Assignment # 2: Read Chapter 2:BEFORE YOU DO THIS WORK!
(Writing historical fiction. 40 points.)
If you were alive during and/or after Reconstruction, what would your story be?
These (#s 1-19, below) are imaginary people, but such people might actually have lived after the Civil War.
Choose one of these people, and write his or her story. It could be a letter, a journal entry, a short story or story written today by the relative of that person. Look up facts and people to make sure you have historically accurate information.
Write paragraphs, double space. Capital letters and spelling counts.
If you were – ( CHOOSE ONE!!)
1. A teacher in a Freedman’s Bureau School in South Carolina: You are a woman who was a Black abolitionist from Pennsylvania. You came to South Carolina with the Freedman’s Bureau. The KKK wants to destroy Reconstruction, and has threatened you and your school where you educate children in the day, and adults in the night.
2. A Southern racist joining up with the Knights of the White Camelia. You used to be a foreman on a cotton plantation. You want to terrify the Black population in a rural town in Georgia.
3. A “Redeemer” politician who is angry that Black men are being elected into the Louisiana State Government-
4. A free Blackman, running for office in Mississippi. You were a freedman, never enslaved. You were a literate, well-read, a cabinet-maker, and well respected in the community of freed Blacks in Jackson. White people bought your cabinets and chests.
5. A Radical Reconstruction Senator who wanted President Andrew Johnson to support the Civil Rights Bill and decided he should be impeached when he opposed it.
6. A poor Black grandmother, former slave, who received land on the island outside of Charleston, land distributed by the Union army. You and your family were going to grow cotton, and sell it, and improve their family’s lives forever, but the land distribution did not go through. You were literate because you secretly learned to read while a young girl.
7. A Black soldier who fought for the Union, says how the end of slavery is important, but worries that the Redeemers and the Night Riders are getting stronger. He believes that the Black soldiers won the war for the Union.
8. A Black legislator from Florida explaining why it was important that public schools be set up throughout the state. Most poor whites had no education, along with the Freedmen.
9. Hiram Revel’s secretary. How Revels supported Reconstruction legislation against the pressure of the Redeemer politicians passing Black Codes.
10. A poor Black family faces an attack of the Night Riders, probably KKK- upon their tobacco farm in Virginia. The family is armed.
11. A child who hid away and saw the entire Colfax Massacre, including the death of his father.
12. A Black legislator commenting on the betrayal of the Republican Party which allowed Reconstruction to end in 1877. He explains what it would mean to the entire Black population of the South.
13. A Black father who ended up back at the old plantation upon which he had slaved away his life before the 13th Amendment, living as a tenant farmer. He commented on Frederick Douglass’ comment: ”You gave us no acres” and the terrible state of 4,000,000 people freed from slavery without land. Didn’t their whole families, for hundreds of years, work and die on those lands?
14. A Black farmer who was able to purchase land, but seeing the plight of his neighbors – the landless Black people, finds himself agreeing with W.E.B. DuBois’ criticism of the Freedman’s Bureau.
15. A white sharecropper, after Reconstruction ended, and whites were able to get better conditions: schools, sidewalks, discussing with his neighbor, a Black sharecropper how their lives were different yet the same. Can be written as a dialogue. They discuss the nature of racism dividing people.
16. White former sharecroppers excited about working in the new factories in the South, lose their enthusiasm as the conditions prove to be very difficult.
17. A wealthy Southern man, formerly a plantation owner, is setting up a textile factory in Charleston, South Carolina. . He will hire only whites, and explains how that will enable him to keep wages down. The Northern bankers backing his business approves of this decision, as it means more profit for them, too. Why does segregation help wealthy landowners and businesmen? Where does that leave poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, Black and white? .
18. An associate and friend of Ida Wells Barnett, worryies about her speeches ( look some up) and the danger to her life for her freedom of speech andher campaign to end lynching. .
19. Meeting of (white) professors in a university gleefully discuss how the ideas of William Dunning will last forever, making white people and Black people believe that Reconstruction was a failure. How did the “Dunning School” reinforce racism?
102: Chapter II: Readings on Reconstruction, the New South, and Southern Poverty:
While the Wars against the Indigenous people began, the nation was fighting what was called the US Civil War, from 1861-1865. The war ended slavery as an institution, and three amendments, after the Union won, numbers 13, 14, and 15 gave the “Freedmen” supposedly equal rights under law.
The Thirteenth Amendment said,
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,”
The Fourteenth amendment, said,
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,”
And the Fifteenth amendment said,
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,”
But these rights could not be guaranteed as the Confederate Southern reactionaries gradually crept back into power in the South. The ruling class, the old Planter class, wanted to “Redeem” the South under their racist control. These “Redeemers” worked against Reconstruction from before the Civil War was even over. The concept of “Redeeming” was a reference to Jesus, the Christian “Redeemer,” but the Southern ruling class thought that Black people were devils and they were the redeeming angels.
