Most of how we think about ourselves as Americans. Most of what we're proudest of, and most of the ways in which we believe we are free, are embedded in the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was born in battle, forged in controversy, and ratified amid rancor. That's the heritage there.
What we didn't account for is how unprepared we were to actually embrace true equality. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And every revolution has an equal and opposite counterrevolution.
Most people have a really hard time with change, especially when they feel like they're losing something. After the Civil War, most white Southerners feel like they've not only lost a war, but they've lost their way of life. They've been humiliated. Former slaves have now gained legal equality under the 14th Amendment. Equality backed by the government.
And as it turns out, 14 needs defending. Because as soon as it's passed, it needs resistance on all sides. In the courts, in the streets. Its significance is even distorted in our memories.
How do you put a republic back together after an all-out four-year civil war? The effort to bring the southern states back into the union on the basis of genuine equality between black and white was always a very difficult project. Slavery was a total institution.
It was a system of labor. It was a system of politics. It was a system of wealth. It was a system of power. You needed to revamp all of that.
Most southern whites did not want the 14th Amendment. They felt it was a humiliation, particularly in the day-to-day interactions of people. Everybody knew how a slave was supposed to act. They were supposed to step off the sidewalk if a white person came by. They could not address a white person except as mass of this, mass of that.
But what is the behavior after slavery? You must not think because you are as free as white people you are their equal, because you are not. If you wish to be esteemed as ladies and gentlemen, you must conduct yourselves accordingly.
Call your old master, master, and your old mistress, mistress. One of the amazing things I don't think we've ever talked about in this country is how remarkable it is, the kind of mindset. That emancipated black people showed during Reconstruction is one of the most inspiring things you can find in American history. Here are people enslaved and brutalized and traumatized and tortured.
Win their freedom and they seek peace and harmony and community. They bear toward their former masters no revengeful thoughts, no hatreds, no animosities. They aim not to elevate themselves by sacrificing one single interest of their white fellow citizen.
They ask but the rights which are theirs by God's universal law. Many of us aren't aware of the magnitude of black, American, and African contribution to America and the world. Join us in a joyous celebration of black cultural contribution.
With the 14th Amendment, we saw remarkable progress. By emancipated black people, with the presence of federal troops, they became successful at commerce, at business, at agriculture. They wanted to serve and lead. Men's red flower, it's an every living thing.
Use your power, spirit use your power. My eyes behold it. Our ears hear it and our hearts feel it and there's no doubt about it. The black man is free. The black man is a citizen and the black man is enfranchised.
African Americans are filled with this excitement about freedom. Filled with this excitement about freedom. what it means to be full citizens and we begin to have this transformation in black life.
They also wanted to establish institutions like churches, the AME church, and black Baptist churches proliferate across the South. So many of the historically black colleges and universities, from Fisk to Howard University in Washington, D.C., were born in this moment as a way for black people to have the institutional basis for making a new life for themselves in a world that they had never known. Right now, we've been... Reconstruction brought about hundreds of black office holders. Whether they were state legislators in the South, lieutenant governors in the South, a few became U.S. congressmen and two became U.S. senators and served nobly.
Hiram Reb... Mr. Revels became the first African-American senator. Washington, February 25, 1870. Mr. Revels, the colored senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon. There was not an inch of standing or sitting.
sitting room in the galleries, and to say that the interest was intense gives but a faint idea of the feeling which prevailed throughout the entire proceeding. We are in the midst of an exciting canvas on the basis of justice and political and legal equality. Get it? But now that we're living so close together, we can get used to each other's ways and work together peacefully. The famous illustrator Thomas Nast created a cartoon, Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving.
was sort of an example of the thinking at that time. Everybody is at this table. White, black, Native American, Chinese.
At that time, I think that was a visual that people had never seen. This was what they were trying to imagine themselves into. The 14th Amendment brought into life what could be a new multiracial nation, a multiracial democracy that finally lived up to its inherent principles enshrined in the Declaration. And it didn't last long. The one thing that's clear is that there were forces in the white south that were determined.
