From the Transformative Justice Coalition and the Voting Rights Alliance
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A Legacy of Disenfranchisement: Black Massacres
(1860’s – early 1900’s)
“Lynchings were the original form of voter suppression…The legacy of that suppression is still evident today. The past affects people’s behavior today even if they don’t realize it.”
The Transformative Justice Coalition and the Voting Rights Alliance, in honor of Black History Month, are reviving the daily special series devoted to sharing the legacies and stories of the sheroes, heroes, and events in the fight for Black suffrage. This series was created in 2017 and will add 13 NEW articles this year. In addition to these daily newsletters all February long, this series also incorporates daily social media posts; an interactive calendar; and, website blog posts to spread the word broadly.
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This article was authored by Caitlyn Arnwine (formerly Caitlyn Cobb)in 2022.Note from the author: This article is comprised of quotes from many different articles in order to provide a more comprehensive account of this time period as well as to keep this article more brief. A complete reference list can be found at the end of this article.
I hope you have enjoyed the first week of this year’s Black History series. Today, February 8th, 2024, we remember the Black massacres that occurred between the 1860’s and early 1900’s. While many more massacres occurred after and before this, the extreme concentration of Black massacres during this time period were specifically targeted against Black men exerting their right to vote under 15th amendment. In this article, I revisit the time periods already covered in previous iterations of this Series, and reveal this brutal hidden history.
Fort Pillow, located on the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee was a strategic location held by United States (Union) forces just north of Memphis and controlling river access to and from St. Louis and the Ohio River Valley. Black soldiers serving in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), who were regularly enlisted in the Union army and in full uniform, were stationed with White troops at Fort Pillow under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest defending the United States flag.
On April 12, 1864, The Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest — also infamous for being the first grand wizard of the early Klu Klux Klan— led an attack on Fort Pillow in Tennessee. The troops tried twice to use a “flag of truce” to surrender prior to the attack, but “[a]fter taking the fort, ‘the Confederates commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded.’ Black women and children in the fort were also slaughtered.
“Out of the garrison of six hundred, only two hundred remained alive.” In the same issue, the Times published an account of events from a correspondent of the Union who was on board the steamer Platte Valley at Fort Pillow:
“On the morning after the battle the [Confederates] went over the field, and shot the negroes who had not died from their wounds . . . . Many of those who had escaped from the works and hospital, who desired to be treated as prisoners of war, as the rebels said, were ordered to fall into line, and when they had formed, were inhumanly shot down. Of 350 colored troops not more than 56 escaped the massacre, and not one officer that commanded them survives.”
“Confederate General Forrest himself prepared a report which stated ‘A demand was made for the surrender, which was refused. The victory was complete, and the loss of the enemy will never be known from the fact that large numbers ran into the river and were shot and drowned. The force was composed of about 500 negroes and 200 white soldiers (Tennessee Tories). The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards. There was in the fort a large number of citizens who had fled there to escape the conscript law.’
According to Lincoln chronicler Ronald C. White, Jr., ‘Lincoln was besieged with calls for retribution.’… The Fort Pillow massacre horrified and alarmed whites and blacks in the North. Historian T. Harry Williams wrote: ‘The newspapers supplied the public with sensational and, in some respects, exaggerated accounts. The great illustrated weeklies dramatized the scenes at Pillow with vivid sketches. Immediately the Jacobins set up a clamor for measures of retaliation upon Confederate prisoners. They charged that Abraham Lincoln was the real murderer of the Negro garrison. If he had threatened reprisals when the Confederacy first announced that it would not grant colored soldiers the protection of the laws of war, the Fort Pillow tragedy would never have occurred.'”
July 13, 1863: New York City Draft Riots and Massacre
“For the conservative provisional governors appointed by President Johnson organized lily-white governments with blatant proslavery biases. In 1865 and 1866 these governments enacted the Black Codes which indicated that the South intended to reestablish slavery under another name. The codes restricted the rights of freedmen under vagrancy and apprenticeship laws. South Carolina forbade freedmen to follow any occupation except farming and menial service and required a special license to do other work. The legislature also gave ‘masters’ the right to whip ‘servants’ under eighteen years of age. In other states Blacks could be punished for ‘insulting gestures,’ ‘seditious speeches’ and the ‘crime’ of walking off a job. Blacks could not preach in one state without police permission. A Mississippi law enacted late in November required Blacks to have jobs before the second Monday in January.
“Even more serious was the vindictive attitude of Southerners, who vented their frustration on unarmed Blacks. Gen. Carl Schurz, who made a special investigation for the president, was astonished by postwar conditions in the South. ‘Some planters,’ he said, ‘held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the country roads to drive back the Negros wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and by-ways. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated with scourges. A number of such cases, I had occasion to examine myself. A . . . reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South.
