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« on: February 09, 2026, 09:58:14 pm »Old but gold: https://youtu.be/GeixtYS-P3s
This episode is an examination of the steady process of the transformation of slavery into a race-based institution -- a process that began in 1619, but was accelerated in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aOzfwrsPYg
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
00:39 - Introduction
01:07 - Colonial Roots of Racism
03:44 - Legal Distinction of Black and White
05:39 - Bacon's Rebellion
07:41 - The invention of Whitenes
10:51 - Question of the Day
How Bacon's Rebellion (1676) united black and white laborers against the elite. Why the ruling class feared this cross-racial alliance. The 25-year strategy to divide the underclass.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1zvomWU0hc
The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705: Legally inventing whiteness. How new laws stripped rights from Black people while giving privileges to poor Europeans. The creation of a permanent, inheritable racial hierarchy to secure power.
"The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious."
"No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious."
"Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges."
A White woman who falsely accused four Black men of **** in the Jim Crow-era South in 1949 has died at the age of 92.
Norma Padgett Upshaw claimed the four men – Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin – sexually assaulted her in Groveland, Florida, about 30 miles west of Orlando, when she was 17. The group, who came to be called the “Groveland Four,” became the faces of the case considered one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Jim Crow-era Florida.
Padgett Upshaw died of natural causes on July 12 in Taylor County, Georgia, according to records filed at the probate court. The Washington Post was first to report her death.
There were doubts about Padgett Upshaw’s testimony from the onset, but in the era of Jim Crow, a jury convicted the men without evidence of a crime.
...
After being arrested, Shepherd, Greenlee and Irvin were tortured until police were able to elicit a confession from two of them. Thomas managed to escape custody and was killed after a manhunt.
Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison.
Shepherd and Irvin received the death penalty. While being transported from county jail for a retrial, the sheriff shot them both and claimed self-defense. Shepherd died at the scene and Irvin survived by playing dead. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
Two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—barely a year after the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act—54 percent of white Americans said they thought the civil rights marches were “not justified,” according to an August 1966 Harris poll.1 In October, 85 percent of whites responded that the “demonstrations by negroes on civil rights” hurt the “advancement of negro rights.”2 By June 1969, only 32 percent of respondents felt Black protesters were “trying to be helpful.”3 Because of the civil rights movement, the country finally began to address the disparities, inequality, and terrorism that were the by-product of a quadruple century of racial oppression. But when all was said and done, the majority of white people in America had reached one conclusion:
Something was wrong with Black people.
And to fix America’s racial problem, all this country needed to do was to fix Black people. To address the drugs, crime, and poverty caused by wealth disparities, unequal employment, and lack of community resources,they decided to police, arrest, and imprison the people who were subjected to redlining, segregation, and systemic discrimination. While the whitewashing of history has led us to believe that, at the time, we simply didn’t understand that mass incarceration does not stop crime, we always knew it wouldn’t work. Black people knew that America needed an economic solution to address racial inequities. Criminologists and sociologists knew that crime is a socioeconomic phenomenon. We have always known that arresting drug dealers and drug users doesn’t affect the proliferation of drugs.
African American voters overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt’s four presidential campaigns in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, but for other contests, as many Blacks identified as Republican as Democrat. Then, in 1948, disgusted with Democrat Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the U.S. Army and the Democratic Party’s support for anti–Jim Crow laws, thirty-five delegates from the Deep South walked out of the Democratic National Convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats). Black voters flocked to the Democratic Party. To be clear, Black people didn’t switch parties. Their votes had always been split between the two political factions; they just stopped voting for Republicans. Indeed, they had a trick for the racist Republicans’ collective ass.
But, as Saint Jerome said in the Bible, “White people gon’ white.”* For the most part, Southern whites kept voting for Democrats and Republicans couldn’t get a foothold in the South. Republican Dwight Eisenhower won everywhere but the “Solid South” in 1952 and 1956. Then, in September 1957, Eisenhower sent federal troops into Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. In 1963, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, broke with the party ideology and used Eisenhower’s playbook to send in the white storm troopers—the Alabama National Guard —to force desegregation at the University of Alabama. Then came the breaking point that would basically change the party affiliation of Southern voters. Shortly before the election of 1964, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
Aside from Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Solid South would never vote for a Democratic president again.
