By the End of This Lesson, Students Will Be Able To

Lesson 9: No Longer Enslaved, Still Not Free (1875-1900)

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Lesson 9: No Longer Enslaved, Still Not Free (1875-1900)

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

· examine attitudes during the post-Reconstruction era that allowed racism to flourish

· examine the methods used to disenfranchise African American voters and their effects on voting

· analyze the impact of race riots and lynching on the African American community

· describe the rise of Jim Crow segregation in the late 19th century

· analyze the importance of African American churches in the post-Reconstruction era

· identify key African American figures of the post-Reconstruction era

· evaluate the reasons for African American migration both within the U.S. and overseas

· describe the experience of African American soldiers in the late 19th century

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Introduction

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After Congress ended Reconstruction in 1877, Southern politicians began undoing the economic and political advances African Americans had made after the Civil War. They passed Jim Crow laws, which segregated African Americans from the rest of society, and instituted a sharecropping system that kept most African Americans in poverty. Southerners also controlled African Americans with intimidation and violence.

Racial strife was not confined to the South. The late 19th and early 20th century marked a low point in race relations across the United States. White mobs in the North and the West, fearing job competition and fueled by scientific racism, attacked African American migrants who moved to their communities. The U.S. Supreme Court also contributed to the racial strife by upholding laws meant to undermine African American civil rights. Many African Americans decided to escape this racism through migration to their own communities, or service in the military.

This lesson chronicles the post-Reconstruction efforts to prevent African Americans from achieving economic freedom and political equality. The lesson concludes with a survey of African American efforts to fight these injustices. Whether teaching black Southerners self-reliance in schools, inspiring hope and hard work from church pulpits, or fighting in the military, the perseverance of the black community through these years helped African Americans withstand the rising tide of racism in the U.S.

TheRetreatfromReconstruction

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For the 12 years of Reconstruction, Republican politicians, African Americans, and the U.S. government, all participated in ruling the former Confederacy. In that time, the rights of African Americans in the South were greatly expanded. In the name of defending the sacrifices of the Civil War, many in the North supported equal rights for African Americans.However, in the hard economic times of the 1870s, support for these programs and empathy for African Americans began to fade.

In 1877, the Republican Party ended its support for Reconstruction in a political deal. The federal government ended occupation of the former Confederacy and removed Union troops. As a result, white southern Democrats quickly resumed control of Southern politics. As they found themselves squeezed out of public life and politics, African Americans were even more vulnerable to racial discrimination.

Many Southern Democrats and conservatives who took over in the South called themselvesRedeemers. Redeemers viewed the Civil War as an attack on the Southern way of life. They and many Southern authors and historians claimed that the South had been a noble land that had fought valiantly for its own freedom, and not to maintain slavery. This vision of a noble South only fighting forstates' rightsagainst overwhelming odds became known as the Lost Cause.This Lost Cause storyline ignored the basic facts of southernsecessionbut proved to be popular and effective in changing attitudes around the country about Reconstruction.

Redeemers wanted to keep the South's plantation system, which depended on cheap labor.Therefore, Redeemers tried to keep African Americans from voting to keep them poor and tosegregatethem from poor white Southerners.Segregation would keep poor white people and African Americans from joining forces and uniting against plantation owners. These two measures—voting restrictions and segregation—created a captive labor force. African Americans were forced into sharecropping and working the land of rich plantation owners to survive.

The Disenfranchisement of African Americans

During Reconstruction, the federal government required southern states to let African Americans vote before they could rejoin the Union. Northern states and Congress also passed Civil Rights Amendments which guaranteed the right to vote, regardless of color. In several states African Americans made up a large portion, if not the majority, of the population. Therefore, African American politicians and white Republicans usually won top positions in many state governments. The voting power of African Americans helped defeat Democrats at the polls and lowered the influence of southern landowners.As a result, the Redeemers became determined to end African American political power once and for all.

Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina was completely open about his bitter hatred of African Americans and his efforts to deny them their rights as citizens.

After winning elections with intimidation and violence, Redeemers wrote laws todisenfranchise, or to prevent African Americans from voting. Technically most of these laws did not violate the Civil Rights Amendments; however, the goals of the Redeemers were clear:

It was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro rule and carpetbag rule....The state of South Carolina has disenfranchised all of the colored race that it could under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. We have done our level best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.

Senator Benjamin Tillman speech of March 23, 1900,Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st session, 3216-3223, 2242-2245.

This speech was given by South CarolinaSenator Benjamin Tillman, one of the most outspoken Redeemer politicians of the era. His words highlight how Redeemers openly used violence and terror to seize power and then used legal disenfranchisement to hold onto it.

Some means of disenfranchisement were simple and did not involve changing laws. Some state officials just set up polling places far away from black communities and held elections during working hours when it was hard for African Americans to leave their jobs. White Southerners also set up roadblocks or claimed that ferries and streetcars were out of order to keep African Americans from reaching the polls. These tactics were not used everywhere and often affected both white and black voters.

Lawmakers disenfranchised African Americans by three main methods: poll taxes, literacy tests, and understanding clauses.Many southern states passed apoll taxthat required voters to pay a fee of $1 to $2 in order to vote. Most poor southern African Americans could not afford to pay the tax. To make voting even more complicated for African Americans, many states required voters to pay the tax six months or a year before the election. Voters then had to present a receipt of payment before they could cast their ballots.