Abolitionists
The United States had been founded on the idea of inequality. Men were superior to women, Whites were superior to people of color, and the idea “races” within the human race was promoted. Rich people had political rights, poor people had none. Whites had the right to annihilate Indigenous people. Racism and patriarchy were the driving force for the political, economic and cultural rule of the leaders of the United States in the South- and in the North as well. [* Take an extra-credit field trip to the African Burial Ground, 290 Broadway]
White people had been schooled on the “inferiority” of Native American people first, and after the introduction of Africans as slaves in the 17th Century, of Black people. All people of color were oppressed, denied rights, education, and equality of any sort. So, when the Civil War ended, the only group of people who opposed this ideology was the people who came from Africa and the few White People who had been
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(https://newsok.com/article/5437392/freedmen-files-oklahoma-mormons-take-on-historic-freedmen-bureau-project-to-help- blacks-trace-ancestry)
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, while not legally freeing the enslaved people, enabled many to flee their plantations during the Civil war. There was little the slave-owners, away fighting the Yankees could do about people liberating themselves. Harper’s Weekly, a magazine that is still published today, wrote in 1863,
“The condition of our emancipated slaves is such as to require the most faithful and intelligent care. The operation of the act is to attract them to our lines. They come in groups of utterly destitute men, women, and children. The most unfortunate of human beings, they yet do not find corresponding sympathy. Even the Government which has freed them, and which invites them to enlist as soldiers, does not treat them honorably, and pays them not the wages of the white soldiers, with whom they bravely fight and nobly fall, but only the ten dollars a month allowed by the law for the general employment of contrabands. Homeless, almost houseless, utterly destitute and dependent, this rapidly-increasing class of our population demand a peculiar care. It is idle to say that no particular class of persons can be provided for, but they must all take their chance . . .
The sagacity of the President will undoubtedly lead him to make some proposition to Congress for the establishment of a Freedman’s Bureau, charged with the care of this exceptional class. Davis says in his Message, with a sly leer at Europe, “By the Northern man, on whose deep-rooted prejudices no kindly restraining influence is exercised, they [the Negroes] are treated with aversion and neglect.” But the reluctance to touch the subject, the stupid prejudice against the word Abolitionism, the dull slang about “one idea,” must give way to plain practical common-sense, or the country will be dishonored.”~ Harper’s Weekly, December 26, 1863, page 818 (Editorial)
Hundreds of thousands of the freed people after 1865 fled from the plantations where they and their families had been imprisoned and oppressed for hundreds of years. The location of their mothers or husbands or children, members of their families who their masters had sold was unknown to them, but they wandered throughout the South, looking for their family, or work, or a home…with only the clothes on their backs and their wits.
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Insecurity characterized the lives of people freed from Slavery: then -Reconstruction
Unwelcome to their former masters, mostly unprotected unless union troops were nearby, the Black people in the South were refugees of a cruel and traumatic system. The Slaveholders had deliberately withheld education to their slaves, by law, so Black people were largely uneducated and freed without any economic or social security. Under the rule of the “slavocrats,” the institution of slavery deliberately weakened the people by breaking up and separating families.
The period after the Civil War was known as Reconstruction. The Republican Party controlled Congress and wanted to secure the Black vote for their party, and some in the Congress actually wanted to try to rectify the conditions of the over four million Black Freedmen and women who were landless, homeless
(https://staffordcountymuseum.com/artifact/freedmens-bureau/)
The Freedman’s bureau and some army leaders also attempted to settle former slaves on Confederate lands confiscated or abandoned during the war. During its years of operation, the Freedmen’s Bureau fed millions of people, built hospitals and provided medical aid, negotiated labor contracts for ex-slaves and settled labor disputes. It also helped former slaves legalize marriages and locate lost relatives and Helped black veterans. The bureau also was instrumental in building thousands of schools for blacks, and helped to found such colleges as Howard University in Washington, D.C., Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia.( http://www.history.com/topics/black- history/freedmens-bureau) US schools do not stress these facts because the writers of most textbooks lie about the effectiveness of Reconstruction. Black people in charge of their own lives is a very threatening idea and historical fact for racists.
Due to Congress, and the new President, Andrew Johnson who had slaveholding friends, there was a “shortage of funds and personnel” for the Freedmen’s Bureau. These racists thus prevented the Freedman’s Bureau from fully carrying out its programs. Through their antagonism to Reconstruction, their schemes and plots to deny funding, US Congress and the “Redeemers” in Southern State Governments, assured the demise of the Freedman’s Bureau. Racist politicos did not want to see the advance of Black people in the South. The US government totally defunded the Freedman’s Bureau after seven years.
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and seeking respite from their horrible experiences under the system of slavery.
Congress established a Freedman’s Bureau to ameliorate the conditions of the millions of freed people. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal Helpance.
