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Assessing Reconstruction End of Reconstruction This 6-minute video gives you more background on the obstacles that Reconstruction faced and the reasons for its end. Note the explanation of "Redemption." To view the video, please click here. Credit: Video for Dallas County Distance Learning class in US History since 1877. ©2005 Dallas TeleLearning and Dallas County Community Colleges (DCCCD) Reconstruction – Failures African Americans as Citizens Reconstruction failed to protect the full citizenship rights of African Americans. When President Rutherford B. Hayes removed the last federal troops from the South in 1877, he acquiesced to the return of Democratic rule in the South and the institutionalization of an American version of apartheid - the Jim Crow system. Economic Development of the South Reconstruction failed to fulfill its promises not only to African Americans but also to the South as a region. Before the Civil War, you recall that "cotton is king" was a boast of Southerners who thought themselves immune from the economic downturn in 1857. Cotton remained a WSBCTC 1 king after the Civil War although a feudal one whose serfs were the black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Reconstruction failed to provide for the economic development of the South away from its dependence on a single crop. Reconstruction – Successes Union Restored Reconstruction reassembled the Union and provided methods whereby the former Confederate states rejoined the United States. Slavery Ended The Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed that "[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude" would exist in the United States. Black Political Leadership Reconstruction, for a time, welcomed black men into political roles. Sixteen blacks served in Congress during Reconstruction and 600 in state legislatures.In the South Carolina state legislature they held the majority of seats in the lower house for a time. WSBCTC 2 Black Families and Community Newly freed African Americans immediately sought to reunite with family members sold to another owner. By consolidating their families and establishing their own churches, African Americans forged the community bonds that sustained them. Education Reconstruction governments established the South's first state-funded public school systems. You read about the Freedmen's Bureau which became the principal agency for overseeing relations between former slaves and owners. The Bureau established nearly 3000 schools and contributed to founding black colleges. In 1880 70 percent of blacks were illiterate, but by 1900 that rate had dropped to 48 percent. Reconstruction's Legacy The Legacy of Reconstruction through Historians and a Movie Historians and the silent film Birth of a Nation play an important role in Reconstruction's legacy. Beginning shortly after Reconstruction ended and extending until the second half of the twentieth century, historians interpreted Reconstruction in this way: The South accepted defeat, was willing to accept freed slaves, and wanted quick readmission into the Union. The misguided efforts of Radical Republicans, blinded by their partisanship and hatred for the rebels, imposed corrupt governments on the South controlled by licentious WSBCTC 3 carpetbaggers, unscrupulous scalawags, and ignorant freedmen. The South suffered for years before principled whites banded together and redeemed the South and ended a dark (pun intended) chapter in southern history. Central to this interpretation was the belief by the historians that the newly freed slaves were childlike and thus were unprepared to exercise the political rights that Northerners thrust upon them. As you look at the caricatures of African Americans in Birth of a Nation and in the clip below from the Jim Crow Museum, think about the long-term effect of those caricatures and their role in the denial of African Americans' civil rights. The famous silent film Birth of a Nation (1915) entrenched this interpretation in the minds of Americans. Based on the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), the film presented caricatures of Reconstruction state houses under African-American control and ended with the triumphant arrival of the KKK to save the South from rapacious Reconstructionists and Southern women from predatory black men. The film stirred controversy for its racism when it was released in 1915, the year when the KKK emerged once again as a prominent force not only in the South but in the Midwest and West where it targeted immigrant groups, Catholics, and Jews. Here are 2 clips from the film. The first 3-minute clip claims to represent "[h]istoric incidents from first legislative session under Reconstruction" and depicts numerous caricatures of black legislators who pass an intermarriage bill while the "the helpless white minority" looks on. Warning: Many of the stereotypes of African Americans, portrayed by white actors in black face, are highly offensive. WSBCTC 4 To view the video, please click here. The second 6.5-minute clip comes from the end of the film when