My Face Is Black Is True Read online

  African-American conventions took place in most of the Confederate states during 1865. In January 1865, a Convention of Colored Men of Louisiana organized to discuss giving support to the National Equal Rights League. From a published attendance list of eighty-three names, some of the wealthiest and most prominent Afro-Creoles attended. Captain James Ingraham, a Louisiana Native Guard hero, was elected president. The local French-language newspaper that served the free colored community, La Tribune, trumpeted the solidarity between free and freed at the convention. However, the relationship between free people of color and new freedpeople remained uneasy. The New Orleans riots, along with the passage of Black Codes and Confederate resurgence in the other southern states, helped to elect the congressmen who passed the Reconstruction Act of March 1867, affirming African-American suffrage. Temporarily, at least the fissure between Afro-Creoles and freedmen seemed healed. In Louisiana, the Constitutional Convention established under the act, consisted of ninety-eight delegates, half white and half African American, six of whom were former Native Guards. They enshrined universal suffrage in the new Constitution.21

  Since the Union defeat of the Confederacy came early in Tennessee in 1862, just as it had in New Orleans, blacks had some freedom to act politically before those elsewhere. Memphis and Nashville also had free Negro populations that could exercise leadership. In Nashville, beginning in 1863, demonstrations for freedom and political suffrage led by free-before-the-war literate blacks and ministers and veterans became common. In Nashville, these men, enacting the part of “political citizens,” went to Union Party rallies. They campaigned for Lincoln in the 1864 campaign and cast their ballots at a mock polling place. In January 1865, on the same day that the Convention of Colored Men met in Louisiana, in Nashville sixty-two colored citizens petitioned the white Unionists meeting in a Constitutional Convention there at the time to abolish slavery in the state. Tennessee, because it was not in rebellion, had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, Callie, as well as the large population of refugees in the cities and slaves still in rural areas, remained legally in bondage in the state. Tennessee slaves were not formally freed by the state until March 1865.22

  After a Nashville convention held in August 1865 attended by blacks from Rutherford County and surrounding areas, the Nashville Colored Tennessean reported how they defined their change from slaves and subordinates to persons with rights. African Americans expected whites to

  Deal with us justly. Tell us not that we will not work, when it was our toil that enriched the South. Talk not to us of a war of races, for that is to say you intend commencing to butcher us, whenever you can do so with impunity. All we want is the rights of men. Give us that and we shall not molest you. We do not intend leaving this country. No land can be fairer in our eyes, than the sunny one beneath whose skies we have lived. We were born here. Most of us will die here. We are Americans and prouder of the fact than ever. Deal justly with us. That’s all we want. That we mean to have, come what may!23

  The Reconstruction Act of March 1867 gave black males the political rights the conventions demanded. They could vote and run for office for the first time. The Union League and political clubs, mass meetings, and speakers, as well as the selection of black registrars designated by the Freedmen’s Bureau, all added to the excitement of the era. At the local level in towns and cities, they learned how to organize local councils or branches. African Americans would listen to a speaker, learn the rituals, and adjourn to form a council. Those who were literate would also read newspapers and other materials aloud to the illiterate. As the meeting place of the local councils where African Americans discussed issues from politics to wages, the churches developed as political institutions. The churches were the community.24

  Women, though they could not vote, also attended the political meetings and joined in the activism. E. Franklin Frazier described how African-American women asserted themselves politically under Reconstruction. During the election of 1868, “if a husband refused to wear a picture of Republican presidential candidate, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant around the old plantation, in the presence of the old slave Master, and or the overseer, his wife would wear it. If he would not give it to her she would walk all the way to town to buy, beg, or borrow one to wear.”25

  African Americans wanted land, schooling, religious freedom, and pensions. They also understood that they needed to vote and hold political office. This man is urging another to vote. “Canvassing for Votes,” Harper’s Weekly, November 2, 1872.

  Ex-slaves saw voting and the election of new conventions and legislatures with African-American members as defining events. Men, women, and children crowded the audiences in the state houses. They expected a new day of opportunity and empowerment. Each of the constitutional conventions called in the southern states had African-American members, but they were in a majority at the conventions in South Carolina and Louisiana. In most states, African Americans constituted a small minority. In six states, native whites were in the majority. Some African-American members were former slaves and others had been free before the war; some were emigrants from the North; and many were veterans of the Union Army. Those who spoke in the conventions took a moderate conciliatory position toward white Confederates, even supporting their enfranchisement. The state constitutions approved by the Reconstruction conventions were much more progressive than the constitutions of antebellum days. They abolished property qualifications for voting and holding office, and some ended imprisonment for debt. Slavery was formally abolished in all of the constitutions they adopted. In every constitution, universal male suffrage was enacted except for certain classes of former Confederates. William Whipper, an African American who emigrated from the North to serve in the Union Army and a delegate to the South Carolina convention, even proposed women’s suffrage. Public school systems and modernized local government administrative provisions were also included. These constitutions were apparently so highly regarded that even when Reconstruction was overthrown by white supremacists, the basic provisions of the constitutions were maintained. The whites overthrew Reconstruction to regain power; they had no problem with the advanced structures of government the conventions established.26

  Black women and men eagerly made political decisions as freedmen gained the vote for the first time. In towns and rural areas men and women learned how to organize and eagerly discussed issues and candidates. “A Political Discussion,” Harper’s Weekly, November 20,1869.

  Reconstruction unraveled all over the South as chaotically as it began. In House’s community, as elsewhere, whites used personal intimidation, threats of dismissal from employment, manipulation of ballots, and Klan violence to force blacks out of the political arena while the national government acquiesced. C. C. Henderson, an early historian of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, wrote that when former masters and former slaves having the same surname sought the same office, election officials counted all of the votes cast for the freedmen in favor of the election to the former master.27

  In 1869, Reconstruction ended in Tennessee and with it an almost complete exclusion of African-American men from politics. A few continued to vote and run for office, and a few received Republican patronage appointments. However, the poll tax, biased election officials, intimidation, and violence kept most African Americans from the polls. According to the Rutherford County historian Carlton Sims, “the better class of white people took over the government.” In the 1870s, Callie’s family, like the rest of the county’s still large, mostly disenfranchised, black population, engaged in farming as tenants or sharecroppers, or employment as domestics or laborers. However, there were a few carpenters, blacksmiths, ministers, teachers, railroad engineers, shoemakers, boatmakers, and two physicians. Blacks had been able to experience political organizing and office holding. Some had even exercised real power for a time.28

  African Americans in House’s community and elsewhere in the South began to consider other routes for political action on
ce Reconstruction ended and black voters were largely driven from electoral politics. With African Americans no longer a factor, white voters divided sharply along class lines. In the 1880s, depressed economic conditions for poor farmers led them to join radical agrarian organizations. The whites-only Southern Farmers’ Alliance was joined by a Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperation Union in 1886. Radical leaders such as Tom Watson in Georgia began preaching solidarity for poor black and white farmers. In 1892, the Populist Party tried to protect African Americans in the exercise of the franchise, to ensure equal application of voting procedures, and to gain the black vote. The Democrats retaliated first by trying and failing to make an alliance with the Populists and then by forcing African Americans who worked for them to vote Democratic. The Democrats also resorted to riots and murder to maintain political power.29

  Soon, however, Democrats began to complain that even when they controlled black voters, they often had to use intimidation or threats of violence. The Populists feared that they would not always be able to control African Americans if they were permitted to behave as allies and not subordinates, and they also feared Democratic control of black voters and efforts to disfranchise poor whites. Poor whites, the planter class, and industrialists joined together in forcing African Americans out of the political arena in the 1890s. State after state formally disfranchised African Americans by the discriminatory use of “reading and understanding clauses,” by writing rigid educational and property tests for voting into their constitutions, and by enacting “grandfather clauses” that enfranchised only those whose fathers and grandfathers had been qualified to vote on January 1, 1867, which automatically excluded blacks, most of whom had still been slaves on that date.30

  Callie grew to adolescence during Reconstruction and the reaction that followed it. In 1880, she lived in Rutherford County with her widowed mother, Ann Guy, in the household of her sister, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, Charles House, a laborer and minister. Callie attended school, and her mother, who could not read or write, took in washing. In 1880, the black population of the county grew to 16,493, still about 50 percent of the total population.31

  In 1881, Tennessee had the distinction of passing the first law in the South that officially mandated the segregation that already existed in fact. In 1883, at age eighteen, Callie left her sister’s household, marrying William House, a laborer, who may have been related to her brother-in-law, Charles. Callie and William House had six children, five of whom, three girls and two boys, survived. Thomas, the eldest, was born in 1885 and Annie, the youngest, in 1893. Callie House’s mother apparently died sometime before the 1900 Census was taken. She no longer lived in the household of any of the relatives, and she does not appear in the Census anywhere thereafter.32

  In the years after Reconstruction, as African Americans considered alternative routes to empowerment, people in House’s neighborhood joined in talking about emigration to the North or to Africa. The discussion was not new. One segment of white opinion in the early Republic believed that democracy and Christianity required the deportation of blacks to Africa. This philosophy, espoused by Thomas Jefferson and others, was the basis of the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in December 1816-January 1817 and the establishment of Liberia on the west coast of Africa in 1822. By the beginning of the Civil War, the ACS had removed about 11,000 African Americans to Liberia.33

  Although some historians insist that there was little real interest in emigration before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the thousands of letters in the files of the ACS suggest another story. Slaves and free blacks continually wrote to the society after 1817, expressing their desire to emigrate to Liberia to escape discrimination, to establish a Christian outpost in Africa, to obtain the same kinds of opportunities in a new land as European immigrants had found in the United States, and to aid in crushing the African slave trade. Peter Butler, a semiliterate free black from Petersburg, Virginia, expressed the typical view when he wrote in 1848, “I wish to Go to Liberia So as I may teach Sinners the way of Salvation and also Educate my children and enjoy the Right of a man[.] I have tried a great many places in these united state and I find that none of them is the home for the Culerd man and So I am Looking in my mind for a home and I find that Liberia is the onley place of injoyment for the Culerd man.”34

