Part Two
FREEDOM’S CHILDREN
THE PASSAGE FROM EMANCIPATION TO THE GREAT MIGRATION
A former slave learning to read, 1870.
Getting to Know Freedom
The day seemed brighter when freedom came. The war had ended chattel slavery. Black men, women, and children who had known nothing but bondage stood free. They were jubilant, anxious, afraid. What would freedom mean for them? My people did not know. But they knew they were free to come and go, to build, to hope, and to rest assured of a better future. Men and women took new names, searched for loved ones, got legally married, got divorced. Some freedmen walked off the plantations, seeking jobs or places to live. It was a new day, my people proclaimed. “There ain’t going to be no more master and mistress, Miss Emma,” a freedman told his former owner. “All is equal. I done hear it from the courthouse steps.”1
Though the war to preserve the union was over, the struggle was just beginning. As the federal government set forth to reconstruct the country, freedmen and freedwomen set out to reconstruct their lives. Those who had once been slaves now erected churches, sent their children to school, and ran for public office. My people wanted the vote, they wanted respect, they wanted a chance to live freely. In the years following the Civil War, there was reason for great hope.
The surrender at Appomattox left the states of the Confederacy under the control of the Union once again; there would be many steps to take before the states could regain their full rights. Before his death, President Lincoln began to map out a program that called for 10 percent of all those who voted in the 1860 election to pledge to uphold the Union and abolish slavery. When an assassin’s bullet ended the president’s life before his ideas were fully realized, Andrew Johnson stepped in to implement his own vision of Reconstruction. In 1865, while Congress was out of session, President Johnson swiftly granted amnesty to all white Southerners who pledged loyalty to the union. Johnson had promised to deal harshly with wealthy slaveholders who had supported secession. Instead, he pardoned them liberally.
Now the very men who had held my people in slavery ascended to power. Newly pardoned white voters elected former Confederate generals, cabinet members, legislators—even the vice president of the former Confederacy—to office. Southern state governments, determined to rule the former slaves, undermined the efforts of Reconstruction and my people’s quest for freedom. Black Codes were enacted that restricted the employment and movement of freedmen and freedwomen. And angry Frederick Douglass would ask, “What good was our emancipation? When you turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.”2 In the wake of Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction, freedom seemed all too similar to slavery.
Group of freed slaves who worked as laborers and servants with the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War.
In 1865 Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency was to administer food, clothing, and medical supplies, redistribute land confiscated from Confederates, and serve as a mediator between former slaves and the planters who would be their employers. The Freedmen’s Bureau coordinated the efforts of several groups, including churches in the North and the South, to provide for the education of the former slaves. By 1870 the Bureau operated more than 2,600 schools. It provided transportation, built hospitals, fed the hungry, protected black workers, educated black children, and distributed land.
From the beginning, the Freedmen’s Bureau was embattled as an agency whose power was a slap in the face to the rights of each state to establish their own policies on freedmen and refugees. Nevertheless, the agency made a significant impact on the lives of those learning to navigate freedom. For some, survival itself depended on the services the agency provided. Even as it made significant advances, the Freedmen’s Bureau was tainted with corruption by the white men who tried to run it. This was the agency that my people turned to. Although far from perfect, it was there for them when local governments turned the other way.
This illustration entitled Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Memphis, Tennessee depicts three Freedmen’s Bureau officials sitting slouched in their chairs while a group of African American freedmen wait for their assistance.
In 1866 Congress took Reconstruction into its own hands. It extended the charter of the Freedmen’s Bureau and passed legislation dividing the South into five districts under military control. It passed the Fourteenth Amendment, granting freedpeople citizenship and equal benefits under the law. States would be required to ratify the amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union. Later Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which would punish states that denied the vote to any male citizen on the basis of race, color, or previous servitude.
In the midst of hostility and political fighting, freedmen built new lives. At times my people made gains—built schools and churches, held political office, voted. At times they suffered setbacks—the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, loss of land, denial of their civil rights. By the turn of the century, friends had become few, racism had grown more intense, laws aiding freedmen had been overturned.
Still, freedom’s children—former slaves and their sons and daughters—would endure. They claimed this nation as their own. Black people would fight in the nation’s wars, push aggressively for their rights, travel across the country in search of a Promised Land. “All is equal,” my people said in proud defiance to a stubborn South. Black men and women were holding freedom in their hands. They would push forward, never turning back.
In the years following the Civil War, relatives torn apart by slavery scrambled to make their families whole again. Advertisements such as this one, placed in The Cleveland Gazette in 1887, were not uncommon.
Living Faith
You could see them in the fields—little country churches filled with hope, praise, singing, and clapping. Religion and a church of their own were of great importance. Freedmen pooled funds, time, skills, and resources to erect their own houses of worship. Some churches were plain, mere whitewashed structures with a few windows and a door. Others were grand edifices, made of brick, with hand-carved pews, lace altar cloths sewn by hand, silver chalices donated by well-to-do members. Here, however grand or small, would be places where my people could worship as they pleased. Here would be a school, a meeting site, and a place where issues important to the community were resolved.
The slaveholder had taken away much under slavery, but he could not take away our religion. Freedmen remembered attending the master’s church and hearing the sermons telling them to obey and to thank God for slavery. There were separate services, segregated seating, and “Christian” slaveholders who would not hesitate to use the lash. While slaveholders taught a Christianity that upheld slavery, my ancestors found in the Bible a God who helped the friendless and the oppressed. When the formal, white church service was over, my people met in secret for a real praise meeting. There, deep in the woods, they called out to God—the God who delivered Daniel from the lions’ den, the God who liberated the children of Israel from bondage.
Sheet music for “Promis’ Lan’” (A Hallelujah Song) by N.J. Corey and H.T. Burleigh, 1917.
But now my people were free. The services that had once been conducted in secret, under cover of darkness, were now held in the light of day. They were spirit-filled—with drumming, clapping, running, shouting, crying, and moaning. Spirituals filled the air: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” “Wade in the Water,” “I Can’t Stay Behind,” and more. Their preachers, once silenced by slavery, could now speak openly, and members supported the preacher with “Amen” and “Yes, brother!” In religious ecstasy, women swooned and fainted, men jumped and shouted. There was no master to silence them now. There would be no holding back. Spirituals once hidden from brutal masters could now be sung—and printed—for the public.
From the black pulpit came a message not only of salvation but also of political action. Often the only literate person in the community, the black preacher became the political educator and leader. Black ministers found themselves called upon to serve as registrars and candidates for offices. More than 100 black ministers from North and South would be elected to legislative seats during Reconstruction. “A man in this State cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interest of his people,”3 declared Reverend Charles H. Pearce, who held many posts in Florida during Reconstruction.
The black church would also be instrumental in educating black people. The church often served as the first schoolroom, the Bible as the first book many learned to read, and church-supported colleges among the first to educate black youth. While the Freedmen’s Bureau began coordinating the efforts to educate former slaves and their children, it left the staffing and running of the schools to the American Missionary Association and church denominations, white and black. From the strength of their faith and devotion, freedmen and freedwomen built a church to worship their God, and through that church, their children were educated.
