The Legacy of the Reconstruction

Era’s Black Political Leaders

BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN AND VIDEO BY ARPITA ANEJA

FEBRUARY 7, 2022 4:16 PM EST

A t least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting in 2021,

according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp
signed a law limiting the number of drop boxes for ballots; in Texas, Gov. Greg
Abbott signed a law banning 24-hour and drive-thru voting.

The laws came after record turnout in the 2020 election, including among
African-American voters—and the Brennan Center’s research shows that the
voter restrictions nationwide are more likely to impact African-American voters
and minority voters.

Historians say that this wave of laws making it harder to vote echo the backlash
to the electoral gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction (1865-
1877), the era of political revolution in the aftermath of the Civil War. The above
video looks back at Black politicians who served at all levels of government about
a century before the 1960s civil rights movement.
“I think one of the reasons that it’s so timely to learn about Black political leaders
during Reconstruction is because we have an unprecedented wave of new laws
that are meant to suppress voters—specifically African-American voters—in some
cases in order to ensure that African-American voices are not adequately heard in
the political process,” says William Sturkey, associate professor of History at the
University of North Carolina.

Vintage illustration features portraits of African-American heroes, including Blanche Kelso Bruce,
Frederick Douglass, and Hiram Rhodes Revels, surrounded by scenes of African-American life in the mid
1800s and portraits of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and Ulysses S. Grant. Getty Images
“Reconstruction was the first time that this country tried to be an interracial
democracy—or a democracy, in other words,” says Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-
winning historian and expert on Reconstruction. “It was the first time that
African-American men… became part of the body politic, voted, held office. And
key issues that are on our agenda today were fought out for the first time in
Reconstruction.”

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, requiring new state

governments to be set up based on universal suffrage in states that were part of
the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. New elections took place
in 1867 and 1868. States like Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina were, at
the time, close to a majority Black and elected Black men to statehouses and local
positions for the first time.

“When African Americans were prevented from voting, federal troops or federal
investigators would often be called in in order to protect [their] rights in order to
cast the ballot,” says Sturkey.

Foner, the author of Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders

During Reconstruction, estimates that about 2,000 Black Americans held public
office at the local, state, and federal levels during Reconstruction. Among the
notable Black officeholders in this era: Republican Hiram Revels of Mississippi,
the first Black U.S. Senator, appointed by the Senate to fill a vacancy; Blanche K.
Bruce, another Mississippi Republican who was the first Black U.S. Senator to
serve a full term; Robert Smalls, who escaped enslavement and went on to serve
five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; and Jonathan Jasper Wright of
South Carolina, the first state Supreme Court justice in the U.S.

On Jan. 6, 1874, Robert B. Elliott, a Black Republican congressman from South

Carolina, gave one of the most powerful speeches of the era in defense of what
would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875. “What you give to one class you must
give to all; what you deny to one class, you shall deny to all,” he said.
A circa 1874 lithograph of South Carolina Congressmen Robert B. Elliott delivering a speech on civil rights
to the House of Representatives. MPI—Getty Images

Historians say one of Black officeholders’ biggest contribution was their role in
establishing state-sponsored public schools. Black lawmakers made up a majority
of delegates at the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention, which greenlit
tax-funded public schools. Similarly, half of the delegates were Black at the
Louisiana constitutional convention, which wrote integrated public schools into
the new state Constitution. (Though most of the schools remained segregated.)

“The southern states were required to write new constitutions by the

Reconstruction Acts of 1867… that allow Black and white men to vote and hold
office. These new constitutions [also] included provisions for public education
systems in the South,” says Foner. “Black officeholders played a key role in the
creation of public education in the South.”

But Black officeholder numbers started to decline after 1877. As part of a deal to
settle the contested 1876 presidential election, Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes
won the presidency in exchange for the removal of federal troops in the South
that had helped protect Black voters. In subsequent elections, Ku Klux Klan and
vigilante violence at poll stations drove Black Americans away from the ballot
boxes. Some Reconstruction state governments were overthrown, and the new
state governments passed restrictive voting laws in what became known as the
Jim Crow era. While the 15th Amendment of the Constitution said states couldn’t
restrict voting based on race, state legislators passed laws that mandated
expensive poll taxes (fees to vote) and literacy tests (questions with no right
answers)—and subjected African Americans to them more than white Americans.
It wasn’t until nearly a century later when the 1965 Voting Rights Act made
literacy tests and poll taxes illegal.

Read more: How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism

One reason the Black political leaders of Reconstruction aren’t often taught in
U.S. K-12 schools is because the backlash to the Black officeholders during
Reconstruction contradicts the narrative that America has improved with each
generation, Sturkey says.

“It’s a little bit tricky to teach Reconstruction because African Americans during
Reconstruction could vote in much of the South, and then things actually got a lot
worse. It doesn’t really fit into this narrative of constant progress throughout
America since the Civil War,” says Sturkey. “I think that a lot of people don’t
realize that Black people actually could vote for a period of time and had lost it
again and then had to fight for it again during the Civil Rights movement.”

Foner says Black political leadership provides a fuller picture of the diverse range
of change-makers in the United States. The stories of Black officeholders during
Reconstruction, he says, are important “for students of all backgrounds to
understand that African Americans have always played a crucial role in American
history.”

Essential Question:
Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the first Black United States
Senators from Mississippi in the 1870s. In 1967, almost a century later,
Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the third Black senator and the
first elected by popular vote.

Based on the article above and other resources referenced in this class, how
were the rights of Black Americans to vote and to hold public office
expanded during Reconstruction and then taken away following
Reconstruction?