From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
Every step forward was earned at great cost and in the face of vengeance from those whose power was slipping away. If America’s second revolution proved to be one of the most radical of the nineteenth-century world, it also inspired some of the most violent counterrevolutions in both the North and the South. Following the Civil War, the economic revolution never matched the nation’s political revolution. The Freedmen’s Bureau would be shuttered only a few years after its inception, and America even reneged on its meager commitment of forty acres and a mule in South Carolina’s lowlands.
Compounding our racial crimes, after refusing freed people modest tracts of land, we distributed huge tracts to white people through the Homestead Acts while constructing land-grant colleges to empower them to develop the land they received free of charge. Between 1866 and 1934, a full 10 percent of our nation’s land – 246 million acres – would be dispersed to 1.5 million white people. Despite these generous public benefits for white Americans, Black people were left to scratch out freedom amid poverty and landlessness.
Enemy number one for Reconstruction was Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice president from Tennessee, who ascended to the presidency following Lincoln’s assassination. “This is a country for White men,” declared President Johnson, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for White men.” Through presidential appointment, every governor President Johnson installed in Southern states adamantly opposed Black suffrage. Through presidential pardon, every Confederate leader received amnesty and restoration without repentance. Despite early hope for his presidency, President Johnson made clear that his commitment was to the restoration of white supremacy, not Lincoln’s new birth of freedom.
As Black people attempted to breathe life into new democratic possibilities, former Confederate soldiers created terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to extinguish any vestige of Black power or participation in politics and reestablish white dominance in every facet of American life. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, white supremacists murdered elected officials and overthrew duly elected governments. These acts of violence are the foundations upon which state governments throughout the South now stand.