SUPREMACY: A post-Reconstruction racial history
Minority groups have always played a crucial role in the history of the United States. After all, the country has become somewhat known for its cultural diversity, being labeled a melting pot of peoples, languages, and culture. Minorities, in America being defined loosely as those people without white skin, do not see fair treatment even today compared to their white counterparts. However, it has come a long way. Minority groups, specifically African Americans, have seen a long history of mistreatment, abuse, and neglect in these United States. Even after the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery in 1865, blatant mistreatment of blacks continued heavily until the period of Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s. This harsh mistreatment is underlined and fueled by a dynamic inferiority/superiority complex between blacks and whites. White supremacy seemed to be the pervasive attitude toward African Americans from Reconstruction onward; its implementation came in the form of financial, physical, and emotional persecution, and even saw approval from the government itself.
The Reconstruction era posed several challenges for both whites and blacks in a time of rebuilding and crippling financial crises, the biggest of which occurred in the agricultural industry of the south. The freeing of slaves left white landowners with much land and little labor to tend it, and left blacks with no land and no jobs to provide for their families. The solution came in the form of sharecropping, a farming method where landowners rented portions of their land in exchange for a share of the harvest. While a good idea on paper, this way of life quickly swung in favor of white landowners, and became a tool for white supremacy throughout the Reconstruction era. Although slavery had technically been abolished, southern white plantation owners imposed white supremacy by ushering in a new era of harsh financial slavery.
Landowners created all the rules for sharecrop farming in the form of a sharecropper’s contract like the one from the 1882 Grimes family farm in Pitt County, North Carolina. These sets of rules were harshly unfair, but owners got away with it because most African Americans either couldn’t read, couldn’t find any other work, or both. As stated in the contract, the landowner controlled when, where, and for how much the shared crop sold, creating a crooked system where they could easily lie and keep most of the profits for themselves (“Sharecropper”). This binding agreement was nothing more than watered-down slavery.
Sharecropping also saw a great unbalance of power. Owners lorded immense control over their tenants such as cleaning out stables, working how the owner specified, and forbidding work on any other farm. This form of glorified slavery deliberately took advantage of African Americans in a time of dire financial need by imposing a great burden upon them. In a time when many Africans Americans were out of work and out of hope, the financial difficulties placed upon them by the power-hungry landowners only led them into deeper poverty and hardships (“Sharecropper”).
African Americans in the late 19th century south faced severe alienation from society led by private white citizens. This feeling of hate and white superiority pervaded mostly in state and local laws in the form of the Jim Crow regime, a set of laws segregating blacks and whites in public places such as schools, restrooms, drinking fountains, and more. In 1896, Homer Plessy, a one-eighth black man from Louisiana, was arrested for sitting in the white section of a tram car. His case was eventually taken to the Supreme Court where it was ruled against Plessy and in favor of the segregation laws covering the south. The majority opinion, written by Justice Henry Billings Brown, marked a turning point in the fight for racial equality (Brown). Although the growing trend of white supremacy originated with private southern citizens, the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling was the first time the federal government gave their stamp of approval to segregation based on race.
Justice Brown stated in his opinion that the Louisiana law did not go against the 14th amendment of equal rights because, “Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other…” (Brown). This feeling, which would eventually become known as “separate but equal,” asserted that although African Americans were forced to use separate facilities, the quality of said facilities were just as adequate. This attitude, which was the foundation of the entire Jim Crow regime up until it was demolished in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, was entirely false because public areas were indeed separate, but not at all equal. The stamp of approval given by Brown and the entire federal government gave the racist south permission to continue to force their oppressive white supremacist agenda for many years to come (Brown).
The Plessy v. Ferguson also gave approval to police power in the states to separate races in public places, meaning the federal government is essentially taking a passive stance on the issue. This idea of the national government stepping back and somewhat turning a blind eye to cruel treatment in the south is a large reason it took so long for blacks to gain major racial equality in the 1960s. Justice Brown said himself, “The most common instance of this [police power] is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enfored…” (Brown).
Homer Plessy also argued that if laws were allowed to differentiate between races, what is to stop them from differentiating between hair style, or make of their car, or color of their house? To this, Brown replied that “every exercise of the police power must be reasonable.” (Brown). This ridiculous assumption was perhaps the greatest catapult of white supremacism into the 20th century. The impacts felt from the Plessy v. Ferguson not only gave a defeating blow to African Americans in the south, but marked the first time the federal government gave their stamp of approval to racial segregation.
