The History of Lynching and Black Disenfranchisement

Episode 21: Lynching and Disenfranchisement

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

According to Ayers, the extrajudicial massacre (initially via riots organized by groups of White southerners) of Black southerners began during Reconstruction to discourage them from campaigning for the Republican party. Lynching (which Ayers defines as the illegal execution by vigilantes of alleged criminals), began in the 1880s and reached its peak in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by the mass hysteria promoted by southern newspapers, white southerners became convinced freed slaves were intrinsically criminal and violent. Nearly every issue of every southern newspaper would carry some report of Black wrongdoing somewhere, and free Blacks were universally blamed for the rising tide of southern crime.

Jim Crow laws in themselves increased crime rates, by allowing most southern jurisdictions to arrest Black men for vagrancy if they failed to produce employer letters verifying their employment. Once arrested, Black prisoners were leased to local farmers and businesses.

Ayers suggests lynching evolved in part to address the burden of growing prison populations. Much of the lynching that occurred was based on white fantasies about Black men lusting after White women. In fact, Blacks could be lynched for merely speaking to or looking at a White woman.

Lynching was most common in regions of Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas with scattered farms, few towns and high numbers of transients. Not only did similar circumstances foster fear and insecurity, but limited contact with the outside world meant there were fewer checks on vigilante behavior.

In this lecture, Ayers also discusses disenfranchisement, the rewriting of all southern state constitutions (between 1880-1910) to deny Black men the right to vote without incurring the penalties of the 15th amendment.* Democratic officials were mainly concerned about the presence of large majority Black districts that were voting Republican. Mississippi held the first disenfranchisement convention in 1890. In their new constitution, they established voting requirements that included a poll tax, selective use of criminal records (disqualifying voters with a history of petty theft) and an “understanding clause.” The latter required voters to demonstrate an understanding of the state constitution to a white voter registration clerk.

In their own conventions, the other southern states all adopted a poll tax. Georgia also adopted a requirement for voters to own property and pass a literacy test. Louisiana opted for an “understanding clause” that exempted everyone whose father or grandfather had voted prior to Reconstruction.

Following the adoption of these disenfranchisement clauses, voter turned out dropped from 75% to 15-34%.

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*Which provided loss of federal representation for states that denied Blacks the right to vote.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/lynching-and-disfranchisement

Just to let people know I’m moving to Substack and Telegram after several readers informed me I’ve been censored from WordPress Reader feed. The link to my Substack account is https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/. The link to my Telegram channel is https://t.me/themostrevolutionaryact I’ll continue to publish on WordPress as long as I’m able, but if my blog suddenly disappears you’ll know where to find me.

The Netflix Version of Reconstruction and the Great Northward Migration

The Fight for America Episode 2

Netflix (2021)

Film Review

Episode 2 briefly covers Civil War Reconstruction, and the immense progress freed slaves made when federal troops occupied the South. This included the construction of a large number of public schools. The latter served both Black and white students, in many cases the first time poor Southern whites enjoyed access to pubic education. It also saw the election of a large number of African Americans to local and national office.

Once federal troops withdrew, white Southerners restored former slaves to a state of servitude via Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan terrorism (ie lynching, firebombing, extrajudicial assassination, etc).

Moreover the Supreme Court ruled against Southern Blacks who sued for their right to equal protection (against arbitrary loss of life, liberty or property) under the 14th Amendment.

In the 1873 Slaughterhouse case, the SCOTUS ruled US citizens had to look to state governments for the privileges and protections guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

In the 1876 Cruikshank case, the SCOTUS ruled the 14th Amendment doesn’t protect US citizens from violence inflicted by private citizens (eg lynching).

In the 1883 Civil Rights case, the SCOTUS ruled the 14th Amendment doesn’t protect US citizens from discrimination by private businesses.

In the 1896 Plessy vs Fergueson case, the SCOTUS ruled state segregation laws constitutional so long as Black citizens were offered “separate but equal” facilities.

KKK terrorism, combined with increasing northern industrialization would lead to a mass migration of southern Blacks to norther cities seeking factory jobs. In many cities, they found that mob violence against African Americans was just as dangerous as in the South.

In 1909 journalist and educator Ida Wells founded the NAACP as part of her tireless campaign to end lynching and white mob violence.

In this episode, filmmakers also examine the origins of southern Lost Cause ideology, which holds the South won a noble victory by “defeating” federal Reconstruction efforts. According to filmmakers, this ideology is celebrated in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, the 1939 film Gone with the Wind and a host of highly controversial Confederate monuments in all the confederate states.

