African-American Resistance in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Era - Essay Example

Margaret Walker has opined, “Handicapped as we have been by a racist system of dehumanizing slavery and segregation, our American history of nearly five hundred years reveals that our cultural and spiritual gifts brought from our African past are still intact” (1997, p.---). This claim speaks a lot about the history of African-Americans. Throughout history, they faced various forms of suppression and oppression. Despite all this, African-Americans have managed to make their lives more livable by exhibiting a great degree of resilience. This work intends to look into the history of anti-black oppression for the period from 1865 to 1941, that is, Reconstruction and the time of Jim Crow, and identify how blacks adopted various strategies to resist the onslaught.

The Civil War was disastrous for the South. Lasting from 1861 until 1865, it killed a considerable number of people and devastated the Southern aristocracy by all means. As the Thirteenth Amendment was accepted, the blacks became freed lot instantaneously. They eagerly started pursuing everything the free people did. For example, they started political actions, opened churches and schools, bought arms, drank liquor, and owned dogs. Though there was a call for a New South, there was no significant improvement in the condition of the African-Americans. Many of them were forced to continue as sharecroppers and tenant farmers because the textile, iron, and steel factories preferred white women instead of blacks (Gao, 2000, pp. 59-60). This kind of discrimination is evidenced in the story of Frances, the black daughter of a white man, Emmanuel Driggs. Though Emmanuel tried his best to save the girl from slavery, the judicial system did not allow that. Though she approached a court of law alleging her master of fathering her child, she was punished for fornication but the person she accused was set free as the court was not ready to take a black woman’s word against a white man (Aurora, 2013). 

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1875 abolished discrimination in public places, there was a flood of court cases against the Act, resulting in the infamous Jim Crow laws (Morrison, 2003, p. 71). This created an atmosphere promoting white racial superiority, and violence and lynching of blacks rose sharply (Hine, Hine & Harold, 2011, p. 97).

Another serious trouble faced by the blacks was the attempts to deny their voting rights. Though the Fifteenth Amendment offered them the right to vote, many southern states attempted to deny their rights through various means. To illustrate, the constitution of Mississippi insisted that those who did not pay all taxes, those who were convicted of any crime, and those who failed a particular literacy test were all ineligible to vote. Similarly, there was the ‘grandfather clause’ in Louisiana (Morrison, 2003).

The response of the blacks to these issues was as complicated and multifaceted as the problem was. Some of them migrated to the urban Northern United States. In fact, the blacks had started this migration as early as the 1850s and the trend lasted until 1930. A KET video reveals how the slaves tried to escape from Kentucky to the North and how common were the open sales of slaves (“Kentucky’s Underground Railroad- Passage to Freedom”, 2000). On reaching there, they gave birth to black-only townships in places like Tennessee, Oklahoma Territory, and Kansas. Some such towns were Marshalltown, North Fork Colored, Canadian Colored, Arkansas Colored, Homer, and Wiley. These towns allowed black men and women to live away from the prejudices and brutality they had to face in mixed communities. In these communities, they were able to lead a family life, get financial assistance from other blacks, and have open markets for their own crops (Gao, 2000, pp. 66-67).

Yet another movement from the part of African-Americans was to organize various civil rights organizations. Some important organizations that took birth in these years were the Citizens Equal Rights Association (1887) and the Afro-American League (1890) (Meier, 1995, p. 70). At the same time, Negro leaders like J. Mercer Langston and J. C. Price advocated full and equal citizenship rights for African-Americans. While William Wells called for more self-dependence, better culture, literacy, and high morale of African-Americans, people like Washington opined that blacks must focus on improving their economic conditions instead of seeking social equality. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall initiated a campaign against the segregation of educational facilities in the year 1930 (Kommers, Finn & Jacobsohn, 2004, p. 895).

Churches and faith had a very important role in the lives of the blacks though they had very little role in church affairs post-Civil War. Religious ceremonies like funerals were very important for them as they gave them a community feeling (Moore, 2012). After the Civil War, history saw the establishment of black churches as a way for blacks to unite, communicate, and show solidarity. To illustrate, in Northumberland County in Virginia, thirty-eight black people filed a petition at the Fairfield Baptist Church to have a separate church for blacks in the year 1867. The request was accepted, and the result was a black-only Shiloh Baptist Church. After this, there was a proliferation in the number of all-black churches, and black ministers played a great role in this sharp increase (Lincoln, 1990, p. 12). These churches played a great role in making African-Americans feel better and united in the face of racial discrimination. The churches offered them a chance to come together and communicate.

In total, one can see that the period from 1865 to 1941 saw the official abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of African-Americans. To meet the continuing discrimination, African-Americans started migrating toward the North and developing all-black settlements, schools, and churches, where they felt free, united, and cared. In addition, they organized various associations to fight for African-American rights.