Up From Slavery

1. Up From Slavery The African-American Struggle for Equality in the Post-Civil War Era

2. The Hard Reality of Emancipation • After the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery (1865), freedmen found themselves without significant resources to start a new life • The Freedmen’s Bureau (est. 1865) provided direct relief, education, jobs, and medical care in an effort to give freed slaves an opportunity to adjust to their new lives • Despite such efforts, many blacks ended up as tenant farmers who engaged in sharecropping – which involved pledging a share of their harvest as repayment to landowners who leased the land; debt peonage often resulted as black farmers went into debt as a result of not being able to cover costs and debt owed to creditors

3. The Failure of Radical Reconstruction The Radical Republican attempt to re-engineer Southern society and politics (1865-77) failed due to: • terrorism - as practiced by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups; violence and intimidation kept reformers from carrying out Radical policies • redemption – Southern Democrats regained control of their state governments as a result of the Compromise of 1877, which (after the disputed election of 1876) gave Republican candidate Hayes the White House in exchange for a Republican pledge to withdraw the last federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction • “Jim Crow” laws created institutionalized segregation through such measures as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses – effectively disenfranchised blacks despite rights provided in the 14th and 15th Amendments

4. Thomas Nast’s View of the Post-War South

5. The Supreme Court Limits Rights • Ex parte Milligan (1866) – the Court ruled that military courts could not try civilians where civil courts were functioning – limited ability of the federal government to prosecute Southern whites who violated the law • Slaughterhouse cases (1873) – the Court created the concept of “dual citizenship” – the idea that the 14th Amendment only guaranteed national civil rights, not state civil rights; effectively limited the scope of 14th Amendment due process protections • Civil Rights cases (1883) – the Court further weakened the 14th Amendment by declaring that it protected only against government infringement of rights, not private infringement (i.e., private businesses could still discriminate against blacks) • Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – ruled segregation legal as long as facilities were “separate but equal” – not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954

6. Booker T. Washington, a former slave and the founder of Tuskegee Institute, argued that blacks would only gain acceptance by white society through education and hard work; patterned after his own life experience Equality must first come on socio-economic terms and political equality would follow; a popular approach with white Americans W.E.B. DuBois, a northern intellectual, argued that blacks must achieve political equality first before socio-economic equality would be fully achieved His approach was widely adopted by civil rights leaders in the 1950s/1960s DuBois helped to lead the Niagara movement and founded the NAACP Two Views of Progress