How did Black Southerners respond to the rising tide of racism and to attempts to disfranchise them and impose segregation?

The denial of land ownership forced blacks to become sharecroppers, tenants (renters), and contract labourers, under a system known as peonage.  Under the sharecropping system, a family committed itself to producing a crop on land it did not own.  Under normal circumstances, the two parties agreed upon sharing the harvest for the year of the contract, usually one-third for the cropper family and two-thirds for the landowner, who provided seeds, fertilizer, draft animals, and food and clothing for the cropping family.  However, the illiteracy of most former slaves and the caprice of many planters ensured abuse and exploitation.

Southern politicians, anxious about re-election began a policy of rabble-rousing and black baiting.  The result saw the notorious Jim Crow laws become standard practice; blacks were rigidly excluded from voting, through such devices as the grandfather clause, the white primary and the poll tax.

The case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, led to segregation in all public facilities and a complete disregard for the 14th amendment.

Disfranchisement of the black community meant that the 15th amendment was ignored.  The amendment was meant to guarantee the continuation of black suffrage, however the southern states simply ignored the political ideals pushed upon it from the north.  Poll taxes and literacy tests helped undermine the amendment and at the same time grant power to the white man.

As a new century approached it was clear that Reconstruction had failed the Afro-American.  It became obvious that the civil war had greatly increased the bitter antebellum struggles.  Emancipation raised a myriad of social, economic, and political questions, the answers to which would have profound effects on the future of the black community. A well-organized political machine was beyond the capabilities of the black community, however black southerners did respond to the rising tide of racism in a number of ways.

By the time of the 1870 national census, the outlines of the freed families were beginning to emerge.  Some 91 per cent of the freed persons lived in the rural South.  Largely illiterate and poor, they nonetheless shared among themselves, their kin, and neighbours the joys and pains of work.

The nuclear family that was the usual late-nineteenth-century family form began evolving within the context of a larger flexible family network that included neighbours who were often related and for periods lived within families’ households.  Many African Americans lived in small clusters consisting of circles of relatives inhabiting a given locality.  Thus, the atmosphere of the time was one of affiliation, a community spirit existed that helped promote the black cause and at the same time offered protection.

The end of the Confederacy similarly emancipated the black church.  The African Methodist Episcopal Church founded in Philadelphia by Richard Allen in 1787 represented the antebellum expression of blacks’ religious independence.  However, the emergence of the black church as a separate institution had to await the end of slavery, since white southerners sought to maintain control over African Americans’ worship, for both religious and social reasons.  Once emancipation had been installed by the victorious North, the church began to play an increasingly vital role in the black community.  Once established, black churches spread rapidly throughout the South.  Because of their decentralized structure, the Baptist churches led in this proliferation.

As the number of Baptist churches grew, they met regularly in regional conventions that then evolved into statewide and national organizations.  By 1866 enough independent black Baptist churches existed in North Carolina to form a state convention, and by 1870 all the former Confederate states had similar organizations.  By 1895, the various Baptist associations had formed the National Baptist Convention of America, representing 3 million African American Baptists, primarily in the South.  The development of religious observance in church was a major weapon in fighting racism.  The church encapsulated elements of African ritual, slave emotionalism, southern pathos, and individual eloquence.  The result was a combination of African and European forms of religious expression to produce a unique version of worship that reflected the anguish, pain, and occasional elation of nineteenth-century black life in the United States.  Prayer and song were the most vital parts of the sermon; the congregation would show their devotion through song, after the preacher delivered a sermon that was relevant to the day.

Education was the only way for the black community to rid themselves of their servile history and at the same time promote themselves on a political stage.  Booker T. Washington poignantly has described the desperate desire of the newly emancipated slaves to acquire the rudiments of education:

Grown men studied their alphabets in the fields, holding the “bluebook speller” with one hand while they guided the plough with the other.  Mothers tramped scores of miles to towns where they could place their children in school.  Pine torches illuminated the dirt-floored cabins where men, women and children studied far into the night.  

