Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

On July 30, 1866, angered by newly issued provisions that disenfranchised Black voters, a group of freedmen, including hundreds of Black veterans, gathered on the steps of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to protest during the Louisiana state constitutional convention. Expressing their outrage in the Blackest way possible, they paraded to the assembly with a marching band to show their displeasure with the exclusionary laws that would become known as the “Black Codes.” As they marched, a mob of white supremacists, policemen, and ex-Confederates brutally attacked the demonstration, until the marchers sought refuge inside the Mechanics Institute, where, as Ron Chernow explained in Grant, The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape. Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.23

The network of terror cells that sprang up during Reconstruction went by many names, including the White League, the White Knights, the Knights of the White Camellia, and—the most famous of all—the “Circle of Brothers,” otherwise known as the Ku Klux Klan. It was insurrection, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism with a little bit of guerrilla warfare mixed in for good measure. To enforce their goals, the loose confederation of historically white fraternities all had one common strategy: killing as many Black people as possible and overthrowing the government that had enabled their freedom.

Ku Klux Klan members in North Carolina assassinated a state senator, murdered a Black town commissioner, and lynched so many Black voters in 1870 that Governor William Woods Holden declared an insurrection, suspended habeas corpus (the right against unlawful detention), and imposed martial law. But none of the more than a hundred terrorists arrested in what would become known as the “Kirk-Holden War” was ever charged with a crime. Holden, however, was removed from office when Democrats gained control of the state legislature after African American voters were forced to choose between voting and their lives.

The rules undermined the labor contracts instituted by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and went as far as to forbid any person of color from learning a new trade, declaring, “No person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shop-keeper, or any other trade, employment or business on his own account and for his own benefit, or in partnership with a white person, or as agent or servant of any persons, until he shall have obtained a license therefore from the Judge of the District Court.”28

In September 1876, a paramilitary group of five hundred white supremacists murdered about one hundred Black people in Aiken County, after threatening them that “their only safety from death or whipping lies in signing an agreement pledging to vote the democratic ticket at the coming election.”30

In 1877, fifteen white men—five U.S. senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices*—gathered in a Washington, D.C., room and decided to give the disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate supported by Black voters, essentially making him the president. In exchange, the whites-only room also agreed to a plan that included three notable provisions: REMOVAL OF TROOPS FROM THE CONFEDERATE STATES: In many places in the South, especially Louisiana and South Carolina, the military presence was the only thing protecting Black freedmen from white supremacist violence. FUNDS TO INDUSTRIALIZE THE SOUTH AND RESTORE ITS ECONOMY: While this never really happened, it was clearly a nod to the white supremacists who couldn’t compete with the Black laborers. THE RIGHT TO HANDLE BLACK PEOPLE AS THEY WISHED: The federal government agreed to essentially disregard the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The “right to handle Black people as they wish” became known as Jim Crow. Across the country—not just in the South—states passed segregation laws and disenfranchised Black people en masse. The Compromise of 1877 was the definition of white supremacy: Black voters had given Hayes the presidency, and in exchange, he and his white co-conspirators chose white supremacy over equality.

The criminal enterprise called America is nothing but a self-perpetuating white supremacy machine.

The lesson of Reconstruction is us. That we exist and breathe and love and sing and laugh and are still here is not a miracle or a revelation. It is a simple, unignorable fact that we cannot be extinguished. All the evil that the world has ever had to offer has been lobbed in our direction. They enslaved. They brainwashed. They lynched us separately and massacred us by the hundreds. They enslaved us by the boatload and sold our families in pieces. They mined our muscles and our minds for their profit and built an empire from it. And when we did the same without their help, they set it on fire. This is America—a floor slick with blood. But that is not who we are.

On November 4, 1890, the white citizens of South Carolina celebrated the election of serial killer turned governor Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. White South Carolinians were well aware of Tillman’s penchant for mass murder, beginning with his time as a recruiter for the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a clandestine paramilitary fraternity devoted to killing as many Black people as they could. Tillman had already been indicted for murdering at least six Black men in Aiken County, South Carolina, after “the leading white men of Edgefield” decided “to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson” by “having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”1 The future governor gained even more fame when his club members assassinated Black state representative Simon Coker as he knelt in prayer.

