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Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 22, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- 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. The economic consequences of slavery for African
Americans
did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. "Reconstruction" in the Southern United States--the
period
from 1865 to 1880--was a revolutionary period in which freed slaves struggled for legal, social and economic equality with their former owners. This "unfinished revolution" was stopped by a counter-revolution that followed in 1877. The counter-revolution's consequences endured
legally until
the civil rights movement of the 1960s--and economically to this day. In 1865, Union troops began to move into the
defeated slave
states of the Confederacy. Under the auspices of a few Union generals, freed slaves began to occupy and farm independently some of the land owned by the white slavocracy. For instance, the 10,000-acre plantation of
Jefferson Davis,
former president of the Confederacy, was declared a "home colony" for freed slaves under the protection of a Black regiment. The land was farmed cooperatively and the newly freed people set up a self-government. An even more widespread re-distribution of land
took place
under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's orders in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. There, 40,000 freed women and men settled and worked the land as their own. (Allen) The ability to claim and farm land was central to
freedom
for Black people after slavery. Most lived in the rural South. There were few towns and few non-agrarian jobs available, and most Black people were farm workers. After emancipation, they needed land simply to survive--to feed themselves and their families--and to move out of servitude. But the Southern white slavocracy, though defeated
militarily, was determined not to be subdued economically. Immediately after the war and the passing of the 13th Amendment that formally emancipated all slaves, the Southern white governments of the former slave states began to pass a series of laws that attempted to return freed slaves to a de facto bondage. 'BLACK CODES'
Beginning in Mississippi in 1865, these so-called
"Black
Codes" appeared to grant Black people certain legal rights, such as the right to marry, for the first time. In reality the Codes "were promulgated to control a newly fluid Black labor force." (Encyclopedia of Southern Culture) Through these laws, the Southern plantation owners
attempted
to keep freed slaves bound to their land, in a kind of legal peonage. Their aim was to prevent freed slaves from becoming free labor, people able to sell their labor power as workers. The codes were designed to control virtually every
aspect of
the lives of newly freed Black people. For instance, some statutes forbade freedom of movement and "migration" into a state unless the person entered into a work "bond" with a landholder. In Mississippi, as well as other states, every freed slave and everyone of African heritage had to have written evidence of a work contract. Language in the contracts specified that contracted
Black
workers were to be known as "servants" and contractors as "masters." If a work contract was not possessed or was not in exact legal order, vagrancy laws were invoked to arrest the Black worker. The state or county then "hired out" the worker. Any justice of the peace could declare someone a
vagrant and
have her or him arrested. In some states, any white man, officer or not, could arrest a Black person. There was virtually no redress in the legal system.
In North
Carolina, for instance, Black people were allowed a status in court only in cases that did not involve white people. (DuBois) Passing the Codes was an attempt to con tinue
slavery. In
the post-war landscape this meant an attempt to impose the most extreme form of wage slavery possible. The Codes generally prohibited firearms to the
freed slaves--
many of whom had fought with and in the Union Army for their own liberation. RESISTANCE TO REIMPOSITION OF SLAVERY
But just as enslaved Africans had fought back from
the
moment they were kidnapped and landed on the shores of the New World, newly freed Black people resisted the re- imposition of slavery. In the revolutionary period of Reconstruc tion,
they
developed new tools of resistance--the Union Leagues with their local councils, armed citizens' militias, and people's assemblies that developed into state Constitutional Assemblies in the late 1860s. These were their defense against the violence of
"White
Terror"--extra-legal vigilante forces that the slavocracy organized to beat back the emerging social, economic, and political independence of the freed Black population. (Allen) This intimidation, occurring in every county, town,
village
and state of the old Confederacy, included the founding of the Ku Klux Klan by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave owner and Confederate general. For the 10 years after the end of the Civil War
there was
battle after battle in the countryside and small towns of the South, as the African American population, and some white allies, tried to liberate their land. Every act toward freedom was a struggle. One
witness
recounted Black people in Mississippi, marching to the voting polls "after the manner of soldiers, armed with clubs and sticks, some of them with old swords and pieces of scythe blades." (Allen) The control of the larger state legislatures,
public
resources and economic destinies depended on these smaller battles. But the greatest significance in these struggles
lay in the
fact that the battle of African Americans for their bourgeois democratic rights--the right to vote, to testify in court, to form civil contracts such as marriage--was completely, inextricably and openly linked to their fight for economic justice. If they could not win re-distribution of land, through outright occupation or through reparations legislation such as the "40 acres" grants proposed by abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens, then newly freed Black people would have no material basis for survival and no way to stand against the seizure of their newly won rights by a resurgent slavocracy. For the Southern slavocracy was not fighting these
battles
alone. Northern capital had its own agenda in the waging of the Civil War and also in the establishment of peace. For instance, in a Northern newspaper the education
of freed
slaves was praised as an opportunity for textile manufacturers to "organize at our own doors a colony--so to speak--that will be worth more to us than any of England's most flourishing dependencies." The federal government gave away millions of acres
of land--
that could have gone to freed slaves--to the expanding railroad interests in the South and in the West. This included public land confiscated from former slaves who had settled on it as free public property. (Allen) The military defeat of the Southern planters ended
the
national struggle over who would control the future of land expansion into the West. There would be no more Missouri Compromises over whether a state would enter as "slave" or "free"--and thus over which financial interests would have an advantage there. DEFENDING BIG LANDOWNERS
With the surrender of the South, Northern interests
rapidly
backpedaled away from supporting the freed African Americans. "To expropriate the land of the [former] slave owners (many of whom had financial ties to the merchant capital, etc., in the North) was also to question the legality of all huge land ownership. And at this very moment the big capitalists, especially the railroad companies, were getting land by the millions of acres from Congress, swindling the white masses as well as the Indians [Native Americans] in the process." (Vince Copeland) Black historian W.E.B. DuBois succinctly summarized
the
"counter-revolution of property" by saying: "How, after the war, triumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of theft that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war; and how revolt against the anarchy became reaction against democracy, North and South, and delivered the land into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South." NEXT: SHARECROPPING AND SEGREGATION
[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."] - END -
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