Black voters played a large role in the heavy Republican losses in the 2026 midterms. Their resentment over actions in the past and present fired their enthusiasm. But a lot of that anger is unjustified.

Dr Paul Craig Roberts, as he has done quite often, brings to light in an Oct. 14, 2026, essay aspects of the history of the United States that others would like to keep forever shrouded in darkness, as he recounts the untold history of black slave holders and other similar stories that make the race hucksters squirm in their seats. He opens with some numbers that will probably startle not a few:

‘Larry Koger’s book, Black Slaveowners, is well documented. Koger provides 34 pages of documentation listing the names of black slave owners and the number of slaves they owned in South Carolina and 38 pages of historical notes. Most free blacks only owned a few slaves, but some blacks themselves had plantations and had as many as 30 or 40 slaves. One owned 123 slaves. Another owned 156 slaves. One owned 68. Another 71. Many owned 10 to 20. In South Carolina alone in 1830 there were 450 black slaveowners who owned between them 2,412 black slaves. The majority were in the city of Charleston, which suggests that these were free black businesses such as bricklayers, cabinet makers, carpenters, coopers, cotton gin makers, millwrights, shoemakers, and tailors. Being artisans meant that the slave employees, some owned and some rented from owners, were likely with the percentage of what they earned they were allowed to keep able to buy themselves out of slavery, and the records show that as time passed the numbers of free blacks increased as did the number of black owned black slaves’ (paulcraigroberts.org).

He goes on to show how integrated the antebellum South was compared to the North, among other interesting sidenotes, while near the end he gives us the following melancholy paragraph:

‘For decades white liberals, and their hanger-ons in the left, have taught blacks to hate whites and to blame whites for all of their problems. We see expression of the rising hate in black violence against white persons.’

Dr Roberts’s essay is very informative, and we hope folks will pay a visit to his site and read what he wrote in this essay. However, for present purposes we would like to go in somewhat of a different direction by illustrating for folks just how integrated the races – black Africans and white Europeans – were here at the South during those supposedly uniformly horrific times for black folks in Dixie from the plantation era to the end of the Civil Rights crusades. As such, we hope it will contribute in some small way to defusing the racial animosities that are still prevalent in the United States.

The material comes from a memoir of the Biedenharn family whose life centered for many years around the cities of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Monroe, Louisiana. They were a well-to-do family who played a large role in the growth of major businesses like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines. In their home worked a black woman whom they called Mammy. They dearly loved her, and she them. Their life together was quite beautiful. Emy-Lou Biedenharn (1902-1984) writes of Mammy,

‘We always knew our colored Mammy in our home forever bossing, loving and teaching us, planning with us, laughing at us and singing to us. The very backbone of our homelife was “Mammy’s raising of us.” Much laughter in a leisured tempo ran through the halls with Mammy in the midst of it. She said that if she closed her mouth, we thought she was sick. So she kept her mouth open and laughed and sang all day’ (p. 105).

We are already well outside the conventional narrative of a South boiling with racial hatred. But Emy-Lou takes us even further outside of it, as she shows how much authority blacks like Mammy had inside of white Southern homes:

‘Mammy really bossed us with a firm hand. This bossing included Mother and Father as well. . . . Mammy would jump up from the front steps to go into the house to phone Father. We could hear her saying, “Mister Joe, time is late. You don’ hafe to work so hard. Come on home. You have disremembered it’s supper time, and you is needed to set de supper talk in dis house.”

‘In winter months, as Bernard and I finished our schoolwork, we could hear Mammy phoning, “Come on, Mister Joe, excusin’ de fact supper is ready, I don tol’ you chilluns learn from example. Supper will be on de table in a “cotton pickin” minute. So now, hurry up before the biscuits git cold.” To us she said, “A father’s fireside manner is necessary in every house.” Regardless of how busy he was at the Coca-Cola plant, Father soon came to supper. He knew that Mother would never allow us to go to table for a meal until he arrived home’ (pgs. 105, 106).

Mammy had latitude in rearing the children also:

‘When Mother and Father had friends for dinner, Bernard and I were usually at the table. Stuffy Victorianism was never allowed. Mammy schooled us in appropriate conversation—“supper talk” she called it. As Mammy served at our side, she glared at Bernard or at me if we were not holding our own in the midst of grown-up ideas. Even as children she expected us to be individuals, and to add something in the way of animated conversation in any group in which we found ourselves’ (p. 107).

