JIM CROW RETURNS

A century ago, they tore the progress of Reconstruction to shreds. They're doing it again.

- Mitchell s. jackson

FOR AS LONG AS THERE HAS BEEN A UNITED STATES OF AMERica, its highest-ranked somebodies have been white, educated men of means. The nobodies have changed across the ages, but for longer than there has been a U.S. of A., the somebodies have conspired Black people into the ranks of nobodies. Black people have opposed that oppression since they were stolen to these shores, have achieved remarkable gains given the dominion of those oppressors. And those gains were most prolific in the 12-year period following the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

Fostering unrivaled Black progress at the time of Reconstruction, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau (1865), whose role included affording Black people federal protection in the former Confederate states, border states, and Washington, D. C., and managing labor contracts between freedmen and former enslavers. In the radical political shift of Reconstruction, Black men gained their suffrage and the right to serve as elected officials (according to historian Eric Foner's Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, more than 1,500 Black people took office in the South during that time), as well as the right to bear arms and own property. Despite the ineffectualness of efforts including the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 and General W. T. Sherman's Special Field Order 15 (source of the famed 40 acres and a mule), Black people still managed to buy 16 million acres of farmland by 1910. One study notes that more than 3,000 Black people owned businesses in the upper South by 1870. Reconstruction begot the first HBCU in the South and included the guarantees granted by the ephemeral Civil Rights Act of 1875: access to public schools, public transport, churches, and theaters and the right to serve as jurors and have lawsuits tried in federal courts.