Reconstruction has long been taught as a lost cause narrative. The true story is one of great force. The great force of a powerful activist Black community that strived to establish a multiracial democracy and achieved great successes and political power. The great force of a violent white community that exploited, abused and murdered those of that Black community who would assert their civil and human rights. The great force of a federal government that was there and then wasn't. This episode is your introduction to that true story.
Our guides to this era are Dr. Kidada Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming and Dr. Kate Masur, author of Until Justice Be Done.
This two-part Civics 101 series was made possible in part by a contribution in memory of Martin Leslie Schneider.
Transcript
Rebecca Lavoie: [00:00:00] This episode of Civics 101 was made possible in part by a contribution in memory of Martin Leslie Schneider.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:10] This episode contains descriptions of widespread systemic racial harassment, violence and killing. Please take care as you listen. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:23] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:24] And this is Civics 101. You're listening to the second episode in our series on Reconstruction, [00:00:30] and this one is called The Big Lie.
Kidada Williams: [00:00:36] I got the K through 12 education that most people get about reconstruction, but that didn't make sense to me because I'm like, well, as a descendant of enslaved Americans, I was like, But they were Black people there and freedom is there. So who failed?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:50] This is Dr. Kidada Williams. She teaches African-American and US history at Wayne State University, and her latest book is called I Saw Death [00:01:00] Coming, a Reconstruction history told from the lives and perspectives of formerly enslaved Americans. And for the record, I did not come up with the title of this episode myself. The Big Lie is Kidada's phrase.
Kidada Williams: [00:01:13] A part of the lost cause narrative of reconstruction, which I like to call the Big Lie of the 19th century, is that, you know, slavery was abolished. Black people were given their rights and they didn't make the most of their freedom. And so white Southerners had [00:01:30] to do what they needed to do to resurrect their lives. And so that's why they had to establish a Ku Klux Klan, etcetera, in order to restore restore the proper order of things. And so that's the sort of gist of the narrative. And so if you think reconstruction failed, then, you know, it becomes easy to justify not spending that much time with it.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:50] So in this series, we've already covered the fact that we don't teach reconstruction in American schools the way we could be teaching it. And what Kidada has just described, [00:02:00] that's pretty much the go to trajectory for reconstruction education.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:04] With plenty of exceptions. And a lot of teachers out there doing their best to teach the actual truth. But yeah, and when Kidada teaches her students that actual truth.
Kidada Williams: [00:02:14] There is a sense of betrayal. They feel betrayed by what they've been told and more specifically, what they've been denied. You know, they've been denied an understanding of the world we live in, how we got here. Et cetera. And it's been done by people they trusted. But the evidence [00:02:30] is all there. The scholarship is there. The sources are there. The Confederates declarations of secession are there. The reconstruction amendments, the texts are all there. You know, for students to look if can look this up online, then why am I not learning this in school? And some of it is about time and complexity. But my students, they all push back on that. They say, no, this isn't just about time, Dr. Williams. This isn't just about complexity. I may not have understood certain things as a kindergartner, but I definitely understand them in high school. And we are being denied access to [00:03:00] an education that would help us understand the world we live in and fight for our American democracy.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:17] Okay, so maybe Civics 101 can have a small part in helping people understand.
Kidada Williams: [00:03:24] I started to dig deeper and realized like this history of Black reconstruction in all of the things that happened and all [00:03:30] of the things that black people accomplished. And then what happened afterwards that wore on African-Americans freedom. I understood the world we live in. I understood all of the history. I understood how we got to this point. And so from that point forward, I loved reconstruction for all of the horrors, for all of the disappointments.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:50] Today, we're going to talk about what actually happened, the horrors and the disappointments, because in that swirl of terror and setbacks, there was [00:04:00] a huge, powerful vocal community saying that freedom is theirs to have and to live.
Kidada Williams: [00:04:06] I think it's one of the most amazing periods in American history. There's so much potential, right? There was such a great expansion of freedom and African-Americans were at the center of it. I feel like that. And that's the part that my students say, you know, they tend to cling to their like. But African Americans, they fought for all of this. And I say, yes, they absolutely did. But then that history gets erased.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:38] And [00:04:30] we're going to talk about what is erased.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:41] We are. The prevailing narrative, the narrative that supports the big lie is that reconstruction is the governmental project of bringing formerly Confederate states back into the union following the Civil War and facilitating the citizenship of Black Americans, many of whom had been enslaved. On [00:05:00] its face, fine. But a major throughline in that narrative is and it didn't work. It was a failed project. So what is the real substance of reconstruction? It's a Black freedom struggle, a democracy building, nationwide activist movement, perseverance in the face of violent white terror, and a government that was not putting its money where its mouth is.
