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.