Nadir of American race relations

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The nadir of American race relations refers to the period in United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the 20th Century, contending racism was worse during this time than any other period. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gains made during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, Segregation, racial discrimination, race riots and expressions of white supremacy increased.

The phrase "the nadir" to describe this period was first used by historian Rayford Logan in a 1954 book titled The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901. It continues to be used, most notably in the books of James Loewen, but also by other scholars. ^{[1] [2]} Loewen himself, however, argues that the post reconstruction period was still one of (contested) national hope for racial equity, when the issue was still championed by idealistic northerners. The true nadir, accordingly, began when northern republicans finally gave up on supporting southern black rights around 1890 and extended through 1940. This period conicides largely with American imperialist aspirations and the sundown town phenomenon across the country. ^[3]

[edit] Reconstruction as a time of hope

In the early part of the 20th century, Reconstruction was often viewed as a tragic period, when overweening Republicans motivated by revenge and profit, used troops to force Southerners to accept corrupt governments run by unscrupulous Northerners and illiterate, unqualified blacks. This version of events was propounded by historians such as William Dunning, a white supremacist who believed blacks were "children" and "black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself…created any civilization of any kind." ^[4] The views of Dunning and his students were enshrined in the popular imagination through such hugely popular works as D.W. Griffith's movie The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. However, among historians, it has been completely discredited. ^[5]

Hiram Revels, the first African American Senator, elected in 1870 from Mississippi. One other black Senator, Blanche K. Bruce, was elected from the same state a few years later. No black person was elected to the Senate again after that for a hundred years. To this day, Revels and Bruce are the only African-Americans ever to represent a Southern state in the U.S. Senate.

Today's consensus follows Reconstruction as a time of great racial idealism and hope. The Radical Republicans who passed the 14th and 15th Amendments were, for the most part, motivated by a desire to help former slaves. ^[6] This view was put forward by African-American historian W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910, but later expanded by Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner. The Republican Reconstruction governments Congress established were in many cases corrupt—but no more corrupt than Democratic governments, or, indeed, than Northern Republican governments. ^[7]

Furthermore, the governments improved education for blacks and whites. No Reconstruction government was dominated by blacks; in fact, blacks never attained a level of representation equal to their population. ^[8] When blacks did serve in public office, they often did so with distinction.

[edit] Reconstruction's failure

"And Not This Man?", Harper's Weekly, August 5, 1865. Thomas Nast drew this cartoon; in 1865 he, like many Northerners, remembered blacks' military service and favored granting them voting rights.

"Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State", Harper's Weekly, March 14, 1874. Nine years later, Nast, again like many Northerners, had given up on racial idealism. He now caricatures black legislators as incompetent buffoons.

Many former Confederates resisted Reconstruction with violence and intimidation. James Loewen notes between 1865 and 1867, when white Democrats controlled the government, an average of one black person was murdered by whites every day in Hinds County, Mississippi. Black schools were an especial target; school buildings were frequently burned, and teachers were flogged and occasionally murdered. ^[9]

Nonetheless, blacks continued to vote and attend schools. Literacy soared, and many African-Americans were elected to state wide office—several served in Congress. There were limits to Republican efforts on behalf of blacks—for example, a promise of land reform made by the Freedman's Bureau, would have granted blacks plots on the plantation land they worked, never came to pass. However, for several years, the federal government, pushed by Northern opinion, showed itself willing to intervene to protect the rights of black Americans. ^[10]

However, most whites in the North – even reformers – believed whites were superior, and were therefore ready to accept that blacks should be second-class citizens. In any case, it became clear to rectify the situation in the face of white opposition in the South would require a massive commitment of money and arms. Rather than face these hurdles, Northerners waffled and then capitulated. Abolitionist leaders like Horace Greeley began to ally themselves with Democrats in attacking Reconstruction governments. Ulysses S. Grant, who as General led the victorious Union campaign, as President explicitly refused to send troops to protect blacks when asked by the governor of Mississippi in 1875. This was a beginning of a trend. After Grant, it would be many, many years before any President would do anything to extend the protection of the law to black people. ^[11]

[edit] South

A postcard showing the burned body of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916. Washington was a 17-year-old retarded farmhand who confessed to raping and killing a white woman. An observer wrote, "Washington was beaten with shovels and bricks. . .[he] was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire. . . Wailing, the boy attempted to climb up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers." He was castrated, mutilated, and burned alive by a cheering mob including the mayor and the chief of police. This image is from a postcard, which said on the back, "This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."