Kidada Williams: [00:05:27] The federal government didn't enforce [00:05:30] the rights. They didn't provide the protection. And we'll get into, I'm sure, when we discuss the reconstruction amendments that, you know, that there are enforcement clauses in every single one of them. But what we see is that federal officials just don't enforce them. And that has a lot to do with the larger sentiments and investments in anti-Blackness across the country, not only in the south, but also in the north.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:11] Okay. [00:06:00] Can we get a timeline here? Like before we establish what rights were being promised and denied and what was going on in this struggle for true freedom. When and where are we exactly?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:23] Okay. Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860. He ran in part on a platform of not permitting slavery [00:06:30] to expand into the Western territories. Seven Southern states seceded in response to his election and his stance on slavery. War ensued. It was four years of fighting in 1863. Lincoln issued an executive order saying that enslaved people are and would henceforth be free.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:50] And this is the Emancipation Proclamation.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:53] It is. Except it only applied to the parts of the nation that were in rebellion and had not yet been occupied by union troops. [00:07:00] A million people remained enslaved. To clarify, enslaved people in, quote, loyal states were not declared free, nor were enslaved people in Confederate states that had come under northern control. And the millions of now, quote, formerly enslaved people, they had this proclamation of their freedom, but it didn't mean they had their freedom.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:25] As in that didn't mean that enslavers suddenly announced to the people [00:07:30] they were enslaving that they were free to go.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:32] It was not until Union troop lines reached parts of the Confederacy that most enslaved people could attempt to leave their enslavers. The proclamation did mean that Black men could join the Union Army, though even that meant facing strong discrimination and radically unequal pay. Ultimately, the Emancipation Proclamation did gain Lincoln political support in the North and with some European powers. It's important to be clear [00:08:00] this executive order was not so much about abolishing enslavement as it was about garnering support for the Union cause. And it did.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:09] And when in this timeline was Lincoln assassinated?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:12] 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and just a few days after Robert E. Lee, leader of the Confederate Army, surrendered, Lincoln's vice president, Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, assumed the presidency. Johnson was a former enslaver He [00:08:30] was regressive, racist, essentially nostalgic for an era of separate and unequal races. And he implemented a postwar plan that was about bringing the South back in both to the union and Congress.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:43] And this postwar plan. This this is Reconstruction.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:47] This is Reconstruction. Except Johnson called it restoration. And he gets his plan going while Congress, a majority Republican Congress, was in recess. And this made Congress [00:09:00] really mad.
Kate Masur: [00:09:07] The summer of 1865 and into the fall of 1865 is a really pivotal time for reconstruction. It's a time when a lot of people are watching to see what's going to happen with these new governments that are being established under Johnson's policy. And it's an extremely violent time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:22] This is Dr. Kate Masur. She teaches the history of race, politics and law at Northwestern, and her most recent book is Till [00:09:30] Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement.
Kate Masur: [00:09:34] So one of the things that's happening on the ground in the south, there's still a lot of United States forces deployed on the ground. There's tremendous outpouring of violence by white Southerners against Black Southerners and to some extent against white unionists as well. And so by the time Congress comes back into session in December of 1865 and they've been out of session, so Congress couldn't really do anything while Johnson's program was unfolding, you know, they could [00:10:00] have only come into session if the president had called them. By the time they're back in Washington in December of 1865. A lot of Republicans are really dismayed at what's going on with Johnson's policy. And that's kind of the beginning of increasing Republican like solidarity around what the policy should be going forward and trying to take it out of the hands of Johnson.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:20] And just to clarify here, Hannah, when we say Republicans, we're talking about the Republican Party before it realigned its values and its politics, this [00:10:30] Republican Party was relatively socially liberal for the time. It was progressive. And for the most part it was pro-abolition.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:37] And the Democrats were, by and large, conservatives for the most part, pro-slavery. Now, Johnson was the rare Southern Democrat who was not, policy wise, pro-slavery, though keep in mind he was a former enslaver, but in reconstruction he promised to disenfranchize wealthy former enslavers and Republicans had this expectation [00:11:00] that he would carry on their preferred plan for this postwar period, a plan with consequences for enslavers. He didn't.
Kate Masur: [00:11:09] It turns out that he. Was not nearly as kind of determined to disempower the southern white elite as he seemed in his initial policy because he began pardoning all of these people.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:21] So this is why Congress was thinking we have to take the power out of this man's hands.
