Nadir of American race relations

• 1. Introduction

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  The nadir of American race relations is the name historians give to what Rayford Logan identified as the worst period for Black Americans after the Civil War. It was not a slow drift toward inequality. It was a deliberate, organized reversal. The promise of Reconstruction was systematically dismantled through legislation, violence, and judicial neglect, leaving millions of people stripped of the rights they had briefly held. How did a country that had just fought its bloodiest war over slavery arrive at a period even darker than what came before? And who decided when the nadir began and ended? The answers turn on a series of political betrayals, mob massacres, and a Supreme Court ruling that would stand for 58 years.

• 2. A Promise Unmade

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  Reconstruction, as understood today, was a period of genuine idealism. The Radical Republicans who passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were, for the most part, driven by a desire to help freedmen. African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois made this case in 1910; later, historians Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner expanded it. Reconstruction governments were not the corrupt, Black-dominated failures that became the popular myth. No Reconstruction state government was actually dominated by Black people. African Americans did not reach representation proportional to their share of the population in any state. These governments established public education and social welfare institutions for the first time, benefiting Black people and whites alike.

  The violence that accompanied this period was real and severe. James Loewen notes that between 1865 and 1867, when white Democrats controlled local government, whites murdered an average of one Black person every day in Hinds County, Mississippi. Black schools were primary targets; buildings were burned and teachers were beaten and sometimes killed. The postwar Ku Klux Klan acted with local support and was largely suppressed by the Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871, though it did not disappear.

  Despite this terror, Black Americans continued to vote and go to school. By 1900, the majority of Black people were literate. That achievement was made possible by a community that refused to abandon education even when the buildings were on fire.

• 3. Reconstruction Collapses

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  The financial Panic of 1873 disrupted the national economy and further weakened Northern political will. In 1874, White League militiamen in Louisiana fought New Orleans police and state militia, won, expelled the Republican governor, and installed Democrat Samuel D. McEnery. They held the state capitol, the statehouse, and the armory for several days before retreating when federal troops arrived. This episode became known as the Battle of Liberty Place. It was a dress rehearsal for what followed across the South.

  Paramilitary groups multiplied. The White League formed in Louisiana in 1874. The Red Shirts organized in Mississippi and the Carolinas around the same time. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." They were open about their methods and invited press coverage. By 1875, Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives. President Ulysses S. Grant, who had led Union forces to victory in the Civil War, initially refused to send troops when the governor of Mississippi requested them in 1875. After Grant left office, it would be many years before any president took meaningful action to protect Black Americans.

• 4. Legal Machinery of Exclusion

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  From 1890 to 1908, Southern Democrats passed legislation and constitutional amendments designed to disenfranchise most Black people and many poor whites. Mississippi created a new state constitution in 1890; Louisiana followed in 1895. The tools included poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and changes to ballot procedures. South Carolina US Senator Ben Tillman proudly stated 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."

  In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The Court at that time was made up almost entirely of Northerners. Equal facilities were rarely provided, since no state or federal law required them. Between 1889 and 1922, the NAACP calculated that lynchings reached their worst historical level. Almost 3,500 people fell victim, nearly all of them Black men.

  Ida Bell Wells-Barnett conducted one of the first systematic studies of lynching. She documented that the most common accusation against victims was murder or attempted murder. She found Black men were lynched for wife-beating, stealing hogs, being perceived as disrespectful to white people, or sleeping with a consenting white woman. The defining feature, as historian James Loewen put it, was that "the murder takes place in public, so everyone knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished."

  Booker T. Washington, the most prominent Black leader during the early part of this period, had argued that Black people could advance through hard work, thrift, and mastery of practical skills before pursuing professional aspirations. His position was crystallized in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Speech, which gave rise to the Atlanta Compromise. W. E. B. Du Bois rejected that accommodation, stating that it was "utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage." Washington, despite his public stance, had in fact been quietly funding legal challenges to disenfranchisement laws, including secretive support for Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903), which the Supreme Court declined to use to interfere with states' rights.

• 5. The Great Migration North

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  Rayford Logan recorded that in the spring of 1879, roughly 40,000 Black people left Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia for the Midwest, with Kansas receiving the largest number. That early movement was a prelude to the Great Migration that began around 1915. Through the 1930s, more than 1.5 million Black people left the South for Northern cities, seeking work and escape from legal segregation and the threat of lynching. The Pennsylvania Railroad, during its years of expansion, recruited tens of thousands of workers from the South.

  White southerners, alarmed that their labor force was leaving, passed ordinances making it illegal for trains to accept pre-paid tickets. Other ordinances prohibited group travel by Black families or clusters of African Americans seeking group travel rates.

  The North did not offer safety or equality. Midwest and Western towns posted sundown warnings threatening to kill African Americans who remained overnight. These towns also expelled Black residents who had been there since Reconstruction. Monuments to Confederate war dead were erected across the country, as far from the South as Montana. In 1896, eugenicists and scientific racists including Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant promoted theories of white racial superiority in academic settings, providing intellectual cover for segregation.

• 6. Red Summer and Massacre

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  World War I returned African American veterans to a country that had not changed its racial order. Newly demobilized and trained as soldiers, these men were less willing to accept discrimination quietly. Strikes and economic competition sparked massacres and attacks on Black communities in Houston, Philadelphia, and East St. Louis in 1917.

  In 1919, so many violent episodes struck major cities that the season became known as Red Summer. The Chicago race riot of 1919 lasted several days; 15 whites and 23 Black people died, more than 500 were injured, and more than 1,000 were left homeless. An investigation found that ethnic Irish communities, which had established political power bases on Chicago's South Side, were heavily implicated.

  The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was more destructive still. White mobs invaded and burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1,256 homes were destroyed, and 39 people were confirmed killed, 26 of them Black and 13 white, though recent investigations suggest the Black death toll was considerably higher. The same year, Woodrow Wilson wrote to his aide Joseph Tumulty calling The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that helped spark the Klan revival, "a very unfortunate production"; yet it had been screened at the White House to Wilson and his cabinet in 1915. By 1924, the revived Klan had four million members and controlled the governorship and a majority of the state legislature in Indiana.

• 7. What the Nadir Left Behind

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  Black literacy, which rose during Reconstruction, continued to increase through the nadir itself. The NAACP was established in 1909, and by 1920 had won several important anti-discrimination lawsuits. Writers and activists including Du Bois and Wells-Barnett carried forward traditions of journalism and organizing that had fueled abolitionism, developing tactics that would later drive the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance and the spread of jazz music broadened awareness of Black culture among white Americans.

  Historian Eric Foner observed that by the early twentieth century, racism had become "more deeply embedded in the nation's culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade." James Loewen argued that the family instability and crime that some sociologists have attributed to the legacy of slavery are better traced to the nadir and what it produced. Foner noted that none of Reconstruction's Black officials created a family political dynasty, and concluded that the nadir cut short the development of Black political leadership in the South.

  The Supreme Court did not overturn Plessy v. Ferguson until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954-58 years after the original ruling. Rayford Logan's own book, which gave the period its name, was published that same year.