Freedman’s Bureau School
A Confederate sympathizer shot Abraham Lincoln, just before the Civil War ended in 1865. Andrew Johnson, his Tennessean Vice President became President. Johnson was a weak man with dubious Union credentials. Tennessee had been a border state – a slave state. Johnson was a middle-class man, much in awe of the slaveholders and their style and power , their fabulous houses and luxuries. When the war ended, Southern ex-Confederates sent their charming wives and daughters to visit the President to beg for the political reinstatement of their fathers, husbands and brothers who lost their political rights to hold office having joined the Confederacy. According to the US Constitution, Article III, section 3 these men had committed treason against the US:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
This was debated in Congress, and Johnson’s pro-Confederate policies resulted in impeachment proceedings which failed by only one vote. That one vote allowed the old Slavocrats back into office and betrayed any “concern” for Reconstruction. Though the war was over, the country was deeply divided, and the ideology of racism still ruled.
A cartoon from the 1870s showed “Columbia,” the symbol of United States, asking, “Shall I trust these men?” The ex- Confederates came begging for readmission as governors, Senators, representatives, Armed Forces officers, and other official positions they held before the war. Cartoonist Thomas Nast showed Confederates, Confederate States of America Vice President Alexander Stephens, Congressman Robert Toombs, Confederate Navy Admiral Raphael Semmes, Generals Robert E. Lee, Richard Ewell, and John Bell Hood, begging for pardons. And one-by-one, President Johnson pardoned them.
“Shall I trust these men?”
(http://adourian.wixsite.com/home/single-post/2016/1/19)
While the Reconstructionist Republicans passed a series of laws
to protect the Freedmen and women, all the legislation in the
world could not protect Blacks when the Southern States came under the control of those “Redeemers” who would, if they could, re-enslave the Black population. They made their image the Christian Jesus, who was called the “Redeemer” in Church, but they were nothing like this symbol of love and peace.
Poor whites were also disenfranchised (they had no vote), since they could not afford to pay the “Poll Tax,” nor could they pass the literacy requirements for voting. This prevented them from prospering. But the Redeemers “rewarded” them as the years went by with the passage of “Jim Crow” laws that segregated the South, a process that began as soon as the ex-Confederates took office in various states. The whites were poor but the white ruling class told them they were superior. They did not advance much in their world, but racism gave them a false sense of worth. Racism divided poor people and prevented them all from advancing. Legislation was passed during Reconstruction promising freedom for the Blacks, but it was only on paper.
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When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, as Harpers Weekly reported:
“The Civil Rights Bill was drawn with simplicity and care for a very necessary purpose. It declares who are citizens of the United States, defines their rights, prescribes penalties for violating them, and provides the means of redress. The power to do this, springs from the very nature and function of a supreme government. But the power being conceded, it is fair to demand that any measure of legislation shall be shown to be necessary, politic, and constitutional…… Nearly a fifth of the population of the country are colored. They are subject to the Government; they support the obligations and do the duty of citizens. … They are native to the soil. They owe and perform the obligations of other citizens. Why not call them citizens? . . .”
(On President Andrew John’s veto of the act):
“The President’s objection to the bill as special legislation is a manifest misapprehension. The bill is universal in its application. If the rights of any citizen of whatever birth or color are invaded anywhere in the country the bill provides the remedy, without any exclusion or exception whatever.”
But how could the government prevent the, “the rights of any citizen of whatever birth or color (from being) invaded anywhere in the country?” Only by Union Troops who were placed in the South. Nor could they be everywhere, so racist mobs KKK and other clubs attacked or threatened thousands of Blacks People. Many people were “captured,” were imprisoned. Many were forced to return to the plantations from which they fled, or forced to accept conditions of near-servitude on other plantations where former masters convinced them they could live if they worked for them.
Black Reconstruction and Radical Reconstruction:
No 40 Acres and a Mule:
Many people have heard of the legislation that would have provided “40 Acres and a Mule” for the newly freed people after the Civil War. It did not happen. Had Congress passed this reform, Black people would have been compensated by land which their families had worked for hundreds of years.
(https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-8216the-wars-of- reconstruction8217-by-douglas-r-egerton-1389993983)
The problem of poverty for Blacks following the Civil War and henceforth would have been solved. As Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates wrote:
“The federal government’s massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves… generated by black leaders themselves… Imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth…
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This idea for massive land redistribution actually was the result of a discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton held four days before Sherman issued the Order # 15) with 20 leaders, headed up by Reverend Frazier, of the Black community in Savannah, Ga., where Sherman was headquartered following his famous March to the Sea.
Section one (of The Order) states, “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the
country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. With this Order, 400,000 acres of land — “a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast, — would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves….”
(https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/justice- thunders-condemnation.226107/)
Reverend Garrison Frazier, born into slavery, and a leading South Carolinian minister spoke for the group which convinced Sherman to redistribute the
land:
“Is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” And when asked next where the freed slaves “would rather live — whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” without missing a beat, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” (http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/01/40_acres_and_a_mule_promise_to_slaves_the_real_story .3.html
40,000 thousand Black people moved onto that fertile land along the southern East Coast. After Lincoln was assassinated, Southern sympathizer Andrew Johnson rescinded the Order, and the Black population was left with no land, and a dismal future under white supremacy.
