Terrorists. Terrorism. Terror. The words are on everyone’s lips. There is fear being stoked, which is the whole point of terrorism. In an attempt to excuse the rejection of Syrian refugees because of “fear,” someone recently remarked, “I understand the visceral response to forcing us to live with terrorism in our daily lives.”
It’s doubtful this person thought about the fact that black American citizens have been forced to live with terrorism for generations. Try being black and knowing that our entire history in the U.S. has been one of having to live with terrorism—a.k.a. white supremacy—then keep on living and working and laughing and simply trying to have a normal life.
Before you dismiss this with, “Well, that is ancient history,” it really isn’t. It is part of an unbroken stream of abuses that continues right up until today. Charleston was terrorism. The burning of black churches is terrorism. Our deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes is terrorism. We just don’t often use that word, and instead just call it “racism.”
November 22 is the 150th anniversary of the Mississippi legislature’s enactment of a post-Civil War Black Code in 1865 to restrict the movement and freedom of recently freed blacks. This sparked the enactment of other even harsher codes across the former slave states, and freedom for many freedmen became an illusion. But the codes were not enough to keep former slaves in line, so white citizens resorted to a reign of terror, like the shooting and burning of Memphis depicted in the illustration above. I’m not talking about the actions of one of our most infamous terrorist groups—the Ku Klux Klan.
From Freedman's Bureau records:
A white man by the name of Dunn, a fireman, was shot and killed by another white man through mistake (reference is here made to accompanying affidavit mkd "B").
During the morning of the 2nd inst. (Wednesday) everything was perfectly quiet in the district of the disturbances of the previous day. A very few Negroes were in the streets, and none of them appeared with arms, or in any way excited except through fear. About 11 o'clock A. M. a posse of police and citizens again appeared in South Memphis and commenced an indiscriminate attack upon the Negroes, they were shot down without mercy, women suffered alike with the men, and in several instances little children were killed by these miscreants. During this day and night, with various intervals of quiet, the nuisance continued.
The city seemed to be under the control of a lawless mob during this and the two succeeding days (3rd & 4th). All crimes imaginable were committed from simple larceny to rape and murder. Several women and children were shot in bed. One woman (Rachel Johnson) was shot and then thrown into the flames of a burning house and consumed. Another was forced twice through the flames and finally escaped. In some instances houses were fired and armed men guarded them to prevent the escape of those inside. A number of men whose loyalty is undoubted, long residents of Memphis, who deprecated the riot during its progress, were denominated Yankees and Abolitionists, and were informed in language more emphatic than gentlemanly, that their presence here was unnecessary. To particularize further as to individual acts of inhumanity would extend the report to too great a length. But attention is respectfully called for further instances to affidavits accompanying marked C, E, F & G.
It bothers me that almost all of these brutal attacks on the black community are dubbed “riots,” as if black Americans are at fault or participants in the terror and murder launched against us.
Although the bloodshed prompted a Congressional investigation,and although most historians agree that the North's reaction to these and other atrocities helped the Radical Republicans sweep the Congressional elections later that year, no study of the Memphis Riots exists. Furthermore, only two essays having relevance to the subject have appeared.Written by the same author, one speculates upon the underlying causes of the violence; the other discusses its political results. Moreover, these historical accounts have several serious shortcomings. Neither describes what happened in the black community during these three fateful days in May.The former relies heavily upon the Memphis Daily Avalanche, quoting it thirty-three times in thirty pages. The study neglects to mention,however, that the newspaper's editor was one of the white rioters. Two years later the Avalanche would welcome the Ku Klux Klan to the river city. Not surprisingly, the article's author places much of the blame for the riot on the presence of Negro troops in Memphis. He ignores the possible factor of white racism, as well as the contemporary report of a black observer visiting the city. The second study displays a similar lack of concern for the Negro. Both say little about the questionable conduct of prominent local officials. Finally, in the general histories of the city of Memphis and the state of Tennessee, which devote only scant attention to the riots, the black man fares little better.
What happened in Memphis was not an anomaly. I’ve written here about other acts of terror, like the Hamburg Massacre in South Carolina in 1876, The Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street in 1921, and the The Rosewood Massacre in Florida in 1923. But the reign of terror included more than just burning towns: It also encompassed lynchings and rape. The “law” was used as a noose to constrain blacks both enslaved and free.
