CIVIL RIGHTS

The black experience in America can be largely defined in terms of the struggle to secure civil rights—the liberties inherent in legal, social, and institutional equity in the American body politic. Though 1870 opened with the promising ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that granted suffrage to black men, the fifty-year period that followed saw African Americans subjected to the cruel irony of the post-emancipation barrage of exclusionary restrictions designed to maintain the racial hierarchy that had existed under slavery. Freedom from slavery represented a nominal condition as white supremacy in the United States was perpetuated by the increasingly repressive laws dubbed "Jim Crow" for a minstrel stereotype of blackness appropriated by a white stage performer in the 1820s. Disfranchisement, restricted access to public facilities, discriminatory hiring practices, delegitimation of court testimony, and exclusion from private establishments were all sanctioned by Jim Crow statutes, which varied in intensity from state to state. Though the North is typically considered to have been more tolerant of the black presence, the first Jim Crow laws were enacted in Northern states during the antebellum era in order to exert control over the free black population. Jim Crow gained currency in the Southern states in 1870 as part of the backlash against Reconstruction that was fueled by the disintegration of the Freedmen's Bureau, the governmental infrastructure that had provided legal protection and assistance to the millions of emancipated slaves since the end of the Civil War.

BLACK CODES AND RECONSTRUCTED RIGHTS

Although the Confederate effort to secede from the Union ended with the surrender at Appomattox, the effort to maintain the way of life the Southerners had fought to defend continued despite the dictate of the Emancipation Proclamation: the thwarted secessionists did not expect race relations to deviate from the established order of white supremacist repression. While blacks relished the liberties they hoped to enjoy once released from the shackles of chattel slavery, many whites labored to make their newly acquired freedom nominal, at best. Surprisingly, those who favored white supremacy found their cause aided by the successor to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875). Though virulently opposed to the institution of slavery, Johnson believed as strongly in the natural superiority of the white race as any of the staunchest Southern separatists. Though he did not block the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, Johnson opted to make it an agency of the military rather than one of the government, and, except for rescinding General William Tecumseh Sherman's 1865 order to distribute abandoned lands to former slaves along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, did little to involve himself in the Bureau's efforts to facilitate the transition of Southern blacks from slaves to free American citizens. Johnson's inaction tacitly sanctioned the rampant incidents of violence and injustice committed against blacks by the vanquished white Southerners; his policy was to allow the individual states to reconcile the relations between the races without significant federal intervention.

Codification of the unwritten rules that governed the hierarchical interaction between blacks and whites resulted in state regulation of the working conditions and mobility of black citizens. White planters were granted the sole discretion to determine the hours of and compensation for labor, and blacks were confined to agricultural and domestic labor unless they were able to secure a special permit. African Americans were also subject to a strict curfew, and the unemployed could be imprisoned, fined, or forced to work for whomever would pay the fine. There was no provision for the public funding of African American education, and blacks were prohibited from voting. Essentially, the legislation was designed to compel blacks to return to their former slave occupations, where they would be under the control of and economically dependent upon their former owners. Until 1870 the Freedmen's Bureau effectively overruled these so-called Black Codes, but the fact that the Southern states attempted to establish them represents the desire to implement a government-controlled caste system virtually indistinguishable from the so-called peculiar institution.

Reconstruction—the effort to bring the South in alignment with the Union—was fraught by a clash of ideologies between President Johnson, who favored federal inaction in consideration of the primacy of states' rights and appointed white supremacist provisional governors to the Southern states, and the Radical Republicans, a powerful group of senators and representatives who advocated black civil rights and racial equality. In 1866, despite Johnson's opposition, the Radical Republicans were able to muster enough votes to override presidential vetoes of the Civil Rights Act and the bill extending the operations of the Freedmen's Bureau, which had been created the previous year. The Radical Republicans were also able to determine the conditions for readmission of the former Confederate states to the Union. They mandated that the Southern states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees full citizenship rights to any person born on American soil, and they required the states to restrict the political participation of former Confederates. On the heels of a successful congressional election that secured their majority control, the Radical Republicans pushed through the Reconstruction Acts beginning in 1867. These laws instituted the presence of federal troops in the Southern states until they complied with the stipulations for rejoining the Union, including amending their state constitutions to incorporate blacks as citizens entitled to equal protection under the law and full civil rights.

