The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Birds chirping

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, African Americans, like the country itself, were plunged into chaos. Their freedom at stake, they risked everything for victory. 5 years later, slavery was over, but what would freedom really mean? Reconstruction brought another period of roiling uncertainty, but never did African Americans relinquish their quest for the real prize--freedom and the rights of citizenship. The lengths they would go and the price they would pay make this one of the most inspiring stories in American history.

GATES

In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Southern cannons opened fire on Fort Sumter, a federal garrison in Charleston Harbor. The North and South were at war. When the Civil War began, more than 3.9 million slaves faced a terrible choice-- to be forced to aid a Confederate army they despised or gamble everything on escape. Half a million chose to break and run. Not only would they change the tide of war, they would change its meaning, turning a war about union into a war about slavery. One of my favorite stories of the Civil War happened right here at the battery just a year after the outbreak of the war over at Fort Sumter. As Charleston slept, a young black man, a slave, plotted his escape aboard a ship. Robert Smalls was a 23-year-old slave pressed into service for the Confederacy aboard a warship called the Planter. For nearly a year, he quietly observed the movements of the ship and its crew. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Smalls took his chance. While the ship's officers slept ashore, he and his fellow slave crewmen pulled anchor and eased the Planter into Charleston Harbor.

MAN

They had prearranged to meet their family members and to pick them up, and then come back down the peninsula and they begin the process, and this is in the wee hours of the morning of sailing out of the harbor. They are embarked now on an extremely dangerous journey.

GATES

Smalls knew these waters like the back of his hand, but he also knew the risks that lay ahead--

4 Confederate checkpoints

Castle Pinckney, Fort Ripley, Fort Johnson, and Fort Sumter. Isn't Smalls afraid of being caught? How in the world is a black slave gonna pull this off? He's extremely afraid of being caught. He disguises himself as the captain and also mimics the captain's gait as he walked back and forth across the wheelhouse.

GATES

Smalls slipped past the first 3 checkpoints undetected. The most dangerous checkpoint remained-- Fort Sumter, with its mighty guns and fearsome cannons. Discovery would mean certain death. As dawn broke, the crew urged Smalls to take a wide berth, but changing course could arouse suspicion. Smalls gave the signal.

Steam whistle blowing

GATES

A few seconds later, the countersignal came back.

Steam whistle blows

GATES

"Pass on by." So they're safe, right? They're free? Well, they're not completely free because now we have this situation where a Confederate-flagged vessel is sailing out, and it begins to approach the vessels of the Union naval blockading force. Fortunately, the vessel was not fired on. As astonished Union officers boarded the Planter, Smalls stood at attention, saluted, and spoke.

POWERS

"I am delivering this war materiel, "including these cannons, and I think Uncle Abraham Lincoln can put them to good use." Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Smalls was ready with his line for history. That's right. That's right.

GATES

"I don't know exactly what you are now," the officer told Smalls, "but you're certainly no longer slaves." Robert Smalls' escape personified a new, more determined attitude among Southern slaves. Before the war, his bold act would have been in vain. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 decreed that runaway slaves were to be hunted down and returned to their masters in chains, but all that changed on May 23, 1861, less than a year before Smalls' escape, when 3 runaway slaves made it here to Fort Monroe, a Union-held outpost in Confederate Virginia. The slaves were taken before Union Major General Benjamin Butler. Defying the law, Butler refused to return the fugitive slaves to the Confederacy. Instead, he invented a new status for them. They were contraband of war, illegal property now forfeited to the North. Butler could have no idea how wide a door he had opened.

MAN

The Contraband Act doesn't legally free them, but if you're a slave on the ground and you reach Union lines, that act says that the officer is required to retain you, put you to work. In practice, you're free.

