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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chafe, William H., 1942– author
Title: Lifting the chains : the Black freedom struggle since Reconstruction/ William H. Chafe.
Other titles: Black freedom struggle since Reconstruction
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023003794 (print) | LCCN 2023003795 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197616451 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197616475 (epub)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003794
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003795
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197616451.001.0001
For William E. Leuchtenburg, a brilliant historian, my mentor, and my dear friend for more than half a century
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Present at the Creation, 1863–1877
2. The Twilight Years, 1877–1898
3. Family, Church, and Community
4. Education and Work
5. Politics and Resistance: From 1900 to World War I
6. World War I
7. The 1920s and 1930s
8. The Persistence of Struggle, the Beginning of Hope: Afri can Americans and World War II
9. Postwar Protest
10. A New Language of Protest, a New Generation of Activi sts
11. Winning the Right to Vote, Coming Apart in the Process
12. Triumph and Division
13. The Struggle Continues
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
This book could not have happened without the ongoing support of my colleagues in the history department of Duke University, and the historians of civil rights and Black history throughout the country. Most important for this work has been the scholarship of graduate students in the Duke Oral History Program.
My colleague Larry Goodwyn and I initiated the oral history program when we joined the Duke faculty in 1971, five months after completing graduate school. Both of us had been involved in civil rights during the 1960s, and both of us had used oral history interviews during our graduate student careers—Larry at the University of Texas, I at Columbia University. Amazingly, we were able to secure a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation during our first year to provide graduate fellowships to white and Black students interested in interviewing activists in the civil rights movement to determine their motivation and their roles in the decision-making process of the movement.
Over the next four decades, we were able to raise millions of dollars more to support these graduate fellowships. Over four decades, we graduated thirty-eight PhDs, half Black, half white. Of these, twenty-eight published their dissertations on the movement, and sixteen won national book awards.
During this same period, I also interviewed numerous civil right activists for my own scholarship, including my book on the Greensboro sit-ins, which won the first Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1981.
Lifting the Chains could not have been written without the oral histories conducted by both our students and myself. I am also deeply grateful for the pathbreaking work of so many scholars who have written about race in America, especially
my colleagues at Duke, William Darity, A. Kirsten Mullen, and Tim Tyson. I also deeply appreciate the comments of Tim Tyson and Thomas Lebien on an early version of the manuscript.
There has been no issue more central to American history than that of race, and racial inequality. This book could not have been written without our oral history program at Duke, and all the scholarship on race and civil rights history that has occurred in the last eight decades.
WILLIAM H. CHAFE
Introduction
This is a book about the long history of the Black freedom struggle in America—from the end of the Civil War until today. No American alive today is untouched by the story recounted here; all of us, whether we are aware of it or not, live with the consequences of this history.
When did my engagement with the Black freedom struggle begin?
I grew up in a segregated white working-class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But I always went to schools that were racially diverse, because my white neighborhood was surrounded on one side by an all-Black community and on the other side by an Italian/Puerto Rican community. As students, we often played with each other after school—but we never went into each other’s homes. Thus, from early childhood on, I became aware of, and was fascinated by, issues of racial difference.
Then as a teenager, I became part of a youth group at the Baptist church I attended four blocks from my house. The leader of our group was a man studying for the ministry who cared deeply about social issues. Every Sunday for four years, we talked about the Social Gospel, and what Jesus might do if faced with issues of racism and poverty.
That interest grew deeper when I went to Harvard as a commuter student in 1958. I took classes with sociology professors that focused on race. Then, when I started my history honors tutorial, I decided to write my senior thesis on W. E. B. Du Bois. I scoured his papers in New York, New Haven, and Cambridge, and became ever more fascinated by Du Bois’s pivotal role in the emergence of the Black protest movement.
After a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York, I got a job teaching juniors and seniors at a progressive high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Knowing of my interest in social justice, one of my colleagues—a physics teacher three times my age—said, “If you care so much about these issues, why don’t you go down South with the civil rights movement?”
The next week, I got on a bus with fifty members of the Northern Student Movement and headed to Montgomery, Alabama, where our task was to lay the groundwork for the Selma to Montgomery march.
The next six days were the most important of my life. Our group was half Black, half white; half male, half female. We arrived late one evening at a Black Baptist church in Montgomery, where we slept on the floor. All night long, cars driven by Ku Klux Klan members drove around the church, beeping their horns. The next day we set out on our task—to recruit local residents to provide food for the marchers, and beds for them to sleep on. We worked in teams of two, usually integrated by race or gender. Our work went well, and we even thought about sitting in at local lunch counters—until we were told that SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had no funds for lawyers to defend us if we were arrested.
