Part II
Black Reconstruction: the unfinished revolution
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
The following is excerpted from a talk given by Pratt, a
poet and Southern anti-racist activist, at a Workers World
meeting in New York on Aug. 10. Part one
appeared in the Aug. 22 edition.
The Radical Republican Party that had initially supported
Black Reconstruction split after the financial panic and
depression of 1873. In the South, the white small farmers and
business elements most affected by this financial crisis began
to bolt to the Democrats, the party of slavery and later of
segregation.
In 1877, President Andrew Johnson ordered the withdrawal of
the Federal soldiers who had provided some bulwark of
protection to the revolutionary struggles in the South. These
same federal troops, removed from protecting newly freed
workers there, were immediately used to put down the first
national railroad strike.
What resulted was the "White Terror" unleashed by the
slavocracy--unrelenting persecution and murders of individuals,
and a series of massacres of freed Black people and some
remaining white allies attempting to retain freedoms that had
been won.
Reactionary elements called this period the "restoration of
home rule." By 1901 every former Confederate state had written
"home rule" into new constitutions, thus formally and legally
expressing the reaction begun in the Black Codes.
Using this repression, the slavocracy reorganized the old
plantation system, worked by slave labor, into a system of
sharecropping and share tenancy, which enabled cash-poor
planters to minimize paying wages to farm workers. This system
lasted in the South until the introduction and widespread use
of tractors and mechanical cotton pickers in the 1940s and
1950s. In the mostly rural South, freed Black people and
impoverished whites were forced into this economic arrangement
to survive.
In the two levels of tenancy, farmers shared both the need
for subsistence credit and a vulnerability to arbitrary demands
by the landlord. The difference lay in this: Share tenants
"often owned mules or equipment and might be able to supply
some feed or fertilizer. Their furnishing needs varied, as did
their supervision." (Encyclopedia of Southern Culture) Thus,
their share of the crop could be from two-thirds to
three-fourths, less advances and interest.
Sharecroppers usually had only their labor to bargain with,
no animals or tools. They depended on lien credit for
necessities of life, and usually received no more than half the
crop, from which interest and supplies were deducted, typically
leaving them in lifelong debt to the landlord. Two-thirds of
Southern tenants were white, and among sharecroppers, there
were about equal numbers of Black and white farmers.
(Encyclopedia of Southern Culture)
While this combination of legal and extra-legal terror and
economic coercion kept Black workers in virtual peonage, the
slavocracy mounted a vicious campaign to split white farm
workers and the urban working class from newly freed Black
labor. Alongside racist propaganda from public officials, state
governments re-seized by the planter economic interests and by
new Southern industrial interests began to allocate money and
benefits like education in a calculatedly racist manner.
For instance, states began to pay pensions to the "relief of
needy confederate soldiers and sailors who from wounds or other
cause are now unable to earn a livelihood by labor." They
granted these privileges to indigent whites loyal to the
slavocracy while throwing freed Black people into jail to be
used as prison labor on the pretext of being "vagrants" because
they had wandered searching for less oppressive landlords or
fairer wages. (Alabama 1891 legal code)
But in the renewed onslaught of reaction in the South--where
lynching of African American men and rape of African American
women became the most notorious terror methods of white ruling
class interests--there was continued resistance.
For instance, the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B.
Wells-Barnett is well known to many. Born a slave in
Mississippi, she became a teacher and then also the editor of a
Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech. In 1891, she lost her
teaching job when she published articles criticizing the local
school system's "unequal allocation of resources to Black
schools." (Wells-Barnett, "A Red Record")
The next year marked the beginning of her lifelong national
campaign against lynching--including supporting the right to
armed self-defense--as she editorially denounced the murder of
three local Black men on the pretext of charges they had raped
a white woman. In fact, she revealed, all three had been
targeted because their business pursuits threatened the white
economic establishment.
Resistance by African Americans continued in every town and
farm in the South, in places still not documented by
historians. For instance, in 1899, in Bibb County, Ala., which
had a population of no more than 5,000 people, Black and white,
the Black workers on a road detail engaged in an armed battle
with their white overseer.
The precipitating incident, which must have come after many
brutal indignities and assaults, was this. The overseer,
Mullen, sent one of the hands, John Sanders, who was Black,
after water. On returning to the spring he passed the water to
other African Americans before he did to Mullen.
In the resulting battle, the overseer was killed, as were
some of the Black workers; others were later lynched. A few
days later, a young white worker was beaten and driven out of
the county by white vigilantes because of his expressing
sympathy for the African Americans who killed overseer Mullen.
