LeeAnna Keith: Exploring Reconstruction | BRI Scholar Talks

0:03 hi everyone I’m Tony Williams with the Bill of Rights Institute senior fellow there and welcome to our next conversation with a scholar who wrote for our life liberty and the pursuit of happiness resource this textbook is currently available for all the teachers out there at WWF Rights Institute org this is my happy privilege to be speaking today with a scholar Liana Keith she teaches history at the collegiate school for boys in New York City and is the author of two fine books on the Civil War and reconstruction period entitled the Colfax Massacre the untold story of black power white terror and the death of Reconstruction and also recently published when it was Grand the Radical Republican history of the Civil War Lana thank you for joining me tonight thanks so much for having me and thanks for inviting me also to participate in the textbook project that’s really been very thrilling and it’s great to see it coming out and it’s in its full form that’s good coming to fruition you you were one of almost a hundred scholars hurt now that’s just a tremendous resource for teachers and students so thank you again for your contribution well that leads me to my first question you did in fact write the chapter introduction for the life liberty and pursuit of happiness chapter on the late 19th century and so can you provide a little bit of general historical context for those events in American history as the setting for discussing the African American experience during the Livingston century right well you know I think the biggest story of the late nineteenth century is really the story of the American economy and of the incredible boom the incredible power of industrial capitalism that emerges during the Civil War it’s not like it had not existed at all before the Civil War but that it’s hyper-charged by the experience of providing for Union armies especially and that that momentum really drives a lot of the change that we associate with the Gilded Age things like not only factory production itself but also the mass markets that are created the consumer channels and tastes and identities that are created during this period the physical infrastructure that ties us together especially in railroads and in telecommunications and that also draws in like a great magnet you know human energy from all over the country right as rural people and African Americans begin to migrate into industrial centers

3:06 and from all over the world as we come to take in so many immigrants from you know international locations but it really changes the whole character of the citizenry to the point that almost one in three Americans has a tie either as a first generation immigrant or is the child of first generation immigrants for a period of time and that energy is I think the single most important that sort of capitalists expression boom of the late 19th century that connects a lot of different trends in a way though the black experience is kind of an outlier to those transformations in a way a kind of a misfit you know as we become more modern and more open in so many ways that there are also during this period real careful attentions to the idea that black people are inferior that they should be positioned and subservient ly in the American social networks and so that and other racist ideas that are very powerfully developed during the late 19th century they’re not really part of that capitalist transformation although they are a very powerful trend not just in the United States but globally as well ideas about racial hierarchy okay so some vast social and you can all and other changes that are going on you know very very interesting and so let’s go ahead and take a deep dive into that african-american experience of Witcher you’re an expert on what was the experience of African Americans let’s take a little step back here maybe especially during civil war reconstruction maybe paint some broad strokes what were some of those constitutional and let’s say electoral or political successes because there were a few and yeah on the other hand how did they suffer politically economically socially during that Reconstruction period right well you know the United States is almost unique in world history in the end that we don’t just end slavery here and and and slavery had ended in a lot of different societies by a lot of different avenues right but we take the most dramatic end almost right there’s there’s one other okay I’m gonna say almost right because the example of Haiti is so distinctive right and like the United States they had a violent upheaval that lasted for many years and claimed many lives as part of the context of their end of slavery also like the United States they make this choice in this case black people making the choice for themselves without white support that what replaces enslavement is going to be equality and that is a very special choice that Americans made during the war Americans black and white strove to transition out of slavery into something