Without federal intervention, Southern states moved quickly to prevent blacks from voting. Since most blacks worked for whites, this could usually be done. However, organized militias like the first Ku Klux Klan threatened black voters. ^[12] South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting]...we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." ^[13] Population statistics make clear what was at stake. African Americans were an absolute majority of the population in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, and were over 40% in four other former Confederate states. Accordingly, African Americans represented a major threat, because in free and fair elections, they would hold the balance of power in a majority of the South. ^[14]

With no voice in government, blacks were subjected to what is known as Jim Crow, a system of segregation. Blacks could not go to the same schools as whites; they could not eat in the same restaurants, travel on the same train cars, live in the same neighborhoods, shop in the same stores. Nor could they serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse. Whites could beat, rob, or murder blacks at will for minor infractions. ^[15] African American author Richard Wright wrote in his autobiographical account of being struck with a bottle and knocked from a moving truck for failing to call a white man "sir". ^[16] A black man from rural Mississippi noted, "You couldn't even smile at a white woman. If you did, you'd be hung from a limb." Indeed, between 1889 and 1922, the NAACP calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history, almost 3,500 people, almost all of them black men. ^[17]

Historian James Loewen notes lynching emphasized the helplessness of Blacks, "the defining characteristic of a lynching is that the murder takes place in public, so everyone knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished." ^[18] The reason given for lynching was usually that black men had raped white women. African American civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett conducted one of the first systematic studies of the subject, found, blacks were "lynched for anything or nothing" - for wife-beating, stealing hogs, being "saucy to white people", sleeping with a consenting white woman - for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ^[19]

Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920.

The constant threat of terror were used to keep blacks "in their place", but certain actions did make blacks more vulnerable. Blues singer Big Bill Broonzy noted those who stood up were called "crazy "and faced violent retribution by whites. Broonzy states:

I had an uncle like that and they hung him… They hung him down there because they say he was crazy and he might ruin the, the other Negroes… See, and that is why they hung him, see, because he was a man, and he had a good education as some of the white—better than some of the white people down there…^[20]

Blacks who were economically successful faced reprisals or sanctions. When Richard Wright tried to train to become an optometrist and lens-grinder, the other men in the shop threatened him until he was forced to leave. In 1911 blacks were barred from participating in the Kentucky Derby because African-Americans won more than half of the first twenty-eight races. ^[21]

This situation called into question the policies of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black leader during the early part of the nadir, who argued black people could better themselves by hard work and thrift. However, as W.E.B. Dubois pointed out,

it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for working men and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.^[22]

Through violence and legal restrictions, Whites often prevented blacks from working as common laborers, much less as skilled artisans or in the professions. Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black people found it virtually impossible to advance.

[edit] United States as a whole

Many blacks tried to leave the South. In 1879, Logan notes, "some 40,000 Negroes virtually stampeded from Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia for the Midwest." More famously, beginning in around 1915, many blacks moved to Northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration.

Whites often reacted violently to black efforts at migration; for instance, in his autobiography Black Boy, Richard Wright notes that he concealed his intention to move North because he was afraid of being beaten. Still, for many blacks, life outside the South was little better. During the nadir, the North largely abandoned egalitarianism. In the Midwest and West, many towns posted "sundown" warnings, threatening to kill any African-Americans who remained overnight. Monuments to Confederate War dead were erected across the nation— in, for example, Montana. ^[23] Black housing was segregated in the North, and, in many regions, blacks could not serve on juries. Blackface shows, in which whites dressed as blacks portrayed African-Americans as shiftless, ignorant clowns, were popular in North and South. The Supreme Court — which gutted the 14th and 15th Amendments by legalizing segregation in a series of decisions culminating in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson—was made up almost entirely of Northerners. ^[24]

As more blacks moved north, racism became worse. While there were critics in the scientific community such as Franz Boas, in academia, eugenics and scientific racism gained stature by scientists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant who argued "scientific evidence" for the racial superiority of whites and thereby worked to justify racial segregation and second-class citizenship for blacks. Even more calamitously for blacks, in 1912, Southern Democrat and outspoken white supremacist Woodrow Wilson was elected to the Presidency. Shortly after entering office, and despite promises to black groups, he introduced legislation to limit black civil rights. Congress refused to pass the measures, so Wilson ended the practice of giving African Americans ambassadorships to nations such as Haiti, effectively re-segregating the federal government. Wilson was a vocal fan of the film Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the rise of the first Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization devoted to intimidating blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. His praise was used to defend the film from the NAACP. ^[25]

A quote from Woodrow Wilson used in "Birth of a Nation".

Birth of a Nation helped popularize the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which gained its greatest power and influence during and shortly after Wilson's presidency. In 1924, the Klan had 4 million members. (Current, p. 693). It also controlled the governorship and a majority of the state legislature in Indiana, as well as exerting a powerful political influence in Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Oregon, and Texas. (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 161-162) Some historical evidence suggests that President Warren G. Harding, Wilson's successor, was inducted into the Klan in a White House ceremony. ^[26]

In the North, lynchings, though not unheard of, were less common than in the South. There were still mob attacks on blacks, however. Mass attacks on blacks (called race riots) occurred in Houston, in Philadelphia and in East St. Louis in 1917, and, most famously, in 1919 in Chicago, when mob violence raged for a week, leaving 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, over 500 injured and more than 1,000 homeless. ^[27] It was during that same year that Race Riots erupted throughout the nation (hence, the term Red Summer of 1919) The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma was even more deadly; white mobs invaded and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa. Witnesses reported seeing whites in airplanes dropping dynamite on the city's black neighborhood. 1,256 homes were destroyed and 39 people (26 black, 13 white) people were confirmed killed, although recent investigations suggest that the number of black deaths could be considerably higher. ^[28]

