Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the postbellum nineteenth century, the federal program known as Reconstruction deployed troops in the South in order to uphold the enfranchisement of blacks and thereby foster a more racially equitable, “New” South. Many whites, especially those who were born in the “Old” South and who demanded black subservience to whites, reacted to Reconstruction with disgust and anger. Coterminous with this response, congressmen passed the Compromise of 1877. In this act, the Republican Party agreed to withdraw the federal army from the South in exchange for the Democrats' acceptance of a Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, as the nineteenth president of the country. The racial consequences of these concessions were remarkable. Over four million former slaves were left unprotected from violent white supremacists and Jim Crow segregation; the rate of blacks being lynched, among other kinds of racial terror, skyrocketed; the Republicans abandoned their fight for black civil rights; and blacks lost their power in Congress. For these reasons, this unfortunate period, from Reconstruction through the Harlem Renaissance, has been called the “Nadir,” the “Dark Ages of Recent American History,” and the “Decades of Disappointment.”Many scholars have examined the formation of African American culture, and the idea of the “New Negro” in particular, against the backdrop of this well-known racial-political ... log in or subscribe to read full text