How the Colonization of Africa Replaced Slave Labor Lost to Abolition

Slavery Routes – a Short History of Human Trafficking

Part 4 Slavery’s New Frontiers

DW (2020)

Part 4 begins by examining Brazil’s unique history in the international slave trade. Two million African slaves landed in Brazil during the 18th century. At present, it has the second highest population in the world (with Nigeria at number one). One of the last country’s to end slavery (in 1888), it’s currently world leader in police violence against its Black residents.

In 1791 a massive slave revolt in the French colony of St Domingue (where African slaves comprised 90% of the population)* successfully defeated Napoleon’s army to overturn the white government and end the plantation system. The Haitian revolution destroyed the most productive slave colony in the world and reduced the Atlantic economy by half.

White plantation owners and foremen fled Haiti to use their experience in running plantations in Cuba, the US and Brazil. Their relocation effectively consolidated slavery (on cotton and coffee, as well as sugar, plantations) throughout the Western hemisphere.

In 1807, the British Parliament passed a law abolishing the British slave trade, and in 1815, the British Navy was granted authority to intercept slave ships from other countries. After 1815, the US would become the center of industrial-scale slavery. Spain would abolish slavery altogether in 1824, Britain in 1833 and the Netherlands in 1863.

In 1864 (in the midst of the Civil War), President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the US. In the South, slavery ended in name only, owing to laws that denied southern Blacks freedom of movement, the right to vote, the right to protest their working conditions or treatment by whites and Jim Crow laws that caused many to be incarcerated and sentenced to forced labor for minor offenses.**

Following the abolition of the slave trade, many European countries sought to replace the slave labor they lost in the New World by aggressively colonizing Africa. This occurred by means of  wholesale land confiscation and forced labor that amounted to de facto slavery. The filmmakers devote the last third of the documentary to this history.

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*The island of St Domingue is currently home to two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

**The most common offenses under Jim Crow were vagrancy and failure to show proof of employment.

For information on broadcast times, see https://www.dw.com/en/slavery-routes-part-4/a-52207639

White Supremacy and the Obama Legacy

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

One World (2017)

Book Review

This remarkable book is a collection of essays about white privilege, Obama’s inability to live up to his campaign promises, and the role of his presidency in setting the stage for Donald Trump.

Coates’ approach to the topic of white privilege is largely historical. He traces the brutal reversal of Reconstruction reforms and re-institution of de facto slavery with Jim Crow laws; the Great Migration north of 6 million African Americans during the early 20th century; the deliberate exclusion of African Americans from New Deal programs such as Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and FHA (Federal Housing Administration) mortgage insurance; as well as the War on Drugs and mass incarceration of African Americans.

Coates has the best definition of white supremacy I have seen anywhere. In his words, white privilege is “banditry.”

“To be black in America is to be plundered. To be white is to execute and benefit from it.”

Coates gives numerous examples to justify this view: the exclusion of African Americans from wealth creation programs such as FHA and VA (Veterans Administration) mortgage loans, long time job discrimination and wage suppression, the recurrent decimation of prosperous Black communities via white race riots, predatory owner “contract” financing of home purchases, and predatory targeting of Blacks for subprime mortgagae they can’t repay.

My favorite essay is the one advocating for African American reparations, based on the argument that systematic exploitation of Blacks didn’t end with slavery but continues to the present day. As a precedent Coates cites the $7 billion (in today’s dollars) West Germany paid Israel in 1953 in compensation for Germany’s genocidal treatment of European Jews during World War II.

 

The Case for African American Reparations

A Moral Debt: The Legacy of Slavery in the US

Al Jazeera

Film Review

In this documentary, journalist James Gannon, a descendant of slave owner and confederate general Robert E Lee, investigates the legacy enslavement has bequeathed the descendants of slaves

Gannon interviews a number of Black historians, scholars and activists who help him understand the immense economic disadvantage descendants of slaves have faced since the end of the Civil War. Not only did southern Blacks face decades of Jim Crow laws that allowed them to be arbitrarily imprisoned and re-enslaved, but vibrant Black communities in the North were routinely destroyed by white race riots in the first half of the 20th century and “urban development” schemes after World War II. African American communities were also deliberately excluded (referred to as “redlining”) from federal mortgage guarantee programs that enabled white families to acquire wealth via home ownership.

As the result of his investigation, the journalist has become a strong advocate of the African American reparations movement. Scholars estimate descendants of slaves are owed approximately $17 trillion. This includes the wealth they created as chattel and Jim Crow slaves, the value of black businesses destroyed by white terrorism and urban development and the monetary disadvantage they experienced due to exclusion from federal mortgage subsidy programs.