6:07 almost like full citizenship and that is a kind of a dizzying transformation right from being subordinated by enslavement you know with with no rights and with tremendous physical hardships and emotional hardships and then to be raised to the idea of rights as citizens including voting rights and to become voters and office holders within a few years of the end of slavery that was a truly distinctive developments in American life and it’s something that we should recognize as a foundation for black achievements and and the sort of broadening democratic ideal in the 20th century and today right without the progress that we made during the civil war writing into our Constitution that black people are entitled to equality before the law and that they have citizenship rights that cannot be denied including voting rights on the basis of their race you know that is a wonderful foundation even if those principles are not fully realized in the 19th century even if the period of time when these principles were applied and really defended by the federal government during Reconstruction proved to be limited it did have long-term impact on making a more equal society now it’s not enough the the provisions that were written into the Constitution the commitment that the Republican Party and that the army took on to try to enforce the laws during Reconstruction that doesn’t last and it falls apart for a number of reasons I bet you’re going to want to talk about you know the sort of end of Reconstruction and and how that happens but having fallen apart it leaves black people with with few allies in national politics and forces people to rely on their own advantages and so even though there’s a lot of suffering and struggle for a time at least there is an opportunity to to testify about their experiences and committees of Congress are recording the kinds of hardships and discrimination that were imposed on African Americans especially those who wanted to vote and hold office and black people have to come up with their own institutions that protect them a little bit from a racist society like their their clubs their own sort of journalists their muckrakers like I did be Wells and like George Washington George Washington cable down in New Orleans the sort of leading black celebrities in the world of business like Madame CJ Walker or black in lecture halls like WB

9:11 Dubois and and over to Washington so it’s not as if they emerge from the period of reconstruction with nothing and yet the Alliance’s that they try to form with white political types like the Republican Party don’t ultimately sustain themselves in the what we call the Gilded Age in the early 20th century okay yes and you were talking about the 13th 14th and 15th amendments I’m assuming with with a lot of the rights they have one so so can can you maybe compare in during Reconstruction some some of the approaches of let’s say the Radical Republicans to those of President Andrew Johnson or let’s say also grant in Johnson all right Johnson comes first and grant is very they’re very different approaches to protecting African American rights in those different administration so maybe you can talk a little bit about that when you think about the Radical Republicans in a way the the faction of the party that had been anti-slavery that had been committed to abolition and that was not the whole Republican Party but just a sort of a fringe of the party becomes more and more influential during the Civil War especially because they are the sort of national security voice of the party to say those who say not only is slavery bad in moral terms but the slavery has presented this incredible challenge to the survival of the country and therefore whatever we can do to overturn slavery and those who had advocated for it within the American political system is good for national security something you recognized in the Civil War as troops come into contact with enslaved persons and people refugees from slavery in the South it becomes pretty quickly apparent that the interests of black people in the south and the interests of the Union war effort are identical and that black people are the only allies for the Union in many southern communities and certainly the most resourceful allies the ones capable and willing to collaborate most closely with the Union and that perspective that there is an identity of interest between black people and the nation carries over into the war period after the war so that radicals are the ones who say to defeat the the challenge the long-term challenge posed by southern racism by southern aristocracy by the sort of an anti-democratic tradition in the southern states that if we can beat back these forces in southern politics that we can create a safer

12:12 space for all kinds of political expression not only to allow African American men to vote and hold office but also the significant number of Southerners who had not been pro-slavery who had not been dedicated to the lost cause of the Confederacy to create space for those white people could also participate in politics that’s what the radicals look to do with the 13th amendment specially the 14th and 15th amendment and then to follow up on those with loss that allow the federal government to enforce those laws the enforcement acts the Ku Klux Klan acts the presence of the United States Army and of sort of bold US attorneys and the new Department of Justice in southern politics that is the sort of essence of radicalism during the 1860s and the 1870s there’s also the sense that in order to truly defeat southern aristocracy there needs to be a social upheaval that dispossesses those and that’s an idea that had originated have broad support during the war even someone like Andrew Johnson during the war became an advocate for dispossessing those who had been leaders of the rebellion his quotation was treason must be made odious and that we might kill two birds with one stone punished Southerners who had created secession while at the same time redistributing their property in a way that provided a practical transition from slavery to freedom and that corrected the moral injustice of uncompensated labor by providing African American families with land that vision is the most radical in many ways of the Radical Republican movement and it’s the one that they they don’t even come close to achieving during Reconstruction and in part they don’t achieve it because of the efforts of Andrew Johnson to block that right his view has changed from the treason must be made odious confiscation policies he’d advocated during the war – more sympathy for white Southerners who have been dispossessed he’s an amazing character study Andrew Johnson because he had a very strong sense of alienation as a politician coming up in the south he’s from Tennessee and had always been an anti-slavery politician or one who had seen himself is outside the slavery system speaking for poor white people who were themselves victims of the slave system that they were these sort of aristocratic slaveholders at the top of a political system but when after the war those same people that he had excoriated all his career come to him and say you are our only hope to defend you know true democracy to defend the social order in the south to defend our rights and

