A closer look

Black Officeholders in the Reconstruction South

How was the promise of full citizenship for African Americans both fulfilled and denied during the Reconstruction period?

by Ellen Noonan, New York University

How Did Black Men Come to Hold Elected Office?

For newly emancipated African Americans, gaining some measure of local political power was essential to their ability to live as free citizens. They pursued public office at the federal, state, and local levels, and historians estimate that as many as 2,000 Black men held office (including 16 as members of the U.S. Congress) in southern states during Reconstruction. Several factors influenced the likelihood of Black men being elected to public office. One was partisan, since most African Americans supported the Republican Party. In places where the Republican party was strong, more African Americans were elected to office. Another was demographic—in rural areas, Black men were more likely to hold office in counties where at least 40 percent of the population was Black. But the crucial catalyst in turning the possibility of Black officeholding into a reality came with the political organizing undertaken by Republican clubs, Union League chapters, and Black churches. These local organizations educated voters on political issues, hosted meetings and debates, and planned campaigns. When election day finally arrived, they had plans in place to make sure their members overcame the many tactics (ranging from confusing and inconvenient voting procedures to economic intimidation and violence) used by white Democrats to prevent Black men from voting. Black women, while they could not vote or hold office, played an important role in creating and strengthening this nascent political culture in a community to which official political participation had long been denied.

Electioneering at the South

While the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to vote to all citizens (defined then as men) “regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Black women were still active participants in political life. Frequently at the center of African American family and community networks, women debated issues, helped with voter mobilization, and ensured Republican party discipline among the men in their lives. This illustration from the national magazine Harper’s Weekly shows Black women as attentive participants at the kind of political meeting that was a frequent and critical part of developing Black political culture during Reconstruction; they also accompanied men to polling places on election day as a show of community solidarity in the face of efforts to intimidate Black voters.

Source: W. L. Sheppard, “Electioneering at the South,” Harper’s Weekly July 25, 1868, 468.

Why Holding Public Office Mattered

At the local level, elected officials touched every aspect of community life: they set tax rates (as tax assessors and collectors), registered voters (as registrars and county clerks), rendered judgements in criminal cases (as magistrates, justices of the peace, and members of juries), supervised public education (as school superintendents and school board members), kept the peace (as constables and sheriffs), and hired others for jobs (such as police officers and teachers). State legislatures had the power to pass laws and allocate state funding in ways that could buttress Black freedom. When Black men held these positions, it gave African American citizens the tangible benefits of access to a fair hearing in the criminal justice system, municipal and county employment, and public schooling. It also had some disruptive effects on the patterns of Black deference to white authority that had long defined these southern communities, as John R. Lynch’s account of his time as a Justice of the Peace in Natchez, Mississippi, suggests.

White Backlash to Black Officeholding

With the withdrawal of federal support for Reconstruction in 1877, the number of Black officeholders declined significantly, though a dwindling number remained. Putting Black men into the kinds of positions once dominated by wealthy white enslavers and their allies was revolutionary, and deeply unwelcome to many white people. As Henry McNeal Turner, a Black Georgian who was himself elected to the state legislature, observed of southern whites, “They do not care so much about Congress admitting negroes to their halls . . . but they do not want the negroes over them at home.” Opposition to Republican government, and to Black Republican officeholders, never abated, and as the 1870s wore on, violent repression of the Black vote increased. In 1874 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, local whites attempted to force the county’s Black elected officials to resign. When sheriff Peter Crosby refused, whites opened fire on the African Americans who had assembled to protest, killing 29 and wounding hundreds.

If these years had been, even briefly, transformative for African Americans, for the whites who vigorously and violently opposed Black political participation they were anything but. White Democrats at the time depicted Black officeholders as ignorant and corrupt, characterizing that period of “Negro rule” as a dreadful but short interlude that ended with the restoration of white political dominance in the 1880s and 1890s. That partisan view powerfully shaped scholarly and popular historical accounts of Reconstruction for decades to follow, from textbooks to films like The Birth of a Nation (released in 1915). The message of such accounts--that African Americans were unfit to hold public office--was demonstrably false but dangerously pervasive.

Reflection Questions

What evidence can you find in documents 1 and 2 for how African Americans in the South participated in local politics?

What changed in southern communities once African Americans could vote and hold elected office? What evidence can you find in documents 1 and 2 of those changes?

Documents 3 and 4 provide evidence of how the majority of white southerners viewed Reconstruction. How does that view differ from the evidence of Black political participation in documents 1 and 2?

Additional Reading

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Eric Foner, “Black Reconstruction Leaders at the Grass Roots,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 219–36.

Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Related Chapters

Reconstructing the Nation, 1865-1877