Movement aiming to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
Immediately after the American Civil War, the federal government launched a program known as Reconstruction which aimed to rebuild the states of the former Confederacy. The federal programs also provided aid to the former slaves and attempted to integrate them into society as citizens. Both during and after this period, Black people gained a substantial amount of political power and many of them were able to move from abject poverty to land ownership. At the same time resentment of these gains by many whites resulted in an unprecedented campaign of violence which was waged by local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, and in the 1870s it was waged by paramilitary groups like the Red Shirts and White League.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in "Plessy v. Ferguson", 163 U.S. 537, a landmark upholding "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional. It was a very significant setback for civil rights, as the legal, social, and political status of the Black population reached a nadir. From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, southern states passed new constitutions and laws disenfranchising most Black people and excluding them from the political system, a status that was maintained in many cases into the 1940s.
Much of the early reform movement during this era was spearheaded by the Radical Republicans, a faction of the Republican Party. By the end of the 19th century, with disenfranchisement in progress to exclude Black people from the political system altogether, the so-called lily-white movement also worked to substantially weaken the power of remaining Black people in the party. The most important civil rights leaders of this period were Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915).
Reconstruction.
Reconstruction lasted from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 to the Compromise of 1877.
The major issues faced by President Abraham Lincoln were the status of the ex-slaves (called "Freedmen"), the loyalty and civil rights of ex-rebels, the status of the 11 ex-Confederate states, the powers of the federal government needed to prevent a future civil war, and the question of whether Congress or the President would make the major decisions.
The severe threats of starvation and displacement of the unemployed Freedmen were met by the first major federal relief agency, the Freedmen's Bureau, operated by the Army.
Three "Reconstruction Amendments" were passed to expand civil rights for Black Americans: the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights for all and citizenship for Black people; the Fifteenth Amendment prevented race from being used to disfranchise men.
Of more immediate usefulness than the constitutional amendments, were laws passed by Congress to allow the federal government, through the new Justice Department and through the federal courts to enforce the new civil rights Even if the state governments ignored the problem. These included the Enforcement Acts of 1870–71 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Ex-Confederates remained in control of most Southern states for more than two years, but that changed when the Radical Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1866 elections. President Andrew Johnson, who sought easy terms for reunions with ex-rebels, was virtually powerless; he escaped by one vote removal through impeachment. Congress enfranchised Black men and temporarily suspended many ex-Confederate leaders of the right to hold office. New Republican governments came to power based on a coalition of Freedmen together with Carpetbaggers (new arrivals from the North), and Scalawags (native white Southerners). They were backed by the US Army. Opponents said they were corrupt and violated the rights of whites. State by state they lost power to a conservative-Democratic coalition, which gained control by violence and fraud of the entire South by 1877. In response to Radical Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) emerged in 1867 as a white-supremacist organization opposed to Black civil rights and Republican rule. President Ulysses Grant's vigorous enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870 shut down the Klan, and it disbanded. But from 1868 elections in many southern states were increasingly surrounded by violence to suppress Black voting. Rifle clubs had thousands of members. In 1874, paramilitary groups, such as the White League and Red Shirts emerged that worked openly to use intimidation and violence to suppress Black voting and disrupt the Republican Party to regain white political power in states across the South. Rable described them as the "military arm of the Democratic Party."
Reconstruction ended after the disputed 1876 election between Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden. With a compromise Hayes won the White House, the federal government withdrew its troops from the South, abandoning the freedmen to white conservative Democrats, who regained power in state governments.
Kansas exodus.
Following the end of Reconstruction, many Black people feared the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Jim Crow laws which continued to make them second-class citizens. Motivated by important figures such as Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, as many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. This was the first general migration of Black people following the Civil War. In the 1880s, Black people bought more than of land in Kansas, and several of the settlements made during this time (e.g. Nicodemus, Kansas, which was founded in 1877) still exist today. Many Black people left the South with the belief that they were receiving free passage to Kansas, only to be stranded in St. Louis, Missouri. Black churches in St. Louis, together with Eastern philanthropists, formed the Colored Relief Board and the Kansas Freedmen's Aid Society to help those stranded in St. Louis to reach Kansas.
One particular group was the "Kansas Fever Exodus", which consisted of six thousand Black people who moved from Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to Kansas. Many in Louisiana were inspired to leave the state when the 1879 Louisiana Constitutional Convention decided that voting rights were a matter for the state, not federal, government, thereby clearing the way for the disenfranchisement of Louisiana's Black population.
The exodus was not universally praised by African Americans; indeed, Frederick Douglass was a critic. Douglass felt that the movement was ill-timed and poorly organized.
Political organization.