To get things back the way they had been. Darkness is the fashionable color in these regions. We have Africans in place all about us. They are jurors, post office clerks, custom house officers. The southern communities will be a desolation until there is a thorough change of affairs in all the departments of government.
Even insurrection would be better than the insensibility that seems to prevail. The 14th says everyone is equal under the law. Then comes the 15th Amendment, which gives black men the right to vote. For some in the white South, together that's a dangerous cocktail.
Those two amendments change Southern law and for a time, Southern leadership. But many white Southern minds haven't changed at all. They'll do anything to take back their power. Anything. We want to live in peace with all mankind, and especially with the whites of the South.
Our interests are identical, but we do not want the peace of the lamb with the lion. Give us our rights. White Southerners marginalized Black people to a second-class citizenship, living subservient lives and throughout much of the South, living almost as they did as slaves. And after the Holocaust, there was a freedom. on paper at least.
Technically, slavery had ended, but the struggle for equality was just beginning. As citizens guaranteed their rights under the 14th Amendment, black Americans now turned to the courts for help against this resistance. Before the Civil War, most of our justices owned enslaved people or were appointed by presidents who did, kinda took all the surprise out of their rulings. But the court in the 1870s and 1880s, it's different. It's like been through a civil war kind of different.
Many of these justices were appointed by presidents who fought for the Union. This court should be full of revolutionaries, right? Hmm, not so much.
Black Americans don't find an ally in the courts, but white Southerners do. I think what many people think about the backlash to Reconstruction. We think about the violence on the ground.
We think about the rise of the Klan. We think about black codes. But we also have to be clear that the Supreme Court plays a vitally important and powerful role in returning African people to a state essentially of servitude. The 14th Amendment, Section 1, says as a citizen you have the privileges or immunities of citizenship. No state shall compromise those.
As a human being, you have the right to equal protection of the laws and due process. Well, are those going to be observed? What the Supreme Court did in a series of cases, Slaughterhouse and Cookshank and civil rights cases, was undermine that commitment.
Slaughterhouse is one of the most... Reviled and criticized decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Basically it said you still look to the states, not the national government, for the basic definition and protection of your rights. This emasculated the privileges and immunities clause and it never has recovered. Okay, let's break down privileges and immunities.
It basically means our rights. The privileges are our freedoms. That's the things we're allowed to do.
And immunities are our protections, the things that we'll be protected from as citizens. And in America, our most basic freedoms and protections are contained in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, right to bear arms, all of that good stuff.
Now, 14 makes it so that you get those rights no matter which state you live in or which state you travel to. And that's really important to black Americans who too often have been deprived of their rights depending on the state they're in. By restricting the enforcement of the 14th Amendment so narrowly, it essentially guided the amendment. Local white supremacist governments would then use the Slaughterhouse case to say the 14th Amendment can't interfere with our local government by guaranteeing civil rights.
In the United States versus Cruikshank, the courts ruled that the 14th Amendment did not protect individual citizens from violence committed by private citizens. The 14th Amendment prohibits a state from depriving any person life, liberty, or property without due process of law, but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another. That fundamentally ripped the guts out of the 14th Amendment's most basic guarantee that the only way black people could have citizenship rights in the United States of America was if they could be protected from violence. So let me get this straight.
Basically, what the Supreme Court is saying is, sorry black Americans, if private citizens commit violence against you, you're not going to get the same benefits as black Americans. Even murder, the federal government can't really do anything about it, even though the 14th Amendment was written to protect you. The civil rights cases essentially removed the power from the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The court essentially say that black people can't be free from discrimination in public accommodations. They can't be free from discrimination in theaters and hotels and so forth. It applied to private action, not state action.
When a opera house says, we don't let black people in here, that's not the state government doing it. That's not a public official doing it. That's a private business.
The civil rights cases legalize segregation in private accommodations, saying it's not a violation of equal protection under 14. It's just a violation of human decency. The court says something in the civil rights cases that's really devastating, that is actually quite familiar to black people. When a man has emerged from slavery, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he ceases to be the special favorite of the laws. The court says, how long must we continue to essentially coddle black people? There must come a time when freed from the shackles of slavery, black people will stand up on their own two feet.
