Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [217]
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AFTER STILL ANOTHER violent clash in Norfolk, in which Yankee troops had vowed to “clear out all the niggers,” a black resident of that city voiced his despair at such betrayal and at the same time warned all whites—Yankees and natives alike—not to push the freedmen too far. “We are a nation that loves the white people,” he declared, “and we would never attack them, but if we are driven to exasperation we know our duty.” Although emancipation and the gradual reduction of Union troops made blacks more vulnerable to attack, most of them had enjoyed freedom, however briefly, and refused to surrender their newly acquired rights without a struggle. It seemed like an appropriate time, then, to invoke such time-honored concepts and virtues as self-defense.
A kind of general serfdom and humiliation of the colored race is about to take the place of slavery—if we do not check the tendency toward that course.… If there is no protection for us at the hands of the municipal police or the military guard, if there is no redress for our people before the Criminal Courts in cases of murder and rape, then let us form at once societies for self-protection and have recourse to personal defense.
That sentiment, voiced by the black newspaper in New Orleans, accorded with advice to discharged black soldiers to retain their guns and its call for Home Guard units which would mobilize whenever circumstances demanded their presence. After all, why should not those who had defended their nation on the battlefields likewise defend their families and friends at home. “In times of peace prepare for war,” a black resident of New Orleans suggested. “They have burned our churches, murdered our friends in their own yards, in the presence of their own family, and yet our civil government is still running, and the murderers are still allowed to roam our streets undisturbed.”144
Not surprisingly, blacks vented much of their anger and “lawlessness” on the law itself. Since they could not expect impartial justice in the courtroom, groups of blacks in some communities invaded the jails and courtrooms to release their accused brethren. At the same time, they evinced a determination to mete out extralegal justice if the white police and courts failed to do their duty. In Selma, Alabama, blacks threatened to burn down the town unless a known white murderer was turned over to them or brought to justice; Federal troops intervened and the suspected murderer escaped. After a white mob in Jeffersonton, Georgia, removed a black youth from the jail and hanged him, allegedly for having killed a farm animal, more than a hundred blacks, all of them armed with guns and pistols, appeared to demand the prosecution of those responsible for the lynching. Although Federal authorities persuaded the blacks to disperse, a still larger crowd gathered the next day, and this time the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent requested Federal troops. Only the presence of such troops prevented a riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, after blacks tried to halt the public whipping of five men found guilty in a trial where black testimony had been excluded; in three Virginia counties, the Freedmen’s Bureau quickly resumed judicial power because the blacks had threatened to retaliate for the injustices committed by the civil courts; and in several communities, blacks armed themselves to resist attacks on their schools and churches.145
The threats of black retaliatory violence obviously concerned native whites and military authorities and gave rise in the postwar years to new rumors and reports of insurrectionary activity. But little was done to attack the sources of black discontent. In Columbia, South Carolina, blacks reacted with outrage when in May 1866 the chief of police shot and killed a young freedman while arresting him for a misdemeanor. Both the coroner’s jury and local military authorities acquitted the