Capitol Men (62 page)

On March 4, 1901, at noon, both houses of the North Carolina legislature passed resolutions of thanksgiving that, with the conclusion of White's term, the thirty-one years during which black men had been allowed to occupy seats in Congress, the era of Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, Robert Brown Elliott, Joseph Rainey, Robert Smalls, and the tenacious George H. White, was finally over. With black Americans segregated in public life to the point of invisibility, denied the ballot, and now banished at long last from the halls of Congress, it was safe to welcome the bright promise of a new century.

A
LTHOUGH NO EPOCH
in history can be condensed into the simple, straightforward narrative we might wish for, it is difficult to imagine another period in America's past as complex as Reconstruction, or one that has been as controversial in the telling. The years 1865–77 were an unprecedented test for a nation barely a century old, bringing rapid corporate and territorial expansion, novel modes of transport and technology, and the flexing of vast new federal authority, as well as the sudden citizenship of four million freed slaves, factional struggles for control of the "late insurrectionary states," and finally, the reuniting of those states with the national government. In the end, the country brought about the latter, reconciliation, by agreeing to set aside the former, the civil rights of black Americans, even to the extent of undoing laws enacted on their behalf—an expediency many view as perhaps the most significant moral failure in our history. Until the fight to rectify that collapse became a national crusade in the mid-twentieth century, historical commentary about the Reconstruction era was frequently clouded by intense sectional feeling, distortion, and myth.

As long as forces largely inimical to Reconstruction dominated Reconstruction scholarship, Robert Brown Elliott and P.B.S. Pinchback, Joseph Rainey and Blanche K. Bruce, and other black officials were often depicted as incompetents and thieves, or worse, simply airbrushed from the historical record. Later, when greater objectivity was brought to the subject, the black representatives nonetheless often remained marginal figures, their role in Congress and on the national political stage considered largely symbolic. Either view tends to invalidate black political initiative and, in any case, flies in the face of the evidence, which indicates that when the reconstructed states of the South began holding elections
that included their enfranchised black populations, men of color were elected to Congress and to state and local positions, or were appointed by their state legislatures to seats in the U.S. Senate, in relatively fair proportion to their constituencies and even with the support of whites.

Given the nature of that era, black officeholders tended to be—
had
to be—exceptional individuals, survivors who had emerged from a world of slavery and war to stand as spokesmen for their race, "men of mark," as they were called by a contemporary biographer. In general they brought an impressive degree of competence and dedication to their jobs, dispelling critics' claims that they possessed no aptitude for politics or statesmanship. Facing major issues related to the integration of black citizens into American life—the desire for land and education, the establishment of new state constitutions, the necessity of confronting the Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the passage of laws safeguarding the vote and expanding civil rights—they were often more humane, perceptive, and prescient than their white colleagues. When they spoke as the first official representatives of a long-despised and mistreated class, their words were at times a revelation to white ears, offering a perspective few whites had known, in vocal cadences most had never heard. Ultimately they gave America a great gift, a demonstration of the loyalty and intelligence of its newest citizens.

Their example not only defied the expectations of many whites but also inspired millions of black Americans. The walls of black homes and even modest sharecroppers' cabins were often graced with a print of the image that adorns the cover of this book, or any of the many similar lithographs of the era, such as the portrait of Senator Hiram Revels, the first black senator, which was sold with pride by the
New National Era,
or the multipaneled color lithograph depicting Robert Elliott's famous civil rights speech before Congress on January 6, 1874, which bore the stirring caption "The Shackle Broken—by the Genius of Freedom."

There is, I believe, something eminently decent about their brief transit across history's pages.

Of course, they were public figures in an era infamous for a lack of probity and the casual disregard of ethical standards in business and politics, and some were compromised by easy temptation. Neither did they always judge correctly the shape of coming events or the right path to take. In Congress, the forces of resistance were aligned almost perpetually against them. Without seniority, they could neither head nor wield influence within prominent committees and had to struggle to leverage power as best they could. One handicap was their want of entrenched
political support. With the exception of Robert Smalls and John Roy Lynch, most were not natives of the districts they represented, and their constituencies, while substantial, tended to be comprised of voters of modest means. Thus they lacked the capability enjoyed by other members of Congress to call upon established political networks in their home districts or states, and in Washington were often forced to rely on white allies whose own influence might rise or wane unexpectedly.

They were not so naive as to assume the permanence of the authority they had gained, but few imagined the extent to which redemption would strip away Reconstruction's many achievements. Placing considerable faith in the power of the franchise, they did not fully gauge the determination of the Southern states to annihilate it, nor necessarily foresee a time when their access to the ballot could no longer be protected by the federal government. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, coinciding with the arrival of the first black representatives in Congress, brought a sense of accomplishment and relief, a hope that the black vote might serve as a cure-all, and that with it the work of the postwar transition would be completed. This proved an utterly misplaced confidence. Radical optimists "living too frequently in a paper world of ideal proposals and proclamations of principle," notes one scholar, proved better at making new laws than enforcing them. "When the flimsiness of all the statutory words was confronted with political opposition, deep-seated prejudice, and physical force, the designated programs made little headway and their minor accomplishments did not endure."