Hidden History: The Abolitionists who Led the European Colonization of Africa

Slavery Trade Routes – Part 3 Slavery’s New Frontiers

Al Jazeera (2018)

Film Review

The final episode in the series begins with the revolution in Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti) that would signal the beginning of the end for the slave trade. Led by Tousaint L’Ouverture, in 1791 the entire slave population of Saint Domingue (90% of residents) revolted again their plantation owners. It would be Napoleon’s first military defeat.

Although the British Navy succeeded in shutting down much of the slave trade in 1815, they couldn’t stem the flow of slaves to feed the prison-style industrial coffee plantations in Brazil. An additional 2 million Africans were deported to Brazil between 1815 and 1850. At present, Brazil has the second largest population of Africans in the world (with Nigeria at number one).

Although the trafficking of slaves to the US stopped in 1815, the American slave population continued to grow – in part due to the routine rape of female slaves by their white masters.

US Last Country to Abolish Slavery

In 1825, after achieving independence, all former Spanish colonies abolished slavery. French, English and Dutch colonies would gradually follow suit. The US formally abolished slavery in 1865 during the Civil War. In reality slavery continued in southern states with Jim Crow laws that denied Blacks the right to vote, freedom of movement and the right to self-defense. In addition, laws providing for the arrest of unemployed blacks for vagrancy resulted in a de facto involuntary servitude.

European Colonization of Africa

For me, the most interesting part of the film concerns the direct link between the abolition of slavery and the intensive European colonization of Africa. The military adventurers who conquered Africa were all “abolitionists.” Officially the purpose of their missions to Africa were to end the slave trade. In reality, they were deeply committed white supremacists who cut deals with Arab slave traders and local chieftains to put poor African peasants to work (involuntarily) on their African coffee, palm oil, rubber and cotton plantations.

The video can’t be embedded but can be seen free at the following link:

Slavery’s New Frontiers

The Negro Motorist Green Book

 

 

Victor H. Green, a post office employee and activist in Harlem, published the first Green Book in 1936 for the New York area. The next year, it expanded to cover the whole country. The book listed “hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, beauty shops, barber shops, and various other services” where Black people would be served. 15,000 copies were produced each year (until 1964) and sold to market Black-owned businesses and more friendly White ones like Esso, one of the few gas stations that would sell to Black people.

During the shameful Jim Crow period, when many businesses all over the US refused to serve black people (even in emergencies), the information allowed black families to travel to parts of the US they had only heard of. In the South, knowledge of safe and unsafe areas could be life saving.

Free PDF (1949 edition): The Green Book

 

Involuntary Servitude: Prisoners Fight California Wildfires

Thanks to climate change, California’s wildfire season got an early start in 2016 – in February. According to the BBC, 30 percent of California’s firefighters (roughly 4,000) are state prison inmates. They make $2 a day while at fire camp, and $1 an hour while on a fire line – saving state taxpayers $80 million a year. Inmates also earn two days off their sentence for every day they’re on a fire. The work of battling a 100 foot high fire wall is incredibly dangerous, and inmate firefighters suffer a “handful” of injuries every year – usually from falling branches and debris.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

While the BBC feature quotes inmates as being honored by the “privilege” of fighting fires, the inmate fire fighting program is taking place against the backdrop of a federal court order requiring California to reduce overcrowding. In 2011, the The Supreme Court upheld  a lower court ruling ordering California to cut their prison populations (by reducing the sentences of low level offenders).

State correction officials complied by offering an early prison-release program to all minimum security offenders – but only “so long as it proves not to deplete the numbers of inmate firefighters.” In 2014, state Attorney General Kamala Harris argued against the program, concerned it would severely impact fire camp participation “a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”

The New Jim Crow

In other words, California is openly balancing the state budget on the backs of prison slave labor.

Given that low income minorities comprise the great majority of California’s prison population – for circumstances largely beyond their control – this policy clearly violates the UN Convention on Human  Rights (which forbids slavery and involuntary servitude).

In fact, it sounds a lot like southern Jim Crow laws.*

In The New Jim Crow , lawyer Michelle Alexander describes in detail how urban police deliberately target minority neighborhoods for enforcement of drug possession and other victimless crimes. She also cites numerous examples of minority arrestees forced to cop guilty pleas owing to their inability to obtain competent legal representation.

Below prisoners fight a 2014 fire in Shasta County.

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*In the Jim Crow system that followed Reconstruction, most southern states passed arbitrary vagrancy laws that were used to imprison black males and force them into unpaid slave labor on plantations, on the railroads and in factories and mines. See 1941: The Year Slavery Finally Ended

 

A Novel About Jim Crow

Some Sing, Some Cry

By Ntozake Shangi and Ifa Bayeza

St Martin’s Press (2010)

Book Review

Some Sing, Some Cry is a novel tracing seven generations of a fictional African American family from slavery to the election of Barack Obama. The authors are sisters and the first half of the book is based on family oral history.

