Racism and Violence toward Blacks in Gilded Age America
Despite the many new rights African Americans were granted via the ratification of the thirteenth (emancipation), fourteenth (citizenship and due process), and fifteenth (the right to vote) amendments, and the political gains made in both local and national governments during the years immediately following Reconstruction, the last three decades of the nineteenth century saw a rapid decline in civil liberties, black suffrage, due process of law, and economic opportunity for African Americans. It was also a period of increased violence in manifold ways—from the extralegal murder in the form of lynching, to segregation, to disenfranchisement and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan at the voting booth. From roughly the mid-1870s to the end of the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth century) the effort to cement white (primarily protestant Anglo Saxon) supremacy in U.S. institutions was a unifying force that galvanized white Americans who were in opposition of African American, immigrant, and Native American equality. It would be the work of prominent black voices such as Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and groups such as the NAACP to expose the pervasive violence which target African Americans in particular, and make known the crimes perpetrated by “the hands of persons unknown.” [1]
Southern whites in the post-war period created the myth of the sexually-motivated “black beast” that purportedly preyed on white women; as Jackson Lears notes, this “invoked the protection of white womanhood to justify the torture, dismemberment, hanging, or burning of black men who may or may not have actually committed any crime at all (and who in any case had never been given a trial).” [2] Furthermore, formulating a unified white identity was critical in order to keep black Americans from establishing themselves socially and economically in white communities. As Mattias Smångs has noted, “the social control function at the heart of accounts of lynching emphasizing its role in economically oppressing rural blacks may thus be specified in terms of the durable inequality engendering mechanisms of exploitation and opportunity hoarding.” [3]
Contrary to what is generally assumed in regard to race and lynching in the United States, the South was not alone in its persecution of African Americans. Indeed, as Christopher Waldrep and Sarah Gualtieri show in their work on San Francisco in 1856 and the lynching of a Syrian man named Nola Romey in Florida in 1929 respectively, as well as the riots in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, lynching was not only a southern phenomenon, but one that crossed political boundary lines as well as racial lines. In his examination of the origins of lynching in America, Michael Pfeifer notes that at the end of the Civil War the remaking of the United States was “a national process, not merely a southern one,” and that whites in the north and west “responded to and remade social, political, economic, and legal arrangements in the wake of emancipation . . . violence, including the collective violence of lynching and vigilantism, was an important aspect of this process, a visceral means of seeking to resist and to redirect the dynamics of social, political, and legal change.” [4] This was essentially, as Lears writes, “a mass ritual of racial [white] revitalization through violence” promulgated through, in part, the advancement of an “unprecedented biological authority during the decades between Reconstruction and World War I” in the form of phrenology and other pseudosciences. [5]
Though lynching did cross racial lines, it was primarily African Americans who were targeted. The Tuskegee Institute, the school established by Booker T. Washington (Fig. 1) in Tuskegee, Alabama, in the nineteenth century, records that 3,417 (known) lynchings of African American men, women, and children took place in the United States between the years 1882 and 1944. [6] Between 1885 and 1900 at least 2,500 lynchings, mostly of black Americans (and mostly in the South), occurred. [7] 1885 in particular was significant, as it saw in July one of the first public lynchings of the post-Reconstruction period when Harris Tunstal was hanged behind a church in Oxford, Mississippi for the “diabolical” sexual assault of one of the town’s “most highly respected [white] young ladies.” [8]
The Gilded Age years saw a drastic reduction in African American rights—a period premised by the abandoning of black protection in the South as a result of the Compromise of 1877, which settled the disputed election results of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. As Daniel Kato writes, “it is important to note that the political will to stop racial violence in the South did not simply disappear; rather, it was bargained away” as a result of Hayes becoming president in exchange for ordering troops out of the South. [9] The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883. [10] Mississippi disenfranchised blacks by ratifying a new state constitution (the latter was upheld by, again, the Supreme Court, in 1898). [11] A third major decision by the Supreme Court established segregation on public carriers and “separate but equal” via the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. [12] All of these established for white Americans what Michael McGerr refers to as “a shield of segregation” behind which the “fundamental project of transforming [white] people” at the advent of the Progressive Era “could go on in safety.” [13]
One of the central figures who resisted the violence, segregation, injustice, and economic restrictions on African Americans during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Ida B. Wells. (Fig. 2) Born enslaved in Mississippi in 1862, Wells became a teacher, journalist, public speaker, and civil rights activist who led an anti-lynching crusade both in the U.S. and abroad. [14] As her biographer Mia Bay writes, Wells “came of age at a time when her people needed aggressive leaders who could combat the erosion of black civil and political rights that accompanied the end of the Reconstruction era.” [15] When she protested in her paper Free Speech the lynching of three black men in Memphis, Tennessee, due to their ostensible “crime” of operating a successful grocery store near another grocery store owned by whites, her press was smashed, and she was threatened herself with death if she ever returned to Memphis. [16] This, however, did not silence Wells. She took to speaking out publicly against lynching in the U.S., making public both the gruesome details of the murders while exposing the myth of the “black beast” threatening white womanhood. Her speaking campaigns took her to New York, Boston, Chicago, and even Great Britain, and she was called by admirers “the only successor to Frederick Douglass.” [17]
Wells, along with W. E. B. Du Bois (Fig. 3) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), labored as the de facto anti-Atlanta Compromise contingency promulgated by Booker T. Washington, which “urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil political rights.” [18] Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk published in 1903 was a “clarion call for blacks dissatisfied with the accomodationist policies of Booker T. Washington to press for equal rights.” [19] A professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois believed that black Americans “must use their education and training to challenge inequality.” [20]He joined the NAACP, who as an organization would work to enforce the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and employ legal strategies to win cases at the Supreme Court level. [21]
References
1. “Death at the hands of persons unknown” was the general coroner’s verdict concerning lynching victims. As Philip Dray writes, this “affirmed the public’s tacit complicity; no persons had committed a crime, because the lynching was seen as a conservative act, a defense of the status quo”—the latter, of course being white Americans. (Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, ix).
2. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 106.
3. Mattias Smångs, “Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation.” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 5 (2016): 1367.
4. Michael Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Champaign, Il: University of Illinois Press, 2011), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xchtc.
5. Lears, 93.
6. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, (New York: Random House, 2002), vii, viii.
7. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 164.
8. Amy Louise Wood, “A Hell Fire Upon Earth: Religion,” in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, (Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 45.
9. Daniel Kato, Liberalizing Lynching, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 46.
10. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 164.
11. Painter, 164.
12. Painter, 164.
13. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 184.
14. Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 3.
15. Bay, 4.
16. Bay, 5.
17. Bay, 5.
18. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Vol. 2, Sixth Edition, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 661.
19. Foner, 764.
20. Foner, 764.
21. Foner, 765.