Those good ol’ Republicans who never read a white lie they didn’t like would like you to believe that Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Democrats opposed it, which is only partially true. To understand the change in both parties’ ideology, all one has to do is count the votes.9
My father told me that he’s tired of hearing about slavery because it happened a long time ago and he had nothing to do with it. Plus, it was legal. How can you ask for redecoration for something that wasn’t a crime?
It’s reparations, RB. And your father is right. But just because enslaving and stealing labor from Black people was perfectly legal prior to 1868, America should not get to ignore the calls for issuing dividends to the descendants of the people who supplied this nation with 246 years of unpaid labor. However, there is a more compelling argument that may be more irrefutable. Namely, that slavery was just one small part of a loan that Black people invested into America for which we never reaped the dividends or the principal. At the center of this argument is how this country became and remained an economic superpower due in large part to the contributions of Black America’s sweat equity and actual funds.
But a lot of white people didn’t own slaves! So how is this their fault?
Again, that’s true. Seventy-five percent of white families didn’t own slaves and 1 percent owned forty or more.1 But all those people stil participated in the institution of slavery and benefited from the theft of labor, from the shipbuilders to the textile industry, the international traders to the national defense. This free labor propped up the entire national economy. But that was only a drop in the bucket when it comes to estimating what America owes Black people in reparations. If the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to function as a reset button to offer the American dream to the millions of Black hostages whose involuntary sweat equity built this country into a superpower, then the time since July 9, 1868, can only be described as a period of illegal theft.
According to the Brookings Institution, in 2016, the typical white family’s net wealth was $171,000, while the net wealth of a typical Black family was $17,150.2 The reason for this staggering wealth disparity is not just due to slavery, Jim Crow, or even America’s unique form of racism. Since the moment the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, America has been engaged in a Robin Hood–like heist. But instead of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the United States has circumvented the Fourteenth Amendment by stealing Black America’s wealth and giving it to white people. Every white person in America—rich or poor, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican—has benefited from stolen goods that were hijacked from Black America.
Wait, are you saying all the white people back then were thieves? My mom would never steal!
Yes, all white people. To illustrate what I’m saying, let me tell you a story about where I’m from.
In 1948, when only sixteen states in America had outlawed segregated public schools, Black students in the tiny hamlet of Summerton, South Carolina, where three out of every four residents were Black, finally got tired of being robbed by white people.3
Every day, these young Summertonians maneuvered through one obstacle course after another, only to be rewarded with an inferior education. If the children were lucky, they walked as far as nine miles to attend one of the segregated schools in Clarendon County’s District 22. On other days, rain would force students as young as six years old to wade across a stream to attend school. Often, when the water was particularly high, someone would provide a raft to row their way across the Lake Marion reservoir.
When they arrived at school, they would have to collect wood for their unheated classrooms . . . if they arrived. Sometimes a student would just drown on the way.
This may sound like a rough life for impoverished rural students, but Summerton was not a poor town. The vast majority of Summerton’s Black citizens were employed. Many owned businesses or worked at well-paying jobs in local factories. Their employers withheld federal, state, and local taxes from their paychecks just like their white counterparts. Summerton’s Black residents were not exempt from paying property taxes, sales taxes, or any other assessment their government deemed necessary. Naturally, Black parents were outraged when they discovered the white children didn’t have to make the same daily trek as their children because the district had purchased thirty buses to chauffeur them to school. Incensed, a group of parents begged school board chairman Roderick W. Elliott for just one bus, to serve the county’s Black students.
He said no.
So, Harry and Eliza Briggs, along with nineteen other Black families, contacted the NAACP and eventually filed Briggs v. Elliott, the first of five cases that would later be combined and become known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. But even before their case dismantled the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” precedent, the parents of District 22 fully understood why their children lived this precariously treacherous existence: white people in the district were stealing their money.
