1877: Retrenchment and Jim Crow
Big Idea
After Reconstruction, African Americans shifted from resisting enslavement in the institution of slavery to resisting a new racial caste system referred to as “Jim Crow.”
What’s important to know?
End of Reconstruction: With the end of federal support for reconstruction requiring White acquiescence to integration, Black advancements ground to a halt.
Sharecropping: The federal government failed to provide land and benefits to freed Black people, leaving them without homes or resources. White plantation owners created the system of "sharecropping" to exploit this vulnerability and maintain economic control over Black individuals.
Jim Crow: Jim Crow referred to the legal and social methods White leaders used to regain control over Black lives in the South.
The Fight for Reparations: Black leaders acknowledged the economic contributions of Black people to White Americans and sought financial reparations to help them establish financial independence and avoid economic subjugation.
1: End of Reconstruction
When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for Black people ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated Black men, women, and children from much of White life in the South. The deep-seated racial attitudes that perceived White people as superior to Black people had not died with the end of the War. And once the federal government was not forcing compliance with measures intended to establish equality between Black and White people, White leaders quickly adapted to recreate the pre-Civil War norms that had elevated White people and subjugated Black people.
A political cartoon of Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, 1865: "The Rail Splitter At Work Repairing the Union." The caption reads (Johnson): Take it quietly Uncle Abe and I will draw it closer than ever. (Lincoln): A few more stitches Andy and the good old Union will be mended.
Image Source: Wikipedia
Historian Kidada Williams (2012) described the actions of White southerns in this way: “from the 1870s to the 1890s, white conservatives sabotaged black people’s economic, political, and social advancement and amassed the political power ceded by white progressives, who were tired of attempting to transform the South. White southern conservatives used many white northern progressives’ desire for sectional reconciliation in service of an aggressive but initially inchoate campaign of resubjugating blacks” (p. 56).
Black Americans resisted and used every possible political avenue they had available to them. They went to Washington, D.C. and testified in front of special panels gathered to investigate the “alleged violence and fraud” in the election of 1878. When that investigation produced no tangible results, Black leaders from the South wrote President Rutherford B. Hayes directly. “We cannot go home,” they wrote, “yet our families are there in want. . . . We cannot ever hope to return to them for to return is to be murdered for daring to be free” (Williams, 2012, p. 56). In this particular case, the White leaders in Louisiana, had told these men they were being “charitably exiled” — i.e., they were being given the chance to leave and remain alive (p. 55).
The end of the Civil War brought constitutional changes, but the federal government's failure to challenge and change existing systems allowed Southern leaders to quickly regain control and restore their practices for their benefit. After the war, the focus on “reconciliation” encouraged Northern leaders to overlook the issues that separated the North and South during the Civil War. They gradually began to accept the Southern claim of states’ rights as the main cause of the conflict, while downplaying the racism and anti-Black actions that actually sparked the war. As Williams wrote, “Looking back on the 1880s from the 1910s, W. E. B. Du Bois likened this congealing of antiblack racism under the long process of sectional reconciliation to a ‘silent revolution,’ a series of tidal waves set in motion by cultural and political earthquakes” (Williams, 2012, p. 58).
Listen
Listen to a podcast from Seizing Freedom with historian Deborah Willis as she describes how photographs from the era help tell the untold story of African Americans during the post-Civil War period.
2: Sharecropping
Because the federal government failed to follow through on it’s initial promise to provide “40-acres and a mule” to freed Black people, thousands of Black families were homeless, unemployed, and with few avenues to gain these.
Freedmen’s contract between Isham G. Bailey and freedmen Cooper Hughs and Charles Roberts, January 1, 1867
Image Source: The Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC04522.11
White plantation owners were only too happy to step into that vacuum and design a new form of forced labor. Known as “sharecropping” (a nice pseudonym that suggested sharing but really was about subjugation) became the dominant system of labor that replaced the old slave-based plantation structure.
Sharecropping agreements divided old plantations into smaller units of land, which were then leased to poor White and Black farmers with nearly half of the land being leased to African American families. These families worked the land (usually 30 to 50 acres) in return for a portion of the crop share. Not having existing savings, White owners “loaned” money to Black farmers with interest so they could purchase their farming supplies (from other White shop owners). The interest charged for these loans and the costs of the materials were often high (some interests rates being as high as 70%). If the harvest for one year was not good, then this would leave the Black farmer in debt. This often drove Black families to use more of their property to grow sellable crops and less of it to farm for basic food items needed for families. Debt accumulation grew as did the lack of food supporting good nutrition — hurting Black family health and keeping them in a cycle of poverty.
“[B]etween 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks.”
3: Jim Crow
Sign for the "colored" waiting room
At a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, May 1940.
