The Reconstruction states sent sixteen Black representatives to the United States Congress, and Mississippi voters elected the nation’s first Black senators: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. Pinchback became the first Black governor in America (and would be the last until 1990). Another eighteen African Americans rose to serve in state executive positions, including lieutenant governor, secretary of state, superintendent of education, and treasurer. More than six hundred African Americans, most of them formerly enslaved, were elected as state legislators during this period. In elections for new state governments, Black voter turnout neared 90 percent in many jurisdictions, 26 and Black voters-who comprised a majority in many districts and a statewide majority in Louisiana-elected both white and Black leaders to represent them. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 also granted voting rights to African American men while disenfranchising former Confederates, dramatically altering the political landscape of the South and ushering in a period of progress. 16” Not surprisingly, under President Johnson, federal Reconstruction efforts to support and enforce Black Americans’ citizenship rights and social and economic freedom went largely unsupported and unrealized. In his 1867 annual message to Congress, President Johnson declared that Black Americans had “less capacity for government than any other race of people,” that they would “relapse into barbarism” if left to their own devices, and that giving them the vote would result in “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed. 15 Johnson made little effort to disguise his racist views. 14 Johnson believed Black people were inherently servile and unintelligent he feared they would vote as instructed by their former masters, reestablishing the power of the planter class and relegating poor white farmers to virtual slavery. , whites of diverse political affiliations declared voting a “privilege” rather than a universal right, and even some whites who had opposed slavery were wary of measures that would lead to Black voting in the North. The largest numbers of lynchings were found in Jefferson County, Alabama Orange, Columbia, and Polk counties in Florida Fulton, Early, and Brooks counties in Georgia Caddo, Ouachita, Bossier, Iberia, and Tangipahoa parishes in Louisiana Hinds County, Mississippi Shelby County, Tennessee and Anderson County, Texas.
Phillips County, Arkansas Lafourche and Tensas parishes in Louisiana Leflore and Carroll counties in Mississippi and New Hanover County, North Carolina, were sites of mass killings of African Americans in single-incident violence that mark them as notorious places in the history of racial terror violence. Lafayette, Hernando, Taylor, and Baker counties in Florida Early County, Georgia Fulton County, Kentucky and Lake and Moore Counties in Tennessee had the highest rates of terror lynchings in America. Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings. Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Some states and counties were particularly terrifying places for African Americans and had dramatically higher rates of lynching than other states and counties we reviewed. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period.Ģ. EJI has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 18, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. We reviewed local newspapers, historical archives, and court records conducted interviews with local historians, survivors, and victims’ descendants and exhaustively examined contemporaneously published reports in African American newspapers. EJI conducted extensive analysis of these data as well as supplemental research and investigation of lynchings in each of the subject states. These sources are widely viewed asthe most comprehensive collection of research data on the subject of lynching in America. Tolnay provided an invaluable resource, as did the research collected at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. EJI researchers have documented several hundred more lynchings than the number identified in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. Racial terror lynching was much more prevalent than previously reported.
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