Gates’s book covers territory well known to scholars and Civil War buffs ... For those wishing to know more about this dismal story of racial hysteria in places as high as Woodrow Wilson’s White House and as low as the blackface minstrel show, Stony the Road is excellent one-stop shopping. With a main text of about 250 pages, Gates offers a compressed, yet surprisingly comprehensive narrative sweep ... Gates is at his most fluent in defining the newer Negro as a feature of the Harlem Renaissance powered by Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and other key figures of the African American creative pantheon ... the author is a painstakingly honest broker in describing the combat among black opinion leaders over the roles of class, skin color, education and social adaptation vs. rebellion in the African American saga ... Analytically, this is a lively, consistently challenging book. I was struck by a sweeping criticism Gates offers in discussing the Harlem Renaissance.
... an indispensable guide to the making of our times ... For in our current politics we recognize African-American history — the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug ... As essential history for our times, Stony the Road does a kind of cultural work that is only now becoming widespread in the United States but that Germans have been undertaking for decades. The German word for this effort is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — coming to terms with the past — and it carries connotations of a painful history that citizens would rather not confront but that must be confronted in order not to be repeated. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essential for understanding the American past as a whole.
...brilliant ... Gates' book is a fascinating social and intellectual history of the time between Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow period of American history. It's an absorbing and necessary look at an era in which the hard-fought gains of African-Americans were rolled back by embittered Southern whites — an era that, in some ways, has never really ended ... It will come as no surprise to anyone who's familiar with Gates' impressive body of work that Stony the Road is every bit as fascinating as the author's previous books. It's a work of history, but a living one ... Gates' analysis is predictably brilliant, but he's also just a joy to read. He writes in long sentences that don't ramble, but rather draw readers in and keep them engaged; his gift at crafting elegant prose serves to complement the persuasive arguments he makes in his book.
Part monograph, part exhibition catalog, the book is packed with an array of reproductions documenting the appalling variety of racist images that infected American culture by the early twentieth century. Those crude depictions stand in stark relief against the literary sophistication and dignity of the leading lights of the New Negro movement ... Gates...stresses how brief and unusual the Reconstruction era was in a nation where white supremacy is built into what he calls America’s 'cultural DNA.' This unfortunate but increasingly popular genetic metaphor amounts to a confession of intellectual failure, an inability to think about history, about change over time, in analytically useful terms. Worse, it indicates a disturbing return to the kind of quasi-biological reasoning employed by the very white supremacists Gates so effectively exposes. Claims that racism is 'built into the DNA' of the United States or that 'slavery is built into the DNA' of American capitalism are not merely ahistorical, they are antihistorical. Their purpose and effect is to deny the manifest reality of historical change.
Gates is one of the few academic historians who do not disdain the methods of the journalist, and his book... is flecked with incidental interviews with and inquiries of other scholars, including the great revisionist historian Eric Foner. Though this gives the book a light, flexible, talking-out-loud texture, it is enraging to read—to realize how high those hopes were, how close to being realized, how rapidly eradicated ... Gates goes on to illuminate the complex efforts of black intellectuals, in the face of the reimposition of white rule, to find a sane and safe position against it ... At one point in Stony the Road, Gates writes wisely of images as weapons ... Gates, who is expert at both, catching fish while seeing tides, leaves us with a simple, implicit moral: a long fight for freedom, with too many losses along the way, can be sustained only by a rich and complicated culture. Resilience and resistance are the same activity, seen at different moments in the struggle. It’s a good thought to hold on to now.
... luminous ... Gates writes brilliantly about the 'New Negro' ... Few authors approach such difficult history with the unblinking clarity of Gates ... If anyone wants to understand how the groundbreaking election of Barack Obama as this nation’s first black president was answered with Donald Trump’s feral white nationalism, Gates has provided a road map. Black excellence incites white resentment. It is a ragged scar on the American psyche that Gates masterly traces from the ruins of Reconstruction to the hate crimes and white supremacy on the rise again today.
... a timely chronicle of the battle to define blackness that raged from the Civil War through civil rights ... [a] vivid survey of recent scholarship ... There’s a lesson in this, Gates implies, for contemporary culture: whatever the talent of a Kehinde Wiley or an Amy Sherald, stylizing black excellence is no defense against state violence and voter suppression.
One of the strengths of Stony the Road is the ample room it gives to showing the racist imagery prevalent in popular magazines, political cartoons, and other cultural products of the era. With so much already written about Reconstruction’s achievements, this may be the book’s most important contribution: drawing links between the political and intellectual racism of the 19th and the 20th centuries and their racist popular culture, and then showing how black Americans struggled against them ... Stony the Road...gives us a powerful narrative of just how fragile the triumphs of American history truly are.
Stony the Road poses at its outset a curious rhetorical question that connects present-day realities to the book's historical subject matter ... Gates, arguably the nation’s number one 'go-to' black public intellectual, is likely using such past-is-prologue devices to pry open a wider perspective on the dismally cyclical pattern of American race relations ... Gates rousingly, persuasively contends that black resistance to racism embodied by the New Negro ideal remains as much a part of the cycle of race relations as white reaction to black progress.
Accompanying Gates’ illuminating narrative are bold 'visual essays' ... Gates also incisively chronicles the 'New Negro' movement aimed at countering pernicious racist stereotypes, how the Black elite engendered both an artistic renaissance and class divides within the Black community, and the rise of such crucial organizations as the NAACP ... fresh, much-needed inquiry...
Gates offers an innovative reinterpretation of a 'long Reconstruction' and a 'war of imagery' that produced the nation’s most odious and enduring antiblack images but also created a well of resistance ... Like the Legacy Museum, Stony the Road faces a narrative dilemma in how it frames black resistance to white supremacy. To what extent should the destructive nature of white supremacy be centered and what emphasis should be placed on the courageous but Sisyphean efforts of African Americans to challenge the Jim Crow regime? ... fails to take the next step in fully painting the world of the black cultural workers who attempted to muddy the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art ... provides a rich cultural history of the Reconstruction and its afterlife.
Gates suggests that it’s possible to consider the entire history of America after the Civil War as 'a long Reconstruction locked in combat with an equally long Redemption,' one that’s playing out even today ... A provocative, lucid, and urgent contribution to the study of race in America.
... an expansive exploration of Reconstruction, Redemption (white southerners’ attempts to reinstate a white supremacist system), and Jim Crow ... Gates outlines the ideals and accomplishments of black thinkers including W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, and he insightfully demonstrates how history repeats itself by comparing the emergence of Jim Crow with the rise in white supremacism surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency. This excellent text, augmented by a disturbing collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century racist images, is indispensable for understanding American history.
