People don't realize that African Americans have always been
a part of this nation's democracy.
Black people always strongly desired the right to vote and always
fought for being included in the political process.
And then also, I think a lot of people might take for granted
that African Americans always get to have that
Right. Because we had it before, but we lost it and so it could
be lost again,
if people don't fight to protect it.
When we learn about the Reconstruction Era in school,
it's often taught as a dark period in American history, a time
of upheaval and unrest right after the Civil War.
But what often gets overlooked is that for a brief period
of time, thousands of black representatives were elected
to office all over the South.
My estimate is that there were about 2,000 African American
men who held public office during Reconstruction. Offices
ranging from the Senate,
there were two black Senators, 14 members of the House of Representatives,
six or seven hundred members of state legislatures,
and then dozens of other offices, state level,
local level etc.
So what was going on was that a lot of the former Confederates,
the most outspoken leaders of white supremacy,
were not allowed to serve in Congress.
And so, you know, with those people absent, there were people
that did believed that African-Americans should be folded
into the fabric of American civil and political life,
and that did advocate for black people to be able to vote.
And then, of course, when African-Americans
were prevented from voting federal troops Federal investigators
were often being called in, in order to protect those African-Americans
rights in order to cast a ballot.
At the time, many states in the South where either majority Black
or close to it.
And because of that, they were able to elect Black legislators,
especially at the state level.
The most significant accomplishment of Black legislators in many southern
states during Reconstruction was the establishment
of public school system,
not only for African Americans, but for white students as well.
And even though these were segregated, they were often the first
time that many African-Americans fresh out of slavery
had an opportunity to learn to read and write.
The highest level of office reached by these black legislators was the U.S. Senate.
And the first was Hiram Revels
a US senator from the state of Mississippi
So Hiram Revels was a pretty unique individual in that he was educated,
and he later became a civil rights Champion, before the civil war, during the civil war.
And then afterward he was sent to Mississippi
where he was appointed by the state
legislature to be a United States Senator.
In response to Black political power during Reconstruction,
the South was just right with violence and every single Southern
state, and the most obvious early example
of that violence was the Ku Klux Klan,
which did all sorts of different things.
But attacked everything from school teachers,
the politicians to farmers. And so these different waves of violence
really popped up especially during election days.
And so in 1875 Mississippi there was an organized overthrow
essentially of the state Republican party, which did include
African-American, there was violence at the polls in different
cities and that spread throughout the entire South.
1876, there was violence in different places like Florida and South Carolina
and Louisiana that led to contested elections that ultimately
paved the way for reconstruction to end.
That overthrow was not put into law really until another generation,
let's say around 1900.
when Southern states, figured out ways to abrogate the 15th
Amendment, which had been enacted in reconstruction,
to guarantee black men's suffrage.
So once the 15th amendment became law
southern states couldn't disenfranchise African Americans simply by saying
Black people are no longer allowed to vote.
And so, in response to reconstruction, in order to eliminate
the black vote, they had to come up with new ideas
in order to make sure African Americans were taken off the voter
rolls and the most powerful of those methods was the literacy
test, which allow for local registrars in a County Courthouse
usually, to look at a candidate and give the candidate a literacy
test to see if they were qualified to register to vote
The nature of the test
usually didn't matter.
The person would just define whether they were qualified
to vote based on whether they thought they were white or black.
And so you had a period
from 1900 to 1965, the voting rights act,
where very few African-Americans were allowed to vote
throughout the entire South.
For a long, long time, reconstruction was portrayed by scholars,
but also by teachers and the general public as sort of the
lowest point in American history, a period
of corruption, misgovernment.
And this idea that reconstruction was a disaster was part of the
legitimation of the old, Jim Crow South.
The underlying message was the South was correct in taking
away the right to vote for black men and that if blacks were
given the right to vote again,
you just have another replay of the horrors of reconstruction.
But I think one of the things in American history that we often teach is that
there's a constant march toward things getting better.
And it's a little bit tricky to teach Reconstruction because
African Americans during reconstruction could vote in much of the South
and then things actually got a lot worse.
And so, it doesn't really fit into this narrative of constant progress
throughout America since the Civil War.
And so in this day and age where we have numerous
African American senators, just look at a place like Georgia
where Raphael Warnock was elected,
and Georgians, white Georgians, are largely trying to respond by--
through tactics like voter suppression to tamp down the black vote,
after the black vote
Largely sent this African American man to the United States Senate.
After the 2020 elections,
we saw historical voters of color, turn out, and a lot of first-time
voters, even during a global pandemic.
And after that we saw a Republican-controlled
legislatures across the country drop hundreds of anti-voting
bills. And so when we saw that collective activity happening,
we had to go to the federal government and ask for protections.
Hillary Holley works for Fair Fight Action,
an organization working to fight voter suppression
around the country.
Though literacy test remain a thing of the past, many states
have enacted laws
that purge voter rolls in ways that target minorities
or have made voting more difficult by closing polling places
in largely black areas.
Fair Fight is now working to get legislation such as the John
Lewis Voting Rights Act passed in Congress to stop these tactics.
So we started working with Congress basically,
right out the gate in January 2021 to help ensure that the legislation
was drafted in a way that could actually mitigate voter suppression
and combat the real attacks that we're seeing in real-time.
Even though today's laws might be a bit different,
they're intended with the same outcome in mind to make it harder for
black people to vote to make sure that African-Americans
don't have equal standing of one, man.
One vote in the democracy,
in order to ensure more white control over our political systems.
I think it's important to learn about Reconstruction in American
history because that was the moment,
I think, where our democracy held the most promise for every
single person, at least every single male, in the history of the
United States of America, regardless of race.
and I think that if we are to ever really fulfill that promise,
then people need to understand the history of voting rights
and voting right loss in the Reconstruction Era.