Catching up to 2019

Let’s wind up this long trip through American history.  It’s not pretty, but it’s ours. 

Though he survived impeachment and remained in the White House, Andrew Johnson would not be elected to a second term in 1868 , would not even be nominated  by either party.  Johnson lost his political base.  Popular Union General Ulysses S. Grant, a moderate Republican, not a radical, won the Republican nomination for president, and was elected over the Democratic candidate, former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who campaigned as the “white man’s candidate.”

Listen to an excerpt from Seymour’s speech to the New York State Democratic Convention delivered on March 11, 1868. 

…”(black people) are in form, color, and character unlike the whites and are, in their present condition, an ignorant and degraded race.”

Seymour criticized post-war congressional civil rights laws that prohibited racial discrimination and established equal citizenship rights.  White terror groups, the biggest of which was the Ku Klux Klan, suppressed the black vote in hopes of delivering  the South for Seymour and the Democrats by carrying out  violent attacks in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia which resulted in hundreds of deaths and successfully prevented black people from casting a single vote in many counties with significant black populations.

The Democratic strategy was to carry the South and gain enough white votes in the North to capture the Presidency.  However, the Republicans, by moderating, and slowing their rhetoric for equality of African Americans, carried most of the Southern states and stayed in power. 

The Klan retreated.  Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford called for its dissolution, claiming its mission had been highjacked by “rogue elements.”  That was a refrain which became common among Klan leaders seeking to distance themselves from the extreme violence they encouraged.  While the Klan partially disbanded as a unified political organization, local entities continued to seek its goals, enforcing white supremacist social mores and economic structures through bloodshed and intimidation.

Varied white groups took up the cause of restoring labor discipline in the absence of slavery.  Vigilantes whipped and lynched black freedmen who argued with employers, left plantations where they were contracted to work, or displayed any economic success of their own. 

But primarily, and even more destructive, was the intense energy white terror groups focused on imposing their own vision of a righteous society, which usually meant targeting black men for perceived sexual transgressions against white women.  Thus, the huge number of lynchings for routinely fabricated rape charges, often exaggerated from minor violations of the social code such as “paying a compliment” to a white woman and other small transgressions.  Through these acts of violence, white vigilantes used terror to revive the privileges of white masculinity over the bodies of their former slaves.

At crucial times in the history of our country we have always maintained hope that the courts will provide a counterbalance to the worst of our instincts as political partisans.  A case in Louisiana filed  against white perpetrators of murder against blacks, in a famous riot called the Colfax Massacres, made its way through the courts and promised to test the 14^th Amendment, adopted in 1868.  That amendment addresses the equal protection and rights of former slaves by limiting the action of state and local officials.  It also addresses due process, which prevents citizens from being illegally deprived of life, liberty, or property. 

Charges of violence against African Americans were brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1875, also called the Enforcement Act, which was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant.  The Enforcement act made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive a citizen of his constitutional rights and allowed the federal government to prosecute any crime committed as part of such a conspiracy.  Authorities in this case charged white defendants in the Colfax Massacre with capital offenses, subject to the death penalty, for murdering black people.  Despite overwhelming evidence one defendant was acquitted and no decision was reached on any others.  The case was scheduled for retrial. 

But before retrial of the case, the defense questioned whether the federal court had jurisdiction to hear the case at all, arguing that the Enforcement Act was unconstitutional as applied to private persons who were not state actors.  In the ensuing trial the judge ruled the Enforcement Act was unconstitutional and dismissed the indictments, prompting an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court accepted the case, United States v. Cruikshank, and decided in 1876 that the 14^th amendment “prohibits a State from depriving any person of life liberty or property without due process, but adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another.”  That meant that the 14^th amendment only applied to actions of the State, not against violence perpetrated by individuals.  The power of the federal government was “limited to enforcement of this guaranty.” 

As a result, the Enforcement Act was a dead letter only a year after being enacted.  African Americans in the South were left at the mercy of white terrorists, so long as the terrorists were acting as private citizens and not under the authority of the State.

Enforcement Act trials throughout the South had been halted pending the Supreme Court appeal.  When Cruikshank was decided the Justice Department dropped 179 prosecutions in Mississippi alone.  Violence continued to spread, and increasingly, attacks on African Americans in the South were carried out by undisguised men in broad daylight.

Reconstruction was essentially over.  Going forward, Southern state governments experienced little federal oversight.  Congress returned full civil rights to Confederate leaders and restored their eligibility to hold public office.  A proposal in Congress to discipline Georgia for violence and corruption in the 1879 election was defeated by a five day filibuster in the Senate.  Northern support for federal intervention on behalf of black people living in the South diminished considerably. 

Former Confederate General Jamel L. Kemper was inaugurated as Governor of Virginia in 1874.  He delivered an address to the General Assembly that same year outlining the racial regime he intended to create in the state.  Here is an excerpt from that speech.

“Henceforth, let is be understood of all, that the political equality of the races is settled, and the social equality of the races is a settled impossibility.  Let it be understood of all, that any organized attempt on the part of the weaker and relatively diminishing race to dominate the domestic governments, is the wildest chimera of political insanity.  Let each race settle down in the final resignation to the lot to which the logic of events has inexorably consigned it.”