While Reconstruction reigned, blacks in the South made great strides toward achieving a political voice and representation in the government. They held their own political conventions before the 1867 elections so they could choose candidates to endorse and platforms to support. Many blacks sought and held public office during the 1870s, including the United States Senators Hiram Rhoades Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi. P. B. S. Pinchback was elected to the Senate as well as the House of Representatives from Louisiana, but was not permitted to take his seat in either congressional body due to challenges against the legitimacy of the election processes. He did serve as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, and for a brief period was the acting governor of the state. There were also twenty black members of the House of Representatives during Reconstruction, among them Joseph Hayne Rainey and Robert Smalls of South Carolina, Benjamin S. Turner of Alabama, and John R. Lynch of Mississippi.

Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 after the controversial election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in the 1876 election. Hayes lost the popular vote but made the concession of promising to remove federal troops from the South in return for the disputed electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. The withdrawal of the military presence from the South meant the resumption of state self-government and the consequent resurgence of the Southern Democrats, who acted quickly to reverse the measures taken under Reconstruction to secure social and political equality for blacks. One of the final triumphs of Reconstruction was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which mandated nondiscriminatory access to theaters, hotels, and railroad cars for blacks as well as whites. This act, however, did not survive a judicial challenge—it was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1883.

THE IMPACT OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Frederick Douglass spoke at a rally after the court's decision on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and opined that the strict constitutionality of the legislation should have been subordinated to the nobility of its purpose: to secure justice on the behalf of all American citizens, regardless of the ancestry of their forebears or the color of their skins. Douglass emerged as the principal spokesperson and leader for the race from the antebellum period until his death in 1895. Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, in 1818, Douglass escaped to the North at the age of twenty and began speaking as a fugitive slave on the abolitionist circuit three years later. In 1845 the first version of his most famous publication appeared, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, which is widely considered the slave narrative that defines the genre. Several subsequent installments of Douglass's autobiographical writings chronicled his subsequent experiences. These included My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Both Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) wrote biographies of Douglass, published in 1899 and 1907, respectively, a testament to his significance as a pioneering race leader even among the most eminent black men of the era.

Douglass was a vociferous opponent of the Jim Crow segregation that gathered momentum in the wake of the 1883 repudiation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In the six years that followed the official demise of Reconstruction in 1877, blacks had been ousted from most of the political offices they had occupied during the era and lost much of the ground they had gained, principally through legislative mandate, toward true equality with whites. During the years from 1866 to 1877 blacks had constituted the majority in the South Carolina House of Representatives, but that numerical surplus evaporated once the Republicans lost political control of the South. Although the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the restriction of voting rights on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," it did not explicitly prohibit states from using other means to effectively bar blacks from voting. This was accomplished through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests and by holding segregated primaries to determine the candidates who would run for office. Disfranchising laws were bolstered by the tried-and-true method of intimidation: Sarah Ann Pringle, a white woman who resided in Texas during Reconstruction, recalled in a memoir that white men who had been disallowed by federal mandate from voting in the gubernatorial election of 1873 due to their active support of the Confederacy used force to defend their access to the ballot. They armed themselves, prepared to shoot anyone who attempted to bar them from the polls, and frightened off the would-be black voters with a volley of gunshots.

Such revolutions in miniature happened throughout the South. Charles Waddell Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a memorable literary account of politically motivated violence. It is based on the massacre and subsequent mass exodus of blacks from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 following an effort by white men to regain Democratic control of the city by inflaming public opinion against what they called Negro domination.

Many of the stories in Chesnutt's collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) trace the black experience throughout Reconstruction to its aftermath—a climate of racial hostility. "The Web of Circumstance," the last of the book's nine stories, centers on Ben Davis, a former slave who becomes a moderately successful blacksmith and chides his fellow blacks for squandering their earnings on travel and elaborate churches instead of investing in property. Wiser financial management, he suggests, would have resulted more swiftly in collective black prosperity. Davis's advice, however, is systematically undercut by the unfortunate series of events that plagues him when he is accused of stealing an ornately decorated whip belonging to one of his white clients. The blacksmith is prosecuted and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary without even so much as being able to testify in his own defense. During the term of his incarceration his property is confiscated for taxes and legal expenses, his wife runs off with his former assistant, his daughter becomes an alcoholic and accidentally drowns herself, and his son is lynched after killing a white man. Ben Davis himself, after resolving revenge against the man whose whip he is wrongfully accused of stealing, finally decides against retribution, but is killed by the man nevertheless because he misconstrues Davis's retreat as a threatened assault on his young daughter.

