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On Sept. 7, 1923, Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel ordered all blacks & Mexicans who'd lived in the city for fewer than seven years to leave immediately. Ultimately, about 1500 working class people of color fled the city for their own safety. h/t @epopppp https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2020/05/29/Cody-McDevitt-Banished-from-Johnstown-Racist-Backlash-Pennsylvania/stories/202005290002+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
I grew up 20 miles from Johnstown. My family had lived in the area since the 1910s. I have a PHD in American History. I spent a summer in grad school researching and writing a local history curriculum. This is the first time I've heard this story.
This attests to the power of America's willful amnesia when it comes to large-scale, racialized violence. None of my teachers in public school ever mentioned that this happened. None of the elders who told me stories about local history ever mentioned it. It just vanished.
Here's a thread I did about the KKK in the 1920s, where I dug into an archive that contained a list of the people in my hometown who bought Klan robes in 1924. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1231691043856236544?s=20
As I mention in that thread, both my Grandma and Grandpa told me stories about seeing a KKK rally in the 1920s. As children of Jewish immigrants it was clearly intimidating. But they told the stories in a dismissive sort of way, that was the bad old days, no big deal.
Historians like to distinguish between history (what happened) and memory (what we collectively and individually remember). "History," the body of information that we use to understand who we are in any given moment, *is* memory. If something is forgotten, it is of no use to us.
Clearly, the story of virulent, violent racism in 1920s Cambria County Pa was not of use to most people in the late 20th century who socialized me. My grandparents told me that KKK story as a way to educate me about what it meant to be Jewish in Western Pa.
But that story ultimately was told to me as a story about the past with no meaningful connection to the present. That was the truth as my grandparents experienced it. It was also the truth as their children and I experienced it. I worry it's becoming less true.
The arc history is not woven into the fabric of the universe. The arc of history is bent by the human beings who inhabit and make history. If we're waiting for history to deliver us from the ugly energies driving the American right today, we're just whistling in the dark.
Carl Becker explained the history/memory distinction far better than I could. This is from 1931, BTW, it's not some new, fancy-pants, revisionist theory. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1166464290355728384?s=20