GATES

The word went out through the slaves' grapevine, and all these Negroes descend upon Fort Monroe. I bet the Army didn't know what hit them. No, they didn't, and they didn't know what to do. Hundreds came over here, and they were located in and around the fort. So there were all these makeshift camps everywhere. Dysentery was very common, tuberculosis, all kinds of diseases. It was a horrendous situation. Neither slave nor free, the contraband had found sanctuary, but were little more than refugees, a burden to the war effort in the eyes of some Northern soldiers. We can't imagine, I don't think, the cost, the courage, the difficulty of making that journey and getting there and some commander saying, "OK, we have to take them in, "but don't give them food because that will make them lazy." Still, the escaped slaves kept coming in a great upsurge of hope and courage. Although their status remained as uncertain at the war itself, the contraband sought to live as fully free men and women. Even in the midst of squalid camps, they pursued a privilege long denied to slaves-- learning to read and write. Some contraband began their education here on what is today the campus of Hampton University, one of the country's oldest black colleges. It was all made possible by a visionary teacher named Mary Peake. For Peake, an educated woman of color, liberating the mind was as important as freeing the body. Before the war, she had taught slaves in secret, defying the law, but in Union-occupied Hampton, Virginia, those laws no longer applied. Peake conducted her lessons beneath the branches of this oak tree, which, incredibly, still stands today. No one even knew at the beginning of the war if a Union victory would even lead

to the abolition of slavery. GLYMPH

No.

GATES

So why would she do it?

GLYMPH

I think that, like a lot of blacks, she saw this as an opportunity. She was passionate about using her skills, her talents and abilities to help uplift the community.

GATES

Mary Peake's contraband students let nothing keep them from learning.

GLYMPH

There was a mother and a daughter. They were living in this tent. They had one dress between the two of them, and so, during the day, the daughter would wear the dress and go to school and then come back after school, and the mother would then do some work and then go to night school. Hmm. So they shared a single dress between the two of them. How quickly does her school grow? It starts with a handful, but then quickly, there are 50. Then there are a hundred. Mm-hmm. She ended up with 900 students. 900 students. What she was trying to do was to prepare people to really be full citizens.

GATES

Escaped slaves were changing their own lives, but they were also transforming the fate of the nation. By the summer of 1862, President Lincoln faced a dilemma. Not only was the North losing the war, but runaway slaves were forcing him finally to confront the question of slavery itself. Lincoln's first objective in the war had been to save the Union. "I have no purpose," he had proclaimed, "to interfere with the institution of slavery." But now, military necessity converged with the moral imperative of ending slavery. This was the country in 1862.

GLYMPH

It was, and, therefore, for Lincoln, a place he could escape to. He came here pretty often in the summer of '62, which is his critical summer where he was writing the Proclamation. This is Camp David. This is his Camp David. As he wrote and made the journey to this cottage, he would have seen black refugees camped out all over the city. What do you do with them? Do you just keep ignoring them? Enslaved people were making the war their war. They were making the war about freedom and emancipation.

STAUFFER

African Americans are arguing, the easiest way to win the war is to emancipate slaves, and they make a brilliant point that eventually the Lincoln Administration accepts, that "You need us. If you want to win this war, you need us."

GATES

Lincoln knew he could no longer avoid committing himself and the nation to slavery's eradication. On September 22, Lincoln showed his cabinet the outlines of a bold plan-- emancipate the slaves in enemy territory and encourage them to find safety behind Union lines. On January 1, 1863, he issued the final draft to the nation. "From that day on," it read, "any slave within a rebellious state "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Though the Proclamation didn't abolish slavery, nor declare all slaves free, it was a powerful statement, redefining the war's purpose as ending slavery. For African Americans, enslaved or free, the Emancipation Proclamation was their Declaration of Independence.

NEWBY-ALEXANDER

When you read the words in the Emancipation Proclamation that say, "thenceforward and forever free," you don't read or hear the words "the exceptions, the limitations that follow." You hear that you're free, and that was all that was needed. That snowball was on that steep cliff, it just got kicked off, and there was not stopping it.

GATES

The Proclamation encouraged slaves to abandon their plantations, but it couldn't help them do so. They would have to run that risk themselves in a gamble for freedom.

GLYMPH

The Union military is constantly on the move. You've got to make a decision knowing that you will have to navigate enemy territory. The amazing thing is that these half a million people, they took that chance. They left... They left. everything that they knew under the hope that they were part of this age of emancipation and age of freedom.

GATES

The Proclamation held one more surprise. It granted black men the right to fight for the Union. Imagine... knowing that they could now actually take up legally arms in their own defense. Mmm, revolutionary. Revolutionary. That has to be the most important thing about the Emancipation Proclamation. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. A white man could be legally killed by a black man. A slaveholder could be legally killed by his former slave. That's everything. That's everything. Nearly 200,000 African Americans enlisted in the military during the war, including my great-granduncle. They fought for themselves, they fought for each other, and they fought for those who had been left behind. But most of all, they fought for a future with hope, a future of freedom and equal rights. Their stories are honored here at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, DC. Hari, given the fact that the military today is so black, my students find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that black men had to fight for the right to fight, as it were. Why? It's like the 1940s and 1950s and the arguments that African Americans, the Negro, cannot play basketball because it requires too much of the intellect. Ha ha! Well, that's the argument during the Civil War. They're just not intelligent enough. They don't have the agility, the courage, the determination to be a good soldier. While the Emancipation Proclamation gave African American men the right to fight, it did nothing to guarantee their equal treatment. Northern white soldiers were skeptical of black soldiers. Southern soldiers simply reviled them. Confederate President Jefferson Davis made it clear. All black Union soldiers would be treated as slaves in rebellion.

JONES

Jeff Davis would come out with a proclamation stating that if a colored soldier is captured, he will be returned to his owner. If the owner could not be found, the state would take the responsibility and they would be put to hard labor. But the Confederate soldiers would behave not according to protocol, in many cases.

GATES

Perhaps the Confederate Army's worst atrocities against African American troops came at the Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864. As defeat loomed, African American soldiers attempted to surrender. Confederate troops massacred them.

JONES

255 African American soldiers were given no quarters. No quarters means that when you're captured as a prisoner of war, they do not take you through the regular protocol. What you're saying is, they wouldn't allow black soldiers to surrender. They just killed them. You do not allow them the honor of being a soldier.

GATES

255 black soldiers were killed in cold blood. It was the Confederacy's brutal reminder to African Americans of the price they would pay for rising up against slavery. Only 6 months later, black soldiers would have their revenge. It was September 29, 1864. Union troops assembled in New Market Heights, a small town right outside of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. They were led by Benjamin Butler, the same Benjamin Butler who, early in the war, had refused to return fugitive slaves to the South. At New Market Heights, he commanded black troops to lead the assault.

JONES

Butler, before the assault, he rides around through the troops and tells them, "You go in crying, remember Fort Pillow." They're up against veteran Texas troops, and to take New Market Heights, capture the closest position to Richmond, you want to send troops who have the determination, that won't back down.

Gunfire

JONES

They're under strict orders not to stop to fire, and their comrades are falling consistently as they're moving forward, and the 4th and 6th United States Colored Troops, they get almost wiped out.

Cannon fire

JONES

So it's the next wave, but it's not easy for the next wave, either. They don't stop. They just keep coming. Confederates are hearing this "Remember Fort Pillow," and they withdraw from the position. I've read some scholars who would say, "Well, they just decided they'd defend another position." Ha ha ha! That's always interesting to me. Yeah, the position that's called Cover My Ass.

Laughter

JONES

That's why the performance of United States Colored Troops in these battles is so important, because they don't stop. They don't just say, "We captured New Market Heights and we're partying, the game's over." They continue. It's only a matter of time before Richmond falls. So that's it. The cake's all dough, as my daddy would say.

