The Civil Rights Movement

The Black Freedom Struggle in America

Bruce J. Dierenfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781134812585
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Now in its second edition, The Civil Rights Movement: The Black Freedom Struggle in America recounts the extraordinary story of how tens of thousands of African Americans overcame segregation, exercised their right to vote, and improved their economic standing, and how millions more black people, along with those of different races, continue to fight for racial justice in the wake of continuing police killings of unarmed black men and women.

In a concise, chronological fashion, Bruce Dierenfield shows how concerted pressure in a variety of forms has helped realize a more just society for many blacks, though racism is far from being extinguished. The new edition has been fully revised to include an entire chapter on the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition, the black experience in the slave and Jim Crow periods has been expanded, and greater emphasis has been placed throughout on black agency. The book also features revised maps, new primary documents, and an updated further reading section that reflects recent scholarship.

This book will provide students of American history with a compelling and comprehensive introduction to the Civil Rights Movement.

Part 1
Up from slavery

1 The Jim Crow South

With the end of America’s bloody civil war in 1865, “freedom” of a sort for enslaved peoples had finally arrived, but there was bitterness aplenty among them. In Mississippi, when an enslaved woman named Caddy learned she was free, she flung down her hoe, marched to the big house, flipped up her dress, and angrily told her mistress, “Kiss my ass!” One bewildered freedman dismissed the claim that he had had a kind master: “Kind! Yes, he gib men corn enough, and he gib me pork enough, and he never gib me one lick wid de whip, but whar’s my wife?—whar’s my poor chill’en as was sold away?” Some elderly enslaved people were fearful of the new order and refused to accept emancipation, preferring to stay with the “marster” and “mistiss” they had known all their lives. At least these people knew that slavery was over for them. In Texas, slaveholders kept their laborers in the dark for two months until Union troops arrived on June 19 with the news of liberation. These newly freed people organized a celebration on the anniversary of that day—“Juneteenth”—the black “Independence Day.”

Feelings of relief, anger, and betrayal notwithstanding, for a few years after emancipation, it looked as if millions of black southerners would enjoy the benefits of freedom and enter the mainstream of society. One form of emancipation was legal and constitutional. Soon after the Civil War ended, Congress enacted its first civil rights law, which defined citizenship without regard to one’s race, skin color, or previous condition. Congress subsequently granted all Americans access to public accommodations and transportation and made them eligible for jury service. To permanently protect those former enslaved, the United States also ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which were intended to transform the country that Abraham Lincoln once described as “half slave and half free” to one in which the guarantees of liberty would be extended to all, including blacks. These amendments ended slavery, promised “equal protection of the laws” to both races, and granted suffrage to black males.

Another form of emancipation involved government assistance. As freedpeople moved about without passes, reunited with far-off family members, and decided for whom and how long they wished to work, the federal government created its first welfare agency—the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—to oversee this transition from slavery to freedom. Though underfunded and understaffed, the bureau relieved considerable suffering, as it built emergency shelters, provided supplies and medical aid, supervised labor contracts, established schools for African Americans, and leased or sold land to displaced southerners, including newly freed blacks.

The Freedmen’s Bureau’s greatest failure involved land distribution. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had issued an order promising formerly enslaved persons who lived along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida the opportunity to rent and later buy forty acres of abandoned and confiscated land, as well as the use of a mule. Word spread that the federal government would hand over the land of all slaveholders in similarly sized parcels as partial compensation for the unpaid labor of enslaved workers. After all, Congress had approved the wartime Homestead Act of 1862, which permitted blacks, as well as whites, to take possession of an even more generous allotment of Native Peoples’ land in the West. In the South, however, the wholesale handover of planters’ land never occurred. President Andrew Johnson, a former slaveholder, voided orders like Sherman’s and directed lands already given by the bureau to freedpeople be returned to their Confederate owners. “Why do you take away our lands … [and] give them to our all-time enemies,” shouted one furious black man when he heard the unwelcome news. “This is not right!”

