White Rage

by Carol Anderson

  Although many poor whites languished, refusing to attend schools built under the supposed “nigger programs” of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the formerly enslaved emerged “with a fundamentally different consciousness of literacy … that viewed reading and writing as a contradiction of oppression.”87

  Instead of offering any support to those who embodied the self-reliance he said he valued, Johnson was blind to the herculean and impressive effort that blacks had mounted in the South, and he demanded that they do even more without any help.88

  The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 also came under attack by the president. In vetoing the proposed legislation, Johnson raised several telling objections. He argued that blacks had to earn their citizenship, reminding Congress that African Americans had just emerged from slavery and, therefore, “should pass through a certain probation … before attaining the coveted prize.” There was to be no born-on-American-soil-lottery, he intoned; instead, they had to “give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens.”89 For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship. And so, by his veto, he rendered the Civil Rights Bill null and void, fearing it would “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. In fact,” he continued, “the bill [is] made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”90 This, a simple injunction against discriminating against blacks, was labeled as favoritism, and that is what made the proposed legislation so patently unacceptable. The Civil Rights Bill, Johnson complained, was just the opening salvo in the Radical Republicans’ efforts “to protect niggers.”91

  Congress overrode both his vetoes and hoped that there might be some way to work with the president. But in the spring and summer of 1866, the South’s descent into an orgy of anti-black violence signaled the final break between Johnson and the Republicans. In New Orleans, nearly fifty African Americans were slaughtered and more than a hundred injured for meeting to discuss voting. When one of the killers, who had just bludgeoned a black man to death, was warned that “he might be punished,” he scoffed. “Oh, hell! Haven’t you seen the papers?” he said. “Johnson is with us!”92 In Memphis, there was another gory bloodbath, and another round of silence from the White House.93 In Texas, from 1865 to 1868, nearly one thousand African Americans were lynched.94

  A woman pleaded with President Johnson “to do something about the plight of the ‘poor negro … their masters are so angry to loose [sic] them that they are trying to persecute them back into slavery.’ ” Justice Miller was livid with Southern leaders, who sat in silence while the violence raged around them. “Show me,” he demanded, “the first public address or meeting of Southern men in which the massacres of New Orleans or Memphis have been condemned.” The “single truth is undenied that not a rebel or secessionist was hurt in either case, while from thirty to fifty negroes and Union white men were shot down,” which removed “all doubt as to who did it and why it was done.” As the black body count mounted, with justice nowhere to be found, least of all from the president of the United States, the Reconstruction era descended into nothing less than an age of violence and terror.95

  Congress, therefore, moved to provide some level of protection, passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which divided the South into five military districts and tried to put U.S. troops between a still-smoldering, vengeful rebel population and the freedpeople. Then, in response to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and organized, terrorist violence, Congress issued the Enforcement Acts. It also passed and the states subsequently ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, weaving citizenship for all those born in the United States, except Native Americans, as well as the right to vote, into the Constitution.

  Johnson did everything in his power to stop constitutional recognition of black people’s citizenship and voting rights, including convincing most of the Southern states not to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and launching a breathtaking and ultimately disastrous political campaign to unseat Radical Republicans in Congress.96 Nevertheless, despite Johnson’s wild fulminations about the “Africanization” of the South and the tyranny of “negro domination,” the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868, followed by the Fifteenth on February 3, 1870.97 Congress had just created a legal structure to begin to atone for America’s “original sin.”

  The U.S. Supreme Court, however, stepped in and succeeded where Johnson had failed. Frederick Douglass lamented that by the time the justices had finished, “in most of the Southern States, the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments are virtually nullified. The rights which they were intended to guarantee are denied and held in contempt. The citizenship granted in the fourteenth amendment is practically a mockery, and the right to vote … is literally stamped out in face of government.”98

  The Supreme Court justices gave the aura of being “strict constitutionalists” whose job was not to interpret or create but merely to distinguish between the rights the federal government enforced and those controlled by the states.99 But the supposedly legally neutral interpretations had profound effects. And the court, just like Johnson, demonstrated an uncanny ability to ignore inconsistencies and to twist rules, beliefs, and values to undermine the solid progress in black people’s rights that the Radical Republicans had finally managed to put in place. The court declared that the Reconstruction amendments had illegally placed the full scope of civil rights, which had once been the domain of states, under federal authority. That usurpation of power was unconstitutional because it put state governments under Washington’s control, disrupted the distribution of power in the federal system, and radically altered the framework of American government.100 The justices consistently held to this supposedly strict reading of the Constitution when it came to African Americans’ rights.