The court became impatient. We fought a war and you guys are now free. What more do you want from us? We've got other things to do. You know, please just fall in line.
This is 20 years after black people have been held in servitude for centuries in this country. The Supreme Court is already washing its hands of the project of equality. Much quicker than anyone would have thought, the northern public lost interest in the project of reform of the South.
And this appetite occurred, which was, let's put this behind us. Let's not be divided as a country between North and South the rest of history. And there was this appetite for what was called reconciliation. That was the end of the federal presence in the South. It was the end of the commitment to the 14th Amendment.
And it would create a long, dark, and torturous road to what would become Jim Crow segregation. And then, of course... In 1896, the Supreme Court decides Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court upholds state laws that provide for segregation, so long as they are separate but equal. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upholds a Louisiana law stating all railway companies carrying passengers and their coaches in this state shall provide equal... but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.
See, that's where we get separate but equal. And no, this doesn't mean you can blame segregation on trains, as much as I'd like to. The Supreme Court has essentially replaced 14 with white supremacy as the law of the land. So let's examine this new law.
What does separate really do? Well, separate means to force apart, to divide. It's an inherently destructive verb. Same reason I don't like the phrase separate the wheat from the chaff.
I mean, why are you so mad at the chaff? What'd it do to you? Look at separate's mark in history. First Africans were separated from their continent by the slave trade. Then African Americans were separated from their families through slavery.
Jim Crow separates African Americans from education, wealth, opportunity, and justice. Black Americans were separated so much that we still have to have a separate Black History Month just so Americans can know our contributions. It's so wrong. Well, now we're about to see what happens when you separate equal. from protection.
During the slave regime, the southern white man owned the negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body. The white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. But emancipation...
And the vested interests of the white man in the Negro's body were lost. A new system of intimidation came into vogue. The Negro was not only whipped and scourged, he was killed.
The South became a field of really remarkable violence. Once black men get the right to vote, once they begin serving in office, you get overtly political. Organized groups. This is the one period in American history when overt uses of terrorist violence became all but a normal part of political life.
The Klan and its many... became the violent arm of a political counterrevolution against Reconstruction. Black people start finding themselves threatened and menaced by mobs.
They were pulled out of jails. They would be targeted if they asked for it. for fair treatment, if they tried to vote, if they tried to organize, if they tried to create political power. They were burned, they were beaten, they were tortured, they were drowned, they were hanged.
Let's call it what it was. It was homegrown American terrorism. The worst political massacre to occur in the United States was in Colfax, Louisiana. As a result of a gubernatorial election, African Americans who had been recognized as having militia rights gathered to protect the newly seated government and were massacred in cold blood.
Estimated numbers run as high as 200 people. They were shot down without mercy. Many were shot in the back of the head and neck.
The face of one was completely flattened by blows from a gun. Another had been cut across the stomach with a knife after being shot. It wasn't just the Koufax Massacre. Time after time after time, white southerners would reverse those gains made by the formerly enslaved. We see the high watermark of black electoral participation begin to subside.
By 1901, there was not a single black person serving in national office representing the South. Lynching became the tool of enforcement for making sure that the 14th Amendment would never be realized. Between the 1890s and the 1950s, more than 4,000 documented lynchings occurred all over the country, from Illinois to Mississippi and in between.
And those lynchings were fundamentally based on the notion that black people weren't just inferior, that they were born criminals. Sometimes in the fight for change, we need witnesses. Ida B. Wells is one of the most forceful witnesses after Reconstruction to write about what was really happening on the ground in the South. As a black woman, no one gives her this authority, but she takes it upon herself to be her generation's truth teller.
This is one of those extraordinary stories of what people could make of themselves. She was an investigative journalist, a civil rights advocate, an activist, an early founder of the NAACP. She was a fierce woman.
And she had an unrelenting sense of justice. What really brought her to national infamy was the loss of three friends in Memphis. These three men owned a local grocery store.