The situation in the South likely would have evolved more satisfactorily had larger numbers of blacks attained property, although it may be wishful thinking to assume that land would have automatically brought the freedmen economic stability. "The trouble was ... not that the grant of political liberty lacked an economic basis—land for black people," suggests Herman Belz, "but that it did not rest on a firm emotional and ideological commitment" to political and racial equality in the South as well as in the North. That commitment, W.E.B. Du Bois once imagined, would of necessity have been deeper and more broadly shared, and included not only a means of land distribution but a system of equal education, civil rights legislation whose tenets could be made acceptable and enforceable, impartiality in the courts, and a permanent cabinet department based on the concept of the Freedmen's Bureau to monitor, evaluate, and guide the way forward.

In the eradication of slavery a noble principle had been achieved, a
ruinous war waged, and a president martyred. By the mid-1870s, however, the country had suffered a harsh financial crisis and, facing new social and economic demands, sought to leave the past and particularly the discord of the war behind; eager for sectional reconciliation, it tired of the seemingly endless difficulties in the South, and began to turn a blind eye to the freed people's still-precarious plight. No doubt if Southerners themselves had requested more of the nation's help and stamina, the outcome would have been different, but they had made it clear that further efforts to transform their society were unwanted and would be vehemently resisted, at least for the foreseeable future. Reconstruction, then, a once-great democratizing impulse, collapsed in on itself—missing by now much of its initial leadership, worn down by the South's intransigence, and devoid of public willingness to any longer sustain the antagonisms of the late war. The "moral debt" to black Americans created by that conflict was simply "found to be beyond the country's capacity to pay, given the undeveloped state of its moral resources at the time."

Of the various personalities who rose to shimmer on the surface of public life in Reconstruction, few were so fully invested in the era's possibilities as the black congressmen who arrived in Washington. They, more than anyone, had taken the country at its word, aligning themselves closely with a program of national refurbishment and expanded citizenship, giving their all to the representation of a previously ignored class. They did so with a minimum of vindictiveness and a good deal of patience and creativity, in the faith that the civil and political well-being of their constituents mattered, and was integral to America's future.

As contentious a subject as the history of Reconstruction has been, there's little disagreement about one aspect of its legacy—that it served as a basis for the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which has been called America's Second Reconstruction.

In the intervening years the struggle for racial justice was by no means idle. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, undertook vigorous campaigns for improvements in housing, employment, and education, and a quest for a federal anti-lynching law; the International Labor Defense's numerous courtroom endeavors included a crusade to save the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men wrongly accused of rape in Alabama in 1931; A. Phillip Randolph and the March on Washington Movement in July 1941 forced Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order desegregating the defense
industries; and later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) emerged as pioneers of modern protest regarding blacks' restricted access to public accommodations. These were only some of the many groups and individuals that tended the flame of civil rights advocacy.

Not until midcentury, however, did the country appear ready to support another broad frontal assault on segregation and white supremacy. What had changed was that a substantial African American population shift to the North had gained blacks a degree of national political influence, while in urban areas such as Atlanta, Nashville, and New Orleans they had achieved economic clout sufficient to force retail businesses and municipal services to take seriously their growing demands for fair and equal treatment. Perhaps most crucial, America, having emerged from a victorious global crusade against fascism, was newly sensitive to the blatant intolerance it found in its own backyard. Conditioned by the successful programs of the New Deal and the winning of the war, the country seemed newly sympathetic to the idea of civil rights reform and to the possibility that the federal government and judiciary would play a supportive role.

At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, progressive forces within the party, especially the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), led the gathering and its candidate, President Harry Truman, in adopting a strong civil rights platform. The ADA spokesman Hubert Humphrey, who was the mayor of Minneapolis, challenged the delegates, "There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years too late ... The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." So bold a declaration provoked many Southerners to abandon the national Democratic Party in disgust, splintering off as Dixiecrats who vowed to defend white supremacy and the separation of the races at all costs.

Battle lines were now drawn for a showdown over civil rights, and the South reacted with predictable outrage to the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education,
which ended school segregation. Southerners decried it as unwanted meddling, much as their forbears had attacked the Blair education bill of 1890. When fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in August 1955, brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly "wolf-whistling" at a white woman, Southern race hatred was revealed at its ugliest, filling Americans from
all walks of life with shame and inspiring protest. Soon after, the contours of the coming struggle were refined by the successful Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott and the emergence of its charismatic leader, Martin Luther King Jr., as well as by President Dwight Eisenhower's decision to send troops to safeguard the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, the first show of armed federal force in the South since Reconstruction.

King's appeal to America's core beliefs of equality and fairness, combined with his creative use of Mohandas K. Gandhi's principles of nonviolent protest, fostered the methods for social change that thousands of young civil rights activists adopted in the early 1960s. They fought bravely across the South for integration and the recognition of voting rights. In his "I Have a Dream" speech of August 1963, King alluded unambiguously to the "promissory note" America had signed with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction amendments, the debt to African Americans that the Civil War had incurred and which had never fully been paid. The link to Reconstruction King spoke of could not have been more clear: the civil rights movement wasn't a revolution seeking to radically remake society (although it felt that way to Southern whites), but a crusade to remind America of constitutional guarantees already in place, laws that the nation had once had the courage to enact but had ignored or nullified over the past century.