The novel’s matriarch originates from on an island off the coast of South Carolina and takes the name of a prominent plantation owner who has fathered children by both her mother and herself. The family are forced off their land when Reconstruction ends, migrating to Charleston.

The first half of the book is the strongest, with its poignant depiction of family members being stripped of their newly won freedoms as Jim Crow laws ban them from most occupations. To a large extent, the plot revolves around complex prejudices within the African American community against family members with darker skin. In one instance, the plantation owner kidnaps an light-complected male child and raises him as his heir. In another a “bright-skinned” uncle passes as Irish to evade trade union rules that ban Negroes.

The novel’s main focus is the role newly freed slaves played in the development of modern American music. The reader gets the strong sense that many Mayfield family members turned to working in minstrel shows, music halls and clubs when Jim Crow laws banned them from other occupations.

The sections dealing with the great northern migration, Harlem renaissance and birth of ragtime and jazz are also quite riveting. I came away with a totally new insight into the African American origin of the dance crazes of the “roaring twenties,” eg the “Charleston” and the “Black Bottom.”

This was also my first exposure to the extreme discrimination African American soldiers faced during World War I. Unlike white troops, they weren’t issued gas masks. Forced to improvise, they covered their faces with urine soaked rags to protect themselves against mustard gas.

Reclaiming Our History

Plutocracy: Political Repression in the United States

Scott Noble (2015)

Film Review

As German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously stated, “History is written by the victors.” In the US, most history books are written by and for the corporate oligarchs who run our government. Plutocracy is the first documentary to comprehensively examine early American history from the perspective of the working class. Part II (Solidarity Forever) will cover the late 19th Century to the early twenties. The filmmaker is currently seeking donations to complete the project. If you’d like to help, you can donate to their Patreon account.

The film can’t be embedded but can be viewed free at Plutocracy

Plutocracy starts with Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, the insurrection of Massachusetts farmers against the courts and banks that were fleecing them of their meager wealth and property. Similar rebellions in Rhode Island and Virginia would cause leading US bankers, merchants and plantation owners to organize a secret convention to create a central government and standing army. Each of the 13 original states, which in 1787 were still independent and sovereign, sent delegates to Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.

Instead of revising the Articles, as authorized by their state legislatures, the delegates closed the meeting to the public and voted to replace them with a federal constitution. The latter substantially limited the freedom and power of state legislatures and ordinary Americans.

Plutocracy moves on to cover the massive Irish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century and the appalling squalor so-called “white Negroes” lived in. During the 19th century, 80% of babies born to Irish immigrants died in infancy.

The film touches only briefly on the Civil War, describing laws that enabled robber barons like John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt to evade the Civil War draft by paying a poor person $300 to replace them.

It offers a detailed depiction of post-Civil War Reconstruction, which coincided with the 1871 Paris commune and saw blacks collaborating with poor whites to establish the South’s first public schools and hospitals. This was in addition to the election of numerous former slaves to judgeships and legislative positions.

Their eagerness to return Negroes to productive status on plantations led northern industrialists to pressure Congress to end Reconstruction by removing the federal troops protecting the rights of former slaves. It also led to their passive acceptance of unconstitutional Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. The chief aim of both was to prevent poor backs and whites from associating with one another.

The federal troops withdrawn from the South were redeployed in genocidal campaigns against Native Americans and Mexicans. By the end of the 19th century, not only had Mexico ceded half their territory to the US (including California, Texas, Utah, Nevada and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Montana – in the 1984 Treaty of Guadalupe), but US corporations enjoyed de facto control of all land remaining under sovereign Mexican control.

Stripping the Native Americans and Mexicans of their land in the West, readied the US for the rise of the robber barons of industry (Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie and Vanderbilt) and a corrupt system of federal and local government run entirely by bribery and patronage.

The corruption and squalid living conditions of the late 19th century would give rise to militant trade unionism, socialism, anarchism and populism. Plutocracy depicts the Pullman and similar strikes in which strikers were brutally beaten and killed by Pinkerton’s Detectives and other goons hired by industrial bosses, as well as national guardsmen and, on several occasions, federal troops.

The film opens with a poignant depiction of the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in US history. It’s the largest armed uprising since the Civil War, involving 10,000 coal miners. Denise Giardini memorializes the Battle of Blair Mountain in her 1987 novel Storming Heaven.

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*Rockefeller and Morgan had a relative monopoly on the banks, Carnegie on steel and Vanderbilt on the railroads.