Toward a “Temporary Farewell”

The decline of Black representation in Congress during the 1880s coincided with the gradual emergence of a state-sanctioned system of racial segregation in the South. Although three Black Representatives served in the 51st Congress, only Henry Cheatham was seated on Opening Day in December 1889. John Langston and Thomas Miller were seated in September 1890 after successfully contesting the elections of their Democratic opponents. In the 10 years that remained of the nineteenth century, only two more African Americans would win election to the House. Even though their numbers were small, each Representative brought the pressing issues facing Black Americans to the House Floor and demanded action.

In 1889, with Republican President Benjamin Harrison in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in eight years, education and voting rights were once again at the center of debate. Known as the “billion-dollar Congress” for its prominent spending spree, the 51st Congress was ineffective at passing legislation important to Black Americans.¹⁰⁹

In 1889, Senator Henry William Blair of New Hampshire reintroduced an education bill that he had first proposed in 1881. It was designed to provide direct federal investment to support a national education system—and establish mechanisms for federal oversight of local schools to ensure equal access, particularly in the South. Money would be distributed based on a formula that assessed the literacy rate in each state, which would allocate nearly 75 percent of the federal funding to southern states. With federal oversight in place, those states could not discriminate in the distribution of monetary aid to schools. At the same time, the Blair bill did not prohibit segregated schools. In fact, it allowed for separate schools so long as funding was equal. This provision was largely uncontroversial at the time. In one of his first acts in the House in December 1889, Henry Cheatham introduced a similar education bill with provisions for separate schools.¹¹⁰

In early 1890, the Blair bill came before the Senate but was defeated in an otherwise crowded legislative calendar packed with tariff and election issues. Congress did establish an important source of federal education funding in the Second Morrill Act, named after Vermont Senator Justin Smith Morrill, the namesake of the 1862 Morrill Act that created land-grant colleges. The 1890 law provided significant funding for those institutions, regardless of whether they served Black or White students.¹¹¹

On June 14, 1890, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts introduced a new federal elections bill in the House. Lodge emphasized the necessity of election safeguards, denouncing the “bitter appeal to race supremacy” which he called “a convenient stalking horse to defraud white men as well as black men their rights.” To limit fraud and discrimination, the bill allowed a small number of constituents in any given precinct to petition a federal judge to take charge of a federal election rather than leave the process in the hands of local—and, in the South, usually Democratic—officials. The bill also enabled the federal government to appoint supervisors to oversee all phases of federal elections, from voter registration to the certification of the results.¹¹²

Opponents in the South soon labeled the Lodge bill the “Force Bill” and likened it to federal policy during Reconstruction. Despite strong words in support of fair elections from Republicans in both chambers, the bill barely passed the House and then languished and died in the Senate, where competing regional factions argued over separate issues related to trade and the money supply that they considered more important.¹¹³

In January 1891, Thomas Miller and John Langston—both of whom had won their contested election cases and joined the House in September of 1890—spoke in favor of the bill and implored the Senate to act. Although they could only encourage Senators to pass the bill, they demanded action from Congress to address the increasing restrictions on African-American life in the South.

Langston argued that the elections bill should not be considered solely of interest to Black Americans; rather it was part of a larger discussion of the meaning of American democracy. If the Civil War had made the country confront “the question of slavery or freedom,” he said, this bill would make the nation answer “whether every American citizen may wield the ballot in this country freely and according to his own judgment.” Senate passage of the bill, Langston said, would allow the nation to “realize the glory and distinction which the fathers knew this country would attain in the future.”¹¹⁴

Miller saw things slightly differently. While the federal elections bill would likely provide Black residents of South Carolina with greater political representation, it did little to solve other pressing issues Black Americans faced in the South, such as lack of fair wages and an imbalanced court system in which justice was impossible for Black plaintiffs. Above all, Black southerners faced an immediate threat from “the infernal lynch law,” the brutal practice of murder and terror directed against individuals with impunity. “We need protection at home in our rights,” Miller declared, “the chiefest of which is the right to live.”¹¹⁵

