Guided Readings: African Americans after Slavery

Reading 1

All freedmen . . . over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling with freedmen . . . shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding in the crease of a freedman . . . fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars, and imprisoned at the discretion of the court. . . .

And in case of any freedman . . . shall fail for five days after the imposition of any fine . . . for violation of this act . . . it shall be . . . the duty of the sheriff . . . to hire out said freedman . . . to any person who will, for the shortest period of service, pay said fines. . . .

—Mississippi Black Code, 1865

Reading 2

This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism . . . its peculiar objects being . . . to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless, from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers. . . .

Interrogations to Be Asked

5th. Are you opposed to Negro equality, both social and political?
6th. Are you in favor of a white man’s government in this country?

—Principles of the Ku Klux Klan

Reading 3

These men are not only armed, disciplined, oath-bound members of the Confederate army, but they work in disguise; and their instruments are terror and crime. . . . They pretended, I believe, in the outset to be representative ghosts of the Confederate dead . . . and they terrified men, women and children, white and black. . . . They are secret, oath-bound; they murder, rob, plunder, whip, and scourge; and they commit these crimes, not upon the high and lofty, but upon the lowly, upon the poor, upon feeble men and women who are utterly defenseless.

—Senator John Sherman on the Ku Klux Klan, 1871

Reading 4

It is assumed that the power of Congress [includes the] authority for declaring by law that all persons shall have equal accommodations and privileges in all inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement; the argument being that the denial of such equal accommodations and privileges is in itself a subjection to a species of servitude within the meaning of the [Thirteenth] amendment. . . .

Can the act of a mere individual, the owner of the train, the public conveyance, or place of amusement, refusing the accommodation, be justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery. . . . We are forced to the conclusion that such an act if refusal has nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude. Mere discriminations on account of race [is] not regarded as badges of slavery.

—Supreme Court invalidates the postwar Civil Rights Act in the Civil Rights Cases, 1883

Reading 5

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. . . . The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the Negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. . . .

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

—Supreme Court upholds segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

Reading 6

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. . . . But in view of the Constitution...there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respects of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

—Justice John Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

Reading 7

I do not think it was ever intended by the Creator that the two races should live together upon equal terms. . . . One or the other must rule. The people of the South tried to share with the Negro the government of the country after the war, but the Negro declined to share with the white man. Black heels rested cruelly upon white necks for many years after the close of the war. The white man endured the Negro’s misrule, his insolence, impudence, and infamy. He suffered his criminal incapacity to govern until the public domain had been well-nigh squandered and the public treasury looted. . . . We invoked the law of self-preservation; we arose in the might of an outraged race and . . . the southern white man drove from power the scalawag, the carpetbagger, and the incompetent Negro.

—James K. Vardaman, 1914

Reading 8

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. . . .

You [white Southerners] can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. . . . In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

—Booker T. Washington, 1895

Reading 9

As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years that have occurred:

1. The disenfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propagandas, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903

Reading 10

I believe Booker T. Washington’s heart is right, but that in fawning, cringing and groveling before the white man he has cost his race their rights, and that twenty years hence, as he looks back and sees the harm his course has done his race, he will be brokenhearted over it

—Charles Satchel Morris, 1906

Reading 11

While most of us were agonizing over the Negro’s relation to the State and his political fortunes, Booker Washington saw that there was a great economic empire that needed to be conquered. He saw an emancipated race chained to the soil by the Mortgage Crop System, and other devices, and he said, “You must own your own farms”—and forthwith there was a second emancipation. He saw the industrial trades and skilled labor pass from our race into other hands. he said, “The hands as well as the head must be educated.”

—William Henry Lewis, 1915