This essay examines how African Americans defined and sought to realize freedom from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement and beyond. Drawing on primary sources and scholarly works by Elsa Barkley Brown, W.E.B. DuBois, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Chana Kai Lee, and Temma Kaplan, the paper traces the political activism of freedwomen in Reconstruction-era Richmond, the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, the unfulfilled promises of the Fifteenth Amendment, the grassroots organizing of Fannie Lou Hamer, the rise of Black feminist thought through the Combahee River Collective, and the environmental justice activism of Dollie Burwell in North Carolina.
How did Black Americans define freedom, and how did they work to realize it? Elsa Barkley Brown's essay "The Labor of Politics" explores the social and political activities of African American women between 1865 and 1880. She points out that during the transition from slavery to freedom, freed African Americans held a very different definition of freedom than their "most supportive white allies" did (p. 76). The northern white liberals who had opposed slavery and now sought to help freed Black people apparently had no expectation that freed Black women in the South would engage in political campaigns. The "Rising Daughters of Liberty," Brown explains, went around raising money for candidates, educating their communities, and getting out the vote (Brown, p. 80).
Some freed African American women were fearless. Although they could not vote, they would walk up to thirty miles into Richmond, Virginia, to participate in the 1868 election, and along the way "placed themselves in potentially dangerous positions by wearing Republican campaign buttons" (p. 80). (The Republican Party at that time was the progressive party in U.S. history.) Freedwomen would "buy, beg, or borrow" a campaign button and wear it "openly in defiance of… master, mistress, or overseer" (Brown, p. 80). Some Black Republican politicians took women's participation seriously, Brown writes on page 82; they encouraged women "to refrain from sexual relations with any man who voted Democratic."
Six years after the end of the Civil War — and a year after the Fifteenth Amendment was passed — some freedwomen were still trying to realize their freedom while living under the constant threat of brutal harassment and violence from the Ku Klux Klan. Harriet Hernandes of Spartanburg, South Carolina, testified that eight men pushed into her house just after Christmas, seeking to kill her husband: "They told me they were going to shoot my damned brains out if I did not tell where my husband was" (Hernandes, p. 50). The second time the Klan arrived, they dragged Harriet and her daughter out to a brush pile and beat them, and they also whipped her fifteen-year-old daughter.
The Klansmen's goal was to kill Black men who had voted "radical tickets," but when those men were not home, they "took the spite out on the women when they could get at them," Hernandes testified (p. 52). On pages 38–39 of "African-Americans in Richmond, Virginia, Petition President Andrew Johnson, 1865," a letter signed by seven freedmen described their freedom as "in many respects worse than when we were slaves" (Cook et al., 1865, p. 39). Even to walk the streets of Richmond, freed people were required to carry a "pass" — and even that did not protect them from "arrest, insult, abuse, violence and imprisonment" (Cook, p. 39).
W.E.B. DuBois writes in The Souls of Black Folk that forty years after emancipation the freedman had "not yet found in freedom his promised land" and the United States had "not yet found peace from its sins" (DuBois, 1903, p. 217). His essay defined the life that freedmen and freedwomen were leading after the war in political, economic, social, and cultural terms. The Fifteenth Amendment, which supposedly made it illegal to deny any citizen the right to vote, came and went; yet the freedman and freedwoman — the "half-free serf" — were left "weary, wondering but still inspired" (DuBois, p. 217). When it became clear that freed Black people would gain little political power, many turned to education, and that too proved a struggle.
DuBois observed that thirty and forty years after being granted the nominal right to vote, with very few changes to their social situation, the freedman "felt the weight of his ignorance — not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities." Free Black people felt "the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet" (DuBois, p. 218). Years after emancipation, they remained "without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings," forced into "competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors." DuBois concluded: "To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships" (p. 218).
"Black feminist organizing confronting race, class, and gender"
"Hamer's moral pragmatism linking food security to voter registration"
"Dollie Burwell's fight against toxic dumping in Black communities"
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