WHAT DONALD MEANS BY “GREAT AGAIN”:
How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America: Gerald Early on the Early History of Black Participation in America’s Pastime (Gerald Early, May 1, 2025, LitHub)
But if the elevation of Black Americans during Reconstruction was a revolution, it was met by a fierce counterrevolution on the part of white Southerners who vehemently and violently opposed any change in the status of Black people. White Southerners utterly opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established to help newly freed African Americans obtain fairer wages and better employment conditions from their former enslavers; the bureau also established, in conjunction with the American Missionary Association, some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). But its main work ended in 1869, and the bureau closed for good in 1872, at which time it had not had nearly enough time to achieve the goal of helping a mostly impoverished people become self-supporting citizens.
Black citizens were climbing a steep hill, but they were willing to do so, in part because so many of them believed in this country, even if the country did not believe in them.
White Southerners formed terrorist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, that brutally intimidated Black citizens and created Black Codes to nullify African Americans’ new rights. Barely a year after the end of the Civil War, in May 1866, Memphis erupted in one of the worst racial pogroms of the Reconstruction period. White people, provoked because Black soldiers had stood up to racist white (mostly Irish) policemen, rampaged through the Black community of Memphis, killing 46 Black people, injuring over 75, and burning to the ground every Black school and church in the city. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873 resulted in the murder of somewhere between 62 and 153 Black citizens who had surrendered after resisting a white attempt to take over the local courthouse.Despite Frederick Douglass’s efforts as the last president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, including lending it $10,000 to keep it afloat, the bank’s failure in 1874 destroyed the faith of millions of Black people in the country’s financial institutions. The lack of will on the part of the federal government and “the friends of the Negro” to enforce the social and economic changes that Reconstruction had promised left Black Americans feeling betrayed, powerless, and further impoverished by the 1880s. With the failure of Reconstruction, Black people were no longer fully empowered citizens but political and social ciphers. As Malcolm X once told a Harlem audience, “You’re nothing but an ex-slave.” The Confederates may have lost the Civil War, but the southern counter revolutionists won the race war that followed.
We did not Reconstruct hard enough.