Politically, there was what amounted to a revolution in black status and an effort to reconstruct the South. The impetus for such unprecedented action stemmed from northern revulsion against the South’s black codes, which virtually restored servitude after the war ended. While the codes entitled freedpeople to marry other blacks legally and purchase property, they also required blacks to sign annual labor contracts with white landowners, permitted corporal punishment of black sharecroppers, and barred blacks from voting, attending white schools, marrying whites, serving on juries or in militias, testifying against whites in court, having guns or alcohol, going hunting or fishing, or starting a job without the previous employer’s approval.

To protect freedpeople and to punish disloyal white southerners, Thaddeus Stevens and other northern Republicans in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson and nearly impeached him. These “radicals” passed legislation that dispatched federal troops to the South to protect lives and property and to oversee the establishment of state governments that were more democratic. When blacks finally could vote, they headed to the polls in droves, electing fifteen hundred black officials across the South, including senators like Hiram Revels of Mississippi, along with state and local officials. With black support, the former Confederate states drew up the most progressive constitutions the South had ever known, instituting a more equitable tax system, abolishing property qualifications for voting and holding office, ending imprisonment for debt, reducing the grounds for applying the death penalty, and ending discrimination in housing, accommodations, and public transportation. State legislatures also repaired the war’s catastrophic damage and financed the construction of public schools, hospitals, railroad lines, and asylums for orphans and the mentally ill. For the first time, the South began to resemble a democracy, and America saw the greatest expansion of civil rights it would ever see.

The drive for racial justice was simultaneously carried on in the North. Toward the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, and Henry Highland Garnet created the National Equal Rights League in Syracuse, New York, which pushed for slave emancipation, black male suffrage, and equal access to public education and public accommodations. “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less,” as the league motto stated, and the league used print media blitzes, legislative lobbying, voting drives, and lawsuits with considerable success. The league also established self-sufficient black communities and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals of equality. For freedpeople of the South, northern league chapters raised money to build churches and schools and paid the salaries of northern teachers to educate newly freed black children.

When it came to making a living, the promise of freedom in the South only went so far. Instead of becoming independent farmers, as they expected, impoverished and illiterate blacks were forced to work white men’s farmland, either as a tenant farmer or, more commonly, as a sharecropper. Whereas a tenant farmer paid for the use of the land, a sharecropper had to sign one-sided annual contracts with whites. The landowners provided seed, tools, draft animals, and fertilizer on credit to their sharecroppers in return for housing, fuel, and a share of the cotton, tobacco, or rice crop produced, usually a third. Sharecroppers had no say in which crops were grown or how they were sold, and they received less pay than urban slaves had earned. When it came time to settle their accounts, the croppers invariably found themselves deeply in debt, the victim of unpredictable harvests, high interest rates, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants. Under what was called debt peonage, croppers invariably had to stay for another year or two on the farm to try to repay the money they owed. Although black farmers were spared from the gang system and close supervision that were characteristic of the slave system, they found themselves in a kind of continuing neo-serfdom. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country.”

Any black adult who failed to enter labor contacts, or who broke them, could be arrested for vagrancy and forced to work without pay to construct roads, dig ditches, or tend to crops, all the while chained together to other blacks. It was a lucrative business for all concerned, except for blacks caught up in this brutal convict-lease system. In Alabama, three-fourths of state revenues came from renting out black prisoners to white farmers or businesses. Because whites who hired black prisoners had no stake in their physical well-being—unlike slavery—the prisoners could literally be worked to death with no economic or legal consequence. There was always another black man who could be arrested and put on a chain gang.

While white southerners managed to restore control over black laborers, they were infuriated by the political and social changes involving freedpeople in Reconstruction. To redeem the South from “nigger domination,” whites terrorized blacks, and federal troops were mostly powerless to prevent the racial violence. There were many vigilante groups, with the most well known of them being the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which was led by a former Confederate general and billed itself as the protector of the Old South’s noble traditions. Klansmen wore white hoods, lit flaming crosses, employed secret codes, and conducted night raids to stop blacks from taking advantage of their new opportunities. In an orgy of violence, Klansmen whipped, castrated, raped, tortured, and lynched thousands of black men and women. In one case involving racial etiquette, a black Texan was murdered for failing to remove his hat in the presence of a white man. All of those who were lynched were killed without due process, and one estimate is that a third of them were falsely accused. None of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes was punished.

One example of the barbarism of lynching illustrates the general pattern. In 1899, near Atlanta, Sam Hose was falsely accused of murdering his employer, Alfred Cranford, and raping his wife. An estimated two thousand whites took the law into their own hands and disrobed “this monster in human form,” chained him to a tree, cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, skinned his face, and plunged knives into his body before setting him ablaze. As his eyes bulged from their sockets and his blood sizzled, he moaned, “Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus!” After Hose died, the crowd fought over pieces of his heart, liver, and bones, which were sliced up as prized souvenirs. Such sadistic “Negro barbecues” amused whites and were intended as a grim warning to blacks never to seek equality. In this nightmare world, a black Mississippian recalled that “to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway—so jest go on an’ kill ’em.’” Appalled by the frequency of such attacks, novelist Mark Twain called America the “United States of Lyncherdom.”

The linchpin in maintaining white power was to disfranchise blacks, who were thought to be ignorant and irrational. Politicians in the Democratic Party—the vehicle at that time to preserve white supremacy in the South—employed fraud and force to keep blacks from voting. Whites claimed that removing blacks from politics would eliminate corruption and improve race relations, as blacks accepted their assigned place in society. Southern states imposed poll taxes that were payable in cash months before elections at a time when black farmers were cash poor and obliged to work in the fields. In Louisiana, the legislature effectively boosted white voting by exempting poor and illiterate whites from education, property, and tax requirements if their grandfathers could vote right after the Civil War. In South Carolina, officials set up eight ballot boxes—one for each office—and invalidated ballots that semi-literate black voters placed in the wrong box. In addition, the voting rolls were kept lily white by imposing “good character” tests, evaluating a black person’s literacy, tossing out improperly completed voting forms, holding party primary elections for whites only, and, ultimately, just closing the registrar’s office for days on end. These measures reduced black voting in the South to a minuscule 3 percent in 1900. South Carolina Governor Ben Tillman, a Confederate Army veteran and onetime leader of a white supremacist paramilitary group, boasted, “We have done our best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Figure 1.1Crowd witnessing a lynching. In May 1916, a crowd of ten thousand people in Waco, Texas, watch the lynching and burning of 17-year-old farmhand Jesse Washington whose charred corpse leans chained to the trunk of a tree.

Source: Photo by Gildersleeve/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.

Once absolute political control returned to whites, southern states rewrote their constitutions and laws to separate the races from birth to burial. Whites were determined to enforce black deference and subordination at every turn, which they did by instituting a rigid caste system called “Jim Crow” that lasted into the 1960s. The term came from minstrel shows where a white performer in blackface entertained white audiences by playing a clumsy, dim-witted character by that name who reinforced demeaning stereotypes of African Americans. Signs appeared reading “white” and “colored” for drinking fountains, toilets, telephone booths, and streetcars. Each race had its own hospital and prison; libraries were for whites only; theaters consigned blacks to the balcony. The races could not visit the park or the zoo together. In some southern states, there were separate Bibles for each race in courts of law, and blacks could not play checkers with whites. In the field of education, there were separate public schools for each race, and white students would never touch textbooks used by blacks. The inequities went beyond separation. For example, in 1920, the eleven southern states spent an average of $10.32 per white public school student, but only $2.89 on each black one. That same year, there was one hospital bed for every 139 whites, but only one for every 1,941 blacks. Even in death, segregation applied, for black and white corpses were interred in separate cemeteries. To rationalize racial separation, southern editors, educators, and clergymen turned to the Bible, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, and the new science of eugenics.

Racial mores in the Jim Crow era prescribed a way of life based on the assumption that blacks were inferior creatures. There was a long list of forbidden activities, such as the following:

• Whites could call black men “Boy,” “Uncle,” or their first name, never a courtesy title, such as “Mr.” or “Sir.”
• Blacks were expected to walk in the gutter when whites came down the...