The racial hate and segregation continued well into the 20th century as well. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s saw continued government approval of mistreatment, financial persecution, and also severe physical abuse of African Americans. Fannie Lou Hamer, in a testimony before the Credentials Committee for the Democratic Convention of 1964, summarized the conditions of blacks in the south in a graphic and heartfelt description. She spoke of losing her plantation job for registering to vote, drive-by shootings on African American houses, and police arresting black women for petty crimes and beating them behind closed doors. The speech, which was an attempt to gain partisan support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, gained so much national attention that then President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to televise a press conference to distract Americans from the horrific details (Hamer).
Hamer speaks of violence throughout the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, particularly in the summer of 1964 known as “freedom summer,” when African Americans generated a large movement to register to vote. She tells of a time when her and three other black women were arrested for attempting to use the restroom at a segregated restaurant. The four women were locked in a cell where they were beaten senseless and called derogatory names. Hamer’s testimony matches up with several others in the south during this time of hatred and bigotry towards the African American race. She also mentions in her testimony several other murders of innocent men accused of raping white women or getting on the wrong side of the white police. She tells of drive by shootings and hate crimes not only ignored by the police, but sometimes encouraged (Hamer). The animosity toward the race progressed into physical violence and only added to the financial burdens African Americans were facing, not to mention the absence of government intervention to relieve any tension. All of this persecution is underlined by an emotional mistreatment, using bullying and harassment to further establish white superiority in the south.
There is perhaps no better example of emotional persecution than the white supremacy group called the Ku Klux Klan. Since the group’s revival in the early 1960s, the Klan terrorized African Americans in the south with not only violence, but also through emotional abuse. Using harsh threats and bullying tactics, they attempted to assert their white supremacist beliefs in the south to keep African Americans in their place. A Klan bulletin posted in rural Ruleville, Mississippi during the “freedom summer” of 1964 warns the citizens of the town to take charge before African Americans earn the right to vote and threaten their way of life (“Warning”).
In the warning letter posted for the town to see, they claim the leaders of the town “has sold Ruleville to a pack of communistic, atheistic, low moral punks from outside the boundaries of our beloved state” (“Warning”). The claim is a mostly false reference to the white college students who volunteered to help register African Americans to vote as well as establish education and other things in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The letter goes on to accuse town leaders of “selling out” by letting the volunteers and blacks themselves have more freedom (“Warning”).
This bulletin, along with several other KKK propaganda, is nothing more than an emotional scarring for African Americans in an already tense time of trying to gain racial equality. It is an example of white supremacy stretching as far as to threaten and bully African Americans into staying in conditions where they make little, are treated poorly, and have virtually no freedom in a land where everyone is guaranteed freedom. Perhaps the most ironic part of the letter is when the Klan states, “We have sat back and allowed punks and scum from outside the boundaries of our beloved southland to take away our cherished way of life in which both races have lived together in peace and harmony through our years” (“Warning”). In no way do both races live in peace and harmony, as plainly demonstrated by the nationwide broadcast of Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony. The KKK also seem to be complaining that they are the one being stripped of their way of life when African Americans are obviously the ones suffering under the cruel and unforgiving regime of white supremacy in the racist south.
The structures of white supremacy took many forms after Reconstruction in the south including financial, physical, emotional, and even with approval and complacency from both the state and local government. Many African Americans were punished financially by losing their job like Fannie Lou Hamer or through unfair sharecropper contracts like that of the Grimes Family in 1882. (Hamer) (“Sharecropper”). They also suffered severe physical abuse and mistreatment, especially in the Civil Rights era, through beatings, arrests, and murders. Intimidation also played a key factor by bullying blacks into not taking any action to further their cause, seen in racist organizations like the KKK. And finally, the federal government joined southern state and local governments by giving their approval to this persecution with the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (“Warning”) (Brown). African Americans have come a long way to gain the acceptance and equality they enjoy today. White supremacy that existed from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement has since passed, and African Americans now enjoy the freedoms that should have been granted to them many years ago.
Works Cited
Brown, Henry Billings. “Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).” Thinking through Sources: Exploring
American Histories. 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt and Steven F. Lawson, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2017, 126-128.
Hamer, Fannie Lou. “Remarks before the Credentials Committee.” Freedom Summer: A Brief
History with Documents, edited by John Dittmer, Jeff Kolnick, and Leslie-Burl McLemore, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2017, 145-148.
“Sharecropper’s Contract (1882).” Thinking through Sources: Exploring American Histories.
2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt and Steven F. Lawson, Bedford St. Martin’s,
2017, 124-125.
“Warning—Citizens of Ruleville.” Freedom Summer: A Brief History with Documents, edited by
John Dittmer, Jeff Kolnick, and Leslie-Burl McLemore, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2017,
60-61.