Almost immediately, we sensed the tension that existed between the young people in SNCC and their older compatriots in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SNCC people spoke with humorous contempt of “de Lawd,” their nickname for Martin Luther King Jr. We also sensed their skepticism, and occasional hostility, toward Northerners. Long before Black Power became a slogan of SNCC and others in the movement, we saw its seeds growing in the response of the local movement people we were working with.
Four days later, we got on the bus and headed back to New York. Before we left, James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, came on the bus to talk with us. This movement, he said, was the most radical and powerful since the Populist
coalition of the 1890s, when poor white and poor Black farmers came together to try to overthrow the white ruling class in states like North Carolina, Alabama, and Kansas. It was a powerful message. And then we left.
For the next thirty-six hours, those of us on the bus talked non-stop. We reflected on what we had seen, heard, and learned. The conversations were intense. They concentrated on the divisions we had witnessed between SNCC and SCLC, but more importantly, on whether whites and Blacks could work together, and on what basis. We confronted the issue of whether “whitey” could fully understand the perspective of Blacks; whether whites, by virtue of their backgrounds, instinctively tried to assume authority and decision-making power within the movement. There was complete candor. But little anger.
When I got back to New York, I was appalled, reading the New York Times and the New York Post, to see how little newspaper columnists and reporters acknowledged or understood the divisions we had observed. The tensions between SNCC and SCLC were visceral—but this would only become evident nationally during the Meredith march in Mississippi, fifteen months later, when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael proclaimed, “Black Power—Move on over Whitey or we’ll move on over you.”
In the meantime, I decided to go to graduate school in history In the fall of 1965, I enrolled at Columbia University As one indication of how much my trip to Montgomery had changed my life, I decided to write my master’s thesis on the alliance of Blacks and whites in the Populist movement in Kansas. The choice was totally shaped by our discussion with James Forman on the bus in Montgomery. The thesis soon became my first published article. By then, as well, I had become convinced that the only way to understand social movements was to use oral histories to get at the source of grassroots activism. The SNCC experience had taught me that change happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Hence, my next article was on the sit-down strikes by automobile workers in Flint, Michigan, a strike that started the United Auto Workers, America’s most progressive union.
Although initially I meant to write my dissertation on Black history, one of my classmates beat me to the topic I wanted to write on. So instead, I chose to write on women’s history. I completed my dissertation—and first book—on the dramatic changes in women’s experiences in twentieth-century America. It was the first of four books I would subsequently write on women’s history.
But as I prepared to move to Duke University in the fall of 1971, I knew that I wanted my next major research project to be on civil rights history, with a focus on grassroots activism from the bottom up. Based on my Flint experience, I also knew that I wanted to rely on oral history, as well as written documents, in order to understand how and why Black protest movements evolved as they did. Within a few months, I decided to write about the Greensboro sit-ins, the student protests that launched the direct-action civil rights movement and within two months spread to fifty-four cities in nine different states. Using both documentary archives and oral histories, I was able to tell a story of how ordinary citizens— students, their teachers, their parents, and their ministers—had helped to transform race relations in America, from the bottom up. The most popular book on civil rights in the early 1970s was titled John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, but I knew that the movement came from below, not from the Oval Office, and that if I were to understand how it began, I had to go and interview those who lived in local neighborhoods and taught in local schools.
Consistent with this approach—indeed, central to it—my colleague Larry Goodwyn and I started the Duke Oral History project. As junior faculty six months out of graduate school, we raised $250,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to recruit primarily Black graduate students at Duke to do community studies, using oral histories as a primary research tool. The goal of our students was to understand the history of grassroots activism throughout the South. Our program soon evolved into the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Race Relations, where we invited SNCC veterans to come and write their books. Eventually, this evolved into the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. We raised millions of additional dollars
from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, including a multi-year grant that allowed us to do 3,600 interviews with Black activists in twenty-two different communities in eleven different Southern states. Entitled “Behind the Veil”—a phrase first used by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903—it uncovered the degree to which Blacks never gave up the struggle against racism, even during the height of Jim Crow segregation from 1900 to 1950.
Over four decades, we trained thirty-eight Ph.D. students, twenty-eight of whom published their dissertations as books on local civil rights histories. Sixteen of these won National Book Awards.
Eventually, the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) made it possible for me, and others, to return to our original partnership with SNCC. Starting in 2013, CDS embarked on a new research endeavor with the SNCC Legacy Project focused on collecting oral histories and other materials from SNCC activists that would be available on a website open to everyone.