“The triumph of democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy, of civilization over barbarism, has been most complete,” said this king of the lynchmen to his inauguration crowd. “The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it. The intelligent exercise of the right of suffrage . . . is as yet beyond the capacity of the vast majority of colored men. We deny, without regard to color, that ‘all men are created equal’; it is not true now, and was not true when Jefferson wrote it.”2

Following his amateur career as a serial killer and his term as governor, Tillman represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate until he died in 1918.3 Tillman was just one of many ethnic cleansers elected after Reconstruction. Georgia governor turned U.S. senator John Brown Gordon, one of the engineers of the Compromise of 1877,* was also commonly recognized as the head of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan.4 Alabama’s Klan leader, John Tyler Morgan, served in the Senate for three decades, from 1877 until 1907. Morgan fought to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment and introduced bills to “legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South.”5 Morgan served in the Senate alongside another Alabama Klan leader, Edmund Pettus, who represented the state for a decade until his death in 1907. Tennessee congressman George W. Gordon doubled as his state’s Grand Dragon (and had written the precept for the Ku Klux Klan). Mississippi’s “Great White Chief,” Governor James K. Vardaman, was unapologetic about his pro-lynching stance: There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for ...

When Hose was captured on April 23, a lynch mob of at least five hundred white people kidnapped him from deputies and took him to a field. People from across the state boarded trains to view the spectacle, but they did not lynch Hose immediately. First, the crowd took turns cutting off pieces of Hose’s nose, ears, fingers, and genitals. Others used their knives to stab him repeatedly as onlookers cheered. Then they skinned him alive and doused him with kerosene while young children collected wood to build a pyre, before burning him alive, watching as his veins ruptured and his eyes withered. After the fire subsided, the crowd diced Hose’s dead body into pieces and sold the remnants of their handiwork as souvenirs for those not fortunate enough to have attended the “barbecue.” The festivities concluded with a prayer, and a sign marking the occasion, reading: “We Must Protect Our Southern Women.”9

On March 9, seventy-five masked white men stormed the jailhouse, dragged Moss, Stewart, and McDowell out of their cells, and took them to a railroad yard outside of town. McDowell, who had whipped two white men, was shot four times in the face, leaving holes as big as fists. Stewart was shot in the neck and the eye. Moss, the owner, who had nothing to do with the alleged crimes, was shot in the neck. After the executions, a criminal court judge issued an order instructing the sheriff to “take a hundred men, go out to the Curve at once, and shoot down on sight any negro who appears to be making trouble.” Armed white posses emptied local hardware stores of their guns and ammunition and heeded the judge’s order. Evidence would later emerge that the judge may have even participated in the lynching. As the Black residents of the Curve hid in their homes, white residents looted People’s Grocery, forever eliminating Barrett’s Black-owned competitor.

“The City of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival,” wrote Wells in that week’s edition of the Memphis Free Speech. “There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” 16

“When the lives of men, women and children are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloquy of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech.” Willard didn’t have much of a response after that. She just continued being white and ignorant.

For most of this nation’s history, lemme tell you how this country defined American: “Not Black people.” That’s right. Ever since the White Lion dropped Angela ’nem off in Jamestown, the subjugation of Black people has been more common than democracy and more powerful than that lil’ Constitution those white folks are always raving about. That was written for them! And that’s not a historical interpretation; it is an inarguable, objective fact. When it comes to the history of folks who look like us, there’s two things I know. When it comes to singing, Frank Sinatra can’t hold Luther Vandross’s Jheri curl juice, and that white supremacy is this country’s most dominant trait. That’s a fact, Jack.*

To commemorate the event, the Fourteenth of September Monument Association and a pro-Confederate women’s group erected the Battle of Liberty Place Monument, a thirty-five-foot obelisk with an inscription that read: McEnery and Penn, having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored). United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state. I hate to say “I told you so,” but white supremacy was so intertwined with Americanism that they etched it in stone!*

Plessy v. Ferguson was more than the state’s white minority had hoped for. The decision allowed them to create a two-tiered system that preserved white power. On May 12, 1898, a reconvened Louisiana constitutional convention adopted a new state constitution that enshrined all their racist imaginings into law. Convention president Ernest Kruttschnitt opened with a plea that foretold their purpose, saying, “May this hall, where thirty-two years ago, the negro first entered upon the unequal contest for supremacy, and which has been reddened with his blood, now witness the evolution of our organic law which will establish the relations between the races upon an everlasting foundation of right and justice. (Applause).”

