By Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston 
and David Cason, University of North Dakota 

Donald Trump is the third U.S. president to pardon a large group of insurrectionists. His clemency toward those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – including seditious conspiracy and assaults on police officers – was different in key ways from the two previous efforts, by Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1873.

But they share the apparent hope that their pardons would herald periods of national harmony. As historians of the period after the Civil War, we know that for Johnson and Grant, that’s not what happened.

When Johnson became president in 1865 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he faced a combative Congress. Though Johnson had opposed the secession of the Southern states before the Civil War began, he agreed with former Confederate leaders that formerly enslaved people did not deserve equality with White people.

Further, as a Southerner, he wanted to maintain the social conventions and economic structure of the South by replacing enslavement with economic bondage. This economic bondage, called sharecropping, was a system by which tenant farmers rented land from large landowners.

Tenants rarely cleared enough to pay their costs and fell into debt. In effect, Johnson sought to restore the nation to how it was before the Civil War, though without legalized slavery – and sought every avenue available to thwart the plans of the Radical Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress to create full racial equality.

Johnson signed an amnesty that gave a blanket pardon to all former Confederate soldiers. However, he required formerly high-ranking Confederate officials to individually seek pardons for their involvement in the rebellion. These officials faced permanent disfranchisement and could not hold federal office if they did not seek a pardon.

When Congress was in recess, Johnson vetoed two bills that had been passed: one to help find homes for formerly enslaved people who could no longer live on the property of their enslavers, and the other to define U.S. citizenship and ensure equal protection of the laws for Black people as well as White people.

Johnson also told Southern states not to ratify the 14th Amendment, whose purpose was to enshrine both citizenship and equal protection in the Constitution.

When Congress came back in session, it continued its effort of Reconstruction of the former Confederate states – reforming their racist laws and policies to comport with the liberty and equality the Union was committed to – by overriding Johnson’s vetoes and requiring former Confederate states to ratify the 14th Amendment as a condition of readmission to the Union, but Congress could not override the pardons the president had granted.

This continued political warfare resulted in Johnson being impeached – but not convicted or removed from office. But the back-and-forth also stalled Reconstruction and efforts toward racial equality, ultimately dooming the effort.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was not covered by Johnson’s general amnesty. As a former Confederate general, he had to apply for a personal presidential pardon, which Johnson granted on July 17, 1868. Two months later, Forrest represented Tennessee at the Democratic Party’s national convention in New York City.

He also took command of the Ku Klux Klan, the unofficial militant wing of the Democratic Party. Forrest initiated the title “Grand Wizard,” a bizarre title derived from his Civil War nickname, “Wizard of the Saddle.” He became a leader of former Confederates who resisted Reconstruction through violence and terror.

After his pardon, Forrest perfected a rhetorical technique for his extremism. His biographer Court Carney described it as a multistep process, starting with, “Say something exaggerated and inflammatory that plays well with supporters.” Then, deny saying it “to maintain a semblance of professional decorum.” Then, blur the threats with “crowd pleasing humor.” It proved an effective way of threatening violence while being able to deny responsibility for any violence that occurred.

Under Forrest’s leadership, membership in the violent, racist Ku Klux Klan spread almost everywhere in the South. Records are sketchy, so it’s impossible to say how many people were lynched, but the Equal Justice Initiative has documented 2,000 lynchings of Black Americans during Reconstruction. Black women and girls were often raped by klansmen or members of its successor militias.

It’s also not possible to say how many pardoned ex-Confederates participated in the lynchings. But the violence was so widespread that just about everyone, North and South, thought the political violence was a resumption of the Civil War.

In the Piedmont of the Carolinas, klan violence amounted to a shadow government of White nationalists. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to apprehend the klansmen, and a newly minted Department of Justice prosecuted the insurrectionists for violating Civil Rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments.

After several trials that proved to be what the federal judiciary’s official history calls “dramatic spectacles,” federal judges handed down conviction after conviction.

The federal government’s decisive action allowed for a relatively free presidential election in 1872. Black voters helped Grant win in eight Southern states, contributing to his landslide victory.

But after his reelection, Grant appointed a new attorney general, who dropped the pending klan cases. Grant also pardoned klansmen who had already been convicted of crimes.

Grant hoped his gesture would encourage Southerners to accept the nation’s new birth of freedom.

It didn’t. The pardons told former Confederates that they were winning.

John Christopher Winsmith, an ex-Confederate who embraced racial equality and whose father had been shot by the KKK, wrote to Grant in 1873, “A few trials and convictions in the U.S. Courts, and then the pardoning of the criminals” had emboldened what he called “the hideous monster – Ku Kluxism.”

And a new gang arose, too: the Red Shirts, who began to murder Black people openly, not even in secret as the klan did. Two of the Red Shirts were later elected to the U.S. Senate.

