The Hundred Years

If I was white I would probably be a Republican. After growing up in Alabama during the 1960’s and 1970’s I would probably be a bigot too. I would have compared myself and my personal circumstances to African Americans and I would probably say, “Come on man, the civil war ended slavery in 1865. That was a hundred and fifty years ago. Quit crying and making excuses. Take some responsibility for your issues. Is it my fault you don’t have a decent education? Is it my fault that so many of you are so poor, live in rundown neighborhoods, go to prison in ridiculously high numbers, can’t find a job, or simply refuse to work? Why should I be blamed if you don’t respect your women and refuse to take care of your children?” I would probably point to the wealthy, high profile, and middle class minorities and insist that they were proof positive that anybody can make it in America if they get up off of their lazy asses and work for it. I would challenge anybody to name any aspiration, any field of endeavor that a Black person has not been ridiculously successful at in the United States, and while they were stuttering, I would say, “I rest my case”.

If I were white, I would feel this way because of my education, formal and informal. I would be blissfully ignorant of what happened between 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, and 1965, when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and handed the pen he signed it with to Martin Luther King Jr. If I were white, I would have gone to very good schools while growing up in Alabama. I would have graduated from an outstanding university as well. My home would have had many books and magazines, my parents would have taken me on vacations and to museums, but what was done to the African Americans during those hundred years would be a mystery to me.

So, what the hell happened?

  

After the war the South was a mess. Their property values had collapsed, the transportation system, primarily the railroads, were mangled, and their greatest asset, slave labor for agriculture, was no longer available.

Blacks now had newly acquired rights and opportunities, including the thirteenth amendment, ending slavery, the fourteenth amendment, granting all the rights of citizenship to the former slaves, and the fifteenth amendment, granting the former slaves the right to vote. There was rabid resistance to all of these laws by southern whites, but the Union army was still present in the south, and the federal government used the army to enforce the new laws. Less than ten years after the war more than 500,000 former slaves were in school for the first time in their lives. Almost 600 Blacks had been elected as state legislators, and many others had been elected as mayors, judges, and sheriffs. On the federal level, 14 blacks served in the House of Representatives and 2 served in the Senate. Ulysses Grant was elected President in 1868 with a plurality of 300,000 votes. He received more than 500,000 votes from Blacks, accounting for his margin of victory.

The response from southern whites was venomous terrorism, embodied by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, with the support of local white communities, did everything in their power to terrorize and intimidate Blacks and their supporters, including burning their homes, beatings, mutilations, and lynching. The Klan was eventually subdued by the Union Army, but the threat of violence remained.

The turning point was the election of 1876. The contest was between Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican from Ohio, and Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat from New York. Tilden received 300,000 more popular votes than Hayes and was only one electoral vote from election. However, there were 20 electoral votes in dispute from three southern states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Eventually, a deal was made that would award the Presidency to the Republican, Hayes, if the Republicans agreed to withdraw all of the federal troops from the south. 

Once the troops were gone, the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments became null and void. The Ku Klux Klan would rise again and become the last word in southern justice. The south was now free to institute and enforce the “Black Codes”. The codes were a web of formal laws and informal customs that were used to restrict a Black person’s right to vote, own property, or move freely from place to place. For Blacks, petty crimes became felonies. Vagrancy laws were particularly insidious, making any Black man without a job a criminal. Peonage and sharecropping subjected thousands to endless debt and involuntary servitude. Many thousands of Black men were arrested and put in prison because they did not have a job. They were then leased out to planters and industrialists for as little as $9.00 per month, which was paid to the state. The prisoners got nothing, but were forced to work until they could work no longer. Many were literally worked to death, with no consequences for their murderers, who simply notified the state they needed another prisoner to replace the one that had died.

Some of the states did not allow Blacks to own guns. Many states also instituted an annual tax on Blacks. This was literally a “freedom tax”, because if they could not pay it they could be imprisoned. Another law allowed the state to take custody of Black children from parents that could not support them. The children would then be “apprenticed” to their former white owners, and forced to work just as they did prior to emancipation.

“Jim Crow” laws were legalized by the 1896 Supreme Court case, “Plessy vs Ferguson” which declared “separate but equal” facilities and accommodations to be legal. As a result, virtually all southern states required racial separation in all facets of life, public and private. This would include churches, schools, lodging, dining, hospitals, public restrooms, transportation, and marriage. Until 1964, all would be separate, and none would be equal.

My mother was born in 1922, just fifty seven years after the end of the civil war. She was 43 years old in 1965. For most of her life, this is the America she knew. Was it her fault that she did not finish high school? Did not go to college? Did not own a home to bequeath to her children? Is it a missing father’s fault if he was put in a state prison for vagrancy because he did not have a job? Should I condemn my grandmother because her education ended in 8^th grade?

America would be a better place if our schools taught our students what really happened in our country after the civil war. I have a feeling that a lot of bigots wouldn’t be bigots if they had a little more knowledge.

The hundred years after the end of slavery changed very little in the south. The fifty years since the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act has changed a lot.

I’m confident, that God isn’t finished with us yet.