by Patrick Chura, Ph.D.,
University of Akron
Novelist Grace Lumpkin was born in 1892 to a once-prestigious Georgia family that had lost its fortune during Reconstruction. Her father was a white supremacist who raised his children to adopt his views. In her childhood Lumpkin attended Klan rallies and participated in celebrations of the romantic splendor of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.
Lumpkin’s first novel, To Make My Bread (published in 1932), includes revealing glimpses of racist rituals, drawn from her early memories.
At one point, Lumpkin describes a massive reunion of Confederate veterans in about 1905. A state politician, overcome with nostalgia for slavery, bolsters the hatred of his working class audience by delivering a rousing oration in favor of “Race Domination.”
Then a well-dressed adolescent girl takes the stage. She charms the aging soldiers by reading war poetry and reminding them that their battle scars are sacred symbols of the Old South. The spellbound vets respond ecstatically, emitting a fierce rebel yell and vowing to forever battle for “white rule.” For today’s readers, the scene might recall Trump’s January 6 insurrection, where quite a few confederate flags were brandished by Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
It’s also interesting that the girl inciting the racist mob in Lumpkin’s novel is based on the author herself at age thirteen. By the time Lumpkin became a writer in the 1920s, she had rejected her father’s bigotry and remade herself as a progressive voice for civil rights.
The unlearning of racism seems a crucially important task for our nation right now. We might ask how a white woman from Georgia accomplished it.
First she had to check her privilege and disavow her culture’s comfortable lies. After her father died penniless, Lumpkin went to school alongside poor whites and even worked barefoot in the cotton fields. She did not insulate herself from social contact with Black sharecroppers and formed relationships across the race divide.
In her early twenties Lumpkin borrowed money to pay for a year of college, then taught night school classes to struggling laborers and farmers. When her mother died in 1925 she got serious about her writing and again stepped out of her comfort zone, moving to New York for a job with a radical magazine.
But before she left the South she witnessed an event that may have been her true awakening. She reworked this brutal incident into a key scene in To Make My Bread.
“The chain gang is camped up the road,” a young male character says to his adolescent friend in Lumpkin’s novel. “Let’s go and watch.”
The two boys hide behind some blackjack bushes and spy a group of chained convicts in striped uniforms. A guard sits behind them with a rifle under his arm and two hounds at his feet. Every time the guard snaps out an order he points his gun. The convicts sing mournfully as they shuffle through the dust toward two long cages on wheels.
“They sleep in those cages,” says the observing boy.
When one of the convicts stumbles at the cage door, the guard brings the butt of his rifle down heavily on the Black man’s head. Screaming for mercy, the convict is stripped and sentenced to thirty scorching “licks” with the overseer’s whip.
“The leather came down on the back of the convict,” Lumpkin writes. “Groans came from the man. They grew fainter, then there came a groan from the cages.”
The white observer is stunned. He hears but does not see the groans because he is “lying face down on the ground with his mouth in the dirt. A sickness had come to him. Like Job of old he wanted to curse God and die.”
Lumpkin’s chain gang murder is the 1930s equivalent of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. In relating this and other experiences of endemic racism, the author challenges readers but also examines her unenlightened younger self, a process that couldn’t have been easy or guilt-free. But Lumpkin’s uncomfortable moral searching changed her.
Recently, at least 15 Republican-led state legislatures have been trying to pass laws that would restrict what schoolteachers can say in class about racism in America. June 12 was a National Day of Action meant to raise awareness about the legislation and send a message from concerned teachers that they will speak honestly about the country’s racist past and present.
As The Washington Post reported, the proposed Republican laws ban teachers from including material that makes an individual feel discomfort when learning about U.S. history. One teacher said in response, “Unfortunately, a lot of American history is uncomfortable.”
In this controversy, Lumpkin’s personal story and her 1932 novel are relevant. They make plain the need to keep teaching about massacres, lynchings, and chain gangs. These forms of oppression not only went unpunished by our justice system but were perpetrated by that system.
Along with many more works by African American writers, To Make My Bread is a type of book that should be studied in schools. It is also a type of book Republicans want to ban.
