Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Throughout the spring and summer of 1883, a debate ensued among black leaders over whether to convene a national convention to bring their grievances to the attention of the nation. State conventions of black civic and religious leaders were still common occurrences in these years, with some advocating independence from the Republican Party. But other black spokesmen believed that the day for separate black conventions had passed with the war and the Constitutional victories of Reconstruction. Still others, like Fortune, resisted a convention initially planned for Washington, preferring a Southern city where “the problem for solution is to be found.” Eventually a national assembly of more than one hundred black leaders from virtually every state met in Louisville, Kentucky, in late September. After intense debate, the assembly officially refused to endorse President Chester Arthur and the Republican Party. The convention’s resolutions included an appeal to memory. The delegates announced their gratitude for “the miraculous emancipation” and adopted the language of national rebirth. But the bulk of their eleven resolutions were demands for the enforcement of civil and political rights, protests against prevailing economic conditions, and an insistence on equal education for black youth. The convention pronounced the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction “nothing more than dead letters.”12 Twenty years after emancipation, i...