At the end of service in many Southern black churches, particularly along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, my people stayed for the “ring shout.” They pushed back chairs and formed a circle. Participants moved in unity to the beat of percussion instruments. They shuffled counter-clockwise, arms outstretched, shoulders hunched, feet never leaving the floor. The rhythm of the circle picked up, shouters now in a religious frenzy. They chanted, they sang, they got caught up in the Spirit. When the right shout ended, when the energy subsided, all felt better. They had “had church” that day.
Northern missionaries were aghast at the emotion-filled services of many rural black churches. They called these religious services barbaric, heathen, noisy, boisterous. My people did not appreciate white interference in their worship. It reminded them too much of slavery. Freedmen called white people’s religion stiff, too proper, empty, with no feeling. Eventually white and black worshippers parted ways. They just didn’t see eye to eye.
Family worship in a plantation in South Carolina, circa 1863.
My people didn’t want “no quiet church,” and they didn’t want a “do-nothin’” religion. The black church was theirs, and through it they would meet the needs of their community. The black church would continue to be a vital force and an anchor of the black community. It was the first institution over which black people had full control. They built it, they supported it, and they turned to it in times of need. My people knew the church would be there for them—and that God would see them through.
Teaching Our Own
It was a wonderful sight—men, women, and children learning to read. They studied in dimly lit cabins, writing their alphabets and straining to read by the light of a fire. They stole moments to read their lesson books as they rode on the wagons that took them to the fields. The young taught the old; the elders reminded the young of the value of an education. One freedman from Mississippi stated what hundreds of former slaves believed: “If I never does do nothing more while I live, I shall give my children the chance to go to school, for I considers education the next best thing to liberty.”4
By 1870 the thirst for education could hardly be met. Schoolrooms sprang up everywhere, in abandoned buildings, in churches, in barns, in open fields. “The parents are delighted with the idea of their children learning to read and many take great pleasure in visiting the school,” reported one teacher. They asked the teacher to “pay ’ticular pains to our children, as we wish them to get all the learning they can, ’caus you know Miss, I’s got no learning myself consequently I know how much I loses without it.”5
Education was, for generations to come, of primary importance to the black community. My people took care of each other. They took it upon themselves to teach their own. Black men and women educated in the North and literate blacks of the South (former slaves who, unbeknownst to their masters, had learned to read and write) gave of themselves and their skills. For their efforts, black people wanted control of black schools, just as white people had control of white schools. For attempting to achieve this, my people paid a high price. Black men worked long hours and then stood armed guard to protect teachers, students, and schools from angry mobs who felt strongly that my people didn’t have the right to be educated. Black women took in washing and sewing; communities pooled their resources to build schools, hire teachers, and pay for education.
Illustration of a teacher educating children in a “colored school,” New York City, 1870.
In schools funded or supervised by the Freedmen’s Bureau, by black churches, and by philanthropic groups, thousands of former slaves and their children were educated. In 1869 there were an estimated 9,500 teachers at schools attended by freedmen in the South.6 By 1900 black Baptists were supporting eighty elementary schools and high schools. White religious institutions, wealthy entrepreneurs, and abolitionists gave millions of dollars and sent teachers to uplift the newly emancipated race.
While my people welcomed others, they were especially pleased when a Southern black stood before black students as their educator. One Alabama freedwoman stated proudly, “Whoever may hereafter lay claim to the honor of ‘establishing’… schools, I trust the fact will never be ignored that Miss Lucy Lee, one of the emancipated, was the pioneer teacher of the colored children…without the aid of the Northern societies.”7
For those who had been in bondage, learning to read or seeing their children do so was a prayer answered. Ambrose Headen, a carpenter who while enslaved had helped build the Baptist Academy in Talladega, Alabama, recalled: “It was a hard thing having to build that school for the white boys when I had no right to educate my son. Then when the war was over and they bought that building for our children, I could hardly believe my eyes—looking at my own little ones carrying their books under their arms, coming from the same school the Lord really raised up for them. I rubbed my eyes and said, ‘Ambrose, you must be dreaming.’”8
The black denominations of the Methodist church played a role in the attainment of higher education. The African Methodist Episcopal church (A.M.E.), the Colored Methodist Episcopal church (now Christian Methodist Episcopal church or C.M.E.), and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church (A.M.E.Z.) each established several colleges. Southern states founded normal schools to train black teachers, most notably Tuskegee Normal School (now Tuskegee University). Black men and women also studied at such early (now historic) black institutions as Howard University, Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), Fisk University, Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University), and Hampton University in the South. They also attended Oberlin, Wilberforce, and Lincoln Universities—to name a few—in the North. By 1910 there were 100 black colleges, most of which admitted women.
Teacher and students in a classroom at Whittier Primary School, in Hampton, Virginia, circa 1899.
As eager as my people were to learn, there were whites just as determined to see them remain ignorant and illiterate. Book learning gave Negroes the impression that they were as good as white folk. In reaction to this, some white people protested. They felt it made Negroes harder to control, made them ask questions. Those who opposed educating former slaves declared war on teachers and black schools. Educators—both black and white—were hounded, whipped, beaten, run out of town, or killed for teaching my people to read. Black schools were ransacked, plundered, and set afire; black schoolchildren were attacked.
Yet despite the adversity they faced from former Confederates who scoffed at the idea that blacks could learn, my people persevered. To these freedmen and former slaves, the high cost of education was worth every penny, every sacrifice, every hope. They knew they were not only helping to educate their own children, they were ensuring freedom for their race.
The Promised Land
For freedmen, owning land was a treasured dream. As slaves, they had traded stories of how different life would be when they were free. Black men looked forward to working for themselves; black women looked forward to coming out of the fields and keeping house and home. The first thing they needed, they agreed, was land. One freedman spoke candidly: “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in? Might juss as well stay [a] slave all yo’ days.”9
As the Civil War came to a close, there was talk among my people that the government would give them land—forty acres and a mule. My people waited, anxious, nervous, praying the rumor was true. Then, in March 1865, the word came. As part of the charter of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Congress had passed a provision guaranteeing that every male citizen (freedman and refugee) would be assigned forty acres of land. They could possess the land for three years, then purchase it. Freedmen and freedwomen gathered around as one of their own read the news from a local paper. Land would be theirs, good land abandoned by slave owners and confiscated by the government. My people could smell the earth, see the crops growing, taste the fresh vegetables. It seemed freedom had truly come.
With the news of forty acres, freedmen lined up at the Freedmen’s Bureau to complete applications and receive promissory titles for their land. In Louisiana, more than 200 freedmen applied for government land, seventy-three representing cooperatives. With this land, they were free to plan to build cabins, organize a town government, and become masters of their own lives. Through hard work, the freedmen and freedwomen began to see their plans executed. From once-abandoned lands, a black farming community rose. With land, my people believed they had a future.
White people wondered, would freedmen work without the threat of the lash? Those who doubted could look to Edisto and the other islands along the coast of South Carolina. As early as 1861, on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, my people had begun farming land abandoned by Confederate planters at the beginning of the Civil War. In 1863 freedmen in Mississippi began working the land at the Davis Bend Plantation. Within two years they had established a community, selected from among them black sheriffs and judges, raised nearly 2,000 bales of cotton, and earned a profit of $160,000. Commented Colonel Thomas Higginson, who had commanded black troops during the war: “They take pride in possession of the land; it would be a part of their domestic feeling, which is strong—it is a great thing with them to feel that their families are provided for.”10
On January 16, 1865, during his long, victorious march, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, which stated that 400,000 acres of Confederate land would be divided into plots along the coast from South Carolina to Florida and given to the freedmen who had worked as slaves. He declared that on the Sea Islands, “no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers, detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside.”
