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A Rural Economic Strategy Extends the Pre-Civil War Way of Life into the Twentieth Century

Overview

Sharecropping is an agreement between the person who owns the land and a laborer, who works the land in return for a percentage of the profits at the end of the season. Almost always, the sharecropper's wife and children were included in the agreement and worked the land as well. Sharecroppers in the U.S. have been of varying races, but in the South, they were predominantly African-American.

Fayette County home. c. 1964. Source: Fayette-Haywood Newspaper.

Harpman Jameson describes Sharecropping
2002 Documentary Project on Fayette County, Tennessee. Source: Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries.
Theoretically, sharecropping might seem like a workable solution for a farming need-one that offers an equal exchange: The landowner would provide seeds, fertilizer, tools, and housing, in return for a sharecropper's labor. At the end of the season, the profits from the harvest would be split between the sharecropper and the landlord. However, in Fayette County, as in most of the South, the landowners held all of the economic power in sharecropping relationships, and could take advantage of the sharecroppers, who often knew no other way of life and lacked alternative means of making a living. In Fayette County, the terms sharecroppers agreed to were often unknown or misunderstood because of low literacy rates and the verbal nature of the contracts. And sometimes, when it came time to settle accounts, the terms were simply ignored-in the landowner's favor.

Most sharecroppers lived with their families in small, unsafe homes.
Source: Sepia Magazine

Post-Civil War, white landowners in the South scrambled to run their plantations profitably-only now, without slaves. Despite the fact that courts deemed sharecropping a vestige of slavery in an effort to enforce civil rights laws after reconstruction, sharecropping remained a pillar of Southern economy. In 1865, the 13th amendment to the US constitution made slavery illegal. However, from 1880 to 1890, Fayette County experienced a 50% increase in the number of sharecroppers [2].

To maintain a steady source of cheap labor and to continue the well-established, patriarchal relationship comfortable for whites in the rural South, it was in the best interest of the landowners to keep their sharecroppers dependent on them. As a result, landowners also kept the sharecropper population powerless. From the seeds for planting crops to the humblest everyday necessities, sharecroppers had to go to their landowner, hat in hand. It is no wonder that critics have called sharecropping "semislavery" [3].

Today, it is difficult for us to truly understand the dire implications of this system: Even through much of the 20th century, conditions in the rural South remained almost the same as they had been for the past two centuries. A low-yield season would leave the sharecropper unable to pay back the landlord for resources advanced at the beginning of the season. Additionally, sharecroppers were unable to repay loans made over the year for necessities he and his family could not grow, raise, or build for themselves, such as health care, fuel, shoes, seeds, and paint. It was common for expenses of the sharecroppers to be rigged when tallied so that, even in a good year, the sharecropper might barely make a profit or even remain in debt to the landowner. This practice left sharecropper families dependent on white landowners for generations.

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Sharecropping is an agreement between the person who owns the land and a laborer, who works the land in return for a percentage of the profits at the end of the season. Almost always, the sharecropper's wife and children were included in the agreement and worked the land as well.

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The Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and passed on February 28 by a vote of 422-3. A companion bill introduced in the Senate by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R.-S.C.) unanimously passed the Senate on March 7.

For nearly a century following the Civil War, mob violence, terrorism, and lynching cast a shadow over this nation. Millions were terrorized by thousands of lynchings that forced nearly six million Black Americans to flee the Deep South during the 20th century. Other disfavored communities were often lawlessly killed by mobs and no one was held accountable.

Lynching and racial terror undermined enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, reinforcing disenfranchisment, Jim Crow laws, and racial hierarchy.

Octavius Catto was lynched in 1871 because he voted and encouraged others to register to vote in Philadelphia. "This is why ensuring voting rights is such a critical priority," Mr. Stevenson observed. "This is why the right to vote should never be undermined or unnecessarily burdened by restrictive laws."

Mary Turner was lynched because she wanted law enforcement to hold the people who lynched her husband to be held accountable. "This is why doing everything we can to create trust between law enforcement and communities is so vital to public safety," Mr. Stevenson noted.

Black Veterans were prime targets of lynching because they proudly and honorably served this country. They returned home and were often attacked because they represented a threat to racial segregation.

"Our nation failed, our courts failed, and Congress failed to intervene when the rule of law was mocked by violent mobs that pulled people out of jails to brutally torture and lynch them on the courthouse lawn," Mr. Stevenson said.

"It is both a triumph and a tragedy that only now has our government officially outlawed the horror of lynching with this historic act," Mr. Stevenson said. "This should have happened a century ago. But it's not too late to commit to a new era in which we value the lives of all Americans and never again tolerate mob violence and lawlessness pretending to be justice."

Lynching in America

The lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported campaign to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.

This was not "frontier justice" carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity.

EJI has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings in America between 1865 and 1950.

In our 2015 report, Lynching in America , EJI documented 4,500 racial terror lynchings in the period between 1877 and 1950. Our 2020 report, Reconstruction in America , documents nearly 2,000 additional lynchings between 1865 and 1876, raising the total number of documented lynchings to nearly 6,500.

Thousands more were attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution.

Very few white people were convicted of murder for lynching a Black person in America during this period, and of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1% resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense.

Emmett Till

Outraged, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Emmett and tortured him to death. The two men were indicted and tried in September 1955. During the three-day trial, prosecutors presented courageous testimony from Moses Wright, Emmett's great-uncle who witnessed his abduction, and Willie Reed, an African American sharecropper who overheard Bryant and Milam torturing Emmett.

After deliberating for just over one hour, the all-white, all-male jury announced a not-guilty verdict on September 23, 1955. All but one juror later admitted that they believed Bryant and Milam were guilty of murder, but chose to acquit because the mandatory punishment (life imprisonment or death) seemed too harsh to impose upon white men for killing a Black boy.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, defiantly held an open-casket funeral in Chicago, where thousands gazed in horror at his mutilated body. To show the world the fate that had befallen Emmett, Mrs. Bradley also distributed a photograph of his corpse for publication in newspapers and magazines, later explaining that " the whole nation had to bear witness to this ."

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The Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and passed on February 28 by a vote of 422-3. A companion bill introduced in the Senate by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R.-S.C.) unanimously passed the Senate on March 7.

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15th Amendment - Brennan Center history and cases

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15th Amendment - Brennan Center history and cases

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Today marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which was adopted to give Black people access to the ballot after the Civil War. The amendment has retained its promise but, unfortunately, the robust democracy that it envisioned remains just out of reach. Today, we should honor the life of the momentous amendment by remembering that the fight to keep it continues.

Case in point: the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Authorized by the 15th Amendment, the VRA is one of the most consequential laws ever enacted. It dismantled Jim Crow practices that severely restricted African-American access to the ballot, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. For some 50 years, it helped ensure that democracy reflected the country's diversity.

That all changed with Shelby County v. Holder. The 2013 Supreme Court decision completed a decades long conservative effort to dismantle the VRA by gutting the section that required states with a history of voting discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their voting laws. Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime crusader against the VRA, wrote the majority opinion, in which he argued that the law undermined "the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty" among the states. He also highlighted the "'dramatic' progress" in minority voting over nearly five decades. In her prescient dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg analogized the majority's approach to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

Indeed, Americans got soaked. Immediately after the ruling, states across the country began to enact strict laws designed to make it more difficult for people of color to vote. Lawmakers have denied that their intent was to discriminate against minority voters, citing imaginary voter fraud as their chief justification. While we haven't reverted to the level of discrimination seen in the Jim Crow-era, there have been consistent efforts to place obstacles between minority voters and the ballot box. And their impact is clear. When pivotal elections come down to a tiny fraction of votes cast in just a few states, any suppression can have election-altering consequences. It paints a bleak picture for our future.

Tragically, failure is nothing new to the 15th Amendment. One need only look to the amendment's history - which, by its nature, is the story of African-American experience - to understand why. For nearly 250 years, "the peculiar institution" of slavery fed into the nation's booming industries and facilitated its boundless growth. Even as the country prospered, enslaved people were denied the fruits of their own labor. They were also denied a voice in America's fledgling democracy. This only began to change in the middle of the 19th century, as the abolitionist movement picked up steam and the United States split in two.

At the close of the Civil War, the nation wrangled with the future of nearly 4 million Black people who, until the adoption of the 13th Amendment, had been held captive in the South. On the heels of the 13th Amendment, which formally ended slavery, Congress passed the 14th Amendment to guarantee Black people citizenship and equality under the law. But suffrage was an entirely separate question. As lawmakers mapped out plans to reunify the country, extending the right to vote was hardly a priority in the North - even among staunch abolitionists.

In the South, however, Black people were voting. In some states - Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina - the African-American electorate outnumbered its white counterpart. That's because in 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts. The new laws established, among other things, conditions for the former Confederate states' return to the Union. Perhaps the most important stipulation was that the readmitted states had to draft new constitutions that guaranteed suffrage to citizens regardless of their race. Meanwhile, many states in the North and West were voting down ballot measures to broaden the franchise in those regions.

But it didn't take long for the Radical Republicans to recognize that for Reconstruction to have a chance, African Americans would have to be able advocate for themselves in elections. So in 1869, the lame-duck Congress passed the 15th Amendment over impassioned opposition. (Delaware Senator Willard Saulsbury, for example, called it an "exercise of absolute and tyrannical power.") The amendment, which was ratified in less than a year, made it illegal to "deny" or "abridge" the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" and gave Congress the power to enforce the new law. Soon, Black people began voting not only in the South but throughout the country. They were elected to statewide office and were even sent to Washington to represent Americans in both houses of Congress.

However, in two key respects, the 15th Amendment came up short.

The first complication was sex. While the original Constitution was written by men and implicitly for men (e.g. "a President . . . shall hold his office during the term of four years"), that understanding was made explicit for the first time after the Civil War. With the adoption of the 14th Amendment, federal lawmakers were authorized to reduce the size of a state's representation if it denied voting rights to any "male inhabitants" over 21 years old. In other words, the Constitution called on states to extend suffrage rights to men and men alone.

Less than a year later, when Congress proposed the 15th Amendment, its text banned discrimination in voting, but only based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Despite some valiant efforts by activists, "sex" was left out, reaffirming the fact that women lacked a constitutional right to vote. The omission prompted a schism in the woman suffrage movement. Some suffragists, like Lucretia Mott, accepted it as political reality and hailed the adoption of the amendment as a victory. Others, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were much less forgiving. They opposed the 15th Amendment, arguing - at times in strident racist rhetoric - that white women deserved voting rights before Black men.

Though it took another half century, white women eventually did win the right to vote. In 1920, when the states ratified the 19th Amendment, the Constitution finally outlawed sex discrimination in the franchise. Yet, with the recent resurgence of women's activism, and in light of Virginia's recent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, it's worth pondering today whether these gains could have been realized sooner. At the same time, it's important to understand that the 19th Amendment left Black women behind.

This is a consequence of the second failure related to the 15th Amendment: the country ignored it.

Reconstruction ended in 1876. From then until the 1960s, the majority of America's Black population was prevented from voting, as states manufactured "legal" ways to suppress their registration and turnout without violating the 15th Amendment. For nearly a century, Jim Crow flourished in the South, where most African Americans lived. This only changed with the rise of civil rights movement, which achieved a string of historic victories that included the enactment of the VRA.

Within four years of the VRA's enactment, Black voter registration rates had surged from 35 percent to 65 percent. But now, in the post- Shelby County era, the VRA is not enough to prevent disenfranchisement of African Americans and other people of color.

So on the sesquicentennial of the 15th Amendment, Americans should celebrate the incredible progress made since the country's founding. But they should also reflect on the rocky route to that progress - and acknowledge that there's much further to go.

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The Promise and Pitfalls of the 15th Amendment Over 150 Years

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Today marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which was adopted to give Black people access to the ballot after the Civil War. The amendment has retained its promise but, unfortunately, the robust democracy that it envisioned remains just out of reach.

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On the anniversary of the 14th Amendment's ratification, Constitution Daily looks at 10 historic Supreme Court cases about due process and equal protection under the law.

On July 9, 1868, Louisiana and South Carolina voted to ratify the amendment, after they had rejected it a year earlier. The votes made the 14 th Amendment officially part of the Constitution. But in the ensuing years, the Supreme Court was slow to decide how the new (and old) rights guaranteed under the federal constitution applied to the states.

In the early Supreme Court decisions about the 14 th Amendment, the Court often ruled in favor of limiting the incorporation of these rights on a state and local level. But starting in the 1920s, the Court embraced the application of due process and equal protection, despite state laws that conflicted with the 14th Amendment.

Here is a look at 10 famous Court decisions that show the progression of the 14th Amendment from Reconstruction to the era of affirmative action.

The Slaughter-House Cases (14 Apr 1873) ―In the Slaughter-House Cases, waste products from slaughterhouses located upstream of New Orleans had caused health problems for years by the time Louisiana decided to consolidate the industries into one slaughterhouse located south of the city. Slaughterhouse owners were incensed; they sued Louisiana and argued that the state-sanctioned monopoly infringed on their newly ratified 13th and 14th Amendment rights. Justice Samuel Miller dismissed the butchers' claims regarding due process and involuntary servitude. He then looked to Article IV, which entitled "the Citizens of each State" to "all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States" and to the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed the protection of the " Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States." Miller reasoned that the two clauses protected different bundles of rights, with Article IV protecting the rights of state citizenship and the 14th Amendment protecting rights of national citizenship. The privileges and immunities of U.S. citizenship were narrow and only those specified in the Constitution, which included the right to freely travel throughout the states. Not included, Miller said, was the right to one's livelihood or be protected against a monopoly.

(17 Apr 1905) ―Lochner, a baker from New York, was convicted of violating the New York Bakeshop Act, which prohibited bakers from working more than 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. The Supreme Court struck down the Bakeshop Act, however, ruling that it infringed on Lochner's "right to contract." The Court extracted this "right" from the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, a move that many believe exceeded judicial authority.

Brown v. Board of Education (17 May 1954) ―It is impossible to mention the victories of the Civil Rights Movement without pointing to Brown v. Board of Education. Following the Court's ruling in 1896 of Plessy v. Ferguson, segregation of public schools based solely on race was allowed by states if the facilities were "equal." Brown overturned that decision. Regardless of the "equality" of facilities, the Court ruled that separate is inherently unequal. Thus public school segregation based on race was found in violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

(18 Mar 1963) ― Before 1962, indigent Americans were not always guaranteed access to legal counsel despite the Sixth Amendment. Gideon, a Florida resident, was charged in Florida state court for breaking and entering into a poolroom with the intent to commit a crime. Due to his poverty, Gideon asked the Florida court to appoint an attorney for him. The court declined to do this and pointed to state law which said that the only time indigent defendants could be appointed an attorney was when charged with a capital offense. Left with no other choice, Gideon represented himself in trial and lost. He filed a petition of habeas corpus to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing that he had a constitutional right to be represented with an attorney, but the Florida Supreme Court did not grant him any relief. A unanimous United States Supreme Court said that state courts are required under the 14th Amendment to provide counsel in criminal cases to represent defendants who are unable to afford to pay their attorneys, guaranteeing the Sixth Amendment's similar federal guarantees.

Griswold v. Connecticut (07 Jun 1965) ―You know when you're walking down the street at night with lights in front of you and behind you, and you get that really dark shadow? In the scientific community, that shadow is known as an "umbra." Flanking that dark shadow on the ground are two or more, half-shadows, not quite as dark, but darker than the well-lit sidewalk around you. Those shadows are known as "penumbras" and were used to explain the most controversial issue of arguably the most controversial Supreme Court case in the 20 th century. Estelle Griswold was the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut when she was arrested for violating a state statute that prohibited counseling and prescription of birth control to married couples. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the Constitution protected the right of married couples to privately engage in counseling regarding contraceptive use and procurement. Justice Douglas articulated that although not explicit, the penumbras of the Bill of Rights contained a fundamental "right to privacy" that was protected by the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause. Griswold's "right to privacy" has been applied to many other controversial decisions such as Roe v. Wade. It remains at the core of substantive due process debate today.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (26 Jun 1978) - Allan Bakke, a white man, had been denied access to the University of California Medical School at Davis on two separate occasions. The medical school set aside 16 spots for minority candidates in an attempt to address unfair minority exclusion from medical school. Bakke contested that his exclusion from the Medical School was entirely the result of his race. The Supreme Court ruled in a severely fractured plurality that the university's use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and ordered that the medical school admit Bakke, but it also said that race could be used as one of several factors in the admissions process. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. cast the deciding vote ordering the medical school to admit Bakke. However, in his opinion, Powell said that the rigid use of racial quotas violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

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10 Supreme Court cases about the 14th Amendment

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On the anniversary of the 14th Amendment's ratification, Constitution Daily looks at 10 historic Supreme Court cases about due process and equal protection under the law.

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Many examples of technologies that reinforce racism are underpinned by Artificial Intelligence with racial biases embedded into the algorithms that power them, so let's look at this in some more detail.

Racial bias in algorithms

When we consider racial bias in algorithms, we really need to look at algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning. In machine learning, applications are able to learn from data and improve their accuracy over time without being reprogrammed.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. The field of AI promises to solve problems by leveraging the speed and power of technology as well as or better than humans can.

What is machine learning?

Machine Learning is the use and development of computer systems that are able to learn and adapt without following explicit instructions by using algorithms and statistical models to analyse and draw inferences from patterns in data. This learning and adaptation are often referred to as training.

Machine learning is a common way that Artificial Intelligence is applied, and it is heavily reliant on data. When biased data is used to train a computer system, the outcomes will also be biased, as the computer system has made inferences from patterns in the data.

AI systems that produce racist outcomes

Here are some examples of AI systems that produce racist outcomes:

1. Object detection is used in driverless cars to detect human figures

A 2019 study by researchers from Georgia Tech found that the algorithm used to detect human figures was more likely to fail to detect people with darker skin (1).

2. Racial bias in an algorithm used to predict risk levels and needs in the US healthcare system

In this example, healthcare costs were used as a proxy for a patient's health. In the US, Black patients have historically had challenges in accessing healthcare. As a result, Black patients' healthcare needs were consistently minimised in comparison to healthier white patients (2).

3. Racist Image Cropping on Twitter

In 2020, Twitter users began noticing that large images which portrayed people of different races would crop out darker-skinned people and focus on lighter-skinned people (3).

Tony Arcieri experimented to see whether Twitter's algorithm would prefer Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama and found it cropped out the image of Obama. Jordan Simonovski found the same results happened even with cartoon characters.

The algorithm also produced the same outcome when applied to dogs of different colours. Later in the course, we will share more examples of applied AI that have serious implications on people's lives.

4. Beauty AI

Beauty AI was the first beauty contest to be judged by AI (5, 6). In 2016 there were 60,000 applications from over 100 countries, and entrants weren't allowed to have makeup, glasses or a beard.

Robot judges were using parameters like wrinkles, face symmetry, skin colour, gender, age group and ethnicity to determine winners. Although 11% of the entrants were black, of the 45 winners, none were black. Thoughts are this was because of the algorithms used to perform the analysis for a multitude of reasons

Inconsistent lighting when analysing darker skin meaning images were excluded

Human bias when creating the algorithms to perform the analysis (consider coding to determine whether wrinkles increase or decrease beauty level)

If this can occur with a beauty contest, imagine the impact when using facial data for other types of analysis or human bias.

5. Google Search

The autosuggestions feature listing some less than desirable results when entering 'Why are Nigerians so...'.

This is also explored further in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (7, 8). How could this happen?

Search algorithms reinforce racist views already in society

The people making algorithms don't reflect people in society

Algorithms have since been updated to actively remove negative results, or enable users to limit the type of data that is returned.

References:

1. Benjamin Wilson, Judy Hoffman & Jamie Morgenstern, 2019. Predictive inequity in object detection Cornell University.

2. Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli & Sendhil Mullainathan. Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations, Science Magazine.

3. Alex Hern, 2020. Twitter apologies for 'racist' image cropping algorithm, The Guardian. Further reading

4. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. 'Default Discrimination: Is the Glitch Systemic?' in Race After Technology, pages 77 - 96.

5. Cision, 2016. Beauty.AI 1.0 announces the first humans judged by a robot jury; Beauty.AI 2.0 to be launched soon.

6. Sage Lazzaro, 2016. Here are the winners of the first beauty contest judged by artificial intelligence, The Observer.

7. Safiya Noble, 2018. Algorithms of oppression.

8. Sean Illing, 2018. How search engines are making us more racist, Vox.

Further Resources:

Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new Jim code

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How racism is embedded in AI and algorithms

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In this article, learn about how racism is embedded in AI and algorithms, and look at examples of AI systems that produce racist outcomes.

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Racial Profiling is a Public Health and Health Disparities Issue

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Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue through its disparate and adverse health impact on those targeted by this practice, as well as members of their communities. We discuss six ways police profiling and racial discrimination…

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Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country, with some metropolitan areas showing very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.

The wide variance in deaths by police shows how preventable these deaths are, study authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz, recent graduates from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told UPI in a June 24 article.

The study was published online June 24, 2020 in PLOS ONE.

Read UPI article: Study: Black Americans 3 times more likely to be killed by police

See coverage from Harvard FXB Center and Fox 32 Chicago

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Black people more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter

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Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017.

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Shroff and his colleagues also measured the disparity in stop rates before and after sunset. They found that black drivers made up a smaller share of those stopped at night, when it's more difficult to discern the race of a driver, which suggests that racial bias may influence stop decisions. For example, in Texas, about 25 percent of drivers stopped right before sunset were black, compared to about 20 percent just after dusk. The analysis found the same basic pattern across all the stops in aggregate. Overall, the data showed about a 5-10 percent drop in the share of drivers stopped at night who are black.

The study, published in peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour, analyzed hundreds of millions of traffic stop records throughout the country with the goal of helping researchers and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between the police and the public.

"Our team contacted over 100 police departments and processed and released over 20 million traffic stop records, in addition to the more than 150 million state-level traffic stop records that were also simultaneously released," said Shroff. "It was a challenging task, but we hope the public release of this extensive dataset and analysis will provide new insight into the nature of law enforcement interactions with the public."

To learn more about this research and other work done by The Stanford Open Policing Project, visit https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/.

About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Located in the heart of New York City's Greenwich Village, NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development prepares students for careers in the arts, education, health, media and psychology. Since its founding in 1890, the Steinhardt School's mission has been to expand human capacity through public service, global collaboration, research, scholarship, and practice. To learn more about NYU Steinhardt, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu.

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Research Shows Black Drivers More Likely to Be Stopped by Police

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New research offers evidence that black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police than their white peers.

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PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX - AN EXPLAINER

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Reinventing the Prison Industrial Complex | Joe Sprangel | TEDxBergenCommunityCollege

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The relationship between racism and prisons

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The relationship between racism and prisons

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The issue: Prison industrial complex - Invest Your Values

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The issue: Prison industrial complex - Invest Your Values

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Investor-owned companies are profiting from exploitative prison labor, immigration jails, and other economic systems of oppression and exploitation.

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THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. Through its reach and impact, the PIC

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As explained by abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, "the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems." By naming the PIC, we identify the expansive network of people and parties with vested interests in mass incarceration and uncover how this network functions to fill prisons and support mass incarceration.

The PIC and Mass Incarceration

Current estimates indicate that there are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, with an additional 4.5 million people on probation or parole. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate and, despite representing under 5% of the global population, the US holds almost 20% of the global prison population ( Prison Policy Initiative). The staggering incarceration rates in the US can be traced back to a variety of factors and forces throughout the course of recent US history. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that "convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States...more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began. Nothing has contributed more to the systemic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs" (Alexander, 2010, 59).

One key feature of mass incarceration in the US is the racial disparity in incarceration rates: people of color are incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than white people. As indicated by Alexander above, the War on Drugs, which began in the late 1960s and continued throughout the next several decades, provides a clear case study for this trend: despite the fact that "people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates" people of color are incarcerated at rates far higher than their white counterparts (Alexander, 2010, 97). For example, "black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than white men" (Alexander, 2010, 98). The disproportionate incarceration of people of color is not exclusive to drug crimes, but rather constitutes a broader trend across offenses. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveals that "one out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino boys - compared to one of every 17 white boys." Differential incarceration rates are not limited to race, and other marginalized groups - including poor people, queer people, and disabled people - are also disproportionately incarcerated.

Additionally, the PIC encompasses a growing network of privatized immigration detention centers, which have become the default for imprisoning undocumented immigrants for indeterminate amounts of time, even while gaining a track record of detainee abuse and neglect. Today, 73% of undocumented people detained in the US are housed in private facilities ( The New York Times, 2018). Operating with little regulation or oversight, these detention centers have a clear financial incentive to cut medical, food, and maintenance costs in order to maximize shareholder returns.

Mainstream narratives suggest that an increase in crime has led to our nation's increase in incarceration. However, this is clearly not the case. ACLU reports that "since 1970, our incarcerated population has increased by 700%." This was not accompanied by a similar increase in criminality. In fact, crime rates have been rapidly declining since the mid-1990s. For example, the murder rates in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles have shrunk by 76% and 90% since 1992 ( Forbes, 2015). There is a clear disconnect between decreasing crime rates and skyrocketing incarceration rates. Scholars and activists thus coined the term PIC to "...contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations" and instead argue that "... prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit" (Angela Davis, 2003, 84).

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As explained by abolitionist organization Critical Resistance , "the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems." By naming the PIC, we identify the expansive network of people and parties with vested interests in mass incarceration and uncover how this network functions to fill prisons and support mass incarceration.

