Nadir of American race relations
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The nadir of American race relations refers to the period in United States history at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. According to many historians, racism in the United States was worse during this time than at any period before or since. During this period, African Americans lost many of the civil rights gains which they had made during Reconstruction. Segregation, racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. So did anti-black violence, including lynchings and race riots.
The phrase "the nadir" to describe this period was first used by historian Rayford Logan in a 1954 book titled The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901. It continues to be used, most notably in the books of James Loewen, but also by other scholars. [1] [2]
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[edit] Reconstruction as a time of hope
In the early part of the 20th century, Reconstruction was often viewed as a tragic period, when overweening Republicans, motivated by revenge and profit, used troops to force white Southerners to accept corrupt governments run by unscrupulous Northerners and illiterate, unqualified blacks. This version of events was propounded by historians such as William Dunning, a white supremacist who believed blacks were "children" and that "a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself…created any civilization of any kind." (quoted in Foner, p. 609). The views of Dunning and his students were enshrined in the popular imagination through such hugely popular works of fiction as D.W. Griffith's movie The Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. Many whites in the United States—especially in the South—still hold to this view. However, among historians, it has been completely discredited. (Current, pp. 446-447)
Instead, the historical consensus today follows more closely an interpretation first put forward by the African-American historian W.E.B. Dubois in 1910, but later expanded by Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner. For these historians, Reconstruction was a time of great racial idealism and hope. The Radical Republicans who passed the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment were, for the most part, motivated not by vengeance or greed, but by a real desire to help former slaves. (Current, pp. 446-447) The Republican Reconstruction governments Congress established were in many cases corrupt—but no more corrupt than Democratic governments, or, indeed, than Republican governments in the north. (Foner, p. 388) Furthermore, the governments had solid accomplishments, especially in the improvement of education for both blacks and whites. Nor are the charges of rule by incompetent blacks justified. In the first place, no Reconstruction government was dominated by black people; in fact, blacks never attained a level of representation equal to their prominence in the population. (Current, pp. 446-449) Secondly, when blacks did serve in public office, they often did so with distinction. In fact, today the entrance of blacks into political life was, Eric Foner argued, the most exciting and positive aspect of the Reconstruction period, constituting "a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century." (p. xxv)
[edit] Reconstruction's Failure
The Reconstruction period was marked by chaos and violence, but this was generally caused not by blacks, but by racist whites. Many former Confederates were determined to resist Northern rule and black equality. They did this through violence and intimidation. James Loewen notes that between 1865 and 1867, when white Democrats controlled the government, an average of one black person was murdered by whites every day in a single county (Hinds) in Mississippi. Black schools were an especial target of white violence; school buildings were frequently burned, and teachers were flogged and occasionally murdered. (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 158-160)
Despite the dangers, blacks continued to vote and to attend schools. Literacy rates soared, and many African-Americans were elected to state wide office—several even served in the national Congress. There were limits to Republican efforts on behalf of blacks—for example, a promise of land reform made by the Freedman's Bureau, which would have granted to blacks plots on the plantation land that they had worked, never came to pass. However, for several years, the federal government, pushed by Northern opinion, showed itself willing to intervene to protect the rights of black Americans. (Current, pp. 449-450)
Eventually, however, racism proved stronger than racial idealism. Most whites in the north – even reformers – believed whites were superior to blacks, and were therefore ready to accept that blacks should be second-class citizens. In any case, it had become clear that to rectify the situation in the face of white opposition in the South would require a massive commitment of money and arms. Rather than face these hurdles, northerners waffled and then capitulated. Abolitionist leaders like Horace Greeley began to ally themselves with the Democrats in attacking Reconstruction governments. Ulysses S. Grant, who as General had led the victorious Union campaign, as President explicitly refused to send troops to protect blacks from white terrorism when asked to do so by the governor of Mississippi in 1875. This was a beginning of a trend. After Grant, it would be many, many years before any President would do anything to extend the protection of the law to black people. (Foner, p. 391; Current, pp. 456-458)
[edit] The Nadir in the South
![A postcard showing the burned body of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916. Washington was a 17-year-old retarded farmhand who had confessed to raping and killing a white woman. He was castrated, mutilated, and burned alive by a cheering mob that included the mayor and the chief of police. An observer wrote that "Washington was beaten with shovels and bricks. . .[he] was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire. . . Wailing, the boy attempted to climb up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers." This image is from a postcard, which said on the back, "This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."](../../../upload/shared/thumb/5/5f/Lynching-of-jesse-washington.jpg/300px-Lynching-of-jesse-washington.jpg)
Without federal intervention, Southern states moved quickly to prevent black people from voting. Since most blacks still worked for whites, this could usually be done by threatening economic coercion. However, organized militias like the first Ku Klux Klan also threatened black voters with violence. (Current, pp. 457-458) As Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina proudly proclaimed in 1900,
