Gary Franks: Are both Reconstruction and affirmative action not ‘fair’ to nostalgic white Americans?

It is amazing how nostalgia turns into public policy.

The state of Virginia is wrestling with what to do about an already removed statute of Gen. Robert E. Lee, military leader of the Confederacy and an outstanding student at West Point.

However, Lee lost the Civil War to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Conversely, Grant was a mediocre student at West Point, and one with a drinking problem at that. Grant, a staunch supporter of Reconstruction, became our 18th president.

Which one is remembered in a more favorable light? Not Grant. He has been the butt of many jokes, such as: “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?”

I will always remember a political science class I taught at the University of Virginia. A question I posed to the students was on Reconstruction. Was it good or bad? One of my best students in class quickly raised his hand to give what he thought was the “obvious answer.” He was a white youngster from Mississippi. The class had every color of the rainbow — you know, it was one of those “diverse” classes.

Most of the white students said Reconstruction was horrible, with some even claiming it was “the worst thing ever.”

I tasked the class to research the topic. But I gave them directions on what the “truth” would be, at least from the perspective of former slaves. My great-grandparents were part of that number, and my grandfather was born during Reconstruction in 1870. People do see it differently, however, depending on their perspective.

Black people were making tremendous progress thanks to President Grant, radical Republicans, hard-working Black people and good white people.

Then we had the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction.

This resulted in the removal of the “pesky” Northern troops meant to force former slave owners to treat Black people fairly — we could call it the 19th century’s version of affirmative action.

The main part of the “Compromise” was the following: Republican Rutherford Hayes agreed to remove Northern troops, once led by Grant, from the South in exchange for the presidency over Gov. Samuel Tilden.

The Democrats favored a Republican president in order to get back control of the South. It was then that Jim Crow was born and over 4,000 Black people were lynched over the decades. States that were majority or near-majority Black saw a mass exodus of Black people to the North and West — called the Great Migration — making all the Southern states majority white.

Easily, the post-Reconstruction made white people in the South happy, and it was arguably the beginning of a dire period — second only to slavery itself — for Black people in America.

And today we have a large number of descendants of slave owners playing a role in getting rid of those “pesky” folks trying to help Black people again.

The statue of Lee, along with streets named after segregationists, and for some the Confederate flag, may be nostalgic for some folks, but we must not relive the past. They seem to want to have a “mulligan” on what took place when Grant and Lee were in Appomattox, the surrender of the Confederacy.

I have yet to find a Black leader or respected Black figure even in history who felt compelled to want the Aunt Jemima logo removed from pancake boxes or the Uncle Ben’s logo from rice boxes.

I don’t know anyone from this same pool of people who were crying for the name change of Fort Bragg or any other fort.

No, Black people could care less. Black people would like to have good paying jobs they are qualified to hold, possibly given the opportunity to work next to “you,” with a comparable salary and title. That is it. The rest is a “your (white people) problem”; it’s not a Black people problem.

With slavery, and post- Reconstruction Jim Crow (segregation) in our memory bank, Black people are not as nostalgic about the past.