Cotton planation scene with pickers at work in Georgia, circa 1900.
On Skidway Island, 5,000 acres were assigned in a single day. A Baptist minister and his party selected acres, planned out their town, and drew numbers for the plots they would occupy. A colony would emerge that would be a model of self-governance and the success that could come to the freedmen and freedwomen given the opportunity to work their own land.
When President Johnson pardoned wealthy planters as part of his plan for Reconstruction, not even communities in the Sea Islands were safe. The government stole back the lands these former slaves had worked and gave them to the very men who had sought to destroy the Union.
Then, on May 29, 1865, President Johnson pardoned former slave owners, granting them amnesty and giving them back their land. The hopes and dreams of freedmen and freedwomen were shattered. My people would have to leave their acres or work the land for former slave owners. The response to the news was one of pain and outrage. Freedmen had been promised land, had held it in their hands, had tilled it, and then had it taken away.
My people had suffered a great setback at the loss of government-promised land, but they would not be defeated. They would own land, or exhaust all means trying. Some formed cooperatives and lending associations. With the aid of a black lending association in Virginia, former slaves bought between 80,000 and 100,000 acres in that state. For most, land ownership would come through individual efforts—scrimping and saving, hard work, and finding whites who would agree to sell land to them. By 1920, black men and women owned nearly fifteen million acres of farmland, a testament to the will of a people who were two generations removed from slavery.
There were those who would not surrender their lands. In January 1867, 200 freedmen on the Delta Plantation, one of the largest in the area, armed themselves and met federal soldiers sent to evict them. One of the freedmen exclaimed, “We have one master now—Jesus Christ—and he’ll never come here to collect taxes or drive us off.”11 The leader then ordered freedmen to “fall in.” Before a single shot was fired, the company of soldiers withdrew.
One can imagine the pride of those who finally purchased land and share the disappointment of those who never realized the dream of ownership. Owning land would be a concern of my people for generations to come. Thousands of black farmers would lose it: many unable to pay the taxes; others cheated out of it; some forced by the Klan to leave in the dead of night. Many would hold on to their land, and counsel succeeding generations about the importance of keeping the property in the family. The land freedmen acquired was not always the best, and perhaps many were charged too much—but it was theirs. Land ownership represented the start of a new life and, for those once tied to the land by slavery, a chance to provide for their own.
A farmer exhibiting his produce at a county fair in Alabama, in 1890.
Earning a Living
Freedom brought about a new economic relationship between former owner and former slave. Once compelled to work by the law and the lash, freedmen could now, at least while laborers were in short supply, demand pay, negotiate contracts, and say no to work they did not want to perform. White people sensed the change in their servants. “The work progresses very slowly and they seem perfectly indifferent,” complained one landowner.12 When asked to scrub pots, a freedman told his former mistress to do it herself. When ordered to clean on the weekend, a servant retorted, “Black folks don’t work on Sunday.” Former slaveholders had to accept a new reality: my people had done enough work for others; they wanted to make a way for themselves.
Planters who owned hundreds of slaves before Reconstruction now had to employ them. Freedmen needed jobs, but they understood that now they worked for wages, and held out and bargained for the best arrangement. Before they agreed to work as servants or field hands they wanted certain guarantees. They wanted to be paid in “good money,” not worthless Confederate dollars. They wanted their own plots of land. There would be no work on Saturdays for women, no work for all on Sundays. They wanted to keep their own pigs and smaller livestock; they wanted to know if clothing would be provided. Their questions amazed some employers, who didn’t think blacks had such a grasp of how to bargain or the forthrightness to ask for what they felt they deserved. An employer complained that she had to listen for six hours as each of sixty-two field hands negotiated his contract to suit his individual desires. When she interrupted one field hand, he responded gravely, “’Top missus, don’t cut my discourse.’ And so it went on all day,” she recalled. “Each one ‘making me sensible,’ as he called it.”13
But freedmen with the ability to win fair contracts were few and far between; the majority of my people had neither the skill nor the option to organize against the landowner. Without land, income, education, or skills, they had nowhere to go except back to the plantations where they had worked as slaves. Awaiting them was a new kind of slave labor—sharecropping. Sharecroppers worked long hours, tilled someone else’s land, used script money redeemable only at “company stores,” and brought on “credit.” At the end of the year, black farm workers received up to one-third of the harvest, payable in wages or crops; the rest went to the landowner. The planter kept a ledger, balancing items on credit against amount owed. Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were charged with overseeing work contracts. Sometimes they sided with the worker, sometimes with the employer. Overwhelmed by the number of disputes they were called to settle, many advised my people to sign a contract just to keep the peace.
Freedmen hoped to come out clear and maybe a little ahead, owing less than they made. But it rarely happened. A Louisiana worker told a Senate committee: “[T]he whites take all we make and if we say anything about our rights, they beat us.…We have been working hard since the surrender, and have not got anything.”14 No matter how hard sharecroppers worked, they always had to work “one more year” to pay off their debts. It seemed that slavery had simply taken on another name.
African American men using machinery in a woodworking shop at Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina, circa 1899.
In 1865 Southern states enacted “Black Codes,” laws that “regulated” those newly freed, and often tied them to the land. A black code in Mississippi required black men to have jobs by the second Monday in January 1866, or face jail and a fine of fifty dollars. South Carolina forbade skilled blacks to work in their trade unless they had a special license from a judge. In Opelousas, Louisiana, any black person found on the streets after 10 o’clock p.m. without written permission from his or her employer was subject to arrest and imprisonment. Farmers repeatedly in debt, or black men and women convicted of petty crimes, were arrested and hired out under state convict-lease systems. Men and women could be found chained together, working on roads or out in the fields. Told one former convict, the lease system was “nine kinds of hell.” Said another, “It was worse than slavery.”
So my people made the best of an economic system that worked against them. For the black family to survive, each member had to work. Women who wanted to spend time raising their families and tending to their homes had no choice but to return to the fields to pick cotton. Men worked in the fields and when possible took second jobs in the cities to bring in extra income. Children worked alongside their parents. If they attended school, chores took precedence over homework. When times became difficult economically, many black children abandoned school altogether. By the late 1880s, despite thirty-five years of sharecropping, black men and women had accumulated only about 600,000 acres of land in the South. By 1910 more than 5 percent of employed black men and women worked in agriculture. Three-fourths of all black workers in the South were share or tenant farmers, working land that belonged to someone else.
Some black farm families managed to purchase their own land or advance to become foremen. The luckiest were able to save enough to get out of sharecropping, or, through hard work and miracles, to see their children educated, even graduated from college. They would persevere, as had generations before them. Inspired by the work songs they sang in the fields and the dreams they shared in the former slave cabins, they learned to make a way out of no way. My people understood hard work. They were determined to eke out an existence, even dare to succeed, despite the odds.
Script money was paid to black farm laborers for working on land owned by someone else.