These interviews—as well as the work of our students in the courses we have taught over the past four decades—have created a growing awareness of how deep and long the Black struggle for freedom has been in our country. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that much of the historical literature on race in America has not dealt with the depth, the length, or the ongoing courage of a movement that continues to this day.
There are numerous themes in this volume. The first—and most important—is that despite the wishes of many whites to the contrary, the struggle for freedom has been carried out primarily by Black Americans, with only occasional assistance from whites. Yes, there were some alliances—between white Republicans and emancipated Blacks during Reconstruction; in the Virginia Readjuster movement of the 1880s; in the biracial Populist movement of the 1890s, especially in places like the Fusion movement in North Carolina; in some segments of the New Deal; and in segments of the civil rights
struggle that emerged with new energy in the years after World War II. But overwhelmingly, Blacks—from the bottom up, in their churches, lodges, women’s groups, schools, and colleges —carried forward the struggle for freedom and justice through their own institutions, their own families and alliances. On occasion, whites became supporters. But over 150 years, this has been overwhelmingly—and heroically—a Black struggle for freedom, with whites deserving only incidental credit for the reforms that were achieved.
Second, the Black struggle for freedom was led by both men and women, the older generation and the younger generation. The Greensboro Four could not have transformed the struggle as they did had it not been for people like Ella Baker, the NAACP field worker who started the local Greensboro youth NAACP chapter in 1943, and organized NAACP groups throughout the South; or the teachers at allBlack Dudley High, who taught their students about the historical resistance of their parents, and provided role models for citizens who refused to ride at the back of the bus, or sit in the balcony at local movie theaters.
Third, it was all-Black institutions—especially the churches, the lodges, the gangs in local communities, the neighborhood women’s groups, the Black college clubs that gathered at local pool halls—that talked up the issues, examined different courses of action, and then put their lives on the line to make change happen.
Fourth, in most cases, whites responded only when they were forced to, and when it was in their self-interest to do so. Thus, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order to enforce Fair Employment Practices in 1941 came only because he could not afford to face 50,000–100,000 Black protestors on the streets of Washington as he tried to mobilize support for American intervention in World War II. John F. Kennedy called Coretta Scott King when her husband was arrested and faced threats of serious personal violence against him because Kennedy desperately needed Black votes in the 1960 presidential election. He then introduced what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act only when Black demonstrators in Birmingham—and especially young children—placed their
lives on the line against police dogs and fire hoses, and captured the nation’s attention and rage.
Fifth, even as whites came to the conclusion that the civil rights acts of the 1960s had solved once and for all the problem of race discrimination, it was Blacks who carried forward the battle against the mass incarceration of people of color, and the persistence of economic impoverishment among African Americans.
Sixth—and in some ways most important—Blacks knew from the beginning that true equality required economic change as well as political and legal change. The right to eat in a desegregated restaurant was important. But it meant little unless and until Blacks had the resources to afford a decent meal. As long as Black Americans earned one third less than white Americans, owned far fewer homes, and owned houses were worth—on average—less that 20 percent of what white homes were worth, it would be impossible to talk about true racial equality in America.
Throughout, Black Americans faced the ongoing tension among those in power between politics on the one hand, and principle on the other. Nine times out of ten, they made a dent in the pervasive walls of white racism only when white politicians were forced to opt for principle.
In the end, the bottom line was what it had always been: it was Black Americans who bore the burden of carrying forward the struggle for racial equality and justice. Even if, on occasion, whites joined their ranks, Black Americans were the heroes who carried forward the struggle for freedom—now, as well as then.
Chapter 1
Present at the Creation, 1863–1877
It was 1863. Abraham Galloway—son of a white father and an enslaved mother—stood next to the Army recruiter, holding a gun to the soldier’s head. He had escaped slavery in the hold of a ship four years earlier, fleeing to Canada, then became a master spy for the Union Army. Now, in the days after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Galloway had returned to North Carolina, becoming the leader of more than four thousand escaped slaves who had joined him in New Bern, North Carolina. We will join the Union Army, Galloway told the recruiter, but only on our terms. Galloway then laid down his demands: the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to run for elected office, equal pay for Black and white soldiers, schools for their children, jobs for women, and care for their families. In retrospect, the demands seem revolutionary. But not so, given the roles that Blacks were playing in the war. Hence, the recruiter said yes. Within days, 10,000 Blacks had joined Galloway to enlist in the Union Army. Those soldiers—along with nearly 200,000 other Blacks who enlisted—proved pivotal to destroying the system of plantation slavery. Soon, they would inaugurate the quest to create a truly democratic America.1
It was as though the world were starting again. For nearly 250 years, slavery had provided the foundation for both politics and society. Slavery was a big business. It shaped the economy and life of the South—and the North as well. The slave system was cruel and violent, with virtually all enslaved families forced to witness one or more of their relatives being sold to a distant planter. On a daily basis, field workers were harassed, and the wives and daughters of slave families were subjected to sexual assault at the hands of whites.