This white man was seen going out armed, together with African
Americans, in his neighborhood, saying that Mullen got what he
deserved and that others would get the same. (Centreville
Press, May 4 and 11, and June 8, 1899)
A month later, when the local newspaper reported a "crowd of
[African Americans] armed in the woods" near Eoline, it also
ran a story about a strike in the coal mines of the adjoining
county by the Black majority Knights of Labor. (Centreville
Press, July 20, 1899)
For even as African Americans struggled for economic equity
in mostly rural arenas in the South, there was a parallel
resistance in the Black urban working class.
The first post-Civil-War strike by Southern women, for
instance, was waged by Black washerwomen in July 1865 in
Jackson, Miss. They organized themselves into a "protective
association" and raised their prices.
In Alabama, ex-Union Black soldiers went on strike at the
Birmingham iron works in 1866. In Mobile, a strike of Black
levee workers spread to the sawmills and smaller industries. In
Savannah, Ga., the dock workers, almost all Black, struck the
City directly for imposing a poll tax on wharf workers. (Allen
and Jacqueline Jones)
During Reconstruction and the counter-revolution, Black
workers--both rural and urban--fought against their economic
exploitation, in a struggle that continues today, through such
campaigns as Millions for Reparations.
In addition to urban Black workers striking for fair and
better wages during this time, Black farmers attempted to hold
on to land they had won. Their tenacity is reflected in the
fact that in 1910, in the Sea Islands area--part of the
original revolutionary land re-distribution--almost 60 percent
of Black farmers still owned their land.
In 1920 over 925,000 Black farmers controlled over 15
million acres. Today there are only 15,000-18,000 farmers, with
less than a million acres.
The taking back of these lands continues today with the
complicity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in denying
loans to Black farmers, thus furthering the interests of
corporate agribusiness. Resistance also continues, however, as
shown in the dramatic July 4 takeover of USDA offices in
Tennessee by 300 Black farmers. (Workers World, July 18)
The continuation of the reactionary policies of the
counter-revolution that crushed Reconstruction also continued
in the attempt by white landowners in the South to keep Black
people from migrating North toward wage-paying jobs. The Black
Codes were used against Black workers, for instance, during
World War I, as they sought to travel to Northern industries,
where labor was short because U.S. policies were limiting
immigrant labor.
The so-called "convict lease" system grew out of the Codes.
In this system, the state leased prisoners, the vast majority
Black, at dramatically reduced wages, to "cotton, rice,
sugarcane, and tobacco planters, coal mines, timber companies,
railroad construction firms, and levee builders." (Encyclopedia
of Southern Culture)
Prisoners of both sexes, sometimes as young as 8 or 9 years
old, were kept on meager diets, given little or no medical
care, and suffered overwork and physical abuse. (Encyclopedia
of Southern Culture)
Though the system was phased out in the South in the late
1930s, we can see its resurgence now in the exploitation of
prison labor by private companies like the Corrections
Corporation of America, subcontracting with the states.
(Workers World, Oct. 25, 2001)
"Competitive prison labor" means that companies like
Starbucks, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret and Boeing make profits
off the labor of prisoners who are mostly people of color. In
Tennessee, for instance, a CCA prison is allowed to pay
prisoners a "maximum"of 50 cents an hour. (Workers World,
November 18, 1999)
When we consider the implications of the Reconstruction
period in the United States for the reparations struggle today,
we can demand in addition to reparations for the losses of
African American people under slavery:
* Reparations for wages lost to freed Black people because
they were forced into virtual peonage through the use of the
Black Codes.
* Reparations for the sale of the crops raised under
sharecropping and share tenancy, lost to landlords' inflated
interest and lien credit, and reparations for the resulting
equity and interest that was lost.
* Reparations for lost wages in urban areas, where Black
workers were paid unequally in relation to white workers.
* Reparations for the education never given by the states,
or given in unequal measure.
* Reparations for being held prisoner and worked on prison
farms, roads, industries, mines, plantations.
Reparations--yes! And more: Finish the unfinished
revolution!
Sources: Encyclopedia of Southern Culture; The Unfinished
Revolution: A Voice from Harper's Ferry, introduction by Vince
Copeland; James Allen, "Reconstruction: The Battle for
Democracy 1865-1876"; W.E.B. DuBois, "Black Reconstruction in
America, 1860s-1880s"; Jacqueline Jones, "Labor of Love, Labor
of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the
Present."
Reprinted from the Aug. 29, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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