Saving Money, Losing Trust
Not all freedmen were tied to the land and the unending cycle of debt from sharecropping. There were those who prospered, owned hundreds of acres of land, were skilled craftsmen and shrewd businessmen. Although this group made up a minority, they did show what black men and women could accomplish. Some achieved their wealth from the slaveholder, often the freedman’s father who provided land or money in his will. Education helped others get ahead. Most would tell you that prosperity came through hard work, buying land when prices were down, providing services—and acquiescing to white patrons. To survive, freedmen, even prosperous ones, had to know when to speak, when to remain silent, when to act as though the racial slurs and slights didn’t matter.
With the help of banks set up to assist freedmen, my people were able to save money and plan for the future. In 1865 Congress chartered the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. The bank paid freedmen interest on their savings and guaranteed that their funds were in safe hands. Churches, fraternal organizations, businesses, and individuals, from washerwomen to cooks, poured their savings into the bank. They were encouraged by the hope of buying a home, purchasing land, or educating their children. Between 1865 and 1870, the bank maintained 37 branch offices in 17 states including the District of Columbia and deposits of $57million. But within a year, the bank was showing signs of trouble. Inexperienced tellers, black and white, were making gross accounting errors. They failed to balance the books, tried to cover their tracks by cutting pages from accounting ledgers, made unauthorized loans, and in many cases simply stole money. Several bank officials were part of real estate investment schemes, and many who weren’t looked the other way.
In 1873 a sudden economic downturn sent the bank reeling. The bank that began as a savings institution for freedmen became a dumping ground for inept tellers and dishonest trustees seeking personal gain. In an attempt to restore my people’s faith, trustees appointed Frederick Douglass as the bank’s president, but the effort was too late. White officials resigned, leaving blacks to shoulder the blame. In 1874 the bank closed its doors. Its collapse was felt by freedmen throughout the South. Its demise brought an end to my people’s trust in banks and in the government that they were led to believe would protect their lifelong savings. Stated Douglass, “[The bank may have] been the black man’s cow, but [it was] the white man’s milk. Bad loans and bad management have been the death of it.”15 Black-owned and operated banks would emerge again, and my people would save, but the failure of the bank and the loss of black money resonated in the black community well into the twentieth century.
Daniel Webster (a.k.a. “80 John”) Wallace was born a slave in Victoria County, Texas, on September 15, 1860. By his mid-twenties, Wallace had made an arrangement with his boss, Clay Mann, to accept cattle as part of his pay. He later acquired a 1,280-acre ranch, a reputation for fairness and hard work, and a savvy that allowed him to survive in the ranching business.
A political cartoon, drawn by Thomas Nast in the 1870s, entitled “A Debt that the Republican Party Ought to Wipe Out.”
Despite the setbacks, freedmen persevered. By the 1920s there would be black businesses, a black middle class, even a wealthy black elite. Not all freedmen reached this level of wealth, but many did well enough to earn a decent living. For those who had started out in slavery, just to see strong black businesses opening, black artisans supporting themselves from their craft, and black farmers working their own land was encouraging. Freedmen in the urban areas had the greatest chance of earning a living by skills rather than sheer strength. They became dentists, brickmasons, physicians, and real estate agents. Some were ministers, insurance men, or educators.
In business large and small, freedmen provided services to patrons black and white. Still, social and economic forces would dictate how white patrons were treated, and when and where urban freedmen could find work. When times were good and jobs plentiful, black masons, carpenters, and dock workers could find work. When times were tight, they were the last hired, the first fired. At all times, black businessmen had to defer to whites, greeting them as “sir,” “mister,” and “ma’am,” while being called “boy,” “uncle,” or “nigger.” During times of economic recession, freedmen with skills felt the pressure deriving from the influx of European immigrants. Jobs once reserved for blacks—waiters, cooks, maids—went to Europeans or unemployed whites who, under better circumstances, would have shunned such professions.
Nevertheless, in every city heavily populated by freedmen, my people could point to prosperous black men and women. They lived in spacious Southern homes in New Orleans, Charleston, Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, Richmond, and Durham, as well as Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Daniel Webster Wallace, former slave and homesteader, became one of the largest cattle ranchers in Texas, owning 10,000 acres of pastureland. John Roy Lynch, a black congressman from Mississippi, did well in real estate, owning eleven city lots in Natchez and for plantations. In New Orleans, freedmen Dominique, Ernest, and A. Mercier established wholesale and retail stores. In 1895 the Mercier brothers were worth $300,000. By 1915 they controlled assets in excess of $1,000,000, making them the richest black people in the South.
It was people such as these who proved that business sense knew no color. Given the opportunity, my people showed that black businessmen could prosper and black businesses would thrive. If any people demonstrated that they could overcome seemingly impossible situations, it was the freedmen.
A deposit book for a savings account at the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, belonging to Thomas Adams of Kentucky.
Casting Our Vote
During the final years of the Civil War, blacks in the North and South held conventions to discuss their political hopes and desires. Though the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment brought an end to slavery, there was still much to strive for. Black men and women were still not considered citizens. In 1864 free blacks at the newly formed National Equal Rights League asked, “Are we citizens when the nation is in peril, and aliens when the nation is in safety? May we shed our blood under the star-spangled banner on the battlefield, and yet be barred from marching under it at the ballot-box?”16
With the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, black men voted en masse for the first time in the history of this nation. The ballot became a powerful and desired tool. Freedmen may not have known all there was to know about politics and voting, but they were eager to learn. Beverly Nash, a former slave who rose to become a member of the South Carolina constitutional convention, declared, “We are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them and in time he will earn a trade. So it is with voting…in time we shall learn to do our duty.”17
My people’s vote made a difference. Between 1869 and 1901, more than 600 black men were elected to state legislatures in the South. As voters and writers of state constitutions, black legislators pushed for public school funding and shored up universal male suffrage with laws that abolished property-holding as a qualification for voting. Their votes made it illegal to imprison a man for failure to pay debt, outlawed whipping and stocks as punishment, supported services for the poor, and erased the discriminatory Black Codes. The average citizen—black or white—fared better under the new state constitutions.
This cartoon from an 1867 issue of Harper’s Weekly depicts the black leadership—the skilled craftsman, the city dweller, and the Union soldier—casting their first ballot. The Fifteenth Amendment made it possible for all black men to vote.
Yet prejudices and racism still contested black leadership. Southern whites stirred up fear of Negro rule. The Klan increased its anti-Negro, anti-Republican activities—stuffing ballot boxes, threatening voters, assassinating political leaders. Of the 29 black representatives in Georgia, 25 were denied their seats. Four mulatto members were allowed to maintain their seats. Three black senators were removed 10 days later. Rioting and deadly violence broke out during state elections in Mississippi and Louisiana. These were, in the words of one freedman, “the most violent of times.”
The 1876 election signaled the end to the nation’s concern for protecting the political rights of the former slave. Contested election results yielded no clear presidential winner. Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise: if the Democratic South conceded Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as the election winner, the president would withdraw troops from the South, give money to rebuild its infrastructure, and pursue a policy of noninterference in Southern affairs.
Although granted the right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, my people knew that flaunting that right could result in deadly consequences. Jonathan Gibbs, a municipal judge in Little Rock, recalled how on campaign tour, common men—farmers, field hands, tradesmen—outwitted the Ku Klux Klan: “I was at [a campaign meeting] where Jack Agery, a noted plantation orator, was holding forth.… Agery as a spellbinder was at his best when a hushed whisper announced that members of the Ku Klux Klan were coming.