Kate Masur: [00:11:27] Republicans are coalescing with each [00:11:30] other across their own divisions in opposition to the president was important in that they had a kind of shared enemy. And because Johnson, you know, Johnson's vetoes of the Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen's Bureau bill in 1866 were so surprising to so many Republicans, they thought that they they thought that they kind of were on the same page with the president. And then he comes along and vetoes these measures that seem quite reasonable. So a lot of Republicans and so, you know, they're outraged.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:57] All right. Hold on. First of all, Freedmen's Bureau [00:12:00] Bill?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:00] The Freedmen's Bureau was a federal agency established early on in reconstruction in 1865 to provide food, clothing and shelter to freed people in the south. A year later, Congress proposed and passed a two year extension of the bureau and its activities. Johnson vetoed its extension, but Congress managed to override that veto.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:22] And Kate said the Civil Rights Act. So when I hear civil rights, I think 1964.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:27] Well, that might be because we tend to talk a lot [00:12:30] about the civil rights era, the 1960s in America. But the 1860s, that was the first one. We're going to talk about the reconstruction amendments in greater detail in another episode. But Congress passed the 13th abolishing slavery in the United States in 1865. In 1866, the first ever civil rights law went to Johnson's desk. He vetoed it. Congress overrode that veto, and this act declared that all people born within the US were citizens [00:13:00] regardless of race, color or previous, quote, condition of slavery or servitude.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:06] And this is significantly different from we are abolishing slavery, right to say that being born in the United States makes you a citizen is a completely different ball game.
Kate Masur: [00:13:17] I mean, I think one of the things that that a lot of people don't know or hasn't gotten enough attention is amidst to what we understand is the abolitionist movement, which was a movement against slavery and a movement to [00:13:30] say that slavery was wrong and needs to be abolished. And that is really important. A fair number of people know about that. It gets taught to some extent in our schools, but alongside that was also this movement that was about racial equality and civil rights, right? And these debates in the free states about if you're going to have a free society, a society where you don't have slavery, is it okay to have racial discrimination or are we going to get rid of racial discrimination completely? Or in what realms? And even if those questions seem to us to be like, [00:14:00] well, of course we're opposed to racial discrimination, but actually these were live questions. And it's worth asking how did we get from race based slavery to some kind of consent versus that racial discrimination is wrong, Right. That was not the direction that most white people were going.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:26] Kate points out that if you look at what are called Black laws, these [00:14:30] are laws in states like Ohio and Illinois that restricted movement of black people, that prohibited them from serving on juries or in militias. We should not take for granted this principle that the United States was not headed for an apartheid system.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:45] Apartheid being the legal segregation system that South Africa had for decades.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:50] Exactly that. Kate says that if you look at what states were doing, you can see that that was a major goal. And let's be very clear here that [00:15:00] while we are talking, by and large about the southern United States and former Confederate states, this anti-Black sentiment permeated the entire country, not just the South. In Ohio, Black people were prohibited from holding office, from voting. Testifying against white people in court. Living in Ohio without proof of their freedom. In Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, there were strict restrictions on free Black people entering the state. Indiana [00:15:30] and Oregon banned free Black people altogether, with Oregon initially including a provision for whipping Black people who violated this law. Throughout the early and mid-19th century, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania restricted or took away entirely a Black man's right to vote. So the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the federal government proclaiming from on high that people in this country do have rights. That was huge.
Kate Masur: [00:15:59] So [00:16:00] the United States government had never passed a law saying that at the federal level there was going to be any kind of promise of equality, any kind of statement of anti racial discrimination. This was the first time that the US government did that, and it was passed in the winter of 1866 by Congress, by Republicans in Congress. And you know, what it said was basically that all citizens, regardless of race or color, shall have the same civil rights as white citizens. And it didn't literally say [00:16:30] civil rights, but it says the various rights to own property, to enter into contracts, to sue and be sued, things like that that are what 19th century people understood to be civil rights. Highly significant because it gives a federal enforcement mechanism to it says that federal officials, federal marshals, federal judges can step in to what would otherwise be local disputes and enforce the civil rights of people of color. If local officials are not going to or if people can't get justice in their [00:17:00] local and state courts. And so it's an example of really changing the balance of power and putting the federal government behind this idea of nondiscrimination. And that is absolutely the first time that that happened in the United States.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:14] Okay. But isn't this what the 14th Amendment did when it was ratified in 1868? It granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the US.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:23] Well, that's another piece of the enforcement principle. Amending the Constitution itself carries an immense [00:17:30] amount of weight. It further gives the federal government teeth to say this is a violation of a fundamental American.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:37] Right, as in the law of the land says this person is a citizen and that means they are due X, Y and Z.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:45] And this is all well and good in theory. Those words are important. But Reconstruction tested that theory. I've told you that the true story of Reconstruction is primarily that of Black Americans fighting to assert [00:18:00] their promised rights, their freedom. And that is the story we are going to tell. That's after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:07] But before the break. A quick reminder that Civics 101 exists because of you. This project could not happen without the support of our listeners. So if you're someone who's able to make a contribution to the show, we are asking you to take a moment today and do exactly that. And we promise to do our best to keep making a show worthy of that listener support. You can make a contribution right now at our website, civics101podcast.org, [00:18:30] or by clicking the link in the show notes.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:37] We're back. You're listening to Civics 101, and this is the second episode in our three part series on reconstruction. And Nick, as you know, we're calling this episode The Big Lie. That is because the truth of Reconstruction, what was really happening and who mattered most during the years following the Civil War is often glossed over [00:19:00] or erased. And this podcast has the joyful and painful marching orders of trying to tell the truth about America. So here we go.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:14] And Hannah, right before the break, you had said that legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1866, like the 13th and 14th Amendments, these were all well and good in theory, but reconstruction is where they were tested. So what did emancipation [00:19:30] and citizenship really look like for Black Americans?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:34] To understand that, let's go back a bit before our emancipation.
