Been in the Storm So Long (63 page)

When blacks drew up their postwar demands, equal justice almost invariably superseded all others. Even those who argued the primacy of the suffrage or economic grievances conceded that without equal protection under the law, neither the property they accumulated, the wages they were promised, nor the vote they might someday cast would be safe. “To be sure, sah, we wants to vote,” a black barber observed, “but, sah, de great matter is to git into de witness-box.” The price exacted of the white South in exchange for the reinstatement of civil courts was the admissibility of
black testimony. Like emancipation and later the suffrage, whites viewed it as a consequence of military defeat and occupation. But that hardly made it a popular concept. “Nothing would make me cut a nigger’s throat from ear to ear so quick,” said a white shoemaker in Liberty, Virginia, “as having him set up his impudent face to tell that a thing wasn’t so when I said it was so.”
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With the right of testimony, blacks had hoped to secure the equal protection which the Constitution ensured all citizens. The credibility accorded such testimony by white judges and juries, however, made this substantially less than the triumph freedmen had imagined. “Why, no nigger can be believed whether he is under oath or not,” a Virginian observed. “No one that knows a nigger will ever think of believing him if it’s for his interest to lie.” Making essentially the same point, a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps said more than he intended when he argued that white people were simply not ready to admit black testimony against other whites. “What would be the good of putting niggers in the witness-box?” he asked. “You must have niggers in the jury-box, too, or nigger evidence will not be believed. I don’t think you could find twelve men in the whole State who would attach any weight to the testimony of ninety-nine niggers in a hundred.”
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Few blacks might have disagreed with that assessment of the minimal impact of their testimony. Unless they were admitted to the juries, too, they realized, equal justice would remain a mockery. “It is the right of every man accused of any offence, to be tried by a jury of his peers,” the Reverend J. W. Hood told a black convention in North Carolina. “I claim that the black man is my peer, and so I am not tried by my peers unless there be one or more black men in the jury box.” By the eve of Radical Reconstruction, blacks were already sitting on some juries, though not without vehement white objections, and still more would be added after the Radical governments took power. In some states, as in South Carolina, Federal authorities stipulated that every person registered as a taxpayer or voter also qualified as a juror. Like the admission of black testimony, the appearance of blacks in the jury box signaled still another encroachment on the white man’s domain. To a Louisiana planter and judge, it all seemed like a steady descent into total anarchy and depravity, and he could trace every step along the way. “The fortune of war has materially changed my circumstances. My niggers used to do as I told them, but that time is passed. Your Northern people have made soldiers of our servants, and will, I presume, make voters of them. In five years, if I continue the practice of law, I suppose I shall be addressing a dozen negroes as gentlemen of the jury.”
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If black jurors and testimony could soften the abuses of the courts, many blacks also contended that only biracial police forces could ensure a semblance of equality in law enforcement. Until that objective had been realized, at least, freedmen would remain vulnerable to harassment, violence, and discriminatory arrests by police officers who acted as the instrumerits
of white control and repression. “The police of this place make the law to suit themselves,” a black teacher in Wetumpka, Alabama, protested, citing arrests of freedmen for minor offenses which were ignored when committed by whites. “From what I can see and hear among the Col[ore]d people of this place,” he added, “something serious will grow out of this if we do not get the proper protection.” In some communities, blacks complained that policemen regularly invaded their homes, ostensibly in search of weapons and to quiet the insurrectionary fears of white citizens. The black newspaper in New Orleans charged the police with “a provoking series of petty persecutions” as well as participation in the riot of 1866 and expressed particular outrage over the disarming of blacks while whites openly displayed their weapons without fear of arrest. The black protests, from wherever they emanated, agreed that law and order could not be established in their communities without some restraints being placed on the police. A resident of Charleston commended the military commander there for having found one constructive solution to the problem of police violence—he ordered the arrest of any policeman found in possession of a revolver or club.
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Despite black testimony and some black jurors, the quality of justice on the eve of Radical Reconstruction largely reflected white power and the determination to preserve it. If anyone thought the freedmen were enjoying equal protection under the law, a black resident of Macon, Georgia, invited him to visit the local courtroom and observe the proceedings. “A white man may assault a colored gentleman at high noon, pelt him with stones, or maul him with a club, without any provocation at all; and if it has to be decided by rebel justice, the colored man is fined or imprisoned, and the white man is justified in what he and his friends call a ‘narrow escape.’ ” To many blacks, that remained the crux of their problem—the black plaintiff appeared to have less of a chance for legal redress than the defendant. If he hesitated to file a complaint against a white person or to involve himself in any way with the legal process, that was because he feared ending up in jail rather than the offender. When the victims of white violence demanded that action be taken against white assailants, some of them were dismissed with the advice to avoid contact with individuals who were apt to harm them.
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That was surely one way to avoid trouble, though difficult to achieve without becoming a recluse; some blacks suggested another alternative, far more in keeping with the values and tradition of white America—they could shoot the assailant in self-defense.

