Nadir of American race relations
The nadir of American race relations is a historical period defined by Rayford Logan as encompassing the worst time for race relations in the United States after the Civil War, which ended slavery. This period coincided with the Gilded Age, and includes the legal solidification of Jim Crow laws after the Reconstruction era, as well as the rise of lynchings and racial massacres. Its exact date range is not uniform amongst historians.
Logan determined in his 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 as the period when "the Negro's status in American society" reached its lowest point. He argued for 1901 as its end, suggesting that race relations improved after that year; other historians, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923. References to a nadir continued to be used; most notably, it is used in books by James W. Loewen as recently as 2006, and it is also used in books by other scholars. Loewen chooses later dates, arguing that the post-Reconstruction era was in fact one of widespread hope for racial equity due to idealistic Northern support for civil rights. In Loewen's view, the true nadir only began when Northern Republicans ceased supporting Southern Blacks' rights around 1890, and it lasted until the American entry into World War II in 1941. This period followed the financial Panic of 1873 and a continuing decline in cotton prices. It overlapped with both the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, and was characterized by the nationwide sundown town phenomenon.
Logan's focus was exclusively on African Americans in the Southern United States, but the time period which he covered also represents the worst period of anti-Chinese discrimination and wider anti-Asian discrimination which was due to fear of the so-called Yellow Peril, which included harassment and violence on the West Coast of the United States, such as the destruction of Chinatown, Denver.
Background
Reconstruction revisionism
In the early part of the 20th century, some white historians put forth the claim that Reconstruction was a tragic period, when Republicans who were motivated by revenge and profit used troops to force Southerners to accept corrupt governments that were run by unscrupulous Northerners and unqualified Blacks. Such scholars generally dismissed the idea that Black people could ever be capable of governing societies.Notable proponents of this view were referred to as the Dunning School, named after William Archibald Dunning, an influential historian at Columbia University. Another Columbia professor, John Burgess, was notorious for writing that "black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself... created any civilization of any kind."
The Dunning School's view of Reconstruction held sway for years. It was represented in D. W. Griffith's popular movie The Birth of a Nation and to some extent, it was also represented in Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. More recent historians of the period have rejected many of the Dunning School's conclusions, and in their place, they offer a different assessment.
History of Reconstruction
Today's consensus regards Reconstruction as a time of idealism and hope, a time which was marked by some practical achievements. The Radical Republicans who passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were, for the most part, motivated by a desire to help freedmen. African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois put this view forward in 1910, and later historians Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner expanded it. The Republican Reconstruction governments had their share of corruption, but they benefited many whites, and were no more corrupt than Democratic governments or Northern Republican governments.Furthermore, the Reconstruction governments established public education and social welfare institutions for the first time, improving education for both Blacks and whites, and they also tried to improve social conditions for the many people who were left in poverty after the long war. No Reconstruction state government was dominated by Blacks; in fact, Blacks did not attain a level of representation that was equal to the size of their population in any state.
Origins
Reconstruction era violence
For several years after the Civil War, the federal government, pushed by Northern opinion, showed that it was willing to intervene to protect the rights of Black Americans. There were limits, however, to Republican efforts on behalf of Blacks: In Washington, a proposal of land reform made by the Freedmen's Bureau, which would have granted Blacks plots on the plantation land on which they worked, never came to pass. In the South, many former Confederates were stripped of the right to vote, but they resisted Reconstruction with violence and intimidation. James Loewen notes that, between 1865 and 1867, when white Democrats controlled the government, whites murdered an average of one Black person every day in Hinds County, Mississippi. Black schools were especially targeted: School buildings frequently were burned, and teachers were flogged and occasionally murdered. The postwar terrorist group Ku Klux Klan acted with significant local support, attacking freedmen and their white allies; the group largely was suppressed by federal efforts under the Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871, but did not disappear, and it had a resurgence in the early 20th century.Despite these failures, Blacks continued to vote and attend school. Literacy soared, and many African Americans were elected to local and statewide offices, with several serving in Congress. Because of the Black community's commitment to education, the majority of Blacks were literate by 1900.
Continued violence in the South, especially heated around electoral campaigns, sapped Northern intentions. More significantly, after the long years and losses of the Civil War, Northerners had lost heart for the massive commitment of money and arms that would have been required to stifle the white insurgency. The financial panic of 1873 disrupted the economy nationwide, causing more difficulties. The white insurgency took on new life ten years after the war. Conservative white Democrats waged an increasingly violent campaign, with the Colfax and Coushatta massacres in Louisiana in 1873 as signs. The next year saw the formation of paramilitary groups, such as the White League in Louisiana and Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, that worked openly to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt Black organizing, and intimidate and suppress Black voting. They invited press coverage. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party."
In 1874, in a continuation of the disputed gubernatorial election of 1872, thousands of White League militiamen fought against New Orleans police and Louisiana state militia and won. They turned out the Republican governor and installed the Democrat Samuel D. McEnery, took over the capitol, state house and armory for a few days, and then retreated in the face of Federal troops. This was known as the "Battle of Liberty Place".
End of Reconstruction
Northerners waffled and finally capitulated to the South, giving up on being able to control election violence. Abolitionist leaders like Horace Greeley began to ally themselves with Democrats in attacking Reconstruction governments. By 1875, there was a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. President Ulysses S. Grant, who as a general had led the Union to victory in the Civil War, initially refused to send troops to Mississippi in 1875 when the governor of the state asked him to. Violence surrounded the presidential election of 1876 in many areas, beginning a trend. After Grant, it would be many years before any President would do anything to extend the protection of the law to Black people.Jim Crow laws and terrorism
White supremacy
As noted above, white paramilitary forces contributed to whites' taking over power in the late 1870s. A brief coalition of populists took over in some states, but Democrats had returned to power after the 1880s. From 1890 to 1908, they proceeded to pass legislation and constitutional amendments to disenfranchise most Blacks and many poor whites, with Mississippi and Louisiana creating new state constitutions in 1890 and 1895 respectively, to disenfranchise African Americans. Democrats used a combination of restrictions on voter registration and voting methods, such as poll taxes, literacy and residency requirements, and ballot box changes. The main push came from elite Democrats in the Solid South, where Blacks were a majority of voters. The elite Democrats also acted to disenfranchise poor whites. African Americans were an absolute majority of the population in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, and represented more than 40% of the population in four other former Confederate states. Accordingly, many whites perceived African Americans as a major political threat, because in free and fair elections, they would hold the balance of power in a majority of the South. South Carolina US Senator Ben Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best ... 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."Conservative white Democratic governments passed Jim Crow legislation, creating a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Blacks were separated in schools and the few hospitals, were restricted in seating on trains, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public transportation systems. They were often barred from some stores, or forbidden to use lunchrooms, restrooms and fitting rooms. Because they could not vote, they could not serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system. Between 1889 and 1922, as political disenfranchisement and segregation were being established, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history. Almost 3,500 people fell victim to lynching, almost all of them Black men.