Perhaps the most important issue of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the fate of the former slaves after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Shortly after his inauguration in 1877, President Hayes made a goodwill tour of the South and he urged blacks to trust southern whites. A new Era of Good Feelings had dawned, he announced. Some southern leaders made earnest attempts to respect the civil rights of African Americans. That same year Governor Wade Hampton of South Carolina proposed to “secure to every citizen, the lowest as well as the highest, black as well as white, full and equal protection in the enjoyment of all his rights under the Constitution.”
But the pledge was not kept. By December, Hayes was sadly disillusioned. “By state legislation, by frauds, by intimidation, and by violence of the most atrocious character, colored citizens have been deprived of the right of suffrage,” he wrote in his diary. However, he did nothing to remedy the situation. Frederick Douglass called Hayes’s policy “sickly conciliation.”
Hayes’s successors in the 1880s did no better. “Time is the only cure,” President Garfield said, thereby confessing that he had no policy at all. President Arthur gave federal patronage to antiblack groups in an effort to split the Democratic South. In President Cleveland’s day African Americans had scarcely a friend in high places, North or South. In 1887 Cleveland explained to a correspondent why he opposed “mixed [integrated] schools.” Expert opinion, the president said, believed “that separate schools were of much more benefit for the colored people.” Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur were Republicans, and Cleveland a Democrat; party made little difference. Both parties subscribed to hypocritical statements about equality and constitutional rights, and neither did anything to implement them.
For a time blacks were not totally disenfranchised in the South. Rival white factions tried to manipulate them, and corruption flourished as widely as in the machine-dominated wards of the northern cities. In the 1890s, however, the southern states, led by Mississippi, began to deprive blacks of the vote despite the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes raised a formidable economic barrier, one that also disenfranchised many poor whites. Literacy tests completed the work; a number of states provided a loophole for illiterate whites by including an “understanding” clause whereby an illiterate person could qualify by demonstrating an ability to explain the meaning of a section of the state constitution when an election official read it to him. Blacks who attempted to take the test were uniformly declared to have failed it.
In Louisiana, 130,000 blacks voted in the election of 1896. Then the law was changed. In 1900 only
5,000 votes were cast by blacks. “We take away the Negroes’ votes,” a Louisiana politician explained, “to protect them just as we would protect a little child and prevent it from injuring itself with sharp-edged tools.” Almost every Supreme Court decision after 1877 that affected blacks somehow nullified or curtailed their rights. The civil rights cases (1883) declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Blacks who were refused equal accommodations or privileges by hotels, theaters, and other privately owned facilities had no recourse at law, the Court announced. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed their civil rights against invasion by the states, not by individuals.
Finally, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court ruled that even in places of public accommodation, such as railroads and, by implication, schools, segregation was legal as long as facilities of equal quality were provided: “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” In a noble dissent in the Plessy case, Justice John Marshall Harlan protested this line of argument. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” he said. “The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race. . . is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom. . . . The two
A cartoon from Judge magazine in 1892 depicts Ku Klux Klansmen barring a black voter from the polls.
Races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.”
More than half a century was to pass before the Court came around to Harlan’s reasoning and reversed the Plessy decision. Meanwhile, total segregation was imposed throughout the South. Separate schools, prisons, hospitals, recreational facilities, and even cemeteries were provided for blacks, and these were almost never equal to those available to whites.
Most Northerners supported the government and the Court. Newspapers presented a stereotyped, derogatory picture of blacks, no matter what the circumstances. Northern magazines, even high-quality publications such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Century, repeatedly made blacks the butt of crude jokes.
The restoration of white rule abruptly halted the progress in public education for blacks that the Reconstruction governments had made. Church groups and private foundations such as the Peabody Fund and the Slater Fund, financed chiefly by northern philanthropists, supported black schools after 1877. Among them were two important experiments in vocational training, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute.
These schools had to overcome considerable resistance and suspicion in the white community; they survived only because they taught a docile philosophy, preparing students to accept second-class citizenship and become farmers and craftsmen. Since proficiency in academic subjects might have given the lie to the southern belief that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, such subjects were avoided.
The southern insistence on segregating the public schools, buttressed by the separate but equal decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, imposed a crushing financial burden on poor, sparsely settled communities, and the dominant opinion that blacks were not really educable did not encourage these communities to make special efforts in their behalf.
View the Image Plessyv. Ferguson, 1896 at Www. myhistorylab. com
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