The white Summertonians who rode on school buses bought, in part, with the taxes paid by Black residents whose children crossed a river of racism are a perfect example of this theft. Those white children arrived at school well rested and ready to learn, while their Black counterparts endured inequities laid out in the initial Briggs v. Elliott complaint, including unhealthy and inadequate facilities, an insufficient number of teachers and classroom space, and inadequate resources.
The Black parents were disproportionately paying for white students’ beautiful new schools and the comfort in which they engaged in learning. And this phenomenon wasn’t unique to Summerton. Even though South Carolina was 40 percent Black in 1948, statewide, Black schools were valued at $12.9 million while white schools were worth $68.4 million.4 If those white students succeeded in their resource-filled schools, they could go on to one of more than a dozen public institutions of higher learning in South Carolina.
However, if the Black graduates wanted to attend a state college, because of state segregation laws there was only one choice—South Carolina State College, the only four-year public Black college in the state. This detail wouldn’t matter as much except for three important facts about the taxpayers whose money actually funded South Carolina’s whites-only state postsecondary schools and the one publicly funded Black college, post emancipation:
South Carolina taxpayers paid for seven whites-only colleges.
South Carolina taxpayers paid for zero Black colleges. (South Carolina State College was a land-grant college, which meant it was founded with federal money after the Civil War.)
The majority of South Carolina taxpayers were Black. (According to U.S. census workers, most of the school-age population, taxpayers, and wage earners in the Palmetto State were Black.)
Every Black person in South Carolina was being robbed, and every white person in South Carolina benefited from it.
Okay, I can kinda see your point, but my dad didn’t even go to college. He can’t even help me with my homework!
I’m sorry about that, RB. But the theft of Black wealth wasn’t just limited to education. Four years before Summerton’s Black parents filed suit against their children’s school district, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. Commonly known as the G.I. Bill, the law offered government-guaranteed home loans and paid tuition costs for World War II veterans . . . unless you were Black.
In the book When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson notes that of the sixty-seven thousand mortgages approved under the G.I. Bill in New York and northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than a hundred of the homebuying veterans were not white. A banker in Corpus Christi, Texas, reportedly explicitly told one Black veteran, “It is almost impossible for a colored man to get a loan.”
When it came to college loans, even colleges in the North rejected Black veterans, and because historically Black colleges and universities were packed to the gills with students who couldn’t attend white schools in the South, in 1946, only 20 percent of the former Black soldiers who applied for education benefits had enrolled in college, according to Hilary Herbold in “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill.” “Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically,” writes Herbold, “the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of Black veterans from earning a college degree.” And many of the G.I. Bill’s home loan denials were based on a government policy that may be the most important contributor to the racial wealth gap: redlining.
Wait . . . Even when my dad tries to help me with my math homework, my teacher marks a lot of the answers with a red line. Are you saying my teacher is racist?
No, that’s a different kind of redlining, my future fascist. You’re talking about dumblining.
For most of America’s history, metropolitan neighborhoods were organically configured, primarily by economics. Rich people lived in rich neighborhoods, and poor people lived in places that smelled a little bit like garlic. Even Irish, Jewish, and Italian enclaves, while ethnically homogeneous, were characterized by residents of similar socioeconomic standing. Poor Irish lived alongside poor Irish. Middle-class Italians lived with other middle-class Italians. Not only did these groups have the chance to advance economically, but they were also afforded the opportunity to achieve whiteness. And with that assimilation came integration.
In the mid-1930s, the federal government sponsored the New Deal, which created huge economic programs to lift America out of the Great Depression. The government mechanized farms, funded businesses, built suburbs, gave out jobs to any able-bodied American, and created a national minimum wage. The new Social Security Administration (SSA) gave people financial security in their old age. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) gave people jobs. Most important, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) refinanced mortgages at low interest rates to prevent foreclosures.