They were so successful that they were a threat to white business owners. And they were killed by a white mob. It is said that Tom Moss begged for his life. For the sake of his wife, a child, an unborn baby.
When asked if he had anything to say, told them to tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here. Everybody in town knew and loved Tommy. He owned his little home, saved his money, and went into the grocery with the same ambition that a young white man would have had. He believed with me that we should defend the cause of right and fight wrong wherever we saw it.
Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning. And it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. She was the first person to begin to really count and document and enumerate the number of lynchings. Ida B. Wells was encouraging black people to recognize that they're going to have to fight, that they're going to have to push back against this tyranny.
We're going to have to speak more critically of our government's failure to protect us. Only under the stars and stripes is the human holocaust possible. Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual. So gagged and bound, he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense. Lynchings became massive spectacles where children were let out of school.
Photographs were often taken and published as postcards. One postcard famously said, I attended this Negro barbecue. It wasn't just the Ku Klux Klan. These were not people wearing robes.
These were bankers and teachers and doctors. and law enforcement officers that were perpetrating these acts of violence with complete impunity. This racial terrorism, this violence, it's a way of saying, pay no attention to what the 14th Amendment says.
I know it says you're entitled to equal protection of laws. I know the 14th Amendment says that you're full citizens. But here's who controls the law in this county, in this town, in this state. Ida B. Wells was set upon herself by a mob that literally burned down her printing press. She was threatened and eventually fled Memphis because she could not stay there for fear of her life.
This violence had huge implications for American society. First of all, the demographic geography of this nation was shaped. By this racial terrorism, the black people in Cleveland and Chicago and Los Angeles and Oakland, six million black people went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror.
Ida B. Wells landed in Chicago in the early 20th century to help black Southerners who were arriving in the city to adjust to their new conditions. If we look at the stories of those who left the terrors of the South for the opportunities of the promised land of the North, what they often found were a lot of empty promises. The black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynching is spreading its wings over the whole country. Now, let me be clear about what those empty promises were. In 1919...
In Ida's new hometown of Chicago, days of violence against black Chicagoans leaves nearly 40 people dead, hundreds injured, and over a thousand people killed. The resistance is no longer a southern problem, it's now an American problem. As hostility develops, blacks learn a bitter lesson that northern violence isn't any different from southern violence. Give gold, keep gold, chain-wearing, fried chicken and biscuit-eating monkey, ate baboon, big guy, fast-running, high-jumping, spear-chucking, 360-degree basketball dunking, titsune, spade, mulling yarn. Take your fucking pizza pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.
We're the Blazers! You are the Blazers! Ida B. Wells would go on to take her anti-lynching campaign to the International Court of Opinion, traveling to various places in Europe, describing racism and lynching as an abomination for a so-called civilized nation.
It's astonishing to me that there has not been a movie about this woman's life. Truly one of the extraordinary women in our country's history. There's a reason Ida B. Wells hasn't gotten her Oscar-winning biopic yet, and why she didn't win the Pulitzer Prize until 2020. 89 years after she died.
It's the same reason you might not be so familiar with the 14th Amendment. Because the former Confederacy got the final cut on the movie of the Civil War. In this new story, the South was a perfect society, victimized by the North and unjustly destroyed.
This myth called the Lost Cause says that slavery wasn't that bad. Therefore, we never needed the 14th. Sometimes making up a new story is easier than confronting the harsh realities of the past. Reconstruction less failed than it was actually defeated. It starts what we call the lost cause.
Mythology that becomes very important after the Civil War. The idea that the South had fought this noble battle, you know, that permeated white society. What the lost cause ideology became was more of a victory narrative. What they came to celebrate in the South was the victory over Reconstruction.
And we saw that as the iconography of the Confederacy was restored in the American South, with monuments and memorials. The raising of these huge pharaonic monuments It's really a kind of social victory lap and as really symbols that this is what the South is. These are our gods. ...from General Lee is to hold the Macy Dixie line, and no Yankees are crossing it.
General Lee? Why, the war between the states ended almost 90 years ago. I'm no clock watcher. And until I hear from General Lee official, I'm a blast in any Yankee that sets foot on southern soil. So scram, Yankee!