Black and Radical Reconstruction:
It may seem strange to 21st Century people to think of Republicans as people who promoted Civil Rights for Blacks. But in fact, there were many former anti-slavery forces who joined the Republican Party when it was formed in the 1850s. In addition, there were businessmen who wanted an end to slavery so that Black people and poor whites in the South would enter the cash economy and be a market for the industrial goods the capitalists were manufacturing. To do this, it was necessary to create legal pathways to “freedom,” which, under capitalism, means the freedom to earn money, to take jobs or leave them, the freedom to hire or fire workers, and to provide equal protection under law for all. In addition, the Republicans wanted the Black men to vote, because they figured they would always vote Republican, since that was the party that freed them.
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“At the beginning of 1867, no African-American in the South held political office, but within three or four years a significant minority of office-holders in the South were black. About 137 black officeholders had lived outside the South before the Civil War. Some had escaped from slavery to
the North, become educated, and returned to help the South advance in the postwar era. Others were free blacks before the war, who had achieved education and positions of leadership elsewhere. Other African- American men who served were already leaders in their communities, including a number of preachers. (Source: Boundless. “African Americans in Southern Politics.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 21 Jul. 2015.//www.boundless.com/u-s- history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history- textbook/reconstruction-1865-1877-19/the- reconstructed-south-141/ frican-americans-in- southern-politics-746-4789/
Black men voting Republican (http://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/shaping_the_constitution/doc/voting)
The legislatures of Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina and other Southern States passed legislation to set up public school systems. There were no public schools for anyone in the South which did not exist in the South before the Civil War. “Historian James D. Anderson wrote that the freedmen and women were the first Southerners
“To campaign for universal, state-supported public education.” Blacks Republicans coalition played a critical role in establishing the principle of universal education in state constitutions for the first time during congressional Reconstruction. …When they gained suffrage, black politicians took this commitment to public education to state constitutional conventions.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era#Public_schools)
One of the most powerful of the Black Reconstruction Republicans was Hiram Revels from Mississippi.
“Mr. Revels was born in North Carolina, in 1822, of free colored parents. He was educated at a Quaker Seminary in Indiana and became a Methodist minister. At the breaking out of the war he was settled in Baltimore, and from that time took an active part in the management of freedmen’s affairs. In 1864 he went to Vicksburg, in pursuance of this mission, and Helped in the organization of schools and churches among the liberated slaves. He passed the next two years in Kansas and Missouri, preaching and lecturing on moral and religious subjects; returned to Mississippi the following year, and has since resided in Natchez. He is presiding elder of his Church for the southern portion of the State. Since July last he has been a member of the City Council, and has served in that capacity with credit. A short time since he was elected to the State Senate by a handsome majority and has now been selected by the Legislature as a proper man to represent the State in the Senate of the United States. Mr. Revels is a tall, portly man, of light complexion; has benevolent features, a pleasant voice, and cultivated manners. He is thoroughly respected by his own people, and by the whites. In a historical twist of fate, Senator Hiram Revels took the Senate seat formerly held by Jefferson Davis, who had served as president of the Confederate States of America.” (http://blackhistory.harpweek.com/7Illustrations/Reconstruction/HRRevels.htm)
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White supremacists, the old Southern pro-slavery racists -were infuriated by Reconstruction. In state after state, they began to conspire to stop Black men from voting. In the state legislatures, they passed Black Codes similar to the laws that restricted Blacks under slavery. The legislatures and then governorships in the South became more and more dominated by the Redeemers who used religion to justify their legal, penal, judicial and paramilitary efforts to oppress the Black population of the South.
Hiram Revels.
(https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/hiram-revels-the-first-african-american-congressman)
Harper’s Weekly wrote: “How easily wicked and treasonable organizations may gain the control over the peaceable and the industrious members of society has always been signally apparent at the South. A band of wild and desperate young men, maddened with whisky and torn by demoniac passions, is the governing power in Texas and Alabama, Georgia, and even Kentucky. Masked, armed, and supplied with horses and money by the Democratic candidates for office, they ride over the country at midnight, and perpetrate unheard-of enormities. It is said, and no doubt truly, that not one in a hundred of their fearful deeds is ever told. Their enormous vices and crimes are faintly depicted in the Ku-Klux reports of 1872. Yet before these infamous associations Southern society trembles. They rob, they murder, they whip, they intimidate; yet no man, white or black, dares to denounce them. If a colored man ventures to tell of some frightful assassination which he saw in the dim midnight, he is himself dragged from the prison where he had been placed for safety and slaughtered, as happened recently in Tennessee, with horrible mockeries. If a United States official becomes conspicuous in politics, he is carried into the woods and shot, as at Coushatta. In Alabama and Louisiana, the bands of young ruffians patrol the country by day as well as night, shooting down Republican voters. According to a recent estimate, there is a Republican majority of 20,000 in Louisiana, yet M’Enery (the Democrat-Redeemer) and his band of assassins claim to have carried the last election, and hope to win the next by their usual outrages. Nor does any Southern paper in Georgia, or Alabama, or Texas, and scarcely in Tennessee, venture even to denounce the murderers or the violators of the laws; or if any Northern journal, roused to a proper indignation by the wrongs inflicted upon peaceable settlers and citizens in the disturbed districts, calls for the suppression and punishment of the lawless crew, it is at once placed under the ban of the secret associations. Such journals (exclaims the Austin Daily Statesman) “are more to be hated than the rattlesnake.” Harper’s Weekly has been especially marked in this way, and its sale is forbidden by no unmeaning threats to the booksellers of Austin. The White Leaguers are resolved that the power of a free press shall never be felt in the South, and hopetopursuetheircareerofcrimeunimpededbythevoiceofhumanityorreason.” (~HarpersWeekly: October 24, 1874)
The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other Racist Paramilitary Organizations:
Meanwhile, the planters and their allies- political Democrats – funded paramilitary organizations prepared to burn, kill, rape, and terrorize anyone who supported equality for Black people or any local schools or
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programs set up by the Reconstruction governments. The Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, and the Order of the White Rose were all funded by wealthy planters and businessmen in the South who wanted to reinstate slavery, even after the 13th amendment to the Constitution abolished it.