When African American legislators took their place in the state capitals during Reconstruction, they made education their main priority.  Two goals were key to their political agenda; to establish publicly funded primary schools to teach basic skills, and second to create colleges to educate teachers to serve in these schools.  The latter goal proved easier.  Prior to the Civil War, only two black colleges (Wilberforce in Ohio and Lincoln in Pennsylvania) had existed.  Between 1865 and 1870, however, nearly thirty black colleges were created, including Howard University (1867) and Hampton Institute (1868).

Yet the decline of black political power following Reconstruction meant that education took on even greater importance, as many blacks and whites came to believe that blacks’ rights would be restored only after the former slaves had been properly schooled.  

Thus, various white philanthropic groups like the Julius Rosenwald Fund supported thousands of black public schools.  Furthermore, John D. Rockefeller gave millions to Fisk, Hampton, Tuskegee, and other institutions.

Black colleges also sprang from black efforts, the church donations that created Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, came from the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

In the early 19th century, African Americans were routinely vilified on the pages of the mainstream press and had no way to respond.  By the winter of 1827, an outraged community had had enough; three blacks gathered on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan and decided that they, too, would use the press as a weapon.  The Freedom’s Journal was the first publication to be published by African Americans.  This paved the way for a great incursion of publications available to the African American.

Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, over 500 black newspapers began publication.  Many of the papers borrowed printing presses from black churches.  Many lasted only a short while, however they appeared throughout the country, in cities like Omaha, Indianapolis, Cleveland and San Francisco.

Once Reconstruction ended the newspapers were able to maintain a foothold, they did, however, have to be cautious.

The failure of Reconstruction had another significant effect on the African American community.  Leaders organized various migrations from the South, to Kansas, Colorado, California, Montana, and Oklahoma.  These movements were very much political in origin, because their goal was more than to homestead the land.  The aim was to locate to a place where blacks could develop their lands and resources unmolested.

In the early 1880’s, Edward McCabe led nearly 40,000 blacks to Oklahoma.  McCabe was convinced that Oklahoma would be a more suitable place for the African American.  The southern climate and Indian population seemed to be an enticing option.

The migration to Oklahoma was the largest political migration of blacks to the West, but every Western state and territory received some African Americans.  By 1900, more than 145,000 blacks had settled in the sixteen western states and territories excluding Texas.

In sum, the southern blacks responded by grouping together and forming their own close-knit communities.  At the centre of this new community was the church. The church was the cornerstone of the battle against racism, without the church, the political success gained in later years would not have happened.  African Americans created their own salvation through the church.  Worship, song, and dance may seem trivial in the grander scheme but they carried the Negro race through the hardships of post Civil War Reconstruction.  Education and the exploitation of the press would not have been available without the support of the church.  The reverence the clergymen were held in was unprecedented.  This is seen by the emergence of Martin Luther King years later.

Word count: 1,988

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. Litwack, Been in the storm so long: The aftermath of slavery (Routledge 1979)

J. M. Bloom, Class, Race and the civil rights movement (New York 1987)

A. Morris, The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change (Scribner New York)

A. Davis & H. Woodman, Conflict and Consensus in American history (Houghton Mifflin Company 1997)

Q. Taylor, The emergence of Afro-American communities in the Pacific Northwest: 1865-1910 in Black communities and urban race relations in American history, edited by K. L. Kusmer, (1991)

H. Gutman, The black family in slavery and freedom, 1750-1925 (Harper & Row 1976)

E. Lincoln & L. Mamiya, The black church in the African American experience (Penguin books 1990) p238

A. Taylor, Travail and Triumph: black life and culture in the South since the Civil War (Chicago 1976)

H. Bond, The education of the Negro in the American social order (New York 1934) p23 found at  

The black press: Soldiers without swords – transcript, found at  p2.  This is a publication to promote black history on the Internet.

J. Grossman, Land of hope: Chicago, black southerners, and the great migration (Free Press 1990)

J. M. Bloom, Class, Race and the civil rights movement (New York 1987)

 

 

 

 

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