The Roughest Riders (4 page)

African Americans voted in greater numbers, with many elected to public office. Black colleges and universities including Howard, Morehouse, Fisk, and Tuskegee, sprung up during this time, propelling their students into the professional ranks as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Yet all of this occurred within an apartheid environment, where separate never amounted to equal, and “uppity” blacks who didn't know their place were treated with scorn and often brutalized.

The African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt described the feelings of a black nurse in his 1901 novel
The Marrow of Tradition
: “These old-time Negroes made her sick with their slavering over the white folks, who, she supposed, favored them and made much of them because they had once belonged to them—much the same reason why they fondled their cats and dogs. For her part, they gave her nothing but her wages, and small wages at that, and she owed them nothing more than equivalent service. It was purely a matter of business; she sold her time for their money. There was no question of love between them.”

By this time, a generation had passed since the official end of slavery, and younger African Americans—both former soldiers and the offspring of former slaves—were eager to shuck off the trappings of their ancestors' servile past. Their forefathers had put their lives on the line for their country, and in some cases either died or were mangled by war for their efforts. They had absorbed the dazzling rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and the lessons taught by his oratorical successor, Booker T. Washington, the first head of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. In 1895, Washington urged new generations of black Americans to work hard, save money, buy property, and rise into the middle class. And while all that advice was well and good if they were allowed to play on a level field, with no insurmountable obstacles strewn in their paths, that was not the reality, not for African Americans in general, and not for the soldiers returning from the wild frontier. What they found instead was a hostile environment, as mean-spirited and un-Christian as the one that had put them under the lash since their forebears arrived on slave ships. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House. It was the first such invitation of its kind, but the backlash was so vicious that Roosevelt never made another. The potential political cost was not worth the risk.

To keep black citizens from climbing further up the tottering ladder of equality, white America had launched a three-pronged assault designed to obliterate the type of progress that had occurred during Reconstruction. The all-out war against equal rights started with disenfranchisement in the voting booth. Beginning in 1890, while the Buffalo Soldiers were still in uniform dodging bullets and arrows out west, every southern state enacted laws that effectively prevented black people from voting, depriving them of the most essential democratic right of all. The second prong was segregation under the so-called Jim Crow laws, which took their name from an old minstrel routine, “Jumping Jim Crow,” and came to be used
as a derogatory stereotype of black Americans. No sooner had the federal government abolished slavery than states passed legislation that created separate racial treatment in housing, banking, the workplace, restaurants, unions, transportation, restrooms, drinking fountains, schools, and other facilities. In 1896, “separate but equal” became the law of the land in the South, and it was a
de facto
practice in the North as well.

Schools set aside for black students were notably inferior to white schools. A journalist of the period described the situation in Pennsylvania as similar to that in other areas of the country: “The interest manifested for the colored man is more for political effect, and those who prate the loudest about the moral elevation and political advancement of the colored man are the first to turn against him when he wants a friend.” He claimed that teachers hired for black schools were totally incompetent, evidence that perpetuating ignorance was a way of keeping black Americans in chains.

Modern civil rights advocates recognized the true inequality of the period. “With white supremacy challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights,” wrote black educator Henry Louis Gates.

Florida led the way along the path of infamy with laws mandating the separation of races on trains. Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and other southern states followed quickly in Florida's wake. These states singled out the idea of integrated train travel as particularly offensive since it forced people of different races to come into physical contact with one another, the men and women of both races given no option but to mingle with one another in close quarters, black skin rubbing up against white skin.

Laws enforcing segregation did much to damage the push for equality, but the most vicious prong in the overall attack was vigilante justice in the form of lynching, primarily of black males. During the
1890s, an average of 187 lynchings occurred every year—between three and four murders a week for more than a decade. The familiar picture was that of bigoted rednecks implementing their savage form of retribution under the cover of night, but the truth was even more horrifying. Lynchings of black Americans had become a spectator sport, as eager onlookers, fueled by gallons of alcohol, reveled in the violence in broad daylight. It was more or less an official pastime, a latter-day version of the public games held at the Colosseum in Rome. And as in those ancient ceremonies, the lynchings themselves were not always a quick deliverance of the victim into eternity, since an unspeakable ritual of torture often preceded the actual execution. The police did not intervene.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an African American journalist of the period writing for a newspaper called
Free Speech
, compiled a list of reasons why black citizens might readily find themselves with nooses around their necks: “insubordination; talking disrespectfully; striking a white man; slapping a white boy; writing an insulting letter; a personal debt of fifty cents; a funeral bill of ten dollars; organizing sharecroppers; being too prosperous,” and the list goes on. More often than not, raping a white woman was also included, and an accusation of such was often punished without a semblance of proof.

There was only one thing left for African Americans to do, claimed Wells-Barnett, and that was to save their money and move to a part of the country that recognized their rights as free and equal human beings. She encouraged black citizens to look for places that would provide them with fair trials when they were accused of crimes, instead of murdering them in cold blood whenever they were targeted by racist whites.

The larger problem, of course, was there was no place to go that offered blacks that much more protection than they had in the deeper regions of the South. The North was hardly more
receptive, although the hostility was less overt. The landed classes in New York, Boston, and other northern cities were busy vilifying the new immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy, and China, and actively fighting for legislation to limit the foreign hordes that came swarming onto American soil in increasing numbers during the later decades of the nineteenth century. These xenophobic Northerners were not about to champion the cause of oppressed black people, whom most of them regarded as genetically inferior in the first place.

That great compendium of knowledge, the
Encyclopædia Britannica
, contained the following entry under the heading
negro
in its 1903 edition: “By the nearly unanimous consent of anthropologists[,] this type occupies the lowest position in the evolutionary scale, thus affording the best material for the comparative study of the highest anthropoids and the human species…. The fundamental equality [desired for African Americans] by ignorant philanthropists is belied by the whole history of the race.”

On May 18, 1896, the highest court in the land, the US Supreme Court, rendered a notorious 7–1 decision on segregation in the case of
Plessy v. Ferguson
: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.”

In other words, racial separation was the best policy for the nation.

Except on the battlefield! While black and white combat units were themselves segregated, there was no distinction between the two in the line of fire. Arrows, bullets, and cannonballs discriminated against no one; they hit their mark where they fell,
obliterating lives and crippling soldiers without regard to race. They struck down white and black alike.

This, then, was the world the Buffalo Soldiers came home to after their years in the wilderness fighting for their country. Many of those who survived wore the scars of their injuries proudly, only to find that they couldn't work at the same places, attend the same schools, eat at the same lunch counters, or drink from the same water fountains as the white people they had fought alongside. Those who tried were likely to be brutalized and hanged.

Then something came along to change the status quo: America went to war again. Naturally enough, the nation had a new need for strong, healthy, young bodies to serve in combat against the country's latest enemy, and black soldiers, who had fought so well in earlier battles, were the obvious choice.

A
t 9:40 on Tuesday evening, February 15, 1898, deliverance of sorts arrived when a horrific explosion shattered the tropical stillness in the harbor off Havana, Cuba. “
Maine
blown up in Havana Harbor at 9:40 tonight, and destroyed,” read the dispatch sent to Secretary of the Navy John D. Long by the ship's captain, Charles Dwight Sigsbee. “Many wounded and doubtless more killed or drowned,” continued the report. Long received the news at 1:40 in the morning of February 16 and directly sent Commander D. W. Dickens to the White House to awaken President William McKinley.

“The president came out in his dressing gown,” Dickens recalled later. “I handed him the dispatch, which he read with great gravity. He seemed to be very deeply impressed with the news,” reading it over two or three times before replying.

The American battleship the USS
Maine
had been anchored facing the harbor, five hundred yards from the arsenal and two hundred yards from the floating dock there. It was an intensely dark night, with low-hanging rainclouds that drenched the area immediately after the explosion. The detonation ripped through the bowels
of the vessel, with its 355-man crew aboard, including 290 sailors, 39 marines, and 26 officers. The eruption obliterated the first third of the ship, where most of the men were sleeping or resting, and the remaining wreckage quickly sank to the bottom of the harbor. Two hundred and fifty-three men were killed instantly, and eight others succumbed to their injuries shortly afterward. Of the ninety-four survivors, only sixteen escaped unscathed. Black sailors were among the dead and wounded. The explosion rocked the Havana waterfront, knocked out the harbor's electrical power, toppled a long network of telegraph and telephone poles, and ignited fires for blocks around. The noise and concussion roused the entire city and swamped many smaller boats in the harbor.

Tensions between the United States and Spain had been mounting for some time, particularly in response to the situation in Cuba. The Spanish colony had been struggling to free itself from Spain's oppression for more than thirty years, and in 1868 the citizens had risen up against their overlords and persisted in that struggle for a decade. The United States, which had strong economic ties and real estate interests on the island, sided with the revolutionaries, lending them moral and financial support. America also nearly stepped in with military force in 1873 when the Spanish captured the American munitions and personnel ship
Virginius
, executing fifty-three men, including US citizens. The incident ultimately passed without America declaring war on Spain, and US support for the Cubans remained strong, especially when the islanders rebelled again in April 1895.

Spain responded by dispatching General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau to suppress the insurgents. Weyler soon earned the sobriquet “The Butcher” when he adopted a Pol Pot–style solution of sorts, relocating innumerable Cubans to concentration camps near Spanish military headquarters. His brutal policies resulted in the starvation of more than one hundred thousand Cubans and incited
war fever in the United States. The so-called yellow press of the era demanded that President McKinley take forceful action to protect American interests on the island.

US minister to Spain Stewart L. Woodford told the Spanish government to “take Weyler out of Cuba or we will do it for you.” Spain recalled Weyler on October 2, 1897, but it was too late to have much effect. Although Spain replaced Weyler with a more conciliatory officer, General Ramón Blanco, the Cubans were not about to be mollified. They had long since reached the tipping point under Spanish domination. Cuba's economy lay in tatters, with unemployment soaring and Spain still maintaining a tight rein on the citizens themselves. On January 24, 1898, McKinley gave in to the pressure and ordered the USS
Maine
to sail from Key West, Florida, to Havana. It departed from Florida at 11:00
PM
that night and arrived in Cuba at 9:30 the following morning, anchoring at Buoy Number 4 in thirty-six feet of water, between the
Alfonso XII
, a Spanish battle cruiser, and the
Gneisenau
, a German training steamer.

Spain reluctantly accepted the presence of the American ship in Cuban waters, as long as the crew remained on board and did not try to stir up trouble on land. Consequently, all crewmembers were confined to the vessel from the time it arrived until it was destroyed, with only officers permitted to go ashore when necessary. The American battleship was indeed impressive. It was originally designed as an armored cruiser with more than seven thousand square feet of canvas, and was later redesigned as a second-class battleship.