Never Been a Time (5 page)

As W. E. B. Du Bois would write, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
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In the last years of the war and the early years of Reconstruction, as the North boomed economically, the American labor movement grew rapidly, and many hundreds of local unions were created. Umbrella assemblies of trade unions sprang up in every major American city from New York to San Francisco, and in the decade beginning in 1863, twenty-six new national trade unions were formed, bringing the total to thirty-two. But almost all of them excluded blacks. The few black unions that did exist were usually ignored when it came to strikes and other decisive action.

Employers in Northern cities continued to stoke racial antagonism during strikes by replacing white workers with low-paid blacks. Sometimes just the threat of bringing in black strikebreakers was enough to break union militancy, and such tactics fed into the bitterness many white workers felt toward blacks. For example, the
Boston Post
in 1866 reported that a business-sponsored emigration society was contemplating shipping two hundred thousand or more black workers to New England to lower the cost of labor. The report was false, but it had a chilling effect on white labor militancy.
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The National Labor Union, the first successful nationwide labor federation, was formed in 1866 and initially seemed to offer some hope for integrating blacks into the American labor movement. It would be “an act of folly” to reject members from “the African race,” the federation stated, arguing that employers would use the rejection to “foment discord between the whites and blacks, and hurl the one against the other.” But most local and regional unions in the federation insisted on excluding African Americans from membership. Typical was the response of the powerful Carpenters and Joiners National Union, which announced in 1869 that “the prejudices of our members against the colored people are of such a nature that it is not expedient at present to admit them as members, or organize them under the National Union.” There was never any significant integration of blacks into the organization.
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Then, in 1873, economic disaster struck. The postwar period of industrial
and financial growth reached overexpansion and came to a halt in a wave of defaults, business failures, and bankruptcies. The Panic of 1873 triggered what, until the 1930s, was referred to as the “Great Depression.” By 1876, more than half the nation's railroads had defaulted on their bonds and were in receivership, and when the railroads slashed jobs and cut wages, eighty thousand railroad employees, black and white, walked off the job across the country. They were supported by hundreds of thousands of workers and unemployed people of both races in what became the Great Strike of 1877. For a brief period, desperation drove poor blacks and whites together. In Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, East St. Louis, and other rail hubs, strikers trying to halt all railroad traffic battled police and militia. The strike lasted for more than a month before state and federal troops and private police brought it under control. Dozens of strikers of both races were killed. Unions collapsed across the country, and those that remained found themselves more concerned with public relief for their unemployed members than with adding blacks to their membership.
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In the wake of the Great Strike and the virtual disintegration of the existing labor movement, the Knights of Labor, a radical, militant national group organized by industry rather than craft, emerged as a national force and grew rapidly for a decade. It welcomed blacks (and women) as members. At the organization's height in the mid-1880s, about sixty thousand African Americans were among its seven hundred thousand members, but the organization went into a rapid decline after losing several crucial strikes and being accused of involvement in the bombing that killed eight policemen at the Haymarket Square riots in Chicago in 1886. Labor violence continued at a ferocious level into the following decade, with workers generally on the losing end of bloody battles. The Knights of Labor were shattered and moribund by the turn of the century.

The American Federation of Labor—an umbrella group of craft unions that was considerably more conservative than the socialistic Knights of Labor—gained a national following as the Knights of Labor declined, and at its convention in 1890, the federation declared that it looked “with disfavor upon trade unions having provisions which exclude from membership persons on account of race and color.” But many independent craft unions, such as the large National Machinists Union, refused to join if they had to accept black members. The federation changed the rule, and unions could enter if
they did not openly exclude African Americans in their constitutions. Many all-white unions simply took the racial exclusion clause out of their constitutions while maintaining the policy.

The American Federation of Labor grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an overwhelmingly white organization. At the same time, few independent black unions succeeded against the virtual monopoly held by white unions. For decades after the decline of the Knights of Labor, blacks had little representation and essentially no clout in the mainstream of the American labor movement.
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After the collapse of Reconstruction, many thousands of blacks—angry, frustrated, and fearful of what would come next—left the South. The black population of the North rose from about 450,000 in 1870 to 615,000 in 1880.
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In the late 1870s, as the noose of white supremacy tightened on millions of Southern blacks, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a dynamic black Ten-nessean with an audacious vision and a gift for promotion, decided it was time for African Americans to leave the South and that the appropriate Canaan for a black exodus was Kansas, where John Brown had waged bloody guerilla warfare in the name of abolition. Singleton established a real estate company to arrange for blacks to be transported to Kansas and, with the cooperation of steamship companies and the railroads, dispatched circulars throughout the black South with the help of itinerant preachers, railway porters, and steamboat workers.

Singleton was not alone in promoting an exodus to the West. An uneducated black Union soldier named Henry Adams—who had returned home to Louisiana in 1869 to find the treatment of former slaves unbearable—organized a committee of more than one hundred blacks to travel throughout the South and “see the true condition of our race, to see whether it was possible we could stay under a people who held us in bondage or not.” Confronted almost everywhere with terrible conditions, the committee reported in the late 1870s that blacks had to leave the South. Adams's colonization council soon had tens of thousands of members from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas who were committed to a black exodus to the North and West.
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The exodus movement spread as far east as North Carolina, and in the late 1870s thousands of blacks crossed the South on foot to the Mississippi
River, where they crowded onto steamboats headed North for St. Louis. From there they could continue west by land or water. A contemporary report described the scene at St. Louis:

Homeless, penniless and in rags, these poor people were thronging the wharves … hailing the passing steamers and imploring them for a passage to the land of freedom, where the rights of citizens are respected and honest toil rewarded by honest compensation. The newspapers were filled with accounts of their destitution, and the very air was burdened with the cry of distress from a class of American citizens flying from persecution which they could no longer endure. Their piteous tales of outrage, suffering and wrong touched the hearts of the more fortunate members of their race in the North and West, and aid societies, designed to afford temporary relief and composed almost entirely of colored people, were organized in Washington, St. Louis, Topeka and various other places.