15:13 property and our constitutional rights he’s swayed by those appeals when people come to him especially the law he makes saying that you have to be pardoned if you’re a rebel and you want to exercise your political rights or hold on to your land a presidential pardon is in order when they write him these pardon letters or May personal appeals in person he proves very sympathetic to the white experience and it’s gonna put his finger on the scale against redistributing property scaling back the role of the army as an enforcer scaling back the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau as an enforcer of african-american rights and ultimately resisting what Congress was trying to do to transform the social order in the south with presidential policies that aim to shore up the old socialist order in the south and does does grant take a better perspective and use the army the federal government to enforce things more than more than you know Johnston’s support for well for white supremacy really yes yes grant is a is an interesting figure right somebody who didn’t come into the war with strong ideas about ending slavery but who is a great example of what I was saying earlier the someone who recognized very early this identity of interests between the US war and the African American experience in the south he’s back at early in 1862 he’s saying wow you know these folks are going to be free as a matter of practical policy when they come in the vicinity of armies and we’re going to employ them and once they have you know proven that they can work as free laborers then it’s not going to be a very big shift to create black military units to to empower them as citizens and he says back in 1862 once they’ve proven themselves as soldiers it’s not much of an issue to put the ballot in their hand and make them into citizens and so he has a kind of a pure I I feel like part of grants genius right is this pure vision that he had from a military point of view that included in grants point of view the effort to disentangle African Americans from slavery and to defend them as independent actors actors who would be sympathetic to the Union right the only true loyalists in the south were the black citizens of the south and that’s a perspective he carried into his presidency he recoils as racial violence becomes common as the can’t clan and other racist organizations are established and as they increasingly interfere in u.s. elections grant is in favor of policies like the enforcement acts and the KKK acts that give the federal government the power to prosecute people who have denied the

18:16 rights of their African American neighbors either by terrorizing them putting on a costume riding on the roads moving a polling site assassinations designed to people put politics a put put black people out of politics and [Music] grant holds for those policies as long as he can and what he discovers in the case of KKK prosecutions in South Carolina or in the case of the Colfax Massacre is that you can work hard to enforce African American protections but there’s so many variables in the court system and in the law enforcement mechanisms the true justice is very difficult thing to achieve and grant like other Radical Republicans becomes disillusioned as the 1870s wear on by the difficulty of the fight to defend African American rights and ultimately he looks the other way he never changes his views but his energies are redirected and I would say that’s what happens broadly in the Republican Party that a party that had had a powerful anti-slavery and anti-racist faction becomes tired of that fight and turns to its interests to other matters what some historians have said is they’ve tried to build a black and white North and South political alliance during the Civil War and reconstruction and that worked for a time but once it became too difficult it’s quite easy for the Republican establishment to look instead to a white and white east and west kind of alliance that replaces that work with african-americans in the south yeah and I you know not to take too tragic a turn here but you know you wrote a book on the Colfax Massacre and the only if he can describe those events not only of that tragedy about how it relates to that the larger tragedy larger problem of some some real horrific racial violence during the Reconstruction era in the south well the town of Koufax in Louisiana up in north-central Louisiana was a major plantation center it had been one of the largest slave plantations in the United States for something like a thousand enslaved persons living on the on the plantations and so places like that after the war tended to be as the reconstruction acts and then later the 14th amendment and then the 15th