By setting up night riders, burning crops on Black peoples’ farms, burning Schools, houses, threatening teachers and students alike. Their sheriffs and deputies arrested people
who did not have a pass, set up prisons which took men who had violated the Black Code pass laws, and making these men labor on plantations or roads as chained convict labor. State by state the Southern aristocracy returned to power and only Black people saw what was happening. With business associates and friends in the North, the Ex-Confederates kept power over poor Blacks and Poor Whites in the South. Through legislation, incarceration, and terror. The entire South was under threat, and though there were significant numbers of poor whites who aligned themselves with Black people, demanding land and better conditions, the wealthy Southern Redeemers threatened them too. Any farmer, teacher, doctor, worker or school child or parent feared for her life. Though the Union troops remained in the South during Reconstruction, they only amounted to 12,000 troops in the eleven Southern States that were set up within the five Military Districts of the former Confederacy. That was not enough to protect everyone, and racist acts of terrorism were rampant. The stories of attacks on schools or communities, such as the Colfax Massacre, spread and intimidated people.
The Colfax Massacre: 1873: In Colfax, Louisiana, white and black militias clashed in an Easter Sunday battle that left scores of Blacks dead. According to a historical marker located at the site of the killings, the white victory “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South. . .” In Grant Parish, a newly-created majority Black district located in central Louisiana, the contest for local offices of judge and sheriff led initially to the installation of white candidates. These “victors” were soon replaced by legally elected Black representatives because a federal judge ruled in their favor. When the officials took control of the courthouse, hundreds of Black residents, of the parish, fearing reprisals, took shelter at the courthouse as paramilitary KKK and White League forces assembled across the countryside and converged on the town of Colfax
“200 white men from surrounding Louisiana
Parishes responded to the racists’ call for help and
demanded the Blacks give up the offices and
records. The Blacks, many of whom had served in
the Union Army, said no, and threw up breastworks
from trenches they dug around the courthouse. The
whites told the African Americans to remove their
women and children, which they did. After a nearly
two-week siege, on Easter 1873 the assembled white
mob — led by former Confederate army officers —
set fire to the courthouse. When armed blacks fired
on the white paramilitary force, a four-hour battle
commenced. By the end, three members of the (https://www.colorlines.com/articles/tbt-144-years- reconstructions-deadliest-massacre )
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White League had been killed while more than one hundred thirty blacks died. Most of the deaths took place after the fighting had ceased and the White League forces shot, mutilated and dumped the bodies of their victims into the Red River.
Although federal charges were brought against nine Colfax conspirators under the 1870 Enforcement Act, the Supreme Court ruled in Cruikshank (1876) that the 14th Amendment — which the 1870 law was intended to uphold — applied only to state actions and did not apply to individuals. With the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval, the rout was on. In the wake of the violence at Colfax, white paramilitary forces assembled throughout the state and across the South with the aim of ending “Negro domination” once and for all. In 1874, Louisiana gubernatorial candidate John McEnery insisted that “we shall carry the next election, if we have to ride saddle-deep in blood to do it.” (http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2007/04/colfax-massacre)
Reconstruction ended because the white people who had cared about Black people were outnumbered, and Black people were terrorized or marginalized. Those whites who had been temporarily interested in the “issue” shifted their focus and supporting the profitable Industrial Revolution sweeping the North.
They could pay factory workers in the South less than the miserable wages they paid Northern workers, threatening to hire Black men for the Southern factory jobs.
