Change and Continuity in the Lives of African Americans (1865-1900)

Document 2
There is, at present, no danger of another insurrection against the authority of the United States on a large scale, and the people are willing to reconstruct their State governments, and to send their senators and representatives to Congress. But as to the moral value of these results, we must not indulge in any delusions … There is, as yet, among the Southern people an utter absence of national feeling… Aside from the assumption that the Negro will not work without physical compulsion, there appears to be another popular notion… that the Negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice, and sugar for the whites, and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way.

Document 3 
I admit that this species of legislation [Civil Rights Act of 1866}] is absolutely revolutionary. But are we not in the midst of a revolution? Is the Senator from Kentucky utterly oblivious to the grand results of four years of war? Are we not in the midst of a civil and political revolution which has changed the fundamental principles of our government in some respects?... There was a civilization based on servitude… Where is that?...Gone forever… We have revolutionized this Constitution of ours to that extent and every substantial change in the fundamental constitution of a country is a revolution.

Document 4
We were liberated not only empty-handed but left in the power of a people who resented our emancipation as an act of unjust punishment to them. They were therefore armed with a motive for doing everything in their power to render our freedom a curse rather than a blessing. In the halls of National legislation the Negro was made a free man and citizen. The Southern states which had seceded from the Union before the war, regained their autonomy by accepting these amendments and promising to support the constitution. Since “reconstruction” these amendments have been largely nullified in the South, and the Negro vote reduced from a majority to a cipher. This has been accomplished by political massacres, by midnight outrages of Ku Klux Klans, and by state legislative enactment.

Document 5
We have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear- dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. 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…. The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing…..The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.