21:16 amendment try to create more opportunity for black voting places where there were large concentrations of black people like call facts become politically important and it made a huge difference in Colfax Louisiana but the owner of those plantations even though he had been one of the major slave holders in the history of the United States also became a Radical Republican what they call is scalawag in the south a native-born southerner who became interested in the cause of black political participation especially not necessarily without some self-interest because based on his popularity among folks who had who lived on the families all the states he himself gets elected to the Louisiana Legislature but at great risk you know socially at great risk and physically as the conflict around the town that he established there and named Koufax was increasingly you know came very violent and so it’s also connected very much to elections that one of the big problems we have in in Reconstruction era is the lack of federal supervision of elections or both the presence of it and then the lack of it because it really had transformed the electoral experience in the south during the period when starting in 1867 black men were empowered to vote in southern districts in the in the reconstructed districts the army became the voting registration engine that enlisted almost all eligible men almost all eligible age eligible black men were registered as voters and with the support of the army they turned out and voted but the Klan the Knights of the white camellia and other organizations that were at that time kind of loosely affiliated with the Democratic Party they counter that sort of Federal Army electoral presence with their own violent acts to try to intimidate or kill politically active black men and the white men and women who supported them and this was was the source of some contested elections so in the case of Louisiana 1872 neither side would agree that they had lost and in every state office the state legislature the governor and in every local office there were both Democrats and Republicans who claimed to have won and in the case of Koufax that meant that there was a sheriff and a judge aligned with the Democratic Party and white supremacy and there was also a sheriff and a judge aligned with the Republican Party and the idea of racial equality and these two contested for

24:19 control of the courthouse for a while the white Democrats had control of it and those dey’s courthouse wasn’t occupied all the time in a rural area like Colfax Louisiana folks ultimately took control of it in the name of the Republicans and for a period of weeks there was a standoff where a black militia formed around the courthouse to try to defend it against any effort to reclaim it by whites and where whites in the surrounding area for about a hundred miles you know spread the word of this atrocity of black men seizing control of the courthouse and openly parading with arms in the southern town ultimately some hundreds of white militants gather they armed themselves with the cannon the white that the black defenders of the courthouse also tried to arm themselves built their own version of a homemade cannon using stove I built intrenchments around the courthouse and a battle got underway now we call it the Colfax massacre but in fact the massacre is just part of what happened there was a proper battle with black soldiers engaging white supremacists formed as a kind of an army or paramilitary but after a short period of actual two-sided fighting like that black defenders retreat inside the courthouse they plead for surrender the court has to set on fire many are shot to death as they fled the building that was burning others are held as prisoners for some time and then in the night they say the white supremacists themselves and the many records of this incident that they generated they said well yeah these 48 we just shot them in the back of the head execution-style so that’s really the massacre itself and while the numbers are hard to ascertain the state of Louisiana came into that town a couple days later and buried 70 bodies so we know at least that many victims the white supremacists themselves claimed a larger number and they said they spent weeks traveling around the countryside afterward shooting people sending a message urging black people to go into the town of Colfax and see what had happened there as a way of spreading the message that this kind of political activism wouldn’t be targeted so the story of what happened in the context Massacre is a more dramatic example in sort of the larger scale example of the kind of violence that takes place in a lot of southern communities as black people and their white allies willing to assert themselves in the name of racial justice become the targets of violent attacks one thing that makes the Colfax Massacre special though is the fact that the grant administration tried so hard to bring to justice the perpetrators of that atrocity and

27:21 ultimately tried there was an indictment of more than a hundred white perpetrators there was a huge military effort to round up and detain the suspect such as the alleged perpetrators but in the end it doesn’t deliver a victory for racial justice in fact the Supreme Court will hold the the enforcement acts that had enabled the prosecution of racially motivated crimes by federal officials were not legitimate and that cases like murder and assault had to be considered only by local officials as was the American tradition and that meant that local officials sometimes could not sometimes would not successfully prosecute racially motivated crimes and it created a kind of a blank check for white supremacy in southern states in fact they really celebrate openly the rulings first at the circuit court level and then at the Supreme Court level in the Koufax case which was called US vs. Cruikshank they say woohoo we won we are forming an army we’re publishing our names in the newspaper we’re no longer a secret organization like the Klan were open-open white League of a leading citizens that will fight against any advance for african-americans under the law awesome some really dramatic and and their tragic events and a larger [Music] larger scene there so so what factors help bring you’ve alluded a few but what factors bring reconstruction to an end and then some some key events right well you know the white supremacists in the town of Colfax Louisiana I like to say that they did it right and in fact they erected a historical marker which still stands today in the middle of this little town where the population is still almost 70% african-american and the marker says on this side in April 13th 1873 occured the Colfax riot they called it a riot in which 150 Negroes and three white men were killed this event marks the end of carpetbag Mis rule in the south basically they say because the enforcement acts were struck down as a result of us vs. Cruikshank this was the the event that turned the tide in the south and there’s some truth fair there is you know the the legal losses the african-americans sustained during the whole period of the Gilded Age and during Reconstruction are a major factor in interrupting their progress especially us versus Cruikshank that the overturned any effort to physically

