Chapter Six continued

Enforcement of Approved Black Social Behavior

“Legally free Black people, in both the North and South, were subjected to all kinds of surveillance and terrorism. Lawmakers across the nation enacted legislation to ensure that free Black people would remain firmly in their place, at the bottom of the social order. Foreshadowing the ‘know your place’ aggression that would dominate race relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, white politicians outlawed any Black behavior that was not immediately recognizable as labor of subservience. In Louisiana for example, it was illegal for free people of color to ‘conceive themselves equal to the Whites.’ As the law explicitly stated, Black people should ‘yield’ to White people ‘on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect.’ If legally free Black people failed to submit to White authority, they were subject to imprisonment.’” 1619 Project Pages 111-112

     During the period which became known as the “Redemption” (1877-1885), the White power structure in the South reversed and eliminated almost all of the gains made by Blacks in the Reconstruction. This was accomplished primarily through unofficial acts of intimidation by secret squads of white vigilantes visiting the families of supposedly recalcitrant Blacks usually at night. Whipping was probably the most common punishment, but other methods were employed (shooting of livestock, setting fire to out buildings or the home, threatening or abusing other members of the household). As the whole White community, including law enforcement approved of these acts, it was known that nothing could be accomplished by lodging a complaint with the local authorities. Within a short time, Black Americans were completely disenfranchised of the vote and were thoroughly intimidated in all aspects of their relationship with the White power structure in their communities.

The Horrors of Lynching

Records are not exact, but it is estimated that 2,460 African Americans were killed by mobs. In Tennessee alone there were 214 victims between 1882 and 1930. Of this number 37 were white, 177 were black and the rest are unknown. While most victims were men, there were women who were lynched. In 1886 a black woman, Eliza Wood, who had been accused of poisoning a white woman, was removed from the jail in Jackson and hung. In 1911, a Clifton farmer, Ben Pettigrew, was shot and his two daughters hung by four white men. Two of the attackers were later convicted in court and hung by the authorities for their crime.

     Less than ten years after the end of the Civil War, racial violence on a large scale came to Gibson County. 16 Black Americans were arrested and jailed at the Trenton Courthouse jail. A white mob demanded that the County sheriff turn over the prisoners for citizen justice. As reported by the Daily Memphis Avalanche newspaper on August 28, 1874, a mob leader stated to the sheriff, “We have come for those niggers and intend getting them; turn over the keys, or we will blow your brains out” After initially refusing, the sheriff relented and the mob marched the prisoners away from the jail. Fourteen of the original prisoners were shot and killed by the mob.

     The chain of events leading to the Trenton lynching seems to have originated in a trivial dispute over the price of food at a barbeque held by blacks near the small settlement of Pickettville (now called Gibson) in the southern part of the county.

     The lynching received a large amount of publicity in the news locally, in Tennessee and nationally. West Tennessee newspapers were strong proponents of white supremacy and some of them, especially the small-town weeklies, gave at least qualified approval to other lynchings in the area well into the twentieth century. This was, of course, a dire warning to West Tennessee Black Americans that similar fates were awaiting them in any future altercation between Whites and Blacks. As Gibson was less than 20 miles from where the Black Burrows lived in Carroll County, one can imagine the impact on them. One of the 16 prisoners was a Jarret Burrow (Jarret Burrow could not be identified by the usual genealogical research methods). Both the state and federal attempts to prosecute the Trenton Massacre lynchers were unsuccessful; no one was ever held legally accountable for the jailbreak and murders.

     Lynchings were often treated as normal occasions by newspapers. In Memphis, where the largest number of lynchings occurred (18), newspapers sometimes announced in advance the place and time for a lynching. Other newspapers tried to absolve their community of the actions. For example, Chattanooga newspapers in 1906, after Ed Johnson was lynched, condemned the mob for taking the law into its own hands. But the newspaper editor placed the responsibility for the lynching on the defendant’s appeal to federal courts and “revived the mob’s spirit and resulted in the lynching.” 1619 Project, Page 110

