People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [121]
Have you been a slave?
I have been a slave.
What did you see of the rioting?
I saw them kill my husband; it was on Tuesday night, between ten and eleven o’clock; he was shot in the head while he was in bed sick. . . . There were between twenty and thirty men. . . . They came into the room. . . . Then one stepped back and shot him . . . he was not a yard from him; he put the pistol to his head and shot him three times. . . . Then one of them kicked him, and another shot him again when he was down. . . . He never spoke after he fell. They then went running right off and did not come back again. . . .
The violence mounted through the late 1860s and early 1870s as the Ku Klux Klan organized raids, lynchings, beatings, burnings. For Kentucky alone, between 1867 and 1871, the National Archives lists 116 acts of violence. A sampling:
1.
A mob visited Harrodsburg in Mercer County to take from jail a man name Robertson Nov. 14, 1867. . . .
5.
Sam Davis hung by a mob in Harrodsburg, May 28, 1868.
6.
Wm. Pierce hung by a mob in Christian July 12, 1868.
7.
Geo. Roger hung by a mob in Bradsfordville Martin County July 11, 1868. . . .
10.
Silas Woodford age sixty badly beaten by disguised mob. . . .
109.
Negro killed by Ku Klux Klan in Hay county January 14, 1871.
A Negro blacksmith named Charles Caldwell, born a slave, later elected to the Mississippi Senate, and known as “a notorious and turbulent Negro” by whites, was shot at by the son of a white Mississippi judge in 1868. Caldwell fired back and killed the man. Tried by an all-white jury, he argued self-defense and was acquitted, the first Negro to kill a white in Mississippi and go free after a trial. But on Christmas Day 1875, Caldwell was shot to death by a white gang. It was a sign. The old white rulers were taking back political power in Mississippi, and everywhere else in the South.
As white violence rose in the 1870s, the national government, even under President Grant, became less enthusiastic about defending blacks, and certainly not prepared to arm them. The Supreme Court played its gyroscopic role of pulling the other branches of government back to more conservative directions when they went too far. It began interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment—passed presumably for racial equality—in a way that made it impotent for this purpose. In 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, outlawing discrimination against Negroes using public facilities, was nullified by the Supreme Court, which said: “Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment.” The Fourteenth Amendment, it said, was aimed at state action only. “No state shall . . . ”
A remarkable dissent was written by Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, himself a former slaveowner in Kentucky, who said there was Constitutional justification for banning private discrimination. He noted that the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, applied to individual plantation owners, not just the state. He then argued that discrimination was a badge of slavery and similarly outlawable. He pointed also to the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, saying that anyone born in the United States was a citizen, and to the clause in Article 4, Section 2, saying “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”
Harlan was fighting a force greater than logic or justice; the mood of the Court reflected a new coalition of northern industrialists and southern businessmen-planters. The culmination of this mood came in the decision of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, when the Court ruled that a railroad could segregate black and white if the segregated facilities were equal:
The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms