APUSH: Reconstruction Assessed

Evaluate the extent to which the lives of African Americans changed in the period after the Civil War (1865-1897).

Document 1: Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, “And Not This Man?” August 5, 1865.

*This is a ballot box

Document 2: Freedman’s Bureau agent Sydney Andrews, Joint Report on Reconstruction, 1866.

Many of the freedmen, and negro workers in the towns and villages, were supporting little schools themselves.
Everywhere I found them hoping to get their children into schools. I often noticed that workers in stores and men
working in warehouses, and cart drivers on the streets, had spelling books with them, and were studying them
during the time they were not working. Go outside any large town in the south, and you will see children and in
many cases grown negroes, sitting in the sun alongside their cabins studying.
APUSH: Reconstruction Assessed

Document 3: African-Americans in Congress (House of Representatives and Senate), 1865-1889

Document 4: The Civil Rights Act, March 1, 1875

Whereas it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is
the duty of government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever
nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political...That all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal
enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or
water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.
APUSH: Reconstruction Assessed

Document 5: Richmond (Virginia) Dispatch, 1889

RALEIGH, N.C., Sept 14—News was received here tonight of another lynching, which is the thirteenth this year. It
occurred at Whiteville, Columbus County, night before last. A body of masked men, a hundred or more, entered
the jail and demanded the keys from the jailer. With a score of revolvers pointed at him, he surrendered the keys,
and the lynchers went to the cell where Sherman Farrier (colored) was confined for an outrage committed on an
aged white woman, and took him and departed. Yesterday, suspended to the limb of a large oak about one mile
from the jail, the body of Sherman Farrier was found with a placard pinned on his breast bearing the words: “We
protect the virtue of our women. Beware.”

Document 6: Henry Grady and Joshua Brackett, 1889-1890

Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady in a speech to Boston Merchants Association, 1889: It is claimed that this
ignorant labor is defrauded of its just hire. I present the tax books of Georgia which show that the negro, twenty-
five years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10 million of assessed property, worth twice that much.

Reverend Joshua A. Brackett, African Methodist Episcopal Church, reply to Henry Grady, 1890: In Georgia, Mr.
Grady’s own state, the negro’s real wealth accumulated since the war, is $20 million. Its population of negroes is
725,132. Twenty million dollars divided among that number will give to each person $27.58.

Document 7: US Supreme Court majority opinion, Plessy v Ferguson, 1896

The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races
before the law, but by the nature of things it could riot have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon
color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms
unsatisfactory to either. We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption
that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If the civil and
political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior
to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.