They Left Great Marks on Me

African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I

Kidada E. Williams

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814795378
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans’ bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans’ testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.

1
“The Special Object of Hatred and Persecution”

The Terror of Emancipation

African Americans embraced freedom with hopes befitting centuries of enslavement. After the Civil War they were ready to make their ascent, to rise above the despair of slavery, and to soar with whites on the wings of American freedom and citizenship. Black people snatched opportunities to abandon rural farms and plantations or urban hotels and factories as federal officials adopted policies to institutionalize abolition. Blacks seized control of their lives by fortifying their families, acquiring work, and challenging restrictions on black people’s landownership. Indeed, these people acted as such because they understood that secured families, land, satisfactory employment, education, and access to the political spheres were critical to their freedom. Free blacks already benefited from these opportunities, of course, but they were anxious to show their capacity for enjoying the benefits of citizenship that they believed accompanied freedom. Reuniting families, voting, receiving equal justice, testifying in courts, serving on juries, building sociopolitical institutions, and bearing arms ranked high on all African Americans’ postemancipation priorities. Thus, with freedom and the promise of citizenship, land, education, and equal rights black people believed they could secure control over their lives and participate fully in American life.

African Americans were free, but their testimonies about emancipation show that freedom, as they envisioned it, was hard to grasp and harder to live in the former slaveholding states. Freedom presented ex-slaves with the mix of a promise of freedom and a daunting challenge: establishing and maintaining the integrity of their families and their communities and institutions. This was difficult because black southerners had to reunite and support their families and build their communities and institutions while they were surrounded by white people who believed and were determined to prove that ending slavery and reconstituting the nation in ways that included black people threatened white people’s survival. However intense white people’s opposition to freedom and citizenship rights for blacks might have been, it did not stop blacks from trying to enjoy their freedom. As an illustrative example of African Americans’ hopes and dreams, black people in a mass meeting in Petersburg, Virginia, produced a resolution to the nation in which they spoke with one voice to make the following point: “We have no feeling of resentment toward our former owners, and we are willing to let the past be buried with the past, and in the future treat all persons with kindness and respect who shall treat us likewise.”¹

White southerners did not share the same feelings, so it is perhaps useful to say a few words about the changes in the white South. After slavery ended, white southerners faced significant challenges that shaped African Americans’ ability to enjoy their freedom. For example, planters and industrialists had to work harder for their financial sustainability, and they even had to pay black workers for their labor while attempting to rebuild the wealth that the war and emancipation had destroyed. Additionally, white farmers and aspirant entrepreneurs before the war had to compete with a small free-black population for land, labor, power, and social position. Now, these whites faced the prospects of even greater competition from millions of free black people who were eager to enjoy and invest in the fruits of their labor. Neither the war’s outcome nor the federal government’s attempts to facilitate African Americans’ transition to freedom extinguished what many whites believed was their natural and constitutional right to control black people. Indeed, the privileges of slaveholding, including the authorized use of violence to govern and to make black people submit to subjugation, were such essential features of racial subjugation during slavery that many whites—regardless of their antebellum social status—claimed them in the postemancipation era. These whites often demanded that blacks continue deferring to white people as they had during slavery. When black people refused to comply, the more pugnacious whites attacked. Over time, these whites used the nearly universal resistance of white Americans to equal rights for blacks and their shriveling support for Reconstruction to wrestle from northern and Republican progressives the gears of the policy machine that was restructuring the nation after the war. Rather than attack white progressives, white conservatives regained control of southern affairs via a war of attrition against black people, who became the “special object” of southern whites’ fury over emancipation and Reconstruction.²

This chapter shows that blacks resisted racial violence by using a variety of strategies, including testifying about it. The history that victims and witnesses created when they testified to Freedmen’s Bureau agents, to army officials, and to members of Congress highlights their attempts to realize their dreams for freedom. Testifiers proclaimed black people’s social, economic, and political values. These African Americans also testified about the ways that whites, who were determined to protect their racial power, used violence to obliterate blacks’ efforts to advance beyond slavery. Testifiers reported that violence started after emancipation and escalated as they started playing a more active role in southern life and politics. On the whole, victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies proclaim that emancipation violence left blacks sifting through the wreckage of violent attacks and trying to rebuild and to reconcile the differences in their lives before and after the violence. For some people, recovery meant narrating the horrors of racial violence by giving testimonial interviews to Freedmen’s Bureau agents and to members of the Joint Select Committee of Congress that investigated the “Affairs of the Late Insurrectionary States.” Many victims and witnesses made their stories known by testifying to family members and friends and by taking advantage of federally sponsored opportunities to testify about violent events and the resulting suffering.³ The process of testifying allowed blacks to develop a vernacular history of racial violence and an intersubjectivity of its impact on black people, and that drove later efforts to end it.

