Sons of the South

September 28, 2008

By DAVID S. REYNOLDS

 

CAPITOL MEN

 

The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen

By Philip Dray

Illustrated. 463 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $30

In a speech in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, declared that the South was great because of slavery. The Confederacy, he said, had achieved “the highest type of civilization ever exhibited by man,” because “its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

Four blood-soaked years later, the South was in ruins and slavery had been abolished. But the view that blacks must be kept down persisted among disgruntled ex-Confederates like Stephens, who became a leading foe of civil rights.

One of the stirring episodes in Philip Dray’s eye-opening book “Capitol Men” involves Stephens getting his comeuppance on the floor of the House of Representatives at the hands of Robert Brown Elliott, a black congressman from South Carolina who was riding the progressive tide of Reconstruction. In January 1874, after Stephens challenged a civil rights bill that was before Congress, Elliott eloquently defended social and political equality for all Americans, regardless of race. To applause and cheers, he remarked of the Confederacy, “The progress of events has swept away that pseudo-government which rested on greed, pride and tyranny.” Reconstruction had remade democracy. American society, he said, was poised to become “the grandest which the world has ever seen” because of legislation like the civil rights bill, which would bring “equal, impartial and universal liberty.”

Elliott’s optimism proved premature. Reconstruction soon collapsed. The era of Jim Crow settled in.

Was Reconstruction, then, a success or a failure? Did it bring real progress for ­African-Americans? Some argue that it did little good in the long run, as evidenced by its aftermath — the period between the late 1870s and the early 1950s, when advances blacks had made just after the Civil War were largely negated. Others say that Reconstruction, though ephemeral, established an ideal of racial equality that America is still trying to reach.

Dray casts fresh light on the positive aspects of Reconstruction and powerfully dramatizes its negative side. His well-researched book is both exhilarating and disturbing. It offers a collective biography of several black congressmen in the South during Reconstruction who bravely took a public stance against racial prejudice. But it also shows that these politicians were stymied by a rising culture of white supremacy and home rule in the South.

While only two blacks, both from the North, are known to have held public office in American history up to the Civil War, hundreds of African-­Americans were elected during Reconstruction as a result of Northern Republicans’ efforts to refashion Southern governments and compensate for centuries of slavery. Political activity among African-Americans was especially notable in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the states with majority black populations. In Mississippi alone, during the 12 years of Reconstruction, 226 black officials served in every position from county tax collector to United States senator.

Dray focuses on a handful of black leaders on the national scene, bringing attention to figures often neglected in Reconstruction surveys. These politicians were pioneers. Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi became the first African-American member of Congress in 1870 when he took the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis. Another Mississippian, Blanche K. Bruce, was also elected to the Senate, where he combated segregation. Senator P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana had been a riverboat gambler and street fighter before becoming a forceful advocate for the integration of blacks into white society. South Carolina elected blacks to the House of Representatives, including Robert Smalls, a former slave and Civil War hero who endorsed free public education for all children, and Richard Cain, who emphasized black economic opportunities.

These and other leaders set an important precedent of political involvement for later generations of African-­Americans. They also worked with forward-thinking whites who supported the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the vote; the Freedmen’s Bureau, which arranged labor relations between blacks and their former masters; and several civil rights bills.

Dray, the author of “At the Hands of Persons Unknown,” a history of the lynching of African-Americans, demonstrates that the more powerful blacks became, the more hostility they provoked among Southern whites. Some areas in the South enforced Black Codes, which set curfews for blacks, barred them from militias and regulated their private conduct. The Ku Klux Klan enlisted whites who disguised themselves and made nighttime rides terrorizing blacks. Groups with names like the White League, the Southerns and the Flanagan Guards copied the Klan.

Dray provides harrowing details about race riots that erupted in New Orleans, Memphis and other Southern cities and towns. With appalling regularity, white mobs went on rampages, massacring scores of blacks. “We are going to kill all the Negroes,” a Mississippi man announced during one such spree. “The Negro men shall not live.”

Whites stripped blacks of power in the voting booth. Voter fraud, intimidation and bribery became rules of thumb in many Southern states. One Southerner wrote, “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine.”

Economic ostracism also took a heavy toll. Republicans, both white and black, found it hard to earn a living when their names appeared in local papers with warnings that advised readers not to hire them or patronize their businesses.

Other problems sped the downfall of Reconstruction. President Ulysses S. Grant, though supportive, lagged in enforcing its regulations. Women’s rights reformers complained that federal law awarded suffrage to black men but withheld it from women. A severe financial blow came in 1874 when the Freedman’s Bank in Washington, an economic hub for African-­Americans, collapsed owing to ­mismanagement.

White supremacists became increasingly brazen. The South Carolina politician Benjamin Tillman declared: “We have done our level best” to disenfranchise blacks. “We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Many blacks decided to leave the South. It is telling that one of the last black leaders Dray discusses at length is the former slave Benjamin Singleton of Nashville, who decided that people of color would never gain equal rights if they remained in the South. Singleton led the so-called Exoduster Movement, in which thousands of Southern blacks re­located to the Kansas frontier.