     Although some Tennesseans accepted lynching as a necessary evil, others did not. In 1931, a group of white men stormed the Carroll County, Tennessee jail intent on lynching a Black prisoner. The sheriff’s wife, Mrs. J.R. Butler, met the men and told them her husband wasn’t there. She then told them they weren’t taking the prisoner, saying “You couldn’t run anything like that over me.” They turned around and left. In 1915 in Deaden, Tennessee, a mob took a black man and put a noose around his neck for an alleged crime, but let the man go when the alleged victim’s husband said he didn’t want anyone killed. In fact, it is estimated that more than half of attempted lynchings failed, usually because the law officials moved the prisoner or protected him. 1619 Project, Page 111

     Local Black Americans were greatly intimidated by lynchings. The threat was if they tried to intervene, then they also could be attacked. Still, some protested the practice. In 1918 more than 2,000 African Americans marched in protest of a lynching in Estill Springs, Tennessee, although the white press did not widely-cover the march. Other Black Americans also attempted to protest segregation and violence against their race. Ida B. Wells (Ida Bell Wells was an American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the NAACP.) wrote articles in local black newspapers in Memphis condemning lynchings. There were so many threats made against her life that she had to leave Memphis and move north.

     “Between 1865 and 1868 White people murdered more than one thousand African Americans in one area of Texas. In the mid-1870s President Ulysses Grant painfully acknowledged that the slew of murders meant that White people clearly had ‘the right to kill negroes . . . without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputation.'” 1619 Project, Page 261.

     “Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand Black men, women and children lost their lives to lynching.” 1619 Project, Page 115. “In 1904 in Mississippi, a Black man was accused of shooting a White landowner who had attacked him. A White mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh, and then burned them alive, while hundreds of White spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade. The landowner’s brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence. He was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Mississippi, a position that launched his son, James Eastland, an avowed White supremacist, to the U.S. Senate; he served six terms, and was president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978.” 1619 Project, Page 281

     In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob composed of two thousand White men and women attacked the Black community killing as many as three hundred people and burning more than thirty-five blocks of Black homes and businesses to the ground. The impact that these killings had on all Black communities throughout the U.S. was enormous and lasting.

     Public sentiment gradually began to turn against mob violence and the lynchings that were often associated with it. Ultimately, both blacks and whites began to work toward ending the practice of lynching in Tennessee. The last person lynched in Tennessee is thought to have been Elbert Williams of Haywood County, who died in June 1940. He had attempted to register to vote, and also established an NAACP chapter in the county.

     Thoroughly intimidated and in many cases privately terrified, Black Americans in the South became extremely wary of any contact with White Americans. This continued from the time of slavery all the way up to the mid-20th Century. The excerpt below was taken from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men written by James Agee about his and his associate, Walker Evans’, three-week stay with a sharecropper family in Hale County, Alabama in 1936. Agee was a journalist and Walker a professional photographer. The purpose of their visit was to produce a feature article about sharecropping for Fortune magazine. The following beautiful passage describes the fear generated in a young Black American couple when unexpectedly approached by James Agee on a country road.

     "A young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera. We spoke and nodded, smiling as if casually; they spoke and nodded, gravely, as they passed, and glanced back once, not secretly, nor long, nor in amusement. They made us, in spite of our knowledge of our own meanings, ashamed and insecure and after a minute or two I decided to go after them and speak to them, and ask them if they knew where we might find a minister or some other person who might let Walker in to a country church that we wanted to photograph.

     They were fifty yards or so up the road, walking leisurely, and following them, I watched aspects of them which are less easily seen (as surrounding objects are masked by looking into a light) when one's own eyes and face and the eyes and face of another are mutually visible and appraising. They were young, soberly buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered their mild and sober faces, hers softly wide and sensitive to love and to pleasure, and his resourceful and intelligent without intellect and without guile, and their extreme dignity, which was as effortless, unvalued, and undefended in them as the assumption of superiority which suffuses a rich and social adolescent boy; and I was taking pleasure also in the competence and rhythm of their walking in the sun, which was incapable of being less than a muted dancing, and in the beauty in the sunlight of their clothes, which were strange upon them in the middle of the week. He was in dark trousers, black dress shoes, a new-laundered white shirt with lights of bluing in it, and a light yellow, soft straw hat with a broad band of dark flowered cloth and a daisy in the band; she glossy-legged without stockings, in freshly whited pumps, a flowered pink cotton dress, and a great sun of straw set far back on her head. Their swung hands touched gently with their walking, stride by stride, but did not engage. I was walking more rapidly than they but quietly; before I had gone ten steps they turned their heads (toward each other) and looked at me briefly and impersonally, like horses in a field, and faced front again; and this, I am almost certain, not through having heard sound of me, but through a subtler sense. By the time I raised my hand, they had looked away, and did not see me, though nothing in their looking had been quick with abruptness or surreptition.