Not all whites in the South owned slaves. That was a privilege of wealth, which was never equally shared. But in the last third of the seventeenth century, rich whites had quelled protests against them by poor white farmers by appealing to a common denominator—their “whiteness.” Rather than address the issue of economic inequality raised by less well-off white activists, white planters succeeded in persuading poor whites that they shared a common citizenship with aristocratic planters. They were people with the same skin color. This common denominator—their “whiteness”— became the pivotal point of division in society. Wealth did not count, nor class; being white was the primary descriptor. The color of one’s skin overrode the profound divisions that separated poor whites from their more well-off brethren. Some poor whites even came to believe the myth that they lived in a world of equal rights—for white people. These same people may even have been convinced—or at least pretended to believe—that the enslaved descendants of Africa accepted their fate and appreciated the paternalism of their owners.
Behind this myth, of course, lay nightmare visions of slave uprisings, turning the image of docile slaves into bloodthirsty beasts bent on vengeance. Both images served to reinforce white supremacy.
Now, a civil war was underway that would destroy these illusions, exterminate the original sin of slavery, and make possible a new effort to realize the promise of freedom and democracy. Galloway and his regiment of Black soldiers stood at the forefront of this struggle. With a boldness difficult for any white person to imagine, Galloway and his brethren set out to claim their freedom. They hoped to create a brand-new world of democratic citizenship.2
If Galloway’s assertiveness suggested the optimism of the immediate period leading to the end of the Civil War, Blacks soon learned how unpredictable their struggle for freedom would be. In 1865 and early 1866, reforms of every kind seemed possible. Just as Galloway had suggested, Black freedmen now looked to be treated as equal citizens, with the rights to vote, own land, send their children to school, and secure decent jobs. Most Northerners were convinced that,
having surrendered in a state of abject helplessness, the white South would accept virtually any conditions the North imposed upon them, potentially including not only the right of Blacks to vote but also to occupy the plantation lands they had once worked as slaves, but now could own as independent farmers. The victors, after all, could impose on defeated Southerners whatever conditions they wished in order to achieve the goals for which they had sacrificed so much.
But then came President Andrew Johnson’s arbitrary restoration of old-style Confederate rule in the defeated South. Rather than demand social justice and a new commitment to equal rights for Blacks, Johnson focused on reconciliation with the “old South.” He undermined the determination of many Republicans to protect Black rights, and overruled their efforts to distribute land from masters to their former slaves. Johnson issued wholesale pardons to Confederate leaders and speedily readmitted former Confederate states to the union. Every governor he named to head the new state governments opposed Black suffrage. It was as if the 613,000 soldiers who had died for the cause of the Union had been lost for nothing, four years of torment wasted—simply to restore to power those who had been in control in the first place. “Never was so great an opportunity lost,” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts observed, “as our President has flung away.” The Confederate power structure had been given the right to resume control, at least in substance. “The moment they lost their cause in the field,” Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens commented, the Confederates “set about to gain in politics what they had failed to obtain by force of arms.”3
Almost immediately, the Republican Congress revolted against Johnson, imposing a totally different regimen on the South, inaugurating what became known as Radical Reconstruction. A new set of possibilities came into being, setting up a conflict of values and policies that would besiege the nation in perpetuity. As historian David Blight has succinctly observed, the basic issue facing America after the Civil War became “how to make the logic of sectional reconciliation compatible with the logic of emancipation.”4
In the end, national fatigue over the issue—and political opportunism—led to a pivotal decision. In the 1876 presidential election, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote against Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. Notwithstanding the fact that slavery as a legal system had been confined to the South, the North too was deeply afflicted with racism. Even if many Northerners wanted to punish their enemy in the Civil War and showed some sympathy for Galloway and his supporters, their commitment to fundamental change in relations between the races was limited. It was now ten years since the war had ended. Hence, there was a willingness to consider a new path—one of compromise.
Thus, despite being the candidate of the party of emancipation, Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes was willing to craft a deal that, in effect, sold out the hopes of Black people. Hayes’s opponent, Samuel Tilden, had won the popular vote. But then Hayes proposed a deal: he would end Reconstruction and withdraw all federal troops from the South if three Southern states—Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana—would cast their electoral votes for him rather than Tilden. The Republican Party abandoned Black Southerners in order to stay in power. The tension between political expediency and acting on principle reflected an ongoing pattern that would persist for well over a century. For most whites, expediency won out most of the time.