Kidada Williams: [00:19:39] The vast majority of white Americans, not only in the South, but in the north and the West, believed that released from bondage and maybe paid for their labor is all Black people should get at the end of slavery.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:53] This is Dr. Kidada Williams again. We first met her at the beginning of this episode. Kidada wrote a book called I [00:20:00] See Death Coming. In it, she shares the stories of formerly enslaved people and the lives they built under the promise of reconstruction and in the face of extreme white resistance and violence.
Kidada Williams: [00:20:11] So the abolitionist movement is a multiracial movement. But when we look at the white folks in there, the vast majority of them can thread the needle very easily. Slavery is wrong, but we believe that only white people should enjoy a piece of the American pie. So this is, you know, their sort of worldview.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:29] So sort [00:20:30] of looking at slavery itself as a vile institution, but not looking at the actual human beings in bondage, Black human beings as equal people who needed the same rights and privileges.
Kidada Williams: [00:20:42] So there's a lot of resistance to emancipation because there's concerned about what might follow, including black people pressing for and possibly getting racial equality and coming through the Civil War, accepting emancipation, The Emancipation Proclamation as a way to quickly end the war [00:21:00] is something that unifies many white northerners and Westerners. But in their minds, they say, Well, this is all there is to it, because the Emancipation Proclamation says nothing about equal rights. It says nothing about equality. It says nothing about voting rights. Okay, fine, we will accept this. But at the end of slavery with the 13th Amendment, you know, going through Congress, going through the states, ratify what you start to see with that sort of white majority outside the south is [00:21:30] a sort of investment in emancipation, being only that release from bondage.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:36] And with that kind of prevailing white worldview. It sounds like emancipation is. not really the great promise it might seem on its face.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:45] And Black Americans call bunk.
Kidada Williams: [00:21:48] African-Americans and their allies. That's not what they think. You know, they believe that what African-Americans are entitled to after slavery is justice. And what justice [00:22:00] looks like is everything that slavery didn't. So for them, they wanted freedom to mean everything that slavery did not. They wanted what the historian Hassan Jefferies called freedom rights. And these are all the rights and liberties that Americans take for granted. Slavery had denied black people these rights, and black people were determined to have them. But the white majority, like I said, believed that emancipation should only mean release from bondage. And so it [00:22:30] takes white abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and others to go back through and say, you know, black people are running into a wall of resistance. So for one, enslavers didn't release them all from bondage easily. There's a lot of violence, extensive violence as people are trying to get away from slavery.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:54] We need to pause on this prior to the end of the war, but long thereafter [00:23:00] to emancipation and the prohibition of enslavement did not mean instant freedom or safety. And again, this is not something that we reinforce in American schools, but it is so important to understanding the truth of this era.
Kidada Williams: [00:23:15] We see extensive violence from 1865 on forward. So this is before African-Americans get the right to vote. And I think that's the point that I was trying to make earlier about enslavers, not just releasing people from bondage, like very easily, [00:23:30] like we get these stories. I should be clear, they do exist. There are instances where enslavers pull the people they hold together in bondage and say, You're free. You're free to go. You can stay and work if you want to. What's also happening at this time is there are people who are saying, Well, you can't leave or you can leave, but your children have to stay. Which is an act of violence. Right. And if you try to if you try to resist, if you try to get your children, if you try to take your children with you, you're going [00:24:00] to be attacked. You might even be killed in the process. What we know is that we don't even know how many African-Americans are killed going back to farms and plantations to get their loved ones out of bondage because they're still being held there in violation of the Emancipation Proclamation and then definitely in violation of the 13th Amendment. And so, you know, there are instances where, [00:24:30] you know, African-American men who served in the war leave the war and they go home to the farms and plantations where their loved ones were held, and they're killed in the process of trying to liberate or to get their people out of bondage because they're still being held there against their will. So there's a lot of violence and there are a lot of attacks on newly freed peoples. And this isn't just sort of spontaneous violence. This is deliberate targeting.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:58] Something entirely missing from my education. [00:25:00] And I will hazard to guess that of many students in America are the stories that Kidada tells in her book. The stories of individual people who faced truly horrifying threats and violence. People who at a base level were simply attempting to leave the institution that the federal government had declared prohibited.
