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Hello and welcome to African Elements. In this episode, Did the Civil War End Slavery?:
An Assessment of the Reconstruction. Despite President Lincolnís initial apprehension,
African Americans fought in the Civil War and made significant sacrifices and contributions
in the war effort. As with all wars ñ past and present ñ they did so with the hopes
of improving their social standing in a country in which north and south, they were in the
words of distinguished Princeton University professor Cornel West, ìsubject to random
violence and terror ñ and hated for who they were.î In this episode, we will assess fruits
of that struggle. What did ìfreedomî mean for former slaves? How did black women fare
in the period of reconstruction? Finally, how did the reality of emancipation stack
up against the aspirations of African Americans who fought and sacrificed during the Civil
War? All that, coming up next. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, the
first real gains African Americans experienced as the United States was being reconstructed
are what are commonly called ìThe Reconstruction Amendments.î These are the thirteenth, fourteenth
and fifteenth amendments to the constitution. The thirteenth amendment stated in part that
ìNeither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United StatesÖî The wording
here is very important. Significantly, it goes on to say ìÖ except as punishment for
a crime.î Two things are significant about this amendment. First, the root of the problem
that the United States had been experiencing since the Constitution was ratified. That
is, the framers of the constitution never saw fit to address the issue of slavery in
any way. There were vague references, but if you were to do a search of the constitution
you would find that neither the word ìblackî nor the word ìslaveryî appear in the entire
document. That is the reason why conflict arose every time there was any type of territorial
gain. There was simply no constitutional way to deal with the question of whether or not
any new land cessions would be free or slave territories. With the 13th amendment, constitutional
issue, was put to rest, and for the first time the word ìslaveryî enters the constitution.
Secondly, the words, ìexcept as punishment for a crime,î are going to set up former
slaves for a form of ìinvoluntary servitude" that, while technically not slavery, is going
to provide a mechanism for transitioning African Americans from the slave plantations to the
prison chain gang. The rise of the convict lease system will be discussed later.
The 14th Amendment to the constitution provided for citizenship for former slaves and equal
treatment and protection under the law. The three main impacts of the 14th Amendments
that I will discuss here are with regard to citizenship, the 3/5 clause and civil rights.
Number 1, the question of citizenship was effectively put to rest. At the nationís
founding, citizenship was largely defined in terms of property ñ specifically property
owning white men. Women, poor whites and blacks experienced varying degrees of citizenship
as property qualifications disenfranchised many poor whites until the 1830s and women
would not enjoy voting rights on a national level until 1920. The status of blacks, however,
was somewhat more ambiguous. Slaves were clearly not considered within the realm of citizenship
since not only did they not own property, they in fact WERE property, but what about
free blacks? What about property owning free blacks? Their status varied from region to
region. In some regions, free blacks enjoyed voting rights and even held elected office.
In other regions, they existed in a state of quasi slavery. On a national level, the
status of African Americans was settled by the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The suit
was based on Dred Scottís claim that he had lived in Wisconsin territory (a free territory)
with his owner for over a decade. Because the slaveowner brought Dred Scott to Wisconsin
territory, the Fugitive Slave Law did not apply. Since Dred Scott was not a fugitive
he asserted that had no obligation to return to the south upon the death of his slave owner,
as the slaveownerís daughter pressed her claims of ownership. The supreme court rejected
Dred Scottís claim. In the infamous Dred Scott decision written by Chief Justice Roger
Taney, the court ruled that African Americans were not brought to the United States to be
citizens, could not enjoy the rights of citizens (including the right to sue in court) not
withstanding their free status, and had no rights that whites were bound to respect.
One immediate effect of the 14th amendment was to reverse the Dred Scott decision.
Secondly, the 3/5 compromise was effectively nullified. The 3/5 compromise ñ a constitutional
provision that counted 3/5 of the African American population for the purpose of apportionment
in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College ñ gave southern slave owners additional
representation on the federal stage. Additionally, states systematically denying citizenship
and equal protection to newly freed slaves risked forfeiting their representatives in
Congress and in the electoral college. Third, a more long term effect was the Civil
Rights movement. With the 14th Amendment, African Americans now had a vehicle for addressing
threats to their rights as citizens through the courts. From the beginning of the 20th
century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in
1909, quickly established court litigation as a major part of their strategy for integration
and social change. Their most celebrated achievement ñ the famous Brown vs. Board Of Education
decision of 1954 ñ was based on the 14th Amendment.