“Agery in commanding tones, told the meeting to be seated and do so as he bid them. The Ku Klux very soon appeared, but not before Agery had given out and they were singing with fervor that good old hymn ‘Amazing Grace.’ The visitors stood till the verse was ended when Agery, self-controlled, called on Brother Primus to lead in prayer. Brother P. was soon hammering the bench and calling on the Lord. ‘Oh,’ said the chief of the night riders, ‘this is only a nigger prayer meeting. Come, let us go.’
“Scouts were sent out to see that ‘distance lent enchantment’ and the political feature of the meeting was resumed.”18
Without federal protection, freedmen’s rights eroded. Although, according to the Fifteenth Amendment, states could not deny freedmen the vote based on race, other discriminatory measures were devised. Southern states enacted the grandfather clause that reserved the right to vote to men whose grandfathers had voted prior to 1867. This law effectively denied suffrage to the vast majority of my people. Since my people were enslaved in 1860, this law effectively denied suffrage to black males. Voters were required to read and interpret a portion of the state constitution, making voting impossible for most former slaves. Ballot boxes were moved, polling places changed the day of the election, voters were required to pay a poll tax.
Despite power lost during Reconstruction, black voters and politicians left their mark on the nation. Those who had been denied the vote and equal protection of the law for so long did their best while in office to ensure that none would ever suffer as they had. Never once did they seek legislation to retaliate against the white race. They understood the meaning of democracy; they would hold the nation to the beliefs and creed of its founding.
In the years following the Civil War, black men made political strides that must have astounded those who remembered slavery. By the time Reconstruction ended in 1876, six black men had served as lieutenant governors: Alonzo Ransier and Richard Gleaves in South Carolina; A.K. Davis in Mississippi; and Oscar Dunn, C.C. Antoine, and P.B.S. Pinchback in Louisiana. Although no black man was ever elected governor during Reconstruction, between December 9, 1872, and January 13, 1873, Pinchback served as acting governor when governor H. C. Warmoth was removed from office. On the national level, twenty black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives, including Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first black man to do so. Two black men served in the U.S. Senate: Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi and Hiram Revels of Mississippi.
Senator Hiram Revels with some of the first black members of Congress, 1870.
Senator Hiram Revels unseated Jefferson Davis in 1870 and took office as the nation’s first black senator. This broadside, printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, told of the great victory of a black man taking the Senate seat once held by the president of the Confederacy.
Restoring White Supremacy
The report was all too familiar: lives brutally taken, property destroyed, dreams shattered. There were whites who did not want to see black men and women voting, buying homes, “getting ahead.” The Ku Klux Klan was behind most of the violence. Organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December of 1865, its reign of terror would last well into the twentieth century. The band took its name from the Greek word kuklos, meaning “circle.” Theirs as an unending circle of hatred. “They were for a white man’s government,” recalled one man recruited by the Klan. “They believed there was but one way to get it, and that was to kill out and beat out all the colored people and all the white Republicans that voted the Republican ticket.”19
The Klan swiftly put its plan into action. They rode in the dead of night, burst through doors, dragged their victims into the middle of their circle. Members took turns beating, whipping, and torturing their captives. Blacks suspected of committing a crime were snatched from jails, tortured, mutilated, and hung—without benefit of trial, without being convicted as charged.
Sheriffs said they didn’t have enough manpower to stop the Klan’s actions. They said the Klan was too big, and that nobody knew who the perpetrators were. In fact, everyone knew who they were. They were local people, farmers, rebels, men of public office. Reported Colonel George W. Kirk of North Carolina: “I have spoken of their [the Klan] having the law and courts all on their side. The juries were made up of Ku-Klux.…Out of all those that I arrested…I do not think one has ever been tried.”20
In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed Enforcement Acts aimed at breaking the Klan. The legislation made it a crime to prevent anyone from voting by bribery, force, or intimidation. It defined Klan activity as a conspiracy and rebellion against the United States. It also gave the president power to declare martial law in areas under Klan attack, and the courts the authority to prosecute Klan members. As a result of the Enforcement Acts, thousands of Klansmen were arrested, tried, and convicted. Yet the violence continued. Between 1885 and 1900, more than 1,200 black men, women, and children were reported lynched.
Henry Smith, a black man accused of killing a three-year-old white girl, is taken to be lynched on February 1, 1893. The entire town of Paris, Texas, showed up to watch the execution.
In 1915 the Klan experienced a new resurgence, this time near Atlanta, Georgia. Its growth was spurred by the racially charged movie The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the Klan in a “historical facsimile” as heroes who “saved” the South from the rise of the blacks after the Civil War. The group now had five million members, its chapters stretching from coast to coast.
Lynching claimed 1,000 lives between 1901 and 1920; hundreds more were victims of mob violence. On June 22, 1903, a mob of 2,000 persons attacked a black man accused of murdering a young woman, burned him, and riddled his body with bullets.21 In 1912, in Princeton, West Virginia, Walter Johnson was lynched for allegedly attacking a fourteen-year-old white girl. It was later discovered that the mob lynched the wrong man; Johnson failed to match the witness’s description.22 In Eastman, Georgia, in 1919, Eli Cooper, an elderly farmer who urged black men to stand up for their rights, was hacked to death in front of his wife. The mob set his church on fire, dragged his body to the burning building, and flung it into the flames. According to a newspaper that reported on the murder, “No arrests were made, none were expected.”23
As they would in every generation, black men armed themselves and fought back. Black people in Long View, Texas, killed several whites who were intent on lynching a black school teacher. The NAACP journal Crisis published a letter from a black woman who praised black men for shooting back during race riots in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, Illinois. The editors of The Messenger magazine ordered: “Always regard your own life as more important than the life of the person about to take yours, and if a choice is to be made between the sacrifice of your life and the loss of the lyncher’s life, choose to preserve your own and to destroy that of the lynching mob.”24
Eliza Lyon told of the night four henchmen arrived at her door:
“They knocked on the door about 11 o’clock at night and asked was Abe Lyon in. They told him to come out, but I jumped up and shut the door and pushed him away.… He wheeled around in the room intending to go out, but the men burst the door open and threw a rope right over his head and drew his arms down and picked him up and toted him out.
“They carried Abe off up a little hill. They shot him with a double-barreled gun. Dr. McCall counted thirty-three holes they shot in him. After they shot him I picked up one of the children and run out of the gate and off across a field and stopped in a thicket of woods to see what they were going to do.”
“Was any of your property in the house stolen?”
“I reckon about $600.”
“Had your husband had any trouble with anybody?”
“None at all. He would not insult a child. He asked them after they had picked him up, ‘Gentlemen, what have I done?’ They says, ‘Never mind what you have done, we just want your damned heart.’”
“What was he saving his money for?”
“We wanted to build us a house.”25
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, recalled the words of his father as a torch-bearing mob attacked their home: “In a voice as quiet as though he was asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, [father] said, ‘Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss.’”26
The Klan, mobs, and vigilantes made lynching a national pastime. While black bodies hung and crosses burned, presidents refused to speak out. My people would meet violence with resistance. They were determined to live free and with honor.