By the 1880s, Southern blacks had two alternatives, both grim: leave and face an uncertain future elsewhere, or stay put, virtually without citizenship rights, under the constant threat of violence. It would not be until Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. that the oppressive weight of legalized segregation began to lift. Even today, Robert Brown Elliott’s prophecy of “equal, impartial and universal liberty” in America seems like an impossible dream.

David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book is “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.”

nytimes

Her Hard-Knock Life

New York Observed

By ALYSE MYERS

IN 1957, when I was 1 and my mother was pregnant with my middle sister, my parents moved from a tenement on the Lower East Side to a one-bedroom apartment in Ravenswood Houses, a public housing project in Long Island City, Queens. Ravenswood, a complex of 31 cookie-cutter brick buildings that had been completed six years earlier and that was home to 4,500 people, was all my father, a postal worker, could afford. In 1959, with two little girls and another child on the way, my parents upgraded to a small two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor.

We stayed until 1972, five years after my father’s death from cancer, at which point my mother, who by now was working as a bookkeeper, had saved enough money to move my two sisters and me to a co-op development across the street. Almost all of our original neighbors had escaped years earlier.

Although in those days many residents of public housing in the city were black and Latino, when we moved in, most of our neighbors in Ravenswood Houses were Irish and Italian. We were one of the few Jewish families, and I was often the target of a bully who would taunt, “Stupid Jew girl” whenever she saw me.

I was 16 when we finally left, and in the decades that followed, I never had any desire to revisit my childhood home, a place I remembered mostly as dark and claustrophobic, a place where most nights I slept with my transistor radio to my ear, trying to drown out the sounds of my parents’ failing marriage. But earlier this year, after the publication of a memoir in which I looked back on those years, I changed my mind. So much of what I ultimately became had been forged within those walls, and I needed to see how far I had come.

The Saturday afternoon my husband and I made the journey from our apartment on the Upper West Side, he found a parking spot right in front of my old building, exactly where my father used to park his prized possession, a used, forest-green Cadillac that my mother said he had no right to own since we couldn’t afford it.

As soon as we walked to the entrance, I saw the intercom, something that didn’t exist when my family lived there. I tried the door, but it wouldn’t open. The place I couldn’t wait to leave now wouldn’t let me back in. I pressed the buzzer for 4E, my old apartment. No answer. I pressed another buzzer. Nothing. But when I pressed a third, a woman answered, and when I gave her my name, she buzzed me in.

I wasn’t surprised by the graffiti in the elevator or the broken tiles on the floor, but I hoped we wouldn’t get stuck. In my day, the elevator got stuck so often, I’d race up the four flights, praying that I wouldn’t see the man from the second floor who sometimes slept on a landing.

When we got out on 4, I noticed that the walls were the same dirty mustard. From down the hall, I heard loud music and a couple arguing. I was about to press the doorbell of my old apartment when my husband stopped me. “You don’t know who lives there,” he warned. “You can’t just invade someone’s privacy.”

So we went back downstairs, and as we stood outside the building, I thought about how much I’d hated Ravenswood, and how I had never wanted to have friends visit, lest they see how cramped and messy our apartment was, or smell the urine in the hallways outside.

As I was going over all this in my mind, a young woman with short black hair came to the front door and took out her keys. I asked her if she lived in the building. When she said she did, I told her that I used to live there, too, and had come back to see who lived in 4E.

SHE told me that 4E had been vacant for a long time, and that she lived in 5E, directly above it. I asked if I could take a look.

As soon as she opened her door, I had to catch my breath. Her apartment was identical to the one that had been ours. The brown wood closets on the right, always stuffed with clothes, and the light-green Electrolux vacuum cleaner. The too-small living room where late at night my parents sometimes danced, drunk, to their Frank Sinatra records.

Peering out the window of the dining area, I asked the woman if she heard garbage trucks at all hours. Yes, she replied; that’s why she usually kept her windows closed. I told her that we had done the same.

“Do you get black soot from the incinerator all over everything, too?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said. “They don’t burn garbage in the smokestack anymore.”

In the tiny kitchen, I remembered my father sitting on a chair, a needle in his thigh filled with morphine to kill the pain of the cancer that killed him when he was 34. He never knew that I saw him.

I walked down the hall to the bathroom. I used to lock myself in ours when my parents were fighting, wishing I had someplace else to go. Then I saw the bedroom, the one identical to the room I shared with my two younger sisters, where I used to sit on the top bunk, gazing out the window and praying that we might one day move to a nicer place and have a happier life.

Finally, I decided that I had seen enough, and I thanked the woman for letting us look around. As we left, I gave her a copy of my book and said I might call her. I haven’t done so, however, and I suspect that I won’t. Maybe that’s because I wouldn’t want to tell her how glad I am I don’t live there anymore.

Alyse Myers, a former marketing executive for The New York Times, is the author of the memoir “Who Do You Think You Are?”