Chesnutt's tale constitutes a many-layered critique of the aborted promise of civil rights under Reconstruction. Ben Davis's advocacy of translating the fruits of independent labor into property acquisition loses much of its force in isolation—his lack of education and reliance upon being in favor with local whites make him vulnerable to the judicial persecution he suffers. In the court of law his reputation for honesty and integrity cannot combat the general prejudice against blacks bolstered by the chain of circumstantial evidence that indicates his guilt. His views on the unrealized potential for racial uplift are twisted by the prosecuting attorney into radical propaganda castigating whites for their continued oppression of former slaves, and Davis can understand none of the rhetoric being attributed to him. Because he has all but ostracized himself from the black community, Davis has no one besides his family to support him. In addition, his previous behavior may have inspired sufficient resentment among other blacks that they are happy to see his ruin and may even have even helped to bring it about. Through the figure of Ben Davis, Chesnutt shows that without political and civil rights, including full participation in the electoral process, legal influence, and access to education, the accumulation of land and ownership of property mean nothing to racial progress because they are insecure holdings.

The insecurity of property became abundantly clear to Frederick Douglass. In 1874 he was named president of the Freedmen's Bank, an institution dedicated to protecting the deposits of emancipated slaves. The bank collapsed that same year despite Douglass's attempts to save it by contributing $10,000 of his personal funds. The bank's failure was caused by ill-advised financial speculation long before Douglass was named president, but he bore much of the criticism for the collapse. The direction of the bank was one of several federal appointments Douglass held under the administrations of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield; the other positions included federal marshal to the District of Columbia from 1877 to 1881, recorder of deeds from 1881 to 1886, and U.S. Minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891.

In his final years Douglass became active in the national anti-lynching campaign led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931). The last speech he wrote, "The Lesson of the Hour: Why Is the Negro Lynched?" was delivered in January of 1894 at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, D.C., and later published under the title Why Is the Negro Lynched? (1895). In the speech he indicted the false perception of Southern black men as ruthless sexual predators, which had been disseminated by such champions of moral purity as Frances Willard of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Douglass noted that this idea had contributed to the practice and toleration of lynching. Public sentiment, as Douglass was well aware, exerted an immeasurable influence on the advancement of civil rights for blacks in America.

ATLANTA COMPROMISE AND PLESSY V. FERGUSON

Public sentiment was swayed once again, and again to the detriment of the black American populace, when Booker T. Washington was invited to deliver the opening address at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, Georgia. Perhaps, had he not succumbed to a heart attack in February of that year, Frederick Douglass might have been entreated to deliver the speech that the Southern organizers hoped would signal to Northern white industrialists that race relations were improving. Instead, Booker T. Washington, the Hampton Institute–educated founder and president of the labor-intensive Tuskegee Institute, was asked to give a public address. Though it pleased the vast majority of Americans who heard or read it and propelled Washington to the national stage as the new voice of black America, the speech may have done more to facilitate the entrenchment of Jim Crow than any deliberate effort to galvanize support for segregation.

The speech commonly known as the Atlanta Exposition was Washington's attempt to conciliate post-Reconstruction resentment between the races and convince Southern whites that blacks shared their commitment to Southern progress and were their best allies in rebuilding the region. In trying to fore-stall potential white interest in replacing their forfeited slave labor with an influx of immigrant workers, Washington may have overdone his effort to depict Southern blacks as docile, tractable, industrious, forgiving, and altogether willing to subordinate any desire for greater civil rights to the need to work alongside whites in restoring the South to its antebellum glory. The lines that white America fixated upon and interpreted as the black endorsement of Jim Crow segregation used the human hand as an analogy for race relations with respect to leisure and labor: Washington said that while the races could be as divided as the fingers socially, "in all things essential to mutual progress" (Washington, Up from Slavery, p. 230) they could work with the united power of the hand.