Kidada Williams: [00:25:24] There was a report of a clergyman, I believe it was, who reported that along [00:25:30] some of the roads in Alabama, the roads stank of dead or slain African-Americans all along the road. And it's presumed they were trying to escape. You know, and there are reports of attacks on people, newly freed people. People who've managed to get away from their enslavers. They're killed, you know, just going about their daily business. You know, a lot of them are apprehended on boats [00:26:00] as they're trying to leave along the rivers or they're shot on the boats. One woman there's a story of a woman who was traveling. She's newly free. She's even got like chickens with her and a coop. And she and the chickens are thrown into the river to drown. And what you know, what they say is that she can go to the Yankees, Right. You know, which is what she was trying to do, probably trying to get away from the people who held her in bondage. And so there is resistance to black people leaving farms and plantations. [00:26:30] There's resistance to them establishing work agreements. There is violent resistance when African-Americans resist not being paid for their labor. There's resistance when African-American parents won't apprentice their children to the people who held them in bondage. And this resistance is a denial of African-Americans rights to be free. And so African-Americans are experiencing extreme amounts of violence, and the historical records are full of accounts. [00:27:00] You know, there are generals who say there are too many people to count and Freedmen's Bureau agents are writing down they're sending in reports to D.C. about all of the people who were killed. And this is before 1868.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:20] So the government knew they had reports.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:23] To me, this makes the absence of these stories in American education all the more galling. Yes, [00:27:30] the government knew there is documented evidence of this violence. I want to make very clear what Black Americans were up against when I say lynching. Nick, do you know what I mean?
Nick Capodice: [00:27:43] Yeah, I think of murder, violent murder often by a group, often of Black people, and often by hanging.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:54] More than 2000 Black Americans were murdered during the reconstruction era. This [00:28:00] looked like North Carolina in 1865, when six Black men demanded pay for their labor and were killed for asking. This looked like Arkansas in 1866, when 24 Black men, women and children living in a refugee camp were found hanging dead from the trees. This looked like Louisiana in 1868, when 53 Black people were attacked and killed by a white mob in order to suppress their vote. We do [00:28:30] not often tell these stories, Nick, but if we're going to understand what Black people were fighting against, what the stakes were when it came to being paid for work, attempting to participate in the political process, we need to actually understand and acknowledge this murder was a common tactic to suppress civic and economic participation.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:54] And Hannah, what was the federal government doing in the face of all this? Like they know they know about [00:29:00] the violence, the killing, their sweeping denials of rights. Isn't it their responsibility to step in?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:07] Well, first things first. Federal enforcement was never really sufficient. But yes, they did do some things. They passed laws when they heard reports of violence of Black Americans being denied the right to marry, to establish contracts, to own land, to practice religion, to access schools. [00:29:30] Congress voted And the Civil Rights Act we mentioned earlier was passed to address what congressmen are being told in no uncertain terms was the violent resistance to what should be basic existence in America.
Kidada Williams: [00:29:51] So the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the original title is an act to protect all persons in the United States of their [00:30:00] civil rights. And so it essentially says, be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress, that it that all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States and such citizens of every race and color withoutrillionegard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude except [00:30:30] as punishment for a crime.
[00:30:33] Shall have the same right in every state and territory in the United States to make and enforce contracts to sue, be parties and give evidence to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property [00:31:00] as is enjoyed by white citizens. What this means is that all of those things that black citizens had been denied the right to make contracts, the right to marry, to have their marriages recognized, the right to access and purchase land, to sue and testify in court. Ostensibly Black citizens now had those rights. The federal government is now saying African-Americans have a right to have [00:31:30] all of these rights.
Kidada Williams: [00:31:32] And that if states deny them, there will be consequences. And so what we see is that as a result of African-Americans agitation and activism for this more just world, for the freedom rights that they believe they're entitled to, we see federal officials laying down. They sort of establish this new order with the civil rights bill of 1866. And I'll just say, like and it is an extension [00:32:00] of the rights that free Black people have been agitating for before the Civil War. You've got people like Martin Delaney and others who are facing these denials of their freedom, their right to movement. Et cetera. And they're saying, you know, Delaney is one of those people who says we have a birthright citizenship. You know, we have a right to all of these rights and privileges that all other Americans enjoy by virtue of us being born here. And so this isn't something that, you know, radical Republicans just sort of [00:32:30] decide that they're going to do out of the goodness of their hearts. It's because they understand, but they believe that there should be justice after slavery. And they are definitely listening to African-Americans about the resistance they're encountering to their freedom.
Nick Capodice: [00:32:58] Hannah, this feels like a major [00:33:00] part of the point that scholars like Kidada Williams and Kate Masur are trying to get across, that things weren't happening because white politicians wanted it to be so, because they felt it was the good and right thing to do. Progress for Black Americans was the result of Black Americans fighting for.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:16] It and saying to government officials, give us the tools to fight for it.