Northern capital thrived because the South had racism. The white people believed themselves superior, no matter how hard a life they had. They had been taught this way. Some realized that was keeping everyone back. But the KKK atmosphere made any organizing dangerous and hidden.
https://theconversation.com/what-everyone-should-know-about-reconstruction-150-years-after-the-15th- amendments-ratification
When a disputed Presidential Election was thrown to the House of Representatives in 1876, the wheeler-dealers promised the Southern Redeemer whites in Congress they would end Reconstruction once and for all and take the Union troops out of the South if they would support Rutherford B. Hayes, in the Electoral College. This deal was called the Compromise of 1877. This left the Federal Government to pursue other projects such as the “Indian Wars” and expansion West, supporting the railroads and “Robber Barons” whose monopolies were strangling the farmers and workers. The Black people in the South at the mercy of the ruling class whites whose systems of sharecropping and tenant farming trapped millions of people into a new kind of slavery. And the Ku Klux Klan and the nightriders proceeded in the following decades to terrorize the Southern Black people in numerous mass atrocities, including the Southern system of prison labor.
What happened at Colfax was repeated many times from the late 19th into the 20th Centuries, and no Federal control was ever created to protect Black people from the massacres and community destroying
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terrorism from racist whites. The “Compromise of 1877” was just another federal acquiescence to the demands of the ruling class racists in the South, and this group continues to hold sway over politics in the US.
Every “Compromise” the US government passed, from 1787 to 1877, was a US Congressional compromise obliterating the rights of Black People:
• The 3/5 Compromise, during the US Constitutional Convention in 1787, allowed Southern Slave States to count 3/5 of their Black enslaved population for representation in Congress, though the representatives elected only represented the Slaveowners. People who were enslaved were not 3/5 of a person; they were not “persons” with rights under law.
• The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, and set up a geographical boundary south of which every territory coming into the union would legalize the institution of slavery
• The Compromise of 1850, which allowed California in as a Free State stipulated severe fines and prison sentences for anyone helping to aid or hide people escaping from Slavery
• And the Compromise of 1877 in the House of Representatives ended any further Reconstruction efforts on behalf of the people freed from Slavery, leaving them prey to the ravages of the Southern Redeemers and racists
So, by 1877, Reconstruction was over. The US government had devoted twelve years to an under-financed attempt to rectify the three century-old crime of slavery.
Frederick Douglass wrote about it in 1892:
“Our Reconstruction measures were radically defective. They left the former slave completely in the power of the old master, the loyal citizen in the hands of the disloyal rebel against the government. Wise, grand, and comprehensive in scope and desire as were the Reconstruction measures, high and honorable as were the intentions of the statesmen by whom they were framed and adopted, time and experience, which try all things, have demonstrated that they did not successfully meet the case. In the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eager desire to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it could alone be upheld.. The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. Frederick Douglass
They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow- man, “You shall serve me or starve,” is a master and his subject is a slave….Though no longer a slave, he is in a thralldom grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him, swindled out of his hard earnings by money orders redeemed in stores, compelled to pay the prince of an acre of ground for its use during a single year, to pay four times more than a fair price for a pound of bacon and to be kept upon the narrowest margin between life and starvation….
When the serfs of Russia were emancipated, (1861) they were
given three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty- handed, without
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money, without friends and without a foot of land upon which to stand. 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 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. ”
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/535998793125659867/?lp=true
Years later, the great historian, professor, activist and sociologist, William Edward Burghardt DuBois wrote,
“THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War. “
“[T]his deeper question forced itself to the surface, despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the Question Assignment; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and so at last there arose in the South a government of men called the Freedmen’s Bureau, which lasted, legally, from 1865 to 1872.
No sooner had the armies, east and west, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp fires of the blue hosts shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men, and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering, hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt, — a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable in their dark distress. . .
. . . General Fremont, as early as August, 1861,
declared the slaves of Missouri rebels free. . ..
Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. “They constitute a military resource,” wrote the Secretary of War, late in 1861; “and being such that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss.”… the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies marched……
“In Washington, the military governor . . . opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on through the South. The government and the benevolent societies furnished the means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of control, thus
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started, rapidly grew. .. General Banks in Louisiana, with 90,000 black subjects, its 50,000 guided laborers, and its annual budget of $100,000 and more. It made out 4000 pay rolls, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of public schools. So too Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over 100,000, leased and cultivated 7000 acres of cotton land, and furnished food for 10,000 paupers. In South Carolina . . . General Saxton . . . and the Treasury officials, sold forfeited estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/09/25/who-was-du-bois/)
. . . [T]he Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. . .. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of 4,000,000 slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been an Herculean task; …. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, — that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable.
. . In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors the Bureau was severely handicapped. . .. Abandoned lands were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of $400,000 derived from black tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold, and public lands were opened for the settlement of the few blacks who had tools and capital . . .
The vision of landowning, however, the righteous and reasonable ambition for forty acres and a mule which filled the freedmen’s dreams, was doomed in most cases to disappointment. [I]n 1865, that the finest opportunity of binding the black peasant to the soil was lost.” W. E. Burghardt Du Bois. “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” Atlantic Monthly (1901):
The South Remains Poor: Racism divides and conquers in the “New South”
The land of the South that formerly belonged to slaveholders was attractive as an investment for Northern businessmen. Because of the systems of SHARECROPPING and TENANT FARMING, there were profits to be made, and the former slaveholders who survived financially, and investors from Wall Street bought up the land. With no money to purchase the farmland, seeds, livestock, and the equipment the poor the rich had a willing system of control over the agricultural masses. Former planters needed workers who would not have to be paid until they harvested a crop — usually one of the two labor- intensive cash crops that still promised to make money: cotton or tobacco. And at the end of harvest, they Black and white sharecroppers or tenant farmers had to pay back all their debts to the owners of the land- and the company store- and were lucky if they broke even.