Birds crowing

GATES

By April, the war was over, and with it, the promise of the end of nearly 3 1/2 centuries of American slavery. The human cost was unprecedented-- nearly 750,000 lives lost, 40,000 of them African Americans-- more deaths than in all other American wars combined. As the country entered the period known as Reconstruction, the massive federal effort to rebuild a new South, the future of the former slaves was anything but clear. Their chains had been struck, but would they realize their hope for new lives as free and equal citizens? We're heading to Edisto Island, which was the home of the famous Sea Island cotton, finest cotton in the world. Legend has it that even the Pope wanted his garments, his vestments, made out of Sea Island cotton because this was the place where black people actually got a chance to take their part in the promise of America. The promise of America was always land, the right to own property. Who understood that better than people who had served as property themselves? Can you imagine what that must have been like to farm this island, producing this rich sea cotton for all those years, back-breaking labor, and then having the opportunity to farm that land for yourself? It must have been one of the most exhilarating moments in the history of the African American people. All over the South, that heady promise, some land of your own, filled African Americans with optimism. As the federal government set about reconstructing, African Americans waited eagerly to receive their own plots. Their optimism was born in part from a remarkable pledge made to freed slaves just a few months before war's end. Today, the phrase "40 acres and a mule" has an ironic connotation, but for newly freed slaves, it represented a tangible manifestation of their new stake in America. In fact, the idea came from the black community itself. In January 1865, 20 black ministers were summoned to a meeting in Savannah with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The general and the secretary wanted some advice. What did former slaves most desire when the war ended? Garrison Frazier, the 67-year-old Baptist minister chosen to lead the group, responded unequivocally. "The best way we can take care of ourselves," Frazier told them, "is to have land "and turn it and till it by our own labor." "We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own." "I would prefer to live by ourselves, "for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over." Give the former slaves land and let them be self-governing, and that was the birth of 40 acres and a mule. 4 days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15. Some 400,000 acres of confiscated lands would be doled out in 40-acre tracts to the heads of former slave families. As a bonus, Sherman threw in some broken-down mules left over from the war. Here on Edisto Island, black women and men, who had once worked this land as slaves, could now claim their own 40 acres as free people. So, Bernard, set the scene for me. They come back with all that expectation. They're gonna get land for the first time. They're gonna get their 40 acres. Yet this would have been a very difficult time for them. They were more free than they had ever been before, but now they would be faced with the prospect of trying to recraft and reconstruct their lives, and it wasn't absolutely certain what the parameters of their freedoms were going to be like. They would have subsisted off of Army rations, but nevertheless, I think, with all of this deprivation that they were surrounded by, there was the hope of a new day. Well, look at the wallpaper.

POWERS

Yeah, that's right. Newspapers and magazines. That's right. They were only given what were called promissory titles, not permanent titles, but they expected to receive clear and free title to the land down the road.

GATES

But the former slaves never did get their titles. Less than a year later, Lincoln was dead. His successor, Andrew Johnson, began to dismantle the plan for Reconstruction, starting with 40 acres and a mule. All confiscated lands were returned to their former owners. For African Americans, President Johnson's order was a crushing disappointment. Still, they had little choice but to keep going, placing their hopes in a reconstructed South. It's something I wonder about and think, "Jesus, how could you survive every day and have hope, build a family, fall in love?" That's right, and I guess that's all you have, is hope, right? Hope did, in fact, bring these people through, and it gave them a firm foundation upon which to visualize their future. If hope was to be the foundation of the former slaves' new lives, love and family would be its brick and mortar.

GLYMPH

Thousands of people have lost their kin, and thousands of people are very keen to find members, family members, and friends who have been sold away.

GATES

In freedom, they set out to rebuild families shattered by slavery. They filled newspapers with information-wanted ads seeking long-lost family members.

GLYMPH

The ads captured the loss that slavery brought in terms of having your child torn from your arms. There would not be as many reunions as there had been separations, but it didn't stop people from yearning and trying to imagine what that babe of 4 months old looked like 20 years hence, how had your child fared.

GATES

Freedom promised a future where black women and men would have control over their most fundamental decisions. They got married, they took new names, and they worshipped freely in their own churches. For the first time, African American women and men could define the terms of their families' labor.

GLYMPH

A black mother could say, "I will not stay overnight anymore, "and my 10-year-old daughter who comes to work with me "every day will now be going to school for 3 months, and when she is not in school, she won't be coming here with me." It meant reclaiming your right as a human being.

GATES

The social changes former slaves experienced were not matched by economic progress. One aspect of Southern society remained fixed-- Old King Cotton still reigned. Without land of their own, many freed slaves went back to work on cotton plantations, some for their former masters, who did their utmost to impose poor wages and working conditions. But once in a great while, a freed slave seized a chance for something more. One such man was Benjamin Montgomery, who had been the favorite slave at the Davis Bend plantation, the crown jewel of Mississippi's planter aristocracy.

WOMAN

Benjamin Montgomery purchased this land, and he purchased it from his former slave-owner, Joseph Davis. Joseph Davis, the brother of the President of the Confederacy.

GATES

When Union forces closed in, Joseph Davis had fled the plantation. After the war ended, the elderly Davis made a bold and surprising choice. He gave his former slave a loan to buy the property that he and his brother Jefferson once shared. These brick columns are all that remain of the house that Jeff built. Standing here, I try to picture what it was like in Davis' heyday-- a rambling, 8-room home with a front and back porch, from which dozens of slaves could be seen tilling the soil. Now, one of them, Benjamin Montgomery, owned the home built by the President of the Confederacy. And soon, he began to recruit his fellow former slaves to join him at Davis Bend.

FIELD

He would rent out the land to them, and together, they would build a successful cotton crop that would ultimately bring profits to all of them.

GATES

And profit they did.

FIELD

In 1870, Benjamin Montgomery was the third-largest cotton planter in the state of Mississippi. And that's a lot of cotton. Right, and Mississippi, of course, is the largest producer in the country, so that makes him, arguably, the third-largest planter in the country at that time. It was not just the quantity of cotton, it was also the quality of it. He was winning awards left and right, and he was widely regarded and widely respected by fellow Mississippi planters, most of whom were white. If this were a Spike Lee film, the Ku Klux Klan would have come galloping down that hill through the river valley... Yeah. roasted Benjamin Montgomery and his new plantation. Right. But that didn't happen. Why not? Local white Southerners, and white planters in particular, were willing to allow him to carry on with his economic activities, as long as he stayed out of the limelight, or at least that was his perception. He's doing a lot of work, culturally and socially, to kind of keep people happy with him, white people, in particular.

GATES

Montgomery was playing a delicate and dangerous game, appeasing whites so he could continue to profit from his land. It was a gamble, but it was paying off. Ultimately, African Americans knew, if they were going to protect and extend the freedoms they had gained in the South, they couldn't depend on the largesse of whites. They needed political power of their own. To get it, they needed the right to vote.

STAUFFER

African Americans were very, very sensitive and great, in a sense, historians. They understood that this social revolution should be a revolution about equality under the law for all people. If you're African American and you have the vote, you have a voice, you have a public voice that whites had long sought to suppress.

GATES

Their struggle for the vote took place in a larger political context. Northern Republicans feared that the freed African American population might play into the hands of their enemies, the Southern Democrats.

POWERS

The Three-fifths Clause, which was the formula used for determining how many Congressmen any state was entitled to. That was over with now, and so, rather than 3/5 of the slaves being counted, now it was the total free population, and so that really was a political boon to the South, and it would have been used against the North.

GATES

But if African Americans were given the vote, they could create alliances with Northern Republicans to forge an unstoppable political force. The Republican-controlled Congress grabbed the chance, passing the 14th Amendment, granting full citizenship and equal protection under the law to anyone born in the United States, regardless of race. And in the 15th Amendment, they gave black men the right to vote. For the first time, blacks in many communities did have equal representation. You had black legislators in Mississippi, in Alabama, in South Carolina. Even South Carolina, the state that fired the first shots in the Civil War, saw black men--former slaves-- elected to office. One of them was Robert Smalls, the same man who had narrowly escaped from slavery on a boat in Charleston Harbor. In 1868, Smalls was elected by the voters of Beaufort County to the South Carolina House of Representatives. All told, some 2,000 African Americans would hold office between 1868 and 1876. There were sheriffs, justices of the peace, even mayors. The first African Americans would be elected to the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. These politicians promised to use the Reconstruction period to transform the South politically, economically, and socially.

POWERS

This would have demonstrated, I think, the virtually unlimited possibilities of the future.

GATES

But the transfer of political power in the South triggered a violent backlash among whites, who saw their way of life threatened. The small window of opportunity for freed southern blacks was slammed shut, as all levels of white society reacted. Eutaw, Alabama-- Southern Democrats assault a rally of black and white Republicans, 4 black men murdered. Colfax, Louisiana-- 300 armed white men attack African Americans over the contested outcome of the local election, 100 black men massacred.

