The nadir of American race relations is a historical period defined by historian Rayford Logan as the worst time for race relations in the United States after the Civil War ended slavery. It overlapped with the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, following the Reconstruction era and the financial Panic of 1873, amid a continuing decline in cotton prices. The period was characterized by the legal solidification of Jim Crow laws, the rise of lynchings and racial massacres, and the nationwide institution of sundown towns.
Historians differ on the period's date range. Logan's 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought defines "The Nadir, 1877–1901" when "the Negro's status in American society" fell lowest, arguing for 1901 as the turning point when race relations started to improve. Others, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argue for ending dates as late as 1923. James W. Loewen (2006) argues for a later starting date, seeing the post-Reconstruction era as one of widespread hope for racial equity due to idealistic Northern support for civil rights. In Loewen's view, the true nadir only began when Northern Republicans ceased supporting Southern black people's rights around 1890, and it lasted until the American entry into World War II in 1941.
Logan's focus was exclusively on African Americans in the Southern United States, but the period also represents the worst of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian discrimination, when fear of the so-called Yellow Peril incited harassment and violence on the West Coast and the destruction of Denver's Chinatown. sidebar "The Anti-Chinese Hysteria of 1885–86".
Background
Reconstruction revisionism
In the early 20th century, a group of white historians claimed that Reconstruction was a tragic period for the South, when Northern Republicans motivated by revenge and profit used federal troops to force the defeated Southerners to accept corrupt governments run by unscrupulous Northerners and feckless black people. Such scholars generally dismissed the idea that black people could ever be capable of self-government.
Proponents of this view became known as the Dunning School, after William Archibald Dunning (1857 – 1922) of Columbia University. Another Columbia professor, John Burgess, was notorious for writing that "black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself... created any civilization of any kind."
The Dunning School's view of Reconstruction held sway for decades. Its views were dramatized in D. W. Griffith's popular movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) and to some extent in Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936). More recent historians have decisively rejected many of the Dunning School's conclusions.
History of Reconstruction
Today's consensus regards Reconstruction as a time of idealism and hope which resulted in some practical achievements. The Radical Republicans who passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were, for the most part, motivated by a desire to help freedmen. African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois put forth this view in 1910, and later historians Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner furthered it. The Republican Reconstruction governments had their share of malfeasance, but they benefited many whites as well as blacks, and were no more corrupt than other governments of the day, Democratic as well as Northern Republican.
Reconstruction governments established public education and social welfare institutions for the first time, improving education for both black and white people, and they tried to improve social conditions for the many left in poverty after the long war. No Reconstruction state government was dominated by black people; in fact, black people did not attain a level of representation that was equal to the size of their population in any state.
Origins
Reconstruction era violence
For several years after the Civil War, the federal government, pushed by Northern opinion, intervened actively to protect the rights of black Americans. There were limits, however, to these efforts: In Washington, a proposal of land reform made by the Freedmen's Bureau, which would have granted black people plots on the plantation land on which they worked (forty acres and a mule), never came to pass. In the South, many former Confederate rebels were stripped of voting rights, but they resisted Reconstruction with violence and intimidation. James Loewen notes that, between 1865 and 1867, when white Democrats controlled the government, whites murdered an average of one black person every day in Hinds County, Mississippi. Black schools were especially targeted; school buildings frequently were burned, their teachers flogged and occasionally murdered. The postwar terrorist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK) acted with significant local support, attacking freedmen and their white allies; the group was largely suppressed by federal efforts under the Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871, but did not disappear. It was refounded on a national level in the early 20th century.
Despite these failures, black people continued to vote and attend school. Literacy soared, and many African Americans were elected to local and statewide offices, with several serving in Congress. Because of the black community's commitment to education, the majority of black people were literate by 1900.
Continued violence in the South, especially heated around electoral campaigns, sapped Northern resolve. A decade after the long years and losses of the Civil War, Northerners had lost heart for the continued massive commitment of money and arms that would have been required to stifle the stubborn white insurgency. As the financial panic of 1873 disrupted the economy nationwide, the white terrorist insurgency took on new life, exemplified by the Colfax and Coushatta massacres in Louisiana. The next year saw the formation of paramilitary groups, such as the White League in Louisiana (1874) and Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, that worked openly to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt black organizing, and suppress black voting. They invited press coverage. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party."
