The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future - Hardcover

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Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic, TIME, and Religion News Service. He is frequently featured in major national media, such as MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. He holds a PhD in religion from Emory University and a MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award, and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He writes a regular Substack newsletter at RobertPJones.substack.com.

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Prologue Prologue BEFORE AMERICA
On May 4, 1863, the steamboat Northerner pushed up the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bound for Fort Snelling, a military outpost north of St. Paul, Minnesota. Just a few miles into the journey, Captain Alfred J. Woods encountered a large handmade raft adrift in the strong currents. Aboard were seventy-six African Americans: forty men, ten women, and twenty-six children.

The leader of this determined group was Robert Hickman, who was attempting to free himself, along with his family and neighbors, from enslavement on a plantation in Boone County, Missouri. Hickman, a preacher who could both read and write, had seen newspaper accounts of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation four months earlier. Although the proclamation did not apply to Missouri because it was under Union control, this news nonetheless inspired him to begin making plans to escape north. The Hickman party aimed to reach free soil by way of the river, which was by then safely patrolled by the Union army. They embarked under cover of darkness on the moonless night of May 3, but because their makeshift craft was not equipped with sails or oars, they drifted for a day in the wrong direction before encountering the Northerner.1

Seeing the floundering party with so many children aboard, Captain Woods asked if they needed assistance. Sympathetic to their plight and knowing that the strains of the Civil War had left Minnesota with a labor shortage, Woods ordered the raft to be securely tied to the steamboat and offered to take them as far as his final destination.

Neither Woods nor Hickman anticipated the vitriol that awaited them. On May 5, the Northerner approached the levee in Lowertown, on the outskirts of St. Paul. As local dock workers, mostly Irish, caught sight of the self-emancipated African Americans (commonly referred to as “contraband” by whites) on the trailing raft, they became increasingly agitated, seeing them as competition for jobs. As word spread, a threatening crowd gathered on the levee. The commotion was so great that St. Paul police arrived on the scene. But after assessing the situation, they sided with the mob and threatened to arrest not the Irish rabble-rousers but the Black asylum seekers, should they disembark.

Captain Woods ordered the boat with its trailing raft to steam on to Fort Snelling. There, Hickman and his party came ashore without incident on May 5, but they were met with an unexpected sight: hundreds of disheveled Native Americans were huddled together, forcibly assembled near the docks.

The desperate and anxious crowd they encountered were part of an original group numbering more than 1,600, mostly women, children, and elderly Dakota people who had been held under armed guard all winter, following the Dakota War of the year before, in a miserable encampment in a lowland area below Fort Snelling. Unbeknownst to them, Minnesota government officials and military leaders were awaiting the spring thaw that would allow for their mass deportation downriver from their ancestral homelands to a bleak reservation in the Nebraska Territory. By the time the ice finally melted and river levels rose, hundreds had died. A group of 770 Dakota people had been shipped off the day before on another steamer, the Davenport.

Having set the Hickman party safely ashore and unloaded the wagons and supplies for the military fort, Captain Woods ordered preparations to receive his next “cargo”: 547 Dakota people, whom he was transporting for the fee of $25 per head plus 10 cents a day for sustenance. Soldiers from Fort Snelling herded the ragtag remnant aboard the Northerner “like so many cattle,” as one observer put it. As they pulled away, a local minister’s wife remarked, “May God have mercy on them, for they can expect none from man.”2

Neither Hickman and his companions, nor the Dakota people, would have had the perspective to realize they were witnessing the momentous final chapter of both chattel slavery in the US and “Indian removal” in Minnesota. They would not have grasped the paradox the two groups represented that afternoon on the banks of the Mississippi River: that the end of bondage for Hickman’s band also marked the last vestige of sovereignty for the Dakota people. And they would certainly have been unaware that, in the closing weeks of 1862, just five months earlier, President Lincoln was simultaneously considering two documents that would dramatically change the fates of each group: a warrant for the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men and the Emancipation Proclamation.

This encounter on May 5, 1863, contains multiple narrative streams, each of which tells a different story about America. The question is, which do we follow? Do we tell the story of Fort Snelling, the military outpost established to protect the westward expansion of settler colonialism? Do we embark back down the Mississippi River to Missouri and the story of enslaved Africans in the South? Do we push upriver from St. Paul to its headwaters and stories of Indigenous peoples populating this land for millennia? Or do we portage east and cross the larger waters connected to the homelands of Europeans who first set foot on these shores just a few hundred years ago? Each narrative pushes back to a different beginning.

AMERICA’S IDENTITY CRISIS

Across the last few decades in the US, we have experienced widespread debates and even violent conflicts over American history. Battles like these typically erupt during times of social change, when cultural convulsions shake the foundations of old ways of knowing and living. In these unsettling times, closely held stories, long-established institutions, and taken-for-granted features of the landscape itself are questioned. We fight over heroes and monuments and scream at school board meetings. Teachers and librarians are surveilled; writers and artists are suspect; books are banned and burned. We move with increasing hesitation in uncharted cultural territory, like explorers venturing into those voids on ancient maps marked only with the ominous words “Here be dragons.”

Identity, rather than policy, drives divisions. History becomes the new front line in the culture wars, as claims about who we are as a people inevitably turn on competing narratives about when and how we arrived at this place. These contests are not mere verbal abstractions. Each narrative arc, each “in the beginning,” privileges one set of interests over others and ultimately validates the accumulation of power and wealth and land in the hands of some and not others.

We are living in such a time of uncertainty and transition. As I documented in The End of White Christian America, over the last two decades the country has, for the first time in our history, moved from being a majority-white Christian nation, demographically speaking, to one in which there is no ethno-religious cultural majority. When Barack Obama, our first African American president, was elected in 2008, a solid majority of Americans (54 percent) still identified as white and Christian. But by the end of his second term, as Donald Trump entered the national political scene and was elected president, that number had fallen to 47 percent.3 According to PRRI’s American Values Atlas, by 2022 that number had dipped further to 42 percent.