Going West, Looking for Freedom
They took their name from a book in the Bible. They called themselves the Exodusters, beleaguered men and women seeking the promised land. Tired of being beaten and lynched and deprived of land and liberty, between 1877 and 1881 thousands of black men and women decided to leave the South. They headed for Kansas and points west—to a land that they hoped would offer them opportunity. Some people tried to dissuade them, but the westward movement could not be stopped. Stated Henry Adams, a key organizer of the westward migration, “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.…We said there was no hope for us and we better go.”29
Black people had been in the West long before the Exodusters poured into lands west of the Mississippi. Black men were among the early settlers who opened trails, mined gold, and rustled cattle. They were cowboys, outlaws, businessmen and businesswomen, lawmen, stagecoach drivers, trappers, and more. They came as slaves who later won or were given their freedom. They came as fugitives fleeing their slaveholders. Black men served as soldiers, men of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and Infantry. They came as free men looking for a better life.
Mary Fields (c. 1832–1914)—known as “Stagecoach Mary” for her reliability—was the first African American woman employed as a mail carrier in the United States, hired at age 60 because she was the fastest applicant to hitch a team of six horses.
Their journey westward was grueling. Only their hope sustained them. Those who survived the journey faced prejudice and nowhere to lay their weary heads. In Denver, Colorado, many whites refused to rent to black settlers; in Lincoln, Nebraska, 150 black settlers were run out of town.
Still, some reached out to my people. In 1879 the governor of Kansas provided relief for 100 black immigrants. Northern religious and philanthropic groups sent food, blankets, and clothing. Black homesteaders established aid societies. A Freedmen’s Bureau relief association was organized. An eyewitness of the exodus reported that “temporary shelter was speedily provided for them; food and the facilities for cooking it were furnished them in ample measure.”30
The promise of life in a successful black community lured thousands out of the South. Ministers moved entire congregations to Oklahoma, California, and Kansas. In Oklahoma, Edwin McCabe, who later served as Oklahoma state auditor, dreamt of making Oklahoma the first black state. McCabe envisioned the all-black city of Langston as the state capital, and himself as governor. Black families poured into Langston as McCabe’s agents promised land titles that “could never pass to any white man,” bought railroad tickets, and passed out copies of the black newspaper, the Langston City Herald. The city soon boasted a population of more than 2,000, and in 1897 the legislature granted forty acres for Langston College.
Photo of African American cowboy Bill Pickett posing in full gear on the back of his horse during the Wild West Show.
Between 1890 and 1910, twenty-five black communities were established in Oklahoma. McCabe planned to settle a black majority in each of the state’s election districts. Freedmen would hold the majority vote and, when the territory applied for statehood, could have political control of the state. But McCabe and other black settlers found that Oklahoma offered freedmen no greater freedom than the Southern states they had fled. In 1910, three years after it was granted statehood, Oklahoma enacted the grandfather clause disqualifying freedmen from voting. The dreams of making Oklahoma a “black state” faded.
What happened in Oklahoma was not unique, and yet towns continued to be erected with great hope for the future. My people followed visionaries and dreamers, those who thought freedom lay outside the South. When the nation urged, “Go West, young man,” it might not have meant my people, but they answered the call. Life on the plains wasn’t always easy or fair. But for the Exodusters, it offered hope of land, of all-black towns, and the dream of beginning anew.
Black men and women were among those who made the West. Had they been white, they would have been legendary. Mary Fields, known as Stagecoach Mary, carried the U.S. mail and gained a reputation for being dependable, durable, and deadly. Bill Pickett and Nat Love (Deadwood Dick) were unsurpassed as rodeo cowhands. Gunfighter Cherokee Bill terrorized the West. Barney Ford opened a hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as did William Leidesdorff in San Francisco. Black newspapers cropped up in Western cities as editors recorded my people’s history; black entrepreneurs took advantage of the opportunities new towns and cities provided, and proved that black businesses could thrive. When one recalls those who won the West, black men and women—their histories buried, their contributions almost forgotten—were part of the story.
Encouraged by articles in black newspapers, freedpeople packed their belongings, purchased train tickets, and headed to Dearfield, Colorado, and other points west.
Advancing Our Cause
My people moved into the twentieth century with great trepidation for their civil and political rights. They feared the implications of two cases in which the United States Supreme Court ruled against the civil rights of freedmen. In 1883 the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which made it illegal to deny a person entry to amusement parks, inns, theaters, and other public facilities based on race, was declared unconstitutional. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court ruled that separate but equal facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. With these two rulings, segregation became the law of the land. Jim Crow laws denying equal access to facilities based on race sprang up throughout the nation. Black men and women protested that the race had been “baptized in ice water.” In response to the court decisions, Timothy Thomas Fortune, political spokesman and editor of the New York Age, wrote, “We have the ballot without any law to protect us…we are declared to be created equal, and entitled to certain rights…but there is no law to protect us in the enjoyment of them. We are aliens in our native land.”31
Several black organizations emerged at this time, determined to bring the issue of race to the national forefront. Not all spoke with the same voice, not all agreed on which way to turn, but self-determination and equal protection under the law were the shared visions and goals. Black men and women spoke out, edited newspapers, and held conventions to plot the course. One such gathering was the Louisville Convention of Colored Men in 1883, in which black leaders focused on education, civil rights, and economics. Black men held state conventions in Rhode Island, Texas, and Kansas to combat lynching, contest treatment of convicts, and protest the existence of Jim Crow laws in the jury system, state militia, and railroads. Black teachers of North Carolina met to demand equal funding for black and white schools and equal pay for black and white educators. Black farmers, more than a million of them, held membership in the Colored Farmer’s Alliance. In 1893 the National Council of Colored Men assembled. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a respected nationalist, took this opportunity to urge emigration to Africa. “There is no manhood future in the United States for the Negro,” he asserted. “He may eke out an existence for generations to come, but he can never be a man—full, symmetrical, and undwarfed.”35
“Heroes of the Colored Race,” includes portraits of Blanche Kelso Bruce, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram Rhoades Revels, surrounded by scenes of African American life, 1881.
Fresh voices were heard. An aging Frederick Douglass looked for new men to rise to leadership. The turn of the century saw organizations rise that would withstand the test of time. Booker T. Washington established the National Negro Business League in 1900. Within five years it boasted more than 100 chapters. In 1905 W.E.B. Du Bois convened the Niagara Movement, a protest organization consisting of mostly northern black intellectuals. Black and white men and women gathered in 1909 and established the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), which would go on to become the leading advocate in the courts for black people’s rights for generations. In 1910 in New York, three organizations merged to form the National Urban League, which to this day continues to address issues affecting black men and women in urban centers. In the meantime, black individuals made gains. Black inventors received patents, black businesses prospered, black men and women attended college in increasing numbers. Black explorer Matthew Henson became the first person to stand on top of the world at the North Pole; James Weldon and J. Rosemond Johnson would compose the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”
All was not dark for freedmen, but times were extremely difficult. In the midst of inventions, conventions, emerging new spokesmen, and talk of self-determination, they still lived in the United States and bore the brunt of its cruelest racism. The battle for full citizenship had just begun. “We have undertaken no child’s play,” reported Timothy Fortune. “We have undertaken a serious work which will tax and exhaust the best intelligence and energy of the race for the next generation.” Still, he was hopeful: “We shall succeed. [With God’s help,] we cannot fail.”36 Leaving the troubled times of the nineteenth century and venturing into the uncertainties of the twentieth, my people, in the words of our national anthem, would “fight on ’till victory is won.”
