Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Philip A. Klinkner is the James S. Sherman Professor of Government at Hamilton College.


Rogers M. Smith is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The Unsteady March

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION The Unsteady March..................................................................................................1ONE "Bolted with the Lock of a Hundred Keys" The Era of Slavery, 1619–1860.................................................10TWO "Thenceforward, and Forever Free" The Civil War, 1860–1865.............................................................47THREE "The Negro Has Got as Much as He Ought to Have" Reconstruction and the Second Retreat, 1865–1908.....................72FOUR "The Color Line" Jim Crow America, 1908-1938................................................................................106FIVE "Deutschland and Dixieland" Antifascism and the Emergence of Civil Rights, 1938–1941..................................136SIX "Double V: Victory Abroad, Victory at Home" World War II.....................................................................161SEVEN "Hearts and Minds" The Cold War and Civil Rights, 1946–1954..........................................................202EIGHT "There Comes a Time" The Civil Rights Revolution, 1954–1968..........................................................242NINE "Benign Neglect"? Post–Civil Rights America, 1968–1998..........................................................288CONCLUSION Shall We Overcome?....................................................................................................317Notes............................................................................................................................353Index............................................................................................................................407

Chapter One

The Era of Slavery, 1619–1860

In 1676, exactly one hundred years before the British American colonists would declare their independence, blacks bound to servitude for life joined landless whites in an effort to overthrow what they felt to be a repressive colonial regime in Jamestown, Virginia. They were led by a rebellious and bold gentry leader, Nathaniel Bacon, whose death from the "bloody flux" (probably dysentery) soon brought the insurgency to an ignominious close. Still, for a time colonial blacks and whites stood shoulder to shoulder in a struggle for greater opportunities. But Americans today do not celebrate Bacon's Rebellion as a milestone of interracial cooperation. Perhaps that is because its story is all too revealing of the sources, consequences, and limits of racial unity in our nation.

Nathaniel Bacon did not welcome blacks to his cause out of any commitment to racial equality. He originally formed his force to conquer the surrounding native tribes, even friendly ones, and take their lands for former indentured servants who had served their time and wanted farms. Bacon added black servants to his corps of poor whites only when he found he also had to fight William Berkeley, the colonial governor. Berkeley thought arming the Jamestown "rabble" too dangerous to be allowed. After Bacon's death, the Virginia government reacted to this spectacle of interracial servant solidarity by slowly eliminating white indentured servitude and expanding the then-new institution of black chattel slavery.

The pattern thus etched—increased white acceptance of blacks as fellow contributors to a common cause during a military struggle, followed by a long period during which whites instead consolidated racial advantages at the expense of blacks—is, quite simply, the pattern of American life through most of U.S. history. This chapter shows the politics responsible for this pattern at work not only in Bacon's Rebellion but in the entire American antebellum period, from 1619 to 1860. From 1619 to 1775, white Americans developed a racial hierarchy based upon black slavery. The ideology and the crisis of the Revolutionary War underlined this hierarchy and led to the abolition of slavery in the North, its weakening in the South, and the extension of at least some of the basic rights of citizenship to free blacks in many parts of the country. Yet after the military crisis and ideological fervor of the Revolution passed, white Americans soon began to build their new nation by reinforcing their racial hierarchies, as slavery was strengthened in the South, native tribes were displaced or destroyed, and the rights of free blacks restricted throughout the land.

Slavery did not spring fully grown onto American soil when the first Africans were brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. It appears that these Africans came not as slaves but as indentured servants who were held to labor for only a finite period of time. Moreover, black and white indentured servants were treated relatively equally at first. As late as 1651, black indentured servants who had completed their term of service were given land on an equal basis with whites of the same status. Blacks also seem to have possessed some political rights, which in a few areas included the right to vote in local elections and the right to testify in court against whites.

By 1640, however, at least some blacks were being held as slaves in Virginia, and throughout the colonies the status of white and black indentured servants increasingly diverged. More and more, blacks were forced into a lifetime of labor, which was passed on to their children. Once established, the institution of slavery spread rapidly throughout the colonies in the ensuing decades, spurred on by the increasing demand for labor, the declining number of white indentured servants, and the growth of racist beliefs that Africans were uniquely qualified to serve as chattel slaves for white colonists.

As slavery grew, so did its repressiveness. Blacks lost most of the rights they had possessed as indentured servants. The fear of slave revolts and of racial mixing led whites to enact harsh and punitive slave codes to ensure the stability of the slave system and to maintain the supremacy of whites over blacks. The slave codes varied from colony to colony. In the South, where slaves were most numerous and white fears of revolt most acute, the codes were elaborate and brutal. In the North, where slaves were fewer and less important to the economy, they were somewhat more lenient. In general, the codes denied slaves the right to marry, to own property, to own weapons, and to defend themselves against whites. They forbade slaves from meeting and traveling outside of the supervision of their masters. The codes also established especially harsh penalties for slaves who committed crimes, particularly those attempting escape or rebellion. African American slaves, in short, did not possess basic rights of life, liberty, or property to any meaningful extent.

The small number of colonial free blacks also saw their status increasingly degraded by new laws. They had to go through burdensome procedures to prove their free status and they, too, could not own many types of property. Free blacks also had to endure higher taxes and more severe criminal punishments than whites. In 1715, North Carolina began what...