New Deal legislation was a massive investment in America’s future, and although it was costly, it helped reduce poverty and charted a path out of the Great Depression. More than any other group of legislation in American history, the jobs, social programs, and guaranteed loans created by the New Deal are responsible for building what we now call the “middle class.” There was only one problem: Black people were overwhelmingly excluded from the most impactful parts of the New Deal.
To ensure that these guaranteed mortgages were not risky, the HOLC created color-coded “residential security maps” of 239 cities. The maps essentially highlighted the neighborhoods that were good investments versus neighborhoods that were poor investments. The “risky” neighborhoods were highlighted in red, including every one of the 239 cities’ Black neighborhoods. In fact, even upscale Black neighborhoods like LaVilla and Sugar Hill in Jacksonville, Florida, visited by Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston, were deemed “too risky” by the HOLC. And instead of solely using these maps for government-backed home loans (which would have been racist in and of itself), banks began using these maps for all home purchases and refinancing. Because of this, as generations of Americans lifted themselves out of poverty, Black people could not take part in America’s primary driver of wealth—homeownership.
Redlining was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, but it still affects almost every economic aspect of Black communities to this day. Nearly every calculable effect of institutional inequality can be traced back to this eighty-five-year-old government policy. Redlining explains why researchers at the Brookings Institution found that homes in neighborhoods where the population is majority Black are valued, on average, $48,000 less than homes in white neighborhoods. The result is a $156 billion cumulative loss in Black-owned property values, even when the white neighborhoods have the same amenities, crime rates, and resources as the Black neighborhoods.5
About 36 percent of education funding comes from local property taxes, the “single largest source of local revenue for schools in the United States.” These lower home values,6 which are the direct result of redlining, mean that schools in Black neighborhoods receive less funding. Therefore, redlining is why Edbuild reports that majority-white school districts receive $2,226 more per student than non-white districts: a theft of $23 billion.7
Residents who live in formerly redlined areas pay higher interest rates and are denied mortgages more often than whites with the same credit and income, according to reporting by the Center for Investigative Journalism. They also pay higher auto insurance rates, pay more for fresh food, have less access to medical care, pay higher interest rates on loans, receive more parking violations, pay higher bail amounts, and wait longer to vote. The white people who built their fortunes from low-interest loans, cheap food, and high home values don’t pay more taxes. Yet they are benefiting from current and past policies that have taken money from Black taxpayers and handed it over to whites.
Doesn’t that sound like theft to you? At the very least, it’s receiving stolen goods.
On April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, leaving Confederate sympathizer Andrew Johnson as president. Johnson was a Southerner, a slaveowner, and a Democrat who had been chosen for the vice presidency in the hopes of stopping the South from seceding. As a former senator of the Great State of Tennessee, Johnson repeatedly let his Democrat friends know where he stood on the issue of freedmen: “As for the Negro I am for setting him free but at the same time, I assert that this is a white man’s government,”14 he said in an 1864 speech, reiterating his earlier promises of “a free, intelligent white constituency, instead of a negro aristocracy”15 after the war. When Johnson ascended to the presidency, his first course of action was to stop that slaves-getting-land nonsense.
As second in charge of the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Brigadier General Saxton refused to comply with Johnson’s orders, writing that “the faith of the Government is solemnly pledged to these people who have been faithful to it and we have no right now to dispossess them of their lands.”16
Johnson fired him.
As soon as he became president, Johnson pardoned every Confederate traitor who was willing to swear their allegiance to the United States and gave them back their land. And because Sherman’s order was only legal under the War Powers Act, as commander in chief, Johnson simply rescinded it. On March 7, 1866, the Charleston office of the bureau informed Charleston’s white plantation owners who had been dispossessed of their real estate after becoming official traitors to their country that they could return to their plantations as long as they shared with the former slaves, issuing General Order No. 9:
1. The former owners of land upon the Sea Islands . . . will be permitted to return and occupy their lands, or a portion of them, subject to the terms and conditions hereinafter specified.