30:22 defend them against their enemies once you have allowed for intimidation and assassination as a political technique it forces out of the electorate black people and those who are sympathetic to their cause and that means that governments organized around the principle of white supremacy become increasingly present in the south and one by one over the course of the middle of the 1870s southern states are redeemed redemption was the term they used to describe the reclaiming of southern offices elected offices by different and the marginalization of the Republican Party which almost ceases to function in many southern states by the early 20th century right they don’t hold Republican primaries in most southern states even into my lifetime everyone voted Democrats and the conservative Democrats existed on a spectrum with more liberal ones there was in fact among in the Democratic Party a kind of a racist wing or Dixiecrat wing that really was powerful in the party for a long time the other part that ends reconstruction though is the exhaustion of white allies and and this is something yeah I mean in piteous and it is it isn’t pity in a way that you have to ask me these questions right as a white women my point of view on the black experience is only partial right but one thing that you have to say about the the black critique of white allies today people like myself is that there is it’s very easy to walk away when the going gets tough right we can show up for a demonstration or have a slogan that we favor but our lives are we can free ourselves at any moment from the difficulties of the commitment to overcoming racial injustice that was certainly to the Republicans in the Civil War era afterwards that they walk away from the alliance with black people it’s too hard it’s too controversial there’s too many people who don’t like it and the party changes its focus for interesting so now in in your your introductory essay yet you talk a fair amount about the the rise of Jim Crow and can you explain what this system of Jim Crow was and also how how did it affect the lives of African Americans well the the name Jim Crow is worth noting that Jim Crow was a sort of stock character in a minstrel show we give the name Jim Crow to talk about

33:23 this period between the middle of the 1870s and extending at least into the 1930s but by some estimates into the 1960s to this period when African Americans lost their political voice nationally and were subjected especially in the southern states but not only in the southern states too racist policies of governments I think that there’s a tendency to associate Jim Crow with segregation that’s how the civil rights movement taught us to understand Jim Crow when they attacked racial injustice in the 1950s and 1960s they went after laws that said black people couldn’t be in certain places at certain times and that separated black people and white people in public accommodations that’s definitely part of the Jim Crow system but it’s hardly the only part and by my estimation it’s not really the most important part what I would say happens is first we create a system in which violence allows black people to be marginalized politically through the processes I just described in the Colfax massacre which were replicated elsewhere as well once there’s violence without without any consequences black people are more and more excluded from the political sphere and people who are elected to office are not sympathetic to their interests and therefore pass more and more laws that damage the state of african-americans and most of these laws initially are not about public accommodations but are about things that are actually more important to white people in the south like overturning any move to make black people economically independent and reinforcing tendencies to make black people dependent on their white neighbors for employment right they want to make sure that land ownership and education are limited for black people so that they continue in their traditional roles as agricultural and domestic laborers the criminal justice system is part of Jim Crow you know we hadn’t had a very fully formed criminal justice system in the southern states especially before the war slavery was like its own great sort of penal system in a way and slaveholders claimed the right to punish their own people as they thought of them and therefore public mechanisms for controlling the black population were kind of like innovations of the post Reconstruction period and you begin to see mass prisons convict leasing and the use of the courts to punish african-americans alongside extra legal