“Throughout this period, and on into the 1870s, hundreds of freemen were massacred in ‘riots’ staged and directed by policemen and other government officials. In the Memphis, Tennessee, ‘riot’ of May 1866, forty-six Blacks (Union veterans were a special target) were killed and seventy-five were wounded. Five Black women were raped by whites, twelve schools and four churches were burned. Two months later, in New Orleans, policemen returned to the attack, killing some forty Blacks and wounding one hundred.”
The New Orleans Massacre is one of the deadliest attacks on voting rights activists in American history. In New Orleans on July 30, 1866, a White mob, led by police and firemen, attacked delegates, Black marchers, and spectators gathered at the Mechanics Institute during the reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The Convention reconvened in response to the state legislature enacting Black Codes and limiting suffrage. The attack left over forty African Americans dead, over 150 wounded.
“In 1864, Union forces had almost entirely liberated Louisiana from Confederate control, and the state’s all-white electorate had drafted and ratified a new state constitution that acknowledged the abolition of slavery. Still, the document sanctioned restrictions on African American civil and political rights, and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Louisiana voters, many of whom were Confederate veterans, returned numerous Confederate officials to state and federal offices under the banner of a Democratic Party that openly proclaimed to be in favor of white supremacy. ‘We hold this to be a Government of white people,’ the platform of the state party maintained, ‘made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.’ Indeed, the platform announced, ‘people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.’ It came as no surprise that the state legislature promptly passed discriminatory laws known as Black Codes that targeted the formerly enslaved, nor that the mayor of New Orleans, former Confederate John T. Monroe, instructed city policemen to single out the formerly enslaved for arrest.
“Frustrated by this ongoing racial discrimination and the resumption of Confederate rule, in 1866 leading African American suffrage activists convinced a handful of white former delegates to Louisiana’s 1864 Constitutional Convention to reconvene the convention in New Orleans, and to draft a state constitutional amendment enfranchising African American men. Their plan relied upon a technicality, namely that the motion to adjourn the 1864 Convention had contained a provision authorizing it to reconvene to pass amendments at any later date.
“Activists also recognized that the vote bore profound symbolic significance. In a world where women could not vote and political participation signified manhood and status, exclusion from the polls was both emasculating and humiliating. African American men demanded “political rights,” argued black Union army veteran and future Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback, but they also demanded ‘to become men’.
“The vote was no less meaningful to embittered Confederate army veterans, who already felt emasculated by military defeat and saw the prospect of African American enfranchisement as an amplification of that emasculation. State Democratic officials declared the reconvening of the Constitutional Convention illegal. When judicial challenges to the reconvening failed, Mayor Monroe, the police chief, and former Confederate officers secretly resolved to annihilate the convention delegates instead. They covertly enlisted hundreds of Confederate army veterans as emergency police officers, and police and fire stations received orders to prepare for a showdown on July 30, 1866.
“On the morning of the convention, a jubilant parade of African American suffrage supporters, [a delegation of 130 black New Orleans residents], carried a large American flag and followed a marching band through the streets towards the hall where the convention delegates were assembling. The marchers’ elation shifted towards apprehension as crowds of hostile onlookers began to gather.”
Newly reinstated acting Mayor John T. Monroe, an active supporter of the Confederacy who had headed city government before the Civil War, organized and led a mob of ex-Confederates, White Supremacists, and members of the New Orleans Police Force to block their way. The Mayor claimed their intent was to put down any unrest that may come from the Convention but the real reason was to prevent the delegates from meeting.”
“A fight broke out. Distant pistol fire cracked.”
“…[T]he city’s fire bell rang twelve tolls, the traditional code for summoning residents to defend the city against imminent enemy attack. As the bell fell silent, police, firemen, and white civilians surrounded the parade and the hall.
Then they opened fire.” “..[T]he group was allowed to proceed to the meeting hall…Now the police and mob surrounded the Institute and opened fire on the building, shooting indiscriminately into the windows. Then the mob rushed into the building and began to fire into the crowd of delegates. When the mob ran out of ammunition they were beaten back by the delegates. The mob left the building, regrouped, and returned, breaking down the doors and again firing on the mostly unarmed delegates.”
According to accounts of surviving spectators, rioters slaughtered marchers kneeling in surrender, and mutilated their bodies. People fell like flies as the mob shot at them, and when they were done, “they tramped upon them, and mashed their heads with their boots, and shot them after they were down.”
As the firing continued some delegates attempted to flee or surrender. Some of those who surrendered, mostly blacks, were killed on the spot. Those who ran were chased as the killing spread over several blocks around the Institute. By this point both the rioters and victims included people who were never at the Institute. African Americans were shot on the street or pulled off of streetcars to be summarily beaten or killed. By the end of the massacre, at least 200 black Union war veterans were killed, including forty delegates at the Convention. Altogether 238 people were killed and 46 were wounded.”
“When federal troops finally arrived hours later, the floor was sticky with blood. Three white delegates and more than forty African American supporters lay dead. Another 150 lay wounded. Only one white Democrat had been killed, by a policeman’s stray bullet.
