29 December 2008
Temporary Gains… and Reverses
Blacks achieved significant gains until the failure of Reconstruction
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
With northern troops enforcing Reconstruction legislation throughout much of the South, African Americans scored major gains. The apparatus of the slave system — slave quarters, gang labor, and the like — was dismantled. Blacks increasingly founded their own churches. Headed by black ministers, these would provide the organizational sinew on which Martin Luther King Jr. and others later would build the modern civil rights movement.
Black voters aligned with a small faction of southern whites to elect Republican-led governments in several southern states. Many blacks held important public offices at the state and county levels. Two African Americans were elected to the U.S. Senate, and 14 to the House of Representatives. Typical was Benjamin Sterling Turner, Alabama’s first black congressman. Born into slavery, Turner was freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He swiftly established himself as an entrepreneur and then was elected tax collector and city councilman in Selma, the site of a crucial 20th-century civil rights struggle. Elected to Congress in 1870, Turner secured monthly pensions for black Civil War veterans and fought for greater federal expenditures in his district.
Republican-led state governments in the Reconstruction-era South typically raised taxes and expanded social services. Among their innovations were state-supported educational systems and measures to subsidize economic growth. African Americans were major beneficiaries of these innovations, and for a time it seemed as if their civil rights might be permanently secured.
But the majority of southern whites were determined to resist black equality. Many could not unlearn the harsh stereotypes of black inferiority on which they had been raised. Many southern whites were very poor, and they grounded their identity in a perceived sense of racial superiority. Southern elites understood that this racial divide could block interracial political efforts to advance their common economic interests. They often employed white racial resentment as a tool to regain political power.
White southerners, associated in this era with the Democratic Party, launched a blistering political attack on white southern Republicans. They called the native southerners “scalawags,” a term derived from a word meaning “undersized or worthless animal”; the northerners who sought their fortune in the postwar South were called “carpetbaggers” because these newcomers allegedly carried their belongings in travel bags made of carpet.
The reaction against newly empowered African Americans was harsher still. Secret terrorist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellia — named for the snow-white bloom of a southern flowering shrub and intended to symbolize the purity of the white race — and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) launched violent attacks to intimidate black voters and keep them away from the polls. President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched three regiments of infantry and a flotilla of gunboats to ensure fair elections in New Orleans in 1874. Grant used federal troops to smash the Klan, but the violence continued as militant whites formed informal “social clubs” described by historian James M. McPherson as “paramilitary organizations that functioned as armed auxiliaries of the Democratic Party in southern states in their drive to ‘redeem’ the South from ‘black and tan Negro-Carpetbag rule.’ ”
Some northern whites feared that Grant had gone too far, and more simply wearied of the struggle. As McPherson writes:
Many Northerners adopted a “plague on both your houses” attitude toward the White Leagues and the “Negro-Carpetbag” state governments. Withdraw the federal troops, they said, and let the southern people work out their own problems even if that meant a solid South for the white-supremacy Democratic Party.
This was essentially what happened. In elections marred by fraud, intimidation, and violence, Democrats gradually regained control of state governments throughout the South. In 1877, a political bargain declared Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the closely contested 1876 presidential election. In exchange, Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South. Black Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom then lived in the states of the former Confederacy, were again at the mercy of racist state laws.
