[MUSIC PLAYS THEN FADES] Chris Barr:
So one of the challenges of talking about Reconstruction that a lot of people have
a hard time with is thinking about its end and its memory. For a lot of people today
if you talked about Reconstruction in your social studies class in middle school or high school,
chances are they didn't talk about much beyond, well, carpetbagger, scalawags,
maybe a little bit of government corruption here and there, and then it ends in 1876.
Well, here in Beaufort County, we can sort of muddy that timeline a little bit.
Reconstruction isn't just this period of corruption. It's not just this period
defined by carpetbaggers and scalawags. This is arguably America's most progressive era,
as the historian Douglas Egerton defines it. He basically argues that this is one of the few times
in which we've had a truly functioning biracial democracy in the United States. By 1868, for
example, here in South Carolina, about half the state legislature's Black, actually representative
of the population of South Carolina. Some historians, the historian Eric Foner's
called Reconstruction America's Second Founding. During the era, we ratified three Constitutional
amendments. 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except as punishment for a crime.
The 14th Amendment said that everybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States
and that states cannot deny you your rights. In 1870, the 15th Amendment is ratified that says
that the right to vote can't be denied based on race. So these three amendments literally sort
of remake America, but at the same time, they plant the seeds for the failure of
Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. In communities throughout the south,
as sort of the pre-war white political class takes back control of state legislatures and
local governments, sometimes through violence or the threat of violence, they use those loopholes
in those amendments as a means to effectively end Reconstruction and usher in the era of Jim Crow.
So the way this works, for example, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery accept as punishment
for a crime. Well that except as punishment for a crime becomes a loophole in which communities
will literally create police forces, criminalize things like vagrancy, it's against the law to
not have a job, and then they sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, "Hey, nobody hire the Black guys."
Then this police force goes out, starts to arresting Black people willy nilly.
And that loophole, once you've been convicted of a crime, you can be re-enslaved and they start
essentially creating a for profit prison system in many Southern communities where Black people,
Black prisoners, are leased out to area planters literally as enslaved people.
To help stop people from sort of rising up against that, they start to implement means to prevent
Black people from voting. The 15th Amendment, it says that the right to vote cannot be denied
based on race. Well, that doesn't guarantee a right to vote. It implies then that the right
to vote can be denied so they start coming up with all sorts of loopholes about that. "Oh,
well, if you've been convicted of a crime, we're not going to let you vote." Those are laws in
Southern states that date to the early 1870s, in many instances. They began to do things, "Well,
if you don't own property, you can't vote. Or if you can't read, you can't vote. Or if
you can't pay this tax, you can't vote." And so they start using those as loopholes,
as stand-ins to disenfranchise Black citizens. And so this collapse of Reconstruction, it's really
the collapse of democracy, particularly in the post-Civil War South. And it's generations long.
It's not like there's this cutoff in 1876 with the 1876 election. And places like Beaufort
are a good example of that. Robert Smalls was elected to his first term in office in 1874,
two years before sort of what your high school textbook would tell you Reconstruction ends.
Throughout the 1880s, 1890s, Beaufort County is still electing Black representatives to
the state legislature. But even then that ends after the state constitution of 1895.
So by the mid 1890s, sort of this promise of Reconstruction, this sort of functioning,
biracial democracy, this experiment, if you will, is largely over in most places,
including here in Beaufort County, South Carolina. In the mid 1890s, the Supreme
Court ruled in the Plessy versus Ferguson case, that separate but equal was constitutional, as
thus cementing this idea of racial segregation and effectively ending the gains of Reconstruction.
The historian WB Dubois defined Reconstruction this way. He said that the slave went free, stood
a brief moment in the sun, and went back again towards slavery. If we think about Reconstruction
as being this arc, this process of emancipation, the enslaved people go free, they stand this brief
moment in the sun. They own property. They have good schools. They're representatives in state,
local, and even national political office, but then they sink back again towards slavery
with the rise of the Jim Crow era. Just 60 years after the collapse of
Reconstruction of the 1890s, sort of this promise of Reconstruction is sort of demanded once again.
One of my favorite photographs from the March on Washington in August of 1963 is it's a protestor,
or a marcher rather, who is carrying a sign, "In 1963, we seek the promises of 1863." And so even
a century after the Civil War, this language of Reconstruction, this promise of Black citizenship,
this promise of Black political representation, adequate schools, access to property ownership,
these are things that people were still debating even a century after the end of Reconstruction.
And so again, here in Beaufort County, this process of Reconstruction we can view it
through sort of a triumphant lens. This is a place where Reconstruction is successful,
but at sort of the national level, we certainly are still grappling with the
end of Reconstruction. [MUSIC PLAYS]