The key to appreciating the import of Washington's pronouncement is determining what "social" really means. If it signifies, as it came to in the law and custom of white supremacist ideology, that blacks and whites were not to meet on terms of equality in any place where sociability might result, then strict segregationist policies were certainly in order. The races could not share the same public facilities or privileges and expect to maintain social separation, and working relationships had to be governed by a strict hierarchy in order to remain professional and not bleed over into the nebulous "social" category. In this way, many blacks felt as if Booker T. Washington had indeed compromised their interests and thwarted their advancement in order to cater to the sensibilities of proud white Southerners not yet able to stomach the notion of racial equality. This sentiment gathered momentum after the decision rendered by the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, handed down the next year, which sanctioned the "separate but equal" doctrine that prevailed until the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Homer Plessy, a Louisiana octoroon (a person of one-eighth black ancestry), violated the state's Separate Car Act of 1890 by refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car on 7 June 1892. The train was stopped and Plessy was taken into custody, thus embarking upon a judicial journey that would end unsuccessfully four years later at the United States Supreme Court and was a precursor to the twentieth-century Rosa Parks incident. The arrest was orchestrated by the Comité des Citoyens, a group composed largely of mixed-race descendants from the celebrated gens du coleur society of free blacks that flourished in the French Quarter of antebellum New Orleans. The organization was formed in 1891 expressly to challenge the Separate Car Act as a step toward dismantling all statutes that violated the civil rights of Americans of African descent. Complicit in the effort were railroad workers who resented being compelled to police the color line by ejecting blacks from the cars reserved for whites and the detective who was compensated for his arrest of Plessy—the Comité des Citoyens did not want to surrender their compatriot to the unpredictability of the treatment he might have received at the hands of just any law enforcement officer.

Plessy's situation is reminiscent of a scene from the fictionalized memoir The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man published anonymously by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) in 1912. The unnamed narrator describes a conversation concerning the "Negro question" that he has with four white men representing four different American constituencies—an unreconstructed Texas cotton planter, a Union veteran, a Northern intellectual recently transplanted to a Deep South state college, and a Jew. What enables him to be privy to their uncensored viewpoints is that, masked by his ambiguously fair skin, he is riding unmolested on a whites-only railroad car through the segregated South. Like Plessy and the men of the organization he represented, the protagonist of Johnson's novel is not interested so much in establishing proximity to whites but in enjoying the luxuries restricted to whites alone. The discrimination that forced blacks of all classes to share the same grossly inferior accommodations violated the spirit of the socalled separate-but-equal facilities policy. The grass-roots movement to unseat Jim Crow that originated in Louisiana was a noble struggle that enlisted the courageous efforts of Louis Martinet, the black lawyer and publisher of the New Orleans Crusader, the black daily that served as the official organ of the Comité, and Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905), a white lawyer and author of the semi-autobiographical novel A Fool's Errand (1879), who argued Plessy's case before the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, public opinion did not favor the eradication of segregation. The popularity of Booker T. Washington's recommendation that the considerations of cooperative labor take precedence over the demands for social recognition made it all the more unlikely that the nation would be receptive to challenges against Jim Crow laws.

Washington's views were also criticized on other grounds. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), perhaps best known as a dialect poet of the 1890s, registered concerns that a unidimensional focus on politics would inhibit racial uplift. An erudite young man from Dayton, Ohio (he died of tuberculosis at age thirty-three), Dunbar excoriated the black press for its scant attention to grammatical correctness and its overemphasis on exhaustively cataloging the wrongs perpetrated against the race. He exhorted the multi-faceted development of black America in the areas of science, art, and literature, a perspective later articulated most persuasively by W. E. B. Du Bois. Like Du Bois, Dunbar was skeptical of the industrial education solution advocated by Booker T. Washington and worried that white America would use Washington's rhetoric to forestall black ambition. In an article entitled "Our New Madness," which appeared in The Independent on 16 September 1897, Dunbar expresses his concern that, despite his "honesty of purpose," Washington is "not doing either himself or his race full justice" in his public addresses (p. 182). Dunbar felt that Washington's speeches resulted in decontextualized quotes that whites used to corroborate their desire to limit blacks to domestic, agricultural, and trade labor.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND W. E. B. DU BOIS

Booker T. Washington's approach to the problem of amalgamation—uniting the races into a single body politic—is often labeled "accommodationist": he opted to accept and work around white opposition to black advancement rather than openly defy it. He championed the efficacy of industrial education, which focused on practical training and the intrinsic dignity of labor, in order to avoid unnerving whites who worried about blacks seeking to elevate themselves from their "proper places." After the overwhelming success of his Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895, influential whites both North and South viewed Washington as the undisputed leader of the race, especially since Frederick Douglass's passing earlier in the same year. Virtually every issue pertinent to the welfare of black Americans was funneled through Washington for endorsement. He approved political appointments, lent support to proposed legislation, proposed individuals for jobs, and solicited funds from his wealthy contacts. For a black person with ambition he was an invaluable friend to have and a formidable enemy. Critics labeled Washington's formalized system of influence the "Tuskegee Machine."

On the other end of the ideological spectrum from Washington was the Harvard-educated William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1868–1963), a member of the intellectual and cultural elite. Du Bois believed in his theory of the "talented tenth"—that every race had its best and brightest, and this ten percent would be the vanguard to lead the community into collective advancement. Unlike Washington, Du Bois felt that liberal arts education would be the means by which blacks could gain access to the upper echelons of society, echoing Charles Chesnutt's sentiment that educational exclusion would be the demise of the black community, however prosperous it became through manual labor. Du Bois most famously articulated his opposition to Washington in the third chapter of his magnum opus, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others." Du Bois points out that Washington's advocacy of postponing the effort to secure political power, civil rights, and access to higher education in the interest of preserving harmonious labor relations resulted in the elimination of black voting rights, legally enforced second-class citizenship, and the reduction of public funds for advanced education for blacks. What is not demanded will not be supplied, Du Bois argued.

In 1903 a close friend of Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934), publicly opposed Washington at a rally in Boston. Believing the Tuskegee Machine to be responsible for having Trotter arrested following the denunciation, Du Bois issued a call to black men committed to the cause of civil justice and the abolition of caste distinctions. In July 1905 twenty-nine men responded to the call, and the group was dubbed the Niagara Movement after the site of the first meeting—the Canada side of the falls, where they convened after being refused accommodation on the American side of the border. The Niagara Movement became racially integrated and gender inclusive when it evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, at the height of Washington's national prominence. Du Bois founded The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, and served as its editor for the next twenty-five years. In his Crisis editorials, as well as the Atlanta University Studies of the Negro Problem conference series, which predated his activity with the NAACP, Du Bois identified a plethora of issues facing the black community that required legislative address and reform. The Crisis also featured the literary work of up-and-coming black writers, many of whom flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, resulting in the "civil rights by copyright" initiative that pushed the cultural achievements of blacks in order to shape public perception and achieve parity with whites in America. Although segregation and legally sanctioned discrimination would essentially withstand opposition until the advent of the nonviolent protest movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, the legacy of resistance left by men and women such as Douglass, Plessy, Du Bois, Wells, and Dunbar set precedents for action and inspired the continuation of the struggle for civil rights.

See alsoThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Blacks; Jim Crow; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching; The Marrow of Tradition; Plessy v. Ferguson; Racial Uplift; The Souls of Black Folk; Up from Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Chesnutt, Charles. Frederick Douglass. 1899. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. 1899. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968.

Douglass, Frederick. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Edited by Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History. 1881. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003.

Douglass, Frederick. Why Is the Negro Lynched? Bridgwater, n.p.: J. Whitby and Sons, 1895.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Washington, Booker T. Frederick Douglass. 1907. New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1969.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. Edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster. Boston: Bedford, 1997.

Wells, Ida B., et al. The Reason Why the Colored American Is not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature. 1893. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Secondary Works

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Holt, 1993.

Medley, Keith Weldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2003.

Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.

Mieder, Wolfgang. "No Struggle, No Progress": Frederick Douglass and His Proverbial Rhetoric for Civil Rights. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Moore, Jacqueline M. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003.

Wintz, Cary D., ed. African-American Political Thought, 1890–1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.

Wormser, Richard. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin's, 2003.

Licia Morrow Calloway