------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 29, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
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." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. 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