Issue of Race in America After the Civil War

¶ … Race After the Civil War

Black or white, which is the color of your skin?

Some time in history, the color of a person's skin had been an essential element in his life's journey. To be socially accepted, people sees to it that you have the right skin color. But which is the right color? Does there exist a right color of skin? This issue seems to be a very narrow and senseless matter that our ancestors were implicated centuries and years ago. Especially after the Civil War, the element of race became an issue in every aspect of their daily lives.

Unfortunate to the discrimination of race in the society of man in America after the Civil War are the black colored people. They were considered and grouped among the minorities who were prohibited with equal rights, not by law, but by human nature of men. Black colored people in America were subjected to color prejudice, inhumanely treated and regarded as only among the mules and horses, inflicted with moral, physical, intellectual, and psychological wounds, only people of the same black race could care.

"Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?"

In his The Color Line, Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist who patronized and fought for equality of race in America, stated the above message as an instance the colored people may seem to protest against the color prejudice thrown upon them.

Race and color prejudice were met by colored people in every episodes of their lives. After the Civil War, despite the improvements other Americans were experiencing, the lives of the colored African-Americans remained in misery. Opportunities for them were very limited, forcing some of them to work as slaves as they did before the emancipation. Douglass indicates the line drawn in every aspect between the blacks and the white Americans.

Without crime or offense against law or gospel, the colored man is the Jean Valjean of American society. He has escaped from the galleys, and hence all presumptions are against him. The workshop denies him work, and the inn denies him shelter; the ballot-box a fair vote, and the jury-box a fair trial.

Specifically in the south, many Southerners refused to acknowledge the emancipation granted to the colored people. Consequently, "Black Codes" were implemented during Reconstruction, deteriorating the status of the blacks. They were obliged to respect and treat the whites as superior to their race. Otherwise, they will be subject for brutal and harsh punishments. Anti-black sentiments still existed during Reconstruction period. As a consequence, different protest movements and groups of blacks were formed delivering their demands for equal rights as citizens of America, and for equality in all social, political, and economic activities.

In 1899, the oppressions upon the blacks were expressed by the colored people of Massachusetts through an open letter to the President of the United States, William McKinley. Despised and degraded by the cruel bondage of white Americans in the South, they had uttered in their written letter their call for help from the President or any member of his Cabinet, and their demands against the silence the President stands despite of the tyranny and cruelty his government empowers against the rights of the blacks as American citizens. Such claims were indicated in the letter as follows.

We ask for the free and full exercise of all the rights of American freemen, guaranteed to us by the Constitution and laws of the Union, which you were solemnly sworn to obey and execute.

... These rights are everywhere throughout the South denied to us, violently wrested from us by mobs, by lawless legislatures, and nullifying conventions, combinations, and conspiracies, openly, defiantly, under your eyes, in your constructive and actual presence.

... Black indeed we are, sir, but we are also men and American citizens.

The issue of slavery in the South has been the subject of many movements who advocate freedom and equality of rights for the blacks. In contrast, however, in his The Sociology of South or The Failure of Free Society, George Fitzhugh supports slavery. His document had afflicted colored Southerners, insulting their status as deserving of being slaves.

We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones. Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class.

Fitzhugh had also conveyed a number of statements downgrading the colored people of the South.

In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate.

Advocating slavery, Fitzhugh's delivery of racism was hidden behind the rationales he emphasized in contradiction to the principles being fought for by the African-American abolitionists. Defending the whites from the miseries they caused to the blacks, and reasoning in favor of the whites against the oppressions the blacks receive from their masters, Fitzhugh stated

We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity