Constitutional gains failed to stop white violence against Black people
Evidence
The historian Annette Gordon-Reed called the carnage a “slow-motion genocide.” It was clear that anytime a Black person tried to fulfill their right to leave an employer or reunite with their family or demand payment for their labor, they could be violently attacked. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and similar domestic terrorist organizations like the Knights of the White Camelia and the Red Shirts meant that the precarity of Black life was the defining condition in post–Civil War America. Despite the subsequent repeal of the Black Codes; the rise of Radical Reconstruction, helmed by the U.S. Congress; the advent of the right to vote for African American men in 1867; the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; and the passage of the third Enforcement Act, a law that criminalized white domestic terrorism, the Klan and other vigilante groups were undeterred. The bloodshed was so intense and the lack of justice so evident, despite the fact that Black people were now voting and holding office, that in the mid-1870s President Ulysses S. Grant painfully acknowledged that the slew of murders meant that white people clearly had “the right to Kill negroes…without fear of punishment, and without loss of caste or reputation.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 806
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in distinguishing reframing arguments from specific empirical claims — this shows Reconstruction’s legal gains being decoupled from actual protection, which is the causal core of the project’s reframing. — connects to: Almost no white rioters against Blacks faced punishment — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 492; Constitutional protections failed to prevent police violence that fueled Black Lives Matter. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4326; Threats and Klan intimidation failed to stop black-home-selling whites. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 153