Paramilitary groups established anti-democratic one-party rule in every former Confederate state, imposing discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow, which were enforced by lynchings and other forms of racial violence.

The federal government took no substantive action against this for a century, until the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement sparked change. And it wasn’t until 2022 that Congress passed an anti-lynching bill.

Joseph Patrick Kelly is professor of literature and director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston, and David Cason is associate professor in Honors, University of North Dakota 

The post Pardons for insurrectionists lead to racial violence and turmoil appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

Contributed

Date and Time: Thursday, August 15, 2024 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location: 50 East Freedom Way, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

Event Type: Panel Discussion, Film Screenings

Cost: Free

The legacy of the Green Book lives on in a generation that outlived Jim Crow.

Explore the history of the Green Book during a screening of THE GREEN BOOK: GUIDE TO FREEDOM and join Reverend Damon Lynch, Jr. (Pastor Emeritus, New Jerusalem Baptist Church), Sherry Glover Thompson (daughter of former King Records executive Henry Glover) and Angenita Brown (PhD, Chief of Staff, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center) as they share their own stories growing up in the era of institutionalized segregation and how the Green Book became a local passport to freedom.

5:30 p.m. Doors open

6 p.m. Screening of The Green Book: Guide to Freedom

7 p.m. Conversation with Reverend Damon Lynch, Jr., Sherry Glover Thompson and Angenita Brown, moderated by Trudy Gaba

About the film:

The Green Book: Guide to Freedom – Run time: 51 minutes

In the 1930s, a Black postal carrier from Harlem named Victor Green published a book that was part travel guide and part survival guide. It was called The Negro Motorist Green Book, and it helped African Americans navigate safe passage across America well into the 1960s.

Explore some of the segregated nation’s safe havens and notorious “sundown towns” and witness stories of struggle and indignity as well as opportunity and triumph.

The post Vacationing with Green Book appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.

The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.

There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.

In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.

As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.

In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..

Reparations to slave owners

The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.

The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.

The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.

The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.

In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.

Emancipation myths and realities

On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”

At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.

After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.

Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.

All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.

Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.

The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.

Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.

Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Slavery by another name

After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.

And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.

In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.

Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”

Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The meaning of Juneteenth

Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.

On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.

They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.

Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.

At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”

The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kris Manjapra, Tufts University

Read more:

• Juneteenth: Freedom’s promise is still denied to thousands of blacks unable to make bail
• There was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people
• African Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces

Kris Manjapra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The post Juneteenth: Celebrating the history of emancipation appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz, Sam Houston State University

Read more:

• 6 books that explain the history and meaning of Juneteenth
• Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too
• Juneteenth and Emancipation Day: How the ‘Buy Black’ movement is addressing economic inequality

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The post Juneteenth’s legacy: Lessons for lawmakers today appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By the Rev. Norman Franklin,

Herald Contributor

I read a Time Magazine article recently by Dr. Robert Jones. He is the author of “White Too Long” and is a White southerner from Mississippi. His latest book is “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.” The Time article pulls from the content of the book.

I find the whole thing unsettling.

Two Papal Bulls were issued in the 15h century that unleashed atrocities against humanity in the immediate and for centuries beyond. That theological error undermines the hope of social equality and undergirds the social construct of race and race superiority. The crimes committed under the authority of these papal edits have not escaped the notice of the God we serve. The crimes committed by those with internalized racial superiority will likewise be held accountable.

The initial edit by Pope Nicholas in 1452, Dr. Jones notes, laid the theological and political foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery. The nefarious doctrine granted Portugal the unfettered right to invade, conquer and enslave any they encountered. The Portuguese were prominent in the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 15^th to the 17^th century. Pope Alexander, in 1493, issued his papal bull with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership rights of lands they stumbled upon.

It baffles the mind, it stretches the boundaries of spiritual credulity, how a man, the Pope, the Holy Father, who God talks to, could issue a Papal Bull, a theological doctrine, that is antithetical to the character and nature of the God he serves.

It makes Him a liar, the God who said He is impartial, the God who said through the apostle Paul, that there is neither Jew or Greek, slave or free for those in Christ, the God who said that His Word does not change and that He does not change, became the god of White Europeans rather than the God of all creation.

At that time there was no one to challenge the theological soundness of the doctrine. The bulls were not widely distributed. Only church leaders who held positions of authority and members of nobility and aristocracy, particularly those with church and political ties, had access to the documents.

The Bible wasn’t readily accessible to low-ranked clergy or the common man until after 1455. Then the Johannes Gutenberg invention of the printing press significantly reduced the cost of producing books. That made the Bible accessible to low-ranked clergy and the common man.

We can excuse the clergy of that day for their silence, we can excuse Portuguese King Alphonso, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Their concerns were with expansion and power, not the soundness of Papal Bulls. Christopher Columbus, even on his second voyage, still believed that he had reached Asian shores; we can excuse his silence. But we cannot excuse the churches, the theologians, the seminaries of the enlightened eras.