Former Confederate Colonel James Milton Smith, elected governor of Georgia in 1872, said this in an 1876 interview published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the status of black people-then 46% of his state’s population.

“Well, the loss of slaves was a severe blow to the south.  Still we should be just as well off without them were the negro race less indolent and unreliable.  They are constitutionally an idle, thriftless race, always depending on the whites for everything, and it will take a century of education before they can be brought up to the standard that will make them in any degree useful members of the community.”

Meanwhile the courts continued to disappoint those Americans who once hoped for equality and justice for black people.  An 1896 ruling by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation as fully consistent with the 14^th amendment and upheld the legality of the separate but equal doctrine for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality. 

In doing so the Supreme Court gave great deference to American state legislature’s inherent power to make laws regulating health, safety, and morals (the “police power”) and to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed.  In reality, segregated public facilities, in particular segregated schools, were anything but equal in quality.  In nearly all facets of public life black Americans in the South were doomed to receive inferior services, inferior treatment, and second-class citizenship.

With those sentiments being voiced by political leaders, and court rulings allowing discrimination, is it any wonder white people in America felt justified in their racist attitudes?  Can you now understand why Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, black pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, who emerged from the rubble of the parsonage next door, which had been blown to bits by sixteen sticks of dynamite on Christmas night 1956 , approached a white policeman on the scene and told him to “go tell your Ku Klux Klan brethren I wasn’t raised to run?”

Reverend Shuttlesworth and that police officer both knew who he was talking about.  Ku Klux Klan members weren’t unknown at all.  In fact, both men knew not only who carried out the bombing but the city official who supported and most likely directed, with a wink and a nod, that terrorist act.  Who were the killers in the South?  Who perpetrated terrorist violence for a hundred years after the civil war?  People like Robert Chambliss, whose terrorist acts earned him the nickname “dynamite Bob.”

Gary May, a professor of history at the University of Delaware and the author of Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy, by researching declassified government files and interviewing still living players in the drama which played out in Birmingham, describes it this way.

“What was unusual about the crime is that authorities quickly identified the men responsible for building and placing the bomb: they were members of a radical Klan splinter group called the Cahaba River Boys, led by Robert Chambliss.

Chambliss first joined the Klan when he was twenty years old, reportedly after watching The Birth of A Nation, and during the next twenty-seven years, rose to become Exalted Cyclops of the Robert E. Lee Klavern.  He resigned in 1951 because of ‘unfavorable publicity,’ he later said, the result of his ‘one-man war’ against blacks, Catholics, and Jews.  In the mines and quarries of Alabama, he learned about dynamite and, in 1947, first used it to destroy the home of a black man who legally won the right to move into a white neighborhood.  Chambliss had found his life’s work.  In 1956, he bombed Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church and by the end of the decade was responsible for most of Birmingham’s bombings.  His friendship with long time City Commissioner Bull Connor won him a job in the city garage and protected him from prosecution for his numerous crimes.”

Eugene “Bull” Connor, former Democratic member of the Alabama House of Representatives, served as an elected Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham for twenty years.  He oversaw the fire and police departments, directed the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against civil rights activists, including children, and became an international symbol of institutional racism.

Why did it take so long to imprison the men responsible for the rash of bombings in Birmingham?  In the case of 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four young black girls were killed while attending Sunday School, FBI agents found several eyewitnesses who could place Chambliss and the others at the church at around 2:00 a.m., eight hours before the bomb exploded.  Two members of Chambliss’ own family, his niece and sister-in-law, heard him make incriminating statements and were willing to testify at trial.  However, despite the urging of local FBI field agents to present evidence to the local prosecutor and U.S. Attorney, neither of whom had knowledge of the evidence gained by the FBI, Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to share information.  Twice he turned down his agents requests to push the case to trial.  Here is a quote from Hoover found in declassified files: 

“From an evaluation of the evidence received thus far, the chance of successful prosecution in State or Federal Court is very remote.”  

Hoover, and many others believed strongly, and perhaps correctly, that no Alabama jury would convict white men, even for the murder of black children.  They were not prosecuted until 1977, five years after Hoover’s death, and twelve years after the crime was committed.  That was the depth of moral depravity in America when it came to race in the 1960’s.  Where are we now?

I know where I am.  I am on Route 83 about a mile from Interstate 65.  Just beyond the overpass I’d hit a town called Evergreen, where I would pick up Route 31, red and thick on the map, which would take me to Brewton, then East Brewton.  That would be my last road change.  A thin road, gray on the map, Route 41, would finally take me out of Alabama.  It was evening.  I’d have to drive in the dark to Pensacola, but I didn’t mind.  My stomach told me it was time to find a restaurant.  I saw a low building in the distance with something sticking out of the roof.  As I got closer it appeared to be the tail end of a small airplane.  The building was plastered with old signs.  Centered over the door was the name of the place in large letters: The Shack.  How can I not stop?