Posted by: antihellenistic
« on: March 28, 2024, 10:36:17 am »Historical Voter Suppression by the "Whites"
Source :
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 179, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189
Quote
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 And because Sherman’s order was only legal under the War Powers Act, as commander in chief, Johnson simply rescinded it.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.
Source :
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America page 179, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189