During the decades after emancipation, and beyond, Blacks never ceased their determination to be free. For most Blacks, principle—not expediency—prevailed. The circumstances might change. Every encounter with whites entailed a risk— how far to go, how direct to be in demanding change, how much to put on the line. But Blacks never gave up their determination to be free. Even as each of these moments posed an intimate challenge—one that often put life itself at risk— Black Americans never stopped pushing for change.
The first truth about the years between 1863 and 1900 is how fluid everything was: the social order that had once seemed immutable now was ripe for challenge. The hopes of African Americans for land, political equality, education, and
self-fulfillment would soar to new heights, only to be followed by periods of plunging descent into near total oppression. During these four decades, the cycle of ups and downs occurred over and over. But amidst the volatility, one fact endured. Never monolithic, and embracing a wide spectrum of ideas and tactics, African Americans never gave up the struggle to advance the well-being of their families and communities.
To be sure, there were fundamental questions of direction. Was the goal of African Americans to achieve complete participation in a society shared with whites—what we now call integration—or was the primary goal to secure the freedom to pursue independent communities where Black people could create their own world—what we now call separatism? What mattered most? Land? Political rights? Security, for one’s family and oneself? And how much did all of this depend on guarantees by the government, and equal relationships with white people? Yet even if the basic issues remained the same, the answers seemed to shift as rapidly as the times.
Confronting this shifting landscape of threat and hope, African Americans made what they could of the opportunities they had, building churches, schools, lodges, and towns. They worked tenaciously to protect and advance the opportunities of their children. They helped each other when trouble appeared, recognizing an allegiance to community based on the common history they shared. To be sure, Black hopes were undermined repeatedly, most dramatically when President Andrew Johnson failed to support racial equality in the South at a time when whites were ready to accept any change ordered from the White House. But the determination of Blacks to achieve this freedom never flagged. At no point did Black Americans cease to protest, or give up the struggle. And what progress was made was always first and foremost attributable to their tenacity, their commitment, and their willingness to bear the risks of demanding progress.
Everywhere they encountered the tenacious reality of white power It assumed various forms—always economic exploitation, often physical brutality, psychological
manipulation, or sheer terrorism. Yet within the framework of that dialectic between Black self-assertion and white power, the struggle to achieve equality persisted. The story would go on for more than a century. And at its roots, the subject matter was always whether it would be possible for the sons and daughters of Africa to become equal citizens in a society that had been founded on white supremacy.
The Beginning
Although, for their own psychic well-being, white plantation owners insisted that their slaves were content, a whole other world existed in the slave quarters and between slaves on different plantations. This was the world that W. E. B. Du Bois described in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, as “life behind the veil.” After night fell on each plantation, when Blacks were no longer under the surveillance of whites, a separate existence flourished. Now, they occupied space they controlled. Families came together, singing, worshiping, dancing, talking, and politicking. News circulated about what had been heard at the master’s table and carried from other plantations. Kinship networks sprang up between slave communities in adjacent areas, and slaves traveling to see family members on other plantations carried information back and forth about relatives, events unfolding in local communities, and what was taking place further afield. On weekends, many slaves worked for wages in nearby areas, providing access to still more information about what was transpiring in the world outside. The “other world” of the slave community offered numerous opportunities for developing separate institutions—like secret places of worship—and provided occasions for individual and group affirmation through cultural ritual, dance, and song. Women played a particularly important role in such communal development. The result was an enormous network of news spreading within the slave community about slave unrest, national and local moments of resistance, and prospects for change. As the grandmother of one twentieth-century Black farmer reported, Blacks “had to act [in front of whites] … just as though everything was all right,” but behind the scenes another reality
existed. Black perspectives, dreams, and aspirations were radically different from those the planter could see in front of him.5
It did not take long before this network quickly spread the word that a Civil War had begun. Booker T. Washington recalled his mother kneeling beside his bed “fervently praying that Lincoln and his armies might be successful.” Slaves knew exactly where the Union lines were, and they looked to escape at the first opportunity to secure their freedom. One Tennessee planter wrote, “My Negroes [are] all at home, but working only as they see fit, doing little.” In fact, he noted, they would prefer to “serve the federals.” Even more threatening, the planter said, they seemed impatient to prepare “cotton lands for themselves,” almost visibly anticipating the day when they could seize the land they had worked for their master and plow it for themselves. By rejecting the will of their owners, and forging new ties to their brethren, the slaves transformed their lives and forged a new sense of their distinctive identity. While control of their own lives might still legally reside with their masters, they were creating the foundation for practicing the politics of a freed people.6
With alacrity, African Americans bolted to join the Union Army as soon as they could. They did so with a political consciousness sharpened by their conversations “behind the veil” about the progress of the Union Army, and by a determination to uplift their entire community through becoming part of the common struggle. “I felt like a bird out of a cage [when I joined the Army],” one former slave in Georgia exulted. “Amen. Amen. Amen. I could hardly ask to feel any better than I did that day.” Another Black soldier in New Orleans rejoiced in his ability to walk “fearlessly and boldly through the streets … without being required to take off [my] cap at every step” in deference to whites. The experience of liberation transformed both behavior and self-perception. As one missionary observed, a slave had left the plantation still “cringing [and] dumpish,” but within days of joining the Army he was “ready to look you in your face … wide awake and active.”