Southern states also began requiring people to pass aliteracy testin order to become a registered voter. Since it had been illegal to teach enslaved African Americans to read, most African Americans were bad at reading or illiterate. In some states, it had even been illegal to teach African Americans to read. White officials, who proctored literacy tests, would regularly fail them. Some states even passedunderstanding clauses, which required registering voters to interpret a government document or to explain the meaning of a law. White poll workers judged whether or not the person actually understood the document. If poll workers decided that a person's explanation of the law was not good enough, that person could not vote. Essentially, all these measures were subjective. Even African Americans who could read and were well educated in government could be denied the vote by the decision of a poll worker.

These restrictions also prevented many poor, uneducated white farmers from voting. To make sure that these measures affected African Americans only, many states added agrandfather clauseto their voting provisions. Grandfather clauses ensured that the poll tax, literacy tax, and understanding clause only applied to new voters. If a man had voted before 1867, before most African Americans could vote, or even if his father or grandfather had voted, he could vote without having to pay or prove that he was literate.The grandfather clause allowed poor illiterate white people to vote and made sure African Americans were the only ones affected by disenfranchisement tactics.

Disenfranchisement methods spread across the South at the end of the 1800s.In 1889, Florida and Tennessee became the first states to pass poll taxes. A convention in Mississippi met the following year for the sole purpose of denying the vote to African Americans. The convention created a $2 poll tax and a literacy test. Black delegates in Mississippi actually helped draft this amendment. They hoped that denying African Americans the vote would satisfy Redeemer politicians and lower the violence directed toward black communities. Because Mississippi did not pass a grandfather clause, the state's restrictions impacted poor white voters as much as African Americans. In the 1896 Mississippi election, African American voter turnout was estimated at just 11% and white voter turnout was 45%.Disenfranchisement ensured that wealthy plantation owners would control Mississippi's government and economy for decades to come.

In 1895, South Carolina set up a constitutional convention to disenfranchise African Americans.Senator Benjamin Tillman, a former governor of the state, headed the Committee on Rights of Suffrage. Tillman made it clear that the reason for the convention was to stop African Americans from voting: "The one overpowering and essential idea which made the convention a necessity was the preservation of white supremacy by such purification of the suffrage as will save us from Negro domination in the future under any and all conditions." At first, Tillman tried to have the state constitution block African Americans from voting because of their race, a move that would have explicitly violated the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the South Carolina 1895 constitution adopted indirect methods. The poll tax, literacy test, and a measure disqualifying voters who had committed certain crimes all became state law.In South Carolina, African Americans, who made up a majority of the population, were now largely unable to vote.

Although the Civil Rights Amendments officially protected the rights of African Americans to vote, the Supreme Court often undermined them. In fact, the Supreme Court allowed the South to deny the vote to anyone they wished.InUnited States v. Reese,an 1876 case that originated in Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that disenfranchisement methods were constitutional as long as the rules did not specifically target a voter's race, creed, or color.This decision paved the way for the approval of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and other methods. It was also one of several Supreme Court decisions which rendered the Civil Rights Amendments useless.

Think About It

Some African American politicians in Mississippi and South Carolina helped draft the laws that denied the right to vote to most African Americans. Why do you think that they did that? What were their options? Who could help them gain justice and rights?

The Rise of Jim Crow Segregation

A train conductor removes an African American from a railway carLondon Illustrated News,September 27, 1856

In the same decades that white lawmakers were stripping voting rights from African Americans, they were also passing segregation laws.Segregation was the legal separation of races in the South. Before 1880, white people and African Americans shared public facilities and shopped in the same stores in the U.S., including in the South. In some communities, they played on the same baseball teams. The segregation that had existed was rooted in custom, not in law. Yet as Redeemer governments rose to power, politicians began to view the legal segregation of African Americans as a way to erode political support for the Republican Party. Segregation would also enforce the aristocratic style of plantation life. As a result, African Americans would be increasingly isolated from the rest of Southern society.

This new system of legal and informal segregation became known asJim Crowsegregation.The termJim Crowitself probably comes from an early 19th century white entertainer who performed in black face. The actor, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, created a popular song-and-dance routine called "Jumpin' Jim Crow" which mocked African Americans.

Jim Crow segregation was a departure from theBlack Codespassed right after the Civil War.The Black Codes had made economic success and civil equality difficult for African Americans, but the Jim Crow laws legally removed African Americans from much of white society.

Jim Crow practices and laws affected every part of Southern life. Black and white southerners shopped at different stores, ate at separate restaurants, sat in different sections on busses or railroad cars.Every level of society was segregated between the races.Theaters, schools, parks, and other public spaces all eventually came under the Jim Crow laws. Facilities and services for African Americans were supposedly equal to those enjoyed by white people, but in reality, they were almost always inferior.

By playing on racial fears among the white population, white politicians could win elections by proposing stricter segregation laws.By going to separate schools, black and white students were taught the principles of segregation from an early age. These laws tried to segregate every aspect of public life. Even leisure activities such as fishing were segregated by some states. Over the years, as new public spaces such as airport terminals, busses and telephone booths were developed, laws were passed to segregate them as well. The first segregation law was passed in 1868, right after the Civil War. The last was passed in 1944, 80 years later.