2. Neither owners of lands nor freed people will be allowed to make use of threats against each other or the authorities of the United States . . . or to do anything to disturb peace on said Islands; but all disputes will be referred to Major Cornelius for adjudication.
3. Grants of land made to the freed people in good faith, by proper authority, or occupied by them . . . will be held as good and valid, until changed or modified by competent authority. But Major Cornelius may set apart and consolidate them contiguous to each other, on one portion of the plantation . . . in such manner as to give the freed people a part possessing average fertility and other advantages.17
In July 1866, Congress agreed to reauthorize the Freedmen’s Bureau while stipulating that all the confiscated lands would be returned to the original owners. For nearly two years, Black people in South Carolina’s Lowcountry actually owned the land on which they had been enslaved. On James Island, America’s slave capital, most of the land had been redistributed to the former slaves before it was taken away. But now these freedmen were surrounded by angry Confederates whose land had been taken by Black repo men. And in those two years, they had all tasted Black power.
...
Building things is hard. Destroying things is easy. After America began to witness what Black people could do if they were simply left alone, the reshapers of their own destiny became the target of disgruntled ex-Confederates who regarded the sharing of power as a collective affront to the white race. For them, power was a zero-sum game. White America’s continued existence depended on the eradication of Black power, and so the destruction began. On July 30, 1866, angered by newly issued provisions that disenfranchised Black voters, a group of freedmen, including hundreds of Black veterans, gathered on the steps of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to protest during the Louisiana state constitutional convention.Expressing their outrage in the Blackest way possible, they paraded to the assembly with a marching band to show their displeasure with the exclusionary laws that would become known as the “Black Codes.” As they marched, a mob of white supremacists, policemen, and ex-Confederates brutally attacked the demonstration, until the marchers sought refuge inside the Mechanics Institute, where, as Ron Chernow explained in Grant,
The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape. Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.23
“The floor grew slick with blood.”
I have never been able to rinse that phrase from my mind. The carnivorous reaction to Black people existing is a theme that runs throughout American history. As early as 1865, the military commanders and workers with the Freedmen’s Bureau began receiving regular reports of “murders and outrages” committed by whites against freedmen. In the Abbeville district of South Carolina, a “desperate and ruffianly character by the name of Reuben Goldberg . . . deliberately, and without provocation, as plenty can testify, shot a Negro by the name of A. Payton, who always bore a good character in this neighborhood and has always been free.”24 Reformer Benjamin Randolph was allegedly murdered in cold blood by a Klansman. Confederate officer D. Wyatt Aiken, a Klan leader, had called for Randolph’s assassination, according to Freedmen’s Bureau officials.25 Aiken was arrested, released two days later, and never faced trial. When they heard about his crime, South Carolina’s white community elected him to serve five terms in Congress.
While many historians describe Reconstruction as a period of “racial unrest” marked by lynchings and “race riots,” it was undoubtedly a war. There were soldiers who wore uniforms, took oaths, and volunteered their service to organized, armed units. They had a common enemy and a plan to take them out. The network of terror cells that sprang up during Reconstruction went by many names, including the White League, the White Knights, the Knights of the White Camellia, and—the most famous of all—the “Circle of Brothers,” otherwise known as the Ku Klux Klan. It was insurrection, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism with a little bit of guerrilla warfare mixed in for good measure. To enforce their goals, the loose confederation of historically white fraternities all had one common strategy: killing as many Black people as possible and overthrowing the government that had enabled their freedom.
In the 1868 election, Black citizens exercised their new right to vote and overwhelmingly supported Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant. In Eutaw, Alabama, Black voters catapulted Grant to a two-thousand-vote margin in the county. Days before the 1870 midterm election, fearing the power of Black voters, Klansmen opened fire at a rally of twenty-eight hundred Black people, killing at least four and causing hundreds to stay home on election day. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate won the county by forty-three votes.
