Buried Black History, When Black People ruled the South and The Klan roiled to life

The history you don't read in textbooks

Black people ruled the South? What’s he talking about****??

Yes, Black people ruled the south! — you read that right- they did. Ever heard of the reconstruction era?

It was a victory for Abolitionists and Radical Republicans, they fought and won. The vote was the ace card. A Black person could have the right to self-determination if he could vote.

That was before the bloodied brotherhood started burning crosses and sticking people’s heads on a pole.

Here’s how things went south for white supremacists.

Congress passed an Act, The Reconstruction Act 1867. It divided the South into five military districts. It outlined how new governments, based on manhood suffrage….

Then in 1870 congress passed the 15th Amendment. — It guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Okay, that’s too much legalese. Let me break it down. — Anyone could get elected Black or White! Halleluiah!

Black people as one man voted for new governments. Suddenly state government seats — Senate and Congress were being won by black candidates who formed the majority of constituents.

Sixteen congressmen were Black — including Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce in the U.S. Senate —

More than six hundred Black representatives won state legislatures. Local offices from the sheriff to the justice of the peace were dominated by black faces.

It was celebration time for descendants of African slaves. Seven years of bliss in the land of the free…!

It was the birth of “Black Supremacy” — That supremacy gave birth to a new kind of fear amid White People, — “the fear of black dominance.”

Beaten at the ballot, slave owners found themselves ruled by their former slaves. White Southerners bellowed-, ‘America is a ‘Whiteman’s land!’

Like a crazed wrestler high on steroids that fear roared to life. “White supremacy”

It licensed a brotherhood. The Ku Klux Klan — Its mission to commit acts of terror against Black people — It would become the most feared organization, raining terror in the dead of the night.

Severed Black heads sprung up on poles. Heads of assassinated Black leaders. ‘Lynching’ — a new word, — sent a chilling message to Black people.

But wait a minute, accusing White people of prejudice and acts of terror isn’t fair.

One of my white readers helped me to know how things work in real life…

(Sir, if you are reading this I want to use your comment to illustrate the competitive nature of politics the world over — no harm intended..)

He said and I quote;

“I’m pro capitalism because I see the alternatives are worse. However capitalism is an amoral system built on competition. The best win and the slightly less good go to the wall. But for capitalism to deliver there has to be rule of law otherwise you can cheat to win — not run faster but trip the opponents up…..”

Back to 1870 South.

White Republicans realized the magnitude of the vote. They closed rank. Protecting the purity of the White race was a rallying point. Reconstruction was viewed as misguided.

An angry South Carolina Governor Benjamin Tillman expressed a common sentiment in the white community;

“In my State, there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters… Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task.

We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got.

As to his “rights” — I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will… I would swear to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores…”

Here’s is a disclaimer lest I should be accused of preaching reverse racism.

Governor Benjamin Tillman made that statement in the 1870s- if he was alive today, he would probably be a Democrat — perhaps he would have voted for former President Barrack Obama…

Okay, Black history, digging into the murky past-

On August 12, 1890, about two hundred White men congregated in Mississippi’s state capital.

Judge Solomon Saladin Calhoun, president of the convention, charged the delegates with a single task — to devise ways to keep Black men from voting.

“This ballot system must be so arranged as to effect one object,” he said.

“Twenty years after the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments granted Black Americans citizenship and gave Black men the right to vote, we find the two races now together, the rule of one of which has always meant economic and moral ruin; we find another race whose rule has always meant prosperity and happiness and prosperity and happiness to all races.” Judge Solomon roused his White audience.

The audience riled, the words stung, reality reeked black hatred. The Ku Klux took a new mantra. “The way to keep a Black man from voting is to terrorize him on the night before the vote.”

Poignant scenes played. In 1873 Black leaders surrendering to armed White plantation owners seizing control of Colfax’s local government in Louisiana were shot. Elected Black leaders in Southern states skulked in fear, they surrendered their seats.

In April of 1877, as the last of the federal troops, left the South, reconstruction bells knelled their last toll.

Black people had seen little improvement in their economic and social status, thanks to white supremacist forces.

By the turn of the century, a new racial system based on the disenfranchisement of Black voters, racial segregation, relegation to low-wage plantation work, and domestic labor was instituted.

Lynching, extrajudicial killings, terror, and unmitigated violence were meted on any Black person bold enough to challenge this new order.

Kept in check the promise of freedom was once more a mirage. W.E.B. Du Bois would capture the poignant moment in these words, “Slaves went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.” he Wrote.

Black people’s history was about to get grimmer. Jim Crow, a Minstrel took a life of its own. Dancing from darkened crevices of racial hatred. The caricature of a Black man became an ominous symbol of racial profiling……

Read on in the second part of this article