The fifteenth amendment to the constitution provides that ìthe right to vote shall not
be abridged on account of race, national origin, creed, color or previous condition of servitude.
Again, there are two things significant about this amendment.
First, notice that it is written in the negative. It does not say that all citizens shall be
granted the right to vote. It says the right to vote shall not be abridged for a variety
of reasons. What that means is that there are any number of ways to effectively disenfranchise
former slaves. For example, it doesnít say that the right to vote shall not be abridged
on account of lack of ability to pay a poll tax or meet literacy requirements. It leaves
the door wide open to disenfranchise blacks for any number of "nonracial" reasons.
Secondly, there is no mention of gender, therefore women, black and white were not granted voting
rights by the 15th Amendment. The result will be a major rift between Black men and white
women, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton who had been long time allies of the abolitionist
movement. Ultimately black women became the casualties of that rift as women who continued
the struggle for citizenship split the movement into the American Womenís Suffrage Association
and the National Womenís Suffrage Association which appealed to Southern racists who were
incensed in Stantonís words, ìto see Sambo walk through the kingdom first.î On the other
hand, with notable exceptions, such as Frederick Douglass many black men were not willing to
continue the struggle on behalf of Black women. One of the systems of labor that would emerge
in the reconstruction era that immediately undermined the 13th Amendment was sharecropping.
It was a system in which former slaves worked a plot of a plantation in exchange for a share
of the proceeds. It had certain advantages in that there was no direct supervision of
overseers, the sharecroppers work on their own terms, and they were able to work as families
as opposed to gangs of slaves. In theory, it was advantageous in that the former slaves
had every incentive to make the plot productive as they now had a direct investment.
In practice however, sharecroppers tended to be subjected to extreme exploitation. Oftentimes
the terms of the contract required that the sharecroppers sell their harvest directly
to the landowner. Of course, the land owner set the price and it was generally set artificially
low. Additionally, the contract required sharecroppers to purchase seeds, tools, groceries, and provisions
from the plantation store. As sharecroppers only saw money once a year ñ at harvest ñ
all provisions were bought on credit. Again, the plantation owner set the price which was
set artificially high. As a result, at the end of the harvest sharecroppers often found
that their share did not amount to the debts they had incurred throughout the year, and
sharecropping families often found themselves in debt. That meant that they were bound to
service for an additional year to pay off the debt. It was a revolving door of debt
peonage, there are reports of some families being bound to these sharecropping plantations
into the 1980s. In other words, former slaves were bound to service and a system of labor
that looked like, felt like, and smelled very much like slavery.
Why didnít former slaves simply refuse to sign the contracts? As the confederate states
rejoined the union they were required to redraft their state constitutions acknowledging the
13th Amendment. In doing so, however, beginning with the Mississippi the former confederate
states included an additional set of laws directed specifically at blacks and intended
to strip them of any semblance of equal protection. While the black codes contained some rights
that slaves did not formally haveóthe right to marry, sign contracts, buy property, sue,
and testify in court ñ they also imposed severe restrictions. African Americans who
were not under labor contract were considered vagrants and subject to imprisonment. Thus,
they were forced to sign the very exploitive labor contracts. In addition, emancipated
blacks were incarcerated for any number of reasons ranging from cruelty animals to such
vaguely defined offenses as mischief. Additionally, as Angela Davis writes in her book, Women
Race And Class, black women were subject to arrest as well as black man, but just as black
women experienced slavery in ways that men would never come to know, black women endured
the hardships of emancipation in ways specific to their gender as well. For Black women,
exploitative labor contracts included not just sharecropping, but domestic service.
What that meant was that black women were on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week
compensated oftentimes only with room and board. In other words, Black women who were
"emancipated" laboring as domestic servants were alsovulnerable to *** assault just
as they had been in slavery. As Mississippi jails began to fill with former
slaves, Mississippi State Penitentiaryís Parchman Farm paved the way for the convict
lease system. The state legislature passed an act to provide for the leasing of convict
labor for the state. It declared that all prisoners may work outside of penitentiary
in building railroads levees or in any private labor for employment.
