Reconstruction’s welfare flowed to railroads, not freed people

Evidence

While Blacks rarely benefited from Reconstruction’s economic policies, growing corporations did. Facing war-torn communities and treasuries, the same Reconstruction politicians who refused to hand out land and aid to landless Blacks, on the pretext that it would ruin them, handed millions out to railroad companies, on the pretext that railroads would develop the South by bringing new jobs, factories, and towns; allow for transport of untapped minerals; and extend agriculture. By 1872, most of the South only had debt and poverty to show for the incredible amounts of welfare handed out to railroad corporations. Bribed politicians happily gave away these funds. Only a small number of Black politicians sat in senior positions of power, and thus their share of the corruption paled in comparison to that of White politicians. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 669

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s existing work on infrastructure (railroads as corporate welfare) — connects to the trees-as-infrastructure piece theme of who infrastructure actually serves.
• SHARE: The detail that White politicians’ corruption eclipsed the tiny Black share is worth sending to someone tracking the ‘Black corruption’ myth in Reconstruction.