“A Peculiar Crisis”

Only the Carolinas sent Black Representatives to the House after 1891. George Washington Murray of South Carolina and Henry Cheatham and George Henry White of North Carolina made the nineteenth century’s last stand against racial discrimination in Congress. They were committed to using their seat in the chamber to push meaningful and practical legislation to improve the lives of Black Americans. At the same time, they observed in their districts and region a striking rise in disenfranchisement and violence against African Americans. When the Democratically controlled 53rd Congress (1893–1895) repealed the remaining federal elections protections in 1894, the prospect for intervention from Washington on behalf of Black voters appeared remote. Rapid changes in the 1890s solidified the system of segregation that came to be known as Jim Crow, producing what Representative White called “a peculiar crisis” in the South.¹¹⁶

This social and political system was reinforced by the economic changes coursing through American society during the final decades of the nineteenth century—a period often referred to as the Gilded Age for its emerging extremes of wealth and poverty. It was also a period of unprecedented immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, regional and global economic transformations, and an expanding role for the United States in the world.

In the 1890s, Black Members engaged with the most pressing matters of the Gilded Age for their constituents. Thomas Miller outlined the manipulative system of credit and company stores that entrapped Black agricultural workers in debt. George Washington Murray called for the coinage of silver, which he hoped would increase the money supply and aid struggling farmers trying to repay loans.¹¹⁷

Isolated and marginalized, Black Members were stifled in their limited attempts to legislate. At home in their districts, White Democrats worked feverishly to shut African Americans and opposition parties out of the political process using a toxic mix of new laws, constitutional revisions, and violence. They rewrote state constitutions to codify segregation and implemented a maze of local and statewide electoral devices between 1889 and 1908. The range of barriers erected to impede Black voter registration included property qualifications, poll taxes, literacy tests, and so-called grandfather clauses, which tied an individual’s right to vote to the voting rights or registration status of their ancestors. The “understanding clause” placed potential voters at the mercy of voter registrars, who capriciously administered a test concerning knowledge of state and federal laws, among other subjects. State governments insisted these measures applied to all and were not designed to discriminate. While these restrictions also prevented many White southerners from voting, they disproportionately affected Black voters. Lest there be any doubt who bore the brunt of the era’s trend toward disenfranchisement, the Democratic Party held all-White primaries to completely bar Black participation.¹¹⁸

State constitutional conventions proved to be the final disenfranchising blow in most southern states. Between 1890 and 1910, southern state constitutional conventions assembled to rewrite state charters with the intention of eviscerating the remaining eligible Black vote. In South Carolina, for instance, the 1895 constitutional convention was called by the Democratic Party of the former governor, Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman, who openly advocated for White supremacy. South Carolina Representative George Washington Murray was part of an organized effort to extend the voter registration period and mobilize Black voters to send Black delegates to the convention. Former Representatives Robert Smalls and Thomas Miller were two of six Black delegates elected to the convention, several of whom drew national attention to the efforts of Tillman and the Democrats to disenfranchise Black voters in a letter of protest published in the New York World in September 1895. The Black delegates also tried to delay convention proceedings through dilatory motions and objections. However, they could not prevent the convention from including an effective array of disenfranchising methods in the new state constitution.¹¹⁹

Similar disenfranchisement tactics were deployed across the South to dramatically reduce the number of registered voters, measures that disproportionately affected African Americans. Just three years after Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention, fewer than 9,000 African Americans out of a total population of nearly 748,000 were registered to vote. In 1896—before the enactment of Louisiana’s literacy test, poll tax, and property qualifications—there were approximately 130,000 registered Black voters in the state, composing the majority in 26 parishes. Only 5,320 voted in 1900, after the changes went into effect. By 1904, there were little more than 1,300 registered Black voters statewide.¹²⁰

In 1899, George White challenged the House to punish southern states by reducing the size of their congressional delegations, which he said should be limited to “the votes that are allowed to be cast in their representation on this floor, and no more.” He stressed that he was not inveighing “against Mississippi, not against South Carolina, not against Louisiana, but for justice—simple justice. Unmitigated justice is what we ask.” White’s speech was well received on the floor but did not produce legislative action.¹²¹