The National Negro Business League was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900, and its purpose is to enhance the commercial and economic prosperity of the African American community.
Lifting as We Climb
While black men were fighting for my people’s freedom, our women were by no means silent. They spoke out not only for the race but also for the black woman. Though not always recognized as such, they were equal partners in the struggle for freedom and wanted to share its fruits. At the turn of the century, women across the country set forth to create settlement houses—residential communities working to uplift those in need and provide women with an outlet for independence and activism. In Atlanta in 1908, a group of black women, led by Lugenia Burns Hope, formed their own settlement house. Neighborhood Union, as it was known, worked for the advancement of the race—politically, economically, and spiritually. These women knew that in order to improve their condition, they must work for the betterment of both their race and their gender.
As a woman born into slavery and working for the freedom of her people, Sojourner Truth recognized that black mothers, wives, and daughters were not always respected as women. Stated the abolitionist and suffragist, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights but not a word about the colored women.… [Women] work in the field and do as much work, but do not get the pay. We do as much, we eat as such, we want as much.”37 When it came to rights, black women could hammer away, develop strategies, protest, and convene until they got them.
In 1917 a group of women participated in a silent parade to protest lynching and racial injustice.
For black women, life was an unrelenting struggle. Black women were twice despised: first for being black, second for being female. As women, their contribution to the cause of their race was often overlooked, their unique struggle as women ignored. Women who rose to the forefront were jeered, and they feared being physically attacked when speaking before white audiences. They grew impatient with black male leaders who failed to take seriously their struggle for equal rights, particularly the right to vote. Remarked Anna Julia Cooper, educator and fighter for the rights of black women, “While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on every other subject, when they strike the woman issue…they drop back into the sixteenth century logic.”38 Some black male leaders, however, would acknowledge women’s rights, and urged other black men to do so. Frederick Douglass assured his male counterparts: “We can neither speak for her, nor vote for her, nor act for her, nor be responsible for her; and the thing for men to do in the premises is just to get out of her way and give her the fullest opportunity to exercise all the powers inherent in her.” He added, “Give her fair play, and hands off[!]”39
It was not just among men that black women had to struggle. My foremothers learned that white women, although also struggling for the rights of full citizenship and the vote, did not always welcome them into the fold. At the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization founded to bring abolitionists and women together to promote the vote for freedmen and all women, black women were overlooked when speakers were selected to address the association. Of the more than fifty national officers and speakers at AERA over a three-year period, only five were black.
Portrait of African American orator and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth, circa 1860.
So black women spoke for themselves. They took up and advocated powerfully for the causes they believed in. My ancestors educated the poor in reading, writing, food preparation, and health care. They raised funds for orphanages and homes for the aged. They gave scholarships to young persons and fed and clothed the needy. In 1896 many black women’s organizations merged, forming the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). By 1927 this influential organization would represent 250,000 women. To be sure, its membership consisted of the race’s elite. Yet the women knew their fate was tied to that of their sisters who labored in the fields and other people’s homes. It was for the less fortunate that black women leaders spoke. The NACW adopted the fitting motto: “Lifting as We Climb.”
Black women rallied for justice to make women’s suffrage and human rights a reality. For this, my sisters deserved to be honored: Fannie Barrier Williams, lecturer, club organizer, and founder of the National League of Colored Women, established in 1893; Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the NACW; Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black woman newspaper editor in North America; Ida B. Wells, newspaper editor and fiery leader of the anti-lynching crusade; and Madam C. J. Walker, America’s first self-made woman millionaire, who contributed generously to black organizations.
Black women would not be still. They would not be silent, could not be bought nor frightened. The black woman possessed a certain strength, a spiritual force that had to be reckoned with. She held together homes, communities, churches, businesses, and schools. Why did my foremothers rally? When would their work be done? “The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal,” avowed Anna Julia Cooper. Only when “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all,” she added, “is woman’s lesson taught, and woman’s cause won.”40
The Phyllis Wheatley Club was an affiliate of the NACW. Founded in 1899, they established a settlement house in 1905 where they developed programs to feed the hungry, donated books written by black authors to school libraries, established kindergartens, and organized mother’s clubs to teach parenting skills.
Fighting for Democracy
When America entered the war, on April 6, 1917, black men were among the thousands to pour into recruitment camps. For the most part, they were rebuffed; fighting was the white man’s work. When learning that the war department said “no thanks” to black men who volunteered to serve, a black proprietor stated, “It looked as if the Negro, like a burglar, would have to break into this war as he did others.”41
The Selective Service Act removed the boundaries that prevented black men from joining the armed services. On July 5, registration day, more than 700,000 black men signed up. Although the nation at first rejected black volunteers, recruiters changed their minds when white men started dying by the thousands. By the end of the Selective Service enlistment, more than two million black men had registered, approximately 367,000 of whom would be called to duty.
The 369th Infantry being led into battle under French command.
The military life that awaited black men resembled the civilian world. Training camps, barracks, dining facilities, recreation places, and hospitals were segregated. White officers hurled racial slurs and made it difficult for black enlisted men to advance. Black commissioned officers also failed to get the respect due them; white privates and noncommissioned officers often “forgot” to salute them. In the eyes of many whites, a black man in uniform was still just a black man. In the North, black soldiers were denied service in restaurants and admission into theaters. In Anniston, Alabama, a black solider was tried and hanged by a civilian court for defending himself against a conductor who drew a weapon. In Spartanburg, South Carolina, a white proprietor struck famous composer and company drummer Noble Sissle several times for not removing his hat upon entering a lobby. In Houston, Texas, thirteen black soldiers were sentenced and hanged and fourteen others received life in prison, when the regiment defended itself against angry mobs.
Approximately 200,000 black soldiers were deployed to France. The first black soldiers sent overseas were assigned to labor or stevedore battalions. Instead of carrying rifles, they carried shovels, unloaded supplies, buried the dead, and performed the meanest, dirtiest jobs. Only 40,000 black men saw combat, serving in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division (the 365th, 366th, 367th, 368th infantry regiments) and 93rd Infantry Division (the 369th, 370th, 371st, and 372nd regiments). They trained under the French instead of Americans, yet another sign of the U.S.’s desire to disassociate itself from the black man. Within eight weeks of its arrival in France, the 92nd moved up to the front. Its artillery brigade was lauded for its accuracy; its engineer regiment did frontline work for the Argonne offense. In the last battle of the war, the First Battalion of the 367th remained on the offense until the Germans retreated. For its heroics, the 367th Regiment received the French Croix de Guerre (Legion of Merit). In the 92nd Division, forty-three enlisted men and fourteen officers were cited for bravery and awarded the United States’ second-highest military honor, the Distinguished Service Cross.
A World War I recruitment poster, specifically targeting black men to join in fighting for their country.
