Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (38 page)

The National Labor Union welcomed Black delegates to its 1869 convention and proclaimed that it “knew neither color nor sex on the question of the rights of labor.” Antiracists and feminists would have preferred for the NLU to accept neither racism nor sexism on the question of the rights of labor. But that was hardly forthcoming.
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After George Downing’s debacle, Frederick Douglass tried to smooth things over by suggesting that AERA members support any measure that extended “suffrage to any class heretofore disenfranchised, as a cheering part of the triumph of our whole idea.” Stanton and Anthony rejected the resolution. Poet Frances Harper, representing the guns of Black feminism, chastised “white women” for
only going “for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.” Sojourner Truth had come to agree with Harper and Douglass. “If you bait the suffrage-hook with a woman, you will certainly catch a black man,” Truth advised, as only the Truth could. The division over the Fifteenth Amendment dissolved the AERA and severed the suffrage movement. The suffrage struggle limped into the 1870s and would not be resolved for women until nearly half a century later.

If it had been left up to the first generation of Black male politicians, women may have received voting rights in the 1870s. All six Black Massachusetts legislators, and six of seven Black US representatives from South Carolina, for example, supported women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony may have privately realized that Black men were not “densely ignorant of every public question,” including her right to vote.
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Democrats tried to block the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, demeaning it as a “nigger superiority bill” meant to establish horrific and barbaric Black supremacy. They had no luck. The amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. Black people from Boston to Richmond to Vicksburg, Mississippi, planned grand celebrations after the ratification. For their keynote speaker, several communities invited a living legend.
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CHAPTER 20

Reconstructing Blame

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
decided to stay home and witness the magnificent two-hour procession of dignitaries, especially the veterans of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. When Garrison stepped to the podium of Faneuil Hall at the close of the celebration of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, he looked older than his sixty-four years, tired and ready to step fully out of public life. He regarded the Fifteenth Amendment as a “miracle.” The members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, meanwhile, felt that their work was finished. They officially disbanded on April 9, 1870.

“The Fifteenth Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands,” imagined Ohio congressman James A. Garfield. An Illinois newspaper proclaimed, “The negro is now a voter and a citizen. Let him hereafter takes his chances in the battle of life.”
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The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment caused Republicans to turn their backs on the struggle against racial discrimination. After refusing to redistribute land, and giving landless Blacks the ability to choose their own masters, and calling that freedom; after handing poor Blacks an equal rights statement they could use in the expensive courts, and calling that equality; they put the ballot in the Black man’s hand and called that security. “The ballot is the citadel of the colored man’s safety,” parodied one Black southerner, “the guarantor of his liberty, the protector of his rights, the defender of his immunities and privileges, the savior of the fruits of his toil, his weapon of offense and
defense, his peacemaker, his Nemesis that watches and guards over him with sleepless eye by day and by night.” As this Black southerner knew so well, the ballot never did stop all those hooded night riders.
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Klan violence was needed to “keep the niggers in their place,” explained Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first honorary “Grand Wizard.” To the Klan, the only thing worse than a Negro was “a white Radical.” But the worst offender was a suspected Black rapist of a White woman. Klansmen glorified White womanhood as the epitome of honor and purity (and asexuality) and demeaned Black womanhood as the epitome of immorality and filth (and sex). Some Black men demeaned Black women, too. “Lord, sar!” said a prosperous Black Kansan. “You not think I marry a black nigger wench?” Klansmen religiously believed that Blacks possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men. It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as a “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue.
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The other threat to White male dominance was upwardly mobile Black people. Klan terrorism showed the charade that was always the strategy of uplift suasion. The Klan did “not like to see the negro go ahead,” reported a White Mississippian. Landless Blacks were terrorized by landowners. Landowning Blacks were terrorized by the Klan. In March 1870, President Grant sent to Congress documentary evidence of more than
5,000
cases of White terrorism. Between May 1870 and April 1871, Congress passed three poorly funded Enforcement Acts that dispatched election supervisors to the South, criminalized interference with Black voting, and turned a wide range of Klan-type terrorist acts into federal offenses. As a result, the Klan had “nominally dissolved” by 1871, but the train of terror still rushed down the tracks under new names. It became clear to all, as a northern transplant explained, that only “steady, unswerving power from without”
could guarantee peace and the survival of southern Republicanism. A steady, unswerving Black power from within could have done so, too, but Republicans remained unwilling to fortify Blacks with Buffalo Soldiers and land.
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The vote was supposed to make miracles, and in some ways it did. Southern constitutional conventions from 1867 to 1869 were a revolutionary sight to behold. They included northern transplants, southern Republicans, and southern Black delegates, about half of whom had been born in slavery. For all their lack of political experience, wealth, and schooling—or rather because of it—these delegates produced alluringly democratic constitutions. They instituted the South’s first publicly funded educational systems, penitentiaries, orphanages, and insane asylums; expanded women’s rights and guaranteed Black rights; reduced the number of crimes; and reorganized local governments to eliminate dictatorships. Initially, however, Black politicians usually stepped aside when the positions of power were divided up because they did not want to lend credibility to persistent Democratic charges of “black supremacy,” as if the charge had some logic to it.

