Black Reconstruction
Possibilities and Disappointments
“One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair” (W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935). Black citizens across the United States began reimagining the nation even before the Civil War’s conclusion and the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. They organized conventions, started newspapers, and pushed for institutions of higher education and sweeping political and economic reforms. And, at least in the South, they had the numbers to make it work. Black citizens were in the majority across much of the South until the early twentieth century, and this electoral power resulted in civil rights gains during the 1860s-1870s. However, reconstruction came to a violent end by the 1880s, as the federal government removed troops from the South; the U.S. Supreme Court hamstrung the Reconstruction amendments and acts; and white mob violence disenfranchised Black voters through intimidation, lynching, and the destruction of property.
William Still. A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of Philadelphia in the City Railway Cars. Philadelphia: Merrihew & Son, 1867.
Reconstruction marked an era of mass civil rights mobilizing across the Northern states, as well as in the South. Many Black citizens had been organizing around desegregation, voting, education, and other reforms for decades before the Civil War. In this pamphlet, Still details his support for desegregating Philadelphia streetcars.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
Hampton and Its Students by Two of Its Teachers, Mr. M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, now Hampton University in Hampton, VA, was founded in 1868 with the support of the American Missionary Association, along with eight other Historically Black Colleges and Universities founded in the late 1860s. It began as a camp set up during the Civil War to educate enslaved and free Black people.
Blanche K. Bruce. “The Mississippi Election. Speech of Hon. Blanche K. Bruce, of Mississippi, to the United States Senate,” March 31, 1876. Washington [D.C.], 1876.
Clipping. “Bruce. (Blache K.). First Negro to become Senator of the US.” and Card from Blanche K. Bruce to J. D. Dafree, Government Printer, providing a corrected address.
Born enslaved in 1841, Bruce began organizing among newly emancipated people in Mississippi in 1867 and quickly rose to prominence within the state’s Reconstruction government. He became the nation’s second Black senator in 1875 and the first to be elected to a full term. The United States would not see the election of another Black senator until 1967.
James Lowell Gibbs Collection of African-American Documents.
Albery Allson Whitman. Not a Man. And Yet A Man. Springfield, OH: Republic Printing Company, 1877.
J. Willis Menard to W. E. Ambler. February 13, 1892.
Packet addressed to W.E. Ambler from Menard, postmarked Feb. 14, 1892, which contains a signed photograph of Menard and a newspaper clipping from the Baltimore American about Menard as “the First Colored Congressman”. Includes summary of article potentially in Ambler’s hand.
James Lowell Gibbs Collection of African-American Documents.
Booker T. Washington. Address of Booker T. Washington, Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Ala. Delivered at the Opening of the Atlantic States and International Exposition, Sept. 18, ’95. Atlanta: 1895.
“If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen.”
Booker T. Washington delivered this speech, later called the “Atlanta Compromise” speech, at the opening of the Atlantic States and International Exposition on September 18, 1895. Washington famously calls on white and Black Southerners to “Cast down your bucket where you are” to build a strong southern economy: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Freedmen Pamphlets.
Booker T. Washington.The Rights and Duties of the Negro. Louisville, KY: 1903.
“I do not believe that any State should make a law that permits an ignorant and poverty-stricken white man to vote and prevents a black man in in the same condition from voting.” Washington delivered this address before the National Afro-American Council, Lousville, KY, on July 2, 1903.
Freedmen Pamphlets.
Max Bennett Thrasher. Tuskegee: Its Story and Its Work… with an Introduction by Booker T. Washington. Boston: Small, Mynard & Company, 1901.
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, was founded in 1881 through the advocacy of Lewis Adams, a formerly enslaved man and political organizer in Alabama. Booker T. Washington served as the Institute’s founding principal and would build Tuskegee into one of the most important institutions of higher education in the nation.
Frances J. Grimké. The Progress and Development of the Colored People of Our Nation: an Address Delivered before the American Missionary Association, Wednesday Evening, October 21, 1908, at Galesburg, Illinois. Washington, D.C.: 1908.
Son of former enslaver Henry Grimké, and nephew to abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frances J. Grimké rose to prominence as a Presbyterian minister and part of the collective that founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Freedmen Pamphlets.
Francis J. Grimké. Equality of Rights for All Citizens, Black and White, Alike: A Discourse Delivered in the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., Sunday, March 7th, 1909. Washington, D.C.: 1909.
Freedmen Pamphlets.