Kidada Williams: [00:33:20] So one of the things that we see in terms of black people's political activism during this period is black people are suing left and right. Right. They are suing in [00:33:30] court. And even their right to sue is contested. It's questioned, especially in light of the Dred Scott ruling. Whether or not they even have the right to sue for someone denying them pay for their labor or denying them access to land, all of that is still up in the air. It's question. But African-Americans are steadfast. So African-Americans are protesting. They're writing letters. They're sending delegations to D.C. And what federal officials recognize is that they essentially have to [00:34:00] authorize or they have to make a public statement that African-Americans have a right to have rights.
Nick Capodice: [00:34:07] So I know we see the Civil Rights Act and the 13th and 14th Amendments, but what about the vote? At what point does Congress finally decide, you know, what enfranchisement is included in citizenship, at least for men?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:22] Even that Nick comes out of violence, resistance and documentation on the part of black Americans who know they have a [00:34:30] right to what they're being denied. So Congress knows about these protests. They're reading the letters. They're meeting with delegates of Black Americans and they're finally saying, okay, well, what else might help here? And they decide maybe if African American men have the right to vote, maybe if they have the power to govern, maybe if they have authority, they can protect themselves.
Kidada Williams: [00:35:06] They [00:35:00] might be mayor, they might be deputies, etcetera, so they can enforce the law to help protect their rights. And so the push for voting rights for African Americans in the South, part of that has to do with the idea that they might be able to ward off some of this violence if they have authority in local governance. African-americans who were free before the war certainly wanted [00:35:30] it, and they believed that newly freed African-Americans should have it. So there is desire for it. But the sort of anti-Blackness and the concern of a large free black population, particularly a voting one, was enough to give most white Americans pause. So there wasn't uniform, there wasn't universal support for black people voting. There is a lot of sort of white fear and concern, which we must put in scare quotes because it's manufactured about black people voting [00:36:00] and having a say in American democracy. So there isn't widespread support for it. But there the sort of drumbeat for radical Republicans gets louder and louder as they're as they are hearing and reading about these reports of this sort of war that white Southerners are waging on African-Americans freedom.
Nick Capodice: [00:36:22] Is this around the time that Congress passes the 15th Amendment, that states are prohibited from denying the vote to anyone based on the color of their skin? [00:36:30]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:36:30] The 15th Amendment was passed by Congress in 1869 and ratified in 1870, nearly five full years after the official end of the Civil War. Of course. What have we learned here? Words are one thing. Enforcement is quite another.
Nick Capodice: [00:36:47] One of the things I do remember from learning about Reconstruction is that there were troops in the South to enforce these rights to protect Black Americans who were exercising them. But from all this, it doesn't really sound [00:37:00] like black people and their rights were being meaningfully protected at all.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:37:04] Right. See, you did have federal troops in certain areas, but not thousands of them. The war is over. Soldiers are ready to go home. Ex-confederates are saying, Hey, we surrendered. What are you still doing here?
Kidada Williams: [00:37:18] So there's intense pressure to sort of reduce the reduce the footprint of the US Army. And so that army is shrinking, right? And [00:37:30] so even when you have instances where there is a troop buildup, we're not talking about thousands and thousands of troops. We might be talking about a couple of dozen, you know, and a lot of times they're stationed in, you know, Jackson, Mississippi. But the violence is happening 300 miles away. Right. You know, or it's happening, you know, 200 miles away. And because the people who are targeting African Americans freedom are calculating. Right. You know, they're not necessarily going to do it while [00:38:00] federal troops are there. You know, they'll do it in the areas where they're not. And so a lot of this violence goes unpunished and it goes unpunished because, you know, not only because of white Southerners, but because of white northerners and their kind of indifference to what's happening in white Westerners in terms of their indifference to what's happening in the region.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:38:19] Kidada says that though white unionists in the South could be of some help to these targeted communities, it was never enough to save everyone, and troops rarely [00:38:30] arrived soon enough to stop murders. What is happening during reconstruction is that formerly enslaved people are asserting their rights loudly and the threats of violence, the threats to their lives. These are not sufficient to stop that.
Kidada Williams: [00:38:47] You know, there are Black majorities in, you know, different places in Mississippi, in Louisiana, etcetera. And so African American men are able to not just vote, but run for office and [00:39:00] win. And they vote a lot and they win a lot. And what we see them do once they are elected into office is they help implement some of the most democratic reforms, some of the most egalitarian reforms in the south that had been seen.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:39:19] Black officials established public school systems in the South. They created asylums. They campaigned for land reform. They ensured access to funds [00:39:30] and resources for other Black citizens to establish businesses.
