Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.