Cathay Williams was the only female Buffalo Soldier. At this time women weren't allowed to be a part of the Buffalo soldiers so she posed as a man by changing her name to William Cathay. She joined the thirty-eighth infantry in November of 1866. On October 14, 1868 she faked an illness and upon examination she was found to be female and was promptly discharged. This made her known as the only female soldier.

http://www.ncbuffalosoldiers.org/history.asp?u_action=display&u_log=1

Late 1800's photograph of members of the 10th Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers). Augustus Walley (top row, 2nd from right, with the bandana around his neck), a former slave from Bond Avenue in Reisterstown, MD, won the Congressional Medal of Honor

http://www.operationmorningstar.org/

This is a photograph of the 24th Mounted Infantry taken somewhere in Yosemite in 1899.

http://americanindiansource.com/buffalosoldiers/BuffaloSoldiersInCalifornia.html

White Supremacist Violence

From the first year of Reconstruction to the early 1940s, lynching was the primary means of maintaining white supremacy in the American South. Considered by the federal government a normal condition of post-Civil War race relations, lynching was used not only as a specific act of summary "justice" but also as a symbol to further intimidate and degrade blacks. The magnitude of recorded mob violence between 1880 and 1940 almost defies description, involving more than five thousand men, women, and children in ritualized murder, often before an invited public. Two-thirds of the victims were African-American men.

http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/all/objectview.aspx?OID=190036457

 This image demonstrates how white supremacy violence was not physical but also mental. The refusal of African American for common jobs and in to public places just because they were black was just as damaging to the people as the beatings.

http://www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/allposts/roots-of-white-supremacy-in-america-black-folklore-and-racial-representation-at-the-birth-of-jim-crow

                                                                                 What makes this plaque so striking is that is a quote from the President Woodrow Wilson. It just shows the attitude towards blacks.

http://thelowmanlynchings.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/the-lowman-lynchings-pg-3/

This is a current picture of a sign in Colfax, LA that tell the story of the Colfax riot took place where it states the 150 blacks and 3 whites were slain on April 13, 1873.  it sits there as a reminder of the violence that took place against innocent people. what also makes this story significant is the fact that no one really knows exactly hoe many blacks died that day but it is a well known fact that 3 whites were killed.

http://quackcetera.com/blog/

164th. Nathan Williams (colored), badly whipped and his cotton taken away without any cause by Bill Mark, a white man, on his place, in 1874, because he voted the Radical [Republican] ticket.

228th. Old man Jack Horse and son was badly beat and shot at by white men- they were as bloody as hogs- at or near Jack Horse's place, going to the election November 7, 1870.

518th. Henry Moore, colored, killed by white men and burned; accused of living with a white girl near Homer, in 1873.

Exodusters Movement

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This image(1) is a 1877 handbill urging African Americans to move to Kansas, especially those who were from the south.

 The image above is of Benjamin "Pap" Singleton and a handbill 

As Moses had led the exodus of the ancient Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt to the "promise land", modern clergymen and other leaders led former slaves and their families out of the defeated but hostile American south and into what they believed was the promise land of Kansas. One of those many leaders was by Benjamin "Pap" Singleton. He was a very important piece to the exodus movement. In the south, blacks found themselves having to overcome great obstacles to obtain land. Singleton learned from organizations involved with the anitslavery movement. Working with several politicians such as Edward P. McCabe who was a land developer and speculator, a lawyer, an immigration promoter, a newspaper owner, and a politician.

http://ctah.binghamton.edu/jennifer/exoduster1.gif

 This image (2)

http://middle.usm.k12.wi.us/faculty/taft/unit5/westwebquest/exodusters/levee.gif

 

This image (3) is a picture of the Exodusters along with the Kansas Freedman's Relief Association (KFRA). In response to the mass exodus from the south in 1879 and 1880, Kansas Governor and Quaker John St. John established the KFRA.  The Association was created in 1879 to “aid destitute freedmen, refugees and immigrants” who were migrating to Kansas. The KFRA provided temporary shelter, employment, and monetary aid and assistance in resettling in various Kansas counties.To help house the influx of African migrants, the KFRA built and maintained a temporary shelter called the Barracks, located in Topeka.  This temporary facility eventually housed over four hundred men, women and children as they transitioned to their life in Kansas.

 http://www.blackpast.org/files/blackpast_images/exodusters_KS_0.jpg

Undermining of Black Civil Rights by the Supreme Court

        African Americans lost many civil rights during the period of "Larger Reconstruction" through extensive interpretation and "reinterpretation" of the Constitution by local and state courts, and particularly the Supreme Court. Violence was justified through legislation that gave preference, as Nell Painter writes in Creating Black Americans, to "Southern white supremacists" (154).

Plessy v. Ferguson

 

"It is now solemnly held that a state may prohibit white and black citizens from sitting in the same passenger coach on a public highway, or may require that they be separated by a 'partition' when in the same passenger coach."

 US. v. Cruikshank

U.S. v. Cruikshank ruled that "The same person may be at the same time a citizen of the United States and a citizen of a State, but his rights of citizenship under
one of these governments will be different from those he has under the
other. "

 
Historian of Reconstruction Eric Foner observed, "Cruikshank "rendered national prosecution of crimes against blacks virtually impossible, and gave a green light to acts of terror where local officials either could not or would not enforce the law."
(Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1989, 531).

The above image depicts victims of murders against African Americans where the white perpetrators were not prosecuted.



Georgia's 1871 Poll Tax

 

The Georgia poll tax probably reduced overall turnout by 16-28%, and
black turnout in half (Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics,
67-8).

Poll taxes targeted newly freed blacks who tended to be poor because of hiring and wage discrimination. Receipts for payment of poll taxes even required that the voter designate his race on the receipt, as shown here.



Song of the Son


Pour O pour that parting soul in song
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so proligate of pines,
Now hust before an epoch's sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes 
an everlasting song, a singing tree, 
Caroling softly souls of slavery, 
What they were, and what they are to me, 
Caroling softly souls of slavery.

-Jean Toomer

"The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role that you play."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"One hundred years from now, these Negroes, if they exist at all, will exist in art."

• Painter, Nell Irvin. Creating Black Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

• United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876).
• "Techniques of Direct Disenfranchisement, 1880-1965," University of Michigan. 
• Toomer, Jean. "Song of the Son." Cane. Norton (1993), 12, 151. 
• Abcarian, Richard. Richard Wright's Native Son: A Critical Handbook. Wadsworth Publishing (1970), 136.