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1 From Reconstruction to the Nadir, 1867–1908 African Americans in Atlanta emerged from bondage in much the same fashion as freedpersons throughout the South. Most were economically destitute and illiterate; their basic needs in food and shelter and some rudimentary education were provided by the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern missionary societies. But by 1867, a school that would soon become the city’s first institution of black higher education—Atlanta University—was founded. Before the end of the century, five other schools with the goal of providing higher education for blacks were also established in the city. Thus, in short order the largest center for the higher education of blacks in the world had been established in Atlanta. The Atlanta University Center (AUC), as it came to be called, was the catalyst for the development of substantial black middle and upper classes in the city. The core of this group consisted of educators (in both the lower schools and higher education), ministers, businessmen, and small shopkeepers .By the early twentieth century,a black business center,including insurance companies and banks, was centered on Auburn Avenue in northeast Atlanta. That street, later dubbed “Sweet Auburn Avenue” by an African American Masonic and political leader, John Wesley Dobbs, had earned a reputation, by the 1950s, as“the richest Negro street in the world.”1 Although, compared to other places, the black middle and upper classes in Atlanta seemed large, the vast majority of African Americans in the city remained in poverty or were among the working poor.And,although class lines were blurred because of a common sharing of the burdens of the racial caste system, occasionally the black working class had to stand up, virtually alone, for its social and economic interests. Such was the case in 1881, when a group of African American washerwomen staged a strike against low wages and poor working conditions. Although they won concessions, they continued to press for improved conditions, even threatening to stage a labor protest during the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States International Exposition. Nevertheless, the existence of a professional and business class provided men and women who were highly literate and often economically independent—a class that 13 From Reconstruction to the Nadir, 1867–1908 could hope to take advantage of the new political opportunities that Radical Republicans offered them in the post-Emancipation South.2 Following the passage by Congress of the ReconstructionActs of 1867,new constitutions went into effect in the southern states that permitted blacks to vote freely. In the spring of 1867, General John Pope, the first commander of the military district of Georgia, appointed registrars. He encouraged eligible blacks to register to vote. Blacks throughout the state held several meetings in anticipation of the fall elections. They divided themselves into parties and adopted platforms. In Augusta, for example, one thousand blacks organized and gave their support to the Union Republican Party. An even larger crowd assembled at Macon, where the black Union chaplain Henry McNealTurner was one of the speakers . In an address described by the Macon Telegraph as the best of all those delivered, Turner said he would ask no more for his own race than he was willing to grant to whites. But John T. Costin, a visiting black Republican from Washington, D.C., was less charitable toward whites, saying he had “no use” for them. Nevertheless, several white men attended the meeting. In October, thousands of blacks actually registered, although, in the end, they were slightly outnumbered by white registrants. In the elections themselves, blacks flocked to the polls in large numbers. At least two thousand voted in Savannah, and several hundred cast ballots in Atlanta. Here, as elsewhere, blacks generally voted with “carpetbaggers” and“scalawags” for the new constitutional conventions. Other than the“scalawags ,” only a few native whites participated in the balloting. In the state, 170 delegates were elected to the convention, including 32 blacks. The more prominent of these were Aaron A. Bradley from the Savannah area; Henry McNeal Turner of Macon; and Tunis G. Campbell, a Canadian who had earlier attempted to establish a black government on St. Catherine Island.3 When the convention gathered in Atlanta on December 9, 1867, the black delegates,who were,“with but few exceptions,”well dressed and well behaved, first turned their attention to laws requiring imprisonment for nonpayment of debt. Under these laws, freedmen and other convicted persons could be forced to work on state projects or hired out to private individuals...

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