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In their own words - don't miss this one

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In their own words - don't miss this one

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Copy of Reading: He Was Always Right and You Were Always Wrong

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Ida B. Wells, Who Took on Racism in the Deep South With Powerful Reporting on Lynchings (Published 2020)

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Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice.

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Today, a simple marker on a street corner in Memphis, Tennessee commemorates the People's Grocery lynching. In 1892 three black men, co-owners of a store giving white businesses a run for their money, were attacked, fought back and were arrested. They never stood trial. A white mob broke into the jail, dragged them away and lynched them.

The murders were grieved by their friend Ida B Wells, an African American teacher, journalist, civil rights pioneer and suffragist about whom it was once said: "She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug."

Wells was galvanised to count, investigate and report lynchings in America as no one had done before, hurling her 5ft frame into hostile territory with all the fearlessness of a war reporter.

For a century she has languished as an unsung heroine, overshadowed by more familiar giants of the civil rights movement. In recent years, however, her crusading activism and muckraking techniques are being rediscovered. A society for investigative reporting bears her name; the New York Times - which once branded her "a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress" - just published a belated obituary, and there are moves to name a street after her in New York and build a monument in Chicago.

One has to ask: 'Would I have the courage to do that?' There was no help going to come for you, no protection from the law

Nikole Hannah-Jones

"I consider her my spiritual grandmother," says Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist covering civil rights. "She was was a trailblazer in every way ... as a feminist, as a suffragist, as an investigative reporter, as a civil rights leader. She was just an all-around badass."

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the civil war. She was orphaned at 16 after her parents - as well as a younger brother - died from a yellow fever epidemic. She found work as a teacher to support her five remaining siblings, then moved to Memphis, where she became a leading journalist and civil rights activist.

At 21, Wells clashed with a white train conductor who ordered her to move from the ladies' car to the a section designated for black passengers, despite her having bought a first class ticket. When she refused and the conductor tried to forcibly move her, Wells " fastened her teeth on the back of his hand ", as she wrote later.

Wells sued after being ejected from the train and won the case (a newspaper headline declared "Darky damsel gets damages"), though the decision was later reversed in court.

By the time Wells turned 25, she was the co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight, a local black newspaper, a platform she used to skewer racial inequality. Then came the People's Grocery Lynching. She denounced it in print, armed herself with a pistol and spent months traveling alone in the south, researching more than 700 lynchings from the previous decade.

Some 4,075 African Americans were lynched in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report, Lynching in America. Some were witnessed by big crowds who brought children and picnic baskets, as if at a public entertainment.

A crowd surrounds two African American men hanging from nooses on a pole. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Wells's great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, an author and public speaker, says: "They would torture people before they were killed and dismember them afterwards and pass around the body parts. It was shocking to me that people would take bones as souvenirs. The more I learned about the level of violence, the more I appreciated what it took for her to do what she did. I am just amazed."

Wells visited places where people had been hanged, shot, beaten, burned alive, drowned or mutilated.She examined photos of victims hanging from trees as mobs looked on, pored over local newspaper accounts, took sworn statements from eyewitnesses and, on occasion, even hired private investigators.

It was astoundingly courageous work in an era of Jim Crow segregation and in which women did not have the vote. Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, says: "There was no protection from the law for a black woman who was going into territories where black people had been stolen from the jail and lynched with the help of law enforcement.

"These places would have been hostile to a black person questioning these communities at all, but think about the types of emotion in a community that has just lynched someone and strung their body up for public display and then to have a black woman come in there asking questions. One has to ask: 'Would I have the courage to do that?' There was no help that was going to come for you. There was no protection from the law. Black folks didn't even have a lot of legal rights and they certainly didn't have much protection from law enforcement."

A marker on a street corner in the Soulsville neighbourhood marks the spot of the People's Grocery lynching of African-American proprietors Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart in 1892. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Wells, however, was a force of nature who once said, "One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." On another occasion, she wrote: "I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. If I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit."

She destroyed the mainstream media's narratives that suggested lynching victims were criminals - often rapists of white women - who got their just desserts. Her reporting showed that rape had not been alleged in two thirds of the lynchings or was only alleged after a covert, consensual, interracial relationship had been exposed.

Duster says: "She was putting names to stories and names to statistics. She was putting context into what was happening. Without what she did, it was pretty much 'OK, this person committed a crime, they got what they deserved.' She said, 'No, they did not commit a crime.' The narrative of the mainstream media at this time was very different from the reality she found on the ground."

Hannah-Jones adds: "Much like the killing of black people by police today, the 'official' story of lynchings was just largely accepted, which was that black men were rapists and that unknown vigilantes were just meting out justice to black brutes. You can look at the way that newspapers covered these things and that was just accepted and Ida B Wells exposed the reality behind lynchings, which is that they were often used as economic retaliation.

"They were used to sow fear in black communities so that black people would stay in their place and she exposed the truth about that. She also exposed that while law enforcement would often say they these lynchings occur 'at the hands of parties unknown', everyone in town knew who committed them and often law enforcement took part."

While Wells was out of town, a mob destroyed her printing press in Memphis and threatened to kill her if she returned. She stayed away from the south for more than three decades but toured the US and UK, raising awareness through public speaking. In 1895 she published a pamphlet, the Red Record, the first statistical record of the history of American lynchings, a forerunner of data journalism projects such as The Counted, the Guardian's project to document people killed by police.

Hannah-Jones says: "She was one of the first people to actually tally the number of lynchings that were happening. We like to say she was one of our early data reporters. She began to collect data on this to show how actually vast the scope of the problem was."

One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap

Wells married Chicago lawyer and newspaper editor Ferdinand Barnett and, uncommonly for the time, hyphenated her name rather than take his. The couple had four children. Wells jugged motherhood, journalism and civil rights. In 1909, she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although was later ousted because she was perceived as too "radical". She also worked with Susan B Anthony as a leader in the movement for women's suffrage.

When Wells died in 1931 at the age of 68 from a brief illness due to kidney failure, her influence was waning, her autobiography was unfinished and her ambition of a federal anti-lynching law was unrealised. Duster muses: "She went out with a whimper. She was almost obsolete. She writes in her autobiography that there was a generation who didn't know who she was and didn't know about lynching. She wrote the book to stop it being forgotten."

Wells and Barnett are interred together in the Oak Woods cemetery in Chicago. She remains a little known figure in America and abroad. Hannah-Jones, who adopted the Twitter handle Ida Bae Wells, reflects: "A lot of people have no idea who Ida B Wells is. To this day people think my name is Ida; they don't even get the reference of my Twitter handle.

"I think her being a woman, and a black woman, were things that pretty much guaranteed her obscurity. She was also written out of the suffrage movement even though she played a huge role in it and was trying to push the white suffragists on racial equality. Both her gender and her race are the reasons why she was largely written out of history."

But now she is inspiring a new generation of women in journalism. Hannah-Jones is co-founder of the Ida B Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which aims to increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of colour in the field.

What if Wells herself were alive today? "I think she would be very unsurprised by the America of 2018," she says. "In many ways it would look very familiar to her. As long as she was able, she would be one of the sharpest critics of this country right now."

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Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement

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The pioneering African American reporter counted, investigated and reported lynchings in America as no one had done before

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Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country, with some metropolitan areas showing very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.

The wide variance in deaths by police shows how preventable these deaths are, study authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz, recent graduates from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told UPI in a June 24 article.

The study was published online June 24, 2020 in PLOS ONE.

Read UPI article: Study: Black Americans 3 times more likely to be killed by police

See coverage from Harvard FXB Center and Fox 32 Chicago

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Black people more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter

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Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017.

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Shroff and his colleagues also measured the disparity in stop rates before and after sunset. They found that black drivers made up a smaller share of those stopped at night, when it's more difficult to discern the race of a driver, which suggests that racial bias may influence stop decisions. For example, in Texas, about 25 percent of drivers stopped right before sunset were black, compared to about 20 percent just after dusk. The analysis found the same basic pattern across all the stops in aggregate. Overall, the data showed about a 5-10 percent drop in the share of drivers stopped at night who are black.

The study, published in peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour, analyzed hundreds of millions of traffic stop records throughout the country with the goal of helping researchers and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between the police and the public.

"Our team contacted over 100 police departments and processed and released over 20 million traffic stop records, in addition to the more than 150 million state-level traffic stop records that were also simultaneously released," said Shroff. "It was a challenging task, but we hope the public release of this extensive dataset and analysis will provide new insight into the nature of law enforcement interactions with the public."

To learn more about this research and other work done by The Stanford Open Policing Project, visit https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/.

About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Located in the heart of New York City's Greenwich Village, NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development prepares students for careers in the arts, education, health, media and psychology. Since its founding in 1890, the Steinhardt School's mission has been to expand human capacity through public service, global collaboration, research, scholarship, and practice. To learn more about NYU Steinhardt, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu.

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Research Shows Black Drivers More Likely to Be Stopped by Police

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New research offers evidence that black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police than their white peers.

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Black code in the United States, any of numerous laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War, in 1865 and 1866, designed to replace the social controls of slavery that had been removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and to assure continuance of white supremacy.

The black codes had their roots in the slave codes that had formerly been in effect. The general philosophy supporting the institution of chattel slavery in America was based on the concept that slaves were property, not persons, and that the law must protect not only the property but also the property owner from the danger of violence. Slave rebellions were not unknown, and the possibility of uprisings was a constant source of anxiety in colonies and then states with large slave populations. (In Virginia during 1780-1864, 1,418 slaves were convicted of crimes; 91 of these convictions were for insurrection and 346 for murder.) Slaves also ran away. In the British possessions in the New World, the settlers were free to promulgate any regulations they saw fit to govern their labour supply. As early as the 17th century, a set of rules was in effect in Virginia and elsewhere; but the codes were constantly being altered to adapt to new needs, and they varied from one colony, and later one state, to another.

All the slave codes, however, had certain provisions in common. In all of them the colour line was firmly drawn, and any amount of Negro blood established the race of a person, whether slave or free, as Negro. The status of the offspring followed that of the mother, so that the child of a free father and a slave mother was a slave. Slaves had few legal rights: in court their testimony was inadmissible in any litigation involving whites; they could make no contract, nor could they own property; even if attacked, they could not strike a white person. There were numerous restrictions to enforce social control: slaves could not be away from their owner's premises without permission; they could not assemble unless a white person was present; they could not own firearms; they could not be taught to read or write, or transmit or possess "inflammatory" literature; they were not permitted to marry.

Obedience to the slave codes was exacted in a variety of ways. Such punishments as whipping, branding, and imprisonment were commonly used, but death (which meant destruction of property) was rarely called for except in such extreme cases as the rape or murder of a white person. White patrols kept the slaves under surveillance, especially at night. Slave codes were not always strictly enforced, but whenever any signs of unrest were detected the appropriate machinery of the state would be alerted and the laws more strictly enforced.

The black codes enacted immediately after the American Civil War, though varying from state to state, were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labour, and all continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves. There were vagrancy laws that declared a black to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labour if unable to pay the fine. Apprentice laws provided for the "hiring out" of orphans and other young dependents to whites, who often turned out to be their former owners. Some states limited the type of property blacks could own, and in others blacks were excluded from certain businesses or from the skilled trades. Former slaves were forbidden to carry firearms or to testify in court, except in cases concerning other blacks. Legal marriage between blacks was provided for, but interracial marriage was prohibited.

It was Northern reaction to the black codes (as well as to the bloody antiblack riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866; see New Orleans Race Riot) that helped produce Radical Reconstruction ( see Reconstruction) and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The Freedmen's Bureau was created in 1865 to help the former slaves. Reconstruction did away with the black codes, but, after Reconstruction was over, many of their provisions were reenacted in the Jim Crow laws, which were not finally done away with until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Black code in the United States, any of numerous laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War, in 1865 and 1866, designed to replace the social controls of slavery that had been removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and to assure continuance of white supremacy.

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The Thirteenth Amendment and the Black Codes: Black History Month, Part 19

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Black Codes (1865) | Constitution Center

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National Constitution Center Historic Documents Library record for Black Codes (1865)

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After the United States Civil War, state governments that had been part of the Confederacy tried to limit the voting rights of Black citizens and prevent contact between Black and white citizens in public places.

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The South's Forgotten Farmers - SHARECROP | Full Documentary

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The Civil War effectively ended in April 1865, when Confederate Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham County. The Union's defeat of the Confederacy resulted in massive societal change and opened up a brief time of tremendous potential for reform and change. During the period known as Reconstruction (1865-1877), the Federal Government maintained a military presence in the South and went about setting the conditions by which southern states could return to the Union. Among a host of political, social, and economic exigencies, was the question of what to do with the nearly four million formerly enslaved people who were freed with no land, jobs, money, or rights of citizenship.

In the first year of Reconstruction, an unprecedented event took place: formerly enslaved people were asked by the government what they wanted for themselves. A gathering took place in Savannah, Georgia in 1865 where the question was debated by Black leaders from across the south. Their spokesperson was Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister from Granville County, located just north of Durham. Land was their number one demand: "The way we can best take care of ourselves, is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor ... and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare ... We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own."

In the days that followed, the government, under Union General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, ordered the redistribution of 400,000 acres of land along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coast. However, Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in late 1865, and the promise of reparations through land redistribution was never fulfilled. Economist and folklorist Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen contend that had this order been carried out, it "would have dramatically reversed black asset poverty and reduced black's economic vulnerability across generations."⁵³⁻⁵⁴

Throughout reconstruction and its aftermath, hunger was rampant across the South and the agricultural system was in chaos. Over the course of the war, critical infrastructure was ruined, farm buildings and machinery were destroyed, livestock ravaged, and agricultural fields laid fallow. The Freedman's Bureau was the federal agency assigned to provide food, housing, medical aid, schools, etc. to freed people. However, the U.S. government was preoccupied with the political and economic questions of Reconstruction and categorically failed to take responsibility for the health and welfare of freed people. Among the reasonings employed was a concern not to have freed people become dependent on the government. Although it is difficult to quantify, historian Jim Downs estimates that during Reconstruction, more than a million Black people became sick from malnutrition, disease, and near starvation, and tens of thousands died. ⁵⁵⁻⁵⁶

By 1900, Democrats (then the party of white supremacy in the South) were in full control the North Carolina Senate, House, and governorship. Intending to keep it that way, Charles Aycock, the newly elected governor, immediately went about ensuring Black voter disenfranchisement by putting forth an amendment to the North Carolina state constitution that drastically restricted Black voter eligibility. The amendment had three main parts. The first was a literacy requirement that voters must be able to read and write a section of the state constitution in the English language in order to be eligible to vote. The second was the introduction of a fee known as a 'poll tax' that people were required to pay before casting a ballot. The third was a legal loophole known as the 'grandfather clause,' that was included in order not to disenfranchise illiterate white people. The grandfather clause created an exception to the literacy requirement if a person or their direct ancestor could vote on January 1, 1867, a date that preceded federal laws against racial discrimination. To drum up local support for the public referendum on the amendment changes, a white supremacy parade took place Durham, with a procession including a "white supremacy banner, followed by a band and a white float with sixteen young ladies all attired in white carrying small white flags. Streamers on each side of the float proclaimed, "Protect us with your vote." The state referendum passed overwhelmingly. ⁸⁹⁻⁹¹

The result of these disenfranchisement policies, combined with ongoing violence, intimidation, and whites-only Democratic primaries, was systemic Black political exclusion across the state. As striking evidence, the number of Black registered voters in North Carolina plummeted from 126,000 in 1896 to 6,100 in 1902. Around the same time, in 1896, the Supreme Court heard the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, and decided that "separate but equal" was legally permissible. These events ushered in a new era of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. ⁹²

References

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2. Darity, William and Mullen, Kristen. (2020) From Here to Equality: reparations for Black Americans in the twenty-first century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 175

3. Darity, William and Mullen, Kristen. (2020) From Here to Equality: reparations for Black Americans in the twenty-first century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 172

4. Downs, Pete. (2012). Sick From Freedom: African-American illness and suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford Press, p. 3-17, 180

5. Library of Congress. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, Martha Allen, 1936. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writer...

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10. Crop Lien System. NCPEDIA. Retrieved from https://www.ncpedia.org/crop-lien-system

11. John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke University Libraries. (1995). Interview with Theresa Jan Lyons (btvnc03021), interviewed by Leslie Brown, Durham (N.C.). Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South Digital Collection

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20. John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke University Libraries. (1995). Interview with Ila Jacuth Blue (btvnc02072), interviewed by Blair Murphy and Kisha Turner, Durham (N.C.). Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South Digital Collection.

21. The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (1936-1940). Interview with Amon Mitchell, interviewed by W.O. Forsters. Federal Writers' Project Papers: 1936-1940. Collection #0379, Folder 387.

22. Hochstadt, Steve. (2019). How African American Land was Stolen in the Twentieth Century. History News Network. Retrieved from https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/154232

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27. John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke University Libraries. (1995). Interview with Mildred Oakley Page (btvnc03029), interviewed by Doris Dixon and Felicia Woods, Durham (N.C.). Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South Digital Collection.

28. McEuen, Melissa. (2004). Seeing America: Women Photographers between the War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, p.168-170

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34. Edmonds, Helen. (1951). The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina: 1894-1901. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 41, 62, 70-74

35. Zucchino, David. (2020). Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2020

36. Brown, Leslie. (2008). UpBuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 60-61

37. Poll Tax. NCPEDIA. Retrieved from https://www.ncpedia.org/poll-tax

38. Grandfather Clause. NCPEDIA. Retrieved from https://www.ncpedia.org/grandfather-clause

39. Anderson, Jean. (2011). Durham County. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 186-187

40. Christensen, Rob. (2008). The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: the personalities, elections, and events that shaped modern North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 39

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Sharecropping, Black Land Acquisition, and White Supremacy (1868-1900) - World Food Policy Center

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The Civil War effectively ended in April 1865, when Confederate Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham County. The Union's defeat of the Confederacy resulted in massive societal change and opened up a brief time of tremendous potential for reform and change.

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Courtesy of Library of Congress, Pierson, H.W., "A Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, with 'Statements' of Outrages Upon Freedmen in Georgia, and an Account of my Expulsion from Andersonville, GA. by the Ku-Klux Klan," pp. 4-6, 1870

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In 1870, Reverend H.W. Pierson authored "A Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, with 'Statements' of Outrages Upon Freedmen in Georgia, and an Account of my Expulsion from Andersonville, GA. by the Ku-Klux Klan." While serving as a pastor and teacher in Georgia, he collected interviews from freedmen and documented the violence and discrimination they faced. This particular account is from the perspective of Cane Cook, a middle-aged, African-American man who was a former sharecropper. Cook recalls his arrangement with Robert Hodges, a white man who he rented land from and gave a percentage of his crops to. The recollection of Hodges turns brutal during a minor disagreement about a charge of syrup. In a rage, Hodges strikes Cook on the back of the head, and Cook loses all control of his body, making his a quadriplegic. Hodges is never charged with the crime and Cook doesn't sue Hodges because "I have not gone before any of the courts I have no money to pay a lawyer, and I know it would do no good." This statement from Cook shows the violent and oppressive abuses facing African-American sharecroppers by their white employers, many of whom were former slave owners.
Transcript of "Statement of Cane Cook"
Source-Dependent Questions

Sharecropping was very common for freemen in the South during Reconstruction. Using Cane Cook's arrangement with Robert Hodges, explain how sharecropping worked.

What were the disadvantages of sharecropping for freemen like Cook?

This incident occurred after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted African-American citizens the right to sue in the court of law. Why then might Cook have believed "it would do no good" to attempt to sue Hodges? What does this suggest about the relationship between state and federal government?

Citation Information

Pierson, H.W., "A Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, with 'Statements' of Outrages Upon Freedmen in Georgia, and an Account of my Expulsion from Andersonville, GA. by the Ku-Klux Klan," pp. 4-6, 1870. Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Interview with Cane Cook, a Former African-American Sharecropper, with Reverend H.W. Pierson, 1870

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Sharecropping in a Depression Photographs of women sharecroppers taken by agents of the Farm Security Administration. Sharecropper's wife chopping cotton Lee Russell, Sharecropper's wife chopping cotton, Southeast Missouri Farms Project,

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The Origins of Lynching Culture in the United States.mp4

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2018 - Inside the memorial to victims of lynching.mp4

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Redlining - A modern day impact of Jim Crow

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Redlining - A modern day impact of Jim Crow

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How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades - The New York Times

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Ida B. Wells, Who Took on Racism in the...h With Powerful Reporting on Lynchings

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Now, a history of forced labor after the Civil War.

A new document that airs tonight on PBS tells the story of how American citizens freed by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution remained under lock and key for decades afterward. "Slavery by Another Name," based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, tells the story of the thousands of African-Americans who were arrested on trumped-up charges and forced to work as convict labor.

In many cases, they were sent to the South coal mines, including some owned by businessman and former slave owner John Milner.

Historians and actors describe it in this excerpt.

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'Slavery by Another Name' Relays the Forgotten Stories of Post-Civil War Slaves

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Now, a history of forced labor after the Civil War. A new document that airs tonight on PBS tells the story of how American citizens freed by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution remained under lock and key for decades afterward.

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The Supreme Court and the 14th Amendment

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For 150 years, the Supreme Court has applied the 14th Amendment in rulings that have shaped civil rights and liberties in America.

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This week marks the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment in the United States, which was born out of struggles to rebuild the country following the Civil War. While approximately 4 million formerly enslaved black people were freed, the battle to define that freedom had just begun. It would last from 1865-1877 and is known as the Reconstruction Era. This period was described as a "splendid failure" by scholar and activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, yet important progress was made toward equal rights.

This progress is seen in legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which began to define citizenship and equal rights, and in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, also known as the "Reconstruction Amendments."

Although this period created modern U.S. as we know it today, the Reconstruction Era usually gains little attention. So, here are three reasons to tip our hats to celebrate the 14th Amendment:

It established the definition of rights and citizenship in the U.S.
"It is easy to forget that the definition of liberty and freedom were contested from the very start of the U.S. as a nation; equal civil rights for all its citizens was not a given. Leading up to the Civil War, President Lincoln and the nation had to imagine what freedom would look like when slavery ended. Ideas included everything from gradual emancipation to mandatory colonization but rarely included any notions of equality under the law. Following President Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson's policies and laws, such as the "Black Codes," restored white supremacy. The 14th Amendment established citizenship rights for the first time and equal protection to former slaves, laying the foundation for how we understand these ideals today.

It is the most relevant amendment to Americans' lives today.
More legal cases are raised by it, more arguments were created by it, and more controversy is connected with it than any other part of the U.S.Constitution.

It is viewed by many as a rebirth of democracy and a key component of the "second founding" of the U.S. as a nation.
Progress towards equality in the U.S. during this time period reveals how history is made by the choices of everyday people and real communities. Democracy requires the active, thoughtful, and responsible participation of all of its citizens to not only survive but to thrive. The stories of individual upstanders, of African Americans who struggled for self-determination and agency even in the face of violent opposition, provide powerful entry points into this history and its lessons.

In Facing History classrooms, students learn that democracy is among the most fragile of human enterprises. Developing students' ability to see and understand real historical dilemmas and the choices made by people responding to them is key to developing an understanding of the past and their current world. The Reconstruction Era teaches us the need to be vigilant against forces that erode democracy and how an active, engaged citizenry can strengthen it.

How will you celebrate the 14th Amendment? Use our resource, The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy, to find lessons, videos, and more to engage your students.

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Three Reasons You Should Celebrate the 14th Amendment

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This week marks the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment in the United States, which was born out of struggles to rebuild the country following the Civil War. While approximately 4 million formerly enslaved black people were freed, the battle to define that freedom had just begun.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Modern Day Connection - Stand Your Ground Laws

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Modern Day Connection - Stand Your Ground Laws

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The spot where Dominic Jerome "D.J." Broadus II died from four shots fired by his male paramour was about as secluded as could be.

Hidden at the end of a sandy, private road cut through the vast, ancient, scrub pine forest that surrounds Macclenny, Florida, it was the perfect place to do something that you didn't want anyone else to see.

There, Gardner Kent Fraser, who is white and from a prominent local family, met Broadus, a Black man, and tried to keep their relationship hidden. Their relationship broke many taboos in this conservative town 28 miles west of Jacksonville.

But the 115 phone calls and over 100 text messages that investigators uncovered between the two men - many of them with sexually explicit photos - showed that their eight-month relationship had grown increasingly tense and troubled. Fraser - who also had a girlfriend at the time - feared Broadus would expose their secret, especially after Broadus played a prank in which he threatened just that.

On Feb. 3, 2018, Fraser shot Broadus dead in a hidden spot behind his house. He claimed to investigators that Broadus - who was unarmed - attacked him and that he shot him in self-defense out of fear for his life. Under the state's Justifiable Use of Force statute, popularly known as the "Stand Your Ground" (SYG) law, a killer who claims self-defense may be legally immune from homicide charges and not be required to prove that his lethal actions were truly self-defensive. The state attorney declined to prosecute Fraser.

But Broadus' family members, who have joined forces with state and local activists, say the killing was cold-blooded murder to cover up a socially unacceptable relationship, and that law enforcement has helped hide the truth in order to protect the Fraser family name.

The case highlights racial discrimination in the way SYG laws are implemented.