While the act provided that all prisoners may work outside the penitentiary, a penitentiary
report of 1871 makes it clear that convict labor was intended to be exclusive to blacks.
The report indicates that 146 colored males and six colored females were shipped to the
Yazoo Delta. While not a single white inmate was shipped to the delta, 61 white males and
25 black males who were elderly and/or disabled remained at the penitentiary. Flying in the
face of the fourteenth amendment ñwhich was supposed to provide equal protection under
the law ñAfrican Americans by the end of the reconstruction era found themselves subject
to a separate and unequal justice system. In a July 11, 2008 segment that aired on Democracy
Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Douglass Blackmon shows how Jim Crow justice
became a widespread phenomenon throughout the south.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn back in time to one of the ugliest chapters in American history:
But a new book by Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed
The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America
from the Civil War to World War II. Author Douglas Blackmon is an award-winning journalist,
also the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta. He joins us now from Atlanta.
Welcome to Democracy Now! DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Why Slavery by Another Name? Why that title?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Because this was slavery, even though we didnít call it that. The legal
institution of slavery, the legal concept of slavery that had existed before 1865, had
in fact been abolished, and there werenít laws on the books anymore that authorized
slavery, and you couldnít file a deed on a slave down at the county courthouse anymore.
But the reality was that in the years after the Civil War, all of the Southern states
passed this array of new laws, which were specifically designed to intimidate African
Americans out of the political process, to inhibit their ability to have economic success,
and eventually to force first thousands, and then eventually hundreds of thousands, of
African Americans back into a form of involuntary servitude. And it wasnít called slavery,
but it was slavery by another name. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, youíve gone back into
county records in areas across the South to unearth this story. Tell us about how the
mechanisms actually worked, especially places like Alabama and Georgia, how they ó and
also, where were these victims enslaved into? What were the areas that they worked in?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, a lot of conventional history thatís been written about this period
of time acknowledged that there was this abusive system of county sheriffs and county judges
and the state courts leasing prisoners, people who had been convicted of crimes, leasing
them out to ó as a way of paying off their fines, leasing them to commercial interests
like coal mines and iron ore mines, timber camps, turpentine stills, where turpentine
was made from pine trees, which was an incredibly important commodity for the whole entire US
economy at that time. And that story has been somewhat documented.
But what I did was I went across Alabama and Georgia and Florida and really all of the
Southern states, but I went courthouse by courthouse across key areas of the Deep South
and discovered enormous numbers of records which really hadnít been looked at in a hundred
years and which made it very clear that among these thousands of people who were arrested
and forced into this form of forced labor, that huge numbers of them had committed no
crimes at all, or they had been arrested and convicted on the most frivolous charges, like
vagrancy or the inability to prove that they had a job at any time, which was something
that almost no one could do in an era without pay stubs.
It was against the law in the South for a farm worker to change jobs, to move from one
landowner to another landowner without the permission of the first landowner. Now, that
law didnít say it would only be applied to African Americans, but overwhelmingly it only
was enforced against African Americans, with the specific purpose of making it impossible
for huge numbers of black people to have any kind of economic mobility or to break free
from this life of de facto slavery. And that was happening in a pervasive way in every
Southern state by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Ö JUAN GONZALEZ: And how was it ó for instance,
if someone was arrested on a vagrancy charge, you would assume that this would only be a
very short sentence. How were they able to be then impressed into service for these companies
for longer periods of time? DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, take, for instance,
the example of a man named Green Cottenham, around whom I built much of the narrative
of the book. Green Cottenham was a child of former slaves who was born in the 1880s in
the center of Alabama. And by the time he had reached adulthood, just after the turn-of-the-century,
this whole new system of intimidation, really terror in many respects, had come into place
against African Americans across the South. And he was arrested in the spring of 1908,
when a deputy sheriff in Columbiana, Alabama went out on a sweep, effectively, to round
up a number of African American men, because a few days later, the man from the US Steel
mine, who came by periodically to pick up laborers and take them back to the mines,
would be arriving in a few days. And so, Green Cottenham was swept up. He was standing around
with a number of other African Americans behind the train station in the town. And this group
of men were arrested for no particular reason. By the time they were brought before a judge
two days later, the deputy couldnít remember exactly what the charge had been, and so the
original charge thatís written down on the day heís arrested is different from the one
that the judge finally decides to convict him of, which was simply vagrancy. And almost
any farm worker, and certainly any indigent African American man, in 1908 could be charged
with vagrancy, unless he had some powerful white man willing to step forward and say,
ìNo, he works for me. Heís under my control.î Well, that didnít happen for Green Cottenham,
and so he is convicted of vagrancy. He was sentenced to a fine of $10 or thereabouts,
but on top of the fines, there would be imposed on these men ó in those days, sheriffs and
court clerks and many other government officials received their compensation not in salaries
from the government, but from fees that were charged to the people they arrested and convicted.