Northern writer James Baldwin commented

I know [a] Negro, a man very dear to me, who says, with conviction and with truth, 'The spirit of the South is the spirit of America.' He was born in the North and did his military training in the South. He did not, as far as I can gather, find the South 'worse'; he found it, if anything, all too familiar.^[29]

Baldwin was writing during the 1950s, after the nadir had ended. However, like Baldwin, most historians of the earlier period argue that racism was the policy of the nation as a whole, not just of the South. Or, as Thomas Hall, an ex-slave interviewed in the 1930s put it,

The Yankees helped free us, so they say, but they let us be put back in slavery again.^[30]

[edit] Legacy

Black literacy levels, which rose during Reconstruction, stayed high. The establishment of the NAACP occurred during this period, and by 1920 the group won a few important anti-discrimination lawsuits. African-Americans, such as Dubois and Wells-Barnett, continued the tradition of advocacy, organizing, and journalism which helped spur abolitionism, as well as developing new tactics helping to spur the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance and the popularity of jazz music during the early part of the 20th century made many Americans more aware of black culture and more accepting of black celebrities.

Overall, however, the nadir was a disaster, certainly for black people and arguably for whites as well. Foner points out:

...by the early twentieth century [racism] had become more deeply embedded in the nation's culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our nation's entire history.^[31]

Similarly, Loewen argues family instability and crime which many sociologists have found in black communities can be traced, not to slavery, but to the nadir and its aftermath. (Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 166) Foner adds "none of Reconstruction's black officials created a family political dynasty" and concludes the nadir "aborted the development of the South's black political leadership." (p. 604) Certainly, the racial cast of many of America's political debates—from the drug war to affirmative action—are part of the nadir's legacy. Segregation in housing and education was established during the nadir.

Political violence is arguably one of the nadir's bitter gifts to American society. Many commentators at the time pointed out lynchings and mob action undermine respect for the established justice system. One famous lynching case occurred in 1981—and other organized violence against blacks and other minorities recurs periodically. On a national level, many of the nation's most famous political assassinations—Martin Luther King Jr.'s, Malcolm X's—were linked to racial divisions which the nadir accentuated. Many white nationalist and right-wing militia movements have their roots in the Ku Klux Klan.

[edit] Exact year

Logan took some trouble to establish the exact year when the nadir reached its lowest point; he argued for 1901, suggesting that relations improved after then. Others, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923. (Logan, p. xxi) Today, though the term "nadir" is still used to describe the post-Reconstruction period, the search for the single worst year has largely been abandoned.

[edit] Sources

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ http://www.onenationdivisible.net/prologue.html
2. ^ http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/042005/footnotes.shtml
3. ^ Loewen, Sundown Towns
4. ^ (quoted in Foner, p. 609).
5. ^ (Current, pp. 446-447)
6. ^ (Current, pp. 446-447)
7. ^ (Foner, p. 388)
8. ^ (Current, pp. 446-449)
9. ^ (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 158-160)
10. ^ (Current, pp. 449-450)
11. ^ (Foner, p. 391; Current, pp. 456-458)
12. ^ (Current, pp. 457-458)
13. ^ (quoted in Logan, p. 91)
14. ^ Gabriel J. Chin & Randy Wagner, "The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty," 43 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 65 (2008)
15. ^ (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 160-165)
16. ^ (Chapter Nine)
17. ^ UNC Press - I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement, by Steve Estes. Introduction
18. ^ (Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 166)
19. ^ (Chapters 5 and 6)
20. ^ (Lomax interview)
21. ^ (Wright, Chapter Nine; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 163-164)
22. ^ (Chapter 3)
23. ^ (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 182-183, pp. 102-103)
24. ^ (Logan, 97-98)
25. ^ (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 28-29)
26. ^ (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 165)
27. ^ (Current, p. 670)
28. ^ (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 165)
29. ^ (Chapter 3)
30. ^ (quoted in Foner, p. 610)
31. ^ Foner, p. 608

[edit] Notations

• James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
• Richard N. Current, et. al, American History: A Survey, 7th ed., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
• James Loewen, Lies Across America, New York: Touchstone, 1999.
• James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
• James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, New York: The New York Press, 2005.
• Rayford Logan,The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson,, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. (This is an expanded edition of Logan's 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir, 1877-1901)
• Alan Lomax interview with Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson on the album , Blues in the Mississippi Night, Rykodisc, 1990.
• Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, 1901
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, 1895
• Richard Wright, Black Boy, Harper & Brothers, 1945

[edit] See also

• Reconstruction
• Jim Crow laws
• White Supremacy
• Anti-racism
• Lynching in the United States
• Mass racial violence in the United States