The Memphis Massacre of 1866 and Black Voter Suppression in the American South - The At... - 0 views
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The unrest started with a rumor of black-on-white crime: Black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering on the city’s south bluffs had allegedly killed white policemen attempting to arrest an African American soldier.
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Although much has changed since the end of the Civil War, the fact remains that political violence undermines the democratic process even where civil-rights protections are supposedly in place.
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Ulysses S. Grant would carry Memphis’s Shelby County in two presidential elections aided by African American men, to whom the state extended voting rights in 1867,
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But as in so many corners of the Confederacy, the camps where former slaves lived swelled with the hungry, the sick, and those seeking to find opportunity and family.
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This set the stage for the violent days of May 1866. When the rumor of the black-on-white crime spread, Fort Pickering’s commander, General George Stoneman, confiscated black soldiers’ weapons and ordered them to their barracks.
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Around the same time, a white mob assembled, including police and firemen, and attacked the camp of former slaves and African American neighborhoods.
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Violence resumed late the next morning when “a posse of police and citizens again appeared in South Memphis and commenced an indiscriminate attack upon the Negroes,
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he Massacre showed the failures of Reconstruction even as congressional Republicans seized control from President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean and former military governor of the state.
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Newly elected legislators in states like South Carolina showed up in their old Rebel uniforms. And though white civil-rights supporters lived in Memphis and other cities, they were targets of violence—including during the Memphis Massacre.
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After all, there was political benefit in this kind of aggressive legislating: African Americans made up the largest bloc of Union-loyal Southerners during the war and were potential Republican voters.
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The Enforcement Act of 1870 outlawed both state and private violence against African Americans, reenacting the 1866 Civil Rights Act under the auspices of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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In 1871, the federal government placed nine South Carolina counties under martial law, and federal courts convicted more than 100 defendants charged under these acts.
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he U.S. Supreme Court held in U.S. v. Cruikshank that the perpetrators of the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana could not be convicted for federal civil-rights violations because the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not extend to individuals’ crimes,
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It took 90 years for the state-built edifice of Jim Crow to be torn down by the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964,
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A new retreat from Civil Rights is getting renewed momentum today in the wake of the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder. The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority invalidated sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act.