Broadus' parents have joined forces with Bob Schlehuber, founder of Peacebuilding Connections, an organization that brings diverse people together in pursuit of nonviolent goals and objectives. Schlehuber, along with the Broadus family and a range of community organizations, has launched a Justice4DJBroadus publicity campaign of protests, marches, community meetings and social media. The campaign also plans bus tours to Macclenny from Tallahassee and Jacksonville to raise awareness of the case.

The tours will preview an upcoming civil trial in the wrongful death lawsuit Broadus' father has filed against Fraser and his family's company.

Legacy of Jim Crow

Krista Dolan, senior supervising attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Criminal Justice Reform Project, said SYG laws are consistent with the country's racist criminal justice system and the legacy of Jim Crow.

"The discriminatory impact of 'Stand Your Ground' laws on Black victims exacerbates a legal system that is already wrought with racial inequity: Nonwhite people are stopped, racially profiled, searched and arrested by police at higher rates than white people and more likely to be sentenced to greater terms than white people," Dolan said.

While there is no current, granular data to show how many Black men and boys have been killed in Florida by white people who have claimed self-defense, the Tampa Bay Times in 2013 published its analysis of 200 cases. It concluded that the law was not applied equally by race and that when the victim was not white, the killer was more likely to escape punishment. It found that "in nearly a third of the cases ... defendants initiated the fight, shot an unarmed person or pursued their victim - and still went free," and "73% of those who killed a Black person faced no penalty compared to 59% of those who killed a white person."

In the years since, researchers have consistently concluded that SYG laws result in more homicides rather than fewer and that the laws are more rigorously enforced when the victim is white.

'Justice delayed is justice denied'

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the campaign demanding justice for D.J. Broadus, but it resumed in late 2022. The campaign has partnered with Black Lives Matter Tampa in collaboration with the Rev. Russell Meyer, director of the Florida Council of Churches, and with the Working Families Party, all of which have provided financial support. Other supportive groups include Dream Defenders, the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, Tallahassee Community Action Committee, and Florida college students with Students Demand Action (SDA) and Moms Demand Action.

The groups are seeking to repeal or reform the SYG law.

In early 2020, Broadus' father, Dominic Broadus Sr., filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Fraser and his family's business, Southern States Nurseries Inc., on behalf of his son's estate and D.J.'s 15-year-old son.

The civil trial was scheduled to begin on May 1, 2023, but on Feb. 7, a new judge assigned to the case postponed the trial until Oct. 30, citing Southern States' failure to provide all pretrial materials requested by Broadus' attorney. The company also requested that the judge dismiss the company as a defendant.

"Can you imagine, you don't do your homework and you get a five-month extension?" Schlehuber said. "Justice delayed is justice denied."

Before the delay in the civil trial, Schlehuber was planning bus tours of Baker County's Confederate iconography and historical sites linked to the area's white supremacist legacies. In addition to seeking the repeal or reform of SYG laws, he hopes that widespread media attention will pressure the new state attorney to reopen the case and ultimately charge Fraser with Broadus' death.

"Florida's legal system has postponed, canceled, delayed and used every stall tactic in the book to prevent the Broadus family [from having] its day in court," Schlehuber said. "But we will not be deterred. ... In many ways we were expecting it, even though delays like this in a civil trial are rare. The strategy and plan moving forward remains unchanged. It is just that our timeline has shifted."

Black parents live in fear

For most of his childhood, Broadus lived in Anniston, Alabama, during the school year with his mother, Del Swain, then a speech pathologist, and an older sister and, eventually, a younger half sibling. He spent summers and holidays in Jacksonville with his father, an environmental engineer for the U.S. Navy.

Like many other Black parents in the U.S. - especially mothers - his parents always feared for their children's safety.

"I always thought that my kids could possibly be hurt by the hands of someone evil as they lurk around every corner in America," Swain wrote in a series of emails to the SPLC from her current home in Europe.

"When it comes to the false narrative of the 'American dream,'" Swain said, "it's certainly not a dream. It's a nightmare."

When Broadus was 15, Swain asked his father - who was to be posted in Naples, Italy - to take their son with him, believing the teen would benefit from his father's influence and be safer than in the U.S. Since the sixth grade, Broadus had complained to his parents about racism in school.

Over the years, both parents drilled into their children a set of "tactics and rules" - as Swain calls them - to safely navigate the "dysfunctional world" where she was raising her children: Be cautious; be home before dark; don't make trouble.

"You can listen to rap music, but you can't live your life like that," Dominic Broadus Sr. said he counseled his son.

He vividly remembered as a young boy his own father telling him about Jim Crow and segregated drinking fountains. He told his son, "You see police pulling people over - you have to be careful. You don't want to get killed before you get out of high school."

After graduating from high school in Italy in 2005 and spending several years in Kentucky, Broadus reunited with his father in Jacksonville in 2009. He attended community college for a time but dropped out when the Great Recession hit and he needed to work to support his own budding family. Later, he was laid off and was arrested for selling marijuana.

Keeping secrets

The need to protect the secrecy in the relationship between Broadus and Fraser stemmed not only from the sexual nature of their meetings, but also the fact that Fraser is from a generationally well-connected family that owned the land where their final encounter took place. Further, Fraser lived and worked at his family's nursery stock business.

Fraser's father, who at the time of Broadus' death had just retired as a sheriff's deputy, was fired from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in 2009 for shooting an unarmed Black man who posed no threat. Fraser's great-uncle, J.E. Fraser, was the reputed grand wizard of the 30,000-member-strong, largest state order of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s.

A great-grandfather was a former state senator for whom the Macclenny hospital is named. Other ancestors, too, were movers and shakers.

'Tampering with evidence'

There was no witness to Broadus' killing - a homicide, the medical examiner and state attorney concluded. There was no video showing Fraser shooting his victim four times behind his house: two shots to Broadus' lower face while both men were standing, and the second two as Broadus lay on the ground bleeding, point-blank, one centimeter apart, behind his left ear, perforating his spine, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Investigative Summary.

There were no signs of a physical scuffle either, according to the FDLE report, despite Fraser telling police that Broadus knocked on a door of his house and attacked him when he opened it.

There were no images of Fraser turning Broadus' body from his right side over onto his back sometime during the 21 minutes before he called 911, during which time he called his cousin, father and sister.

There was no proof that the killer took Broadus' cellphone from his motionless, clenched hand, which bore the phone's imprint. The phone vanished from the scene and was never found.

And there was no crystal-clear answer to the question of the true motive for the killing: Did Fraser - who first denied knowing Broadus, then told sheriff's deputies that it was "a practical joke from a couple of weeks ago gone bad" - kill Broadus because he believed his victim planned to expose him?

In 2021, nearly two years after the killing, Fraser was sentenced to the maximum one year in prison for "tampering with evidence."

'It was a joke'

The relationship between Fraser and Broadus began to deteriorate in December 2017.

After Fraser failed to show up for a planned encounter at a hotel and stopped responding to Broadus' text messages and explicit photos, Broadus played a prank on him.

Pretending to be a stranger and using several pseudonyms, Broadus posted a photograph of Fraser in women's underwear on a Craigslist forum for gay men.

Broadus removed the post from the site right after taking a screenshot of it, then texted it to Fraser, pretending to be the stranger who had seen the post. In response, Fraser told the supposed stranger that he had sent the photos and texts himself - "I was being funny and led this Black guy on" - and that "it was a joke."

But the fake outing ramped up. The "stranger" told Fraser that a Black man was at the local Walmart parking lot, handing out Fraser's email, address, phone number and pictures of him in women's underwear. At some point, the stranger texted, "But does his family and friends know??? It's time for him to be exposed."

The prank amplified Fraser's fears that Broadus would "out" him, according to Caroline Light, a historian who studies gender, sexuality and racial violence at Harvard University and the author of the 2017 book Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense.

Light has been studying the Broadus case since 2019 after the state attorney declined to charge Fraser with homicide and Broadus' family consulted her. She and Vice Media, which is filming a documentary about the case, obtained the recovered texts, photos, call transcripts and videotaped interviews conducted by the sheriff's department through joint Freedom of Information Act and evidence records requests.

Light also contends that the Broadus killing and Fraser's subsequent evasion of punishment is a perfect example of the dangers and racial injustice of self-defense claims under SYG laws. Killers can invoke SYG law after a homicide, and it's up to the state to prove that the killer was not acting in fear for their life. In an interview with the SPLC, Light called SYG laws "vigilantism disguised as self-defense" - a kind of "legal lynching" consistent with "historical structures of white supremacist and patriarchal power."

The broad, self-defense Justifiable Use of Force statute in Florida was first enacted in 2005. Thirty-seven other states have similar laws, with the strong backing of the National Rifle Association (NRA). (The NRA is among pro-gun organizations that offer self-defense insurance policies to gun owners involved in crimes.) These laws often enable white killers to escape punishment, particularly when they kill a Black man or youth. Unless the case evidence - such as a video, explicit audio, or a first-person witness account - proves without a shadow of a doubt that the killer is lying, he can escape punishment by asserting that he committed the killing in self-defense.

'License to kill'

Although a legal exception for deadly self-defense in a shooter's home already existed, Florida's law gutted a centuries-old legal standard that someone in fear for their life has a duty to retreat before using deadly force.

The state's self-defense standard came under intense national scrutiny in 2012 after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was Black and unarmed, was fatally shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman.

Five years later, lawmakers expanded the immunity standard further by removing the burden of proof from the defense and placing it on prosecutors, who must disprove the self-defense claim. This innovation "discourages prosecutors from filing criminal charges when someone invokes the claim pretrial," the SPLC's Dolan said.

As Light puts it, the killer claims the mantle of self-defense by framing himself as the victim, even when he was the initial aggressor. The law allows the roles of perpetrator and victim to become reversed.

Police, too, are discouraged from making arrests when a killer claims self-defense, Light said, because under the law they can be sued for false arrest if the killer is later found to have been in reasonable fear for their life.

In the Broadus case, the state attorney cited a lack of sufficient state evidence to disprove the killer's claim of self-defense.

National gun control organization Everytown, which fights to repeal or amend the SYG law through its Florida chapters of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, calls the law "a license to kill."

'Keep the faith'

In the aftermath of their son's death, Swain and Broadus Sr. contacted Marcus Arbery, whose 25-year-old son Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in 2020 by two white men with a white accomplice while he was jogging unarmed in his South Georgia neighborhood. Were it not for three separate videos of the moments before, during and after the murder that surfaced nearly two months later, the trio would likely have escaped prosecution and conviction, because they invoked "self-defense" and were not initially charged.

"It's hard to get justice for Black people if there is no video," Marcus Arbery told the SPLC.

"For us to get justice, it meant a lot to me and his mother. Look at Trayvon, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor - we can't bring our little ones back, but you have to make them [the killers] accountable. It takes a little of the pain off if you know they are paying for it, because when you don't, it really hurts. I just tell D.J.'s parents they have to keep the faith with God and don't give up."
Photo at top: On Feb. 3, 2018, Dominic Jerome Broadus II was fatally shot in Macclenny, Florida, by Gardner Kent Fraser, who claimed self-defense and was therefore legally immune from homicide charges. Five years on, Broadus' family and community activists continue to seek justice via a campaign of protests, marches, community meetings and social media. (Credit: Emil Ashok)

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'Legal Lynching': 'Stand Your Ground' laws reflect legacy of white supremacist vigilantism in Deep South

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The spot where Dominic Jerome "D.J." Broadus II died from four shots fired by his male paramour was about as secluded as could be. Hidden at the end of a sandy, private road cut through the vast, ancient, scrub pine forest that surrounds Macclenny, Florida, it was the perfect place to do something that you didn't want anyone else to see.

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For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching. The citation comes with a bequest by the Pulitzer Prize Board of at least $50,000 in support of her mission. The grant was given to the Ida B.

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Main Content

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and activist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ¹ An African-American woman of "striking courage and conviction," she received national recognition as the leader of the anti-lynching crusade. ² Wells-Barnett sought a federal anti-lynching law that would convict forms of "violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation." ³ In response to the frequency of lynchings throughout the American South, Wells-Barnett brought her campaign to the White House in search of reform. Her petitions spanned seven presidential administrations from William McKinley to Herbert Hoover. Despite the little support she received from presidents, Wells-Barnett's mission was not deterred. The history of lobbying for anti-lynching legislation at the White House has been undeniably inspired by the legacy of Wells-Barnett. Many successive African-American activists have continued this campaign in pursuit of national anti-lynching legislation; this goal was finally realized in 2020. Even thought it took more than a century to enact such legislation, it would not have been possible without the historic efforts of Wells-Barnett.

Wells-Barnett was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862. ⁴ Following the death of her parents, Wells-Barnett and her younger siblings moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1882, to live with a relative. ⁵ In 1885, she entered journalism and became part-owner of the Free Speech newspaper in 1889. ⁶ On March 9, 1892, Wells-Barnett learned that a mob had lynched Thomas Mass, a grocery store owner, along with two of his workers, Henry Stewart and Calvin McDowell. ⁷ All three men were African-Americans. Moss was a friend of Wells-Barnett's and following his murder, she began investigating mob violence and documenting lynchings throughout the South. ⁸

Wells-Barnett published an impassioned editorial regarding the recent lynchings in the Free Speech newspaper on May 21, 1892. ⁹ Six days later, while Wells-Barnett was away attending a conference in New York City, a mob responded to her article by burning down her press office and threatening her life if she ever returned to Memphis. ¹⁰ As a result, Wells-Barnett remained in New York City until 1893 when she moved to Chicago, Illinois. ¹¹ While living in the North, Wells-Barnett continued to write about lynchings, particularly those taking place in the South. ¹² She began publishing her research in a pamphlet titled, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in 1892. ¹³ The pamphlet "is an indictment of the lynchings perpetrated against" African-Americans in the years following the Civil War. ¹⁴ Southern Horrors was the culmination of Wells-Barnett's intensive investigative work and provides eyewitness accounts and statistics for lynchings reported in newspapers across the South and North. ¹⁵ Southern Horrors was a groundbreaking text in that Wells-Barnett provided documentary and statistical evidence that white men were rarely punished for perpetrating sexual violence against African-American women while African-American men were murdered by mobs for having consensual relations with white women. ¹⁶ By demonstrating that about thirty percent of the African-American victims of "lynch mobs had actually been accused of rape," Wells-Barnett undermined the notion that lynchings always occurred in response to rape. ¹⁷

Furthermore, Wells-Barnett challenged a fundamental assumption regarding lynching by providing evidence that African-American men were not the exclusive victims of mob violence, but rather that African-American women were subjected to lynchings as well. ¹⁸ For example, on August 20, 1886, a mob took Eliza Woods from a jail in Jackson, Tennessee, and hanged her for allegedly poisoning her employer. ¹⁹ In an editorial for T he Gate City Press, Wells-Barnett stated that Eliza Woods "was taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view!" ²⁰ Between 1880 and 1930, at least one hundred and thirty African-American women were murdered by lynch mobs. ²¹

In 1895, Wells-Barnett published The Red Record, the first documented statistical report on lynching. ²² The book described lynching in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and noted that during Reconstruction, most Americans did not fully realize the growing rate of violence against African-Americans in the South. ²³ Although "the numbers were lower, mirroring the lower concentration of Black residents," in northern and western states, racialized lynchings-which had grown increasingly synonymous with hangings-committed outside of the South featured many of the same characteristics. ²⁴ With the book's publication, Wells-Barnett became one of the first prominent African-American women journalists in the U.S. and one of the first data reporters, decades before the discipline formally existed. ²⁵ Her works were critical in drawing attention to the use of lynching as a means of terrorizing and oppressing free African-Americans, who were perceived as a threat to existing economic, social, and political structures following the abolition of slavery. ²⁶

Having earned national renown, Wells-Barnett used her platform to petition the White House to support legislative reforms. In response to the lynching of Frazier Baker-the newly-appointed postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina-and his daughter on February 22, 1898, Wells-Barnett sent two letters to President William McKinley, urging him to submit a recommendation to Congress. ²⁷ On March 3, 1898, Wells-Barnett appealed on behalf of the Ida B. Wells Women's Club of Chicago, Illinois, for President McKinley to "apprehend and punish those responsible for the shooting." ²⁸ The Ida B. Wells Women's Club sought support for Frazier Baker's widow and children stating that "the nation owes that family the support and maintenance of which they were deprived by that brutal mob, in so far as money can requite their loss, these helpless ones should be indemnified." ²⁹ Wells-Barnett believed that this request for compensation would be successful as President McKinley had set a precedent "whereby the U.S. paid a considerable amount of money" to the direct descendants of three Italian citizens who were lynched while visiting New Orleans in 1896. ³⁰ Furthermore, during President Cleveland's administration, several Chinese subjects were lynched at Rock Springs, Wyoming on September 2, 1885. ³¹ In response, President Cleveland granted China's demands that "the Chinese subjects be fully indemnified for all losses and injuries they had sustained." ³² In closing, Wells-Barnett wrote that the members of the Ida B. Wells Women's Club of Chicago "come under the Stars and Stripes, believing that the plea of an outraged American citizen should be as potent for protection and justice as the demand of a frowning Power." ³³

Later that month, Wells-Barnett expressed her frustrations regarding the surge in lynchings in a typewritten, four-page letter to President McKinley, sent with a letter by Republican Senator Shelby Moore Cullom of Illinois. ³⁴ In this letter, dated March 19, 1898, Senator Cullom introduces Wells-Barnett to President McKinley, "urging him to give much consideration to what she has to say regarding the murder of the postmaster and his daughter" and any 'counsel and advice you think proper in the premises.'" ³⁵ On March 22, 1898, Wells-Barnett, along with eight Illinois congressmen, visited the White House to bring their protest directly to President McKinley himself. 36

During the White House visit, Wells-Barnett gave a petition to President McKinley in which she stated:

For nearly twenty years lynching crimes, which stand side by side with Armenian and Cuban outrages, have been committed and permitted by this Christian nation. Nowhere in the civilized world save the U.S. of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless. Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years. To our appeals for justice the stereotyped reply has been that the government could not interfere in a state matter. Postmaster Baker's case was a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post of duty in defense of his country's honor, as truly as did ever a soldier on the field of battle. We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home. Italy and China have been indemnified by this government for the lynching of their citizens. We ask that the government do as much for its own.³⁷

Following her visit, President McKinley forwarded the document and the cover letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, ordering that a formal investigation be conducted. ³⁸ After fourteen months, "a Federal grand jury found that there was sufficient evidence to charge [thirteen] white men with conspiracy to deprive Frazier and Julia Baker of their civil rights." ³⁹ Legal deliberations resulted in a mistrial after which the Department of Justice did not pursue the case any further. ⁴⁰ Despite Wells-Barnett's appeals, President McKinley withheld support for a national anti-lynching law. ⁴¹ Wells-Barnett remained in Washington, D.C. for another five weeks. ⁴² During this time, Wells-Barnett lobbied Congress for a national anti-lynching law, introduced by Illinois Congressman William E. Lorimer. ⁴³ Lorimer's bill, however-which he presented before the House of Representatives-did not become official legislation. ⁴⁴ Also during this time, North Carolina Congressman George White-who was the only African-American member of Congress-was lobbying for the passage of a federal anti-lynching bill. ⁴⁵ White presented his bill before the House of Representatives in 1900, and although it never made it "out of committee," it marked the first of what would become nearly two hundred attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation. ⁴⁶

As Wells-Barnett's crusade stretched into the twentieth century, she now turned to the Theodore Roosevelt administration in hopes of receiving federal support regarding the anti-lynching campaign. President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley following his death on September 14, 1901. ⁴⁷ President Roosevelt had developed a reputation of providing federal intervention to prevent lynchings. In 1903, the president issued a public statement in support of Indiana Governor Winfield T. Durbin's use of a state militia to prevent a local lynching. ⁴⁸ Moreover, after being "deeply troubled" by a lynching in Wilmington, Delaware, President Roosevelt maintained "that participation in a lynching or even viewing its aftermath was inherently demoralizing." ⁴⁹ He stated, "There are certain hideous sights, which when once seen, can never be wholly erased from the mental retina." ⁵⁰ Moreover, President Roosevelt warned that the impact was "'a thousand fold stronger' for participants: 'Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must for ever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.'" ⁵¹

President Roosevelt made several controversial decisions regarding race-related issues that caused southern segregationists to criticize him heavily. ⁵² President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, public intellectual and founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School (now Tuskegee University), to have dinner with him at the White House on October 16, 1901. ⁵³ Disagreements over African-American political appointments, including those of former administrations, "plagued Roosevelt" and he sought Washington's counsel on several matters. ⁵⁴ News of the dinner spread and by October 18, 1901, President Roosevelt was faced with openly hostile reactions from southern newspapers and criticisms of his judgement from northern newspapers. ⁵⁵ This backlash from across the nation left its mark on the president, who had not anticipated such a reaction. While President Roosevelt continued to correspond with Washington, he never invited Washington to the White House again. ⁵⁶ Although troubled by the persistence of lynchings across the nation, President Roosevelt maintained his appeals to public morality and sentiment rather than proactively instituting federal reforms to effectively respond to the crimes being perpetrated against the victims of mob violence. ⁵⁷

Succeeding administrations, such as that of President William Howard Taft, were faced with the continued spread of lynchings nationwide. In 1912, an African-American man in Kentucky "was tied up on an opera house stage and tickets were sold for the right to riddle him with bullets." ⁵⁸ Following this horrific event, members of the Washington, D.C. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.)-an organization which Wells-Barnett helped found-urged President Taft to intervene. ⁵⁹ President Taft, however, preferred to leave the issue to the states. ⁶⁰ In 1919, the N.A.A.C.P. organized a "national anti-lynching conference at Carnegie Hall and produced the report, 'An Address to the Nation on Lynching,' signed by former President Taft." ⁶¹ Although he was not particularly active or vocal regarding mob violence and lynching while in office, President Taft did agree to support the anti-lynching crusade following his presidency. ⁶²

The anti-lynching campaign found considerably less support during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. The day before President Wilson's 1913 inauguration, the first national parade for women's suffrage was scheduled to take place on Pennsylvania Avenue. ⁶³ Wells-Barnett had returned to Washington, D.C. intending to march alongside women from across the nation, as one of the first activities of her Alpha Suffrage Club founded in January 1913. ⁶⁴ When "white women from the South" learned that African-American women intended to march, "they threatened to withdraw." ⁶⁵ As a compromise, the parade organizers created "a separate contingent for African-American women" at the back of the parade. ⁶⁶ Wells-Barnett, however, refused to comply with this segregation. She stated, "Either I will go with you or not at all...I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race." ⁶⁷ She waited in the crowd until the "parade was underway and then slipped into the first section and marched boldly forward" passing the White House along the parade route. ⁶⁸ The parade overshadowed President Wilson's inauguration as the suffragists clearly demonstrated that they would not be ignored. ⁶⁹ Their persistent activism, frequent clashes with the Wilson administration, and pressure on federal and state legislators eventually resulted in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. ⁷⁰ This victory, however, was not shared by all American women. Wells-Barnett's suffrage campaign for the rights of African-American women continued, as did her efforts in pursuit of anti-lynching legislation.

In the fall of 1913, Wells-Barnett along with civil rights leader, William Monroe Trotter, met with President Wilson at the White House to express dismay over Jim Crow laws. ⁷¹ Over the next year, despite their efforts segregation only worsened nationally. ⁷² Throughout his presidency, Wilson supported the segregation of Black federal employees in the workplace. ⁷³ Furthermore, President Wilson hesitated to issue public statements condemning lynching and mob violence. ⁷⁴ On April 26, 1918, Wells-Barnett sent a letter to the president addressing the segregation and discrimination in army units during World War I. ⁷⁵ In July 1918, due to mounting foreign policy concerns, President Wilson delivered a speech "condemning mobs and vigilante violence" against African-Americans. ⁷⁶ He related mob violence as counterproductive to the war effort and eventually, previous bills "tied to the war effort were soon expanded" to protect African-American soldiers and their families during the wartime and all African-American citizens "regardless of wartime necessity." ⁷⁷ Although President Wilson was reluctant to support the anti-lynching crusade, his successor, would prove more decisive on the matter.

President Harding was a progressive Republican who advocated for civil rights for African-Americans and women's suffrage. On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivered a speech in which he publicly condemned lynching. ⁷⁸ In response to President Harding's speech, civil rights activist and scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that although the president qualified his demands for social equality, they nevertheless "stand out so clearly in his speech that he must be credited with meaning to give them their real significance." ⁷⁹ According to Du Bois, it was in this way that "the President made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of." ⁸⁰ Public response to President Harding's speech was largely negative and indicative of the difficult road that lay before anti-lynching activists.

President Harding supported the Anti-Lynching Bill-known as the Dyer Bill-introduced by Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri, during the Wilson administration in 1918. ⁸¹ This bill would have made lynching a federal crime, penalized local officials for negligence, and fined a county $10,000 if a lynching occurred in its jurisdiction. ⁸² During Harding's administration, the Dyer Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922, "and was given a favorable report" by the Senate Committee "assigned to report on it in July 1922." ⁸³ On June 14, 1922, thousands of African-Americans participated in a silent protest parade past the White House against lynching and urged for the passage of the Dyer Bill. ⁸⁴ Among those who marched were individuals belonging to the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Association of Colored Women (N.A.C.W.), both of which Wells-Barnett helped found. Despite President Harding's' support of the Dyer Bill and African-American protests, the bill was halted by a filibuster in the Senate. ⁸⁵ Some African-American activists, however, regarded this defeat as a victory because it caused the federal government to recognize lynching as a nationwide issue and demonstrated the persistence of African-Americans in their crusade for justice in the form of federal anti-lynching legislation. ⁸⁶

Despite the barriers she encountered, locally and nationally, Wells-Barnett remained committed to anti-lynching activism. By disrupting the "rhetorical link between lynching and black criminality," Wells-Barnett "undermined romantic notions of lynching as an expression of justice." ⁸⁷ Consequently, local communities began to see an "association with lynching as undesirable." ⁸⁸ Wells-Barnett's activism was instrumental in establishing the "discursive space in which future debates" on American lynching would take place. ⁸⁹ Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931, in Chicago "as the terror of the lynching era still raged and before the legacy of her tireless dedication was fully realized." ⁹⁰ Even after her death, her influence continued and affected how the public and future lawmakers responded to lynching and mob violence.