Northern businessmen set up middlemen to manage the lands they bought up. Large landowners divided their lands into smaller plots and turned to a tenant system. From the end of the Civil War and well into the 20th Century, African Americans and poor whites became tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Tenant farmers usually paid the landowner rent for farmland and a house. Sharecroppers owned nothing, borrowed everything, and paid a large share of the crop for this “privilege.”
These agricultural people worked hard. Their children and their elderly relatives, parents, uncles, cousins and aunts all worked just to survive. Most tenant farmers and sharecroppers bought everything they needed on credit from local merchants, hoping to make enough money at harvest time to pay their debts. But though they did all the work, sharecroppers received only one third of the value of the crop, so at the end of the season, they were often more deeply in debt than they had been in the beginning. Maybe they
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needed to buy a new mule, or someone had needed medicine or a doctor’s care; there were always emergencies. This bound them to this cruel system. They could not leave since they owed the landowner money after producing for him a profit that would enrich him and keep them poor.
But even those who owned land lost it during times of economic crises (the “Panics” of 1873, 1884, and 1893) when commodity prices went down. Landowners with small farms were forced into tenancy. The crop-lien system took the land from the small landholders by forcing the farmers to mortgage their land at the beginning of every season. If they did not clear a profit, they lost the land bit by bit until they too
were tenant farmers and the banks were their landlords. This kept many in an endless cycle of debt and poverty. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of tenants increased by 40%. By 1890, one in three white farmers and three of four black farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers. (http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist- newsouth/4698)
(http://neworleansingreen.blogspot.com/2015/)
The “New South”
There was a propaganda campaign after 1877 that was designed to represent a new direction for the South. The rural, one-crop-economy, old Southern- aristocracy-run South was to be modernized. But as has been shown, poverty was the order of the day for
both Blacks and whites, and the KKK and other terrorists had free reign over the countryside. The Southern ruling class may have wanted to industrialize, but their capital had disappeared in the Civil War and the only Southern industry was making Duke Tobacco’s cigarettes. So, Northern bankers and industrialists developed the steel mills of Birmingham, the mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. All these industrial jobs were only available to whites, and their wages kept low by a constant threat of hiring Black workers. Northern Textile manufacturers moved South for the Cheap labor.
“Southern textile mills opened in the 1880s in the Piedmont region from central Virginia to Alabama. Mill owners depended on low-skilled, low-paid white labor, and their mills attracted workers from rural areas. Workers settled in company towns where entire families worked for the mill. The South replaced New England as the nation’s leading locale for textile mills. (http://www.countriesquest.com/north_america/usa/history/industrialization_and_urbanization/the_new_so uth.htm)
The newspaperman who coined the term, “New South,” Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution in his articles and speeches, assured Southern “gentlemen” that,
“ [T]he supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race… [This declaration] shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.” (Myrdal, Gunnar; Bok, Sissela (1944). An American Dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy. p. 1354.)
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Racism and the Culture of Violence in the South: Lynching-
“[T]he pattern of almost exclusive lynching of Negroes was set during the Reconstruction period. [T]he great majority of lynchings in the United States took place in the Southern and Border States. According to social economist Gunnar Myrdal: The Southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings.
. More than two-thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South: Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas. Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama were the leading lynching states. These five states furnished nearly half the total victims. Mississippi had the highest incidence of lynchings in the South as well as the highest for the nation, with Georgia and Texas taking second and third places, respectively. However, there were lynchings in the North and West, and in the Far West, Chinese people suffered at the hands of lynch mobs. .” ((http://www.yale.edu/ )
(https://blackmediacouncil.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/ida-b-wells-a-forgotten-shero-of-the- media/)
The KKK and other white supremacist groups burned several Black towns to the ground. The inhabitants were tortured and murdered. Wilmington, North Carolina, Tulsa Oklahoma, and Rosewood Florida were attacked and the Black citizens dispersed in the
late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Ida Wells Barnett, an educator, suffragist and Civil Rights leader moved to Chicago and campaigned against lynch laws after three of her friends were lynched for competing with white businessmen at their grocery store, she wrote,
“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes.”
An Historiography of Racism: The danger of scholarly miseducation
The “Indian Wars” and the incarceration of all the Indigenous nations onto Reservations was a form of racism which justified the murder of thousands of people and the plunder of the land of the Original People of the West. This program had its beginnings in the 18th Century, when George Washington and all successive presidents made war on and captured all “Indian” lands in the United States up to and through the Civil War. Justification for this aggression was the “Inferiority” of Indigenous people, their supposed “savagery,” and lack of “civilization.” This was racist policy.