Yet the attack backfired. News of the brutality swept the nation and horrified the North, galvanizing northern white support for African American political and civil rights. Republicans swept the 1866 Congressional elections. In 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under federal military control and calling for new constitutional conventions in which African American men could vote for delegates. Federal officials removed Mayor Monroe and other former Confederate officials from office. Louisiana’s new legislature dissolved the New Orleans’ police department and replaced it with a racially integrated force.”
Below are more massacres of Black people that occurred after the 1860’s.
Sept. 28, 1868, Opelousas Massacre
Deadliest Massacre in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana: On Sept. 28, 1868, one of the worst outbreaks of violence during Reconstruction took place in Opelousas, Louisiana.
In late October of 1868, armed groups of White men mobilized to suppress the recently emancipated voters in the hopes of regaining their way of life turned upside down by the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The Camilla Massacre took place on September 19, 1868 near Albany, Georgia. The massacre was one of many acts of repression carried out by white supremacists during the Reconstruction era to roll back advances in civic, economic, and human rights …
As Mary Ann Shadd Cary joined other women in an unsuccessful attempt to vote in 1874:
Nov. 3, 1874: White League Attacks Black Voters
On Nov. 3, 1874, deadly election “riots” took place in Barbour County, Alabama. The White League, (a paramilitary group affiliated with the Democratic party) attacked African-American voters at the polls in Eufaula and Spring Hill. Seven…
On Dec. 7, 1874, the Reconstruction era “Vicksburg Massacre” occurred in Mississippi, with estimates ranging from 75 to 300 African Americans killed. Whites attacked Black citizens who had organized to defend Peter Crosby. Formerly enslaved and a …
The Reconstruction era Clinton Massacre began on Sept. 4, 1875, in the small town of Clinton, Mississippi at a Republican rally to introduce the party’s candidates who were running for political office in the upcoming November elections. The…
On July 4, 1876, (in the midst of a heated Reconstruction era local election season) a Black militia was engaged in military exercises when two white farmers attempted to drive through. Although the farmers got through the military formation…
The Danville Riot occurred on Nov. 3, 1883. White supremacists resented the biracial Readjuster Party which controlled the city council seats in the majority African American city of Danville, Virginia in 1882. An attack by white supremacists…
A couple years after 1896 when Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Margaret Murray Washington, Frances E.W. Harper, and Mary Church Terrell founded The National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC-) in Washington, D.C.; and, during George H. White’s Congressional term for North Carolina’s Second Congressional District (1899-1901):
Nov. 10, 1898: Wilmington Massacre
On Nov. 10, 1898, white supremacists murdered African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina and deposed the elected Reconstruction era government in a coup d’etat. It was the morning of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the…
Remembering Red Summer – Which Textbooks Seem Eager to…
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when Black people defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship in thousands of acts of courage and daring, small and large, individual …
In 1920 after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, as Maggie Lena Walker was holding voter registration drives; as Anna A. Clemons was pleading for her right to vote; as Mary McLeod Bethunerode a bicycle door-to-door raising money to pay the “poll tax”:
Nov. 2, 1920: The Ocoee Massacre
In response to an attempt by African Americans to exercise their legal and democratic right to vote, at least 50 African Americans were murdered in a brutal massacre in Ocoee, Florida on Nov. 2, 1920 in what is now called the Ocoee Massacre.
One of the most violent episodes of dispossession in U.S. history began on May 31, 1921 in Greenwood, a thriving Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. . . . From May 31 through June 1, deputized whites killed more than 300 African Americans.
We cannot go through every massacre, but encourage our readers to read up on different massacres using the map below and the sources listed at the end of this article as a starting reference.
Did you miss any of the #VRABlackHistory series articles?
[December 25, 1868.- Granting full pardon and amnesty to all persons engaged in the late rebellion.]: By the President of the United States of America. A proclamation … Done at the City of Washington, the twenty-fifth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight … (n.d.). [Online text]. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.23602600/
Donald, H. B. B. (n.d.). WHEN THE RULE OF LAW BREAKS DOWN: IMPLICATIONS OF THE 1866 MEMPHIS MASSACRE FOR THE PASSAGE OF THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT. BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, 98, 70.
July 19, 1919: White Mobs in Uniform Attack African Americans — Who Fight Back — in Washington, D.C. (n.d.). Zinn Education Project. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/red-summer-dc/
Monica, 1776 Main Street Santa, & California 90401-3208. (n.d.-a). Historic Lynchings in the U.S. South Are Linked to Lower Levels of Voter Registration Among Black People. Retrieved February 9, 2022, from https://www.rand.org/news/press/2021/07/27.html
Stephen West. (2018, October 27). 1. In the Reconstruction South, Democratic leaders publicly denied responsibility for the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. They blamed violence on “poor whites” and said it had no political significance. Those politicians were lying. [Tweet]. @Stephen_A_West. https://twitter.com/Stephen_A_West/status/1056264357586313216
Williams, J. (n.d.-a). Historical Lynchings and Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks. 52.
Williams, J. (n.d.-c). Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20190549