More than two decades after Wells-Barnett was laid to rest, a horrific lynching stirred the nation. On August 28, 1955, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was "brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier." ⁹¹ When Till's body was recovered, it was unrecognizable. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, requested that her son's body be returned to their home in Chicago, Illinois, where she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that "all the world could see" what had happened to her son. ⁹² Jet, an African-American weekly magazine, published a photograph of Till's disfigured corpse. ⁹³ This photograph enabled the story of Till's lynching to circulate quickly, reaching many Americans who responded in shock and horror. ⁹⁴

On September 2, 1955, Till-Mobley sent a telegram to President Dwight Eisenhower, along with many civil rights organizations petitioning on behalf of her son. ⁹⁵ In her letter, Till-Mobley stated, "I the mother of Emmett Louis still am pleading that you personally see that justice is meted out to all persons involved in the beastly lynching of my son in Money, Miss." ⁹⁶ Till-Mobley also requested to meet with President Eisenhower at the White House, but having not inquired about the investigation, the president did not respond. ⁹⁷ The disregard and unwillingness to intervene displayed by federal authorities are summarized in a memo by Director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover stated, "There has been no allegation made that the victim [Emmett Till] has been subjected to the deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and protected by the Constitution and the laws of the United States..." ⁹⁸ After not receiving aid from the White House, Till-Mobley traveled to Sumner, Mississippi for the trial of her son's murderers on September 23, 1955. ⁹⁹ The all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of "not guilty" on account of the inability to identify Till's body. ¹⁰⁰ The verdict sparked national outrage and brought to light the "brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the South." ¹⁰¹ Despite the protests, federal anti-lynching legislation was delayed for another sixty-five years after the brutal murder of Emmett Till.

In 2019, the Senate passed the "Justice for Victims of Lynching Act," introduced by the chamber's three African-American senators: Kamala D. Harris (Democrat from California), Tim Scott (Republican from South Carolina), and Cory Booker (Democrat from New Jersey). ¹⁰² The bill, however, was never passed by the House of Representatives. ¹⁰³ According to Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter of Wells-Barnett, Harris continued Wells-Barnett's "unfinished anti-lynching work, quoting her on the Senate floor." ¹⁰⁴ Although the "law still has not passed," Harris and Wells-Barnett are "linked together in that quest for justice." ¹⁰⁵

The persistent efforts and steady vision of Wells-Barnett, and many other anti-lynching activists, finally materialized in 2020. On February 26, 2020, the House of Representatives "overwhelmingly passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime, more than 100 years since the first such measure was introduced in Congress." ¹⁰⁶ The bill, H.R.35, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act-sponsored by Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat from Illinois-"comes after lawmakers tried, and failed, to pass anti-lynching bills nearly 200 times." ¹⁰⁷ Between 1882 and 1968, "at least 4,742 people, mostly African Americans, were reported lynched" in the U.S. in "all but four states" and ninety-nine percent of "perpetrators escaped state or local punishment." ¹⁰⁸ In 2005, the Senate approved "a resolution apologizing for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation." ¹⁰⁹ Mary Landrieu, who was then a Democratic Senator from Louisiana, pointed to the impact of these decades of inaction, "declaring that 'there may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility.'" ¹¹⁰ Representative Rush stated that today, "'we are still being confronted with the same violent racism and hatred that took the life of Emmett and so many others.'" ¹¹¹

Wells-Barnett's activism has inspired organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. ¹¹² This memorial, set on a six-acre site, "uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror." ¹¹³ The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to "symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place." ¹¹⁴ The names of lynching victims are "inscribed on columns suspended from the ceiling." ¹¹⁵ The monument also includes a reflection space created in honor of Wells-Barnett. ¹¹⁶ Consistent with the ideals established by Wells-Barnett in her anti-lynching crusade, the EJI hopes to inspire communities across the nation to "enter an era of truth-telling about racial injustice and their own local histories." 117

On May 4, 2020, Wells-Barnett was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African-Americans during the era of lynching." ¹¹⁸ Although Wells-Barnett did not live to see the fulfillment of her life-long goal, her national crusade-spanning from Memphis, Tennessee to the White House in Washington, D.C.-made the passage of a federal anti-lynching bill in 2020 possible. She will be remembered always as an African-American woman of striking courage and remarkable conviction. 119

This article was originally published April 9, 2021

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Anti-lynching and the White House

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Main Content Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and activist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 An African-American woman of "striking courage and conviction," she received national recognition as the leader of the anti-lynching crusade.

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The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after she arrived, Wells was involved in an altercation with a white conductor while riding the railroad. She had purchased a first-class ticket, and was seated in the ladies car when the conductor ordered her to sit in the Jim Crow (i.e. black) section, which did not offer first-class accommodations. She refused and when the conductor tried to remove her, she "fastened her teeth on the back of his hand." Wells was ejected from the train, and she sued. She won her case in a lower court, but the decision was reversed in an appeals court.

While living in Memphis, Wells became a co-owner and editor of a local black newspaper called THE FREE SPEECH AND HEADLIGHT. Writing her editorials under the pseudonym "Iola," she condemned violence against blacks, disfranchisement, poor schools, and the failure of black people to fight for their rights. She was fired from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist. In 1892, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner and friend of Barnett, was lynched, along with two of his friends, after defending his store against an attack by whites. Wells, outraged, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper; she also encouraged the black residents of Memphis to leave town. When Wells was out of town, her newspaper was destroyed by a mob and she was warned not to return to Memphis because her life was in danger. Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England and was well received.

Wells wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. She was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington and had personal, if not ideological, difficulties with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells-Barnett continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died.

--Richard Wormser

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Ida B. Wells | PBS

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The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.

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The Amazing Events and Words of Ida B. Wells

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The Amazing Events and Words of Ida B. Wells

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Today, a simple marker on a street corner in Memphis, Tennessee commemorates the People's Grocery lynching. In 1892 three black men, co-owners of a store giving white businesses a run for their money, were attacked, fought back and were arrested. They never stood trial. A white mob broke into the jail, dragged them away and lynched them.

The murders were grieved by their friend Ida B Wells, an African American teacher, journalist, civil rights pioneer and suffragist about whom it was once said: "She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug."

Wells was galvanised to count, investigate and report lynchings in America as no one had done before, hurling her 5ft frame into hostile territory with all the fearlessness of a war reporter.

For a century she has languished as an unsung heroine, overshadowed by more familiar giants of the civil rights movement. In recent years, however, her crusading activism and muckraking techniques are being rediscovered. A society for investigative reporting bears her name; the New York Times - which once branded her "a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress" - just published a belated obituary, and there are moves to name a street after her in New York and build a monument in Chicago.

One has to ask: 'Would I have the courage to do that?' There was no help going to come for you, no protection from the law

Nikole Hannah-Jones

"I consider her my spiritual grandmother," says Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist covering civil rights. "She was was a trailblazer in every way ... as a feminist, as a suffragist, as an investigative reporter, as a civil rights leader. She was just an all-around badass."

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the civil war. She was orphaned at 16 after her parents - as well as a younger brother - died from a yellow fever epidemic. She found work as a teacher to support her five remaining siblings, then moved to Memphis, where she became a leading journalist and civil rights activist.

At 21, Wells clashed with a white train conductor who ordered her to move from the ladies' car to the a section designated for black passengers, despite her having bought a first class ticket. When she refused and the conductor tried to forcibly move her, Wells " fastened her teeth on the back of his hand ", as she wrote later.

Wells sued after being ejected from the train and won the case (a newspaper headline declared "Darky damsel gets damages"), though the decision was later reversed in court.

By the time Wells turned 25, she was the co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight, a local black newspaper, a platform she used to skewer racial inequality. Then came the People's Grocery Lynching. She denounced it in print, armed herself with a pistol and spent months traveling alone in the south, researching more than 700 lynchings from the previous decade.

Some 4,075 African Americans were lynched in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report, Lynching in America. Some were witnessed by big crowds who brought children and picnic baskets, as if at a public entertainment.

A crowd surrounds two African American men hanging from nooses on a pole. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Wells's great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, an author and public speaker, says: "They would torture people before they were killed and dismember them afterwards and pass around the body parts. It was shocking to me that people would take bones as souvenirs. The more I learned about the level of violence, the more I appreciated what it took for her to do what she did. I am just amazed."

Wells visited places where people had been hanged, shot, beaten, burned alive, drowned or mutilated.She examined photos of victims hanging from trees as mobs looked on, pored over local newspaper accounts, took sworn statements from eyewitnesses and, on occasion, even hired private investigators.

It was astoundingly courageous work in an era of Jim Crow segregation and in which women did not have the vote. Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, says: "There was no protection from the law for a black woman who was going into territories where black people had been stolen from the jail and lynched with the help of law enforcement.

"These places would have been hostile to a black person questioning these communities at all, but think about the types of emotion in a community that has just lynched someone and strung their body up for public display and then to have a black woman come in there asking questions. One has to ask: 'Would I have the courage to do that?' There was no help that was going to come for you. There was no protection from the law. Black folks didn't even have a lot of legal rights and they certainly didn't have much protection from law enforcement."

A marker on a street corner in the Soulsville neighbourhood marks the spot of the People's Grocery lynching of African-American proprietors Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart in 1892. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Wells, however, was a force of nature who once said, "One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." On another occasion, she wrote: "I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. If I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit."

She destroyed the mainstream media's narratives that suggested lynching victims were criminals - often rapists of white women - who got their just desserts. Her reporting showed that rape had not been alleged in two thirds of the lynchings or was only alleged after a covert, consensual, interracial relationship had been exposed.

Duster says: "She was putting names to stories and names to statistics. She was putting context into what was happening. Without what she did, it was pretty much 'OK, this person committed a crime, they got what they deserved.' She said, 'No, they did not commit a crime.' The narrative of the mainstream media at this time was very different from the reality she found on the ground."

Hannah-Jones adds: "Much like the killing of black people by police today, the 'official' story of lynchings was just largely accepted, which was that black men were rapists and that unknown vigilantes were just meting out justice to black brutes. You can look at the way that newspapers covered these things and that was just accepted and Ida B Wells exposed the reality behind lynchings, which is that they were often used as economic retaliation.

"They were used to sow fear in black communities so that black people would stay in their place and she exposed the truth about that. She also exposed that while law enforcement would often say they these lynchings occur 'at the hands of parties unknown', everyone in town knew who committed them and often law enforcement took part."

While Wells was out of town, a mob destroyed her printing press in Memphis and threatened to kill her if she returned. She stayed away from the south for more than three decades but toured the US and UK, raising awareness through public speaking. In 1895 she published a pamphlet, the Red Record, the first statistical record of the history of American lynchings, a forerunner of data journalism projects such as The Counted, the Guardian's project to document people killed by police.

Hannah-Jones says: "She was one of the first people to actually tally the number of lynchings that were happening. We like to say she was one of our early data reporters. She began to collect data on this to show how actually vast the scope of the problem was."

One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap

Wells married Chicago lawyer and newspaper editor Ferdinand Barnett and, uncommonly for the time, hyphenated her name rather than take his. The couple had four children. Wells jugged motherhood, journalism and civil rights. In 1909, she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although was later ousted because she was perceived as too "radical". She also worked with Susan B Anthony as a leader in the movement for women's suffrage.

When Wells died in 1931 at the age of 68 from a brief illness due to kidney failure, her influence was waning, her autobiography was unfinished and her ambition of a federal anti-lynching law was unrealised. Duster muses: "She went out with a whimper. She was almost obsolete. She writes in her autobiography that there was a generation who didn't know who she was and didn't know about lynching. She wrote the book to stop it being forgotten."

Wells and Barnett are interred together in the Oak Woods cemetery in Chicago. She remains a little known figure in America and abroad. Hannah-Jones, who adopted the Twitter handle Ida Bae Wells, reflects: "A lot of people have no idea who Ida B Wells is. To this day people think my name is Ida; they don't even get the reference of my Twitter handle.

"I think her being a woman, and a black woman, were things that pretty much guaranteed her obscurity. She was also written out of the suffrage movement even though she played a huge role in it and was trying to push the white suffragists on racial equality. Both her gender and her race are the reasons why she was largely written out of history."

But now she is inspiring a new generation of women in journalism. Hannah-Jones is co-founder of the Ida B Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which aims to increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of colour in the field.

What if Wells herself were alive today? "I think she would be very unsurprised by the America of 2018," she says. "In many ways it would look very familiar to her. As long as she was able, she would be one of the sharpest critics of this country right now."

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Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement

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The pioneering African American reporter counted, investigated and reported lynchings in America as no one had done before

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Archives of Women's Political Communication

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Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, editor and anti-lynching activist, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. Wells attended Rust College in Holly Springs until 1878, when a yellow fever epidemic killed her parents and one of her six siblings. Determined to keep her family together, Wells began teaching in surrounding areas. In 1881, she moved her youngest siblings to Memphis to live with an aunt and took a job as a schoolteacher in nearby Woodstock.

In September 1883, while commuting by train, Wells was asked to leave the "ladies' car" and move to the smoking car, where all African Americans were expected to sit. She refused to leave, bit the conductor who tried to remove her, and then filed a successful suit against the railroad. Teaching in the Memphis public schools from 1883 until 1891, Wells wrote articles for black newspapers around the nation under the pen name "Iola." In 1889, she became part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Two years later, the school board did not renew her contract after she wrote editorials critical of its actions. Elected secretary of the black-run National Press Association in 1887, Wells became known as the "Princess of the Press" by her mostly male editorial colleagues.

In 1892, Wells found a focus for her militancy following a triple lynching in Memphis. After three young black men opened the People's Grocery, a white competitor's resentment triggered a chain of events that led to their murders. Earlier lynchings had angered her, but the deaths of three friends brought the evil close to her. Turning the full force of her powerful pen against lynching, Wells attacked the premise that lynching was a necessary deterrent to black rapists. In May she wrote a "Free Speech" editorial, in which she suggested that many rape charges arose from the discovery of voluntary sexual liaisons of white women with black men. While Wells was away, angry whites closed the newspaper office and ran her partner out of Memphis.

Afraid to return home, Wells settled in New York and began writing for T. Thomas Fortune's New York Age. In June, the paper published a lengthy attack on lynching, reprinted as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In it, Wells argued that lynching was often used to counteract black achievement and had grown worse as African Americans became more educated and successful.

After African-American women in New York gave Wells a testimonial dinner, that raised about $400 for her crusade, she received dozens of lecture requests. On one visit to Philadelphia she met Catherine Impey, an Englishwoman who published the journal Anti-Caste. Early in 1893, Impey joined with Scottish author Isabelle Mayo to invite Wells to tour Scotland and England in the cause of anti-lynching. Following her first lecture, the women organized the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Mankind, which invited Wells back the next year for a second tour.

The attention of the English press catapulted Wells to the leadership of the anti-lynching movement. She used all available platforms for her message. At the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago during 1893, she joined with the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Chicago lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett to circulate a coauthored protest pamphlet. Even after Wells married Barnett in 1895, she continued her activism. Assuming the editorship of her husband's newspaper, the Chicago Conservator, Wells-Barnett remained a militant voice, giving speeches, investigating lynchings, criticizing Booker T. Washington, starting organizations, and joining movements-while giving birth to four children.

Participating in the founding of such organizations as the National Association of Colored Women (1896), the Afro-American Council (1898), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1910), Wells-Barnett remained active in few. She personally founded the Ida B. Wells Women's Club in 1893; the Negro Fellowship League, a kind of settlement house for black men, in 1910; and the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. In addition, from 1913 to 1916, Wells-Barnett served as an adult probation officer in Chicago. Always busy, she was active in the Republican Party and, in the three years before her death, began her autobiography and ran for the state senate. For more than four decades, Wells-Barnett's militant voice brought worldwide attention to the evil of lynching and influenced the course of American reform. She died in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1931. On May 4, 2020, Ida B. Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."

More information: http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00924.html?a=1&n=Ida%20B%20Wells&d=10&ss=0&q=1

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Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, editor and anti-lynching activist, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. Wells attended Rust College in Holly Springs until 1878, when a yellow fever epidemic killed her parents and one of her six siblings. Determined to keep her family together, Wells began teaching in surrounding areas.

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Ida B. Wells Knew How to Craft the Perfect Image for Her Cause

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Nikole Hannah-Jones on impact and legacy of Ida B. Wells

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Ida B. Wells, Who Took on Racism in the Deep South With Powerful Reporting on Lynchings (Published 2020)

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Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice.

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Wells Foundation - GREAT embedded articles and videos  (ask me if you don't see these)

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Wells Foundation - GREAT embedded articles and videos  (ask me if you don't see these)

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Ida B. Wells was born into slavery on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi as the oldest of eight children. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, was a famous cook. Once slavery ended, Ida attended Shaw University (now Rust College) along with her mother who attended school long enough to learn how to read the Bible.

She was surrounded by political activists and grew up during Reconstruction with a sense of hope about the possibilities of former slaves within the American society. Both parents died, along with an infant brother, during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic when Ida was 16 years old. At that young age, she assumed the responsibility of rearing her five surviving younger brothers and sisters.

She soon became a teacher in a rural Mississippi school order to earn money for the family. After two years, she moved to Memphis for a higher paying teaching job. Although she wrote for church newspapers about inequality in many areas of life, one day changed her life forever. She was accustomed to riding the train in whatever seat she chose. In 1884, the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad forbade her from sitting in the ladies' coach, even though she had a ticket. She was forcibly removed by three men because she refused to move to the colored car. She decided to sue the railroad and also wrote an article about the experience. The success of her article about the case as well as the uproar caused by her criticism of the school systems, influenced her career change from teacher to journalist.

As injustices against the formerly enslaved spread throughout the South and a reign of terror began, Wells' sense of indignation and quest for justice was fueled. Three of her male friends, who were upstanding, law-abiding, successful businessmen opened a grocery store (in direct competition with a white-owned store). They were lynched in 1892 on the pretext of a crime they did not commit. Wells decided to use her pen to expose the motives behind the violence. Her major contention that lynchings were a systematic attempt to subordinate the black community was incendiary. She wrote about the situation with a clarity and forcefulness that riveted the attention of both Black and White people. Lynching had become one of the main tactics in the strategy to terrorize Black people, and exposing its real purpose became the target of her crusade for justice. She also advocated for both an economic boycott and a mass migration of Black people from Memphis to the Oklahoma territory.

This so enraged her enemies that while she was traveling in the Northeast, they destroyed her printing press, and put a price on her head, threatening her life if she returned to the South. Despite the danger, she continued writing and speaking across the country and went to the United Kingdom to explain the brutality of lynching and the government's refusal to intervene.

Wells was invited to Chicago by Frederick Douglass in 1893 to work on the pamphlet that was distributed at the World's Fair to explain the lack of African American representation. In 1894, she traveled throughout England speaking about the atrocities of lynching. In 1895 she settled in Chicago when she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower and a fellow crusader who was a well-known attorney as well as the founder of The Conservator newspaper. Barnett had two children from his previous marriage, the couple had four children together in eight years.

Even with this added responsibility, Wells continued in her relentless fight for social justice. She was involved with many clubs and organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. She also was very active in the women's suffrage movement, starting the all-black Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913. She created one of the first kindergartens for Black children in Chicago. For ten years, from 1910 - 1920, she and her husband started and ran a rooming house and social center called the Negro Fellowship League. In her final year of life, Ida ran for Illinois state senate.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her husband Ferdinand L. Barnett lived at 3624 S. King Drive until 1930, which is now a national landmark. Ida B. Wells-Barnett died on March 25, 1931 leaving a formidable legacy of undaunted courage and tenacity in the fight against racism and sexism in America.

She and her husband are interred at Oak Wood Cemetery in Chicago. Her legacy continues to inspire in the form of scholarships, awards, buildings, streets names, historical markers, books, movies and more.

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Ida B. Wells was born into slavery on July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi as the oldest of eight children. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, was a famous cook. Once slavery ended, Ida attended Shaw University (now Rust College) along with her mother who attended school long enough to learn how to read the Bible.

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Ida Wells was an anti-lynching crusader who used the power of journalism to raise awareness about the most extreme horrors of life under Jim Crow.

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How one journalist risked her life to hold murderers accountable - Christina Greer

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Ida B. Wells: Crash Course Black American History #20

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Ida B. Wells - Investigative Journalist and Lynching

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Ida B. Wells - Investigative Journalist and Lynching

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Journalist Ida B. Wells was already out of town when she realized that an editorial she'd written had caused a riot. In 1892, Wells had left Memphis to attend a conference in Philadelphia, when the office of the newspaper she co-owned was destroyed and her co-editor was run out of town.

"As a result of the editorial, Memphis has just exploded," says Paula J. Giddings, a professor emerita of Africana studies at Smith College and author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions. "And she is threatened with lynching, herself, if she comes back to Memphis."

The editorial was about lynching, a form of terrorism with which Wells was painfully familiar. On March 9, a white mob had murdered her friend Thomas Moss and his business partners, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, because their People's Grocery was taking business from a white man's neighborhood store.

By this time, Wells was already a journalist and minor celebrity. Several years before, a train conductor had kicked her out of the first-class ladies' car after she refused to move to a segregated carriage. She sued the railroad for segregating its cars, won $500 in a local court (whose ruling the Supreme Court later overturned) and began writing newspaper columns about her lawsuit.

But the murder of her friend Moss prompted her to focus her reporting on lynchings. "This begins kind of a new phase of her work in that she becomes an investigative journalist," Giddings says.

"She sees of course the stereotypes about black men raping white women," she continues. This was something lynch mobs frequently accused their victims of. "She starts investigating these accusations, she actually goes to the scene of lynchings, she interviews witnesses-she becomes really one of the first investigative reporters in this period."

Using statistics and quantitative data, Wells concluded that "this idea of rape and even criminal behavior is not so much connected to lynching, but that lynching was a means to keep blacks-who were very economically competitive at this point-to keep blacks down," Giddings says. She also found that in some cases, the "rape" black men were accused of was actually consensual sex with white women.

These conclusions incited a riot while Wells was in Philadelphia. It was too dangerous for her to return to Memphis, so she decided to stay in the north. Over the next several years, she traveled widely in the United States and Europe to talk about lynching. It was in Chicago, though, that she found her new home.

Wells saw the potential for "a real political vanguard in Chicago," Giddings says. There were many black political organizations and newspapers, as well as a fair amount of interracial activism for the period. Chicago was also where she met Ferdinand Barnett, a widowed lawyer and journalist who supported women's suffrage. She married him in 1895, changing her last name to the hyphenated "Wells-Barnett"-a pretty unique move at the time.

Wells-Barnett lived in Chicago for the rest of her life. She founded the city's first black women's club, the first black kindergarten and first black suffrage organization. After women in Illinois won state voting rights in 1913, her suffrage organization helped elect Oscar De Priest as the first black alderman on the Chicago City Council.

"She really is very, very important to the political and civic life of Chicago," Giddings says. Decades later, the city government formally recognized Wells-Barnett's contributions. In July 2018, Chicago named a street after her. That same month, activists raised $300,000 to erect a monument to Wells-Barnett, who remained politically active in Chicago until she died in 1931.

"At the very end, a year before her death, she runs for a [Illinois] State Senate seat as an Independent," Giddings says. "She doesn't win. But she's again creating paths for not only blacks but for black women particularly and for women in general."

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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When Ida B. Wells Took on Lynching, Threats Forced Her to Leave Memphis | HISTORY

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Death threats drove Wells from Memphis, but she was not silenced and would find her home in Chicago.

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Reconstruction: Ida B. Wells - Pioneer of Civil Rights | PBS LearningMedia

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Long before Rosa Parks there was Ida B. Wells, a Civil Rights pioneer. At the end of the 19th century, Jim Crow laws were enacted widely throughout the Southern United States. These state and local laws sought to mandate and enforce racial segregation in public transportation, schools, public places, restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains.

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Women & the American Story: Ida B. Wells, Journalist and Anti-Lynching Activist

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Congress set a new diversity record this year with its highest-ever number of women and racial minorities, including 60 Black lawmakers.

But that's mostly in the House.

People of color have historically had a tougher time getting elected to the Senate. Newly elected Raphael Warnock is only the 11th Black US senator since the Senate convened for the first time in 1789. Only two of those have been women. And with the departure of Kamala Harris, the number of Black female US senators is now at zero.

Voters in urban congressional districts tend to be more diverse and politically progressive, driving the higher number of minorities in the House. But that has had little effect on the number of Black senators.

"Black US Senate candidates, and especially Black politically progressive Democratic candidates, have found it difficult to get traction and win statewide elections due to the default political conservatism in White majority regions of the US," says Karlos Hill, chair of African-American studies at the University of Oklahoma.