By the 20th century, the medium of film is extremely important. The white supremacist epic, Birth of a Nation, one of the most popular films of all time, Gone with the Wind, became highly popular visions of the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction, not just for Southerners, but for a lot of Northerners as well. Films like Birth of a Nation were trying to tell a new story about the valor and nobility of the effort to preserve slavery, of the Confederacy, to reinforce this idea that the South never did anything wrong. The actual rewriting of history was another big part of the story or narrative of black inferiority.
There's a mythology of Reconstruction that it was the lowest point in the history of American democracy, and the reason was that African Americans were given power, the right to vote, the right to hold office, and therefore an orgy of corruption and misgovernment followed. From which eventually the South was rescued by the Klan. When that film was screened at the White House, Woodrow Wilson gave an American stamp of approval to this new world order where there would be violence and terror.
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere... instinct of self-preservation, to rid themselves of the burden of the votes of ignorant Negroes. Negro rule was finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established.
Once Birth of a Nation premieres, the KKK explodes all across America, growing larger than ever. Having these images seared in people's minds through this new popular medium, Not only reinforces white supremacy, but also helps to ignite a new type of racial vengeance. In every way imaginable, writers and journalists and scientists set out to prove that black people were inferior and a dangerous threat to civilization. It has allowed white people with scarcely any pang of conscience whatever to create in every generation only the Negro they wish to see. Who was that lady I saw you with this afternoon?
That was no lady, that was my wife. The Old South and the Lost Cause ideology became a kind of cultural escape of a sentimentalized Old South that had been an ordered civilization where black people were by and large a contented people who had found their place in the order of things. That was the beginning of the retelling of the Civil War story. Would you paint a picture for us of what it was like on the plantation in your early days?
It was a lovely, happy time. Everyone was happy. We never heard of all these things that we hear about today. And then it's no... to see they're like children when we see that.
It's because they are like happy children. There were always dissenters to this sentimentalized lost cause vision about the war, but by and large, they weren't winning the cultural battle, the literary battle for the hearts and minds of the American imagination. There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here, in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bar. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair.
Of master and slave. Look for it only in books. For it is no more than a dream remembered. A civilization gone with the wind.
These stories seeped into the American mind. They could escape into this ordered older civilization before the war if they were anxious or offended or fearful of all the new immigrants coming to America, all the growing big cities, and all the industrialization that seemed to be out of control. On the plantation outside Charleston, where his family has lived for eight generations, Norwood Hastie was asked if he thinks slavery was immoral.
No, no, I don't. Because when a slave came from Africa... He couldn't speak the language.
He was totally untrained to do any job at all that would fit in the civilization. Someone had to take care of him. So I think slavery just had to be in those early days.
But customs die awful hard. It takes a long time. And everyone knew years ago that the Negro would have to be given equality.
But in the South, white people's attitudes will change in time. I'm a lot more liberal than I was five years ago, and I know I'll be a lot more liberal five years from now, and I think almost everyone else is in that category. What has tended to make you more liberal? Well, realization that the Negro is a human being like anyone else. Mr. Hastie, what did you think we were before you began to think of us as human beings?
Well, in a way, we thought of you almost as a very superior pet. I was born in 1950 in the South. This is the period of high segregation.
We were in an environment that was almost completely shaped by this ideology of the lost cause, of the idea that the Confederacy had been this high watermark in American history and that we had been falling off ever since then. When you've grown up with that, it's just all-encompassing. You know, your vision of what America is, it turns out to be a vision of white supremacy, and you don't even really know it.
In 1861, South Carolina was the first state to stand up for its own rights. The history of that flag has so much to do with the Southern heritage, not slavery. I'm just here to defend my heritage, and my heritage is not... That of slavery. My family never owned slaves.
I don't have any slaves. It does represent slavery, no matter how much they say it doesn't, but it does. That flag just does not deserve to fly at all in South Carolina. We want it down because we just think it's disrespectful to us. We come to show our support, to keep our history and our heritage.