In 1874, in a continuation of the disputed gubernatorial election of 1872, thousands of White League militiamen fought against New Orleans police and Louisiana state militia and won. They turned out the Republican governor and installed the Democrat Samuel D. McEnery, took over the capitol, state house and armory for a few days, and then retreated in the face of Federal troops who reinstated the elected governor. This was known as the "Battle of Liberty Place".
End of Reconstruction
Northerners wavered and finally capitulated to Southern election violence. Former abolitionist leaders like Horace Greeley began to ally themselves with Democrats in attacking Reconstruction governments. By 1875, there was a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. President Ulysses S. Grant, who as a general had led the Union to victory in the Civil War, initially refused to send troops to Mississippi in 1875 at the request of the governor. Violence surrounded the presidential election of 1876 in many areas, beginning a trend. After Grant, it would be decades before any President would do anything to extend the protection of the law to black people.
Jim Crow laws and terrorism
White supremacy
As noted above, white paramilitary forces contributed to whites' taking exclusive power in the late 1870s. A brief coalition of populists took over in some states, but Democrats had returned to power after the 1880s. From 1890 to 1908, they proceeded to pass legislation and constitutional amendments to disenfranchise most black people and many poor whites, with Mississippi and Louisiana creating new state constitutions in 1890 and 1895 respectively, to disenfranchise African Americans. Democrats used a combination of restrictions on voter registration and voting methods, such as poll taxes, literacy and residency requirements, and ballot box changes. The main push came from elite Democrats in the Solid South, where black people were a majority of potential voters. The elite Democrats also acted to disenfranchise poor whites. African Americans were an absolute majority of the population in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, and represented more than 40% of the population in four other former Confederate states. Accordingly, many whites perceived African Americans as a major political threat, because in free and fair elections, they would hold the balance of power in a majority of the South. South Carolina US Senator Ben Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best [to prevent black people from voting]... we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it."
Conservative white Democratic governments passed Jim Crow legislation, creating a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Black people were separated in schools and the few hospitals, were restricted in seating on trains, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public transportation systems. They were often barred from some stores, or forbidden to use lunchrooms, restrooms and fitting rooms. Because they could not vote, they could not serve on juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system. Between 1889 and 1922, as political disenfranchisement and segregation were being established, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calculates lynchings reached their worst level in history. Almost 3,500 people fell victim to lynching, almost all of them black men.
Lynchings
Historian James Loewen notes that lynching emphasized the perceived powerlessness of black people: "the defining characteristic of a lynching is that the murder takes place in public, so everyone knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished." African American civil rights activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett conducted one of the first systematic studies of the subject. She documented that the most prevalent accusation against lynching victims was murder or attempted murder. She found black men were "lynched for anything or nothing" – for wife-beating, stealing hogs, being "saucy to white people", sleeping with a consenting white woman—for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Black people who were economically successful faced reprisals or sanctions. When Richard Wright tried to train to become an optometrist and lens-grinder, the other men in the shop threatened him until he was forced to leave. In 1911, black racers were barred from participating in the Kentucky Derby because African Americans won more than half of the first twenty-eight races. Through violence and legal restrictions, whites often prevented black people from working as common laborers, much less as skilled artisans or in the professions. Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and talented black person found it extremely difficult to advance.
This situation called the views of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black leader during the early part of the nadir into question. He had argued that black people could better themselves by doing hard work and being thrifty. He believed that they had to master basic work before they went on to pursue college careers and professional aspirations. Washington believed that his programs trained black people for the lives which they were likely to lead as well as for the jobs which they could get in the South. Washington's position was advanced in his influential Atlanta Exposition Speech in 1895, which was the genesis of the Atlanta Compromise.
W. E. B. Du Bois advocated a more uncompromising position than Washington, stating: