Reconstruction and Racial Segregation, 1865-1900

PROFESSOR ROBERT COOK: My first talk deals with the period from roughly 1865 to 1900.

It encompasses Reconstruction and the creation of a racially-segregated or Jim Crow society in the Southern states.

The political framework for Reconstruction was laid down by Northern Republican politicians in Congress in 1866 and 1867. Concerned that Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, was excessively lenient in his dealings with the rebels, Republican leaders including antislavery radicals like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania sought to remake the South as a capitalistic, free labor society that would never again endanger the safety of the Union.

They did so in part by attempting to enhance the Civil rights of the so-called freedmen under the law, and by empowering them with a vote.

The 14th Amendment, drafted in 1866 and ratified two years later, made it clear that African-Americans born in the country were citizens of the United States.

In a ringing phrase, it also guaranteed them the equal protection of the laws. Early in 1867, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the first Military Reconstruction Act, dividing the South into military districts and enabling adult Black men to vote in federally-supervised elections to new constitutional conventions.

Three years later, ratification of the 15th Amendment prohibited individual states from preventing US citizens from voting on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Armed with the electoral franchise, newly liberated African-Americans seemed well-placed to transform their own lives and the world they lived in.

During Reconstruction, Blacks use their newfound political power as well as their own restricted resources and the limited help and protection the US authorities were able to provide them in order to develop stronger communities. They took advantage of new marriage laws to build the kind of stable families that had been impossible under slavery.

Aided by the US government's Freedmen's Bureau, as well as northern missionaries, they built schools to educate themselves and their children.

Keen to worship spiritually, away from the gaze of their former White masters, they set up their own churches.

These churches were at the heart of the Black community during this period. They often supplied spaces for education, for fraternal organizing, and for political meetings, as well as for religious worship.

Reconstruction delivered some impressive gains.

African-American men and women participated enthusiastically in politics.

They set up union leagues and local republican organizations across the South. As a result of their activities, scores of Black men were elected to political office as state legislators, and in a handful of cases, as US congressmen and senators.

Hiram Revels, a Black Republican from Mississippi, stepped into shoes vacated by former US Senator Jefferson Davis, who had served as president of the Confederacy. Black Republicans often use their influence to increase public services to their constituents and in a few instances notably in South Carolina to provide land for the former slaves.

But in the final analysis, Reconstruction failed the Freedmen. Their attempts to participate in southern society as equal citizens were resisted violently by the former Confederates who had absolutely no intention of abandoning White supremacists as well as slavery.

Black Republicans were targeted for attack across the South after 1865 by White terrorist groups affiliated to the Democratic Party.

The most infamous of these organizations was the Ku Klux Klan, a shadowy vigilante group made up largely of Confederate Veterans.

Along with rampant factionalism that divided southern state Republican parties along racial lines, White violence and intimidation sapped the strength of the South Republican governments. By 1877, only three were left in place. The rest had been in the parlance of the time redeemed from what most southern Whites regarded as illegitimate and racially mongrelized regimes imposed upon the brave vanquished Confederates by vindictive northern Yankees.

The federal government in Washington and northerners were also to blame for the failure of Reconstruction. Most northern Republicans were wary of excessive government intervention. They feared that parceling out land to the former slaves would inhibit poorly-educated Blacks from developing a culture of work and independence. They were also opposed to alienating national-minded southern conservatives and they recognized their northern constituents, declining interest in African-Americans during the harsh economic depression of the 1870s.

Although President Ulysses S Grant's administration successfully used federal troops to suppress the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in the early 1870s, Washington proved increasingly loath to deploy its relatively few remaining soldiers in the South to assist Black or White Republicans. After the Ohio Republican Rutherford B Hayes narrowly triumphed in then disputed presidential election contest of 1876, he withdrew the last occupying troops to barracks. The South's last remaining Reconstruction governments collapsed and African-Americans in the former Confederacy were left largely to the tender mercies of their former masters.

Although restoring White supremacy was hard work, Southern Whites succeeded in constructing a racially-segregated society by the beginning of the 20th century.

They used several tools to do this.

Again, violence and intimidation played a central role in the project.

Every year, during the key decade of the 1890s, scores of African-Americans were lynched by southern mobs.

Lynchings were ritualized killings of alleged Black criminals, often Black men accused of raping White women. Attended by entire communities, reveling in the mutilation, and murder of Blacks whom they regarded as sexually-aggressive beasts.

As the levels of White supremacist violence increased, southern Democrats adept at using racial issues to mobilize Whites of all classes, moved to deprive African-Americans of their political and civil rights. Using a variety of subterfuges including poll taxes and literacy tests for voters, they proceeded to disenfranchised the vast majority of southern Blacks. Municipal and state governments, meanwhile, created a patchwork of racial segregation laws that were intended to rob African-Americans of their dignity and to brand them as second class citizens.

Blacks were barred from using the same railroad carriages as Whites, from eating in the same facilities as Whites, and also from using the same toilets, drinking fountains, libraries, schools, hospitals, parks, and even cemeteries as the master race. Depressingly, the US government was complicit in this process. Successive Supreme Court decisions from the Slaughterhouse Case in 1873 through the Civil Rights Cases in 1883 and Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 chipped away at rights that appeared to have been guaranteed to Blacks by the 14th Amendment and by Reconstruction era statutes.

Plessy proved to be a particularly decisive intervention. In this landmark case, the Republican-dominated court ruled that racially segregated facilities were constitutional as long as they were notionally equal in quality.

The doctrine of separate but equal underpinned the creation of a fundamentally unequal society, wittingly designed to render Blacks second class citizens. By 1900, as the United States entered onto the world stage as a colonial power after its crushing victory in the war against Spain, racism was a pervasive and pernicious force across the republic.

Theories of biological racism such as Social Darwinism provided pseudo-scientific justification for claims of natural Black inferiority as well as the stereotypical characterization of Black men as lazy, undisciplined, and sexually predatory. Commercial advertising regularly depicted Blacks as thick-lipped and stupid.

Popular songs of the day included Edward Hogan's All Coons Look Alike to Me.

Northerners and Southerners proved to be avid consumers of racist fiction. Not only the plantation romances of Southern authors like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, but also the vicious anti-Black texts of the North Carolina author, the Reverend Thomas Dixon.

For the mass of ordinary Blacks then, Reconstruction looked to be an aborted revolution. So much had been promised, so little had been delivered. At the beginning of the 20th century, most African-Americans lived in rural poverty, mired in an economic system of sharecropping, and debt peonage that chain them to a system of staple crop production--

cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and one that delivered them nothing but misery.

And yet, it was not all bad news African-Americans took pride in the emancipation of the race and the accomplishments of race leaders like Frederick Douglass, as well as Black troops who had fought to save the union, free the slaves, and promote civil rights. Some leaders pointed to declining illiteracy, to rising land ownership, and to the creation of small Black businesses as evidence the progress was possible in the United States. Certainly, the impressive efforts of a Black woman named Ida B Wells to campaign against lynching signaled that African-Americans would not be silent in the face of gathering oppression.

In the next talk, I'll address the attempts of Booker T Washington, the most celebrated Black spokesman of his day, to fashion a strategy that would enable his race to prosper as well as survive in the overheated racial climate of the 1890s and 1900s.