“Lynchings were the original form of voter suppression...The legacy of that suppression is still evident today. The past affects people's behavior today even if they don't realize it.”

- Jhacova Williams, author of a study finding Historical Lynchings and Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks (2017) and an associate economist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.

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This article was authored by Caitlyn Cobb. Note from the author: This article is comprised of quotes from many different articles in order to provide a more comprehensive account of this time period as well as to keep this article more brief. A complete reference list can be found at the end of this article.

I hope you have enjoyed this year's Black History series. Today, February 21st, 2022, we remember the Black massacres that occurred between the 1860's and early 1900's. While many more massacres occurred after and before this, the extreme concentration of Black massacres during this time period were specifically targeted against Black men exerting their right to vote under 15th amendment. In this article, I revisit the time periods already covered all month long, and reveal this brutal hidden history.

When you think of the time period after the American Civil War known as "Reconstruction", what comes to mind? Is it a rampant massacres to uphold White Supremacy by suppressing the Black vote? A new report brings the number of victims of racial terror killings between 1865 and 1950 to almost 6,500. Furthermore, a 2017 study found Historic Lynchings in the U.S. South Are Linked to Lower Levels of Voter Registration Among Black People. It is up to us to learn from our history. We can not allow new voter suppression tactics to continue this legacy of disenfranchisement.

The Black Soldiers

Fort Pillow, located on the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee was a strategic location held by United States (Union) forces just north of Memphis and controlling river access to and from St. Louis and the Ohio River Valley. Black soldiers serving in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), who were regularly enlisted in the Union army and in full uniform, were stationed with White troops at Fort Pillow under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest defending the United States flag.

On April 12, 1864, The Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest — also infamous for being the first grand wizard of the early Klu Klux Klan-- led an attack on Fort Pillow in Tennessee. The troops tried twice to use a "flag of truce" to surrender prior to the attack, but "[a]fter taking the fort, 'the Confederates commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded.' Black women and children in the fort were also slaughtered.

“Out of the garrison of six hundred, only two hundred remained alive.” In the same issue, the Times published an account of events from a correspondent of the Union who was on board the steamer Platte Valley at Fort Pillow:

"For the conservative provisional governors appointed by President Johnson organized lily-white governments with blatant proslavery biases. In 1865 and 1866 these governments enacted the Black Codes which indicated that the South intended to reestablish slavery under another name. The codes restricted the rights of freedmen under vagrancy and apprenticeship laws. South Carolina forbade freedmen to follow any occupation except farming and menial service and required a special license to do other work. The legislature also gave 'masters' the right to whip 'servants' under eighteen years of age. In other states Blacks could be punished for 'insulting gestures,' 'seditious speeches' and the 'crime' of walking off a job. Blacks could not preach in one state without police permission. A Mississippi law enacted late in November required Blacks to have jobs before the second Monday in January.

The New Orleans Massacre is one of the deadliest attacks on voting rights activists in American history. In New Orleans on July 30, 1866, a White mob, led by police and firemen, attacked delegates, Black marchers, and spectators gathered at the Mechanics Institute during the reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The Convention reconvened in response to the state legislature enacting Black Codes and limiting suffrage. The attack left over forty African Americans dead, over 150 wounded.

"In 1864, Union forces had almost entirely liberated Louisiana from Confederate control, and the state’s all-white electorate had drafted and ratified a new state constitution that acknowledged the abolition of slavery. Still, the document sanctioned restrictions on African American civil and political rights, and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Louisiana voters, many of whom were Confederate veterans, returned numerous Confederate officials to state and federal offices under the banner of a Democratic Party that openly proclaimed to be in favor of white supremacy. 'We hold this to be a Government of white people,' the platform of the state party maintained, 'made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.' Indeed, the platform announced, 'people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.' It came as no surprise that the state legislature promptly passed discriminatory laws known as Black Codes that targeted the formerly enslaved, nor that the mayor of New Orleans, former Confederate John T. Monroe, instructed city policemen to single out the formerly enslaved for arrest.

"Frustrated by this ongoing racial discrimination and the resumption of Confederate rule, in 1866 leading African American suffrage activists convinced a handful of white former delegates to Louisiana’s 1864 Constitutional Convention to reconvene the convention in New Orleans, and to draft a state constitutional amendment enfranchising African American men. Their plan relied upon a technicality, namely that the motion to adjourn the 1864 Convention had contained a provision authorizing it to reconvene to pass amendments at any later date.