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” Martin Luther King Jr., said as he spoke out against the war in Vietnam. The same principle applies to sounding out the error of theological doctrine.

I can’t help reasoning that at some point religious leaders, particularly since America experienced three “Great Awakenings” of religious revival and spiritual renewal, would have spoken out against an ideology undergirded by false theology that was drenching the faith in sin.

The first awakening was 1730-1740, a period of colonialism and the grumblings of Christian nation building. The second was the 1790s-early 1800s, America was fully engaged in chattel slavery, land grabbing and genocide of Native Americans. The latest was in the late 19^th and early 20th century. There was a marked emphasis on social reform, abolishing slavery and women’s suffrage.

None of the awakenings put the axe to the root of our sin.

The Doctrine of Discovery escapes the scrutiny of most White scholars and theologians, Dr. Jones states.

Whites are unwilling to consider the illegitimacy of privilege and its damning effect on social equality, unwilling to acknowledge their internalized superiority beliefs and implicit bias, unwilling to point the finger of accountability at a pillar of their faith whose misstated doctrine unleashed a torrent of hatred, murder and sin that yet permeates every fiber of our world.

I find it disturbing that there is no moral outrage at the scriptural ignorance, the positional arrogance, the audacity of the content and context of the papacy’s statement that led many to commit sins. I’m disturbed that the average White person harbors internalized superiority. 

This ideology gave us years of genocide, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, the torture and massacre of Emmitt Till, mass murders of Native Americans and the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. 

The silence of the church and the silence of so-called progressive White America is a betrayal of biblical principles, Christ and of the Christian faith. I needed to find some understanding for why Pope Nicholas, a “man of God,” one believed to possess the power of papal infallibility, would misrepresent God with his 1452 edit. 

I reached out to my friend, former pastor, writer and Christian thinker, the Rev. Joel A. Bowman Sr., for some perspective. 

Bowman says, “This indicates that Western Christian theology was shaped by White supremacy. When one baptizes this pernicious ideology with the allusion of God’s sanction, it is especially dangerous.”

I pensively processed all this through the prism of the hope of justice, as I paced back and forth through the annals of my mind. The problem, the error, the false theology can never be resolved until it is confronted. 

James Baldwin, renowned African American writer who challenged the social order, said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

It’s past time for us to face this. 

The post Commentary: The silence that betrayed Christianity appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By Daniel Thorp

Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech   

Reprinted with permission     

The commemoration of Black History Month affords an opportunity to explore the rich history of Black communities in Appalachia between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. Daniel Thorp, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, has dedicated his research toward this aim.

Q: A widespread misconception about southern Appalachia maintains slavery didn’t exist in the region, thus there was a sparse Black populace. What was the reality?

“If a time traveler were to arrive in Southwest Virginia in the late 1800s seeking African American/Black communities, he or she would find dozens of rural Black communities and Black neighborhoods in almost every town in the region. Thousands of enslaved men and women lived in Southwest Virginia when slavery ended, in 1865, and many of them stayed in the region for years after gaining their freedom. Few had the resources to move immediately, and this is where their family and friends were; so they stayed.”

Q: How did African American communities come together in post-Civil War Appalachia?

“Almost immediately they began to establish dozens of independent Black churches, and with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern philanthropic societies they opened dozens of schools. These churches and schools often became the nuclei around which Black communities grew.”

Q: How did the people in these communities support themselves?

“Rural Blacks were mainly farmers, though some men combined farming with work on the railroad.  In towns, Black men were often laborers, though small numbers worked as craftsmen or shopkeepers, and by the end of the century a very small number of Black lawyers and doctors had begun to appear. Black women living in towns often worked as domestic servants.”

Q: Did any of them have a say in regional politics?

“Throughout this era Black men participated in politics. Few were elected to office in Southwest Virginia, but Black men voted in large numbers until the early 20th century, when a new state constitution made it almost impossible for them to do so.”

Q: What caused modern misconceptions about Black communities in Appalachia to take hold?

“Racism became more pronounced in Southwest Virginia at the turn of the 20th century. Lynching became common during the 1890s, and after 1900 segregation became more widespread and a new state constitution disenfranchised Black men almost entirely. These changes, combined with the difficulty of making a living in Southwest Virginia, led more and more African Americans to leave the region and move to southern cities like Roanoke or Charlotte, to coal fields in West Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa, or to northern cities like Chicago. Today few of these Black communities or neighborhoods still exist and few Whites, at least, even remember them.”

Daniel Thorp is an associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. Shortly after he joined the faculty, Thorp noticed that the prevailing story that slavery was mostly unheard of in Appalachia did not match the historical evidence and began researching further. He advocated for the dedication of Vaughn-Oliver Plaza, named after Virginia Tech’s first known Black employee. 

The post Expert recovers the history of Black communities in late-1800s Appalachia appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .