[Lecture writ. 2/11/14] © ’14 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Dear fellow students;
I thank you and your professor, Dr. Fernandez, for this brief opportunity to share some time with you, as you study what I think was a pivotal point in time for the United States:
Reconstruction.
Most of us spend little time and perhaps less thought on this period, for let’s face it; it’s ancient history, right?
I can hear the rolling of eyes, the sucking sounds of mouths, the closing of minds snapping shut – and the whispered thought; “what does this have to do with me? All this stuff from the 1870s and 1880s!”
But Reconstruction is more than a word historians attach to an era; it was, for the first time in American life, a real attempt to change America’s trajectory from a slave nation to a truly free nation.
And that brave, noble attempt ended in failure and betrayal.
Reconstruction, formally, refers to the years 1866-1876 (other historians and authors differ on these dates). These dates are bookmarks in time, for when Congress began passing the Reconstruction Acts which became the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and supportive legislation; and the congressional-presidential deal that made Rutherford Hayes president, on the condition that the U.S. Army be removed from southern territory, exposing African – Americans to a deluge of white terrorism, most often organized by an army of the Democratic Party, known as the Ku Klux Klan.
Some will argue, in protest, that the South was defeated by the military power of the North, and while true, it doesn’t tell all of the story. For, what the military wins in the field, politicians can deal away at the negotiating table.
That’s what happened in the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1876, when the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden seemed to land more votes than Hayes.
A congressional committee was established, and the Electoral College gave Hayes one more vote than Tilden. Hayes took the presidency and fulfilled a campaign promise to pull out the U.S. Army (actually tens of thousands of Black troops), and Reconstruction came to a dirty, brutal end.
In the recent book, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, by Charles Lane, we see clearly how all levels of government turned their faces from African Americans, and left them to the cruel, tender mercies of their former tormentors and enslavers of the white South.
Lane writes:
Instead of a new Civil War, there had been a new compromise; a grand
bargain, between the white Republicans of the North and the white
Democrats of the South. The latter had traded the presidency to the
former in return for control over their own states. And that meant
control of their colored population –because the Supreme Court had decreed
that the Negroes must look first to the states for protection against violence
and fraud. They must look to the likes of Wade Hampton and Francis
Nicholls. The Compromise of 1877 was less formal than the Missouri
Compromise or the Compromise of 1850, but its basic logic was similar.
The Union was to be preserved at the risk of the rights of four million
Americans of African descent. “The Negro”, the Nation opined, “will
disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a
nation will have nothing more to do with him.”
Reconstruction was over (Lane 245).
Lane took the implications of what that meant further:
The South pushed on Republican fault lines until they cracked. The
Confederate States of America lost the Civil War militarily and
economically, but in the ways that mattered most to white Southerners
— socially, politically, and ideologically – the South itself did not. [U.S.
President] Ulysses S. Grant died on July 23, 1885, having tried but
failed to secure the new birth of freedom for which he had fought
the Civil War. (254).
Because the U.S. government ceded the issue of states’ rights, or local power
and control, for all intents and purposes, the South won the war to treat
Black people as slaves in everything but the name.
When a Civil Rights bill was passed in 1875, it would take less than 10 years
for the Supreme Court to strike it down.
Black people were free, according to the Constitution, but in reality, their
lives were virtually indistinguishable from that of their captive ancestors.
They could not vote. They could not hold office. They could not take certain
jobs and professions.
They were denied the right to travel from what used to be plantations.
They were betrayed, and it would take a century to rebuild movements of the
1960s, for voting rights, for so-called ‘freedom.’
For the South had won the war politically, which they lost on the fields of
Gettysburg.
_-© ’14 maj
{Source: Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died; The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008)}