36:24 violence and that this system that has economic interests at its heart expresses itself in segregationist policies segregation was like a reminder like the decor of a system that in really fundamental structural ways was exacting even more pernicious price you know for your for your blackness in southern states and you mentioned segregation can you can you talk a little bit about what was decided in that landmark case plus Ferguson in 1896 Plessy v Ferguson yes if you don’t mind I would also say that Plessy v Ferguson 1896 exists on a in a series of Supreme Court decisions that really damaged the struggle for equality the first being the slaughterhouse cases in 1873 that limited the way the 14th amendment would be applied made it very difficult to rise to the standard of requiring federal protection and the US vs Cruikshank and US vs Reese in 19 in 1873 both of those cases having to do with elections in the case of Colfax can you prevent the violent interference of white supremacists in elections using federal prosecutions the answer was no in the case of US Reese us versus Reese can we prevent racist officials voter registrar to exclude black people by putting discriminate practices into into place yes and so those two setbacks were those three setbacks are the context in which the subsequent attacks that we associate with segregation take place in 1883 what they call the civil rights cases said well a theater may discriminate a restaurant may discriminate as long as state laws do not discriminate based on race there’s no violation of the 14th amendment that was in 1883 by 1896 in the Plessy case they said okay well here is a state law that’s discriminating and in the case of Plessy it was Louisiana law that required railroads to provide segregated accommodations and prohibited black passengers from writing in the white cars in this case it was a state law that had stipulated that there would be a discriminatory policy the ruling in 1896 at the Supreme Court level says well okay there can be state laws as long as equal accommodations are provided however you can separate the racists without violating the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment and then by my

39:24 lights an opinion that has not had enough attention and scrutiny it’s the follow-up to Plessy in 1899 in a case called versus the Board of Ed you know we’ve required under the Plessy doctrine separate but equal accommodations but in the coming case the Supreme Court says they’re asked to consider well what if what if a municipality doesn’t have a black school but the black students are prohibited from attending the white school if there are no separate accommodations that are equal what then is the law and ultimately in that case the Supreme Court said you know we can’t really require equal accommodations after all that’s not really the purview of the federal government to say who should build which school where so they really violate their own principles again and again and justifying setbacks to equality and there were there were others right there are many others can you talk a little bit about the restriction of voting and and other civil rights sharecropping continued examples during Reconstruction of violence of lynchings you know sharecropping was an unjust system that was subject to unjust accounting at the biggest problem with sharecropping us that it’s the white land holders who have the books who make the entries who set the prices for the kind of goods that they’re providing in advance of harvests and so there are fundamental inequalities that express themselves and you know certainly is not an avenue for black economic advancement at the same time though sharecropping answered what black people demanded for themselves in the Reconstruction period this demand for separation from white people from separation especially from the gang labor that had been characteristic of plantations right they don’t want to work under an overseer anymore they don’t want to work in gangs they don’t want their wives and children to be mobilized under the supervision of oversee years and so the sharecropping gave them black people some of the autonomy that they craved even at the very high price you know of the just compensation for their labor in terms of voting rights we have a sense that reconstruction ends the states in the South are redeemed and that black voting ends but it actually doesn’t disappear overnight and black people really cling pretty tenaciously to their voting rights all through the 19th century so that historian has done calculations on this says by the end of the 1870s it’s true that by voting had declined by almost 1/3 and that over the course of the next