A
FTER STILL ANOTHER
violent clash in Norfolk, in which Yankee troops had vowed to “clear out all the niggers,” a black resident of that city voiced his despair at such betrayal and at the same time warned all whites—Yankees
and natives alike—not to push the freedmen too far. “We are a nation that loves the white people,” he declared, “and we would never attack them, but if we are driven to exasperation we know our duty.” Although emancipation and the gradual reduction of Union troops made blacks more vulnerable to attack, most of them had enjoyed freedom, however briefly, and refused to surrender their newly acquired rights without a struggle. It seemed like an appropriate time, then, to invoke such time-honored concepts and virtues as self-defense.

That sentiment, voiced by the black newspaper in New Orleans, accorded with advice to discharged black soldiers to retain their guns and its call for Home Guard units which would mobilize whenever circumstances demanded their presence. After all, why should not those who had defended their nation on the battlefields likewise defend their families and friends at home. “In times of peace prepare for war,” a black resident of New Orleans suggested. “They have burned our churches, murdered our friends in their own yards, in the presence of their own family, and yet our civil government is still running, and the murderers are still allowed to roam our streets undisturbed.”
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Not surprisingly, blacks vented much of their anger and “lawlessness” on the law itself. Since they could not expect impartial justice in the courtroom, groups of blacks in some communities invaded the jails and courtrooms to release their accused brethren. At the same time, they evinced a determination to mete out extralegal justice if the white police and courts failed to do their duty. In Selma, Alabama, blacks threatened to burn down the town unless a known white murderer was turned over to them or brought to justice; Federal troops intervened and the suspected murderer escaped. After a white mob in Jeffersonton, Georgia, removed a black youth from the jail and hanged him, allegedly for having killed a farm animal, more than a hundred blacks, all of them armed with guns and pistols, appeared to demand the prosecution of those responsible for the lynching. Although Federal authorities persuaded the blacks to disperse, a still larger crowd gathered the next day, and this time the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent requested Federal troops. Only the presence of such troops prevented a riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, after blacks tried to halt the public whipping of five men found guilty in a trial where black testimony had been excluded; in three Virginia counties, the Freedmen’s Bureau quickly resumed judicial power because the blacks had threatened to retaliate for the injustices committed by the civil courts; and in several
communities, blacks armed themselves to resist attacks on their schools and churches.
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The threats of black retaliatory violence obviously concerned native whites and military authorities and gave rise in the postwar years to new rumors and reports of insurrectionary activity. But little was done to attack the sources of black discontent. In Columbia, South Carolina, blacks reacted with outrage when in May 1866 the chief of police shot and killed a young freedman while arresting him for a misdemeanor. Both the coroner’s jury and local military authorities acquitted the police chief, setting off a new wave of anger in the black community. On the morning of May 30, a Union officer was “startled” to find that a notice had been posted during the night in the local post office.

Two companies of Federal troops were brought into the city, the police chief secluded himself, and the black threats of violence failed to materialize. But “the worst feature in the case,” a black woman wrote the Freedmen’s Bureau, was that nothing had been done to satisfy the grievances of the black residents, thereby encouraging the whites to think themselves immune to prosecution or control.

This graphic description of conditions in the capital of South Carolina in mid-1866 might have been duplicated in countless communities and
regions. Neither her assessment nor her despair were unique. Although the talk of armed retaliation might evoke images of black “minutemen” and “regulators,” the freedmen possessed neither the weapons nor the power to offset the better organized whites. Nor could they successfully contend with the threat of Federal intervention to suppress them if they took the law into their own hands. Despite the rhetoric of violence, the great mass of blacks recognized where the power still resided.

If confronted with an intolerable situation on the plantation or in the neighborhood, alternatives other than armed resistance were presumably available to black people. Freedom permitted them to take their labor elsewhere. For many freed slaves, in fact, this right constituted the very essence of their new status, and they proposed to use such a weapon to carve out a greater degree of independence for themselves and their families. Not all freedmen exercised this prerogative in the same way, or at the same time, and some did not exercise it at all. Neither the former slave nor his former master, however, could easily predict the precise moment when confrontation and separation would become unavoidable.