Racism is a word that people define as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” Examining that definition, it would appear that anyone could be racist if they had a bad opinion of another group. To understand the material reality of racism, ask: who wields the power to oppress another group? Looking at these two groups: The Indigenous and The Africans who suffered the greatest abuse in the United States, it is clear that the entire system of governance and exploitation in the United States rests upon the racist oppression before, during and after the institution of slavery existed. During that time, power was in the hands of rich white men, the upper class. When the Italian or Portuguese or Eastern European or Jewish immigrants arrived, the upper classes could easily take the malevolent patterns of racist oppression and turn the white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) masses against any immigrant group
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The oppression of Black people was not only economic and political, it was part of a dogmatic systematic brainwashing which “intellectually” justified the white ruling class belief in the inferiority of Black people and “Indians.” White educators through the schools, religious authorities in churches, political ideologues in government, published authors of literature, history, and sociology, and a massive policy of ideological social engineering promoted white racism toward both groups. The ruling class had
prepared the white population to believe in racial “inferiority,” and white “superiority.”
The subjugation of women also rests on the power of white men to enforce their superiority and to get all men to go along with this malevolent ideological and economic control, as if it were in their interest to do so. Dividing people from eavh other by superiority/inferiority stories worked well to keep the wealthy in power.
When the Civil war was over, the former Confederate slaveholders lost one third to one half of their “wealth” when the US government Constitutionally
abolished slavery. Furious at the loss of capital and labor, they devised a systemic political and economic attack on Black people in the South that was eventually called, “Jim Crow,” which was a name devised by a white minstrel who made fun of Black people during slavery days. It was the code name for segregation after slavery ended. The function of this was to maintain poor “Freedmen” and also poor whites in constant insecurity and poverty- and competition. https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Jim-Crow-A- Song-Book//1
The upper-class whites therefore imposed Segregation upon the Southern Black populations. Southern states and many in the North developed separate and unequal schools, sidewalks, laws, prisons, court systems, housing, wages, voting systems, police forces, all with a view to reducing the rights and advancement of Black citizens. And making whites believe this was in their interest. This is why the universities in the US, after Reconstruction was over, began to promote a view of Reconstruction as a very dangerous, ill-advised period. In Chapter II the realities of the Reconstruction period show that there was a mighty effort, especially among Black people who needed to improve their lives, to make Reconstruction succeed. But the US government closed it down in only 12 years. Then Columbia
University historian William Dunning (1857–1922) and other racist professors got to work denying the righteousness and successes of Reconstruction.
When the Federal Government under the “Radical Republicans” drew up a Reconstruction program, it was to grant economic and political rights for Black people. Horrified that Black people might be adjudged to be equals, Southern racist intellectuals organized a permanent ideological barrier to the possibility of Black Equality. They had read the racist “Sociology” of George Fitzhugh who claimed that, “the negro “is but a grown-up child” and influenced the slaveholders and Southern ante-bellum politicians to restrict Black peoples’ lives under slavery.
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Dunning reflected these racist views, having studied Fitzhugh in university. Dunning said Black people, “had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like whites.” Another Dunning School “intellectual” said, “Yankees “had never seen a n—-r except Fred Douglass.” Blacks were “as credulous as children, which in intellect they in many ways resembled.” (http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2499#.Wpb5jExFxv0)
The educated ruling class males in the United States considered William Dunning, who taught for 40 years, the major US historian on Reconstruction. His students, and students of his students were the ones who went on to write textbooks indoctrinating generations of high school and junior high school history teachers through the Twentieth Century. They taught that Reconstruction was a terrible period, because Black people had power and purpose and that was wrong, because Black people, according to Southern racists, could not handle anything but menial work. These teachers taught thousands of high school teachers and ultimately tens of millions of students in the US. Their basic premise was that Black people had to be under white control.
They promoted the idea that during Reconstruction, the people who came from the North, to work in towns and country, many who had been former Black abolitionists believing in equality, were nothing but corrupt “Carpet Baggers.” Since it was to the advantage of poor whites finally to have schools and jobs and training and community centers, white people in the South who welcomed Reconstruction were labeled, “Copperheads,” Southern snakes with fatal bites. Dunning professors denigrated any white people from in the South who supported Reconstruction. Any unity between poor Blacks and whites was dangerous, since racism had to rule the South, keeping people apart, and this was facilitated when terrorist groups like the KKK rode through the countryside, intimidating any Black and white people who tried to organize together.
Historian Eric Foner, one of the late 20th Century professors who fought against teachings of the “Dunning School” wrote,
“The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from Black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations because of the worry of having another Reconstruction. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_School)
The first book that challenged the lies of the Dunning School was W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, written in 1935. But DuBois, notably the greatest intellectual of the 20th Century, was Black, so this book was ignored by most white university scholars. DuBois wrote that Reconstruction began a great program which aided Black and White people alike, creating educational systems, improving Black Communities, and developing leaders whose accomplishments quickly improved the Southern States from which they came. He wrote that the end of Reconstruction was a mortal defeat for justice for Black people in the South and a death knell for the future of democracy in the US.
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