For all of her strictness, there was also a fun-loving side to Mammy, as Emy-Lou recounts:

‘With Pied Piper technique on almost any day in summer, Mammy would lure me to her home, about ten steps from our kitchen door. There, with her head thrown back, in an aura of joyous triumph, we would sing together as Mammy pumped and played her old reed-organ with tugging tenacity. . . . Sometimes we sang hymns; our favorite was “In the Garden.” . . . Any spiritual sung with Mammy’s rhythmic feeling seemed to hold the pulse of a hundred years of folk culture’ (p. 109).

Staying in the religious realm, Mammy would take the Biedenharn family back further in time with stories ‘of “big doin’s on the plantation” . . . The biggest of the doin’s were the ceremonies surrounding the baptizings in the river’ (p. 110). The full account is too long to include in this essay, but the end of her narration is helpful enough in dispelling the notion of a monolithic South of race hatred:

‘In loud sonorous tones, the Bible reading and the singing and the preaching and the praying went on from the preacher standing in the water and the deacons standing on the banks. At this plantation baptizing an endearing sight to us was to watch an elderly Negro preacher with frail frame and bent shoulders. His abundant snow white hair gave a light to his enraptured expression. He stood near the water’s edge. Two visiting preachers stood close to him, one held the large church Bible open; the other preacher held an old black umbrella over the feeble darkie’s head, to protect him from the hot sun while he read his text from the open Bible. This dear old preacher, an ex-slave nearing ninety, read with deep feeling and with surprising clarity. One by one the visiting preachers prayed, while everyone present bowed their heads. When they had finished praying for everybody, a shrill voice sang out, “Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee.” The singing was accompanied with loud Alleluias and Amens from those who “got religion.” Shouting, moaning and chanting came from the converts, young and old, as they gasped for breath coming up from being emersed in the cold water. This went on for hours and gradually worked up to a great emotional climax of rejoicing.

‘No group of happier people could be found on earth than these good-hearted religious folk, expressing their child-like faith in God. Late into the night we could still hear soft sounds and echoes of “Lord, Give Me Dat Old Time Religion” as the feasting went on and on’ (pgs. 111-12).

Emy-Lou summed up her younger years with Mammy thusly:

‘We loved Mammy regardless of all the things she made us go through. Our “Mammy education era” held some tears, but no artificiality, only a value for reality, fun and play. We had confidence in our raisin’, our lives, our habits, and our standards. Mammy set the mold and we toed the mark!’ (p. 109).

Such was the raging spirit of racism in Monroe, Louisiana, in the early 1900s, and in many other places in the South.

Unfortunately, as Dr Roberts alluded to above, the race hucksters have made quite a lucrative industry out of stirring up animosity between blacks and whites, so much so that in Monroe, where scenes of wonderful harmony like those between Mammy and the Biedenharns once were witnessed (and, thankfully, still are witnessed quite often), now the white mayor and the majority black city council are clashing, with the latter charging the former with not supporting black districts to the extent that they would like. And this sort of thing is not limited to Monroe by any means.

It is all very shameful, but better times are possible. The example of the Biedenharn family with Mammy, and the numerous other examples like them throughout Southern history, are proof of that. A warm friendship between whites and blacks is the natural way of things here at the South. Yes, mistakes were made in that relationship, sometimes

grave ones, as they are made in nearly every human relationship this side of the Fall. Yet it would be foolish to narrowly focus on those mistakes to the exclusion of the rest of the history of these two prominent parts of the Southern family.

But if we are to view one another as enemies, let us recall the warning of the beloved 20th-century saint, Silouan of Mt Athos – ‘The soul that has not known the Holy Spirit does not understand how one can love one’s enemies, and does not accept it’ (orthochristian.com). We would rather have the Holy Spirit within us, as did those happy people on the plantation after their baptism in Mammy’s tale. We hope the rest of the South, black and white, and all the other States, would likewise rather have that than the bitterness of endless racial animosity. Future political campaigns and elections results will help us know how close we have gotten to that goal.

Quotations about the Biedenharns are taken from Emy-Lou Biedenharn, Biedenharn Heritage, 1852-1952, Emy-Lou Biedenharn Foundation, Monroe, La., 1994.