And so, in addition to his fine, there was almost $200 of additional fees tacked onto
what he would have to pay to become free. Well, thatís two or three yearsí wages in
that era. And that was something that would be impossible for a young man like him to
have produced. And so, to pay off those fines, he was effectively
sold into the control of US Steel Corporation, who would pay back his fines a month at a
time. And this happened to thousands of people, many of whom, even after their fines had been
paid off, were still not released, or the people who were holding them would invent
another offense and make another claim of a spurious crime, have them convicted again
and hold them for an even longer period of time. Ö
Another blow to the 14th Amendment came with the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Jim Crow
was a form of a dance that African Americans during the period of slavery developed to
skirt legal restrictions outlawing dance which was defined as crossing oneís feet. A white
character in blackface performed an exaggerated form of the dance during a popular form of
entertainment in the period known as a minstrel show. The term, "Jim Crow" came to signify
the rigid laws of segregation that took hold in the south by the end of the reconstruction
period that separated every aspect of life between black and white Americans literally
from the cradle to the grave. Blacks were born in separate hospitals (if they were born
in hospitals that all), buried in separate cemeteries, and every aspect of life in between
was subject to rigid segregation. Additionally the rise of the Ku Klux *** saw strict social
codes of white supremacy enforced by violence. African-American men enjoyed a brief moment
of unprecedented representation in civic life. With much of the south occupied by union troops,
African Americans were able to vote in the south for the first time, and with the disenfranchisement
of many ex confederates, Blacks were elected to local state and Federal offices in proportions
that would not be seen again until the 1960s. It is important to note, however, that the
franchise was extended only two black men. Women ñ black and white would not be able
to exercise the vote until the 19th amendment of 1920. It is also important to note that
while there was Federal protection in much of the south, Federal troops could not be
everywhere. The terrorism of the Ku Klux *** quickly came to disenfranchise African American
voters and was firmly entrenched by the time Federal troops were removed with the Compromise
of 1877. As a result of social terrorism and exploitative
measures such as the grandfather clause, literacy tests, and poll taxes that were selectively
applied, the brief period of African-American enfranchisement and representation came to
end and by the turn of the twentieth century. The last reconstruction era Black representative,
George H. White of North Carolina left office in 1901. It would take nearly three decades
before Oscar De Priest ó a Black republican from Illinois ñ would be elected to Congress.
It would not be until the 1940s until two African Americans would serve in the Congress
at the same time. So, as we have seen the 13th Amendment of
the constitution forbade slavery, but slavery was simply replaced by other forms of involuntary
servitude such as sharecropping, domestic service, and the convict lease system. The
14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law, but Black
Codes and Jim Crow segregation relegated to blacks to second class citizenship at best.
The 15th Amendment barred disenfranchisement on account of race national origin or previous
condition of servitude, but because the vote could be denied for various other reasons
including illiteracy, poverty and felony conviction (which we are still dealing with at the present
time) many African Americans would be denied the vote until the end of the civil rights
era. Thatís it for this episode. You can see everything
youíve seen here as well as the entire archive of episodes at my website www.africanelements.org.
You can also join the discussion on our Facebook Group African Elements. I'm Darius Spearman.
Thank you for watching.