The constitution used taxpayer money to provide pensions to Confederate soldiers.

“We met here to establish the supremacy of the white race,” remarked Judiciary Committee chairman Thomas Semmes during his closing remarks. “Our mission was, in the first place, to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done, and what has our ordinance on suffrage, the constitutional means by which we propose to maintain that ascendency, done? We have established throughout the State white manhood suffrage.”12

“The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again,” complained the senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina.

Others, including a trending poem called “Niggers in the White House,”

Between 1890 and 1903, six bills were introduced in Congress offering a lump sum, followed by monthly payments, to Black Americans who had outlasted slavery. But after Southern Democrats regained reputation in the federal legislature, anything that offered economic or political support for Black America was dead on arrival. After all, if they couldn’t pass a law that made lynching illegal, reparations were a long shot.

Vardaman was one of many Americans who despised the New Negro phenomenon. Known as the “Great White Chief,” the pro-murder white supremacist rose to national prominence on a populist stance that included his position that “if it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”11 When Vardaman ran for Mississippi’s Senate seat in 1912, his “redneck” followers wore “bloodstained” neckerchiefs.

MARCH 18, 1919: When the NAACP asked Florida governor Sidney J. Catts to prosecute the mob who lynched Bud Johnson, he replied, “This would be impossible to do as conditions are now in Florida, for when a Negro brute, or a white man, ravishes a white woman in the State of Florida, there is no use having the people who see that this man meets death brought to trial, even if you could find who they are: the citizenship will not stand for it.”14 APRIL 4, 1919: Residents of Blakely, Georgia, were so “unsettled” by the appearance of Private Wilbur Little’s army uniform, they asked him to stop wearing it. Because he had no other clothes to wear, he ignored them. He was found beaten to death. His death was announced, in the Chicago Defender, on his twenty-second birthday. No one was ever arrested.15 APRIL 5, 1919: Daniel Mack, a Black veteran, brushed up against a man on market day. They sentenced him to thirty days on a chain gang. A white mob broke into the jail and took him to the edge of town, beating him all the way there. Mack survived by playing dead. No one was ever arrested, and it never made the newspapers because—as it turns out—the people of Sylvester, Georgia, “rioted” all the time.16 JUNE 7, 1919: In Macon, Mississippi, a white mob beat a principal, a businessman, and other prominent Black people because they heard that Black workers had asked for better working conditions and brought up a crazy idea called a “minimum wage.” They whipped all the Blacks and literally...

JULY 10, 1919: After a Longview, Texas, lynch mob killed Lemuel Longview for making “indecent advances” toward a white woman, whites attacked a Black man whom they believed had reported the incident to the Chicago Defender. They then set the Black neighborhood on fire, and killed at least four men.18 The governor eventually ended the “riot” by declaring martial law . . . and arresting twenty-one Black people.19 AUGUST 29, 1919: In Caldwell, Georgia, whites burned three Black churches and a lodge, killing at least one person, because they heard a rumor that a Black leader would “rise up and wipe out the white people.”20

As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it, as long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of a small clique not subject to democratic scrutiny and control. Then repression, intimidation, and entrapment are to be expected. We do not believe that this destruction of democracy and democratic society results simply from the evilness, egoism or senility of some leaders. Rather, this destruction is the result of certain undemocratic social, economic, and political institutions.36

The documents would reveal that John Edgar Hoover had used his skills to create a fifty-year intelligence-gathering and surveillance project that evolved into COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that targeted every Black leader during the civil rights struggle. Its stated goal was to:

Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups . . . Prevent the RISE OF A “MESSIAH” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement . . . Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the commun...

But to understand the politics of Baby America, all you have to know is one fact: White supremacy is the defining characteristic of America’s politics.

Gillian Brockell, “Before 1619, There Was 1526: The Mystery of the First Enslaved Africans in What Became the United States,” Washington Post, September 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/07/before-there-was-mystery-first-enslaved-africans-what-became-us/.