     I walked somewhat faster now, but I was overtaking them a little slowly for my patience; the light would be right by now or very soon for a photo of the church; I had no doubt Walker would do what he wanted whether we had 'permission' or not, but I wanted to be on hand, and broke into a trot. At the sound of the twist of my shoe in the gravel, the young woman's whole body was jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately, the rear foot skidding in the loose stone so that she nearly fell, like a kicked cow scrambling out of a creek, eyes crazy, chin stretched tight, she sprang forward into the first motions of a running not human but that of a suddenly terrified wild animal. In this same instant the young man froze, the emblems of sense in his wild face wide open toward me, his right hand stiff toward the girl who, after a few strides, her consciousness overtaking her reflex, shambled to a stop and stood, not straight but sick, as if hung from a hook in the spine of the will not to fall for weakness, while he hurried to her and put his hand on her flowered shoulder and, inclining his head forward and sidewise as if listening, spoke with her, and they lifted, and watched me while, shaking my head, and raising my hand palm outward, I came up to them (not trotting) and stopped a yard short of where they, closely, not touching now, stood, and said, still shaking my head (No; no; oh, Jesus, no, no, no!) and looking into their eyes; at the man, who was not knowing what to do, and at the girl, whose eyes were lined with tears, and who was trying so hard to subdue the shaking in her breath, and whose heart I could feel, though not hear, blasting as if it were my whole body, and I trying in some fool way to keep it somehow relatively light, because I could not bear that they should receive from me any added reflection of the shattering of their grace and dignity, and of the nakedness and depth and meaning of their fear, and of my horror and pity and self-hatred; and so, smiling, and so distressed that I wanted only that they should be restored, and should know I was their friend, and that I might melt from existence: 'I'm very sorry! I'm very sorry if I scared you. I didn't mean to scare you at all. I wouldn't have done any such thing for anything.'

     They just kept looking at me. There was no more for them to say than for me. The least I could have done was to throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet. That impulse took hold of me so powerfully, from my whole body, not by thought, that I caught myself from doing it exactly and as scarcely as you snatch yourself from jumping from a sheer height: here, with the realization that it would have frightened them still worse (to say nothing of me) and would have been still less explicable; so that I stood and looked into their eyes and loved them, and wished to God I was dead. After a little the man got back his voice, his eyes grew a little easier, and he said without conviction that that was all right and that I hadn't scared her. She shook her head slowly, her eyes on me; she did not yet trust her voice. Their faces were secret, soft, utterly without trust of me, and utterly without understanding; and they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man, or even appears not to listen while he is talking, and because I could not walk away abruptly, and relieve them of me, without still worse a crime against nature than the one I had committed, and the second I was committing by staying, and holding them. And so, and in this horrid grinning of faked casualness, I gave them a better reason why I had followed them than to frighten them, asked what I had followed them to ask; they said the thing it is usually safest for negroes to say, that they did not know; I thanked them very much, and was seized once more and beyond resistance with the wish to clarify and set right, so that again, with my eyes and smile wretched and out of key with all I was able to say, I said I was awfully sorry if I had bothered them; but they only retreated still more profoundly behind their faces, their eyes watching mine as if awaiting any sudden move they must ward, and the young man said again that that was all right, and I nodded, and turned away from them, and walked down the road without looking back." Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee & Walker Evans, pages 39-43.

The Black Codes

     The intentions to force the newly freed Black Americans back into “slavery by another name” is clearly apparent in the adoption of the “black codes.” These were state laws newly enacted or old slave laws revised by the deletion of certain words or phrases. Adopted over the first decade after the end of the Reconstruction, they returned the “freedmen” to a semi-state of slavery. Without the protection of the federal government, the Black Americans of the South had nothing that they could do to resist.

