Black Birds in the Sky: Chapters 2–3

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.

The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, also known as the Ten Percent Plan, was issued in December 1863 and allowed any Confederate state with 10 percent of voters who swore allegiance to the Union to build new state governments and revise their state constitutions.

It also protected the physical property (excluding enslaved Black people) of former plantation owners and pardoned all Southerners, except for top-level Confederate officials and military leaders, for secession from the Union.

“The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion.”

The act was in part a response to the “Black codes,” racist laws in Southern states that limited the freedom and job opportunities of Black Americans in the post-Civil War nation, while also punishing them for falsified crimes such as “vagrancy” if they were unemployed.

Johnson, who believed in states’ rights, did nothing to curtail the discriminatory laws, forcing Congress to take action.

By 1877, around two thousand African Americans held positions in local, state, and federal office in the rebel states, just twelve years after the end of the Civil War. These unprecedented numbers of Black leaders are largely credited for the dismantling of the Black codes.

This enraged proslavery white Southerners, who were furious that the source of their labor and wealth had been set free and were now enfranchised.

They believed the racist notions that had allowed slavery to thrive for centuries: that Africans and African Americans were unintelligent, wild, incapable of leadership, and fit only for hard manual labor and domestic work. Or, if they didn’t truly believe this in their hearts, they behaved as if they did, perpetuating the system of white supremacy the United States had been built upon.

Some were so disillusioned that they began to associate with freed Black people; in reality, poor Southern white people often had more in common with Black Americans at the time than either of them did with the well-off white men who’d held the vast majority of political and economic power in the country since its inception.

President Andrew Johnson is surely a mascot for the failure of Reconstruction; his racism and refusal to hold states accountable only served to undermine the tireless efforts of Congress.

But instead of seeing this as much-needed progress in the decades after Reconstruction, white politicians and constituents remained threatened by Black Americans gaining even an ounce of political power.

Therefore, the law excluded many Black Oklahomans from voting, as Black Americans had historically been lawfully prevented from learning to read and write or forced to attend inadequate, woefully underfunded schools. This crooked legislation also allowed voting registrars to turn away Black voters at their discretion, without ever giving them the test.

Whatever the reason, violence and terrorism inflicted on Black Americans increased greatly in the years after Reconstruction—and no single organization was more responsible for or emblematic of this white supremacist resurgence than the Ku Klux Klan.

So powerful was its influence that The Birth of a Nation was the first movie to ever be screened at the White House, during President Woodrow Wilson’s first term. Wilson, who segregated federal government offices to appease Southern conservatives, supposedly said about the film: “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true.”

The Klan also has law enforcement roots in Anaheim, California, where in the early 1920s, residents elected four Klansmen to the five-member city council, which allowed its members who were also police officers to parade around in full KKK regalia during their shifts.

Lynching, a term for any murder committed to punish an alleged crime without administering a fair trial, was a common form of vigilante justice in the late 1800s and early 1900s; it manifested primarily as death by hanging (often preceded by torture and burning).

The accusations were often born out of a completely innocent interaction, such as a fleeting look or accidental touch; this is what many believe happened between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page in that Tulsa elevator in 1921.

She briefly remained in New York, writing a comprehensive report on lynching for the Black newspaper the New York Age, before moving to Chicago.

Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913 in Chicago and defied racist white suffragettes from the South when she marched beside them—rather than behind them—at that year's Woman Suffrage Parade.

And while the number was decreasing, when Oklahoma entered the Roaring Twenties, vigilante justice and mob violence were still prevalent.

When Nida succumbed to his injuries and Belton pleaded not guilty, a mob a thousand people strong stormed the jail with guns.

Chief Gustafson expressed regret about the murder, claiming he did “not condone mob law” and that he was “absolutely opposed to it,” but in the same breath stated, “It is my honest opinion that the lynching of Belton will prove of real benefit to Tulsa and [the] vicinity. It was an object lesson to the hijackers and auto thieves, and I believe it will be taken as such.”

A shootout had ensued, and Chandler’s father died, as did one of the officers.

When Black people fought back to defend themselves, the story was often twisted and called a riot, rather than the blatant attacks that they were.

Known as the Great Migration, an estimated six million Black Americans left Southern states between 1915 and 1970 to start new lives. Before this mass exodus, 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states in which they or their ancestors had been enslaved; now they headed to cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia, which were facing labor shortages in manufacturing and industrial jobs.

They may have escaped the Jim Crow laws that kept everything from restaurants to water fountains to schools “separate but equal,” but Northern cities were not free of bigotry. White people weren’t always eager to see Black people in their neighborhoods or working beside them, and they didn’t hide it.

Not everyone believed in the cause; some found it hypocritical that a country that didn’t treat Black Americans equally would ask them to fight on its behalf.

Protest signs have long been a clever, concise, and effective way to call for desired social change.

The protest sign, then, can be seen as a facetious take on the situation, or perhaps a sincere call to be magnanimous and show compassion for the women who, though often portrayed as passive or submissive, were just as guilty as their white male counterparts.

The white mob was furious that they wouldn’t get their chance with the prisoners—and in response, they incited a riot.

There was a great deal of animosity toward any well-established Negro who owned his house and had a good job.

About the film, NAACP national secretary May Childs Nerney, who was white, wrote: “If it goes unchallenged it will take years to overcome the harm it is doing. The entire country will acquiesce in the Southern program of segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching.”

White people were also concerned that Black veterans, who’d been treated as valued members of their country while fighting in the war, would become “uppity” and start demanding the sort of rights and respect they’d been fighting for abroad.

And as the white people who perpetrated these crimes faced no consequences, the violence continued into the next century.

We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb.

We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb.

On July 19, a nineteen-year-old white woman had been walking home from her job at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing when, she claimed, she was accosted by two Black men.

On October 7, the troops were withdrawn and many Black people were jailed for allegedly planning the “insurrection”; on October 31, 122 of them were indicted for a variety of charges, including murder.

On October 7, the troops were withdrawn and many Black people were jailed for allegedly planning the “insurrection”; on October 31, 122 of them were indicted for a variety of charges, including murder.