Black men across the South obtained the right to vote in 1867, and joined the Republican Party. The typical organization was through the Union League, a secret society organized locally but promoted by the national Republican Party. Eric Foner reports:
By the end of 1867 it seemed that virtually every Black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League, the Loyal League, or some equivalent local political organization. Meetings were generally held in a Black church or school.
The Union Leagues promoted militia-like organizations in which the Black people banded together to protect themselves from being picked off one-by-one by harassers. Members were not allowed to vote the Democratic ticket. The Union Leagues and similar groups came under violent assault from the KKK after 1869, and largely collapsed. Later efforts to revive the Union League failed.
Black ministers provided much of the Black political leadership, together with newcomers who had been free Black people in the North before the Civil War. Many cities had Black newspapers that explained the issues and rallied the community.
Factionalism.
In state after state across the South, a polarization emerged inside the Republican Party, with the Black people and their carpetbagger allies forming the Black-and-tan faction, which faced the all-white "lily-white" faction of local white scalawag Republicans. (The terms for the factions became common after 1888, a decade after the end of Reconstruction.) The Black people comprised the majority of Republican voters, but got a small slice of the patronage. They demanded more. Hahn explains the steps they took:
Black assertiveness...looked toward local political power and independence and began to construct a new political identity. Black laborers called white party leaders to account. They moved to control the county and district party machinery. They rejected white office-seekers and substituted Black ones. They nominated all-Black electoral slates.
The Black-and-tan element usually won the factional battle, but as scalawags lost intra-party battles, many started voting for the conservative or Democratic tickets. The Republican Party became "Blacker and Blacker over time", as it lost white voters. The most dramatic episode was the Brooks–Baxter War in Arkansas in 1874. Michael Les Benedict says, "Every modern history of Reconstruction stresses its [factionalism] contribution to the collapse of southern Republicanism." In terms of racial issues, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins argues:
White Republicans as well as Democrats solicited Black votes but reluctantly rewarded Black people with nominations for office only when necessary, even then reserving the more choice positions for whites. The results were predictable: these half-a-loaf gestures satisfied neither Black nor white Republicans. The fatal weakness of the Republican Party in Alabama, as elsewhere in the South, was its inability to create a biracial political party. And while in power even briefly, they failed to protect their members from Democratic terror. Alabama Republicans were forever on the defensive, verbally and physically.
Populism.
In 1894, a wave of agrarian unrest swept through the cotton and tobacco regions of the South. The most dramatic impact came in North Carolina, where the poor white farmers who comprised the Populist party formed a working coalition with the Republican Party, then largely controlled by Black people in the low country, and poor whites in the mountain districts. They took control of the state legislature in both 1894 and 1896, and the governorship in 1896. The state legislature lowered property requirements, expanding the franchise for the white majority in the state as well as for Black people. In 1895, the Legislature rewarded its Black allies with patronage, naming 300 Black magistrates in eastern districts, as well as deputy sheriffs and city policemen. They also received some federal patronage from the coalition congressman, and state patronage from the governor.
Determined to regain power, white Democrats mounted a campaign based on white supremacy and fears about miscegenation. The white supremacy election campaign of 1898 was successful, and Democrats regained control of the state legislature. But Wilmington, the largest city and one with a Black majority, elected a biracial Fusionist government, with a white mayor and two-thirds of the city council being whites. Democrats had already planned to overthrow the government if they lost the election here and proceeded with the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. The Democrats ran Black people and Fusionist officials out of town, attacking the only Black newspaper in the state; white mobs attacked Black areas of the city, killing and injuring many, and destroying homes and businesses built up since the war. An estimated 2100 Black people left the city permanently, leaving it a white-majority city. There were no further insurgencies in any Southern states that had a successful Black-Populist coalition at the state level. In 1899, the white Democratic-dominated North Carolina legislature passed a suffrage amendment disenfranchising most Black people. They would largely not recover the power to vote until after passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Economic and social conditions.
The great majority of Black people in this period were farmers. Among them were four main groups, three of which worked for white landowners: tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers.
The fourth group were the Black people who owned their own farms, and were to some degree independent of white economic control.
Urban elements.
The South had relatively few cities of any size in 1860, but during the war, and afterward, refugees both Black and white flooded in from rural areas. The growing Black population produced a leadership class of ministers, professionals, and businessmen. These leaders typically made civil rights a high priority. Of course, great majority of Black people in urban America were unskilled or low skilled blue-collar workers. Historian August Meier reports:
From the late 1880s there was a remarkable development of Negro business – banks and insurance companies, undertakers and retail stores... It occurred at a time when Negro barbers, tailors caterers, trainmen, Black peoplemiths, and other artisans were losing their white customers. Depending upon the Negro market, the promoters of the new enterprises naturally upheld the spirit of racial self-help and