Ku Klux Klan members in North Carolina assassinated a state senator, murdered a Black town commissioner, and lynched so many Black voters in 1870 that Governor William Woods Holden declared an insurrection, suspended habeas corpus (the right against unlawful detention), and imposed martial law. But none of the more than a hundred terrorists arrested in what would become known as the “Kirk-Holden War” was ever charged with a crime. Holden, however, was removed from office when Democrats gained control of the state legislature after African American voters were forced to choose between voting and their lives.
Many of the reports of these atrocities came directly from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Even before the war’s official end, bureau officers detailed “outrages,” warning that white people were getting a little out of control. In describing a “freed boy” who was “dragged about three miles with a rope around his neck,” residents of Caldwell Parish in Louisiana were told by the sheriff that if they signed a warrant, they would be “met by 50 armed men and killed.” The bureau report ended by noting that “many colored people have been and are being killed in Parish on a/c of political opinions.”26 In Laurens, South Carolina, “ten or twelve persons” were slaughtered the day after the 1870 state elections. A congressional committee investigating Klan violence heard accounts of whites and Black ballot-casters being “waited upon” by a white supremacist mob.
On Easter Sunday in 1873, the Knights of the White Camellia, Klansmen, and Confederate sympathizers opened fire on Black voters in Colfax, Louisiana, burned the victims’ bodies, and threw the corpses in a nearby river. No one knows how many people were murdered during this incident, but a military report lists eighty-one Black men; another fifteen to twenty bodies were fished out of the Red River, and another eighteen were secretly buried. “The bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era, the Colfax massacre taught many lessons,” writes historian Eric Foner. “Including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority.”27
The white supremacist terrorism was not confined to violence. Almost every single state of the former Confederacy had begun enshrining Black Codes in their state constitutions in attempts to preserve the social and economic order that existed prior to emancipation. In South Carolina, farmworkers were required to work from “sun-rise to sun-set,” and were mandated by law to refer to their supervisors as “master.” The rules undermined the labor contracts instituted by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and went as far as to forbid any person of color from learning a new trade, declaring, “No person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shop-keeper, or any other trade, employment or business on his own account and for his own benefit, or in partnership with a white person, or as agent or servant of any persons, until he shall have obtained a license therefore from the Judge of the District Court.”28 Even worse, nine states passed or updated their vagrancy laws, essentially redefining “vagrancy” as “existing.” In Mississippi, a Black person was breaking the law if he or she was “found unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day or nighttime.”29 Kentucky filled up its jails by banning “rambling without a job” or “keeping a disorderly house.” Tennessee laws withheld education from Black children by forcing them to work for free as “apprentices” under their former slavemasters.
Most often, whites used a combination of violence and technicalities to reclaim political and social status. In the 1866 election, when Georgia’s Black voters elected three Black state senators and thirty state representatives, deemed the “Original 33,” white supremacists flocked to the Peach State to expel the lawmakers under the new Black Codes. When the legislators challenged the laws in White v. Clements, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled, “After the most careful examination of this question, I am clearly of the opinion, that there is no existing law of this State which confers the right upon the colored citizens thereof to hold office, and consequently, that the defendant has no legal right to hold and exercise the duties of the office which he claims under her authority.” For its violence and discrimination against Black people, Georgia was placed under military rule again in 1869.
Perhaps the most interesting part about the white supremacist tactics is that, in the long run, they still were unable to defeat the Black majority without cheating. Heading into the 1876 elections, in counties across South Carolina, white supremacist mobs threatened Black voters to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton over Republican governor Daniel Chamberlain. In September 1876, a paramilitary group of five hundred white supremacists murdered about one hundred Black people in Aiken County, after threatening them that “their only safety from death or whipping lies in signing an agreement pledging to vote the democratic ticket at the coming election.”30 The Republican votes there somehow disappeared, but the Democratic votes quadrupled. In Edgefield, the vote total exceeded the voting-age population by more than two thousand.31 The elections board threw out the suspicious counties’ vote totals, which were upheld by a federal court. The Republican presidential candidate won South Carolina, as did the Republican governor.
