(ThyBlackMan.com) When Rep. James Clyburn recently warned that America risks sliding backward toward the post-Reconstruction era, many heard the words but failed to grasp the horror behind them.
They should.
The soft-spoken South Carolina congressman is not given to exaggeration. When Clyburn invokes the specter of post-Reconstruction America, he is not quoting a distant chapter in a textbook. He is warning of a period so brutal, so morally disfiguring, that its scars remain visible in the American landscape more than a century later.
His warning came after he narrowly survived a congressional redistricting battle pushed by the Supreme Court and President Trump. It threatened to erase the district he represents. Had it succeeded, about 1.4 million Black South Carolinians would have been left without a single Black member of Congress representing them.
For many redistricting can seem like a technical debate over maps and voting boundaries. But his choice of words should not be whitewashed. Gentile one-liners or mellifluous phrases won’t do. The headlines should be blood-soaked, screaming and explosive.
Clyburn’s warning reminds us of the terrible tyranny after slavery ended.
After the Civil War, America entered Reconstruction which lasted from about 1865 to 1877. For the first time, nearly four million formerly enslaved people were recognized as citizens rather than property. They could finally be treated as humans owning their own bodies.
The passage of the 13th amendment abolished slavery, the 14th granted citizenship –although millions had been enslaved since 1619, the 15th protected voting rights of Black men.
Those legal actions produced remarkable results Black Americans voted. They organized. They built businesses, churches, schools, and communities. More than 1,500 African Americans held public office. Twenty served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two served in the U.S. Senate.
Then came the backlash.
The U.S. Supreme Court aided and abetted a rising anti-black campaign to dispel Black political advancement. The most egregious case was the 1857 Dred Scott decision delivered by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruling Blacks had no rights that whites had to respect. In 1896, the high court’s Plessy V. Ferguson decision legalized racial segregation.
Without the protection of the legal system, the KKK and white vigilantes conducted a reign of terror since it was not against the law to murder Blacks. In fact, more than 6,500 Blacks were lynched according to the Equal justice Institute from 1830 to 1950. It was not unusual for pastors to pause church services for their congregants to watch lynching’s of Black people and return to church observances as if nothing inhumane had happened.
Incidents like the Tulsa massacre of 1921 were not unusual. A white mob attacked a prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa Oklahoma destroying homes and businesses. About 300 Blacks died there.
Courts weakened civil rights protections. States erected barriers to voting. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and intimidation campaigns transformed constitutional rights into empty promises.
Legal segregation meant Blacks were forced to suffer the indignity of Jim Crow laws which mandated they could not play cards nor checkers with whites or participate in integrated sports. They had to enter white restaurants through back doors and be off the streets at sundown. Schools, parks, movies, hotels were segregated and when they died Blacks were buried in segregated graves.
Today similar circumstances that disenfranchised Black people are arising today. The Supreme Court recently passed legislation that virtually gutted the rights of Black voters.
In addition, President Trump has instituted one of the most Anti-Black campaigns that suggests the return of the Post Reconstruction Period – Firing of black leaders, the dismantling of civil rights protections, the gutting of federal jobs that helped build the Black middle class and canceling diversity programs that aided Black colleges. In fact, 300,000 jobs held by Black women were terminated last year.
In the wake of falling election poll numbers Trump officials are ordering GOP leaders in Southern states to gerrymander voter districts to curtail Black voters who are key to the Democrats base.
That is why Clyburn’s warning deserves attention.
He recounts in his book, The First Eight, how eight Black men from South Carolina were elected to Congress during the Post Reconstruction era. Yet within a decade, a combination of violence, voter suppression, and legal barriers drove them from office. It would take nearly a century before another Black South Carolinian—James Clyburn himself—would be elected to Congress in 1992.
As the doors of democracy begin to close again, we must remember: What is taken from one group is taken from us all.
If America returns to the spirit of Jim Crow, the greatest loss will not be Black political representation alone. It will be the moral core of the nation itself.
And as Clyburn warns, some damage would take generations to undo.
Written by Dr. Barbara Reynolds