The black immigrants to Kansas, who spilled over into Nebraska and other farm states west of the Mississippi, became known as Exodusters. Southern officials—alarmed at the departure of so many workers, some of them skilled—tried with little success to stop the exodus by various means, from trying to put pressure on steamship companies to stop selling tickets to blacks to arresting blacks on false charges as they waited to board ships or trains. Still, between fifteen and twenty-five thousand blacks moved to Kansas in the late 1870s.
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There were far more Exodusters than there was employment or land in Kansas for them, and many became refugees who crowded into some of the cities and towns. The immigrants were not always welcome, or even tolerated. At Leavenworth, on the Missouri River, police and city officials prevented a steamboat full of blacks from landing, and in Topeka a gang of whites tore down barracks being built to house black refugees. But there was nothing close to a riot. Aided by large contributions from church and charitable groups in other Northern states, Kansans founded organizations to provide food, shelter, and work for the refugees, and most of the Exodusters stayed, establishing at least one all-black town and large black enclaves in Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas. Black historian Carter Woodson observed in 1918,
“The people of Kansas did not encourage the blacks to come. They even sent messengers to the South to advise the Negroes not to migrate … When they did arrive, however, they welcomed and assisted them as human beings.”
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Although some of the Exodusters failed in Kansas and went back to the South, most did not return, despite hard times and the winter wind knifing across the desolate prairie. A letter from a white woman in rural Kansas to a friend in Chicago vividly points out why. She wrote in horror, “A respectable colored man came here last spring, worked hard, earned enough to buy a lot, build a cottage and save $100 and then returned to bring his wife and family. The brutal Regulators seized him, cut off both his hands, and threw him into his wife's lap, saying, ‘Now go to Kansas and work.' “
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Black leaders disagreed about the wisdom and efficacy of migration. The venerable black abolitionist Frederick Douglass urged blacks to remain in the South, contending that leaving was not a permanent solution to ill treatment by whites and that the government should protect and defend its citizens no matter what their skin color or where they lived. The eloquent Douglass had been born a slave in Maryland in 1818 and, before his 1838 escape to the North, had been brutalized by a “slave-breaker” trying to cure him of his rebelliousness. He argued:

Bad as is the condition of the Negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse. A few years ago he had nothing—he had not even himself. He belonged to somebody else, who could dispose of his person and his labor as he pleased. Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other as shall best suit his own happiness … At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South, unfortunate that men are going over the country … telling the people that the government has no power to enforce the Constitution and laws in that section, and that there is no hope for the poor Negro but to plant him in the new soil of Kansas or Nebraska.
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But lawyer and educator Richard T. Greener, dean of the law school at Howard University and the first African American to graduate from Harvard,
was among many blacks who argued that leaving the South would not only improve the lot of those who left, but would pressure Southern whites into better treatment for those who remained. Greener, who was born free in 1844 and had grown up in Philadelphia and Boston, contended that many blacks were actually worse off in the South than they had been in slave days. “Before the war,” he said, “the Negroes in the Southern cities and larger towns were the carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons, and in some instances, manufacturers on a small scale. Send him West and open up to him the life of an agricultural laborer, a small farmer, a worker in the mines or on the great lines of railways, and you will soon find out what a steady, cheerful worker he is.”
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From 1880 through 1889, the black population of the North (including the North Central states) rose from about 615,000 to more than 700,000.
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Black migration often came in waves provoked by events—new crop failures, harsher Jim Crow laws, an increase in lynching. One wave of migrants left for the North after Grover Cleveland was elected president in 1884. A rumor had swept the Black Belt that when Cleveland and the Democrats took power, they would reinstitute slavery.

In a 1954 judgment that has met wide acceptance in the years since, African American historian Rayford W. Logan described the years from 1877 to 1901 as “the nadir” of the black experience in America.
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The Panic of 1893 brought an end to the so-called Gilded Age, which had been in part fueled by a modest economic recovery in the 1880s, and the nation sank back into depression as America's boom-and-bust economy seemed to be forever locked into a vertiginous twenty-year cycle. Unemployment soared, labor violence erupted across America, and in the South, seemingly defying the tenets of free market economics, agricultural prices continued to fall despite crop failures. As usual, times that were bad for whites were even worse for blacks. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Southern blacks lost virtually all of what little political power they had left. Populism, beginning in the 1880s, briefly and tentatively united some Southern blacks and whites in dreams of a radical reconstruction of the American economic system, but the People's Party—a new national organization that bore no relationship to the party of the same name that murdered blacks in Vicksburg in 1874—and other manifestations of populism were undermined by the white supremacist campaigns of the Bourbon Democrats, campaigns filled with vicious antiblack propaganda that inevitably included charges of rape.