Events in Louisiana and Florida had played out similarly as they had in South Carolina, with voter intimidation and suspicious vote totals throughout the state. In 1877, fifteen white men—five U.S. senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices*—gathered in a Washington, D.C., room and decided to give the disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate supported by Black voters, essentially making him the president. In exchange, the whites-only room also agreed to a plan that included three notable provisions:
REMOVAL OF TROOPS FROM THE CONFEDERATE STATES: In many places
in the South, especially Louisiana and South Carolina, the military
presence was the only thing protecting Black freedmen from white
supremacist violence.
FUNDS TO INDUSTRIALIZE THE SOUTH AND RESTORE ITS ECONOMY:
While this never really happened, it was clearly a nod to the white
supremacists who couldn’t compete with the Black laborers.
THE RIGHT TO HANDLE BLACK PEOPLE AS THEY WISHED: The federal
government agreed to essentially disregard the Constitution’s equal
protection clause.
The “right to handle Black people as they wish” became known as Jim Crow. Across the country—not just in the South—states passed segregation laws and disenfranchised Black people en masse. The Compromise of 1877 was the definition of white supremacy: Black voters had given Hayes the presidency, and in exchange, he and his white co-conspirators chose white supremacy over equality.
But there were some things they could not undo. By 1900, 42.8 percent of Charleston County’s Black residents owned land and produced most of the cotton.32 Historically Black colleges thrived, civic organizations flourished, and the religious institutions remained. The foundation created during this period of Black construction would form the framework for every movement for Black liberation going forward. What Black people created in the light of freedom could only be undone by trickery and evil. But that is not the lesson of Reconstruction.
Every single stereotype that remains about Black America was disproven after the Civil War. We were smarter. We worked harder. We were not the violent ones.
The criminal enterprise called America is nothing but a self-perpetuating white supremacy machine. The only parts that are good and decent are the ones we shined with our spit. Everyone who calls themselves a citizen is a by-product of our determination to free ourselves. Due process exists because of us. The Founders only said, “All men are created equal”; we, the ones who made this country, prove it.
Still, that is also not the lesson of Reconstruction.
More generally, World War II did mark some important achievements in America’s struggle for racial equality. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president in American history to denounce lynching as a crime. During the 1940 presidential campaign Roosevelt’s Republican opponent Wendell Willkie ran on a civil rights platform, pledging to integrate the armed forces and the federal government if elected. After Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive march on Washington to protest segregation in the defense industry, in June 1941 Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in war plants and creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to enforce it.174 Although the FEPC had little power, the prospect of a federal agency actually devoted to fighting racial discrimination had great symbolic weight and did help Blacks and other minorities gain access to jobs in the burgeoning war industry.
Finally, freedom for the former slaves meant the right to vote. Immediately after the end of the war Blacks began organizing to demand suffrage for all men regardless of race. For them, voting, like land ownership, was important both as a practical guarantee and as a symbol of their newly free status. This desire for the political franchise was supported by the Radical branch of the Republican party, which for a decade after Appomattox largely controlled the national government. In 1866 the Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which made all former slaves US citizens, and a year later followed it with the Reconstruction Act, requiring Southern states to ratify the amendment and allow Blacks to vote as a condition of their readmission to the Union. The result was a political revolution in the South, as the former slaves streamed to the polls in overwhelming numbers, with their white allies electing a series of progressive state governments across the region. This expansion of the franchise reached its zenith in 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment, granting the right to vote to men of all races, became the law of the land.123
Most white Southerners viewed these changes with horror and moved to limit the impact of emancipation as much as possible. In 1865 and 1866 several Southern states passed Black codes that forced freedmen to provide proof of employment, usually by signing contracts to work on plantations. They became one way of “getting things back as near to slavery as possible.”124 More ominously, Southern whites initated a campaign of violence and terror against local Republicans, both Black and white. At the end of 1865 Confederate veterans in Tennessee founded the Ku Klux Klan, which over the next few years murdered hundreds of Blacks and their white supporters. The Klan targeted in particular Republican politicians in a violent attempt to disenfranchise the Black population and maintain white supremacy. This reign of terror continued until 1872, when President Grant suppressed it with federal troops.125