42:25 two or three decades by the beginning of the 1890s they have lost another third but they’re still thousands and thousands of African American men voting in southern communities even in 1890 but the 1890s themselves are a decade when white politicians crack down on black voting and when elite politicians crack down on voting by poor whites as well especially after the populist movement challenged the supremacy of the two-party system and raised the specter of the idea that white poor white people in the south and poor black people in the south had common interests a big response to that movement is an effort to write new voting registration processes and balloting processes that would exclude those voters at the bottom of the political at the bottom of the economic heat and the interest of maintaining the privileges of those at the top of the heap and so the loss the new constitutions that were written in the 1890s were the ones that truly terminated black voting at scale so that by the early 20th century in many southern states like in the state of Louisiana for example black political participation which have been at nearly 100 percent when the Army was registering voters drops less than 2% in 1920 in Louisiana and so it’s a process that mostly takes place or at least in the first base takes place because of violence and electoral fraud but that becomes legalized regularized in these voter registration practices like you know giving registrar’s a lot of authority testing people on their knowledge and understanding of the state constitution creating complex ballots that person with marginal literacy would not be able to understand poll taxes and other practices to try to keep like people and their allies away from the polls and increases in violence during the period as well what to say about lynching you know which accelerates in the 20th century right the chapter that I have contributed to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness ends in 1900 and at that time lynching was already a very well-established problem right they estimated in the middle of the 1870s in Louisiana that 2500 people had been killed by lynching and so it was not like the problem wasn’t already quite dire during Reconstruction at the very end of Reconstruction but it becomes a kind of a standard

45:27 practice there are moments when it’s practice is accelerated so that the 1920s are an especially tough decade for all kinds of racial violence and the period after World War two actually is the time when you see sort of the last blast of of terrible lynching you know as like soldiers came home in uniform and just by that appearance challenged white supremacy in southern towns and lynching you know was not limited to southern states at all but was practiced in the Midwest and to some extent in northern cities on the one hand in which crowds targeted individuals often with trumped-up charges of rape or other kinds of violent crimes and then what they call the race riot which is a very distinctive form and one that we should have our eyes on now you know as the term riot is being employed on the right to talk about civil rights movement today rioting was an activity that was directed by white people but blamed on black people and so that in places like Colfax where there have been this hideous massacre perpetrated by whites when they commemorate the event the marker that they put up in that in the 1950s describes it as as a riot because a riot was when black people got out of line riot was when black people needed to be reminded of their place and the even though the violence in those riots was perpetrated by white mobs and sometimes by organized white supremacy organizations like the Klan it was the rioting itself was seen as you know a violation of community standards by black people so in Tulsa in 1921 rosewood Florida I think that was 1922 and Greenwood I’m sorry I’m thinking of in North Carolina in 1898 Wilmington riots I mean there’s so many stories in which black communities were targeted for destruction for sort of pogroms where people were beaten killed terrorized and some spoke out for black equality many did actually many african-americans but maybe can talk about a compare and contrast some of the ideas of two of the more famous ones Booker T Washington and a view he b-boys all right well two boys you know what an amazing figure I’m sorry can I start with Washington because chronologically he was a star before Dubois was a star and he’s older and so he’s someone who has any southern right so he has the experience that so many subs by people

48:27 had had of being born into slavery in his case he remembered and wrote in his book up from slavery about his first day of school you know the first time you realized that no one had ever referred to him or his mother with the last name like Here I am at school everyone had a last name the teacher got to him he said my last name is Washington you know when he got home and told his mom about it she said ok we have last name honey it’s Taliaferro that’s why he’s Booker T right he kept the name Washington that he gave to himself and and who takes his experience and and and allies himself with local white people and with sort of international national organizations that were supporting black colleges and other kinds of missionary work philanthropic work among southern black people to become an educator the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the guy that we associate with this idea of industrial education that black people can better their circumstances by improving their skills improving their habits building up their economic resources creating kind of community that has resources that can defend itself against a cruel setting and cruel times and Washington as I say he works closely with white people and he tries to deliver a message the white people can accept write what he says is let’s think of ourselves as separates socially let’s accept segregation and the other signs of black subordination within our system separately like the fingers of a hand but together like the fists with white our white neighbors we can you know get things done and they’ll recognize our contributions and they’ll participate in our upload and we will make the best of our bad situation that’s a message that a lot of people warm to in the 19th century it was kind of in keeping with some of the black traditions that have been established before Jim Crow got into place and he becomes famous well-known well-respected the sort of Dean of african-american life at least for Southerners Du Bois comes out of a very different setting as a northerner as someone who had avenues for elite education and who really pursued his study studying in Germany for a PhD getting the first PhD granted by Harvard and his idea was industrial education will not suffice for someone like myself right should I WB Dubois learn to be a plumber because the society said that that’s all I’m good for know that in fact there is a human instinct that can’t be denied to