  Yet, this same court threw tradition and strict reading out the window in the Santa Clara decision. California had changed its taxation laws to no longer allow corporations to deduct debt from the amount owed to the state or municipalities. The change applied only to businesses; people, under the new law, were not affected. The Southern Pacific Railroad refused to pay its new tax bill, arguing that its rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. In hearing the case, the court became innovative and creative as it transformed corporations into “people” who could not have their Fourteenth Amendment rights trampled on by local communities.101 So, while businesses were shielded, black Americans were most emphatically not.

  The ruling that began this long, disastrous legal retreat from a rights-based society was the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases. New Orleans had passed a law not only to confine butcher shops, with their blood, entrails, and inevitable disease, to a discrete section of town but also to allow only city-authorized stores to operate. The butchers went to court, pleading that their right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. The justices ruled that that was impossible because the amendment covered only federal citizenship rights, such as habeas corpus and the right to peaceful assembly. Everything else came under the domain of the states.102 As a result, “citizens still had to seek protection for most of their civil rights from state governments and state courts.”103

  Even the right to vote, despite the Fifteenth Amendment, was not federally protected. In Minor v. Happersett (1874), Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite wrote, “The Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone,” because the vote “was not coexistent with citizenship.”104 This was reaffirmed in United States v. Reese (1875). In Lexington, Kentucky, a black man, William Garner, had tried to vote. The registrars, Hiram Reese and Matthew Foushee, refused to hand Garner a ballot because he had not paid a poll tax. Yet, the black man had an affidavit that the tax collector had refused to accept his payment. The registrars scoffed. With one wing of local government demanding proof of payment an
d the other flat out refusing to accept the funds, Garner knew his right to vote had been violated. The U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8–1 decision, disagreed. In another opinion, Waite wrote that the Fifteenth Amendment did not guarantee the right to vote but “had merely prevented the states from giving preference to one citizen over another on account of race, color, etc.” To emphasize the point, Waite reiterated, the “right to vote … comes from the states.”105

  In quick succession, the court had undermined citizenship, due process, and the right to vote. Next was the basic right to life. In 1873, Southern Democrats, angered that African Americans had voted in a Republican government in Colfax, Louisiana, threatened to overturn the results of the recent election and install a white supremacist regime. Blacks were determined to defend their citizenship rights and occupied the symbol of democracy in Colfax, the courthouse, to ensure that the duly elected representatives, most of whom were white, could take office. That act of democratic courage resulted in an unprecedented bloodbath, even for Reconstruction.106 Depending on the casualty estimate, between 105 and 280 African Americans were slaughtered. Their killers were then charged with violating the Enforcement Act of 1870, which Congress had passed to stop the Klan’s terrorism. Chief Justice Waite, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), ruled that the Enforcement Act violated states’ rights. Moreover, the only recourse the federal government could take was the Fourteenth Amendment, but, he continued, that did not cover vigilantes or private acts of terror, but rather covered only those acts of violence carried out by the states. The ruling not only let mass murderers go free; it effectively removed the ability of the federal government to rein in anti-black domestic terrorism moving forward.107

  But the rollback of rights was not over yet; next on the list were dignity and equality. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the justices ruled that the 1875 Force Act that banned discrimination in public accommodations was also unconstitutional because the Fourteenth Amendment could be enforced only by the states, not the federal government. Moreover, in a wicked one-two punch, the justices added that the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “badges of servitude” did not extend to discrimination in public accommodations, such as in hotels, restaurants, and railcars.108 U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Bradley was exasperated with African Americans consistently seeking legal redress and laws to fend off the violence, state-sponsored discrimination, legalized terror, and the reimposition of “crypto-slavery” and a “netherworld of rightlessness” that had come to define their lives after the Civil War. He barked that “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.”109 Like Andrew Johnson, Bradley saw equal treatment for black people as favoritism.

  Unequal treatment, however, became the law of the land. In Hall v. DeCuir (1877), the justices ruled that a state could not prohibit racial segregation.110 Then, in a series of decisions, Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), Ex parte Virginia (1880), and Virginia v. Rives (1880), the U.S. Supreme Court provided clear guidelines to the states on how to systematically and constitutionally exclude African Americans from juries in favor of white jurors.111 The crowning glory was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Homer Plessy, a black man who looked white, thought his challenge to a Louisiana law that forced him to ride in the Jim Crow railcar instead of the one designated for whites would put an end to this legal descent into black subjugation. He was wrong. The justices, in an 8–1 decision, dismissed the claims that Plessy’s Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law were violated. Justice Henry Brown unequivocally stated, “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.” And when Plessy argued that segregation violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban against “badges of servitude,” the Supreme Court shot down that argument as well, noting: “We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy’s] argument … to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”112 Despite more than a generation of irrefutable evidence of widespread racial discrimination in the aftermath of the Civil War, the court created the mythic “separate but equal” doctrine to confirm racial segregation as the law of the land. The court then followed up with a ruling in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) that even ignored Plessy’s separate but equal doctrine by declaring that financial exigency made it perfectly acceptable to shut down black schools while continuing to operate educational facilities for white children.113