The suppression of the Klan showed that the key to Black freedom lay in the North; only as long as the Radical Republicans held power would they enforce the right of Southern Blacks to vote. By the early 1870s the signs were not encouraging. As we have seen, Black suffrage was not popular in the North before the war, and even after 1865 proposals to enfranchise African Americans were voted down in most Northern states. By the early 1870s many Northern whites were more interested in reconciliation with the South than with protecting Black rights there. The Democratic Party scored a major election victory in 1874, winning control of the House of Representatives, signaling that the reformist approach to the former Confederacy had lost much of its steam. White Southerners soon drew their own conclusions from these signals, and in 1875 renewed their violent campaign against Reconstruction. In Mississippi, armed vigilantes murdered Republican politicians and terrorized their supporters from voting, enabling the Democrats to win the state by a landslide. The same happened in South Carolina in 1876, by which time Democrats and their terrorist allies had overthrown all the Reconstruction state governments in the South. Unlike in 1872, the federal government refused to intervene. Instead, in 1877 the new presidential administration of Rutherford B. Hayes agreed, in exchange for Southern support in the disputed election of the previous year, to withdraw all federal troops from the South and recognize the legitimacy of its Democratic state governments. The so-called Bargain or Compromise of 1877 effectively ended the Reconstruction of the South, and with it hopes for Black freedom.126
The next two decades witnessed the rebirth of white supremacy in the South. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Southern states passed a series of laws to keep their Black populations separate and inferior. Collectively known as Jim Crow, these measures rigidly segregated Blacks in all major spheres of life, from hospitals, schools, and public parks down to telephone booths and drinking fountains. Facilities available for Blacks were invariably inferior in quality, highlighting their exclusion from the mainstream of Southern life. Jim Crow was not just a Southern phenomenon, however; public racial segregation existed throughout the North and West, and the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding the doctrine of “separate but equal” made it in effect national policy.127
The main thrust and goal of the post-Reconstruction reaction, however, was the disenfranchisement of the Black population. Starting in 174 Chapter 4 earnest in 1890, Southern states began enacting a variety of measures to keep African Americans from voting. These included residency requirements, literacy tests, and poll taxes requiring people to pay a fee for the right to vote. As a result of these and other restrictions and of the racist terror that continued to threaten those Blacks who attempted to exercise their franchise, Black electoral participation dropped precipitously in the South. By 1910 only four percent of all Black men in Georgia had registered to vote, whereas for the South in general less than ten percent of eligible African Americans routinely came out for elections. The right to vote had once again become the white to vote, and the effective elimination of the Black franchise and Black political power illustrated the racialized nature of democracy. Since the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in the South, their disenfranchisement essentially limited voting to whites in general. The Civil War and Reconstruction thus ended in a ringing reaffirmation of white supremacy and white freedom.128
On January 29, 1901, congressman George Henry White of North Carolina gave his final speech in the US House of Representatives. The last of the Black politicians elected during Reconstruction, Representative White had lost his battle for reelection thanks to the disenfranchisement of most of his African American constituents. In the speech that marked the end of Black freedom in America, congressman White declared:
Now, Mr. Chairman, before concluding my remarks I want to submit a brief recipe for the solution of the so-called American negro problem. He asks no special favors, but simply demands that he be given the same chance for existence, for earning a livelihood, for raising himself in the scales of manhood and womanhood that are accorded to kindred nationalities. . . . This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people—rising people, full of potential force.129 Empire, Racial Citizenship, and Liberal Democracy 175 The implementation of Jim Crow throughout the South by the dawn of the twentieth century underscored the durability of slavery and the racial nature of liberty in America as a whole. The defeat of the greatest challenge to white freedom in the nation’s history would play a key role in shaping the character of American democracy in the modern era.