Release from bondage was transformative. When a planter greeted one former slave with the paternal “howdy Uncle,” the African American retorted, “[Now, you can] call me Mister.” After President Abraham Lincoln took the decisive step on January 1, 1863, of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation— now letting the world know that this was a war about race and Black freedom, not just the reunion of a divided country— Blacks flooded into the Union Army. With almost 200,000 Black soldiers by 1864, half from the South, half from the North, Union troops were transformed into an Army of Liberation, part of what Steven Hahn has called the “largest slave rebellion in modern history.”7
Quickly, African Americans who joined the Army became activists for equality. Protesting low wages and bad assignments, they insisted on the same pay as whites, and Congress responded, equalizing their wages in June 1864. Soon, they were demanding educational opportunities as well, turning their barracks into night schools where they learned reading and writing.
No one better personified the “new” Negro than North Carolina’s Abraham Galloway. He and his community sought to put in place a new internal social structure, even as they prepared to do battle with Confederate troops. Blacks organized their own schools, created self-help groups, built churches, and laid the foundations for an autonomous Black political life. Addressing a large audience of Black supporters in New Bern, Galloway declared: “We want to be an educated people and an intelligent people… . If the Negro knows how to use the cartridge box, he knows how to use the ballot box.”
The same spirit infused Blacks everywhere. With pride, they exulted in their role in the Union Army’s triumph. They constituted 10 percent of the 360,000 casualties on the Union side and helped to liberate numerous cities. They celebrated their victory publicly, with a band playing “Year of Jubilee” in Richmond. Black men and women danced through the streets singing, “Slavery chain done broke at last.” The Union Army’s commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, wrote President Lincoln that Black soldiers were the most decisive factor in the Union Army’s victory, an assertion that Lincoln soon
adopted as his own.8 Black Americans themselves had thus become a primary instrument of their own liberation.
Family, church, and education constituted the core priorities shaping Black activities. Once emancipation came, thousands of African American couples rushed to validate their family vows. In Granville County, North Carolina, 878 couples registered their unions, while in nearby Warren County, 150 couples took their vows in just two days. Churches became the first institutions totally controlled by Black people, with their own ministers and communities. However simple their physical structures, the Black church became the centerpiece of the community, a weekly reminder of how much people cared for each other, plotted together to advance their common interests, and sustained a sense of being part of a larger community, dedicated to collective advancement. From Bible school at nine thirty to morning worship at eleven, choir practice at noon, adult Bible school at four, and evening worship at eight thirty, this centerpiece of Black life brought joy, inspiration, and communal solidarity to each African American community in the South. As historian Hasan Jeffries observes about Lowndes County, Alabama, the places of worship might be no more than “simple clapboard in thin coats of white paint, with … roughly hewn wooden benches masquerading as pews, [but] these unpretentious buildings quickly emerged as the centerpieces of AfricanAmerican social life.” From children’s Bible school in the morning to evening worship at eight thirty, the Black church served as the heart of the Black community.
It was the churches too that provided the meeting place for political groups, and they spawned the schools that represented the hope for the future of African American parents and children. “What a great thing larning is,” one freed slave said. “White folks can do what they likes, for they know so much more’na we.” Soldiers took advantage of the chance to learn to read and write. “A large portion of the regiment have been going to school during the winter months,” a Black sergeant wrote from Virginia. “Surely this is a mighty and progressive age in which we live.” In Richmond, Blacks created schools in warehouses and churches, with 1,000 pupils enrolled by April
1865, and 75 adults. In Georgia, Blacks built 123 day and evening schools. The appetite for education was insatiable. As one federal officer wrote, “A negro riding on a loaded wagon, or sitting on a hack waiting for a train, or by the cabin door, is often seen, book in hand, delving after the rudiments of knowledge. A group on the platform of a depot, after conning an old spelling book, resolves itself into a class.”9
In the throes of celebrating emancipation, Lincoln became a new Moses and anything seemed possible. “There was to be no more Master and Mistress now,” said one Richmond Black. “All was equal.” Men insisted that their wives be called “Mrs.” and that they no longer work in white folks’ kitchens. In the South’s cities, Black women often paraded with parasols, wearing brightly colored clothes and enjoying their newfound status as free and equal citizens. In response, whites complained of Black insolence, calling Black women “uppity.” They raged at former servants, one of whom told her erstwhile mistress, “If she want any dinner she kin cook it herself.”10 Black troops occupied Southern cities, Black schools and churches grew like flowers in a garden, and a new day seemed in the offing.