From slavery and Jim Crow laws to suppression of minority voters, Black political candidates have long faced stumbling blocks. Hiram Revels, the first Black US senator, took office in the late 1800s as part of a wave of African American lawmakers during the Reconstruction era, but he was elected by the Mississippi legislature, not the state's voters.

Decades of voter suppression has limited Black voting power in the South, says Tobin Miller Shearer, director of African-American studies at the university of Montana.

Shearer also cites the "incomplete legacy of the 15th Amendment," which granted everyone the right to vote but was undermined by states in the deep South which disfranchised Black voters through literacy tests, property ownership requirements and other racist measures.

It wasn't until 1965 that these discriminatory voting practices were outlawed by the federal Voting Rights Act.

Half a century later Black voters in the South are wielding new power, thanks in part to a push by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and other organizers to register new voters and combat voter suppression.

"Black candidates can compete and win competitive statewide races if they are able to effectively mobilize the Black electorate," Hill says. "If the momentum created by Abrams and Warnock's recipe for mobilizing the Black electorate can be sustained, we could begin to see more Black representation in the US Senate. Only time will tell."

Here are the 11 Black US senators:

Hiram Revels, Republican

Hiram Revels was a former barber and minister who served in the US Senate from 1870-1871.

Mississippi lawmakers chose him to fill a vacant seat, although he faced fierce opposition from his future colleagues who questioned his citizenship. Their argument was based on a 1857 Supreme Court case that ruled African Americans could not become citizens of the United States.

Born a free man in 1827 - the slavery era - he was an army chaplain during the Civil War, working at churches in Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana. After the war ended, he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he was an elder at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and built a reputation as a respected community leader.

Mississippi was seeking readmission to representation in the US Congress and needed to fill two Senate seats that had been unoccupied since 1861, when it seceded from the Union. Revels was offered the shorter of two terms - one set to expire in March 1871.

Revels took the oath of office 22 days after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which held that Americans could not be denied the right to vote based on their race. Revels was "the 15th Amendment in flesh and blood," civil rights activist Wendell Phillips said.

Blanche K. Bruce, Republican

Sen. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi was the first African American to serve a full term in the US Senate.

Born into slavery, he could not attend school, so he sneaked in some lessons from a tutor hired for his master's son. He escaped at the beginning of the Civil War and taught Black students in Missouri before moving to Mississippi, where he held several jobs, including a county sheriff and tax collector.

Like Revels, he was elected to the US senate by the Mississippi state legislature, not voters. Bruce served from 1875 to 1881.

The former slave later became a plantation owner, and lived a privileged life that was a far cry from that of his Black constituents. Despite moving in elite circles, he fought for the rights of freed slaves and was a strong advocate for Black war veterans. But Black people in Mississippi questioned his commitment to their plight.

Edward Brooke, Republican

Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts was the first African American elected to the US Senate by popular vote. He's also credited with integrating the Senate barbershop with his first haircut on Capitol Hill after his win.

The former World War II Army veteran graduated from Howard University and then attended law school at Boston University. He served two full terms in the Senate, from 1967 to 1979.

Brooke did not consider himself a trailblazing politician and maintained that he represented all his constituents. "I do not intend to be a national leader of the Negro people. I intend to do my job as a senator from Massachusetts," he once declared. He died in 2015 at the age of 95.

Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat

Carol Moseley Braun shattered barriers as the first Black female US senator.

Moseley Braun was also the first woman to serve on the powerful Finance Committee after Democrat Tom Daschle gave up his seat to create a spot for her.

The Democrat from Illinois served only one term, from 1993 to 1999. Before joining the Senate, she was a prosecutor in the office of the United States Attorney in Chicago and assistant majority leader in the Illinois House of Representatives.

She defeated both the Democratic incumbent and the Republican challenger for a seat in the US Senate, becoming the first female senator from Illinois as well. But she lost her bid for reelection to the Senate and unsuccessfully ran for president in 2004.

"I cannot escape the fact that I come to the Senate as a symbol of hope and change," she said shortly after being sworn in. "Nor would I want to, because my presence in and of itself will change the US Senate."

In the nearly three decades since, there has only been one other female Black senator: Kamala Harris.

Barack Obama, Democrat

Barack Obama was the fifth Black US senator and only the third one elected by voters.

He took the oath of office in January 2005 after serving in the Illinois state senate for almost eight years. Obama served one term in the Senate before running for President in 2008.

A former community organizer in Chicago and the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama made history again as the first Black President of the United States. He became the 44th President and served two terms.

Roland Burris, Democrat

Roland Burris was appointed in 2008 to fill President Obama's vacated seat in the US Senate.

Before taking on that role, Burris was the first African American to win a statewide election when he was elected comptroller of Illinois in 1978. After serving as comptroller for over a decade, he became attorney general of Illinois.

He served in the Senate until November 2010, when voters chose his successor in a special election. Citing fundraising difficulties, Burris chose to retire instead of running for a full term.

Tim Scott, Republican

In 2013 Tim Scott of South Carolina became the first African American US senator from the deep South since Reconstruction. The former entrepreneur worked in insurance and real estate, and served in the US House of Representatives before joining the Senate.

He was appointed US senator in January 2013 after the resignation of his predecessor, then was elected to a full term in 2016.

The lifelong resident of South Carolina has marveled at his family's remarkable journey, considering his grandfather once dropped out of school to pick cotton.

"Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime," he said last year.

William Cowan, Democrat

William Cowan was appointed to fill John Kerry's seat after Kerry resigned in 2013 to become secretary of state.

Before his appointment, Cowan was a partner in a law firm and served as chief of staff to Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

His appointment in February 2013, a month after Scott, marked the first time two African Americans served in the US Senate simultaneously.

Cowan spent less than six months in the Senate and chose not to run in a special election to decide who would serve the remainder of Kerry's term.

Democrat Edward J. Markey won that race and has since been re-elected twice.

Cory Booker, Democrat

Cory Booker was the first African American to represent New Jersey in the US Senate.

He was the popular mayor of Newark, the state's largest city, before he joined the Senate after a special election in October 2013 following the death of Frank Lautenberg. The next year he was elected to a full term.

The former Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate unsuccessfully ran for President in 2020 but was later reelected to the Senate.

Kamala Harris, Democrat

Kamala Harris was the first Black woman to represent California in the US senate when she took office in January 2017. But she was making history long before then.

She was the first Black person and first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, a position she held until 2016.

And she's still shattering glass ceilings. This month, she was sworn in as Vice President of the United States - the first woman, first Black woman and first Asian American to hold that post.

Many advocates had called for a Black woman to replace her, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom instead appointed Alex Padilla, California's first Latino senator. While historic, it leaves no Black women in the upper chamber of the US Congress.

"When you think about the history of this country, of the challenges that exist for African Americans ... this is a real blow to the African-American community, to African-American women, to women in general," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said.

Raphael Warnock, Democrat

Rev. Raphael Warnock's win in a Georgia runoff election earlier this month played a big role in highlighting the growing power of Black voters in the South.

Like Revels, his path to the US Senate followed a key role in a pulpit of the Black church. Warnock is a senior pastor at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King served as co-pastor. Black voters in Atlanta and its suburbs turned out in big numbers to help him win.

In his victory speech, Warnock reflected on his mother's teenage days picking cotton to in rural Georgia. He acknowledged how far the nation has come.

"Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator," he said.

Along with Booker and Scott, he is one of three African Americans in the current Senate.

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international relations and national security

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In the nearly 232-year history of the US Senate there have only been 11 Black senators | CNN

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Congress set a new diversity record this year with its highest-ever number of women and racial minorities, including 60 Black lawmakers. But that's mostly in the House. People of color have historically had a tougher time getting elected to the Senate.

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Voting - 2021 Revival of voting restrictions!

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Voting - 2021 Revival of voting restrictions!

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Why the Black Politicians of Reconstruction Are Often Overlooked

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A short video on how Black politicians in the South after the Civil War provide context for voting rights battles today.

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Top takeaways

Continuing the same trajectory as years past, the number of active Ku Klux Klan hate groups again declined in 2022. The decline can be attributed to infighting that has long been a hallmark of the Klan, as well as the comparatively greater appeal of newer racist groups that feature more contemporary tactics and rhetoric that is focused online and on younger audiences.

There were very few Klan events of note in 2022, and there were 22 flyering incidents, which was the same amount in 2021. However, the subsequent news coverage they received helped maintain the false perception that the Klan is a dominant white supremacist group in America.

Key moments

Longtime themes of Klan rhetoric - including the need to "take back the country" - continued to permeate Klan propaganda in 2022. While there were Klan rallies throughout 2022, they were small, remote and operated by individual Klan organizations with little cross coordination or overlap between other groups.

Election denialism has played a role in Klan mainstream relevancy and messaging revolving around the country being lost to "undesirables." Former Grand Dragon David Duke's radio show continues to falsely promote that millions of votes were stolen in the 2020 election. The Klan activity is mostly confined to flyering and spreading propaganda online, most of which is spread on alt-tech platforms like MeWe and the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. Old Glory Knights in Tennessee and the Loyal White Knights of North Carolina and Virginia were recorded as having contributed to most of the flyering in 2022, while the United Klan Nation was most active on Telegram. Stormfront remains a popular outlet for Klansmen with some updated daily channels focusing on recruitment and propaganda.

What's Ahead

KKK activity will likely remain stagnant or continue to decline in 2023. Platforms like Stormfront that are not very publicly accessible will likely be where much Klan activity remains, and Klan events are likely to remain equally insulated. Contemporary white supremacy movements will continue to eclipse the Klan in terms of recruitment, propaganda, events, and overall success and many within the movement view the Klan as defunct or out of touch.

Background

In 1865, at the conclusion of the Civil War, six Confederate veterans gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, to create the Ku Klux Klan, a vigilante group mobilizing a campaign of violence and terror against the African American people that benefits from the progress of Reconstruction. As the group gained members from all strata of Southern white society, they used violent intimidation to prevent Black Americans - and any white people who supported Reconstruction - from voting and holding political office.

In an effort to maintain white hegemonic control of government, the Klan, joined by other white Southerners, engaged in a violent campaign of deadly voter intimidation during the 1868 presidential election. From Arkansas to Georgia, thousands of Black people were killed. Similar campaigns of lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks on those challenging white supremacy became a hallmark of the Klan.

The first leader or "grand wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a well-known Confederate general. Within the structure of the Klan, he directed a hierarchy of members with outlandish titles, such as "imperial wizard" and "exalted cyclops." Hooded costumes, violent "night rides" and the notion that the group made up an "invisible empire" conferred a mystique that only added to the Klan's infamy.

After a short but violent period, the "first era" Klan disbanded when it became evident that Jim Crow laws would secure white supremacy across the country. However, the legacy of the original Klan, and the figureheads of the Confederacy before it, have been enshrined across the country in the " Cult of the Lost Cause." Only in recent years - after gaining significant attention through large counterprotests and after deadly attacks from far-right extremists - have these statues started being removed and public spaces renamed. On July 9, 2020, Tennessee's State Capitol Commission voted to remove the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capitol building. It was subsequently removed on July 23, 2021, and placed in the Tennessee State Museum.

In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was revived by white Protestants near Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to the group's anti-Black ideological core, this second iteration of the Klan also opposed Catholic and Jewish immigrants. A growing fear of communism and immigration broadened the Klan's base throughout the South and into the Midwest, with a particular stronghold in Indiana. By 1925, when its followers staged a march in Washington, D.C., the Klan had as many as 4 million members and, in some states, considerable political power. A series of sex scandals, internal battles over power and newspaper exposés quickly reduced the group's influence.

The Klan arose a third time during the 1960s to oppose the civil rights movement and attempt to preserve segregation as the Chief Justice Earl Warren-led U.S. Supreme Court substantiated civil rights in multiple rulings. Bombings, murders and other attacks by the Klan took a great many lives. Murders committed by Klansmen during the civil rights era include four young African American girls killed in 1963 while preparing for Sunday services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1964 murder in Mississippi of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.

Throughout the second and third eras of the Klan, many Black Americans left Southern states in the Great Migration. While those who moved North were seeking economic prosperity and social opportunities, they were also hoping to escape the racial terror centered around the Klan's ideological stronghold in the South. With over 6 million Black Americans taking part in this migration, the demographics of the country shifted dramatically.

With the conclusion of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the subsequent return of American soldiers, several key figures arose within the Klan. Louis Beam, upon his return from Vietnam, joined the Alabama-based United Klans of America. His teachings on "leaderless resistance" and early adaptation to technological advances helped bridge neo-Nazi and Klan groups into the organized white power movement. Similarly, David Duke - founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975 - maintained a distinctly antisemitic hatred that closed ideological gaps with neo-Nazis.

Through a series of court cases aimed at bankrupting the Klan and closing the group's paramilitary training camps, the organization has been greatly weakened. Internal fighting and government infiltrations have led to a seemingly endless series of splits, resulting in smaller, less organized Klan chapters. Given the Klan's insistence on remaining an "invisible empire," it is nearly impossible to estimate how many active members there are today. However, it is fair to assume that the infighting, rigid traditions and the uncouth image of the Klan are not attracting significant new membership.

2022 KKK hate groups

View all groups by state and by ideology.
* - Asterisk denotes headquarters.

American Christian Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Christian Revival Center Harrison
Arkansas

East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire
Pennsylvania

Honorable Sacred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Madison, Indiana

Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Pelham, North Carolina
Virginia

Old Glory Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Santa Fe, Tennessee

United Klan Nation
Tennessee

White Christian Brotherhood of the Ku Klux Klan
Maryland

White Christian Brotherhood of the Ku Klux Klan
Dayton, Ohio

Klan glossary

AKIA: A password meaning "A Klansman I Am," often seen on decals and bumper stickers.

Alien: A person who does not belong to the Klan.

AYAK?: A password meaning "Are You a Klansman?"

CA BARK: A password meaning "Constantly Applied By All Real Klansmen."

CLASP: A password meaning "Clannish Loyalty A Sacred Principle."

Genii: The collective name for the national officers. Also known as the Kloncilium, or the advisory board to the Imperial Wizard.

Hydras: The Real officers, with the exception of the Grand Dragon.

Imperial Giant: Former Imperial Wizard.

Imperial Wizard: The overall, or national, head of a Klan, which it sometimes compares to the president of the United States.

Inner Circle: Small group of four or five members who plan and carry out "action." Its members and activities are not disclosed to the general membership.

Invisible Empire: A Ku Klux Klan's overall geographical jurisdiction, which it compares to the United States although none exist in every state.

Kalendar: Klan calendar, which dates events from both the origin and its 1915 rebirth Anno Klan, and means "in the year of the Klan," and is usually written "AK."

Kardinal Kullors: White, crimson, gold and black. Secondary Kullors are grey, green and blue. The Imperial Wizard's Kullor is Skipper Blue.

K.B.I.: Klan Bureau of Investigation.

KIGY!: A password meaning "Klansman, I greet you!"

Klankfraft: The practices and beliefs of the Klan.

Klanton: The jurisdiction of a Klavern.

Klavern: A local unit or club; also called "den."

Kleagle: An organizer whose main function is to recruit new members. In some Klans, he gets a percentage of the initiation fees.

Klectokon: Initiation fee.

Klepeer: Delegate elected to Imperial Klonvokation.

Klonkave: Secret Klavern meeting.

Klonverse: Province convention.

Kloran: Official book of Klan rituals.

Klorero: Realm convention.

SAN BOG: A password meaning "Strangers Are Near, Be On Guard."

Terrors: The Exalted Cyclops' officers.

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The Ku Klux Klan, with its long history of violence, is the oldest and most infamous of American hate groups. Although Black Americans have typically been the Klan's primary target, adherents also attack Jewish people, persons who have immigrated to the United States, and members of the LGBTQ community.

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The Freedmen's Bureau was established in March of 1865 to help freed people achieve economic stability and secure political freedoms.

Many white Southerners, as well as President Andrew Johnson, challenged the Bureau's legitimacy, sparking racial violence in the South and the ultimate failure of the Bureau.

The Bureau presented questions about the role of the federal government in establishing and maintaining racial and economic equality in the United States.

The promising goals of the Freedmen's Bureau

As the Civil War wound to a close in 1865, African Americans in the South celebrated the end of slavery. They immediately began to take steps to improve their own condition by seeking what had long been denied to them: land, financial security, education, and the ability to participate in the political process. However, they faced the wrath of defeated white Southerners who were determined to keep blacks an impoverished and despised underclass. Recognizing the widespread devastation in the South, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865, popularly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Lincoln approved of the Bureau, giving it a charter for one year.

The Freedmen's Bureau was intended to act as a primitive welfare agency, aiming to ease the transition from slavery to freedom. While some Bureau agents were corrupt or incompetent, others worked hard to secure significant freedoms for blacks. Under control of Union war hero Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau delivered food to freedmen and poor whites in the South, and it helped freed people gain labor contracts.

The Bureau also took up the fight for African American education, establishing scores of public schools where freed people and poor whites could receive both elementary and higher education. Respected institutions such as Fisk University, Hampton University, and Dillard University are part of the legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau. General Howard later opened and became president of the historically black college, Howard University. In this endeavor, the Freedmen's Bureau received support from Christian organizations that had long advocated for abolition, such as the American Missionary Association (AMA).

Prolonging racial tensions post Civil War

The schools that the Freedmen's Bureau and the AMA established inspired resentment among the white population in the South. Indeed, the Freedmen's Bureau's programs and its very existence were sources of controversy. Those who resisted this type of federal government activism denounced it as a foolish effort and a waste of federal money.

Congress renewed the Bureau's charter in 1866, but President Johnson, who steadfastly believed that the work of restoring the Union had been completed, vetoed the rechartering on the grounds that it interfered with states' rights. Congress, in turn, overrode the president's veto.

Johnson pardoned many former Confederates and restored their land, as well as removed Bureau employees he thought were too sympathetic to African Americans. Radical Republicans continued to support the Bureau, igniting a contest between Congress and the president that intensified during the next several years.

This dispute involved conflicting visions of the proper role of the federal government. Radical Republicans believed in the constructive power of the federal government to ensure a better day for freed people. Others, including Johnson, denied that the government had any such role to play.

Due to pressure from white Southerners, Congress dismantled the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872. The Bureau failed to make a real stride towards racial equality mostly due to the fight between Congress and the President, as well as subpar funding.

What do you think?

Did the Freedmen's Bureau succeed or fail? Why?

How did the Freedmen's Bureau expand the reach of the federal government?

How did the Freedmen's Bureau compare to later federal programs for education and public welfare, like the New Deal or the Civil Rights Act?

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The Freedmen's Bureau (article) | Khan Academy

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The Freedmen's Bureau was established in March of 1865 to help freed people achieve economic stability and secure political freedoms. Many white Southerners, as well as President Andrew Johnson, challenged the Bureau's legitimacy, sparking racial violence in the South and the ultimate failure of the Bureau.

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The Freedmen's Bureau was created by the U.S. Congress near the end of the Civil War as an agency to deal with the enormous humanitarian crisis brought about by the war.

Throughout the South, where most of the fighting had taken place, cities and towns were devastated. The economic system was virtually nonexistent, railroads had been destroyed, and farms had been neglected or destroyed.

And 4 million recently freed enslaved people were faced with new realities of life.

On March 3, 1865, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, its original charter was for one year, though it was reorganized within the war department in July 1866.

The Goals of the Freedmen's Bureau

The Freedmen's Bureau was envisioned as an agency wielding enormous power over the South. An editorial in The New York Times published on February 9, 1865, when the original bill for the creation of the bureau was being introduced in Congress, said the proposed agency would be:

"... a separate department, responsible alone to the President, and supported by military power from him, to take charge of the abandoned and forfeited lands of the rebels, settle them with freedmen, guard the interests of these latter, aid in adjusting wages, in enforcing contracts, and in protecting these unfortunate people from injustice, and securing them their liberty."

The task before such an agency would be immense. The 4 million newly freed Black people in the South were mostly uneducated and illiterate (as a result of laws regulating enslavement), and a major focus of the Freedmen's Bureau would be setting up schools to educate formerly enslaved people.

An emergency system of feeding the population was also an immediate problem, and food rations would be distributed to the starving. It has been estimated that the Freedmen's Bureau distributed 21 million food rations, with 5 million being given to White southerners.

The program of redistributing land, which was an original goal for the Freedmen's Bureau was thwarted by presidential orders. The promise of Forty Acres and a Mule, which many freedmen believed they would receive from the U.S. government, went unfulfilled.

General Oliver Otis Howard Was Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau

The man chose to head the Freemen's Bureau, Union General Oliver Otis Howard, was a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine as well as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Howard had served throughout the Civil War, and lost his right arm in combat at the Battle of Fair Oaks, in Virginia, in 1862.

While serving under Gen. Sherman during the famous March to the Sea in late 1864, Gen. Howard witnessed the many thousands of formerly enslaved people who followed Sherman's troops on the advance through Georgia. Knowing of his concern for the freed enslaved people, President Lincoln had chosen him to be the first commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau (though Lincoln was assassinated before the job was officially offered).

General Howard, who was 34 years old when he accepted the position at the Freedmen's Bureau, got to work in the summer of 1865. He quickly organized the Freedmen's Bureau into geographical divisions to oversee the various states. A U.S. Army officer of high rank was usually placed in charge of each division, and Howard was able to request personnel from the Army as needed.

In that respect, the Freedmen's Bureau was a powerful entity, as its actions could be enforced by the U.S. Army, which still had a considerable presence in the South.

The Freedmen's Bureau Was Essentially the Government in the Defeated Confederacy

When the Freedmen's Bureau began operations, Howard and his officers had to essentially set up a new government in the states that had made up the Confederacy. At the time, there were no courts and virtually no law.

With the backing of the U.S. Army, the Freedmen's Bureau was generally successful in establishing order. However, in the late 1860s there were eruptions of lawlessness, with organized gangs, including the Ku Klux Klan, attacking Black and White people who were affiliated with the Freedmen's Bureau. In Gen. Howard's autobiography, which he published in 1908, he devoted a chapter to the struggle against the Ku Klux Klan.

Land Redistribution Did Not Happen as Intended

One area in which the Freedmen's Bureau did not live up to its mandate was in the area of distributing land to formerly enslaved people. Despite the rumors that families of freedmen would receive 40 acres of land to farm, the lands that would have been distributed were instead returned to those who had owned the land before the Civil War by order of President Andrew Johnson.

In Gen. Howard's autobiography he described how he personally attended a meeting in Georgia in late 1865 at which he had to inform formerly enslaved people who had been settled onto farms that the land was being taken away from them. The failure to set up formerly enslaved people on their own farms condemned many of them to lives as impoverished sharecroppers.

The Educational Programs of the Freedmen's Bureau Were a Success

A major focus of the Freedmen's Bureau was the education of formerly enslaved people, and in that area, it was generally considered a success. As many enslaved people had been forbidden to learn to read and write, there was a widespread need for literacy education.

A number of charitable organizations set up schools, and the Freedmen's Bureau even arranged for textbooks to be published. Despite incidents in which teachers were attacked and schools burned in the South, hundreds of schools were opened in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

General Howard had a great interest in education, and in the late 1860s, he helped to found Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically Black college that was named in his honor.

Legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau

Most of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau ended in 1869, except for its educational work, which continued until 1872.

During its existence, the Freedmen's Bureau was criticized for being an enforcement arm of the Radical Republicans in Congress. Virulent critics in the South condemned it constantly. And employees of the Freedmen's Bureau were at times physically attacked and even murdered.

Despite the criticism, the work the Freedmen's Bureau accomplished, especially in its educational endeavors, was necessary, especially considering the dire situation of the South at the end of the war.

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Controversial Yet Essential: The Freedmen's Bureau During Reconstruction

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The Freedmen's Bureau was created by the U.S. Congress near the end of the Civil War as an agency to deal with the enormous humanitarian crisis brought about by the war. Throughout the South, where most of the fighting had taken place, cities and towns were devastated.

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Creation of the Freedmen's Bureau

The Freedmen's Bureau was established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865, two months before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union's Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.

Intended as a temporary agency to last the duration of the war and one year afterward, the bureau was placed under the authority of the War Department and the majority of its original employees were Civil War soldiers.

Did you know? Howard University, a historically all-Black school in Washington, D.C., was established in 1867 and named for Oliver Howard, one of its founders and the head of the Freedmen's Bureau. He served as the university's president from 1869 to 1874.

Oliver Otis Howard, a Union general, was appointed commissioner of the bureau in May 1865. Howard, a Maine native who attended Bowdoin College and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, reportedly had been planning to become a minister when the Civil War broke out.

During the war, Howard, nicknamed the "Christian General," fought in major battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg, and lost an arm in the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862.

Reconstruction

America's Reconstruction era was a turbulent time, as the nation struggled with how to rebuild the South and transition the 4 million newly freed Blacks from slavery to a free-labor society.

"There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program," according to The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction, edited by Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller. "Congress and the army and the Freedmen's Bureau were groping in the dark. They created the precedents."

From the start, the Bureau faced resistance from a variety of sources, including many white Southerners. Another leading opponent was President Andrew Johnson, who assumed office in April 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

When Congress introduced a bill in February 1866 to extend the bureau's tenure and give it new legal powers, Johnson vetoed the proposed legislation on the grounds that it interfered with states' rights, gave preference to one group of citizens over another and would impose a huge financial burden on the federal government, among other issues.