Image Source: Wikipedia
A racial caste system, referred to as “Jim Crow,” replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. These laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Blacks to second-class citizens (Hoelscher, 2003, p. 659; Woodward, 1955). Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) describes Jim Crow in the following way: “between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks” (pp. 22-23).
Jim Crow was more pervasive and all-encompassing than most, especially White people today realize. As Margaret Burnham noted in her book By Hands Now Known (2024):
“[T]he system of white supremacy that prevailed between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century is ancient history for the current generation… they likely have little sense of the quotidien violence that shaped routine experiences like grocery shopping and tied the nation’s legal institutions to its racial culture… The chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life, dictating the movements and posters of white storeowners and Black customers, is what sustained Jim Crow for over half a century” (p. xx).
In his classic way, Frederick Douglass described Jim Crow as a system where “wrongs are not much now written in laws which all may see — but the hidden practices of people who have not yet, abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man” (Douglass, 1887 letter).
“[W]rongs are not much now written in laws which all may see – but the hidden practices of people who have not yet, abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man.”
4: The Fight for Reparations
Callie House - leader of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association
Image Source: Wikipedia
African Americans continued to assert their rights and push back against the Jim Crow-ism that sought to control their lives in the American South. Their success kept Jim Crow in check. Geographer Steven Hoelscher (2003) noted “its [Jim Crow’s] power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (p. 660).
One way Black Americans fought for their agency was through the cause for reparations. Historian Mary Francis Berry wrote about the story of Callie House, an African American woman who had been freed after the Civil War and who dedicated her life to holding White men and women responsible for the sin of enslavement.
She tirelessly advocated for pensions to be provided to previously enslaved Americans and to be paid for by using the $68 million in taxes seized from rebel cotton (Berry, 2010).
Your Turn
Are there ways that Jim Crow attitudes still appear in society? How are they displayed? How has the reparations argument developed over time? What does the United States owe African Americans?
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Listen to an oral history interview of a man who grew up under the sharecropping system in the South. (Library of Congress).
Explore The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship from the Library of Congress.
Watch the PBS documentary “Slavery by Another Name.”
Visit the website project “A Red Record,” which traces the history of lynching in the American South.
Visit the website for the Jim Crow Museum.
Explore the Jim Crow Era Timeline.
Explore Behind the Veil: A Documentary Digital Archive from Duke University on Jim Crow and segregation.
Read:
Berry, M. F. (2006). My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the struggle for ex-slave reparations. Vintage.
Costa D. L. (2010). Pensions and Retirement Among Black Union Army Veterans. The journal of economic history, 70(3), 567–592. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050710000549
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Lesson plan from Learning for Justice related to African American experience after the Civil War. (Middle and high school grades)
Documentary film - An Outrage - on lynchings in the American South from Learning for Justice. (Grades 9-12)
Lesson plan using a Sharecropping Contract from Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Lesson from Smithsonian Museum of American Art on Jim Crow in the South.
Library of Congress Teaching Guide on Jim Crow and Segregation.
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Read about African Americans in Missouri in the post-war years at the Missouri Digital Archive.
Read the autobiography of a woman who grew up on The Ville during Jim Crow: Merry, P. E. (2022). Growing Up in The Ville in St. Louis, Missouri. Great Tales Well Told Publishing.
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Berry, M. F. (2006). My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the struggle for ex-slave reparations. Vintage.
Burnham, M. A. (2022). By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. W.W. Norton.
Cook Bell, K. (2018). African American Freedom and the Illusive “Forty Acres and a Mule.” Black Perspectives, AAIHS.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (2007, reprint). Black Reconstruction in America. Oxford University Press.
Jaynes, G.D. (1989). Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882. Oxford University Press.
Logan, R. W. (1954). The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir 1877–1901. Dial Press.
Moses, W. J. (1988). The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925. Oxford University Press.
Hunter, T. (1998). To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Harvard University Press.
Thaggart, M. (2022). Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad. University of Illinois Press.
Williams, K. E. (2023). I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction. Bloomsbury Press.
——-. (2012). They Left Great Marks on Me : African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/9780814784860.
Woodward, C. V. (1955). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.
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Berry, M. F. (2006). My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the struggle for ex-slave reparations. Vintage.
Cook Bell, K. (2018). African American Freedom and the Illusive “Forty Acres and a Mule.” Black Perspectives, AAIHS.
Douglass, F. (1887). Frederick Douglass to unknown recipient, November 23, 1887 (Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC08992).
Hoelscher, S. (2003). Making place, making race: performances of whiteness in the jim crow south. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,93(3), 657-686. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1515502
Mintz, S. (2008). Frederick Douglass Reflects on the Status of African Americans. OAH Magazine of History, 22(2), 49–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162173
Royce, E. (1993). The rise of southern sharecropping. The origins of southern sharecropping (pp. 181-222). Temple University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt3nz.9
Thompson Fullilove, M. (2016). Root shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it. New Village Press.