In fact, the new day did appear, for a time. Eight years after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared that Blacks, slave or free, had no rights that a white person needed to respect, a Black lawyer was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court; just a few months after draft riots in New York City had expressed deep anti-black sentiment, Manhattan organized a massive parade to honor Negro soldiers. In Illinois, Blacks were serving on juries; and Massachusetts passed a public accommodations law granting Blacks equal access to facilities such as restaurants and hotels. As freedmen’s conventions met throughout the South in the summer and fall of 1865, there was a taste of a new Zion where past subjugation would be buried and a society of equality and self-determination created. Or so it seemed—at least at the beginning.11
Reconstruction—The Beginning of the Black Quest for Freedom
Those who marched out of slavery toward this new Zion held tenaciously to two basic dreams: political equality, embodied in the right to vote; and economic independence, symbolized by the ability to raise crops on land that they hoped to possess in their own right. These were two aspirations, separate but entwined. As they attained one, even partially, the other should advance as well. Or so they hoped.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave, a pioneering abolitionist, and most important, the greatest African American political leader of the nineteenth century, proclaimed the linkage between politics and freedom when he declared in May 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” By the fall of that year, North Carolina’s Abraham Galloway was meeting with more than a hundred other Black delegates in Raleigh to demand that Black Americans receive full rights of citizenship, public schools, a fair regulation of working hours, and abolition of all laws that permitted discrimination based on race. The South Carolina freedmen’s convention in the fall of 1865 mirrored the sentiments of those in the state to their north: “We simply ask that we be recognized as men; that there be no obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall govern over black men; that we have the right of trial by jury of our peers; that schools be established for the education of colored children as well as white; … that in short, we are dealt with as others are—in equity and justice.”12
The military experience of Black soldiers provided the training ground for Black political self-assertion. The uniform of the Union Army licensed Black soldiers to see themselves as free—equal in every respect to their white compatriots, able, in the words of one observer, to walk “fearlessly and boldly through the streets without being required to take off [their caps] at every [encounter with whites].” It was former soldiers, together with ministers, who took the lead in convening political meetings and drawing out the logic of the progression from emancipation to political equality Just as the
collective rush of slaves to join the Army built on the foundation of the “news networks” that had flourished on the plantations, so too the collective rush of former soldiers to freedmen’s conventions in the fall and winter of 1865 built upon the battles they had won when they insisted on equal pay and fair treatment in the Army. The Wilmington, North Carolina, chapter of the national Equal Rights League demanded “all the social and political rights of white citizens”; and hundreds of freedmen attempted to vote in Norfolk, Virginia. Former slaves, having formed their own churches and built their own schools, now focused on the one political right that, more than any other, signified citizenship—the right to vote. And not surprisingly, the leaders in that effort came from the Black soldiers who helped transform Union forces into an army of liberation. Indeed, from their ranks came sixty-four of the Black legislators who would sit in state capitols over the next decade, three of the lieutenant governors, and four of the US Congressmen.13
But just as important as the vote—and some would say much more important—was the opportunity to own land. When the South Carolina Freedmen’s convention articulated its goals, foremost among them was “that no impediments be placed in the way of our acquiring homesteads for ourselves and our people.” It was not only “Master’s niggers” who should be taken from him, said one Virginia freeman, but “Master’s land too.” If in fact there was to be a “new Zion,” where former slaves could realize their wish to be fully free women and men, it would require the elimination of economic dependency and the removal of the power of whites to shape Black behavior by continuing to control their food and shelter. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote almost four decades later, political freedom and economic independence were inextricably linked. It was difficult to imagine any people, white or Black, arriving at independent political judgments as long as they remained dependent on someone else for their family’s survival. Thus, in the view of many, political autonomy depended upon economic empowerment.14
As the war drew to a close, the hope for such a linkage of political and economic democracy was almost palpable. As
early as December 1861, the Port Royal Experiment operated on the principle that newly freed men and women should be granted land vacated by southern planters to engage in homesteading. When Congress enacted legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau in the spring of 1865, Republicans spoke specifically of the possibility of assigning land to every male freedman to cultivate. The Freedmen’s Bureau reflected the determination of Republicans in Congress to guarantee that the federal government would implement the social and economic changes necessary to make freedom an existential reality, not just a hoped-for ideal. Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist Pennsylvania Republican who most eloquently articulated the changes that freedom might bring, envisioned a social revolution, achieved through seizing more than 400 million acres from the wealthiest 10 percent of Southern planters and reallocating it in 40-acre plots to former slaves. “The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed,” he declared. “Without this [redistribution of land], this government can never be … a true republic… . How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse, exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? If this South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the … free labor of intelligent citizens.” 15
As if to prove that such a vision was not a utopian dream, the Freedmen’s Bureau was authorized to divide some land that had already been confiscated into forty-acre plots to be owned, and farmed, by former slaves. When General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied the South, he issued Field Order 15, which delineated the Sea Islands and the Low Country of South Carolina for settlement by Blacks, with each family allocated forty acres, as well as a mule to pull the plow. Word soon spread among former slaves that the federal government was contemplating giving Black farmers at least 900,000 acres of land. More than 40,000 freedmen settled on these plots of land. “Gib us our own land and we can take care ourselves, but without land, de ole mass can hire us or starve us, as dey please,” said one freedman.