In July of that same year, Congress overrode the president's veto and passed a revised version of the bill. However, Johnson became embroiled in a bitter fight with the Radical Republicans in Congress, who viewed the president's Reconstruction policies as too lenient, and the Freedmen's Bureau suffered as a result.

Johnson's actions, which included pardoning many former Confederates and restoring their land, as well as removing bureau employees he thought were too sympathetic to Black people, served to undermine the bureau's authority.

The bureau's mission was further muddled by the fact that even among the agency's supporters in Congress and its own personnel, there was disagreement over what type of assistance the government should provide and for how long.

Freedmen's Bureau's Successes and Failures

The Freedmen's Bureau was organized into districts covering the 11 former rebel states, the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and West Virginia and Washington, D.C. Each district was headed by an assistant commissioner.

The bureau's achievements varied from one location to another and from one agent to the next. Over its course of existence, the bureau was underfunded and understaffed, with just 900 agents at its peak.

Bureau agents, who acted essentially as social workers and were frequently the only federal representatives in Southern communities, were subjected to ridicule and violence from whites (including terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan), who viewed the agents as interfering in local affairs by trying to assist Blacks. While some agents were corrupt or incompetent, others were hardworking and brave people who made significant contributions.

During its years of operation, the Freedmen's Bureau fed millions of people, built hospitals and provided medical aid, negotiated labor contracts for ex-slaves and settled labor disputes. It also helped former slaves legalize marriages and locate lost relatives, and assisted Black veterans.

The bureau also was instrumental in building thousands of schools for Blacks, and helped to found such colleges as Howard University in Washington, D.C., Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. The bureau frequently worked in conjunction with the American Missionary Association and other private charity organizations.

Additionally, the bureau tried, with little success, to promote land redistribution. However, most of the confiscated or abandoned Confederate land was eventually restored to the original owners, so there was little opportunity for Black land ownership, which was seen as a means to success in society.

Freedmen's Bureau's Demise

In the summer of 1872, Congress, responding in part to pressure from white Southerners, dismantled the Freedmen's Bureau.

Since that time, historians have debated the agency's effectiveness. A lack of funding, coupled with the politics of race and Reconstruction, meant that the bureau was not able to carry out all of its initiatives, and it failed to provide long-term protection for Blacks or ensure any real measure of racial equality.

However, the bureau's efforts did signal the introduction of the federal government into issues of social welfare and labor relations. As noted in The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction, "The Bureau helped awaken Americans to the promise of freedom, and for a time, the Bureau's physical presence in the South made palpable to many citizens the abstract principles of equal access to the law and free labor."

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The Freedmen's Bureau was established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865, two months before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union's Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.

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A little more information on the men (scroll down)

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A little more information on the men (scroll down)

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LibGuides: American History: The Civil War and Reconstruction: Key Events and Figures of Reconstruction

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Guide for Library Research on the Civil War and Post-Civil War Reconstruction

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In August 1874, the White League murdered six white Republicans and as many as 20 black witnesses in Coushatta, Louisiana. Following the massacre, Louisiana governor William Kellogg issued the following statement.

Having felt it my duty to issue my proclamation offering a large reward for the apprehension and conviction of the murderers in the Coushatta outrage, and to the end that the law-abiding citizens of the State may fully comprehend the magnitude of the crime committed and be induced to render more active assistance to the officers of the law, I deem it proper to make the following statement :

These facts are gathered from reliable information received at the executive department :

On or about the 28th day of August, 1874, a body of persons, belonging to a semi-military organization known as the White League of Louisiana, assembled in the town of Coushatta, parish of Red River, in this State, for the purpose of compelling by force of arms the State officers of that parish to resign their positions.

These officers were men of good character, most of them largely interested in planting and mercantile pursuits. They held their positions with the full consent of an admittedly large majority of the legal voters of the parish, this being a largely republican parish, as admitted even by the fusion returning-boards.

The only known objection to them was that they were of republican principles. Frank S. Edgerton, the duly-qualified sheriff of the parish, in strict compliance with the laws of this State and of the United States, summoned a posse comitatus of citizens, white and colored, to assist him in protecting the parish officers in the exercise of their undoubted rights and duties from the threatened unlawful violence of the White Leagues. His posse, consisting of sixty-five men, was overpowered by a superior force assembled from the adjacent parishes, and finally, after several colored and white men had been killed, surrendered themselves prisoners with the explicit guarantee that their lives would be spared if the more prominent republicans would agree to leave the parish and those holding office would resign their positions.

These stipulations, though unlawfully exacted, were complied with on the part of the republican officials, who were then locked up in the jail for the night.

The following-named persons were among those so surrendering and resigning:

Homer J. Twitchell, planter and tax-collector of Red River, and deputy United States postmaster in charge of the post-office at Coushatta; Robert A. Dewees, supervisor of registration, De Soto Parish; Clark Holland, merchant and supervisor of registration, Red River Parish; W. J. Howell, parish attorney and United States commissioner; Frank S. Edgerton, sheriff of Red River Parish; M.C. Willis, merchant and justice of the peace.

On the following morning, Sunday, the 30th day of August, these persons were bound and conducted by an armed guard to the McFarland plantation, just over the parish-line of Red River, within the boundaries of Bossier Parish, about forty miles east of the Texas line. There they were set upon and deliberately murdered in cold blood. Their bodies were buried near where they fell, without inquest or any formality whatever.

On the night preceding the surrender a body of forty members of the White League of Caddo Parish, mounted and armed, left the city of Shreveport, and were seen riding in the direction of the place where the murder was subsequently committed.

WILLIAM P. KELLOGG, Governor.

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1. Citations

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White League Massacre at Coushatta (1874)

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In August 1874, the White League murdered six white Republicans and as many as 20 black witnesses in Coushatta, Louisiana. Following the massacre, Louisiana governor William Kellogg issued this statement.

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Please note that this reading includes dehumanizing language. We have chosen to include the terms in this handout in order to honestly communicate the bigoted language of the time. We recommend that teachers review the section "Addressing Dehumanizing Language from History" on page xiv before using this material.
State Senator Charles Caldwell was a former slave who had led a company of African American soldiers, earlier in 1875, in a state militia formed to protect freedpeople from the White Line. The militia was later disbanded by the governor as part of a "peace agreement" with the White Line, but attacks and intimidation continued, and Caldwell himself was assassinated later that year. Eugene Welborne, who served as Caldwell's first lieutenant in the militia, gave this account of election day in November 1875 in Clinton, Mississippi, and Caldwell's efforts to ensure a fair vote.

We could hear in the morning, the cannons commencing to shoot in every direction, just a firing. You could see men with their sixteen-shooters buckled on them charging all through the country. They went in squads.

One crowd would come in from Raymond and say, "One hundred and fifty niggers killed in Raymond; one white man slightly wounded." The guns were firing continually. Word came from Jackson, "The white men have whipped the niggers and run them out."

We did not know what in the world to do. Senator Caldwell was there and I said, "Senator, I think we might just as well give up. We can't do anything here. These men are riding all about the county with their sixteen-shooters." He says, "No. We are going to stay right here. I don't care what they say to you, don't you say a word." We voted as rapidly as we could.

Our votes were pretty strong all day and we would have polled our usual vote, even with all the intimidation, if they would have let us. But our Republicans that were appointed by the board of registration were told that it would not be healthy for them to serve and they made the whole thing Democratic. So when a Republican would come in to vote this fellow looked on the book and said, "I cannot find your name here. Stand aside." They turned off 80 Republicans, one after the other, that way.

I saw Senator Caldwell standing at the door. Said I, "What are you going to do about these registration papers?" "I think," says he, "we will go in and see these fellows." So we went in and spoke to one of the officers. When Mr. Caldwell said, "I know that this man's name was on that book," they said it didn't make any difference what he knew and that he was not going to vote.

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Election Day in Clinton, Mississippi (1875)

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State Senator Charles Caldwell was a former slave who had led a company of African American soldiers, earlier in 1875, in a state militia formed to protect freedpeople from the White Line. The militia was later disbanded by the governor as part of a "peace agreement" with the White Line, but attacks and intimidation continued, and Caldwell himself was assassinated later that year.

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Historian Douglas R. Egerton describes the life and political career of Mississippi politician Blanche K. Bruce, the first African-American to serve a full six-year term in the United States Senate.

We have chosen to include certain racial epithets in this handout in order to honestly communicate the bigoted language of the time. For more guidance on how to approach these terms in your classroom, see our explanation, Addressing Dehumanizing Language from History.

Just ten years after President Abraham Lincoln, in his final public address, advocated voting rights for the "very intelligent [blacks], and on those who serve in our cause as soldiers," Blanche Kelso Bruce, a former slave, raised his right hand to take the oath of office as a U.S. senator from Mississippi. Garbed in a black suit and starched white cotton shirt, his black waistcoat adorned with a fourteen-karat-gold pocket watch, the stout, slightly balding statesman looked older than his thirty-four years. His dark "wavy" hair and newly trimmed van dyke revealed his mother's heritage, while his light skin was the legacy of his father and former master. Preceded in the Senate by Hiram Revels, who had served a partial term from 1870 to 1871, Bruce took his oath less than two decades after Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced that blacks were not citizens in the country of their birth. "Unpretending and unostentatious," the Memphis Planet [newspaper] conceded, "he moves quietly on, the honoured representative of four millions of colored people."

Born in 1841 in Farmville, Virginia, the child then known as Branch and his five siblings were slaves because their mother, Polly Bruce, was a slave. Blanche later insisted that his father, Pettis Perkinson, had treated him as "tenderly" as he had treated his white children, and the young slave-who changed his name to Blanche while still in his teens-was employed as a domestic to his half brother and taught to read. But in an act that demonstrated that the war truly could be a conflict of brothers, in 1861 Blanche's white half brother William left to join the Confederate cause. Blanche decided "to emancipate [him]self " and decamped for the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas, where he found employment as a teacher. The decision nearly proved a fatal one when in August 1863 the town was sacked by Confederate guerrillas led by William Clarke Quantrill. The raiders murdered 183 men and boys, slaughtering anybody above the age of fourteen, but Bruce was able to hide in bushes behind his house. "Quantrill's band certainly would not have spared a colored man," Bruce later wrote.

After the war, Bruce briefly attended Oberlin College, the rural Ohio school widely known for its abolitionist origins and progressive attitudes on educational integration. His meager financial resources soon forced him to withdraw, but while working on a Mississippi River steamboat, Bruce heard about opportunities for ambitious black men in the lower South. Arriving in Mississippi in February 1869, at a time when the state had not yet been readmitted to Congress, Bruce settled in Bolivar County, a devoutly Republican region with a four-to-one advantage in black voters. . . . He quickly won elections for sheriff, then tax collector and superintendent of education, all while editing a local newspaper. Senators were then chosen by state assemblies, and on February 3, 1874, Bruce was chosen by the Mississippi legislature to serve in the national Senate. He journeyed north toward Washington to begin what would become the first full term served by an African American senator. There he joined black Congressmen John Adams Hyman of North Carolina and Robert Smalls, who succeeded Richard "Daddy" Cain in South Carolina's fifth district. Congressman John Roy Lynch, one of the youngest members of the House, continued to represent Mississippi's sixth district. "A turn in fortune's wheel" was one white editor's characterization of just how dramatically the political world had been turned upside down.

As the only man of color in the [Senate] chamber, Bruce sought to position himself as the servant of his state's entire population and dispel any notions that he was a single-issue politician. That meant seeking to appease his state's other senator, James L. Alcorn. Just one month into his term, Bruce stepped across the aisle to converse with Alcorn, a conservative Republican and former Confederate officer who routinely caucused with the chamber's Democrats. Alcorn had not seen fit to honor the tradition of escorting his junior colleague to his swearing-in ceremony, but Bruce was not a man to carry a grudge. The two were engaged in "harmonious conservation" when above them in the gallery, two white observers began to loudly discuss the novelty of "a nigger coming over to sit with Democrats in the United States Senate." The second man, a Marylander, admitted that Bruce "looks clean, and maybe he will keep his place and be respectful." But most senators, well aware of just how far their country had progressed since 1861, accepted his presence, if perhaps grudgingly. "He has made a most favorable impression upon the members of the Senate and those with whom he came into contact," observed one black editor. In politics, power and influence could trump race. If Mississippi Unionists preferred their senator to be white, the reality was that Bruce held the seat, and he shared their vision of regional prosperity, even if they did not share his of an interracial democracy. One Pennsylvania Republican visited Bruce's office and was surprised to find a "small army of white Mississippians" in his waiting room, all of them "ready to swear by you." The northern man thought that curious. He had never before met white southerners, and he "had a lurking idea that these people were all down on a negro on general principles." But Reconstruction was an era of new opportunities, and southern whites, whether they dreaded it or accepted it, had seen this day coming for nearly a decade. 1

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The Honoured Representative of Four Millions of Colored People

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Historian Douglas R. Egerton describes the life and political career of Mississippi politician Blanche K. Bruce, the first African-American to serve a full six-year term in the United States Senate. We have chosen to include certain racial epithets in this handout in order to honestly communicate the bigoted language of the time.

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The following six tables provide information about the numbers of African American officeholders in the South during Reconstruction and the backgrounds of those officeholders.

Table 1: Black Officeholders during Reconstruction By State

Table 2: Black Officeholders during Reconstruction: Federal

Table 3: Black Members of Congress during Reconstruction

Table 4: Black Officeholders during Reconstruction: State and Major Black State Officials

Table 5: Black Officeholders during Reconstruction: County or Local

Table 6: Antebellum Status of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction

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The following six tables provide information about the numbers of African American officeholders in the South during Reconstruction and the backgrounds of those officeholders.

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In February 1875, Alabama's black Republican legislators sent a petition to the US Congress, noting that "the Democratic Party of Alabama has made, and is now making, a deliberate and persistent attempt...to change the penal code and criminal laws of Alabama so as to place the liberty and legal rights of the poor man, and especially of the poor colored man, who is generally a Republican in politics, in the power and control of the dominant race who are, with few exceptions, the landholders, and Democratic in politics." The petition goes on to say that if this action is allowed to stand, the war to preserve the Union would have been a "grand mistake."

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A Black Republican Leader Asks for Protection (1875)

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In February 1875, Alabama's black Republican legislators sent a petition to the US Congress, noting that "the Democratic Party of Alabama has made, and is now making, a deliberate and persistent attempt...to change the penal code and criminal laws of Alabama so as to place the liberty and legal rights of the poor man, and especially of the poor colored man, who is generally a Republican in politics, in the power and control of the dominant race who are, with few exceptions, the landholders, and Democratic in politics."

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Newsela | Time Machine (1870): Hiram Revels becomes the first Black senator

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Hiram Revels was the first Black elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870

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Why the Black Politicians of Reconstruction Are Often Overlooked

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A short video on how Black politicians in the South after the Civil War provide context for voting rights battles today.

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After the war was over and slavery abolished, Reconstruction was underway. Although there were challenges ahead, African Americans were filled with unprecedented hope. In 1867, Congress granted the right to vote to Black men in most of the South. In 1869, the 15th Amendment was passed (ratified in 1870), barring racial discrimination in voting. And with that, Black men took to the polls. Over the next several years, African American men moved into public leadership, including legislative positions. Two such stories belong to Hiram Revels and Robert Smalls.

A truly historic moment occurred on February 25, 1870, as Hiram Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate. Revels was an educator and minister, who had helped form regiments of African American soldiers during the Civil War. While he was serving in the Mississippi State Senate, he was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the United States Senate. Although his term was brief, Revels served as a symbol of hope in a post Civil War era. Born into slavery, Robert Smalls became a national hero and free man during the Civil War when he seized a Confederate vessel and sailed it to the U.S. Navy. Smalls continued to serve, fighting in more than a dozen engagements for the Union throughout the Civil War and helping to enlist other African Americans. In 1870, Robert Smalls was elected to the South Carolina State House of Representatives. In 1874, he was elected as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving for five terms.

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Reconstruction: The 15th Amendment and African American Men in Congress | PBS LearningMedia

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After the war was over and slavery abolished, Reconstruction was underway. Although there were challenges ahead, African Americans were filled with unprecedented hope. In 1867, Congress granted the right to vote to Black men in most of the South. In 1869, the 15th Amendment was passed (ratified in 1870), barring racial discrimination in voting.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

Black people in the South embraced politics like they had never imagined, and from the earliest Reconstruction election, especially in 1868, hundreds of African American politicians were elected. There's your most visible obvious revolution out of Reconstruction, the black politicians.

Black people, having experienced non-personhood, knew that they had to create new democratic practices and institutions. Now they had every reason to resent whites. They had every reason to equate whiteness with slavery. They had every reason to maybe want to destroy the land that they worked for nothing, but instead they thought their blood and sweat, their labor, built something that they now wanted the fruits and benefits of.

And so they wanted the South to succeed. They wanted it to be productive. They wanted it to be economically successful. And having asked for rights themselves, they didn't think it would be fair to deny it to other people. And so what they did was they made alliances with poor whites.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Radical Reconstruction is the term we use to describe the period after Congress passes the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which sets in motion the creation of new governments throughout the Southern states based on what they call manhood suffrage. That is men voting without any racial qualification. That wasn't the end of Radical Reconstruction in congressional terms. You have the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, which fails. The Senate comes one vote short of actually removing him from office.

You have the 15th Amendment passed by Congress 1869, which prohibits the states from denying the right to vote to anyone because of race. It tries to make black suffrage now national. The Reconstruction Act only applied to the South. Now the border states and the North-black men are supposed to vote throughout the country. And finally, in 1875, you get the final act of Radical Reconstruction, which was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which tried to declare illegal racial discrimination in public accommodations.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Radical Reconstruction lasts about 10 years up through 1877, and during that period, Congress is continuing to attempt to underpin some notion of equality for the former slaves, now black American citizens. Now Radical Reconstruction also refers to what's going on in the South. New governments are created in all the Southern states with African American men voting in large numbers for the first time and holding office for the first time. And these radical governments attempted with various measures of success to rebuild the South.

The way that African Americans reimagine themselves as political beings was something that was very important in terms of how Reconstruction manifested itself on the local everyday level in the South.

Now most offices were held by whites. The old view of Reconstruction used to call this the period of black supremacy, which it wasn't. Most major offices were held by whites. But nonetheless, in a country where no black people, virtually, had held any public office before the Civil War, suddenly you have by my estimate about 2000, maybe, black men who held public office ranging from US Senate and Congress down to members of state legislatures, state officials of one kind or another, down to justices of the peace, sheriffs, school board officials-in other words, was all levels of political society.

We always hear about Reconstruction as a period in which race triumphs the adequate functioning of government, because there is such racism among the white population that they are unable to work with African Americans. In fact, that's really not true. In the early years of the political reconstruction of the South, the late 1860s, the early 1870s, you're going to get, in many of the Southern states, coalitions where African Americans and especially poorer whites work together fine.

Many Southern whites are OK with voting with African Americans. They're OK with the new state constitutions, because one of the things the new state constitutions do in the South is they use state governments to rebuild the shattered states. They rebuild the schools. They rebuild the hospitals. They rebuild orphanages. They put money into railroads. And that was very popular among both black voters but also poor white voters. So there was a moment when African Americans and whites did work together.

These Reconstruction governments were in large part interracial political experiments. All of these people had never before worked together within the realm of politics, all of whom are coming out of the system of slavery were now sitting across the aisle from one another, next to one another, trying to figure out how do we reconstruct our constitutions, how do we rewrite our state constitutions? How do we pass new laws? How do we guarantee at the state level in Southern states, which had denied black people rights of citizenship, had denied them citizenship all along throughout American history, how do you reconstruct a new state, not just a new society, a new nation, but a new state?

One particular experiment is the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868, and this was convened, as all the Southern states convene them, to rewrite the state constitution. And so what happens in South Carolina, which is quite remarkable is that a majority black delegation comprised of formerly enslaved people and also free people of color from before the Civil War came together and along with sympathetic whites and other folks who got elected to the delegation, to rewrite the state constitution. And what comes out of that are a number of incredibly progressive laws and pieces of policy.

In particular, you see the support for and the enshrinement of universal public education, integrated co-educational public schools that are supported by taxes. Because the delegates, particularly the black delegates at the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, understood that without good schools, without full opportunity to get a great education, the promise of freedom was always going to be constrained, was always going to be hampered if black people could not get the kinds of educations that would then give them access to a better life.

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Probably the most long-lasting achievement of Radical Reconstruction was the creation of the first public school systems in the South. There had been virtually no public education in the South before the Civil War. These schools were almost all racially segregated. In New Orleans, there were integrated schools, but basically in most places there weren't. But nonetheless, the establishment of public schools was something that was obviously fundamental and necessary in the South, and that lasted well after the end of Reconstruction. There were also efforts, as I say, to rebuild the Southern economy, railroad construction. These states passed the first civil rights laws in American history at the state level outlawing various kinds of discrimination.

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And even on a more, I guess, down-to-earth basis, the presence of sympathetic local officials-police, sheriffs, judges, justices of the peace, the fact that blacks are now serving on juries for the first time-meant that the law just, sort of, operated in a more egalitarian way. If a black person was accused of a crime, he had a jury with some black people on it. Or if there was a black sheriff, he would try to treat everybody pretty much the same.

This was a moment in which the idea of a white supremacy was fundamentally challenged. The world was turned upside down from the perspective of white Southerners, and that was remarkable.

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Certainly many white Southerners benefited from the Reconstruction governments, even though they tended to oppose them. But the notion that these are black governments and are mostly favoring blacks, which is a considerable exaggeration because a lot of what they're doing is trying to rebuild the whole region, becomes more and more of a political weapon against Reconstruction. There were other issues as well. It costs money to do all these things. Building a school system out of scratch costs money. Taxes went up. White people owned more property than black people. They paid a higher percentage of the taxes.

But the basic reason for the opposition was just pure racism. Three or four years after the end of slavery, most white Southerners just found it impossible to accept the idea of blacks exercising genuine political power. They just found that white supremacy was the rallying cry of the opposition to Reconstruction, and by the 1870s, that is undermining white support where it existed for the Reconstruction regimes.

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MUSIC PLAYING] Black people in the South embraced politics like they had never imagined, and from the earliest Reconstruction election, especially in 1868, hundreds of African American politicians were elected. There's your most visible obvious revolution out of Reconstruction, the black politicians. Black people, having experienced non-personhood, knew that they had to create new democratic practices and institutions.

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Khan Academy - the Amendments and the failure of Reconstruction

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Khan Academy - the Amendments and the failure of Reconstruction

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Failure of Reconstruction (video) | Khan Academy

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During Reconstruction, three new amendments to the Constitution redefined freedom, citizenship, and democracy in the United States. But how much really changed? In this video, Kim examines continuity and change over time in the lives of African Americans in the South before and after Reconstruction.

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Sound Smart: The 15th Amendment | History

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Khan Academy Explains the 14th Amendment!  (Great video)

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Khan Academy Explains the 14th Amendment!  (Great video)

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The 14th Amendment, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868, is a cornerstone of equality and due process in the U.S. Constitution. This amendment, born out of the Civil War and Lincoln's vision, overturned the Dred Scott decision, granting African Americans the same civil rights as whites. Created by Aspen Institute.

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The 14th Amendment (video) | Reconstruction | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Holes in the 13th Amendment and the connection to the 21st century

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Holes in the 13th Amendment and the connection to the 21st century

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When U.S. lawmakers set out to abolish slavery in 1865, they turned to language in the Northwest Ordinance, which contained loopholes that effectively maintained human bondage. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News)

In December, lawmakers introduced the Abolition Amendment, which would tweak the language of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution.

Passed by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, and ratified later that year, the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery across the nation, with a key loophole: "Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." This paved the way for the country's burgeoning prison labor system and the world's largest prison population at 2.3 million in 2020. Penal labor, prison labor camps and convict-leasing programs represent the legacy of bondage that we are grappling with today. The Abolition Amendment seeks to "finish the job" of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery once and for all.

But where did this loophole originate? It started with a much older law, one that shaped a more complex legacy of human bondage.

The 13th Amendment's language was based on Article Six of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance almost verbatim. In July 1787, while some lawmakers in Philadelphia were drafting the Constitution, others met in New York to haggle over the territory beyond the 13 colonies, the region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.

They wrote and passed the Ordinance so that inhabitants of this vast territory - a mix of French, British, American and Indigenous populations with different sympathies - would be incentivized to form states in the new nation. There were three Northwest Ordinances (1784, 1785, 1787), and while provisions against slavery were introduced into all three, language was passed unanimously only in the final one.

Article Six reads: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid."

This language meant states forming out of the Northwest Territory were free states, but enslavers could reclaim formerly enslaved people who had escaped into the Northwest Territory or any states formed out of the region. The language allowed for loopholes.

The states of Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Wisconsin (1848) and portions of present-day Minnesota (1858) sought to uphold this law in adopting their constitutions. But the loopholes for criminal punishment and fugitive slaves led to different interpretations by states, as proslavery sympathizers lived in northern border regions between slave and free states.

Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota used the exact phrase from the Ordinance outlawing slavery in their state constitutions. Ohio and Michigan writers modified their language to read, "Unless for the punishment of crime." In 1846, Iowa did the same.

This move reflected how state constitution writers frequently copied one another's texts. The states that formed out of the Northwest Territory became models for other states incorporated throughout the 19th century. A 2019 report noted 12 state constitutions that include variations of the Northwest Ordinance language with the criminal punishment exception; nine permit involuntary servitude as punishment, and one, Vermont, permits involuntary servitude "for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like." (Some states voted out their language in 2020.)