The Black Codes
Black Codes are most commonly associated with those adopted in the southern states after the American Civil War until the beginning of Reconstruction to regulate the freedoms of former slaves. Contrary to popular belief, the Black Codes did not begin in 1865. Rather they developed over the span of half a century or more and mandate to the early 19th century in some northern states. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin entered the union as free states. In the early 19th century, however, white negrophobia prompted a call for statutory regulations and restrictions on free blacks who resided in or moved through their territory. In several cases these restrictions amounted to an outright ban on blacks from owning property, contracting, or taking up residence in certain states. Ohio's state legislature adopted the Ohio Black Codes, one of the first immigration laws against freedmen in 1804. The territorial legislature of Illinois followed suit in 1813 by enacting an outright prohibition against free black settlers within its borders.Enacted in 1804 and 1807, the Ohio Black Codes were meant to stop Blacks from moving to Ohio. The most onerous of these was a law that required Blacks to pay a $500 bond signed by two White men within 20 days of arrival in order to remain in the state.
As the abolitionist movement gained steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so did the backlash of negrophobia among whites in the north. Indiana passed an anti-miscegenation statute, in 1845. In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their State Constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated that "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." The 1848 Constitution of Illinois led to one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state.
A book that should be on every bookshelf is Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
The book was the basis for a PBS documentary.
I was never taught any of this history in school. We learned about the Civil War, the “freed slaves,” and something mumbled about “carpetbaggers” from the North. Then we skipped quickly to Jim Crow and a cursory discussion of the civil rights movement. In my first year of college in 1964 I took a “History of Film” class where the professor forced us to view Birth of a Nation and to listen to his praise of a film that is a paean to white terrorism. I protested and walked out of the class.
I could walk out of that class, but across the United States and especially in the South, there are shrines and monuments to the same white supremacy.
There are people who object to our efforts to remove monuments to a vile history. From my perspective they are a daily reminder of who we are and what our status still is in this country, and inflict mental pain. This is a situation we are told to accept as part of “history.” Protection of these heinous tributes is part of “free speech.” Activists who have spray-painted them are dubbed “anarchists.”
For decades there has been a battle over the Liberty Monument in New Orleans, erected to memorialize the Battle of Liberty Place, which was an insurrection mounted by the White League:
an American white supremacist paramilitary terrorist organization started in 1874 to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing.
…
Although sometimes linked to the secret vigilante groups, the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camelia, the White League and other paramilitary groups of the later 1870s marked a significant change. They operated openly in communities, solicited coverage from newspapers, and the men's identities were generally known. Similar paramilitary groups were chapters of the Red Shirts, started in Mississippi in 1875 and active also in North and South Carolina. They had explicit political goals to overthrow the Reconstruction government. They directed their activities toward intimidation and removal of Northern and black Republican candidates and officeholders. Made up of well-armed Confederate veterans, they worked to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt their political organizing, and use force to intimidate and terrorize freedmen to keep them from the polls
Fast forward about a hundred years.
In 1970, the Times-Picayune noted that the monument "carried a defacing smudge of black pitch or paint on it." After numerous protests by black political activists in the early 1970's, Mayor Moon Landrieu's administration attempted to solve the problem by placing an explanatory plaque next to the historical marker which read, "Although the 'Battle of Liberty Place' and this monument are important parts of New Orleans history, the sentiments in favor of white supremacy expressed thereon are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-day New Orleans."
This gesture satisfied almost no one. In 1976, the NAACP Youth Council requested the monument's removal, while some decried the plaque as "historical revisionism." Furthermore, modern white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan began to see the memorial as a rallying point for planned marches and demonstrations.
In 1981, the monument nearly left public view at Mayor Ernest "Dutch" Morial's order, sparking a new round of public discussion and protest. Ultimately, the City Council blocked any move or alteration, and the monument remained on Canal Street, although partially hidden behind tall bushes.
The monument battle continues in New Orleans, and is still unresolved. Republicans have offered a “compromise:” Leave the shrines to the confederacy and add a statue of a black man—P.B.S. Pinchback, the first black governor of Louisiana.
This would allow for shrines to hate, honoring haters, to remain.
Here is the solution I support. Last summer the Southern Poverty Law Center launched an “Erasing Hate” campaign.
In response to the tragic murders at Charleston’s “Mother Emanuel” A.M.E. Church by a Confederate flag-waving white supremacist, the Southern Poverty Law Center is launching a campaign to identify and erase government-sanctioned symbols of the Confederacy across the country.
As the politics of hatred are being ramped up in the United States over the issue of admission of Syrian refugees (who are fleeing terrorists), it’s no surprise that the map of states whose governors are loudly rejecting refugees is very similar to the maps of the location of monuments to hate, though the territory is expanded and extended.
The roots of hate run deep in our soil, and we frequently water them with blood.
Join the battle to erase the hate—against citizens like me, and those who are fleeing hate and terror in other parts of the world.