- "We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting]...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." (quoted in Logan, p. 91)
With no voting rights and no voice in government, blacks were subjected to what was known as Jim Crow, a brutal system of segregation and discrimination. Blacks could not go to the same schools as whites; they could not eat in the same restaurants, travel on the same train cars, live in the same neighborhoods, shop in the same stores. Nor could they serve on juries, which meant that they had little if any legal recourse. Whites could beat, rob, or murder blacks at will for minor infractions. (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 160-165) In Black Boy, an autobiographical account of life during the nadir, Richard Wright writes about being struck with a bottle and knocked from a moving truck for failing to call a white man "sir". (Chapter Nine) Another black man from rural Mississippi noted that, "You couldn't even smile at a white woman. If you did, you'd be hung from a limb." Indeed, between 1889 and 1922, the NAACP calculates that lynchings reached their worst level in history, with almost 3,500 people, almost all of them black men, murdered. [3] James Loewen notes that lynching emphasized the helplessness of Blacks, since "the defining characteristic of a lynching is that the murder takes place in public, so everyone knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished." (Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 166)
The reason given for these lynchings was usually that the black men had raped white women. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who conducted one of the first systematic studies of the subject, found that, on the contrary, blacks were "lynched for anything or nothing" — for wife-beating, for stealing hogs, for being "saucy to white people", for sleeping with a consenting white woman, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Chapters 5 and 6)
The constant threat of terror were used to keep blacks "in their place", but certain actions did make blacks more of a target. Big Bill Broonzy noted that those who stood up for their rights were called "crazy" by other blacks and faced violent retribution by whites. Broonzy states:
- "I had an uncle like that and they hung him… They hung him down there because they say he was crazy and he might ruin the, the other Negroes… See, and that is why they hung him, see, because he was a man, and he had a good education as some of the white—better than some of the white people down there…" (Lomax interview)
Blacks who were economically successful also faced reprisals or sanctions. When Richard Wright tried to train to become an optometrist and lens-grinder, the other men in the shop threatened him with violence until he was forced to leave. In a similar fashion, the Kentucky Derby refused to allow black jockeys in 1911, not because they were unfit to ride, but because African-Americans had won more than half of the first twenty-eight races. (Wright, Chapter Nine; Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 163-164)
This situation called into question the policies of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black leader during the early part of the nadir, who argued that black people could better themselves by hard work and thrift. This did seem like a reasonable path during the Reconstruction period, and Washington followed it himself to some extent. However, as W.E.B. Dubois pointed out,
- "it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for working men and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage."(Chapter 3)
Through violence and legal restrictions, Whites often prevented blacks from working as common laborers, much less as skilled artisans or in the professions. Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black people found it virtually impossible to advance.
[edit] The nadir in the United States as a whole
Faced with the intolerable conditions in the South, many blacks tried to leave. In 1879, Logan notes, "some 40,000 Negroes virtually stampeded from Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia for the Midwest." More famously, beginning in around 1915, many blacks moved to Northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration.
Whites had mixed reactions to the migration of blacks, sometimes encouraging it and sometimes (violently) discouraging it. For blacks themselves, however, life outside the South was often little better than life inside it. During the nadir, the United States as a whole, not just one section of it, became more racist. Having abandoned the fight for egalitarianism, the North largely abandoned the ideal as well. In the Midwest and West, many towns posted "sundown" warnings, threatening to kill any African-Americans who remained overnight. Monuments to Confederate War dead were erected across the nation—even in, for example, Montana—symbolizing the sympathy of the nation as a whole with the racial hierarchy of the Confederacy. (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 182-183, pp. 102-103) Black housing was segregated in the north, and, in many regions, blacks could not serve on juries. Blackface shows, in which whites dressed as blacks portrayed African-Americans as shiftless, ignorant clowns, were popular in North and South. The Supreme Court — which gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by legalizing segregation in a series of decisions culminating in 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson—was made up almost entirely of northerners. (Logan, 97-98)
Racism in the North did not improve later in the nadir; in fact, if anything, as more blacks moved north, it became worse. In academia, eugenics and "scientific" racism gained stature (see Franz Boas). Even more calamitously for blacks, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat was elected to the Presidency. Wilson was a historian in the Dunning mode and an outspoken white supremacist; shortly after entering office, and despite promises to black groups, he introduced legislation to limit black civil rights nationwide. Congress refused to pass the measures, so Wilson took what action he could on his own. Since Reconstruction, a few government posts—such as ambassador to Haiti—had been traditionally given to African-Americans; Wilson ended this practice, effectively re-segregating the federal government. Wilson was also a vocal fan of the racist film Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrated the rise of the first Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization devoted to intimidating blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. His praise was used to defend the film from NAACP charges of racism. (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 28-29)
