US government gave Black populace little protection
State governments neglected the rights of the Black populace after the American Civil War. Historian Mark Leon de Vries has discovered that the federal government offered Blacks practically no assistance either. Dissertation defence on 23 April.
Ku Klux Klan terror campaign
After the American Civil War (1861–1865) ended, the federal government introduced a number of laws that should have ensured far-reaching social and political equality for Black citizens in the American South. That didn’t happen: a group of conservative Whites in the region—the Ku Klux Klan—put up fierce resistance to this policy and orchestrated a campaign of terror against the Black populace as well as the Whites who supported them.
Government did not enforce its own laws
But local opposition was not the only cause of Black Americans’ deplorable situation. ‘Politicians in the North did little to enforce their own laws in the South’, explains de Vries. ‘That was because the issue wasn’t really on people’s minds in the North, where relatively few Blacks lived.’ In terms of votes, the government didn’t have much to gain by devoting staff and resources to the problem. Furthermore, as time went by, repairing the relation with the Southern states became an increasingly important issue.’
Red River Valley: hotbed of violence
Among the things that led de Vries to this discovery was studying violence on Blacks in the Red River Valley, Louisiana. ‘According to statistics that was one of the regions where violence against Blacks was most prevalent. One of the reasons for that was that the federal court was located so far away: you had to take a boat for a couple of days in order to get there, first on the Red River and then on the Mississippi. When the water level was high enough, that is. Enforcement of the law was mostly in the hands of local sheriffs and judges who had no great liking for Northern ethics.’
Washington aware of abuses
He thinks that compliance with the laws actually did have an effect on the position of Blacks. ‘Firstly, because violence in the region decreased visibly in those towns where local federal officials took their own initiative to enforce existing laws. Because word did get to Washington that there were abuses in the Red River Valley. A few years later, after federal enforcement had been greatly reduced, the violence flared up again. Secondly, if the legislation had no effect, why would Southerners have put up such resistance to it? De Vries is the first historian to study a specific region to investigate the attitude assumed by the US federal government towards violence against Blacks.
Echo from the past
De Vries uses his research to make a connection between the past and the present. ‘The racial terror and lawlessness of the period still reverberates in the recent killings of Black Americans.’ Does he think that the federal government should take a more active role in intervening now as well? ‘That’s a tough question. You see that now there’s a greater response to the abuses on the part of the official agencies. The police officer who recently shot the Black man Walter Scott dead is being prosecuted. The police union is not supporting him. Let’s hope that the cultural change continues.’
After his dissertation defence de Vries will be starting work as a postdoctoral fellow at the History Institute in Leiden, where he will be conducting research on federalism and regional identities in the United States in the years following the Civil War
(20 April 2015)