“In the years that followed the Civil War, White Southerners employed a wide range of weapons —legal and extra-legal—to restore their control over rebellious Black people and return them to ‘their place.’ Southern states swiftly reinvented their tools for racial control and enacted ‘Black Codes’ that were akin to the old slave codes. As expressed by one Alabama planter: ‘We have the power to pass stringent police laws to govern the negroes—This is a blessing—For they must be controlled in some way or White people cannot live amongst them.’ These codes segregated schools and prohibited, for example, interracial seating in the first-class sections of railroad cars. Other codes were intended to establish systems of peonage resembling slavery to ensure a cheap labor force. Vagrancy laws were adopted and selectively enforced against Black people; these essentially made it a criminal offense not to work, often forcing formerly enslaved people to sign labor contracts with the same people who had once enslaved them. Simply being Black and standing on a street corner could be interpreted as idleness or vagrancy by the police and result in arrest."1619 Project Page 113

“The Black Codes were deliberately designed to take advantage of every misfortune of the Negro. Negroes were liable to a slave trade under the guise of vagrancy and apprenticeship laws; to make the best labor contracts, Negroes must leave the old plantations and seek better terms; but if caught wandering in search of work, and thus unemployed and without a home, this was vagrancy, and the victim could be whipped and sold into slavery. In the turmoil of war, children were separated from parents, or parents unable to support them properly. These children could be sold into slavery, and ‘the former owner of said minors shall have the preference.’ Negroes could come into court as witnesses only in cases in which Negroes were involved. And even then, they must make their appeal to a jury and judge who would believe the word of any white man in preference to that of any Negro on pain of losing office and caste.

     The Negro's access to the land was hindered and limited; his right to work was curtailed; his right of self-defense was taken away, when his right to bear arms was stopped; and his employment was virtually reduced to contract labor with penal servitude as a punishment for leaving his job. And in all cases, the judges of the Negro's guilt or innocence, rights and obligations were men who believed firmly, for the most part, that he had ‘no rights which a white man was bound to respect.’" Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois, page 167

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The Ku Klux Klan

     The Ku Klux Klan has had three major periods of prominence in American history. The first Klan, established in the wake of the Civil War first in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a defining organization of the Reconstruction era. Pulaski is 75 miles south of Nashville. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes and the Federal Army began taking action against it. The Klan sought to overthrow Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. The Klan was organized into numerous independent chapters across the Southern United States. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secretive about membership and plans. Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks and pointed hats, designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities. The suppression of the Klan by the Federal army was largely successful and most Klan chapters were disbanded by 1873.

“In 1910, when the white residents of Graham, North Carolina, gathered in the town square to dedicate a Confederate monument where Wyatt Outlaw was lynched in 1870, the master of ceremonies was Jacob Long, who had led the murderers: he declared that the monument would ‘recall the achievements of the great and good of our own race and blood.’ In 1900, E. A. Crawford, a member of the gang that lynched Jim Williams, was named sergeant-at-arms of the South Carolina state senate; the leader of the gang, Dr. Bratton, was appointed the chairman of South Carolina's state Board of Health. Of Bratton, the Charleston Sunday News later declared, ‘there was no Klansman more active and none more zealous in the work of maintaining the supremacy of the Southern white man,’ at a time when ‘the Ku Klux Klans were spread over the South like the dew.’ Noting his stonewalling testimony before the congressional Joint Committee in 1871, the newspaper approvingly asserted that he did not ‘divulge the slightest scintilla of evidence. Men of his caliber didn't tell.’” Klan Wars: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, Fergus Bordewich, Page 357

     The second Klan started in 1915 as a small group in Georgia. It suddenly started to grow after 1920 and flourished nationwide with a membership estimated to be three to eight million persons in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West. The group's membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.

     The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on opposition to the civil rights movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists. The active membership of the Klan has declined steadily since the 1970s. A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League claims an estimate of just over 30 active Klan groups existing in the United States. Estimates of total collective membership range from about 3,000 to 8,000.

Tennessee and the KKK

     The excerpt given below was taken from Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save the Reconstruction by Fergus Bordewich. It is an excellent account of the activities of the Klan in Tennessee in the 1ate 1860s and early 1870s.