the KKK rides to the rescue of a white family under attack by black men, some shirtless, wearing Union Army kepis (hats). To view the video, please click here. What happened in the South in the decades after the Civil War? Economy: After the Civil War, many entrepreneurs (or swindlers, depending on your point of view) referred to the "New South" and its economic opportunities. The Reconstruction Era failed to see the economic restoration of the South to antebellum (pre-war) levels without slavery much less to see the construction of new infrastructure that would allow the South to prosper in the increasingly industrialized nation. Recall that in the antebellum South, most white southerners did not own slaves and were small farmers. In 1830 64 percent of them owned no slaves. Of the 36 percent of white southerners who owned slaves, most owned fewer than 5 and only 2.5% owned 50 or more. Thus our image of the plantation owner on the veranda overseeing hundreds of slaves fits very few white southerners. After the Civil War, the South declined into the nation's poorest agricultural region. The South's dependence on cotton increased and the overproduction resulted in declining prices. Not only black farmers were sharecroppers, poor whites were as well. By 1880, about one-third of the white farmers and nearly three-quarters of the black farmers in cotton states were sharecroppers or tenants. In the "New South," a cottondominated commercial agriculture with landless tenants and sharecroppers as the main work force replaced the more diversified economy of the pre-war era. WSBCTC 5 This 1.5-minute video explains in more depth the sharecropping system. In it, NYU Professor of History David Levering Lewis refers to it as "slavery by another name." To view the video, please click here. Credit: Video for Dallas County Distance Learning class in US History since 1877. ©2005 Dallas TeleLearning and Dallas County Community Colleges (DCCCD) Politics: Before the end of Reconstruction, you read how the Ku Klux Klan terrorized African Americans in the South especially to prevent them from voting. On a single bloody Easter Sunday in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 at least 100 and some sources say 280 blacks were killed. When federal troops withdrew from the South, former Confederates quickly resumed control of state governments and instituted policies that accomplished what the KKK had through terrorism. You read about the disfranchisement of African Americans in the postReconstruction South. Through devices such as literacy tests, property requirements, poll taxes, and white-only primaries, Southern states prevented African Americans from voting. For example, as late as 1896, 130,334 blacks were registered voters in Louisianan, but by 1904, only 1,342. Lynching: Though the KKK was less prominent after Reconstruction ended, violence against blacks continued. Lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against African Americans early in the 19th century, by the 1890s and into the 20th century the vast majority of those lynched were African Americans. Figures vary widely but a conservative estimate for the number lynched between 1882 and 1951 listed 4,730 lynchings: 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites.[1] WSBCTC 6 WSBCTC 7 WSBCTC 8 Credit: George Meadows, "murderer & rapist," lynched on scene of his last crime. L. Horgan, Jr. (dates unknown). Photograph, c. 1889. The Progress of a People, A Special Presentation of the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-31911. Jim Crow: You read about the systematic segregation of facilities in the South into "Whites Only" and "Colored Only." The Plessy v. Ferguson case gave judicial approval to "separate but equal," but, of course, the separate facilities for whites and blacks were not equal. In our exploration of the legacy of Reconstruction, view the video below about the caricatures of African Americans propagated during Reconstruction to deny black Americans equal rights and then promoted throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In this 9-minute video, Dr. David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan, discusses the Jim Crow legacy: To view the video, please click here. A Positive Legacy - Confronting the Past After reading and viewing all of the above, let's end with the story of a city, the home to Abraham Lincoln, that confronted the racist violence in its past and is using that past today as a way to bring its citizens together. This story of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, and the city's 2008 centennial commemoration of that event is reported by Douglas Blackmon, the journalist who wrote Slavery by Another Name. To view the video, please click here. [1] Data are from the Tuskegee Institute as noted in Robert A. Gibson, "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950," Themes in Twentieth Century American Culture, vol. II (1979), Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 1978-2010. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, WSBCTC 9 2011. Web. 27 April 2011. ©2011 Susan Vetter WSBCTC 10