I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

Sometimes, white loathing only lingered at the edges of social life, in the exchange of looks between one man who had hitched his future to perpetual slavery and another man who bet on emancipation. But white rage boiled as poor, landless whites seethed watching Black families transcend the hard struggle—wives like Eliza Lyon retreating from fields; children like her William, Ella, and Annie attending school; people enjoying leisure time and building thriving institutions like Robert Meacham’s church; men acquiring land like Samuel Tutson did; men like Abe Lyon starting businesses; men running for office like Abram Colby. Other times that rage crashed through the center of daily life, when whites—possessed by a desire to maintain their power—forgot themselves and the expectations of the new order and presumed the right to continue violently attacking Black people as they had done under slavery.126 When outraged and jealous whites strove to undermine Black people’s self-determination and their sense of security, they intentionally targeted these people’s homes, and the places and spheres surrounding them. The very spaces African Americans created to serve as the foundation for their liberation became the primary theaters in the war against their freedom.127