Members of the 93rd Division also showed exemplary skills. The 369th Regiment, dubbed “the Hell Fighters” by the Germans, was the first unit of the Allied Army to reach the Rhine. They set a record of 191 days on the firing line; the entire regiment won the Croix de Guerre. The 370th was the first American troop to enter the French fortress of Laon. They fought the last battle of the war, capturing fifty German wagons and crews in half an hour. Men of the 371st and 372nd joined the French’s 157th, the Red Hand Division. Despite being under heavy gunfire, they took a number of prisoners of war and captured machine guns, cannons, and supplies. The division won 126 French and 26 American Distinguished Service Crosses.
When historians recount the heroics of the 369th, “The Battle of Henry Johnson” should be told. Johnson and Roberts were guarding a small outpost when it was attacked by a unit of twenty Germans. The two fought back—Roberts throwing hand grenades as he lay on the ground, Johnson pulling a bolo knife and engaging in hand-to-hand combat, killing four German soldiers and wounding at least eight. For their courage, Johnson and Needham received the French medal of honor. Johnson was the first American, black or white, to be awarded the Croix de Guerre.
When the war ended, my people received black soldiers with heroes’ welcomes. Approximately one million people42 cheered the 369th, one of the most decorated units of war, as they marched up New York’s Fifth Avenue to Harlem on February 17, 1919. The jubilation was short-lived. Black soldiers who helped bring peace to the world found violence awaiting them in America. The war’s end brought the return of peace-time normalcy—racism, lynching, mob attacks on black citizens. For all their efforts, little in America had changed. For the nation, the so-called “War for Democracy” was over; for my people, it was just beginning.
A confidential message from one French commander to another regarding the 92nd Infantry Division, an all-black unit. The letter reiterates the American order to the French that blacks should not be treated as equals, since they are not treated that way in the United States. (See full transcription and translation shown here.)
Farewell—We’re Good and Gone
It was World War I that brought many black people to the North. With thousands of men leaving the North to fight, there were jobs to fill in Northern factories. The North needed manpower, and it knew there was plenty in the South. Many Northern industrialists sent agents to the South to recruit black workers. Company men sent out flyers, waited at train stations, whispered in black men’s ears about jobs awaiting them. Black people scrimped and saved, sold furniture and other goods, and moved in with family to save for the journey north. They left without fear or hesitation. “Farewell,” they sang to the South, “we’re good and gone.”
Although many of the first black migrants missed the warmth and familiarity of the South, they sent encouraging reports back home. They assured family and friends that if they came too, there would be a place and a job for them, schools for their children, a chance to be treated as citizens. Wrote one who settled in Philadelphia: “Of Course, everything they say about the North ain’t true, but here’s so much of it true don’t mind the other.”43
So more came—too many more. They flooded Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other industrial cities. The North was not as eager to receive them as the propaganda had led my people to believe. There was housing, but it was the poorest housing—segregated, dilapidated breeding grounds for tuberculosis and pneumonia. Wages were higher, but so was the cost of living. There were white people who addressed my people by their names to their faces but never considered them their equal.
Black women laborers weighing wire coils and recording weights to establish wage rates in a factory, circa 1919.
World War I ended, and a new kind of trouble began. Whites returning home wanted their jobs back—and their cities free of Southern blacks. Black soldiers returned demanding the rights they had fought for abroad; the black community, tired of segregated housing and high-rent districts, wanted full citizenship. The summer of 1919 was known as the Red Summer for all the blood spilled. From June to the end of that year there were approximately twenty-five race riots across the nation. Black communities were set afire. Black people were escorted from their homes under police protection, forced to leave “for their own good.” Black people were attacked in the streets by mobs. Ten World War I veterans were among the seventy-seven blacks lynched that year by white mobs. In Georgia, a soldier still in uniform was beaten to death for violating Jim Crow laws. It made no difference that my people had laid their lives on the line for this nation. In the eyes of many whites, a black person still had no rights they were bound to respect.
Those who left the South for a better life in the North found that the North was not the promised land for which my people had hoped. Though they had left behind signs that read “white only,” everyone still knew through which door to enter. Fighting racism and seeking justice throughout the courts became goals of black national organizations. Black leaders agitated and demanded that the masses do so also.
With true determination, my people stood their ground and held fast to their dreams. America was theirs, although she treated them as unwanted children. For their parents who had seen Reconstruction fail, for their grandparents who had been harnessed by slavery, they held the dream of freedom alive. When they wanted to give up, they would look at how far they had come. When the nation refused them their civil rights, they echoed the worlds spoken before: “All is equal.” They would hold America to its Constitution and its promises. “No turning back,” my people encouraged one another, “no turning back.”
World War I opened doors to opportunites usually reserved for white men. Black women were among those recruited by the Department of Labor to join the war effort and fill jobs left vacant by departing soldiers.
Holding on to Freedom
The years following the Civil War were years of great hope and disappointment. For the first time, African Americans as a group were free. But our freedom would not last long. Some of my people stood at the threshold of the twentieth century wondering if they had lost as much as they had gained. Some undoubtedly questioned if they had ever been free at all.
It is difficult to talk about Reconstruction and the years that followed. Less is written about it than any other major period in America’s history. It was a time when the Negro was being blamed for the Civil War and feared as a viable threat to white power and the Southern way of life. When one strives to find evidence of the accomplishments of freedmen, one must look hard. Although there were more than five hundred black men elected and appointed officials in the South, few are mentioned in textbooks. Although my people owned property, we as land owners are overlooked. We educated our children, opened banks, ran businesses, founded fraternal organizations, held conventions, and lobbied for our rights as citizens. In return my forefathers were lynched, disenfranchised, denied education, attacked, and hounded out of political offices. Why? Could it have been that my people had proven what too many people did not and still do not want to believe: that given the opportunity, we could succeed?
When one looks at the battles waged, one can only imagine how far my people could be today if we had not been systematically held back. That’s why masses of us still uphold the ideas of affirmative action, why some still recall the government’s promise of “forty acres and a mule.” For one hundred years, even as citizens, we were denied our rights, our due process under the law. It took a certain strength to endure, a certain spirit that would not shrink.
African Americans sorting tobacco at the T. B. Willimas Tobacco Company in Richmond, Virginia, 1899.
We must look at Reconstruction and the decades that followed, for that time showed the true nature of governments if citizens are denied the rights to vote. Under slavery, one could deny us civil rights because we were property—not men, not women, not citizens. Under freedom, that cloak was removed. My people were denied their rights because they were black. Freedom’s children carried those burdens with undying strength, character, and pride. How many times did black families pick up and start all over again? How often did black youths huddle in one-room schoolhouses to learn so they could teach their elders? How many black men died rather than surrender their land or allow their women and children to be defiled? How many black mothers toiled in the factories and fields, while praying the Negro spiritual, “Lord, Keep Me from Sinking Down?” If you looked for a hundred years, you couldn’t find a more resilient people. We learned to bend under the weight of oppression, and in bending, we could not be broken.
America tried to silence freedom’s children. We now must let them speak, and we must speak to them: As we stand at the threshold of the twenty-first century, we understand what you must have felt one hundred years ago. For we, too, often wonder if we have ever really been free. History may have overlooked you, may have ignored your accomplishments and hurried through your time, as though you did not matter. Still you endured, and your strength strengthens us. To honor you, we must continue your fight, until we are truly free. Thank you for standing tall. Your sacrifices have not been forgotten, your struggles have not been in vain.
African American sixth-grade school children crammed into a small room in an old storehouse and taught by a single teacher near the Negro High School in Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1917.