"Activists also recognized that the vote bore profound symbolic significance. In a world where women could not vote and political participation signified manhood and status, exclusion from the polls was both emasculating and humiliating. African American men demanded “political rights,” argued black Union army veteran and future Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback, but they also demanded 'to become men'.

"The vote was no less meaningful to embittered Confederate army veterans, who already felt emasculated by military defeat and saw the prospect of African American enfranchisement as an amplification of that emasculation. State Democratic officials declared the reconvening of the Constitutional Convention illegal. When judicial challenges to the reconvening failed, Mayor Monroe, the police chief, and former Confederate officers secretly resolved to annihilate the convention delegates instead. They covertly enlisted hundreds of Confederate army veterans as emergency police officers, and police and fire stations received orders to prepare for a showdown on July 30, 1866.

"On the morning of the convention, a jubilant parade of African American suffrage supporters, [a delegation of 130 black New Orleans residents], carried a large American flag and followed a marching band through the streets towards the hall where the convention delegates were assembling. The marchers’ elation shifted towards apprehension as crowds of hostile onlookers began to gather."

Newly reinstated acting Mayor John T. Monroe, an active supporter of the Confederacy who had headed city government before the Civil War, organized and led a mob of ex-Confederates, White Supremacists, and members of the New Orleans Police Force to block their way. The Mayor claimed their intent was to put down any unrest that may come from the Convention but the real reason was to prevent the delegates from meeting."

"A fight broke out. Distant pistol fire cracked."

"...[T]he city’s fire bell rang twelve tolls, the traditional code for summoning residents to defend the city against imminent enemy attack. As the bell fell silent, police, firemen, and white civilians surrounded the parade and the hall.

Then they opened fire." "..[T]he group was allowed to proceed to the meeting hall...Now the police and mob surrounded the Institute and opened fire on the building, shooting indiscriminately into the windows. Then the mob rushed into the building and began to fire into the crowd of delegates. When the mob ran out of ammunition they were beaten back by the delegates. The mob left the building, regrouped, and returned, breaking down the doors and again firing on the mostly unarmed delegates."

According to accounts of surviving spectators, rioters slaughtered marchers kneeling in surrender, and mutilated their bodies. People fell like flies as the mob shot at them, and when they were done, "they tramped upon them, and mashed their heads with their boots, and shot them after they were down."

As the firing continued some delegates attempted to flee or surrender. Some of those who surrendered, mostly blacks, were killed on the spot. Those who ran were chased as the killing spread over several blocks around the Institute. By this point both the rioters and victims included people who were never at the Institute. African Americans were shot on the street or pulled off of streetcars to be summarily beaten or killed. By the end of the massacre, at least 200 black Union war veterans were killed, including forty delegates at the Convention. Altogether 238 people were killed and 46 were wounded."

"When federal troops finally arrived hours later, the floor was sticky with blood. Three white delegates and more than forty African American supporters lay dead. Another 150 lay wounded. Only one white Democrat had been killed, by a policeman’s stray bullet.

Yet the attack backfired. News of the brutality swept the nation and horrified the North, galvanizing northern white support for African American political and civil rights. Republicans swept the 1866 Congressional elections. In 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under federal military control and calling for new constitutional conventions in which African American men could vote for delegates. Federal officials removed Mayor Monroe and other former Confederate officials from office. Louisiana’s new legislature dissolved the New Orleans’ police department and replaced it with a racially integrated force."

As Mary Ann Shadd Cary joined other women in an unsuccessful attempt to vote in 1874:

A couple years after 1896 when Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Margaret Murray Washington, Frances E.W. Harper, and Mary Church Terrell founded The National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC-) in Washington, D.C.; and, during George H. White's Congressional term for North Carolina’s Second Congressional District (1899-1901):

In 1920 after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, as Maggie Lena Walker was holding voter registration drives; as Anna A. Clemons was pleading for her right to vote; as Mary McLeod Bethune rode a bicycle door-to-door raising money to pay the "poll tax":

We cannot go through every massacre, but encourage our readers to read up on different massacres using the map below and the sources listed at the end of this article as a starting reference.

Go to VotingRightsAlliance.org to view them all!