MAN

What's happening during Reconstruction is the possibilities, right, of racial equality are emerging. Black people become a threat to, you know, white supremacy.

STAUFFER

Most Southern whites could not envision a society in which blacks had rights, in which blacks were treated as humans. They just assumed that black supremacy would replace white supremacy, it would be one or the other. Mm-hmm. And that fueled their desire to do anything possible to prevent that from happening. They would particularly pursue people who had achieved what they saw as unreasonable success. The image of a man with his own wagon or carriage on the street, these became kind of rallying cries for white supremacy. You identify the leading African Americans and you just murder them. Ideally, you'd do so in public to send a message

and a warning

"Know your place."

GATES

As the violence escalated, Northern Republicans began to reassess their support for Southern blacks. Political alliances were one thing; a second Civil War was another. "There is a feeling in this country," one African American observer wrote, "that the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have." The final betrayal came in 1876. With the presidential election deadlocked, and both political parties claiming victory, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes cut a cynical back-room deal with Southern Democrats. In return for the presidency, Hayes promised to remove the final few thousand federal troops lingering in the South. For African Americans,

the meaning of that symbolic gesture was all too clear

Reconstruction was over.

STAUFFER

By 1876, let's face it. Most conservative and moderate whites had lost whatever sympathy they had had for African Americans, and they rationalized it by saying, "Well, look what we've already done for them. "We've passed the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment. "We've given them everything they need. Hey, it's time they figure it out on their own." 250 years of slavery, 10 years of freedom... Yes. "You're on your own."

BROWN

Southern Democrats take back the South from the Republican party and from all these black people who have occupied positions in Southern legislatures. So you have the establishment of white supremacy, you know, brick by brick in these Southern territories.

GATES

Once again, African Americans in the South can only depend on their own tenacity and hope. Isaiah Montgomery had helped his father Benjamin run a successful cotton empire on his master's former plantation, Davis Bend, only to lose the land when the economically volatile years after Reconstruction left the family mired in debt. Now, Isaiah was determined to build a haven for black people in a remote corner of Mississippi.

FIELD

The Delta was a majority-black region that was largely unsettled. Isaiah Montgomery saw himself as improving upon his father's dream, and he improved upon it by making this a paradise for black landowners.

GATES

Isaiah would call his new town Mound Bayou. It was a self-contained, all-black world.

FIELD

The idea of having your own grocery stores, your own sidewalks to walk down, free from the kind of constant harassment and the constant threat of violence that pervaded most Southern towns by this point is simply unimaginable.

GATES

Mound Bayou residents today remember with awe the kind of respect their relatives were afforded, especially by white Southerners.

MAN

There's a story of my granddad. He went to the local tractor shop there in Cleveland, Mississippi, and he stood in the back. There was this young guy that not long had been working behind the counter, and he saw my granddad standing there, and he said, "Nigger, take your hat off!" And so my granddaddy just stood there, and before he could say it the next time, he said, "Nigger--" Said, "Come here," they said, "That's not a nigger. He's from Mound Bayou."