  Just prior to that, the court had sanctioned closing off the ballot box. In a unanimous 9–0 decision in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the justices approved the use of the poll tax, which requires citizens to pay a fee—under a set of very arcane, complicated rules—to vote.114 Although the discriminatory intent of the requirement was well known prior to the justices’ ruling, the highest court in the land sanctioned this formidable barrier to the ballot box. In fact, Justice Joseph McKenna quoted extensively from the Mississippi Supreme Court’s candid admission that the state convention, “restrained by the federal Constitution from discriminating against the negro race,” opted instead to find a method that “discriminates against its [African Americans’] characteristics”—namely, poverty, illiteracy, and more poverty.115

  The repercussions were harrowing for American democracy; the poll tax not only ensnared black voters but also trapped poor whites. As late as 1942, for instance, only 3 percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot in seven poll tax states.116 Just 3 percent of an electorate in these states decided who would sit in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to shape federal policy. This, in turn, strengthened the years of seniority and thus the stranglehold on federal law of these officials, who accordingly rose in the ranks to assume or hold on to key leadership positions, such as chairing the Foreign Relations Committee, judiciary committees, and others.

  Senator Walter George (D-GA) was proud of how states like his beloved Georgia were able to legally disfranchise millions of voters. “Why apologize or evade?” he asked. “We have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution—but we have been very diligent in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would have a Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man.”117

  From 1873, with the Slaughterhouse Cases, Cruikshank, Plessy, Williams, and others, the U.S. Supreme Court had systematically dismantled the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and rendered the Enforcement and Force Acts dead on arrival. For strict constructionists, the court willfully ignored congressional intent and the history behind the laws and amendments. At the onset of the twentieth century, in Giles v. Harris (1903), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “the federal courts had no power, either constitutional or practical, to remedy a statewide wrong, even if perpetrated by the state or its agents.”118

  The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights. Through antiseptic, clinical, measured language, the learned jurists had entrusted the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for African Americans to the very same states that bragged “this is a white man’s government”; that yearned for the moment to regain control of the freedmen and then “the niggers will catch hell”; whose citizens fretted, “We showed our hand too soon” with the Black Codes, which allowed Mississippi and its brethren to criminalize, auction off, and whip black people; and that were determined to “get things back as close to slavery as possible.” The result was not lost on African Americans. One black man from Louisiana summed it up this way: “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that had held us as slaves.”119

  So while the United State
s may have won the Civil War, and blacks may have tasted freedom, the white opposition that ruled from the White House and the Supreme Court all the way down through every statehouse in the South meant that real change was infinitesimal at best. To quote one historian’s paraphrase of Frederick Maitland: “The slave law of the South may have been dead, but it ruled us from the grave.”120

  Two

  Derailing the Great Migration

  It was 1918. The United States was in the midst of a global war “to make the world safe for democracy.”1 But in Georgia, it was anything but safe for black people. In the southern part of the state near Valdosta, a white plantation owner, Hampton Smith, had become notorious for his brutal treatment of black laborers on his farm. Because his standard employee management practices included beatings, theft of wages, and whippings, he had considerable difficulty hiring anyone to willingly work his land. With fields to plow and a crop to harvest, he turned to an old trusty labor supply. Drawing on the peonage system set up after the Civil War, the planter routinely went to the local jail, paid the fine of a black person, and then had the African American work on the plantation until the debt was paid. At least that was the way it was supposed to be. But Smith, although only thirty-one years old, was already a mean, hard man. He ruthlessly worked African Americans far past the point of any debt payoff and then refused to provide any compensation for the additional work. If challenged, he would pull out his whip.2 In May 1918, he did that to the wrong black man.

  After a dispute over work, Hampton Smith gave Sidney Johnson, an African American laborer whose thirty-dollar fine the plantation owner had paid, an unforgettable and unforgivable thrashing. Within a week after the beating, Johnson took out a rifle and put two bullets into the planter’s chest. Smith died instantly. White retribution was swift, indiscriminate, and merciless. In a “five days lynching orgy,” at least eleven African Americans, ten of whom had absolutely nothing to do with Smith’s death, were hunted down and slaughtered.3 Perhaps none more gruesomely than Mary Turner.