Or Other Crime

How Black voting rights were sabotaged by a three-word phrase in the 14th Amendment, and how they can be reconstructed

- By Pema Levy

In 1866, an Army officer named Robert Avery was stationed in North Carolina when he began hearing disturbing reports: Former rebels were rounding up as many Black men as they could find, dispensing summary justice, and whipping them in public view. Avery, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau there, alerted his superiors in Washington. The press got hold of his dispatch and began to chronicle the situation. Harper’s Weekly told of 500 people in Raleigh gathering to watch “the public whipping of colored men.”

The whippings were about more than bloodlust. They served a political purpose. Under North Carolina law, a crime punished by public whipping would cost the offender the right to vote. The white rebels plotted to “seize negroes, procure convictions for petty offenses punishable at the whipping post, and thus disqualify them forever from voting in North Carolina,” Avery reported. He had overheard members of the state legislature celebrating that it would “head off Congress from making the negroes voters.” One had bragged, “We are licking them in our part of the State and if we keep on we can lick them all by next year, and none of them can vote.”