The Ordinary Violence of Emancipation

The violence that white southerners had used to subjugate enslaved and free blacks before and during the Civil War continued and intensified after emancipation. Some federal officials’ concerns for the well-being of freedpeople fostered the creation of new legal mechanisms and distinctively public forums that recognized victims’ and witnesses’ suffering from racial violence and allowed them to testify about it. Sympathetic army generals and progressive Republicans created spaces to investigate and establish a complete picture of postemancipation violence, its nature, causes, and violations of African Americans’ rights as free people and as citizens. Among these spaces was the Freedmen’s Bureau, which Congress created in 1865 to oversee emancipation and Reconstruction and to provide aid to freedpeople and refugees, and the hearings of the congressional committee investigating Klan violence. Bureau offices and the sites of the congressional hearings were where many victims and witnesses recalled for each other and for federal officials violent attacks and the conditions of lives that were transformed by violence. What is more, emancipation-era addresses, petitions, and memorials also point to black people’s willingness to assert their citizenship rights by testifying about violence and by inserting their beliefs and opinions about it into the public spheres. Together these sources reveal the nature of violence that blacks endured and their assessments of its impact on them.⁴

The presence African Americans in Freedmen’s Bureau offices and at the congressional hearings and their initiation of discussions about violence through their addresses, petitions, and memorials suggest their appreciation for public forums as opportunities for victims of and witnesses to violence to resume the acts of living by having some official acknowledgment of violence and its impact. This acknowledgment of racial violence and its impact on African Americans had two parts, relating to testifying victims and witnesses and to listening audiences. Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman have written that “the choke and sting of experience only becomes real—is heard—when it is narrativized.” Acknowledgment of victims’ and witnesses’ pain and the role of perpetrators, Das and Kleinman argue, can also “give recognition to the injury or the deaths inflicted on a collective, and also legitimate that collective’s quest for repair, revitalization, and healing.”⁵ Federal officials’ willingness to provide spaces for black people to testify about violence served as a formal, albeit undeclared, acknowledgment of the wrongs that some southern whites committed against black people. The significance of having federal officials acknowledge their suffering was not lost on victims and witnesses.

African Americans’ testimonies in these settings represented a collective effort on the part of victims and witnesses to create public knowledge about postemancipation violence, to make their audiences bear witness to their suffering, and to explain “who they thought they were” as a people in relation to the violence they endured.⁶ Thus, their testimonies provide a ground’s-eye view of white people’s ordinary assaults on individual blacks and of their extraordinary attacks on families and communities. Their petitions and transcribed testimonies point to the dimensions of violence that mattered most to victims and witnesses—suffering—and form a vernacular history of emancipation that elucidates the way that whites looking to protect white supremacy laid waste to black people’s efforts to live and to exercise their rights as free people. In fact, complaints to Freedmen’s Bureau agents, testimonies before Congress, and some petitions and memorials highlight the everyday occurrence of violence and some contexts in which violence occurred. These testimonies show how violence created ruptures in African Americans’ paths to full participation in American life. Indeed, victims and witnesses testified about lives and homes torn asunder by violence, because they wanted white citizens and state and federal officials to acknowledge their suffering and to provide a degree of restorative justice.⁷

Slavery created a context for southern cross-racial exchanges in which African Americans’ behavior in the interplay of the master-slave relationship was supposed to be deferential to white authority. Confederate defeat, emancipation, and the policies of Reconstruction were supposed to upset this dynamic. Nevertheless, violence often erupted across the former slave-holding states when blacks attempted to act on their freedom and their citizenship. The violence people endured during the first years of emancipation ensnared everyone. It often originated in quotidian disputes, from such matters as wages, land, and reputation to childrearing and such issues as the protection of girls and women from sexual coercion and rape. Political massacres such as those that occurred in 1866 in both Memphis and New Orleans are well known. However, African Americans’ testimonies indicate that more common were acts of decentralized and spontaneous nonfatal violence committed by individual whites or small groups of whites who were seeking to punish blacks for failing to defer to their authority.⁸

The vernacular history of emancipation suggests that African Americans took aggressive steps to fortify their freedom by preserving the integrity of their families and by erecting cordons to insulate them from white people’s influence and violence. Blacks established independent homes and “home-places” as the first line of defense. The family home provided physical space for shelter. Additionally, the homeplace, according to bell hooks, was the atmosphere that African Americans created inside their homes. It was a space where black people could achieve “a certain degree of autonomy and, by extension, power” over their lives and communities. The homeplace was the space where blacks constructed new identities and rebuilt their families and where they could “freely confront the issue of humanization” in the larger context of white supremacy. Therefore, homeplaces were spaces where blacks could “affirm one another, … heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination.” Homes were places where blacks “could resist,” reject the “social ideology of white supremacy and black inferiority,” and prepare to live as citizens.⁹ African Americans also established what Earl Lewis calls “home spheres,” the “community, the streets, the neighborhood,” the kinship groups of friends and family and shared institutions that surrounded and encompassed black people’s homes. Within these enclaves, black people attempted to establish authority and autonomy over their lives and to limit the intrusion of white people’s influence that they had had to endure under slavery.¹⁰

Reading African Americans’ complaints to Freedmen’s Bureau officials and to members of Congress, as well as ex-slaves’ descriptions of the postemancipation era, it becomes clear that many of them modeled their homes, families, and communities on the mainstream white society and established male heads of households so they could claim the sociopolitical capital that infused the privileges of citizenship. Blacks recognized the ways that the challenges of finding satisfactory employment and reestablishing families presented certain obstacles to those who wished to establish homes that were similar to those of whites. Many families made the most out of their circumstances. They produced a wide swath of residences on the land of white farmers and plantation owners, on plots of land black people owned during slavery, and on land they purchased with money raised from sharecropping and wage work as domestics and farm and urban laborers.¹¹

African American families worked to meet the demands of freedom by tailoring white people’s family and communal dynamics to suit their specific goals and objectives and their distinct circumstances because of slavery. The responsibility of working steadily outside the home to provide economic security and shelter, as well as overseeing the lives of women and children, was seized by and fell primarily to black men, who often worked a series of jobs to provide for their families. For example, Alfred Richardson of Georgia and Joseph Nelson of Florida were carpenters. Skilled men such as these used their trades to generate wealth, while their unskilled counterparts likely took jobs performing field and farm work. Whether men were skilled laborers or not, many of them and their families balanced wage work with subsistence farming. People who generated enough produce, wheat, cotton, or poultry or livestock sold their overflow at the market. For instance, Richardson and his brother turned their skills and surplus cash into wealth and provided a service to their community when they collaborated to establish a grocery store. Charles Pearce was a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal church in Florida. Richard Pousser of Jackson County, Florida, was a constable who also testified that he would “hawk and peddle … chicken, eggs, butter, potatoes, beef, and pork” for his family. In all, free and freed black men worked hard to meet the needs of their families.¹²

The status of head of household—which was granted for the first time to emancipated men by Reconstruction—bestowed on all black men the cultural and legal right to control their families and to chart the destiny of their communities. Indeed, progressive proponents of Reconstruction believed that codifying black men’s patriarchal authority to control their families’ affairs and to make decisions about sexual partners, employment, and property, would help blacks establish self-sufficient families that could participate in American society. Black men acted out their gender roles by embracing the franchise, negotiating contracts and apprenticeships, and working their own land or that of another for profit. Yet, if black men controlled where, how, for whom, and under what circumstances they and their dependents worked, then what would happen to the authority that white men had enjoyed over black people before the war? If black men possessed this control over their lives and their communities, if they could decide where to work and determine the cost of land or crops, if they could control the formation of their families and the gender roles and sexual conventions to be carried out in them, then did that mean that they had the right to defend themselves against whites and to protect their interests? Many white southerners argued no. This authority in the hands of black men constituted a fundamental threat to whites who believed in the superiority of the white race and the need to subordinate blacks to whites in all matters of life.

Postbellum southern whites did not fail to observe and understand the power of African American families, institutions, and communities headed by black men. In fact, most postemancipation racial violence involved whites attacking and killing off the black veterans, politicians, contract negotiators, labor organizers, and aspiring entrepreneurs who insisted on asserting their authority over their own lives and those of their families. Accordingly, whites often attacked black men while they were performing the very gender roles and conventions designed to safeguard their own and their family’s freedom. Indeed, conservative whites saw as threats black men who carried arms, lobbied for the right to vote, disputed labor arrangements, or protected women and children from harm. These whites thought the right to exercise these privileges should remain in the purview of white men. Preserving these activities for white men, they believed, was the best way for whites to retain their power. Black men’s refusal to submit to white supremacy—as seen through their attempts to fulfill their roles as defenders and providers of their families—was the antithesis of white folks’ ideas of acceptable behavior for black men. This clash of interpretations about freedom put African American men on a collision course with whites and drew violence down on them and their families.¹³

The case of Louisiana freedman Cuff Canara illustrates what happened when black men tried to defend their families against violent whites. Canara burst into the Freedmen’s Bureau office at Sparta on August 1, 1866. Canara reported that he had confronted Dan Docking over the two sexual assaults the white man had committed on Canara’s wife. The rape of enslaved women and girls had been recognized as in the purview of the slaveholding class. Although some enslaved men confronted white men about sexual assaults on their wives, daughters, mothers, or sisters, enslaved people had little legal recourse. Canara recognized that, as a free man, he no longer had to tolerate assaults on his wife, so he took his complaint to the bureau. When Canara ran for the bureau office, Docking, two other armed white men, and four dogs tracked him ten miles to prevent him from reporting the rapes. Canara arrived at the bureau office with one gunshot wound after slaying three of the dogs pursuing him. The Canaras, like ot...