Civil War Reconstruction Redemption Gettysburg Buffalo Soldier The

Civil War Reconstruction & “Redemption”

Gettysburg

Buffalo Soldier

The Emancipation Proclamation, Jan. 1, 1863 • President Lincoln’s executive order • Freed 3 million slaves and made areas of the South free • Involved 10 states • Not passed by Congress • No compensation to slave owners • Did not actually outlaw slavery • Did not grant citizenship to Freedmen

Black Codes North Carolina’s Black Codes, 1865 • Short-lived precursors to the Jim Crow laws • Black Codes adopted after the Civil War borrowed elements from the antebellum slave laws and from the laws of the northern states used to regulate free blacks. • Some Black Codes incorporated morality clauses based on antebellum slave laws into Back Code labor laws. For example, in Texas, a morality clause was used to make it crime for laborers to use offensive language in the presence of their employers, his agents, or his family members. Borrowing from the Ohio and Illinois codes, Arkansas enacted an ordinance banning free blacks from immigrating into the state.

What was Reconstruction? PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION: 1865 -67 After Lincoln’s assassination, President Johnson tried rather ineffectually to follow his policies on the Southern states were required to accept the 13 th Amendment to have Confederate debt relieved. But Johnson ran afoul of the formerly abolitionist “Radical” Republicans when he vetoed extension of the Freedman’s Bureau funding and the first Civil Rights Bill and acquiesced to the South’s new Black Codes, which essentially reduced Freedmen to plantation slaves.

Reconstruction Act, 1867 3 subsequent acts • “An act to provide for the more efficient government of the Rebel States” • The establishment of military government in the Southern states as a feature of the system imposed under the Reconstruction Acts was due primarily to the fact that the introduction of Negro suffrage was thought to be possible only through a show of strength. • Freedmen’s Bureaus, established in 1865, to facilitate voting, education, commerce, etc. “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands

Freedmen’s School, Richmomd, VA, 1866

Louisiana, 1870 s

A Bureau agent stops a white mob, 1868, Harper’s Weekly

RADICAL or FEDERAL RECONSTRUCTION: 1867 -77 • “Radical” Republicans wrested control of Reconstruction programs from Johnson, adding the 14 th Amendment to the Constitution and passed a Civil Rights Act in 1866. In 1870, Blacks received voting rights. Other Radical proposals were defeated, including seizing land for redistribution to Freedmen, which didn’t happen but got a lot of attention. Martial Law was declared in 1867 and federal troops oversaw race relations in the South until the Tilden/Hayes Compromise in 1877. • For Ten years, Blacks were educated, voted, were elected to office, and many rose in status and income. • In 1877 the troops were withdrawn and the South’s Freedmen were thrust into a condition called “Redemption” by white Supremacists. Carpet baggers were ejected and it was open season on Blacks.

Freedmen, carpet-baggers, & scalawags beware!

• Carpetbagger: A Northerner who came South to help slaves, then Freedmen • Scalawag: A white Southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction • Copperheads: Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War

Redemption

Nathan Bedford Forest, KKK Founder and Delmar Dennis, KKK Informer

“Of course, he wants to vote the Democratic ticket. ” Harper’s Weekly, 1876

Project HAL: Historic American Lynching

What was Jim Crow? The name comes from a minstrel show song: Come listen all you gals and boys, I'm going to sing a little song, My name is Jim Crow. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

“Jim Crow” was the era of legal and social systems that evolved after the Plessy v Ferguson U. S. Supreme Court ruling of 1896. It had only one good outcome, but was a disaster for Blacks. • It slowed violence against Blacks, in that there were fewer lynchings. • It essentially removed the gains that Blacks had made during Reconstruction. For example, no Black person was elected to South Carolina’s House of Representatives until James Clyburn was elected in 1993. Douglas Wilder was the first Black governor of a state (VA), elected in 1990. But the losses in education, economic opportunities and the franchise were devastating, reverberating today. • It nullified the 13 th, 14 th, and 15 th “Reconstruction” Amendments to the Constitution and relegated Black people to second class status until the Civil Rights era of the 1960 s. Some say that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act ended Jim Crow. What do you think?

The Reconstruction Amendments The 13 th Amendment, 1864: Ended Slavery Section 1. 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. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 14 th Amendment, 1868: Citizenship Clause Section 1. 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. There are 3 more sections that deal with due process, equal protection, and dealing with Confederacy officials.

15 th Amendment, 1870: Voting Rights Section 1. 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. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Homer Adolph Plessy 3/17/1863 - 3/1/1925 A New Orleans Creole civil rights activist of African and European heritage. He could have passed for white, but he defied the NOLA segregation laws and was jailed in 1892 for sitting in a whites only railroad car. Plessy v Ferguson was heard by the US Supreme Court in 1896, which ruled against Plessy in an 8 to 1 decision. Justice John Marshall Harlan I dissented. The doctrine of “separate but equal” became the law of the land, legalizing many laws that sanctioned segregation and were collectively known as Jim Crow Laws. Brown v Board of Education, 1954, overturned Plessy.

Examples of Jim Crow Laws • • • • White nurses couldn’t help Black men Separate transport waiting rooms & ticket offices for Blacks & whites couldn’t play pool together People of different races couldn’t marry Separate toilets, fountains Black barbers couldn’t serve white haircut needers Separate baseball fields Separation of circus ticket booths Separation of white & Black blind people Separation of white & Black prisoners Black & white students couldn’t use the same textbooks Blacks could not be served in white restaurants or lunch counters No Blacks in public libraries Whites forbidden to sell real estate to Blacks And on and on…

Pender County, 1934: Real Estate Indenture between Hugh Mac. Rae Corporation and John G. Boruck, et al – …conveyance is made upon the express condition that no sale of conveyance of the said land, or any part of it, shall ever be made at any time hereafter to a negro or mulatto… Raleigh, NC, 1949: Deed of Sale of lot in Belvidere Park – Section Eight: No person of any race other than the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with a an owner or tenant.

Jim Crow: Racial segregation in all things large & small.

Wilmington, 1898

Black-owned Daily Record, Wilmington, 1898

Tulsa, 1921

Jim Crow Era White Supremacist Riots Many, in some cases hundreds of African Americans died. • • • 1873: Colfax, LA 1898: Wilmington, NC 1898: Greenwood, SC 1900: New Orleans, LA 1900: New York City 1904: Springfield, OH 1906: Atlanta, GA 1906: Greenburg, IN 1906: Brownsville, TX 1908: Springfield, IL 1917: St. Louis, IL. Chester, PA, Philadelphia, PA, Houston, TX 1919: Red Summer—Chicago, Omaha, Charleston, Longview, TX, Knoxville, TN, Elaine, AR • 1921: Tulsa, OK • 1923: Rosewood, FL

The Convict Lease System, 1865 -1928 (but not really) “It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion. ” Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name

Alabama, 1932

One Dies, Get Another Matthew Mancini

Tarboro, NC 1940 s

Dothan, AL 1984

Citadel Yearbook, 1977

Michael Donald, 1979 & 1980 Mobile, AL KKK victim

Ella Watson photo by Gordon Parks