Kidada Williams: [00:39:34] What they are trying to provide for the entire nation is or for the entire region, particularly in the South, are all the rights, privileges and freedoms that have been denied to them. And so they're actually very, very successful. And that is why they are targeted.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:39:51] Over 2000 Black men served in office during Reconstruction. The first Black US senator, Hiram Revels, was elected in [00:40:00] 1870, which is an indication of the long existing political organization and will of Black Americans held back only by the denial of basic rights. There was Joseph Rainey, the first Black American to serve in the US House of Representatives. Robert Elliott, another representative who fought public discrimination in Washington, DC. Tunis Campbell. Probably the most influential Black politician and voting rights advocate in Georgia. Black women, even without the right to vote, were [00:40:30] civic leaders during Reconstruction. Frances Ellen Watkins. Harper went toe to toe with white suffragettes, urging them to acknowledge the privilege of their whiteness. Maria Stewart, one of the first Black woman to ever speak publicly, wrote to her Black audience and extolled them to pursue education and demand political rights, saying they should sue for their rights and privileges and know why they could not attain them.
Nick Capodice: [00:40:55] And I have to confess to you, Hannah, these are not names I know, which seems part and [00:41:00] parcel of the big lie that Kidada has described, this idea that it was just too much, too difficult for a multiracial democracy to thrive. These figures prove that to be false. And the brutality, the horror, the violence that we've talked about that just makes these political successes all the more impressive.
Kidada Williams: [00:41:20] I think that's part of, you know, that sort of the mythology, the lost cause mythology of reconstruction, which is that black people, they didn't do anything with freedom. Black people are targeted [00:41:30] specifically because of what they achieved in freedom. You know, you rarely have instances where African-Americans are just sort of are being targeted by groups like the Klan, you know, for just being shiftless. That's not why they're being targeted. They're being targeted because they are acquiring land or they have land because they're running for office or they have been elected into office because they have. Establish their own businesses because they have established schools, churches that, you know, all of [00:42:00] the stuff. And so it is not because African Americans weren't doing enough. It was because in the minds of white Southerners, they were doing too much. White Southerners had told themselves that, you know, the sort of lie they you know, the lie they spun was that Black people were lazy. Right. But Black people were very industrious and they were litigious. They sued, Sued. Sued. Sued. Sued. Suit sued. Trying to get cases that would make it out of local courts and up into federal courts. They wrote federal officials, they signed [00:42:30] petitions. They went to D.C., They did everything they could. And then that is why they were targeted.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:42:40] I've been thinking about the reasons why this part of the story is not widely told, this important and horrifying history. And to me, it ties pretty closely with attempts to suppress all sorts of education related to the Black experience in America. For example, the [00:43:00] attempted banning of books that tell the true stories of integrating schools. Growing up Black in the 1960s and 70s in the US, the aftermath of police killings of Black people to attempted bannings of words like injustice in the classroom. If white people today can separate themselves from the actions of white people in the past, from the systems of oppression that were cemented in eras like reconstruction, then [00:43:30] they can feel like they are somehow on the right side of history. But that requires not actually knowing the history. That requires telling mythologies instead. That's the big lie. And that approach to history started even as that history was being made.
Kidada Williams: [00:43:53] So you do have a lot of white northerners and Westerners subscribe to the Lost Cause mythology about the Civil War and [00:44:00] about reconstruction, and that's because of those underlying investments in white supremacy. Now, while they're doing that, they're also casting themselves as all abolitionists, right? So they're, you know, creating their own mythology. And this is a story that many of us who are born in the Northeast or the Midwest get right. We were all abolitionists. And the truth of the matter is that they were not, Kidada says.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:44:24] There are so many myths that are born of investments in white supremacy. The idea [00:44:30] of pulling oneself up by your bootstraps, for example, doesn't acknowledge the ways in which the federal government helped white people pull them up. It's convenient to cast Black people as not living up to the promises of reconstruction, the promises of freedom.
Kidada Williams: [00:44:46] It becomes the convenient story to justify lynching them, disfranchizing them, and segregating them in order to protect white supremacy. So when we're thinking about this, we've got to be very clear on if you understand how white supremacy [00:45:00] works, if you understand its end goals, then all of these moves make sense, right? But if you don't want people to understand white supremacy, if you don't want people to understand how it works, what you do is you create a convenient narrative, which is what we get with the lost cause narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction. And people are willing to go along with that. And and if they are, then that protects white supremacy and it keeps it in place.
Nick Capodice: [00:45:29] And Hannah, [00:45:30] it does end. There is a conclusion to this period that we were never really told the truth about. Because the truth has the real potential of making white people uncomfortable. The truth would reveal complacency and complicity. Eventually, all of the promise and the power gets suffocated. So how does Reconstruction end?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:45:55] Kidada says there was a widespread desire for reconciliation among white people, [00:46:00] one that completely ignored the oppression of Black people. It was basically okay. We had this war, we had this conflict. But we are a nation of progress, of westward expansion, railroads. The Amnesty Act of 1872, which removed most of the penalties put on former Confederates. Most importantly, this act let former Confederates back into the government.
