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2. Maintaining White Dominance during Reconstruction
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63 2 Maintaining White Dominance during Reconstruction “This civil rights bill . . . is trifling. You talk about giving these [black] people the right to go to the theater, when there is not one of them in a hundred who knows what they are.” —Representative James Blount of Georgia, 18751 A F T E R T H E C I V I L War, slavery ended in name only. Black servitude continued , as vagrancy laws and laws governing black apprentices were clever strategies to perpetuate slavery. Sharecropping and strategies to reduce black field hands to economic dependency precluded a genuine free labor system. The Civil War may have ended formal slavery, but it also set in motion a new racial schism of white superiority/black inferiority and black separation. The period between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction at the turn of the 19th century reflected the initiation of white resistance to government efforts to reduce racial inequality. While slavery’s demise would require new institutions and mechanisms to ensure maintenance of the three cornerstones of the paradigm, white superiority /black inferiority, black separation, and black victimization would continue, primarily through massive white resistance to change. At the end of the Civil War, supporters of the Confederacy were even more committed to ensuring that whites maintained the same level of privileges. Courts in southern states had endorsed notions of white superiority in cases like Mann,2 Hudgins,3 and Punch,4 which set the stage for Reconstruction-era lawmakers to create policies that treated blacks more harshly than whites. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery in name only, as most southern state governments instituted the Black Codes—laws directed at newly freed blacks—effectively reenslaving them. The Black Codes5 subjected blacks to vagrancy and curfew laws in an attempt to reenslave them through convict labor provisions once they were convicted and sentenced to prison. With the Confederate military 64 Creating the Paradigm disbanded in defeat, and the southern economy in chaos, unemployment rates were high. In this difficult economy, it was not a crime for whites to be unemployed, but it was for blacks. Under the codes, a black person could be arrested simply for being unemployed.6 Once convicted, blacks were required to perform subservient labor tasks as they had done previously as slaves.7 Moreover, the Black Codes applied to all blacks irrespective of whether they were former slaves or free blacks, making their physically apparent race, not their former slave status, the reason for their harsh treatment.8 The Black Codes were one of the core reasons why, despite slavery’s demise, subsequent amendments were required to grant blacks rights following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to newly freed slaves along with a right to “due process” and “equal protection of the laws.”9 In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment passed, prohibiting race discrimination in voting.10 The latter two amendments granted Congress the authority to enforce these rights through “appropriate legislation” that restrained the sovereign power of the states.11 These Reconstruction Amendments, and accompanying congressional enforcement statutes,12 prohibited the Black Codes and other forms of economic and political race discrimination prevalent at the time. Yet, resistance to the letter and spirit of these laws by many southern whites would cause many northern whites to reduce and relinquish support for blacks, culminating in new practices that reinforced the racial paradigm. Black Hope Begins Even before the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, blacks had reason to be hopeful as the Civil War drew to a close. As blacks gained their freedom through military liberation by Union forces, they began establishing small private schools.13 Toward the end of the Civil War, Union major general Nathaniel P. Banks had established a Board of Education to organize and govern the spread of such schools.14 At the war’s end, 95 schools were operating under the board, with 162 teachers instructing 9,571 children and 2,000 adults.15 By 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal government agency created a few months earlier to assist freed slaves with education , employment, and subsistence, assumed control over a majority of this school system throughout the southern states.16 [35.175.232.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:17 GMT) Maintaining White Dominance 65 As Freedmen’s Bureau private schools began to open in the South after the Civil War, large numbers of...