“Uncivil,” an excellent new podcast about the Civil War hosted by Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika, begins with a visit this summer to a controversial statue. It doesn’t involve Robert E. Lee or the Confederate flag, they tell us: it’s the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which was put up in 1876. Abraham Lincoln stands about twenty feet tall, impeccably dressed, his hand extended. Beneath him is a black man on his knees, naked but for a loincloth, a broken shackle on his arm. He looks almost as if he might be “shining Lincoln’s shoes,” Kumanyika tells us. “Lincoln is still standing over the dude.” The statue doesn’t give black people “any credit or represent the agency of black people in freeing themselves,” he continues. “Black people were trying to free themselves, rebel from slavery, before the Civil War even started.” Much of traditional American Civil War history can feel a lot like this statue. But “Uncivil” wants to do its part to present a different, truer, version. In an introduction, it claims to “ransack America’s history,” and, Faulkner-style, to show that “the past is never really past.” Then we hear a clip from this August, of the tiki-torch-wielding mob of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “You will not replace us / Jews will not replace us.” In 2017, we don’t need much convincing that the past is still here.
I talked to Hitt and Kumanyika recently at the offices of Gimlet, the company that produces “Uncivil,” in its industrial-elegant two-story space in Gowanus, Brooklyn; the office is full of reclaimed-looking wood beams, glass-walled workspaces and recording booths, framed posters of Gimlet shows, and busy young people in ergonomically sophisticated chairs. (The office’s aesthetic, Gimlet’s co-founder Alex Blumberg told me, came from a previous occupant.) Hitt, Kumanyika, and I sat around a high table in a small glass booth. Kumanyika, a forty-four-year-old African-American journalism professor at Rutgers, wore a black T-shirt that said “Nah.—Rosa Parks, 1955.” He and Hitt, a sixty-year-old white journalist, author, and “This American Life” contributor, talk in a tag-team way, with boundless energy for the stories they’re producing. They are serious and fired up and laugh easily, often at the bitter ironies of American life now and forever.
Kumanyika was in Charlottesville during the riots in August. “We were covering the quiet world of monuments,” Hitt said, with a rueful laugh.
“I’ve been to a fair amount of Klan rallies,” Kumanyika said. “But Charlottesville was like nothing I’d experienced before. As soon as I walked out on the street that morning, you just felt something in the air. People walking with open guns, Three Percenters walking around with AK-47s. At first, you thought they were the National Guard.” There were hundreds of agitated, aggressive white people on the streets. “And there was no coverup about heritage in Charlottesville,” Kumanyika said. “It was just straight-up naked white supremacy. And anti-Semitism. That’s not talked about enough, actually, the anti-Semitism.”
They met a couple of years ago, when Hitt approached Kumanyika about doing a show together. Kumanyika said, “Although we wanted to deal with some issues that had to do with race and ethnicity, and the way those things were baked into the politics in this country—forever, really—we didn’t want to have a ‘dialogue about race.’ ” He laughed. “Let’s listen to me, an African-American, and you—”
“A white man—we will talk about race!” Hitt said. “We affirmatively decided never to do that.” But, they thought, What if we reported stories together instead? “Both of us are completely fascinated by the stories you don’t hear about the Civil War,” Hitt said. He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, “avoiding the Civil War for all my life, partly because I grew up swimming in it,” he said. “It’s on every plaque, it’s on every building. Fort Sumter is in the harbor.” Eventually, he started reading about the Civil War; then he heard Kumanyika on the radio and called him up with the idea of trying to report stories together about its hidden history. One of these stories was about the Combahee River Raid of 1863, the subject of the first episode. “The Combahee Raid happened just down the street from me,” Hitt said. “I’d never heard of it.”
It just so happened that Kumanyika, too, had recently learned the incredible story of the raid. “Jack called me at a moment when I was very interested in the Civil War,” he said. “But it didn’t start like that. For a long time, I didn’t really see it as relevant to the contemporary political environment. As a professor and as an organizer, I’m trying to address things now. But I started noticing that anytime somebody had a really informed take, they always talked about something to do with the Civil War.” He started reading and quickly got hooked. “You know how you have a bag of chips and you try to just have two chips?” he said. He set out to read two stories, which led to more, and then to books. Hitt’s idea had immediate appeal.
As they dug around in the world of Civil War stories, Hitt said, “all of a sudden we would find ourselves talking about yesterday’s headlines. The connections are deliberate but also unavoidable.” That’s all the more true now. “The Civil War reverberates in both directions—all the way back to the original sin of the country and right up to whatever Trump tweeted yesterday,” Hitt said.
