Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (37 page)

The irony was cruel—as cruel as the elite Blacks who blamed rural migrants for the race riot and urged their removal from Memphis. During and after the war, rural Blacks across the South had fled to southern cities and heard racist southerners—many Black elites included—predicting that the migrants would descend into idleness and criminality. It was said that God had made Black people to cultivate the soil (actually, Black elites diverged on this point). Black urbanites, new and old, were resisting discrimination and building schools, churches, and associations, achieving a modicum of economic security. And yet, their uplift did not improve race relations. Their uplift—and activism and migration—only fueled the violence in Memphis and beyond.
¹⁰

As White southern violence spread, Democratic newspapers published stories arguing that masters’ loss of control was energizing the
Black
crime wave. Southerners also read stories of the “murder and mutilation” of Whites in Jamaica by “infuriated negro savages, bent on destroying the civilization which surrounds and vexes them.” Jamaica’s 1865 revolt was, in fact, a freedom fight against British slavery in everything but name. So it made sense that those who were trying to re-enslave the emancipated in the United States feared another Jamaica. They used any opportunity to attack Black communities to prevent it, and every racist idea to justify their attacks.
¹¹

DAYS BEFORE THE
Memphis riot, a compromise proposal appeared before Congress that incorporated all of the divergent postwar issues into a single constitutional amendment, including denying Confederates the ability to hold office and placing Confederate war debt on southern laps. The Fourteenth Amendment’s first clause pleased the Radical Republicans: “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.” For the sake of the amendment’s passage, most Republicans rejected demands to define this statement’s terms. Republicans did not deny Democrats’ charges that the amendment was “open to ambiguity and . . . conflicting constructions.” The ambiguity effectively ensured that both antiracists and racists would vie for the amendment’s power. Indeed, both the defenders of equal opportunity and the defenders of White “privileges or immunities” would vie for the riches of the Fourteenth Amendment after its passage on June 13, 1866 (and ratification in 1868).
¹²

For not guaranteeing Black male suffrage, Wendell Phillips blasted the Fourteenth Amendment as a “fatal and total surrender.” Republicans argued that omitting suffrage was strategically necessary. They told Black male suffragists that “‘the negro must vote,’ but the issue must be avoided now so as ‘to keep up a two thirds power in Congress.”
¹³

Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed the woman must vote, too, and they joined Black male suffragists in founding the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866. “I would not trust [a Black man] with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic . . . than ever our Saxon rulers are,” Stanton said at the AERA’s first annual meeting in 1867. With the “elevation of women,” it would be possible to “develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life and thus, by law of attraction, to lift all races,” she added. Stanton offered an enduring rationalization for the racist idea of the hypersexist Black male, of Black men being
more
sexist
than White men. It was the consequence of his racial oppression; the abused becoming the abuser.
¹⁴

Sojourner Truth rose to defend Stanton’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. “White women are a great deal smarter,” Truth said, “while colored women do not know scarcely anything.” After wielding racist ideas against colored women, the eighty-year-old legend turned her racist ideas onto colored men. Colored women “go out washing . . . and their men go about idle,” she said. “And when the women come home, they ask for money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food.”
¹⁵

WHEN MIDTERM ELECTORS
in 1866 sent the two-thirds majority of Republicans necessary to override presidential vetoes back to Congress, President Johnson was not dismayed. If Republicans brought Black male suffrage before Americans, a Johnson aide said, then “we can beat them at the next Presidential election.” Republican congressmen and their voters were a motley crew: it included segregationists, who were seeking to confine Black “brutes” to the South by eliminating racial discrimination; assimilationists, who wanted to humanize the “imbruted” Blacks and eliminate racial discrimination; and a handful of antiracists, who wanted to eliminate racial discrimination and afford equal Blacks equal opportunities.
¹⁶

Nowhere was opportunity as unequal as in work, where rural Blacks’ desires for secure land and urban Blacks’ desires for secure jobs hardly registered in the political discourse. Every union should promote “one dividing line—that which separates mankind into two great classes,” said labor editor Andrew Carr Cameron at the 1867 convention of the newly founded National Labor Union (NLU). Cameron obscured the color line in the first-ever national labor agenda. From then on, this denial of racism allowed racist laborers to join with racist capitalists in depressing Black wages, in shoving Black workers into the nastiest jobs, in driving up their rates of unemployment, and in blaming the racial disparities they helped create on Black stupidity and laziness.
¹⁷

African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs “to educate . . . a number of blacks,” and then “send them forth to regenerate” their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England’s Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed “white teachers” to be “the best,” as claimed in the New York National Freedman’s Relief Association in its 1865–1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the “high culture” of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of “refined,” often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily “unrefined” poor Blacks.

Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans “had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism,” the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedmen’s Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks’ working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.
¹⁸

For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with
Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White spaces.
¹⁹

CONGRESS PASSED FOUR
Reconstruction Acts between March 2, 1867, and March 11, 1868, that laid the groundwork for the new state constitutions and for readmission of ten of the eleven southern states into the Union. Confederates were forced to accept Black male suffrage, while northern Free Soilers soundly rejected Black suffrage on their ballots in the fall of 1867. Confederates roared hypocrisy at these northerners, who were “seeking to fasten what they themselves repudiate with loathing upon the unfortunate people of the South.” Republicans stripping the vote away from “respectable” southern Whites and handing it to the “unrespectable” southern Blacks was “worse than madness,” President Johnson said in his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1867. “No independent government of any form has ever been successful in [Black] hands,” he added. With voting power, Blacks would cause “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.” Johnson engaged in a debate that was over before it began. Since the very presence of Blacks was deemed to be tyrannical, racists would only see tyranny no matter what Black voters and politicians accomplished in the coming years.
²⁰

During the 1868 elections, Democrats pledged to free White southerners from the “semi-barbarous” Black male voters who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust,” as stated by a vice presidential candidate, the fanatical Missouri politician and Union general Francis P. Blair Jr. The Democratic platform attacked
Republicans for subjecting the South, “in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.” The Ku Klux Klan, founded originally in 1865 as a social club in Tennessee, made a charade of the “profound peace.” With Johnson’s anti-Black military appointments looking away, the Klan commenced a “reign of terror,” assassinating Republicans and barring Blacks from voting.

Millions of Blacks voted for president for the first time in armed southern Black counties that the Klan would not dare to enter, swinging the 1868 presidential election to a Republican war hero, General Ulysses S. Grant. Blacks voted into life what segregationists would begin their struggle to kill—the Black politician. “Nigger voting, holding office, and sitting in the jury box, are all wrong,” blared Mississippi’s
Columbus Democrat
. “Nothing is more certain to occur than these outrages upon justice and good government will soon be removed.”
²¹

Numerous Republican congressmen, such as Ohio’s James A. Garfield, were privately expressing “a strong feeling of repugnance” about Blacks being “made our political equal.” But when these racist Republicans calculated the serious advantages the “loyal” Black vote could give them in swing states, they finally gave their support to Black suffrage. As with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, these powerful congressmen had not been morally persuaded to open the door to Black rights. It was about self-interests. On February 27, 1869, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. It forbade the United States and each state from denying or abridging voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congress empowered itself to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” but refused to go any further. Protections for Black politicians, uniform voting requirements, and the prohibition of race-veiled measures to exclude Blacks, however, were denied.
²²

Denied, too, was any serious discussion of enfranchising women. This issue caused dissension between White and Black suffragists at the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) meeting on May 12, 1869, weeks after Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment. It stung leading suffragist Susan B. Anthony to think the Constitution
had “recognized” Black men “as the political superiors of all the noble women.” They had “just emerged from slavery,” and were “not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.” Ironically, sexist men were using similar arguments about women’s illiteracy, women’s ignorance of public questions, and noble men—as the natural political superiors of all women—to oppose Anthony’s drive for suffrage rights.
²³

For instance, George Downing, a Black activist and businessman who attended the meeting, spoke of women’s obedience being God’s will. The AERA meeting went from bad to worse. Feminists challenged him. Downing and other organizers of the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) came under fire again for this view at their founding meeting later in the year. A Black woman from Downing’s home state of Rhode Island expressed her disappointment that “poor women’s interests were not mentioned.” In the end, the CNLU admitted its “mistakes.” It would have been wholly hypocritical for the CNLU to refuse to address gender discrimination, after developing in reaction to the National Labor Union’s refusal to address racial discrimination. Then again, hypocrisy had normalized in the American reform movements. Racial, gender, ethnic, and labor activists were angrily challenging the popular bigotry targeting their own groups at the same time they were happily reproducing the popular bigotry targeting other groups. They did not realize that the racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and classist ideas were produced by some of the same powerful minds.