Kidada Williams: [00:46:27] You know, once they regained authority in governance, [00:46:30] they are absolutely steadfast in their commitment to dismantling all of the rights and privileges African-Americans had gained access to. And then the Supreme Court does its thing in terms of restricting some of the policies of reconstruction, overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which provided equal access to places of public accommodations. And so reconstruction is, you know, it's deliberately targeted with a lot of [00:47:00] these policies and practices.
Nick Capodice: [00:47:02] So this pretty clearly, I mean, in addition to everything else we've talked about in this episode, reveals how very much reconstruction was not something that failed. The project was not inherently impossible or broken or too much for Black Americans to handle. It was actively dismantled.
Kidada Williams: [00:47:22] Its overthrown and abandoned. So as overthrown by the violence in the south and it's abandoned by white northerners and Westerners [00:47:30] who simply want to move on and don't want to acknowledge that white Southerners are waging war on African-Americans freedom. And so, like, you know, we've got the 1877 date that people say reconstruction ended, but a lot of reconstruction policies continue to sort of stay in place until like the the last decade of the 19th century. It takes about two and a half decades. You know, a lot of it has to do with African Americans still continuing to focus on voting. So even [00:48:00] despite all of the violence and you see this with a lot of testimonies before Congress, with the Klan hearings, what they say is I'm going to continue to vote. They're not going to stop me from voting. And so a lot of African-American men continue to vote, and it's because they continue to vote. They continue trying to exercise authority and governance so they can protect their other rights. They see voting as the way to protect all of their other rights. And so African-Americans are still voting. And what. The [00:48:30] ex-Confederate states. And then more broadly, the southern states do is they start to target voting. Right. Violence isn't enough.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:48:42] This is when you see a rise in new voting policies, a poll tax which deliberately targeted working class Black men when that wasn't enough because it couldn't prevent all Black men from voting. There were the literacy tests and the understanding clauses. Well, [00:49:00] Black men who can read can pass those.
Kidada Williams: [00:49:03] And so that's when you'll you know, you'll see, you know, white southern states or southern states, they will go with the grandfather clause, which is sort of like the coup d'etat. Right. You know, only, you know, men whose grandfathers could vote before the Civil War. Now, they don't care that a lot of those Black men would have white grandfathers. Right. They don't care about that. I mean, they would have known that that wasn't the point [00:49:30] to the people who were, you know, passing these laws because they don't recognize the parentage of these white men who have been sexually exploiting girls and women during slavery. And so but it does become like the final straw where they're able to just sort of like knock down all of the, you know, use a bowling ball to knock down all the pins. It takes a while for them to disenfranchize African-American men. And it's only once they do that that they can get Jim Crow in terms of segregation in place. [00:50:00]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:50:01] The term Jim Crow is thrown around a lot. This era is typically, as Kadada mentioned, said to have started in 1877.
Nick Capodice: [00:50:11] Which is when, in very brief, Congress settled the disputed election between Rutherford B Hayes and Samuel Tilden. Basically, Republican Hayes was awarded the presidency on the stipulation that he would remove federal troops from some states in the South.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:50:27] And in doing so, allow anti-Black violence [00:50:30] and law to thrive. Now, as Kidada also said, it was not an overnight dissolution of Black political power. What happened was years and years of suppression, oppression, violence and law making on the part of white Americans paired with a lack of federal investment. The term Jim Crow comes from a white performer who used to dress in Blackface, a racist, exaggerated stage makeup that distorted, [00:51:00] stereotyped and subjugated Blackness in appearance, language and character. The term Jim Crow became a racial epithet for Black people, and then later, that term was used to describe laws that oppressed and essentially criminalized Black existence. Reconstruction was brought to an end.
Nick Capodice: [00:51:24] And then we lied about it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:51:27] Yeah. And then we lied about it. That [00:52:00] does it for episode two in our Reconstruction series. We've got one more covering the laws and federal regulation, or lack thereof in the reconstruction era. But keep in mind, there's only so much that we can fit into these episodes and so much more scholarship [00:52:30] and information out there. Make sure to read Kidada Williams's book, I Saw Death Coming and Kate Masur's until Justice Be Done as well. There will be links to these as well as many more resources at our website civics101podcast.org. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Jacqui Fulton is our producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Very special thanks to Jada Lightning for all of her help on this episode. Music In this episode [00:53:00] by Ingrid Witt, The Big Letdown, Sven Lindvall, Daniel Fridell, XIVI, Duplex Heart, Amber Jaune, Chris Zabriskie, Anemoia and Xylo Ziko. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.