“At the start of 1869, Tennessee seemed prepared to go to war with the Klan. Governor William Brownlow hired a Union veteran from Ohio, Seymour Barmore, ‘a shrewd, sharp sort of man,’ to infiltrate the order and expose its leadership. On his first attempt. Barmore was captured by the Klan and warned that he would be executed if he tried again. Undeterred, he obtained a set of regalia, disguised himself, and managed to penetrate the Klan's Pulaski ‘mother den.’ He was en route back to Nashville when, at 3 a.m. some twenty-five Klansmen dressed in scarlet boarded his train and seized him. ‘No one interfered in his behalf,’ the Knoxville Whig reported. They had been tipped off by a local telegrapher who served the Klan and were likely assisted by members of the train's crew. Weeks later, Barmore's horribly decomposed body was found floating in the Duck River, with a rope around his neck, his arms tied behind him, and a bullet hole in his head.

     Barmore's murder prompted Brownlow to declare martial law in nine counties and to muster eighteen hundred State Guardsmen from the staunchly loyal eastern counties. He made it clear that he was prepared to enroll Blacks as well as Whites, if he had to. Open war seemed imminent. Then, suddenly, the entire political landscape changed. Brownlow abruptly left the governor's office to enter the U.S. Senate, to be replaced by his lieutenant governor, Dewitt Senter. It was assumed that Senter would continue Brownlow's forceful policy toward the Klan. Instead, he softened martial law, moved Klan trials to civil courts, and by May discharged the militia. He then won conservative support, and at least tacitly that of the Klan, when he announced his intention to repeal all legislation that limited the political activity of former Confederates. The result was the election of an overwhelming conservative majority to the state General Assembly, and the effective end of Reconstruction in Tennessee.

     With the uncompromising Brownlow gone and the compliant Senter in his place, the Klan's nominally ‘official’ leadership liquidated itself. In March, the ‘Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire’—that is, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest—issued a ‘General Order’ for the destruction of masks and costumes, and the cessation all ‘demonstrations’ unless they were authorized by a ‘Grand Titan,’ the chief of a congressional district, or a higher authority. It is possible that all this was theater, a feint to forestall the crackdown that seemed imminent after Barmore's murder. But the Pulaski den did cease its activities, at least to all appearances, and the several Nashville dens, three hundred strong, ostentatiously paraded in full regalia through the streets of the state capital in what they claimed was the finale to the Klan's flamboyant career.

     When Forrest was summoned to testify before a joint committee of Congress investigating the Klan, in 1871, he claimed virtually total ignorance of the organization. He first asserted that, as best he knew the Klan had ‘dispersed in the spring of 1868.’ ‘Or it might have been in the early summer, I cannot say.’ Or maybe later. Or perhaps when Senter was elected governor, in the autumn of 1869. Forest figuratively shrugged: ‘I do not recollect; I have never paid attention to the elections.’ Nothing that Forrest said could be taken at face value, of course, since he obfuscated without compunction about every aspect of his association with the Klan. Asked why exactly it had been disbanded, Forrest replied, because there was no need for it anymore, because ‘the country was safe.’ If there had been any assaults since then by men calling themselves Klansmen, then those were just ‘wild young men and bad men’ who had no organization at all. He claimed to know nothing about such people.

     By this time, Forrest liked to present himself as the very model of a reformed rebel, opposed to violence, earnestly engaged in business—'Railroads had no politics,’ he told his interrogators-- entirely comfortable with the new status quo. No one in the South, he asserted with faux naivete, believed that killing a Negro was any less of an offense than killing a white man. He boasted that he had freed the forty-five slaves on his plantation in 1863, two years before the war's end, and said that he not only supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments but had advocated for them to ‘our people,’ because ‘they were inevitable and should be accepted.’

     It is just barely possible that Forrest was sincere, despite the mass of lies he told about his affiliation with the Klan. At bottom, he was an opportunist. In business, as a would-be politician, and as soldier, he was a man who seized the advantage when he was certain to prevail, slipped away when the odds were decisively against him, and never undertook a battle that he didn't need to fight. He had come to the conclusion that he had no future in politics, for which he was temperamentally unsuited. Now he was dependent on attracting northern investment for his railroad schemes, and he also needed willing Black labor to work for him: the ‘butcher of Fort Pillow' and the ‘Grand Wizard’ were roles that no longer played to his advantage. (In the years to come, as he struggled to recoup his fortunes, he pioneered the exploitation of prison labor as a business, one which differed very little from his use of slaves on his plantations in prewar times.)