  Some African-American emigrationists saw efforts toward colonization in Africa of free Negroes and subsidization of the American Colonization Society by Congress as claims for redress. They consistently demanded that the U.S. government pay blacks for their sufferings and unrequited toil while in bondage. At the Emigration Convention of 1854, blacks insisted, “Nothing less than a national indemnity, indelibly fixed by virtue of our own sovereign potency, will satisfy us as a redress of our grievances for the unparalleled wrongs, undisguised impositions, and unmitigated oppression, which we have suffered at the hands of this American people.… For our own part, we spurn to treat for liberty on any other terms or conditions.”35

  The advent of the Civil War and the hope that it would bring complete liberation led to a decrease in interest in emigration. However, after the Civil War, in 1865, the ACS renewed its work. By 1868, the ACS had sent 2,232 blacks to Liberia from all over the South, including Nashville and the surrounding area in middle Tennessee. This was more than twice the annual average for the entire period from 1820 to 1861. In addition to educated blacks who wanted to become missionaries, poor African Americans, still seeking land, were attracted. Henry Adams, a former slave in Georgia and Louisiana, became one of the mass leaders. For three years he served in the Union Army, where he learned to read, write, and count. Faced with the mistreatment blacks experienced in the service, he and a few others began to organize. Adams traveled throughout the South, splitting rails, working and organizing, and observing the poor conditions of blacks everywhere. The violence attending the post-Reconstruction regaining of power by whites in Louisiana caused him and others to petition President Ulysses S. Grant to send blacks to Liberia. In 1877, they sent a similar petition to Rutherford B. Hayes. They noted that twelve years after the Civil War, African Americans in some ways were “in a worst condition… than they were before those constitutional guarantees were extended.” They cited their disfranchisement, violence, landlessness, and inability to control their lives and protect their families. They had no hope that their prospects would improve.36

  African-American political participation, starting in 1867 during Reconstruction in the deep South, reduced the interest in emigration, but the brutal white reaction against Reconstruction stimulated it again. Blacks participated in electoral politics when they could but then organized and kept the emigrationist idea before them. Information spread through the local political councils, benevolent associations, schools, black newspapers, and the ACS’s African Repository, which was read aloud at church or local political meetings.37

  Heightened interest in African emigration, in Tennessee and elsewhere, came in 1879 and 1880. At the same time the Exodus to Kansas Movement, started by the illiterate Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former Tennessee slave who had escaped to Canada before the Civil War, gathered momentum. Returning to middle Tennessee after the war, Singleton urged blacks to abandon politics because they were being swindled. As a result of the emphasis on politics during Reconstruction, Singleton contended, “whites had the lands and the sense and the blacks had nothing but their freedom.” In order to make this freedom real, Singleton organized a land company in 1869. After prices in Tennessee proved too high, in 1871 he began urging African Americans to acquire public lands in Kansas. Between 1873 and 1879, he took several groups of Tennessee and Kentucky blacks there. Singleton and his cohorts wanted to create an independent, separate African-American enclave in Kansas.38

  “The Negro Exodus—the Old Style and the New,” Harper’s Weekly, May 1, 1880. Unlike the runaway slave fleeing alone through the swamp, these blacks moved in a group to Kansas to form new communiti
es as an escape from Jim Crow and repression after Reconstruction ended.

  Southern blacks showed a feverish interest in emigration between 1876 and 1881; thousands of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas blacks moved into Kansas during this period. By 1879, they had purchased about 10,000 acres of public land.

  The emigrants were generally so destitute, however, that initially they had to obtain relief from Kansas whites. As their numbers increased and discrimination and segregation arose in Kansas, Singleton began urging blacks to emigrate to Canada or Liberia, and in 1885 he formed the United Trans-Atlantic Society to foster African colonization. Despairing that they would ever achieve full citizenship in the United States, the society argued that only in an African state with a separate national existence could blacks survive.39

  Henry Adams worked with Singleton for a time. His petition to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1874 insisted that “the exodus of our people to some other country” was “the only hope and preservation of our race.” He supported the exodus north or emigration to Liberia as alternatives. He thought blacks needed to leave the South for someplace where they might have an opportunity for self-development and control over their own lives.40

  Southern whites reacted negatively to the prospect that they might lose the use of exploited black labor. So concerned did the government become about the exodus and the Back to Africa emigration movement that in 1880 the U.S. Senate held an investigation into the “Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States,” producing three large volumes of testimony and assessment. No matter how much discontent African Americans expressed, probably no more than 25,000 blacks actually emigrated to Kansas in 1879-1880. Also, probably no more than about 4,000 managed to reach Liberia during the whole post-Civil War period.41