51:32 achieve and express oneself and black people are worthy of that same opportunity and so to create opportunities in which black people could have the full American experience of Education respectability and electoral recognition and he personally sets a standard for that with all of his accomplishments and he also advocates for that idea you know it’s interesting in the 20th century the ideas of Washington became less favored right and people come to associate him and and it’s actually Dubois who comes up with this meaning it as an insult this label that we put on Washington accommodationist that he would accommodate Booker T Washington would accommodate himself to injustice and the alternative that Dubois outlines himself in his work as an intellectual and a scholar and also as a founding member and spokesperson for the n-double-a-cp is that we have to break down the barriers that deny this fullest expression of black identity and and and both of them were right right in fact they’re at they’re both right that black people could do a lot by building up their own institutions and acquired wealth and that like people did deserve opportunities to express themselves their true and full selves you know neither those ideas is free of the racism of the period in a way that they both accept certain racist ideas like if you look follow someone like ebrill expend e right he’s they’re both buying into the racist idea that black people have to prove themselves that they can do what white people can do that’s what Dubois believes or the black people have to accept a subordinated role in society and in fact not everybody accepted those ideas there were black people who felt that just by relocating African Americans could have proved their experience so many many migrated out sometimes in organized groups out of the South where they feel most discriminated against and to places like Kansas where the Exodusters try to create a an all-black community or the even more ambitious idea of black migration overseas so that there are people who are trying to build up Liberia as the destination for African Americans or who are targeting other overseas destinations and serve Marcus Garvey ISM and all that that’s that exists alongside these two what seem like color visions articulated by Washington and Du Bois that you either have to live with the system and make the best of it or beat the system and show by your own example that the system is wrong is there a way to get outside of the system a lot of African Americans try to do that especially in the 20th century of the great migration into northern cities yes I’m not

54:33 thinking ahead here a little bit as we conclude our conversation what how we’ll do all of these very dramatic and important events sort of shaped that African American experience into that fight for civil rights and progress during the 20th century in a nutshell that’s how you know well black people build up their resources alright they build up there are body of ideas in the way that we just described you know Rao playing behind the ideas of great thinkers in their community they build up their their critical faculties so someone like Dubois in the souls of black folk and other publications you know they’re critiquing white society and describing the black person’s place within it in ways that still have tremendous impact today on well anyone who meets them and also building up the sort of public discourse surrounding race so that someone like Ida Wells for example you know she’s she’s investigating and turning up evidence of the real injustice behind lynching for example or other atrocities perpetrated on black people black muckraking black journalism the black church and institutions like these historically about colleges and universities that are founded many of them during the Reconstruction period and one of the achievements that is never undone of Reconstruction is the ongoing success of historically black colleges and universities many of which pursue the Booker T Washington industrial education model so the aggregate Agricultural and Mechanical is a tag sometimes placed on a black college that’s really an expression of of Washington’s vision of put your bucket down where you are find an opportunity where you live and within the system that you live in the n-double-a-cp of wish to boys as a founder is a great resource for african-americans especially in that because african-americans have the law on their side right because of the achievements of the Civil War reconstruction and amendments 13 14 and 15 especially 14 right 14 a powerhouse of guarantees that the law cannot single you out that the law has to be applied equally to people that all people are entitled to due process of the law these guarantees create a wealth of opportunity for black people who work within the legal system directed by the n-double-a-cp and its legal defense system the legal defense fund to challenge the system in court and ultimately to succeed in a number of important cases such as Brown versus

57:34 Board slam well Liana Keith I I can’t thank you enough for your contribution to your life liberty and the pursuit of happiness textbook and for our conversation today thank you very much for joining me thank you Tony I enjoyed it and thank you for all your teachers all the teachers out there and students who are joining us and you can find Liana Keith X is a in life liberty and pursuit of happiness and you can find other materials they are on the African American experience and you can also find additional resources in other a bill of rights to materials such as American portraits heroes and villains and our forthcoming liberty and justice for all thank you again very much for joining us