     No matter what Forrest said, or may actually have meant, in his edict of 1869, it seems to have applied only in Tennessee, and it was not universally obeyed even there. The dissolution of the Pulaski KKK den meant little. It had long since ceased to serve as more than a symbolic touchstone for a movement that had grown far beyond anything that the founders had imagined. Forrest was no longer needed: he had given the Klan his best, and then neatly extricated himself before he was targeted by the federal government. Although his full role is hard to define with precision, he lent more than charisma to the Klan's development. He pioneered the organized application of terror: the exploitation of his wartime style of warfare for political ends, the lightning strike, the rapid concentration of overwhelming force—now against unarmed civilians rather than Yankee soldiers. He and the commanders he recruited and encouraged had shown that Forrest's quintessential tactics could work anywhere in a region where the Klan's enemies were vulnerable, isolated, and defenseless. He had, in short, taught the Klan how wage guerrilla war." Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save the Reconstruction by Fergus Bordewich, pages 116-118.

Black Voting Deterrents

     Probably the most common law enacted throughout the South to discourage the Black vote was a “poll tax”. A poll tax is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual without reference to income or resources. Poll taxes are regressive, meaning the higher someone's income is, the lower the tax is as a proportion of income. For example, a $100 tax on an income of $10,000 is a 1% tax rate, while $100 tax on a $500 income is 20%. Other common methods of discouraging the Black vote had to do with ordinances or local laws requiring proof of literacy. In the early years of Jim Crow, 90% of the Black population was illiterate, thus preventing most Black Americans from voting. Another method of restricting the Black vote commonly utilized in the South was the requirement to own land of a certain value ($300 was a typical figure). Additionally, Southern states required early voter registration, allowed secret ballots, and required separate ballot boxes for state and federal elections. Eventually, state legislatures actually passed laws prohibiting Black Americans the right to vote. As an example, Alabama in 1901 adopted a new state constitution in which virtually no Black person could vote in that state. This remained state law for the next six decades until the national civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

     “What remained of Black voting rights in the South was being systematically stripped away with twisted legality. The Fifteenth Amendment had left a gaping loophole: it banned explicitly racial tests intended to disenfranchise Black voters, but it failed to outlaw supposedly ‘race-neutral’ measures that had the same effect. Soon every southern state had adopted poll taxes and literacy tests that required Black voters to interpret complicated texts, which joined more traditional forms of manipulation such as gerrymandering, the sudden shifting of poll locations, truncated poll hours in Black areas, and the physical muscling away of Black voters from ballot boxes.” Klan Wars: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, Fergus Bordewich, Page 354

     “The disenfranchisement of Negros in the South became nearly complete. In no other civilized and modern land had so great a group of people, most of whom were able to read and write, been allowed so small a voice in their own government. Every promise of eventual recognition of the intelligent negro voter has been broken. In the former slave states, from Virginia to Texas, accepting Missouri, there are no Negro state officials; no Negro members of legislatures; no judges on the bench; and usually no jurors. There are no colored county officials of any sort. In the towns and cities, there are no colored administrative officers, no members of the city council, no magistrates, no constables and very seldom even a policeman. This way at least 8 million Negros are left without effective voice in government, naked to the worst elements of the community.” Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois, page 695

Sharecropping as Rigged Economic System

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"Right at that period of time, Mr. Hoover got to be President, hollerin, ’keep the dollar out of the nigger’s hands.’ These white folks down here sang that like singing birds. ‘Keep the dollar out of the nigger’s hands.’” All God’s Dangers, Theodore Rosengarden, Page 264

Because the overwhelming majority of newly freed Black Americans was illiterate, a progression of fraudulent behavior on the part of landowners, merchants & lending institutions was almost a given. Often, landowners simply requested and even demanded that renters and tenants sign contracts without even allowing them to read the document in question. Often, contracts spelled out the terms of repayment at the end of the growing season with clauses giving the landowner rights to dispossess the tenant of not only his home, but livestock, personal possessions, etc. if he defaulted on paying back what was owed for loans on seed, provisions and fertilizer at the end of the year. Interest for these loans was typically usurious and poorly understood by the uneducated sharecropper. Often the wording in the contract made the tenant bear the larger deficit for poor crop production due to drought, low cotton prices, damage by the boll weevil, etc. Over time a whole economic system of deception, deceit and criminal manipulation became the accepted norm in the South.