Birth of a Nation helped popularize the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which gained its greatest power and influence during and shortly after Wilson's presidency. In 1924, the Klan had 4 million members. (Current, p. 693). It also controlled the governorship and a majority of the state legislature in Indiana, as well as exerting a powerful political influence in Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Oregon, and Texas. (Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 161-162) Some historical evidence suggests that President Warren G. Harding, Wilson's successor, was inducted into the Klan in a White House ceremony. (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 165)
In the North, lynchings, though not unheard of, were less common than in the South. There were still mob attacks on blacks, however. Mass attacks on blacks (called race riots) occurred in Houston, in Philadelphia and in East St. Louis in 1917, and, most famously, in 1919 in Chicago, when mob violence raged for a week, leaving 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, over 500 injured and more than 1,000 homeless. (Current, p. 670) It was during that same year that Race Riots erupted throughout the nation (hence, the term Red Summer of 1919) The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma was even more deadly; white mobs invaded and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa. Witnesses reported seeing whites in airplanes dropping dynamite on the city's black neighborhood. 1,256 homes were destroyed and 39 people (26 black, 13 white) people were confirmed killed, although recent investigations suggest that the number of black deaths could be considerably higher. (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 165)
Northern writer James Baldwin commented that
- "I know [a] Negro, a man very dear to me, who says, with conviction and with truth, 'The spirit of the South is the spirit of America.' He was born in the North and did his military training in the South. He did not, as far as I can gather, find the South 'worse'; he found it, if anything, all too familiar." (Chapter 3)
Baldwin was writing during the 1950s, after the nadir had ended. However, like Baldwin, most historians of the earlier period argue that racism was the policy of the nation as a whole, not just of the South. Or, as Thomas Hall, an ex-slave interviewed in the 1930s put it,
- "The Yankees helped free us, so they say, but they let us be put back in slavery again." (quoted in Foner, p. 610)
[edit] The legacy of the nadir
There were a few hopeful signs for black people during the nadir. Black literacy levels, which rose during Reconstrution, stayed high. The establishment of the NAACP occurred during this period, and by 1920 the group had already won a few important anti-discrimination lawsuits. African-Americans, such as Dubois and Wells-Barnett, continued the tradition of advocacy, organizing, and journalism which had helped spur abolitionism before reconstruction, as well as developing new tactics which would help to spur the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance and the popularity of jazz music during the early part of the 20th century made many Americans more aware of black culture and more accepting of black celebrities.
Overall, however, the nadir was a disaster, certainly for black people and arguably for whites as well. Foner points out that:
- "...by the early twentieth century [racism] had become more deeply embedded in the nation's culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our nation's entire history." (pp. 608)
Similarly, Loewen argues that family instability and crime which many sociologists have found in black communities can be traced, not to slavery, but to the nadir and its aftermath. (Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 166) Foner adds that "none of Reconstruction's black officials created a family political dynasty" and concludes that the nadir "aborted the development of the South's black political leadership." (p. 604) Certainly, the racial cast of many of America's political debates—from the drug war to affirmative action—are part of the nadir's legacy. Segregation in housing and education was established during the nadir, and both helped to ensure that African-Americans would remain disproportionately poor to the present day.
Political violence is also arguably one of the nadir's bitter gifts to American society. Many commentators at the time pointed out that lynchings and mob action undermine respect for the established justice system. Lynchings have not disappeared—one famous case occurred in 1981—and other organized violence against blacks and other minorities also recurs periodically. On a national level, many of the nation's most famous political assassinations—Robert Kennedy's, Martin Luther King Jr.'s, Malcolm X's—were linked to racial divisions which the nadir accentuated. Many white nationalist and right-wing militia movements have their roots in the Ku Klux Klan.
[edit] The exact year of the nadir
Logan took some trouble to establish the exact year when the nadir reached its lowest point; he argued for 1901, suggesting that relations improved after then. Others, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923. (Logan, p. xxi) Today, though the term "nadir" is still used to describe the post-Reconstruction period, the search for the single worst year has largely been abandoned.
[edit] Sources
- James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
- Richard N. Current, et. al, American History: A Survey, 7th ed., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
- W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk
- Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
- James Loewen, Lies Across America, New York: Touchstone, 1999.
- James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, New York: Touchstone, 1995
- Rayford Logan,The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson,, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. (This is an expanded edition of Logan's 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir, 1877-1901)
- Alan Lomax interview with Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson on the album , Blues in the Mississippi Night, Rykodisc, 1990.
- Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, 1901
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, 1895
- Richard Wright, Black Boy, Harper & Brothers, 1945