The 1818 Illinois Constitution gave rise to circumventions. Slavery had been practiced in pre-statehood Illinois since 1719 under French rule. The writers of the Illinois Constitution apparently considered this preexisting slavery to be exempt from the Northwest Ordinance language. Accordingly, the language read: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this State," followed by the exceptions for criminal punishment and fugitive slaves.

This state constitution outlined that existing indentured servants would remain in their contracts, and children born to them would be freed only at certain ages - women at 18, men at 21. It also included provisions for Kentucky farmers traveling into the region-turned-state with enslaved people for grueling work in the profitable saltworks at Shawneetown, Ill. Circumscribed to this locale, this practice was to sunset in 1825.

Under French rule in Illinois, the Code Noir regulated free Black and enslaved people's activity, with penalties for violations. This practice continued through the Illinois Black Codes that imposed gathering limits on free Black people and registration requirements, and levied heavy fines on runaways. In operation from 1819 until 1870, the Codes were protected by the criminal punishment and fugitive exceptions in the Illinois Constitution.

Effectively, creative writing and interpretation kept a great deal of slavery intact in early Illinois. There was a strong legalization push. In February 1823, two-thirds of the state's House of Representatives - the required quorum - passed a resolution calling for a convention to change the Illinois Constitution to legalize slavery.

Following the resolution, proslavery Illinois legislators marched in the streets of the early capital of Vandalia, Ill., with torches and a crowd of supporters, shouting, "Slavery or death!" For 18 months, proslavery and antislavery factions rallied for their sides, until Illinois voters rejected the proposed convention by a narrow margin in August 1824.

Despite these loopholes and their impact, when U.S. lawmakers set out to abolish slavery in 1865, they turned to the Northwest Ordinance language. This language was familiar, it ensured widespread agreement and there was a "need to settle quickly on basic language to get the job done," lest momentum toward abolition unravel.

Immediately following the addition of the 13th Amendment, Southern states reacted to their suddenly free Black populations and an upended system of labor. Mississippi was the first to create Black Codes regulating behavior in public places, interactions with White people and a vagrancy law requiring free Black people to carry proof of employment or risk being re-enslaved. At least six Southern states modeled their Black Codes after Mississippi, sometimes verbatim.

The 13th Amendment's criminal-exception loophole created conditions for preserving the economic benefits and social order embedded in the system of slavery. Proslavery lawmakers created laws that, if violated, were covered by the exception, just as Illinois had done with its Black Codes.

Post-Civil War Black Codes resulted in virtual re-enslavement of the free Black population. The Black Codes were mostly repealed by 1868 but laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

This trajectory of the Northwest Ordinance, state constitutions, the federal amendment and overall loophole maneuvering support the assertion of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, that "slavery did not end in 1865, it just evolved."

Since the 1970s, increased criminal penalties due to the war on drugs have fueled mass incarceration, and the incarcerated form a hidden workforce in the prison industrial complex that persists today. The words in our Constitution - "except as a punishment for a crime" - have legally given rise to this evolution.

It has only been amid the push for criminal justice reform that states began reexamining this language drawn from the Northwest Ordinance. In 2018, Colorado was hailed as "progressive" and "leading the way" when voters removed the state's constitutional slavery language. In the November elections, Utah and Nebraska voters followed suit.

The Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Jersey legislatures are still wrestling with the issue. Mississippi only just ratified the 13th Amendment in its 2013 constitution, apparently due to a filing error. More than 20 state constitutions still include language that addresses slavery with this loophole.

Passing the Abolition Amendment is one part of abolishing slavery for good. Legal scholars in 2020 wrote that state constitutions can potentially "provide a stronger foundation for protecting democracy than their federal counterpart." Individual states must continue reckoning with outdated constitutional language that has provided cover for our legacy of bondage for far too long.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Loopholes have preserved slavery for more than 150 years after abolition

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In December, lawmakers introduced the Abolition Amendment, which would tweak the language of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution. Passed by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, and ratified later that year, the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery across the nation, with a key loophole: "Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

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President Obama celebrates the 13th Amendment and its history

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President Obama celebrates the 13th Amendment and its history

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0:00 / 13:44•Watch full video

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The President Commemorates the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment

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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified just months after the end of the American Civil War, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude-except as a punishment for a crime-in the entire United States. As passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865, the full text of 13th Amendment reads:

Section One
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section Two
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Two Centuries of Slavery in America

While the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the U.S. Constitution as adopted in 1789 both stressed liberty and equality as foundations of the American vision, the 13th Amendment of 1865 marked the first explicit mention of slavery in the Constitution.

Key Takeaways: The 13th Amendment

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude-except when applied as punishment for a crime-in the entire United States.

The 13th Amendment was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865.

Along with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the 13th Amendment was the first of the three Reconstruction Period amendments adopted following the Civil War.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed slaves only in the 11 Confederate states.

Unlike the 14th and 15th Amendments, which apply only to the government, the 13th Amendment applies to the actions of private citizens.

Despite the 13th Amendment, vestiges of racial discrimination and inequality would continue to exist in America well into the 20th century.

As the Civil War began, an estimated 4 million people-almost 13% of the total U.S population at the time-most of them African Americans, were held as slaves in 15 southern and the North-South Border States.

The Emancipation Proclamation's Slippery Slope

Despite his long-held hatred of slavery, President Abraham Lincoln wavered in dealing with it.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent the Civil War in 1861, then President-elect Lincoln implicitly endorsed the so-called Corwin Amendment, a never-ratified constitutional amendment that would have banned the U.S. government from abolishing slavery in the states where it existed at the time.

By 1863, with the outcome of the Civil War still in doubt, Lincoln decided that freeing the slaves in the South would cripple the economy of the 11 Confederate States and help win the war. His famous Emancipation Proclamation ordered that all slaves held in those states "then in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

However, since it only applied to the areas of the Confederate states not already back under Union control, the Emancipation Proclamation alone failed to end slavery in the United States. Doing so would require a constitutional amendment that abolished and forever banned the institution of slavery.

Passage and Ratification of the 13th Amendment

With the help of his growing popularity generated by recent Union military victories, Lincoln easily won re-election over his Democratic opponent, General George McClellan. Since the election took place during the Civil War, it was not contested in the states that had seceded from the Union.

By the time Congress reconvened in December of 1864, Republicans, empowered by Lincoln's landslide victory, made a big push to pass the proposed 13th Amendment. Lincoln himself personally lobbied Union-loyal Border State Democrats to change their "nay" votes to "ayes." As Lincoln famously reminded his political friends and foes alike, "I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes."

And "procure those votes" they did. On January 31, 1865, the House passed the proposed 13th Amendment by a vote of 119-56, barely over the two-thirds majority required. On February 1, 1865, Lincoln ordered the joint resolution proposing the amendment sent to the states for ratification.

As the end of 1865 approached, nearly all of the Northern states and enough of the already "reconstructed" Southern states had ratified the measure to qualify it for final adoption.

Tragically assassinated on April 14, 1865, Lincoln did not live to see final ratification of the 13th Amendment, which did not come until December 6, 1865.

The Legacy of the 13th Amendment

Even after the 13th Amendment effectively abolishes slavery, racially-discriminatory measures like the post-Reconstruction Black Codes and the Jim Crow Laws, along with state-sanctioned labor practices like convict leasing, continued to force many black Americans into involuntary labor for years.

Since its adoption, the 13th Amendment has been cited in prohibiting peonage- a system where employers could force workers to pay off debts with work-and some other racially-discriminatory practices by labeling them as "badges and incidents of slavery."

While the 14th and 15th Amendments apply only to the actions of the government, the 13th Amendment applies to the actions of private citizens. In this manner, the amendment gives Congress the power to enact laws against modern forms of slavery like human trafficking.

Despite the intent and efforts of 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to achieve equality for black Americans, full equality and a guarantee the civil rights of all Americans regardless of race would not be realized until well into the 20th century.

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) OurDocuments.gov. Online

The 13th Amendment: Slavery And Involuntary Servitude,Constitution Center. Online

Foner, Eric, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, W.W. Norton, 2010

Crofts, Daniel W, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union, The University of North Carolina Press (April 25, 2016, ISBN 978-1469627311

Goodwin, Doris Kearns, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Simon & Schuster (September 26, 2006). ISBN 978-0743270755

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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified just months after the end of the American Civil War, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude-except as a punishment for a crime-in the entire United States.

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The 15th Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, extended the right to vote to Black American men seven years after the emancipation proclamation deemed the enslaved population free. Giving Black men voting rights was yet another way for the federal government to recognize them as full American citizens.

The amendment stated:

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

However, fierce racial discrimination that would last for several decades effectively prevented Black American men from realizing their constitutional rights. It would take the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to eliminate the obstacles, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and retaliation from employers that disenfranchised Black American men and women alike. However, the Voting Rights Act, too, has faced challenges in recent years.

The 15th Amendment

Black Men Use Voting Rights to Their Advantage

Black Americans were staunch supporters of the slain President Abraham Lincoln, the Republican politician who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. After his assassination in 1865, Lincoln's popularity grew, and Black Americans expressed their gratitude to him by becoming loyal supporters of the Republican Party. The 15th Amendment allowed Black men to use their votes to give Republicans an edge over rival political parties.

The North American 19th-century Black activist Frederick Douglass actively worked for Black male suffrage and tried to make the case for it in his public remarks about the issue. He acknowledged that anti-Black stereotypes had fostered the idea that Black Americans were too ignorant to vote.

"It is said that we are ignorant; admit it," Douglass said. "But if we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag for the government, he knows enough to vote ... What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice."

A man named Thomas Mundy Peterson from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first Black American to vote in an election after the 15th Amendment was enacted.﻿﻿﻿ Newly given the right to vote, Black men quickly influenced the American political scene, allowing Republicans to usher in sweeping change across the former Confederacy, which was part of the Union once more. These changes included getting Black men, such as Hiram Rhodes Revels, elected in Southern states. Revels was a Republican from Natchez, Mississippi, and distinguished himself by becoming the first Black American elected to the U.S. Congress.﻿﻿﻿ During the period after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, many Black Americans served as elected officials in state legislatures and local governments.

Reconstruction Marks a Shift

When Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s, however, Southern lawmakers worked to render Black Americans second-class citizens again. They flouted both the 14th and 15th Amendments, which recognized Black Americans as U.S. citizens and granted them voting rights, respectively. This shift stemmed from Rutherford B. Hayes' 1876 presidential election, in which a disagreement over electoral votes led Republicans and Democrats to make a compromise that sacrificed Black suffrage. This agreement, called the Compromise of 1877, was that Hayes would remove troops from southern states in exchange for the support of Democrats. Without troops to enforce Black civil rights, governing power was restored to the White majority and Black Americans faced severe oppression once again.

To say this agreement had a detrimental effect on Black male suffrage would be an understatement. In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional convention designed to restore "white supremacy" and adopted a constitution that would disenfranchise Black and poor White voters alike for years to come. This was done by requiring applicants to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test in order to vote and was not seen as unconstitutional at the time because it also affected White citizens. The 15th Amendment was essentially erased in Jim Crow Mississippi.

In the end, Black men were technically American citizens but could not exercise their right to vote. Those who did manage to pass the literacy tests and pay the poll taxes were often threatened by White people when they arrived at the polls. In addition, large numbers of Black Americans in the South worked as sharecroppers and faced the threat of eviction from landlords who objected to Black suffrage. In some cases, Black men were beaten, killed, or had their homes burned down for attempting to vote. Several other states followed Mississippi's lead and Black registration and voting took a nosedive across the south. Voting as a Black American in the Jim Crow South often meant putting one's life and livelihood on the line.﻿﻿﻿

A New Chapter for Black Suffrage

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Civil rights activists had worked diligently to secure voting rights for Black Americans, and federal legislation eliminated the local and state policies that effectively blocked people of color from casting ballots. White civic leaders and polling officials could no longer use literacy tests and poll taxes to deter Black people from voting, and the federal government granted the U.S. attorney general the power to conduct probes into the use of such methods during elections.

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the federal government began to review the voter registration process in places where most of the minority population had not signed up to vote. By the end of 1965, more than 250,000 Black Americans had been registered to vote.﻿﻿﻿

But the Voting Rights Act didn't reverse the challenges Black voters faced overnight. Some jurisdictions simply ignored the federal legislation on voting rights. Still, activists and advocacy groups could now pursue legal action when the rights of Black voters were violated or ignored. After the Voting Rights Act's enactment, record numbers of Black voters began to vote for the politicians, Black or White, who they felt advocated for their interests.

Black Voters Still Face Challenges

In the 21st century, voting rights remain an issue of pressing concern for voters of color. Voter suppression efforts continue to be a problem. Voter ID laws, long lines, and poor conditions in voting precincts in minority communities, as well as the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, have all undermined the efforts of people of color to vote.

Stacey Abrams, a 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate, insists that voter suppression cost her the election. In a 2020 interview, Abrams said that voters face systemic barriers in states across the country during the election process and that the cost of voting is too high for many. She started the organization Fair Fight Action to address voting rights in the U.S. today.﻿﻿

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15th Amendment Grants Voting Rights to Black American Men

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The 15th Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, extended the right to vote to Black American men seven years after the emancipation proclamation deemed the enslaved population free. Giving Black men voting rights was yet another way for the federal government to recognize them as full American citizens.

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Scroll down for the video on 14th and 15th amendments

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Scroll down for the video on 14th and 15th amendments

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When slavery ended in the United States, freedom still eluded African Americans who were contending with the repressive set of laws known as the black codes. Widely enacted throughout the South following the Civil War-a period called Reconstruction -these laws both limited the rights of Black people and exploited them as a labor source.

In fact, life after bondage didn't differ much from life during bondage for the African Americans subjected to the black codes. This was by design, as slavery had been a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and the former Confederate states sought a way to continue this system of subjugation.

"They may have lost the war, but they're not going to lose power civically and socially," says M. Keith Claybrook Jr., an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach. "So, the black codes were an attempt to restrict and limit freedom."

Losing the Civil War meant the South had little choice but to recognize the Reconstruction-era policies that abolished slavery. By using the law to deny African Americans the opportunities and privileges that white people enjoyed, however, the one-time Confederacy could keep these newly liberated Americans in virtual bondage.

A Loophole in the 13th Amendment

White planters in these states denied Black people the chance to rent or buy land and paid them a pittance. The 1865 ratification of the 13th Amendment prohibited slavery and servitude in all circumstances " except as a punishment for crime." This loophole resulted in Southern states passing the black codes to criminalize activities that would make it easy to imprison African Americans, and effectively force them into servitude once more.

First enacted in 1865 in states such as South Carolina and Mississippi, the black codes varied slightly from place to place but were generally very similar. They prohibited "loitering, vagrancy," Claybrook says. "The idea was that if you're going to be free, you should be working. If you had three or four Black people standing around talking, they were actually vagrant and could be convicted of a crime and sent to jail."

In addition to criminalizing joblessness for African Americans, the codes required Black people to sign annual labor contracts that ensured they received the lowest pay possible for their work. The codes contained anti-enticement measures to prevent prospective employers from paying Black workers higher wages than their current employers paid them. Failing to sign a labor contract could result in the offender being arrested, sentenced to unpaid labor or fined.

Enslavement by Debt

Fees were the easiest way to reinstitute servitude, as African Americans earned so little that paying a steep fine was out of the question for most of them. Failure to pay fines allowed the state to order them to work off their balances, a system called debt peonage. Typically this work was agricultural in nature, just as Black Americans had performed while enslaved.

Black children were not spared from forced labor. If their "parents were seen to be unfit or weren't around, the state received these children as orphans, and they would be put into apprenticeships," Claybrook says. "Again, they are doing work without compensation."

The black codes not only forced African Americans to work for free but also essentially placed them under surveillance. Their comings and goings, meetings and church services were all monitored by the authorities and local officials. Black people needed passes and white sponsors to move from place to place or to leave town. Collectively, these regulations codified a permanent underclass status for African Americans.

After the black codes had been enacted throughout the South in 1865, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to give African Americans more rights-to a degree. This legislation allowed Black people to rent or own property, enter contracts and bring cases before courts (against fellow African Americans). Moreover, it allowed individuals who infringed upon their rights to be sued.

Progress With the 14th and 15th Amendments

The passing of the 14th and 15th amendments gave African Americans some hope for the future. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship and "equal protection of the laws" to Black people, while the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race. In the end, the South rescinded the black codes, but the repeal of these restrictions didn't significantly improve life for African Americans.

"With the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, there was a shift over to Jim Crow laws, which were kind of a perpetuation of the black codes," says Connie Hassett-Walker, an assistant professor of justice studies and sociology at Norwich University in Vermont. "You don't just flip the switch and all that structural discrimination and hatred just turns off. It kept going."

And Black Americans weren't "separate but equal," as the states enforcing Jim Crow laws claimed. Instead, their communities had fewer resources than white communities, and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized them.

The Ku Klux Klan and Lynchings Terrorize Black Americans

"You start to see the rise of lynching, and lynchings were really about the message sent to the living people," Hassett-Walker says. "It might have been about punishing that individual person, but it was done to keep the other people in line, to say, 'See, this could happen to you.'"

Simply exercising one's right to vote could lead to a visit from the Klan, and employment options for Black Americans remained limited. They largely worked as sharecroppers, which entailed working the land of others (typically white people) for a fraction of the worth of any crops grown.

To say that sharecropping paid poorly would be an understatement, and impoverished African Americans racked up debts in shops that charged them high interest rates on the supplies they needed as tenant farmers.

Those who couldn't pay their debts risked incarceration or forced labor, much like they faced during the black codes. The debt peonage system robbed them of income and locked them into servitude once again. Additionally, the police imprisoned them for minor offenses that whites weren't jailed for in equal numbers, if at all. In prison, Black Americans-men, women and children-provided free labor.

The black codes may have been repealed, but African Americans continued to face a series of regulations that reduced them to second-class citizens well into the 20th century. It would take the activism of civil rights leaders, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to see this legislation overturned.

Fact Check

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How the Black Codes Limited African American Progress After the Civil War | HISTORY

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The black codes effectively continued enslavement for African Americans by restricting their rights and exploiting their labor.

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A literacy test measures a person's proficiency in reading and writing. Beginning in the 19th century, literacy tests were used in the voter registration process in southern states of the U.S. with the intent to disenfranchise Black voters. In 1917, with the passing of the Immigration Act, literacy tests were also included in the U.S. immigration process, and they are still used today. Historically, literacy tests have served to legitimize racial and ethnic marginalization in the U.S.

History of Reconstruction and Jim Crow Era

Literacy tests were introduced into the voting process in the South with the Jim Crow laws. These were state and local laws and statutes enacted by Southern and border states in the late 1870s to deny Black Americans the right to vote in the South following Reconstruction (1865-1877). They were designed to keep White and Black people segregated, to disenfranchise Black voters, and to keep Black people subjugated, undermining the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution.

Despite the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, granting citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States," which included formerly enslaved people, and the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which specifically gave Black Americans the right to vote, Southern and border states continued to find ways to keep racial minorities from voting. They used electoral fraud and violence to intimidate Black American voters and created Jim Crow laws to promote racial segregation. During the 20 years following Reconstruction, Black Americans lost many of the legal rights that had been gained during Reconstruction.

With the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively undermined the protection of Black Americans by providing legitimacy to Jim Crow laws.﻿﻿ In this case, the Supreme Court maintained that public facilities for Black and White people could be "separate but equal." Following this decision, it soon became the law throughout the South that public facilities had to be separate.

Many of the changes made during Reconstruction proved to be short-lived, with the Supreme Court continuing to uphold racial discrimination and segregation in its decisions, thus giving southern states free rein to impose literacy tests and all manner of voting restrictions on prospective voters, discriminating against Black voters. But racism was not just recurring in the South. Although Jim Crow Laws were a Southern phenomenon, the sentiment behind them was a national one. There was a resurgence of racism in the North as well and a belief among White people across the country, and internationally, that Reconstruction was a mistake.

Literacy Tests and Voting Rights

Some states, such as Connecticut, used literacy tests in the mid-1800s to keep Irish immigrants from voting, but Southern states didn't use literacy tests until after Reconstruction in 1890. Sanctioned by the federal government, these tests were used well into the 1960s. They were given ostensibly to test the voters' ability to read and write, but in reality they were designed to discriminate against Black American and sometimes poor White voters. Since, at that time, 40% to 60% of Black people were illiterate, compared to 8% to 18% of White people, these tests had a large differential racial impact.

Southern states also imposed other standards, all of which were arbitrarily set by the test administrator. Favored were those who owned property, or had grandfathers who had been able to vote (" grandfather clause "); people with "good character," and those who paid poll taxes. Because of these impossible standards, of the 130,334 registered Black voters in Louisiana in 1896, only 1% could pass the state's new rules eight years later.﻿﻿ Even in areas where the Black population was substantially greater, these standards kept the White voting population in the majority.

The administration of literacy tests was unfair and discriminatory. If the administrator wanted a person to pass, they could ask an easy question-for example, "Who is the president of the United States?"﻿﻿ While the same official could require a much higher standard of a Black person, even requiring that they answer every question correctly. It was up to the test administrator whether the prospective voter passed or failed, and even if a Black man was well-educated, he would most likely fail, because the test was created with failure as a goal.﻿﻿ Even if a potential Black voter knew all the answers to the questions, the official administering the test could still fail him.

Literacy tests were not declared unconstitutional in the South until 95 years after the 15th Amendment was ratified, by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Five years later, in 1970, Congress abolished literacy tests and discriminatory voting practices nationwide, and as a result, the number of registered Black American voters increased dramatically.

Actual Literacy Tests

In 2014 a group of Harvard University students was asked to take the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test to raise awareness about voting discrimination.﻿﻿ The test is similar to those given in other Southern states since Reconstruction to potential voters who could not prove they had a fifth-grade education. In order to be able to vote, a person had to pass all 30 questions in 10 minutes.﻿﻿ All of the students failed under those conditions because the test was meant to be failed. The questions have nothing at all to do with the U.S. Constitution and are completely nonsensical.

Literacy Tests and Immigration

In the late 19th century, many people wanted to restrict the influx of immigrants to the U.S. due to increased problems of urbanization and industrialization such as crowding, lack of housing and jobs, and urban squalor. It was during this time that the idea of using literacy tests to control the number of immigrants able to enter the United States, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, was formed. However, it took those who advocated for this approach many years to try to convince lawmakers and others that immigrants were the "cause" of many of America's social and economic maladies. Finally, in 1917, Congress passed the Immigration Act, also known as the Literacy Act (and Asiatic Barred Zone Act), which included a literacy test that is still a requirement for becoming a U.S. citizen today.

The Immigration Act demanded that those who were over the age of 16 and could read some language must read 30-40 words to show they were capable of reading.﻿﻿ Those who were entering the U.S. to avoid religious persecution from their country of origin did not have to pass this test. The literacy test that is part of the Immigration Act of 1917 included only a few languages available to immigrants. This meant that if their native language was not included, they could not prove they were literate and were denied entry.

Beginning in 1950, immigrants could legally only take the literacy test in English, further limiting those who could gain entry to the United States. Besides demonstrating the ability to read, write, and speak English, immigrants also have to display knowledge of U.S. history, government, and civics.

Additional References

Foner, Eric., "The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction -- and Vice-Versa,
Columbia Law Review, November 2012, 1585-1606.

,"Techniques of Direct Disenfranchisement 1880-1965" University of Michigan.

Onion, Rebecca, "Take the Impossible 'Literacy' Test Louisiana Gave Black Voters in the 1960s, Slate.com.

Schwartz, Jeff, "CORE's Freedom Summer, 1964 - My Experiences in Louisiana."

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Literacy Tests, Race, and Immigration in U.S. History

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A literacy test measures a person's proficiency in reading and writing. Beginning in the 19th century, literacy tests were used in the voter registration process in southern states of the U.S. with the intent to disenfranchise Black voters. In 1917, with the passing of the Immigration Act, literacy tests were also included in the U.S.

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Race and Voting in the Segregated South

After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election. But when he and some other black ex-servicemen attempted to vote, a white mob stopped them. "All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens," Evers later related. "We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included. Now, after the Germans and Japanese hadn't killed us, it looked as though the white Mississippians would...."

Grave of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Arlington National Cemetery. (Wikimedia Commons)

The most basic right of a citizen in a democracy is the right to vote. Without this right, people can be easily ignored and even abused by their government. This, in fact, is what happened to African-American citizens living in the South following Civil War Reconstruction. Despite the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing the civil rights of black Americans, their right to vote was systematically taken away by white supremacist state governments.

Voting During Reconstruction

After the Civil War, Congress acted to prevent Southerners from re-establishing white supremacy. In 1867, the Radical Republicans in Congress imposed federal military rule over most of the South. Under U.S. Army occupation, the former Confederate states wrote new constitutions and were readmitted to the Union, but only after ratifying the 14th Amendment. This Reconstruction amendment prohibited states from denying "the equal protection of the laws" to U.S. citizens, which included the former slaves.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified. It stated that, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

More than a half-million black men became voters in the South during the 1870s (women did not secure the right to vote in the United States until 1920). For the most part, these new black voters cast their ballots solidly for the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.