The Combahee Raid is a story that I’m still amazed we don’t all know—what the show describes as “the most ambitious covert operation of the Civil War.” “Uncivil” begins the story with an enslaved man named Shedrick Manego in Beaufort, South Carolina, known as Pa Shed, who decides to escape. One of the points that “Uncivil” wants us to understand is that there were patches of Union and Confederate in both regions—it wasn’t solid blue and gray but was “Swiss cheese,” as Hitt put it. What follows involves the tale of Pa Shed’s clever and daring escape, via a pine-log raft, to a nearby Union outpost, Port Royal; a wild-eyed Kansas abolitionist, Col. James Montgomery, who forces him to enlist; an ambitious plan involving a regiment of black soldiers; Harriet Tubman, acting as spymaster and leader; three gunboats; unsuspecting riverfront plantations; and a whole lot of incredible action. Descendants of Pa Shed, James Montgomery, and Harriet Tubman help narrate. The immediacy of the generational connections, like so much else these days, reinforces the proximity of the Civil War.
In much of the “huge Civil War industry,” Hitt said, and in textbooks, “there’s a lot of bullshit that is written and recorded and said in order to perpetuate this kind of reconciliation narrative—that the Civil War was just a momentary blip in American history.” It’s part of a quiet conspiracy, he said, to “confine the narrative largely to battlefields and generals and dates, the kinds of things that boys and girls are forced to memorize in school,” to keep the conflict defined as a military war. “Once you don’t buy into that premise, all of a sudden this whole other set of stories appears before your eyes,” he said. Like what?
“Here’s something you don’t know,” Hitt said. “New York City, led by its mayor, tried to secede and join the Confederacy—and form a separate and confederate nation called Tri-Insula.” He was right: I didn’t know this. “Why? Because all the bankers were deeply embedded in cotton trades, and all the financing of the plantations happened here on Wall Street. So, it’s very complicated, is what I’m saying.” The whole idea of “Uncivil” was, “Let’s the two of us hit the road and start reporting these stories,” Hitt said. Whatever differences there were in the perspectives of the two hosts, whatever awkwardness arose, would become part of the show. “Our premise is that it’s a given that the racial divide has always been here.”
I’ve heard three episodes of “Uncivil.” They’re all superb. Next week’s, involving the myriad betrayals of the “forty acres and a mule” promise and the theft of black-owned land, is as astounding as the story of the Combahee Raid—and it’s devastating. Another episode, involving Civil War reënactors, amazed me with historical revelations I didn’t expect, whose themes are eerily contemporary. When I first encountered “Uncivil,” I worried a bit at the show’s claim of ransacking American history. Badass approaches to history can overdo it, aesthetically and otherwise. But “Uncivil” neither overdoes it nor tries to be badass—it’s reporting fascinating stories that most of us haven’t heard and need to hear now, with humor, slang, and purpose, in voices natural to the hosts and the storytellers. The storytelling is riveting, and the information that leads to the narrative surprises is doled out in a way that feels satisfying and fair. Occasionally, transitions can be a little abrupt, and a couple of times continuity questions stopped me. (At one point, Pa Shed’s brother, previously unmentioned, was also escaping slavery on the log raft; a somewhat protracted description of Harriet Tubman waited too long to name her, for dramatic effect, when clarity would have been welcome.) But these are minor issues. Mostly, “Uncivil” feels valuable and bracingly interesting. My chief response to it—and to another history-related podcast that I’ll be reviewing soon—is gratitude. In a historical era that grows increasingly scary and surreal, and at a time when too many white Americans refuse to acknowledge or confront white supremacy, this kind of palatable perspective, honesty, and insight are much needed.
“One of the things that also gets covered up is really just all stories of African-American agency in the war,” Hitt told me. The traditional narrative, he said, tends to be that enslaved people “sat on the fields waiting for the nice white Yankees to come down and tell them they were free to go.”
“I’m really concerned with black agency,” Kumanyika said. “I talk about that in the pilot. Now, there have been writers like Adolph Reed, for example, who have actually written critiques about narratives of black agency—how the effort to try to highly emphasize black people as actors cuts different ways. One way is that some people can flat-out create narrative stuff that’s not true.” In the Combahee Raid, he said, Harriet Tubman played a central role—but he’s seen versions of this story “where they have her doing stuff that she didn’t do.” Beyond that, heroism and the pursuit of justice take many forms, and telling stories about the reality of how justice happens needs to be true to that, too. “In real life, resistance isn’t always dramatic and spectacular,” he said. “Sometimes resistance is small. And sometimes resistance is about coalitions.” At this political moment, he said, we need multiracial coalitions. “The Combahee Raid required all the people involved, and that included Montgomery, his commanders—some of those folks were white—white soldiers, and certainly the leadership of the black soldiers and Harriet Tubman. But it was multiracial.” It’s been an interesting challenge to tell this story, he said. “You have this enslaved person who rebelled in this very dramatic way. And then there are also these other subtle ways. And those are also important.”
