People don't realize that African Americans have always been a part of this nation's democracy. Black people always strongly desired the right to vote. They've always fought for being included in the political process.
And then also I think a lot of people might take for granted that African Americans always get to have that right because we had it before and we lost it. And so, you know, presumably it could be lost again if people don't fight to protect it. When we learn about the Reconstruction era in school, it's often taught as a dark period in American history.
A time of upheaval and unrest right after the Civil War. But what often gets overlooked is that for a brief period of time, Thousands of Black representatives were elected to office all over the South. My estimate is that there were about 2,000 African American men who held public office during Reconstruction.
Offices ranging from the Senate, there were two Black senators, 14 members of the House of Representatives, six or seven hundred members of state legislatures, and then dozens of other offices, state level. local level, etc. So what was going on was that first of all, a lot of the former Confederates, the most outspoken leaders of white supremacy, were not allowed to serve in Congress. And so, you know, with those people absent, there were people that did believe that African Americans should be folded into the fabric of American civil and political life, and that did advocate for Black people to be able to vote.
And then of course, when African Americans were prevented from voting, Federal troops and federal investigators were often called in in order to protect those African-Americans'rights in order to cast a ballot. At the time, many states in the South were either majority Black or close to it. And because of that, they were able to elect Black legislators, especially at the state level. The most significant accomplishment of Black legislators in many Southern states during Reconstruction was the establishment of public school systems, not only for African Americans, but for white students as well.
And even though these were segregated, they were often the first time that many African Americans, you know, fresh out of slavery, had an opportunity to learn to read and write. The highest level of office reached by these Black legislators was the U.S. Senate, and the first was Hiram Revels, a U.S.
Senator from the state of Mississippi. So Hiram Revels was a pretty unique individual in that He was educated and he later became a civil rights champion, you know, before the Civil War, certainly during the Civil War. And then afterward, he was sent to Mississippi, where he was appointed by the state legislature to be a United States senator.
In response to Black political power during Reconstruction, the South was just rife with violence in every single Southern state. And the most obvious early example of that Of that violence was the Ku Klux Klan, which did all sorts of different things, but attacked everything from school teachers to politicians to farmers. And so these different waves of violence really popped up, especially during election days.
And so in 1875 Mississippi, there was an organized overthrow, essentially, of the state Republican Party, which did include African Americans. There was violence at the polls in different cities, and that spread throughout the entire South. In 1876, there was violence in different...
places like Florida and South Carolina and Louisiana that led to contested elections that ultimately paved the way for Reconstruction to end. That overthrow was not put into law really until another generation, let's say around 1900, when Southern states figured out ways to abrogate the 15th Amendment, which had been enacted in Reconstruction to guarantee Black men's suffrage. So once the 15th Amendment became law, Southern states couldn't disfranchise African Americans simply by saying Black people are no longer allowed to vote.
And so in response to Reconstruction, in order to eliminate the Black vote, they had to come up with new ideas in order to make sure African Americans were taken off the voter rolls. And the most powerful of those methods was the literacy test, which allowed for local registrars in a county courthouse usually to look at a candidate and give the candidate a literacy test. To see if they were qualified to register to vote.
The nature of the test usually didn't matter. The person would just define whether they were qualified to vote based on whether they thought they were white or black. And so you had a period, you know, from 19... From the 1800s to 1965, the Voting Rights Act, where very few African Americans were allowed to vote throughout the entire South.
For a long, long time, Reconstruction was portrayed by scholars, but also by the teachers and the general public as sort of the lowest point in American history, a period of corruption, misgovernment, and this... idea that Reconstruction was a disaster was part of the legitimation of the old Jim Crow South. The underlying message was the South was correct in taking away the right to vote from Black men and that if Blacks were given the right to vote again, you just have another replay of the horrors of Reconstruction.
But I think one of the things in American history that we often teach is that there's a constant march toward things getting better. And it's a little bit tricky to teach Reconstruction because, you know, African-Americans during Reconstruction could vote in much of the South, and then things actually got a lot worse. And so it doesn't really fit into this narrative of constant progress throughout America since the Civil War. And so, you know, in this day and age where we have numerous African-American senators, just look at a place like Georgia, where Raphael Warnock was elected, and, you know, Georgians, white Georgians, are largely trying to respond by through tactics like voter suppression to tamp down the Black vote after the Black vote largely sent this African-American man to the United States Senate. After the 2020 elections, we saw historical voters of color turn out and a lot of first-time voters, even during the global pandemic.
And after that, we saw Republican-controlled legislatures across the country drop. hundreds of anti-voting bills. And so when we saw that collective activity happening, we had to go to the federal government and ask for protections.
Hillary Hawley works for Fair Fight Action, an organization working to fight voter suppression around the country. Though literacy tests remain a thing of the past, many states have enacted laws that purge voter rolls in ways that target minorities or have made voting more difficult by closing polling places in largely Black areas. Fair Fight is now working to get legislation such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed in Congress to stop these tactics.
So we started working with Congress basically right out the gate in January 2021 to help ensure that the legislation was drafted in a way that could actually mitigate voter suppression and combat the real attacks that we're seeing in real time. Even though today's laws might be a bit different, they're intended with the same, you know, outcome in mind, to make it harder for Black people to vote, to make sure that African Americans don't have equal standing of one man, one vote in the democracy in order to ensure more white control over our political systems. I think it's important to learn about Reconstruction in American history because that was the moment, I think, Where our democracy held the most promise for every single person, at least every single male in the history of the United States of America, regardless of race.
And I think that if we are to ever really fulfill that promise, then people need to understand the history of voting rights and voting right laws in the reconstruction era.