort to incite a massive slave insurrection throughout the South. Now, some Southerners believed, the war must be prosecuted with even greater vigor and determination. It must waged with “no quarter.” In other words, the South should refuse to take any prisoners on the battlefield, particularly if they were black Union soldiers.

The fear of black men seizing their rights through their own actions did not diminish after the war. The heart of the American Reconstruction story is the waging of a different, but often no less fatal, kind of war between whites and blacks about the nature of American citizenship, rights, and liberties. African Americans were determined to seize these rights that had been won at the point of a bayonet; many former Confederates, often proclaiming with pride that they were “unreconstructed”, sought to restore the old ways, to find legal or extralegal means of denying the full rights of citizenship to Black Americans.

Even one hundred years later, black Louisianans were still fighting for basic rights of citizenship, like the right to vote or hold office. Luse and Alexander continue to trace this thru-line in their podcast: that it is not just white’s fear of black’s assertion of rights, but also, white fears of black success. For if we as a nation truly believed that “all men [and women] are created equal” – then there would have to be a reckoning, a recognition of not just our country’s responsibility for its past and the ways many individuals have been excluded from the American polity – but perhaps most threatening of all – we’d have to reckon with our present, and how far too many Americans, especially people of color, remain excluded or are thwarted in their pursuit of “the American dream.” That “liberty and justice for all” today still remains very carefully proscribed and limited, and that there are many laws already in place, or being considered, that seek to restrict and limit rights even further, so that it is instead, “liberty and justice for some” – or even only a few. This erosion of American civil liberties continues to take place today throughout our country. The efforts by some states to control the information provided about our shared American history, to pick and choose the stories that are told, to ensure that only positive, sanitized and simplified stories are told about a past that is far too complicated, messy, and diverse to be told in this way – are nothing but attempts at propaganda. Our children and our nation deserve better, and we all deserve the truth – as complicated, messy, uncomfortable and inspiring as it might be.

The story of Milliken’s Bend tells these truths. Brutality and hope; unfairness and wisdom; injustice and triumph. This is the stuff of true American history. Not a simplistic version of a cheerleader shouting out “U.S.A., U.S.A.” – but instead, “We the People” – and all of the complexity and wonder, sadness and regret, warmth and inspiration that phrase entails.