When Mississippi rejoined the Union in 1870, former slaves made up more than half of that state's population. During the next decade, Mississippi sent two black U.S. senators to Washington and elected a number of black state officials, including a lieutenant governor. But even though the new black citizens voted freely and in large numbers, whites were still elected to a large majority of state and local offices. This was the pattern in most of the Southern states during Reconstruction.

The Republican-controlled state governments in the South were hardly perfect. Many citizens complained about overtaxation and outright corruption. But these governments brought about significant improvements in the lives of the former slaves. For the first time, black men and women enjoyed freedom of speech and movement, the right of a fair trial, education for their children, and all the other privileges and protections of American citizenship. But all this changed when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops withdrew from the old Confederacy.

Voting in Mississippi

With federal troops no longer present to protect the rights of black citizens, white supremacy quickly returned to the old Confederate states. Black voting fell off sharply in most areas because of threats by white employers and violence from the Ku Klux Klan, a ruthless secret organization bent on preserving white supremacy at all costs.

White majorities began to vote out the Republicans and replace them with Democratic governors, legislators, and local officials. Laws were soon passed banning interracial marriages and racially segregating railroad cars along with the public schools.

Laws and practices were also put in place to make sure blacks would never again freely participate in elections. But one problem stood in the way of denying African Americans the right to vote: the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed them this right. To a great extent, Mississippi led the way in overcoming the barrier presented by the 15th Amendment.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representative and later the Senate. Revels served in Congress from 1870 to 1871, representing Mississippi. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1890, Mississippi held a convention to write a new state constitution to replace the one in force since Reconstruction. The white leaders of the convention were clear about their intentions. "We came here to exclude the Negro," declared the convention president. Because of the 15th Amendment, they could not ban blacks from voting. Instead, they wrote into the state constitution a number of voter restrictions making it difficult for most blacks to register to vote.

First, the new constitution required an annual poll tax, which voters had to pay for two years before the election. This was a difficult economic burden to place on black Mississippians, who made up the poorest part of the state's population. Many simply couldn't pay it.

But the most formidable voting barrier put into the state constitution was the literacy test. It required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk who processed voter registrations. This clerk, who was always white, decided whether a citizen was literate or not.

The literacy test did not just exclude the 60 percent of voting-age black men (most of them ex-slaves) who could not read. It excluded almost all black men, because the clerk would select complicated technical passages for them to interpret. By contrast, the clerk would pass whites by picking simple sentences in the state constitution for them to explain.

Mississippi also enacted a "grandfather clause" that permitted registering anyone whose grandfather was qualified to vote before the Civil War. Obviously, this benefited only white citizens. The "grandfather clause" as well as the other legal barriers to black voter registration worked. Mississippi cut the percentage of black voting-age men registered to vote from more than 90 percent during Reconstruction to less than 6 percent in 1892. These measures were copied by most of the other states in the South.
The Winds of Change
As a result of intimidation, violence, and racial discrimination in state voting laws, a mere 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote in 1940. In Mississippi, less than 1 percent were registered. Most blacks who did vote lived in the larger cities of the South.

By not having the power of the ballot, African Americans in the South had little influence in their communities. They did not hold elected offices. They had no say in how much their taxes would be or what laws would be passed. They had little, if any, control over local police, courts, or public schools. They, in effect, were denied their rights as citizens.

Attempts to change this situation were met with animosity and outright violence. But in the 1950s, the civil rights movement developed. Facing enormous hostility, black people in the South organized to demand their rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. They launched voter registration drives in many Southern communities. This set the stage for great changes in the 1960s, but not without tragedy. Medgar Evers, the black veteran stopped by a white mob from voting, became a civil rights leader in his native Mississippi. Because of his civil rights activities, he was shot and killed in front of his home by a white segregationist in 1963.

For Discussion and Writing

1. What legal devices did Southern states use to exclude most of their black citizens from voting? What other methods were used to stop blacks from voting?

2. What was unfair about the way literacy tests were used for voter registration in the South from 1890 to 1965?

3. What were the consequences to African Americans of being excluded from voting in the segregated South?

For Further Reading

McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Bond, Julian & Juan Williams. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

A C T I V I T Y

Who Should Not Vote?

All states have some voting restrictions. Are they necessary? Below are five traditional restrictions on the right to vote. Form small groups to decide whether your state should retain each of these restrictions. Before making a decision on each restriction, the group should discuss and write answers to these two questions:

1. What are some reasons favoring the restriction?

2. What are some reasons against the restriction?

After the groups have finished their work, each restriction should be discussed and voted on by the entire class.

Restrictions on the Right to Vote

In order to vote, you must...

A. Reside in a voting district for at least one month.

B. Be at least 18 years of age.

C. Not be in prison or on parole for a felony conviction.

D. Be a U.S. citizen.

E. Register to vote.
Return to Black History Month Home Page

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After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election. But when he and some other black ex-servicemen attempted to vote, a white mob stopped them. "All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens," Evers later re, After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election.

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Race and Voting

The most basic right of a citizen in a democracy is the right to vote. Without this right, people can be easily ignored and even abused by their government. This, in fact, is what happened to African American citizens living in the South following Civil War Reconstruction. Despite the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteeing the civil rights of black Americans, their right to vote was systematically taken away by white supremacist state governments.

Voting During Reconstruction

After the Civil War, Congress acted to prevent Southerners from re-establishing white supremacy. In 1867, the Radical Republicans in Congress imposed federal military rule over most of the South. Under U.S. Army occupation, the former Confederate states wrote new constitutions and were readmitted to the Union, but only after ratifying the 14th Amendment. This Reconstruction amendment prohibited states from denying "the equal protection of the laws" to U.S. citizens, which included the former slaves.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified. It stated that, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

More than a half-million black men became voters in the South during the 1870s (women did not secure the right to vote in the United States until 1920). For the most part, these new black voters cast their ballots solidly for the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.

When Mississippi rejoined the Union in 1870, former slaves made up more than half of that state's population. During the next decade, Mississippi sent two black U.S. senators to Washington and elected a number of black state officials, including a lieutenant governor. But even though the new black citizens voted freely and in large numbers, whites were still elected to a large majority of state and local offices. This was the pattern in most of the Southern states during Reconstruction.

The Republican-controlled state governments in the South were hardly perfect. Many citizens complained about overtaxation and outright corruption. But these governments brought about significant improvements in the lives of the former slaves. For the first time, black men and women enjoyed freedom of speech and movement, the right of a fair trial, education for their children, and all the other privileges and protections of American citizenship. But all this changed when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops withdrew from the old Confederacy.

Voting in Mississippi

With federal troops no longer present to protect the rights of black citizens, white supremacy quickly returned to the old Confederate states. Black voting fell off sharply in most areas because of threats by white employers and violence from the Ku Klux Klan, a ruthless secret organization bent on preserving white supremacy at all costs.

White majorities began to vote out the Republicans and replace them with Democratic governors, legislators, and local officials. Laws were soon passed banning interracial marriages and racially segregating railroad cars along with the public schools.

Laws and practices were also put in place to make sure blacks would never again freely participate in elections. But one problem stood in the way of denying African Americans the right to vote: the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed them this right. To a great extent, Mississippi led the way in overcoming the barrier presented by the 15th Amendment.

In 1890, Mississippi held a convention to write a new state constitution to replace the one in force since Reconstruction. The white leaders of the convention were clear about their intentions. "We came here to exclude the Negro," declared the convention president. Because of the 15th Amendment, they could not ban blacks from voting. Instead, they wrote into the state constitution a number of voter restrictions making it difficult for most blacks to register to vote.

First, the new constitution required an annual poll tax, which voters had to pay for two years before the election. This was a difficult economic burden to place on black Mississippians, who made up the poorest part of the state's population. Many simply couldn't pay it.

But the most formidable voting barrier put into the state constitution was the literacy test. It required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk who processed voter registrations. This clerk, who was always white, decided whether a citizen was literate or not.

The literacy test did not just exclude the 60 percent of voting-age black men (most of them ex-slaves) who could not read. It excluded almost all black men, because the clerk would select complicated technical passages for them to interpret. By contrast, the clerk would pass whites by picking simple sentences in the state constitution for them to explain.

Mississippi also enacted a "grandfather clause" that permitted registering anyone whose grandfather was qualified to vote before the Civil War. Obviously, this benefited only white citizens. The "grandfather clause" as well as the other legal barriers to black voter registration worked. Mississippi cut the percentage of black voting-age men registered to vote from over 90 percent during Reconstruction to less than 6 percent in 1892. These measures were copied by most of the other states in the South.

Other Forms of Voter Discrimination

By the turn of the century, the white Southern Democratic Party held nearly all elected offices in the former Confederate states. The Southern Republican Party, mostly made up of blacks, barely existed and rarely even ran candidates against the Democrats. As a result, the real political contests took place within the Democratic Party primary elections. Whoever won the Democratic primary was just about guaranteed victory in the general election.

In 1902, Mississippi passed a law that declared political parties to be private organizations outside the authority of the 15th Amendment. This permitted the Mississippi Democratic Party to exclude black citizens from membership and participation in its primaries. The "white primary," which was soon imitated in most other Southern states, effectively prevented the small number of blacks registered to vote from having any say in who got elected to partisan offices--from the local sheriff to the governor and members of Congress.

When poll taxes, literacy tests, "grandfather clauses," and "white primaries" did not stop blacks from registering and voting, intimidation often did the job. An African-American citizen attempting to exercise his right to vote would often be threatened with losing his job. Denial of credit, threats of eviction, and verbal abuse by white voting clerks also prevented black Southerners from voting. When all else failed, mob violence and even lynching kept black people away from the ballot box.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

As a result of intimidation, violence, and racial discrimination in state voting laws, a mere 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote in 1940. In Mississippi, under 1 percent were registered. Most blacks who did vote lived in the larger cities of the South.

By not having the power of the ballot, African Americans in the South had little influence in their communities. They did not hold elected offices. They had no say in how much their taxes would be or what laws would be passed. They had little, if any, control over local police, courts, or public schools. They, in effect, were denied their rights as citizens.

Attempts to change this situation were met with animosity and outright violence. But in the 1950s, the civil rights movement developed. Facing enormous hostility, black people in the South organized to demand their rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. They launched voter registration drives in many Southern communities.

In the early 1960s, black and white protesters, called Freedom Riders, came from the North to join in demonstrations throughout the South. In some places, crowds attacked them while white police officers looked on.

Medgar Evers, the black veteran stopped by a white mob from voting, became a civil rights leader in his native Mississippi. Because of his civil rights activities, he was shot and killed in front of his home by a white segregationist in 1963.

But through the efforts of local civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and other Americans, about 43 percent of adult black men and women were registered to vote in the South by 1964. That same year, the 24th Amendment was ratified. It outlawed poll taxes in federal elections. (The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that all poll taxes are unconstitutional.)

White supremacists, however, still fiercely resisted voting by African Americans. Black voter registration in Alabama was only 23 percent, while in neighboring Mississippi less than 7 percent of voting-age blacks were registered.

A major event in the civil rights movement soon brought an end to voting discrimination. Early in 1965, a county sheriff clamped down on a black voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. Deputies arrested and jailed protesting black teachers and 800 schoolchildren. The leaders of the voter registration drive decided to organize a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama.

On March 7, 1965, about 600 black and white civil rights protesters passed through Selma and began to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge spanning the Alabama River. They were met on the other side by a large force of Alabama state troopers, who ordered the marchers to return to Selma. When the marchers refused to turn back, the troopers attacked, some on horseback, knocking down people and beating them with clubs. This was all filmed by TV news cameras and shown that evening to a shocked American public.

The Selma march pushed the federal government to pass legislation to enforce the right of black citizens to vote. A few days after the violence at Selma, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before a joint session of Congress. Johnson declared, "it is not just Negroes, but it's really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965, suspended literacy and other tests in counties and states showing evidence of voter discrimination. These counties and states also were prohibited from creating new voter requirements that denied citizens their right to vote. Moreover, in the areas covered by the act, federal examiners replaced local clerks in registering voters.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended the practices that had denied African Americans the right to vote in Southern states. Registration of black voters in the South jumped from 43 percent in 1964 to 66 percent by the end of the decade. This represented an increase of more than a million new African American voters who could finally claim their right to vote.

For Discussion and Writing

1. What legal devices did Southern states use to exclude most of their black citizens from voting? What other methods were used to stop blacks from voting?

2. What was unfair about the way literacy tests were used for voter registration in the South from 1890 to 1965?

3. What were the consequences to African Americans of being excluded from voting in the segregated South?

For Further Reading

The Voting Rights Act of 1965: This site displays the full text of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Who Should Not Vote?

All states have some voting restrictions. Are they necessary? Below are five traditional restrictions on the right to vote. Form small groups to decide whether your state should retain each of these restrictions. Before making a decision on each restriction, the group should discuss and write answers to these two questions:

1. What are some reasons favoring the restriction?

2. What are some reasons against the restriction?

After the groups have finished their work, each restriction should be discussed and voted on by the entire class.

Restrictions on the Right to Vote

In order to vote, you must...

A. Reside in a voting district for at least one month.

B. Be at least 18 years of age.

C. Not be in prison or on parole for a felony conviction.

D. Be a U.S. citizen.

E. Register to vote.

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Race and Voting in the Segregated South After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election. But when he and some other black ex-servicemen attempted to vote, a white mob stopped them. "All we wante, After returning home from World War II, veteran Medgar Evers decided to vote in a Mississippi election.

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When Did African Americans Actually Get the Right to Vote?

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The 15th Amendment was supposed to guarantee Black men the right to vote, but exercising that right became another challenge.

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Courtesy U.S. National Archives
Amendments 13-15 are called the Reconstruction Amendments both because they were the first enacted right after the Civil War and because all addressed questions related to the legal and political status of the African Americans.
AMENDMENT XIII
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment.

Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
________________________________________
AMENDMENT XIV
Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.
Note: Article I, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of the 14th amendment.

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
*Changed by section 1 of the 26th amendment.
________________________________________
AMENDMENT XV
Passed by Congress February 26, 1869. Ratified February 3, 1870.

Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude-

Section 2.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

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Amendments 13-15 are called the Reconstruction Amendments both because they were the first enacted right after the Civil War and because all addressed questions related to the legal and political status of the African Americans. AMENDMENT XIII Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified ... Read More(1865) Reconstruction Amendments, 1865-1870

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Note: Author's footnotes have been omitted. Introduction The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner-fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses-Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North-U.S. Steel Corporation-the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12-one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners- many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama-even a child of slaves-could have ever imagined.

Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.

Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.

Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke-the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.

Steel's production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel. Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.

I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.

Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron-all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.

A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery's inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.

The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then "leased" by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired. Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery-a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.

The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: "I guess it's really no surprise." The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way-partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation's most conservative daily newspaper-supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.

As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn't be determined. Official accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources-southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal-and tainted-local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large-seemingly unavoidable-social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources.

Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks-changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity- or loud talk-with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South-operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace-often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina-where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories and mines in the 1850s were also the first to employ forced African American labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves, and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against "slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that suffocated the aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of his life.

Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the rising southern white assault on black independence-even as black leaders increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.-the vast majority of white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the role of blacks in U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have to accept the end of freedom.

On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him. . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case 12007. No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man-even a black child-was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.

Millions of blacks lived in that shadow-as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War.

That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book- especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that steeped the place and era of Green Cottenham's birth; of the obliterating forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single, anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's most authentic and compelling dimension.

Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the boundaries of the burial field, considering even without benefit of his words the stifled horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that Cottenham belonged as the central figure of this narrative. The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this book.
Excerpted from Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Copyright © 2008 by Douglas A. Blackmon. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Untold History of Post-Civil War 'Neoslavery'

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In Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal argues that slavery did not end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. He writes that it continued for another 80 years, in what he calls an "Age of Neoslavery."

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Lynching in America | American Experience | PBS

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Lynching served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social, and political spheres.

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Clear discussion of what it was and why it was...

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Clear discussion of what it was and why it was...

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Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | Article

Sharecropping and Changes in the Southern Economy

Historians discuss labor relations between former slaves and former masters after the Civil War.
What happened to labor on Southern plantations right after the war?

Ed Ayers

Ed Ayers: Perhaps the most fundamental thing that had to be decided the day that slavery ended was what form would labor take now. Slavery is fundamentally a form of extracting labor from unwilling people. Now what's going to happen? You can't wait to find out. This is not an abstract question. The day that freedom comes, it's springtime. It's time to be plowing the fields. It's time to be putting in the seed. It's time to be clearing the ditches. If you don't do it now, it's going to be too late. Soon that hot Southern sun's going to come baking down, and if those plants haven't started, they're never going to start. And if they don't grow, there's nothing to eat. So these are not just sort of things that people can sit around and decide later what they're going to do...

Black Southerners make one thing clear. They're going to work, and they want to work as free people, which does not mean being put in a gang and presided over by a man on horseback with a whip. What they want is what white people had. They want a chance to show what good workers they are; their own families, their own work to be rewarded for what they do. So they go to the former masters and say, "We're ready to work. Let us have our own responsibility for what work we need to do." Masters say, "I don't know that black people will work like that. You know, the whole idea of slavery was, we had to force you to work, and that you would only work if somebody was watching you. And you'd only work if somebody was threatening you. Can I count on you to do that?"
How did landowners and freedmen resolve their differences over labor issues?
Ed Ayers: Well, there's a lot of negotiating and a lot of worry, and a lot of anger going on... It's challenging fundamental ideas of the way things really were... So sometimes a master would say, "Okay, tell you what. You, your family have always been excellent. I'm going to have you work that land over there. Let's see what you can come up with, and I'll pay you a certain amount per day." And they would often get mad, these former masters, when the former slaves would say, "Well, boss, can we put that on paper? Let me have a contract. You know. I need to be sure that we can get paid. Now this is the way they tell me that these Yankee soldiers say that things should be; that up North, when you work for somebody else, you have a contract, and you say right at the outset how much it's going to be, how much you pay." And the white men would be furious... "You're doubting my word? You're doubting that if I say that I will pay you, that I will?" Former slaves [would say], "Well, I'd just feel better if we had a contract." And often the Freedmen's Bureau agent is insisting on it. And so they go, the white man and the black man together, to the Freedmen's Bureau agent, and he would write out the contract. White Southerner would be seething at this notion. But he needs the work. All the land in the South is not worth anything if there's not anybody to work it. You've still got to pay taxes on it, still got to feed yourselves. If you're going to get back on your feet, [you've got to] have work. So this is what goes on in 1865, these kinds of elaborate kinds of deals.
Why did many Southern blacks stay on the land where they'd been slaves?

Nell Painter

Nell Painter: The freed people believed that land was important because they were a rural people. They were peasants. And working land was what they did. I should add that most Southerners were rural people, and saw land as of crucial importance. So you have land, you have labor. But the difference was that the freed people wanted to farm for themselves. So they saw their own land as a means of having a stake in society. They often talked about living and working under their own vine and fig tree. And that was real freedom...

The difference between what the freed people wanted and what the federal policy offered was that the federal policy was temporary, and what freed people wanted was permanent. They almost never got any land, either through federal action or through state action. Freed people did get land, but by and large it was through working it themselves. That was a minority of Southern black farmers. Most of them turned into tenants and sharecroppers. The land crisis in the South endured throughout the 19th century, and affected more than black farmers. Black and white farmers became progressively less landed over the period of the late 19th century. So black and white farmers did not own their land, and the proportion of land-owning Southern farmers decreased.
How did the idea of sharecropping originate?
Ed Ayers: After [freedmen] begin to get that one crop in the ground, they can tell, they're going to have to work something on a more stable basis. So these same really hardworking black families say, "Tell you want we want to do. We want to have some land of our own that we have responsibility for. And we want to work it and get the benefit of our hard work...You've never seen anybody work as hard as we will, if my own family gets this fruit of my labor." And the master says, "Well, you know, I don't have any cash." There is no money in the South. "But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a share of the crop, if you produce it. I'll supply the land, I'll supply the mule, I'll supply the plow and the seed. You supply the work. And then at the end of the year, we'll share a crop." And the former slaves, "Well, that sounds better than a gang. And that does reward me and my family for the hard work we're going to do. And that means that we might have some money at the end of the year. We might come out ahead. Now, it does mean that you'll loan us money along the way for the food or medicine that we might need. Right? Because you're waiting. There's no money changing hands here. You're going to wait till the end of the year and it's all done. But in the meantime, right, you'll be loaning us the things that we need?" "Yes, we can do that."

Nobody ever signs a law says "Sharecropping is invented," but it's invented over and over and over again across this vast expanse of the South, as these kinds of bargains are struck.
Could freed slaves succeed as sharecroppers?
Ed Ayers: Few years go by, during Reconstruction, different kinds of bargains might be struck. "Boss, I've got my own mule. I've got my own plow. I'll put five of my children in the field." Or "Look at the crop we produced last year. It was the biggest you had. You give us more land to sharecrop on. And if we do any of those things, we might get a larger share of the crop." So that's one of the things that might happen. People who are fortunate could find that sharecropping had actually worked to their benefit.

More often, black families with the wives and children working in the fields, using a white man's mule, plow, work all year long, and they come up to the end of it, and they're ready to go get their share of the crop, their share of the money, and they go to the former master, and they're ready, and he says, "Well, you've all got a good crop in this year, but you know, remember when I loaned you that money for that medicine for your little girl? And I see here that you got a dress back there in December, and you know, I'm afraid that when we add up all that food that I loaned you money for, that you didn't quite cover it, and you still owe me some money. But I tell you what I'm going to do. We'll [make] the same arrangement again this year. Maybe you can work your way out of it." And the black people think, "We worked this entire year, and we have nothing to show for it? All we've done is keep ourselves alive? All those nights we're working out there by the light of the moon, and all the times when my wife was just too sick to come out there but she did anyway, and we don't have anything? We have less than anything? But what choice do we have? Okay. We'll do it again this year. Maybe we'll have better luck this year. Maybe that rain will come at the right time this year. Maybe we'll get a bigger crop in. Maybe the prices will bounce back a little bit." So they did it again. At the end of the year, very often, "I'm sorry. The rains didn't come." Or, "The prices in New Orleans are down. I'm afraid you still owe me money. And you're going to have to stay here. You can't leave. If you owe me money, the sheriff is going to come get you if you try to leave." So we're sharecropping, but what that's turned out to mean is that you're still on the same land that you were on as a slave, and you can't leave until you get yourself out of debt.
Why wasn't sharecropping more profitable?

Eric Foner

Eric Foner: [The] larger economic context... is very disadvantageous. Cotton prices are falling. World demand for cotton is slowing. The credit system in the South, based on the so-called "crop lien" (whereby people borrow money pledging the future cotton crop as their collateral to a merchant), leads to over-production of cotton and further declines in the price. So it is not a vehicle that enables people to move ahead. It's not a vehicle for improvement. Very often the sharecropper is in debt at the end of the year, and continues in debt year after year. So it does give black families far more independence than they had as slaves, or even as gang laborers or something like that, but it certainly doesn't fully give them the economic independence that they have wanted, coming out of slavery.
Did sharecropping keep freed slaves in poverty permanently?
Ed Ayers: One of the miracles of the Reconstruction era and the period that follows is that despite the fact of having been slaves, and despite the fact of starting with nothing, nothing, that through their hard work, [freed slaves] were able to scrimp and save and buy a little bit of land for themselves, and build a better future for their children. They educate their children somehow, out of all this. How could they afford to do that? Just through sacrifice.

So we don't want to let the story of subjugation and poverty so overwhelm us that we don't understand that despite all those things, that African Americans in the South were able to fight their way up into a better life for themselves and their families.
How did the changes in black labor affect white workers?
Nell Painter: Sometimes white employers said, "Well, I've had so much trouble with these black people, I'm going to employ white people." So white people had a real opening into the labor market in 1865, in a way they hadn't. And it turns out that they acted in the labor market very much the way other people did. So poor white women were no more anxious to do housework than poor black women. And what that did was raise wages...

There were many more skilled black people in 1865 than there were skilled white people. And when skilled work became wage work, then white workers moved into that niche... We know that there was a good deal of violence around skilled work. And it was violence that finally got a lot of black people out of skilled work. In the railroad business, for instance, there was a series of hate strikes and attacks, so that by the early 20th century, black workers' role in railroad work was as Pullman porters or as helpers to mechanics and so forth. So they could no longer be engineers and that sort of thing.

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Sharecropping and Changes in the Southern Economy | American Experience | PBS

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Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | Article Historians discuss labor relations between former slaves and former masters after the Civil War. What happened to labor on Southern plantations right after the war? Ed Ayers: Perhaps the most fundamental thing that had to be decided the day that slavery ended was what form would labor take now.

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After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of Black people were forced into what authors have termed "slavery by another name" until the 1930s.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but explicitly exempted those convicted of crime. In response, Southern state legislatures quickly passed "Black Codes" - new laws that explicitly applied only to Black people and subjected them to criminal prosecution for "offenses" such as loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. Crafted to ensnare Black people and return them to chains, these laws were effective; for the first time in U.S. history, many state penal systems held more Black prisoners than white - all of whom could be leased for profit.

Industrialization, economic shifts, and political pressure ended widespread convict leasing by World War II, but the Thirteenth Amendment's dangerous loophole still permits the enslavement of prisoners who continue to work without pay in various public and private industries. As recently as 2010, a federal court held that "prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution."

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After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions.

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The Modern Day Connection - Don't  miss this!

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The Modern Day Connection - Don't  miss this!

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Convict Leasing | Black History in Two Minutes or So