For a brief moment, it seemed as though his hope—and Stevens’s promise—would be redeemed. As part of its proposed plan for what would happen to the newly liberated slaves, the Freedmen’s Bureau proposed that planter’s land be seized from former slaveholders, and then be divided into 40acre-and-a-mule plots that would be allocated to former slaves so that they could support themselves. Acting on their desire to become independent yeoman farmers, Blacks sought to control their own lives. They refused to work in gangs, as they had in the master’s fields; they took to the road to find lost kin; and they refused to let women family members work in the fields as they had been forced to do on the plantations. The taste of freedom was tantalizingly close, even given the indifference of so many whites in the North to the condition of Blacks. With the Freedmen’s Bureau plan for the distribution of planters’ lands to former slaves, the prospect of joining the cause of political equality to that of economic independence seemed a real possibility.
But It Was Not to Be
Though for a brief few months some freedmen had reason to believe that their dream of independent Black homesteads might be realized, the immediate afterglow of war’s end soon faded away. Notwithstanding Stevens’s plan for “agrarian reform” and the Freedmen’s Bureau’s readiness to allocate small farms to former slaves in Tennessee, Port Royal, and the Carolina lowlands, the men who controlled power in Washington soon determined that confiscation of land from rich planters was too revolutionary. In 1866, a tug of war unfolded between those pressing to take advantage of new possibilities to create a genuine agrarian democracy, and those preferring to return to established patterns of stability, including respect for previously existing divisions of power and wealth in the South.
Ultimately, the issue came down to what the war had been about. It had started with the simple objective of restoring federal authority over a rebellious region. But with the passage of time, it took on the theme of giving new meaning to “equal
rights for all.” Would that goal lead to a social revolution, including racial equality in all matters, economic as well as political? Or was it only about control of political power? Was “waving the bloody shirt” enough to win Black votes for the Republican Party, or did the end of slavery mean something more—a new world of equal economic opportunity as well as political independence?
On the issue of land, those advocating maintenance of existing property distribution prevailed. Planters would retain control over their plantations. As a result, the government forced tens of thousands of freedmen to give up the forty acres and a mule that had been theirs; the fabric of faith that many Blacks had come to believe in was ripped asunder. “You ask us to forgive … the man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes,” one former slave said. “That man I cannot well forgive … seeing as how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness [by taking back my land].” Instead of empowerment, freedmen were now left with “no land, no house, not so much as a place to lay our head.” They now had to negotiate their livelihood with the same planter class that for a lifetime had controlled their prospects for independence, autonomy, and social mobility.16
It was in this context that the new economic paradigms of sharecropping and tenant-farming evolved. The South remained a one-crop culture, largely untouched by mechanization. Mules and humans remained the primary means of cultivating cotton, with former slaves dragging the plow through dusty fields, and striking a series of deals with planters. One option was to be a tenant farmer—to own the crop, then pay the landlord a rent when the crop was sold. The other option was to become a sharecropper—the freedman would plant and harvest the crop, but it was the landowner’s to control, with the freedman getting only a predetermined share of the income. The advantage of these patterns was that the freedman and his family could still be “master of their own time.” Gang labor would not exist. Women might be kept out of the fields. Some form of independence existed. And as long as prices remained stable or went up, some progress was possible.17