While Blacks rarely benefited from Reconstruction’s economic policies, growing corporations did. Facing war-torn communities and treasuries, the same Reconstruction politicians who refused to hand out land and aid to landless Blacks, on the pretext that it would ruin them, handed millions out to railroad companies, on the pretext that railroads would develop the South by bringing new jobs, factories, and towns; allow for transport of untapped minerals; and extend agriculture. By 1872, most of the South only had debt and poverty to show for the incredible amounts of welfare handed out to railroad corporations. Bribed politicians happily gave away these funds. Only a small number of Black politicians sat in senior positions of power, and thus their share of the corruption paled in comparison to that of White politicians.
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Every dollar taken from southern treasuries heightened southern reliance on cheap labor. President Grant figured that maybe if Blacks had somewhere else to go, planters would value Black labor more. (Actually, planters did value cheap labor, and they used their guns and
racist ideas to keep Black labor as cheap as possible.) In early 1870, Grant began a presidential push for the annexation of the Dominican Republic to provide a haven for “the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.” He sent Frederick Douglass on a fact-finding mission in 1871. The DR could not only become a Black haven, the impressed Douglass reported, but by “transplanting within her tropical borders the glorious institutions” of the United States, the Blacks who moved there could uplift the impoverished and backward Dominican people. Douglass seemed unaware that he was recycling against Dominicans the very same racist ideas that had been used against African Americans. And if the US institutions were so “glorious,” then why did African Americans need a foreign haven?
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Assimilationists like Douglass encouraged American expansion, while segregationists and antiracists discouraged it, bringing the ongoing racial dispute into foreign policy. The US Senate voted down the annexation treaty in June 1871. Tired of Grant’s preoccupation with annexation, and his openness to using federal power to protect southern Black lives, Republican dissidents broke away. In May 1872,
New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley and Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, central forces in the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, headlined an assembly of “Liberal Republicans” in Cincinnati. “Reconstruction and slavery we have done with,” declared E. L. Godkin, the editor of
The Nation
, speaking for the Liberal Republicans. They pledged amnesty and voting rights for ex-Confederates, the end of federal southern intervention, welfare for the rich in the form of tax breaks, and nothing for the poor.
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Greeley emerged as their presidential candidate. The arch-enemy of the Confederacy became the arch-friend of the Confederacy, similar to the nation’s most famous preacher, whom Frederick Douglass sarcastically called the “apostle of forgiveness.” Seeking to reunite White northerners and southerners through Christian Whiteness, Henry Ward Beecher published the first American biography of Jesus,
The Life of Jesus, the Christ
, in 1871. “There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. And yet Beecher included in the book five depictions of the
perfect God-man named Jesus, and they all depicted a White man. Henry Ward Beecher gave White Americans a model for embedding Whiteness into their religious worldviews of Jesus Christ without ever saying so out loud, just as southern and northern Whites were doing with their political worldviews. It went without saying for racists that White people were the best equipped to rule the United States under the heavenly guidance of the White Father and Son.
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Horace Greeley had long been associated with emancipation and equality, but he made himself over in order to campaign as the Democratic candidate for president in 1872. “Political equality is far off,” he lectured Blacks. “Social equality will remain forever out of reach. Don’t expect free gifts of land. Segregate yourself; employ each other. Who are your best friends?—Sound, conservative, knowing white Southerners.” These “knowing white Southerners” made it known to Black people, as one South Carolinian observed, that “to vote against the wishes of their white employers and neighbors was to risk death.” Congress issued a report in the spring of 1872 condemning southern violence, but it only went so far. The report even adopted the segregationists’ position, arguing that Blacks were the cause. The violence, the report explained, was a response to the “bad legislation, official incompetency, and corruption” of Black politicians. It hardly mattered that southern White politicians sat in the overwhelming majority of the powerful and corruptible positions. The truth hardly mattered to the producers of these racist ideas who were seeking to defend the racist policies of buckling Black political power. Grant’s former secretary of the interior, Jacob Cox, said southerners could “only be governed through the part of the community that embodies the intelligence and the capital.”
The Nation
put it more bluntly: Reconstruction had “totally failed.”
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Enough Blacks and Republican Whites risked death to win most of the South and President Grant’s reelection in 1872. On southern streets, armed Republicans had to defend their reelected politicians. In Colfax, Louisiana, sixty-one armed Blacks barricaded themselves inside a courthouse on Easter Sunday, 1873. Democrats shelled the courthouse with artillery, snatched out the thirty-seven survivors, and executed them in the town square. The day after the Colfax
Massacre, the US Supreme Court, including Grant’s four corporate lawyer appointees, massacred the civil rights protections of the Fourteenth Amendment in the
Slaughterhouse Cases
. White New Orleans butchers felt their economic “privileges and immunities” were being denied by the bribe-instigated 1869 Louisiana statute requiring them to do business at the Slaughterhouse Company. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Miller upheld the monopoly on April 14, 1873, distinguishing between national and state citizenship and citing Roger B. Taney’s
Dred Scott
opinion. The Fourteenth Amendment only protected the relatively few rights of national citizens, Miller stated. Three years later, this doctrinaire split between national and state citizenship allowed a unanimous Supreme Court to reverse the convictions of the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre (murder prosecutions “rests alone with the States”), thus giving Louisiana the freedom to exonerate them. The Court also voided the Enforcement Acts and encouraged White terrorist organizations just in time for the election of 1876.
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