That's why original source material, such as that found in The Trouble They Seen is so important and arrives with such power. 

(The subtitle itself lends an amusing, if unintended comment, about the whole process of assessment after the fact. My edition, published in 1976, is Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction. 

The 1994 edition uses a different subtitle: Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans. It's a very minor change, as these things go, but it provides some commentary on the changes in American society in the space of 20 years, and tells us someone preferred to alter the presentation. 

This is really a small matter, though, in the overall value of this book.) 

Does anyone need to be told at this point how horrible slavery was, the sustained damage it did to an entire people? If you think we do not need to read about it again, think again, because it tells us the damage didn't end with the Emancipation Proclamation--surprise!--and it didn't stop with the end of the Civil War. 

This collection of writings from black newspapers, diaries, copies of speeches and other material forms the basis of the black viewpoint of what was going on during Reconstruction, why it failed, and why that failure thrust the black citizens of this country right back into a degradation one step removed from slavery. This book practically drips with pain. 

The book opens with this blunt accusation from Frederick Douglass, written in 1876:
"You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? 
When the Israelites were emancipated they were told to go and borrow of their neighbors--borrow their coin, borrow their jewels, load themselves down with the means of subsistence; after, they should go free in the land which the Lord God gave them. When the Russian serfs had their chains broken and were given their liberty, the government of Russia--aye, the despotic government of Russia--gave to those poor emancipated serfs a few acres of land on which they could live and earn their bread. 
But when you turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters." 

  My edition, 479 pages, is organized into six chapters, and careful readers who had not paid attention in social studies class will quickly get a sense of the approaching doom as Reconstruction falls apart. These days, we'd say that the ex-slaves and their supporters were set up to fail.

Chapter One: Year One, with hope still alive, as freed slaves ask simply to be accepted as human beings even as they reveal the deep wounds of slavery. One such moment occurs in the recounting of a parade held by freed black tradesmen showing off their skills, including the bizarre, incomprehensible inclusion of a black auctioneer of slaves whose mock auction shouts stir several black women to shout out, "Give me back my children! Give me back my children!" 

Chapter Two: We Are Laying the Foundations of a New Structure, stories of the very beginnings of the attempt to set black people up to govern for themselves, as the Freedmen's Bureau began to take root. Designed to be a "bridge" between slavery and freedom, the bureau had severe limitations on its power to enforce its decisions and address injustices. For example, a letter written in 1867 complains that the bureau's order to former slaveholders to relinquish possession of a young boy has gone unheeded. 

Chapter Three, the Spokesmen: Fairly quickly, leaders began to emerge from among the freed population and those previously free through circumstance of birth or geography. Many wound up elected to rather significant leadership positions in state governments, a development the temporarily repressed Confederates would eventually crush. 

Chapter Four, The People. Oh, the poignancy revealed here, enough to keep Hollywood busy for years. For example, this report from the New National Era, July, 1984, recounting the attempts of the newly freed to locate and reunify their families torn apart by slavery: 
"Richmond feels highly flattered by the visits of so many excursion parties. On the 3rd of July a large company arrived from Georgia to search out relatives and friends from whom they had been separated by the cruel necessities of slavery.
Aged women and grayhaired men journeyed to Virginia from far-off Georgia hoping to hear some word, or, perchance, to meet sons and daughters whom they bade farewell at the auction block. Many had the good fortune to find those they sought, and their greetings were pathetic beyond description.
A curious circumstance deserves mention. It was a custom for us to be known by the name of our masters and whenever a change of ownership took place, our names were also changed. So when our Georgia friends came here it required considerable ingenuity to trace the various pedigrees, as many had assumed different names since their departure from this State." 

Chapter Five, There Is a Bright Future. Even as emancipation's benefits were vanishing, hope obtained that the future would be better. Education was the key, it seemed, and teachers were recruited from all over to teach the children. Letters from black children, often written to white children, are filled with their hopes while unconsciously revealing the sense of inferiority of their writers ("I don't suppose I'll ever be white." and "Will you speak to a black boy?") 

Chapter Six, the Government of the United States Abandons You. Here's where everything truly falls apart. Loaded with letters about ex-slaves forced to vote the way the white owners wanted, the shameful ouster of black lawmakers from the Georgia legislature the minute the federal troops were withdrawn, intimidation and, of course, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. 
This is how a white minister described, in 1872, his trip through Alabama in 1867: "I put up with some of the leading men of the state and learned from them that they would never yield. They had lost their property and worst of all, their slaves were made their equals and perhaps their superiors, to rule over them. They said there was an organization, already very extensive, that would rid them of this terrible calamity. I asked how, and they replied, "Why, suppose a man drops out here"--meaning that they would kill him. "While that is being investigated another will drop out there and yonder until the cases are so numerous that they will overwhelm the courts and nothing can withstand the omnipotence of popular sentiment." On my arrival at Huntsville, I learned of the organization of the Ku Klux Klan. It seemed to answer precisely the design expressed by these men."

  The chapter gives account after account of assassination, intimidation, political skulduggery resulting in the return of power to former Confederates and their friends. Thus, as one black leader writes on the book's final page: 
"In 1877, we lost all hopes..The whole South--every state in the South--had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves." 

What a piece of work, well worth every moment spent on it. I'm not sure how I've owned this book for so long and yet barely read it until fairly recently. It cries out for our attention, as if it were the link that explains so much of our domestic history of the last 100 years. 

As important as the story is about unregenerate racism triumphing over poor black folk, there's much more here.  It also should serve as a warning of what happens to us as a country and a people when we abandon people because we've tired of the  crusade.

I also recommend Richard Kluger's book, Simple Justice, to anyone wanting to know more about the struggle for civil rights conducted through the judicial system. 

 Pam Robinson is based at Newsday as a news editor with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service,  and is co-founder of the American Copy Editors Society.