As these efforts to disenfranchise Black voters decimated the ranks of Black elected officials, the Supreme Court once again intervened to provide constitutional sanction for discrimination. Whereas the court’s decisions in the 1870s and 1880s had determined that state and local authorities had jurisdiction over any infringement of individual rights, the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson set new boundaries for a society increasingly defined by racial segregation. The court ruled that public accommodations and transportation could be provided on a “separate but equal” basis. States could set the standards, and the federal government was unlikely to intervene when equal accommodations were not available. A rigid system of segregation, codified in state law and tacitly sanctioned by the federal government, flourished in the South.¹²²

The First Congressional Antilynching Campaign

On November 10, 1898—two days after George White was re-elected—violence consumed Wilmington, North Carolina, as White citizens murdered at least seven and possibly as many as 20 Black residents and overthrew the local government. While George White did not address the events in Wilmington directly on the House Floor in January 1899, he did speak generally about the violence plaguing Black Americans in the South. He spoke of an imagined future, “when civilization will so develop all over this nation that there will be no more lynchings and barbarity and mobocracy, now so prevalent in some portions of this country.” A year later, on January 20, 1900, White introduced H.R. 6963, the first federal antilynching bill, intended “for the protection of all citizens of the United States against mob violence.”¹²³

Lynching was the brutal act of public execution, often by hanging or shooting and preceded by torture. This practice was used by White citizens in the South to terrorize Black communities. Some lynchings were perpetrated by small groups, others occurred as grotesque public spectacles. Black men, women, and children were lynched, but a disproportionate number of the victims were Black men.¹²⁴

Particularly in the South, lynching victims were targeted because of their political activism, economic success, and other perceived violations of the prevailing order of the Jim Crow South. Many Black men were falsely accused of sexual violence against White women. The antilynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells of Memphis, Tennessee, documented the misinformation campaign that established the narrative of sexual violence as the most common justification for lynching—a narrative largely accepted outside the South. Although Wells devised a national and international campaign against lynching that successfully drew attention to the practice, the murders continued well into the twentieth century. The actual number of lynchings in the United States might never be known, but a recent study by the Equal Justice Initiative identified “4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.”¹²⁵

Wells’s celebrated work and international renown informed the first attempt to focus the attention of the House on this issue. In 1894, newly elected Representative Henry Blair of New Hampshire—the former Senator—introduced a joint resolution to investigate “unlawful violence” against Americans. Blair’s resolution would have funded a report by the Commissioner of Labor to collect “the attendant facts” on lynchings in the United States and report the findings to Congress, presumably with the intent of shaping new legislation.¹²⁶

Blair’s effort attracted widespread support among Black women activists who joined Wells in campaigning against lynching and formed groups such as the Women’s Loyal Union in Brooklyn, New York. Press coverage documented Wells’s presence at hearings held by the House Committee on Labor, waiting for her turn to testify. She was never called before the panel, though, and the bill was shuffled between the Committee on Labor and the Committee on the Judiciary in the remaining months of the 53rd Congress.¹²⁷

White’s antilynching measure was more direct. It sought to revive the role of the federal government in protecting the individual rights of citizens in the South. On February 23, 1900, during general debate on American territorial expansion in the Caribbean and Pacific, White defended his bill on the House Floor. He provided statistics and graphic accounts of lynching atrocities and singled out House Members who had sanctioned these acts. White demanded access to a trial by jury for all and called on Congress to make lynching a crime under the jurisdiction of federal courts. This “most dangerous evil,” White said, required lawmakers to act, and he provided legal citations to argue that Congress was well within its constitutional rights to do so. For White, the fate of the nation was imperiled “if mob violence is not stamped out of existence and law once permitted to reign supreme.” White’s bill died in the Judiciary Committee at the close of the 56th Congress (1899–1901).¹²⁸

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