Black Political Achievements

ASU HST 200 (Historical Themes) The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 Black Political Achievements Union Leagues were fraternal organizations founded in the North that promoted loyalty to the Union and the Republican Party during the Civil War. After the war, these groups expanded into the South and were transformed into political clubs that served both political and civic functions. Black voter registration in the late 1860s and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment finally brought what Lincoln had described as "a new birth of freedom." In addition to serving as informational channels and middlemen between the Black community and the White establishment, the leagues' central roles as Black communities' hubs in the South also allowed them to carry out useful tasks like assisting in the construction of churches and schools for the local population. These leagues served as extensions of the Republican Party, assisting it in winning elections and registering newly enfranchised Black voters. Numerous African Americans and freed slaves entered politics across the South as a result of the leagues' political efforts. Black individuals started to hold political office for the first time, and several of them were elected to the US Congress. Congress. Fifteen Black members of the House of Representatives and two senators served in the 1870s. Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator and eventually president of the Confederacy, was born and raised in Mississippi, where both senators Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels were from. Born free in North Carolina, Hiram Revels (Figure 16.11) first gained notoriety in 1869 as a state senator for Mississippi after serving as a clergyman in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The state legislature chose him the next year to occupy one of Mississippi's two U.S. Senate seats, open since the end of the conflict. As the New York Times reported, "the colored Senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon," his entrance in Washington, DC, sparked a great deal of curiosity. ....The galleries were crowded so tightly that there was not a single square inch of space for standing or sitting. ......"A pin might have dropped when the VicePresident said, 'The Senator elect will now advance and take the oath,'" as the New York Times description above illustrates. However, while their presence in Congress during Reconstruction was significant and dramatic, the few African American senators and representatives represented only a small portion of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Black people who served in numerous capacities at the local and state levels. In the early 1870s, the South was teeming with Black people who had been freed from slavery and were now serving as county commissioners, school board commissioners, justices of the peace, constables, coroners, magistrates, sheriffs, auditors, and registrars. A fresh concern for the underprivileged and impoverished in the South coincided with and was influenced by this wave of local African American political activism. The Republican leadership in the South eliminated the despised Black codes, reversed the actions of White supremacists, and attempted to lessen the challenges faced by those who had been emancipated. Infrastructure was developed throughout the reconstruction era, with a focus on the restoration of the southern railroads. Both White and Black children were enrolled in the public education systems they established. They constructed hospitals, orphanages, and asylums for the crazy, or boosted money for them. In many places, basic essentials like firewood and even food were given to the impoverished by the municipal and state governments. The administrations also imposed taxes on land and property to pay for these new services and subsidies, which went right to the core of the region's economic inequalities. In fact, the land tax exacerbated the alreadyexisting issues faced by White landowners, many of whom were quite impoverished, and added to the wrath of what the South perceived as yet another northern assault on their way of life. When the reforms were forced upon them, white Southerners responded horrifically. The image of Black people who had formerly been under slavery holding powerful positions as congressman, sheriffs, and city council members stoked intense animosity toward the Reconstruction era and its eroding of the South's traditional social and economic underpinnings. Outraged southerners denounced this period of reform as a time of "negro misrule," accusing resentful freedmen of rapacious corruption and avaricious northerners eager to line their own wallets with the wealth of the South. Regretfully, for the vast majority of sincere reformers, Southerners could only cite a few actual instances of corruption, including lawmakers who lavished themselves with extravagant salaries or used public funds to purchase hams and perfumes. These were, however, very rare instances, much like the widespread corruption of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, these stirring tales and the South's pervasive racism against Black people sparked Democratic efforts to "redeem" state governments. In the end, Democrats throughout the South used White vigilante violence and the economic clout of planters to wrest back state political authority from the Republicans. By 1876, when President Grant's focus shifted from the South to the Indian Wars in the West, White people had regained much of the authority in the South, and Reconstruction had all but been abandoned. Only the Republican-run governments of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida remained in place by the end of 1876. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, the belief that the South had been unfairly sacrificed to northern depravity and Black retaliation lingered for many years. This story was so strong and widespread that by the time D. When W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was published, White people all around the nation were ready to believe the myth that uncontrolled Black people frequently violated and assaulted White southerners. In actuality, the reverse was true. Beginning in the 1860s, white southerners planned a counterrevolution against Reconstruction measures in the South that was occasionally violent but largely effective. The South's reformers and modernizers frequently faced threats of violence for their efforts. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan often tormented, attacked, and even killed Black Republican politicians in the South with impunity. White leaders frequently employed deceit and fraud at the polls, when they didn't completely disregard the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, in order to obtain the desired outcomes. These practices defined African Americans' lives in the South as Reconstruction came to an end and continued to do so for over a century.