Both laugh

GATES

Isaiah believed that only by living apart from white people could black Southerners thrive. But his all-black town also appeased white Southerners increasingly determined to impose racial segregation on the South. White America did not fear Mound Bayou. Mm-mmm. Montgomery had already made clear in various ways that he had no intentions of being a political problem. That is, he had no intention of claiming his rights beyond the confines of building his business and his world in Mound Bayou. In 1890, Isaiah was the only black delegate to the Mississippi State Constitutional Convention. Hoping to protect Mound Bayou from violence, he reluctantly voted in favor of literacy tests, knowing that they would effectively bar black men from voting in Mississippi. It was a bargain that would reverberate across the South for decades to come. He said, "I'm willing to sacrifice 123,000 men in order that white people will give us some breathing room." Mm-hmm. "We will stand back "and let you have the political arena. "We will let you have the franchise. Just give us a little bit of room so that we can, you know, do a few things." Isaiah himself acknowledged that it was a compromise, but on the other hand, you have to understand the South and, particularly, Mississippi at the time. There is a lynching in the South every-- it's either third day or fourth day. Mmm. He needs to do everything he can to ensure that whites aren't gonna get outraged and have a reason for torching and burning his community. Mm-hmm. And one reason is to say, "OK, I'll accept your disenfranchisement. I just want to retain my autonomous black community." So...was it possible? Was there a scenario that you imagine where their logic made sense? In the United States of America, which purports to be a democracy, the notion that you would have to give up your freedom to become free, it just doesn't make any sense. Or that you can bargain away the future freedoms of people by giving up current rights, I think it was... like a devil's pact. You can do it and hope that, "OK, you know, we accommodate some, they'll treat us better," but they won't, and they did not. As Southern legislatures mounted a relentless assault on their hard-won rights, African Americans devised new strategies to hold on to the gains they had made during Reconstruction. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy strode through the streets of his native New Orleans toward the train station.

Train bell clanging

GATES

This was no idle stroll. He was about to test the 14th Amendment's promise of equal protection under the law. He would board a white passenger car and refuse to move to the black one. OK, June 7, 1892, the Press Street depot. What is Homer Plessy doing there? Homer Plessy is attempting to be arrested, booked, and tried for violating the segregation laws of 1890. I don't think he was very confident that he wouldn't be hung that day because there was a serious plan in effect to actually orchestrate his arrest. Mm-hmm.

Bell clangs

GATES

Conceived by a group of black Republicans, Plessy's gambit was a calculated act of civil disobedience-- breaking Louisiana's law in the hope of landing the case in the United States Supreme Court. The group had chosen Homer Plessy

for one overriding reason

he was so light-complexioned that he was indistinguishable from whites.

GATES

Why did they need a guy light and bright and damn-near white?

BROWN

What they wanted to do is to tell the courts that, you know, you're putting someone on there whose race has to be determined by a train conductor. How can this be the basis of law when every train conductor has to look carefully, right, at people's skin and look and say, "Oh, I think this person is a Negro"-- Negro reader. Yeah, exactly, right? As if they would have a Negro meter or something like that. It's patently absurd. Plessy gets his ticket, he goes right past the colored car, sits in the white car, and that's when a plain-clothes officer warns him to get off the train and, when he doesn't move, arrests him and takes him off.

GATES

The case did make it all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Justices didn't do what Plessy and his backers hoped. In a momentous decision that would shape the next half-century, they upheld Louisiana's segregation law. The Supreme Court decided that separate but equal was the law of the land. Justice might be blind, but the United States Constitution would no longer be color-blind. The Plessy decision dealt the final blow to the brief, flickering hope of Reconstruction. Now, the law relegated African Americans to the margins of white society. Free? Yes. Equal? No.

BROWN

That drastically reduces the horizons for black people. So what they begin to do is they begin to live within the limitations set by the federal government and the state governments. It doesn't mean the traditions of struggle end. Throughout the darkest days of Jim Crow segregation, the black freedom struggle never goes away.

GATES

The poet Langston Hughes would compare the extraordinary experience of Reconstruction to a telescope of dreams. Seen through one end, the dream "looms larger, so much larger, it seemed, than truth can be." "Turn the telescope around," he tells us, "and wonder why what was so large becomes so small again." As the 20th century dawned, the African American people could only ask themselves, "Where has all our freedom gone?" facing the bitter irony of winning their freedom in war, only to lose their rights under the law. Could they summon the strength for a new fight? Could they ever reach that elusive promised land?

Bird screeches

GATES

Next time on "The African Americans"... Jim Crow laws offer new challenges. We're going to show that separate but equal is not going to stop us from being successful.

ANNOUNCER

And they take the fight to the Supreme Court.

WOMAN

He says, "The black lawyer is a soldier taking the battle into the courtroom."

ANNOUNCER

"The

African Americans

Many Rivers to Cross." "The African Americans" story continues online at pbs.org/manyrivers with streaming video and more. "The Many Rivers to Cross" is available on DVD for $34.99. The companion book is also available for $34.95 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917.