It's a heritage the way it is because it is what made America. It sanitizes the Confederacy and the only reason the Confederacy existed was to protect slavery. We're taking pride in our heritage and honoring our ancestors. It's about heritage and it's about pride.
It's our heritage, it's who we are. This is everybody's heritage. People that's saying, oh well it's my flag, it's my heritage. Your heritage is slavery, oppression, and KKK terrorism and I think that's what that flag stands for.
This is part of who we are. The problems we have in South Carolina throughout the world are not because of the movie or symbols, it's because of what's in people's hearts. How do you go back and reconstruct America? Mr. Speaker, I come today to give you a perspective that you may not have heard.
As a pastor of a church, of a congregation in Charleston County, Mount Oremi Church, I listen to the stories and the pain. Of the people who feel so offended by the fact that a flag that has been used as a symbol to brutalize, demoralize, and humiliate them still flies in our state capitol. Let us be the shining example to this great state, to all of the people that we represent, that for maybe the first time in our great history, we are willing not to do what is in our own self.
interests but to do what is for the best of all of South Carolina and I say to you again today in April of 2015 I was at a conference in Charleston South Carolina a remarkable conference all about the ending of the Civil War but the principal speaker of the day was the Reverend Clementa Pinckney I stand with mixed emotions, with joy, but also as a man of God, with sadness, knowing that so many died for the freedom of us. Pinckney argued, as a preacher would, that since the Civil War, we had, to some degree, experienced a redemption. He even honored Confederate veterans, his fellow South Carolinians, he said. We sang America the Beautiful, and I actually held a program with Reverend Pinckney. We sang from the same printed lyrics.
One of the most remarkable public history events I had ever participated in. The problem, of course, came two months later. ...reporting there's been a shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. That was Clementa Pinckney.
In 1961... The state of South Carolina raised a Confederate flag over the dome of their capital, and they wrote into the law that the flag couldn't be lowered for any reason without approval from the statehouse. Well, that's where the flag was when, in 2015, a white supremacist named Dylann Roof entered a historically black church, Mother Emanuel AME, in Charleston and murdered nine black parishioners during a prayer meeting.
One of the deadliest attacks against a black church in U.S. history. One of the victims is the pastor of the church, 41-year-old Senator Clementa Pinckney. Senator Pinckney was the moral conscious of the General Assembly.
When it came time to bury the pastor of Mother Emanuel, his casket was processed through the streets, and the state of South Carolina lowered the American flag. But because of this law that they had written, the Confederate flag stayed at the top of the pole. It sent a clear message that even though the South had lost the Civil War, white supremacy reigned above every other form of power.
I have a deep personal connection to the history of slavery in South Carolina. My ancestors were enslaved in South Carolina. I've had relatives tell me. about their experiences with the Klan.
I felt very strongly that a statement had to be made. Man! Manhole! Manhole! You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence!
This life on San Jose! Get off the phone! Of course I knew that I was going to be arrested, but we could not carry on like this anymore.
There's nothing automatic about progress. There is nothing inevitable about progress. Progress comes because people make decisions and people make choices.
It seems to me that Pinckney and his parishioners died in a horrific sacrifice, perhaps to force the rest of the country to finally have a reckoning, if we can, with the meaning of the Confederacy, and the meaning of the Civil War, and the meaning of emancipation, and the meaning of the 14th Amendment, in our ever-recurring present. These monuments celebrate a fictional confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. We cannot be afraid of the truth.
Progress does not come without resistance. It is not a straight line. It's messy. It's urgent. Even people who are sympathetic to the cause sometimes say, just wait, there are bigger issues, or that's too much, too fast.
But for the people who are suffering... We are in a state of emergency. No justice, no peace, and no justice. America, you have proven yourself for 435 years now to have no respect for black life.
No justice, no peace, and no justice. This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation. Enough is enough.
It's time for us to start. Stand up and say, get your knee off our necks. We're going to honor the fact that I have to fight for all these people again.
My, my, my. They are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge. Let's get Gone With The Wind. Can we get like Gone With The Wind back, please?