so-called Redeemers: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), Kindle loc. 11087.
useless to the emancipated: Lawrence Goldstone, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Civil Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865–1903 (New York: Walker & Co., 2011), Kindle loc. 239.
“The Reconstruction amendments”: Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), xxi.
“Men talk of”: Quoted in Blight, Douglass, 737.
1864–1869: The Civil War
won themselves freedom: Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 82.
U.S. Colored Troops: www.afroamcivilwar.org/about-us/usct-history.html.
“300 reliable colored”: William A. Doback, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2011), 6.
tried to organize: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 563.
Emancipation Proclamation: Doback, Freedom by the Sword, 9. It is significant that the Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to enslaved people in border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland).
thousands of Black Americans: Doback, Freedom by the Sword, 10.
“Once let the black”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 620.
“If they stake”: Ibid.
“apostles of black”: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 71.
“old army uniforms”: Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 174.
“protect, strengthen”: Ibid., 177.
Union Leagues: Ibid., 186.
“several republican clubs”: Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 241.
“double victory”: Matthew Delmont, “Why African-American Soldiers Saw World War II as a Two-Front Battle,” Smithsonian, August 24, 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-african-american-soldiers-saw-world-war-ii-two-front-battle-180964616/.
1869–1874: Reconstruction
could possibly outweigh: David J. Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (2011): 307–48.
more than 700,000 Black people: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation (1968), www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12p753.pdf.
“there is no existing”: White v. Clements, 39 Ga. 232 (1869).
“waited upon”: Ku-Klux-Klan, The Ku-Klux Reign of Terror. Synopsis of a Portion of the Testimony Taken by the Congressional Investigating Committee (broadside), no. 5., n.p. (1872), Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.23700800.
A military report: Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 265–66.
McEnery and Penn: Dorothea Lange, “Battle of Liberty Place Monument” (photograph), Washington, DC, c.1936, Library of Congress, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.
1874–1879: Atlanta
writing an article for Harper’s: Ernest Ingersoll, “The City of Atlanta,” Harper’s Magazine 60 (December 1879): 30–43.
“feature of the city”: Ibid., 42.
“random collection”: Ibid., 43.
“drainage is therefore”: Ibid., 40. On African American life and labor in Shermantown, see Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
“There are certain features”: Ingersoll, “City of Atlanta,” 33–34.
1879–1884: John Wayne Niles
Callie House’s National Ex-Slave: Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is True Is Black: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Random House, 2006).
“a burly and muscular”: “Niles Nailed: The Chief of the ‘Indemnity Party,’ A Colored Rogue and Swindler, Placed in the Penitentiary,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, June 3, 1882; “The Seat of Government: Agitating the Establishment of a Colored Man’s Territory,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 3, 1883; “Negro Niles: A Further Account of the Man Who Is Raising the Indemnity Party,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 6, 1882.
“more illiterate of his own race”: “Negro Niles: A Further Account,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
In 1869, in Tennessee: Charlotte Hinger, “John Wayne Niles (1842–?),” Black Past, July 29, 2014, www.blackpast.org/vignette_aahw/niles-john-wayne-1842.
the Exodusters movement: Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (1976; New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).
Nicodemus, Kansas, colony project: Kevin Marvin Hamilton, “The Settlement of Nicodemus: Its Origins and Early Promotion,” Promised Land on the Solomon: Black Settlement at Nicodemus, Kansas, National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior (Kansas State Historical Society, Entourage Inc., 1984).
“The judge who criticized”: Ibid., 10.
W. H. Smith, president: “The Fraudulent Niles,” Daily Rocky Mountain (Denver), April 11, 1878.
Indemnity Party: “Negro Niles: A Further Account,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
he was convicted again: “Niles Nailed,” Daily Arkansas Gazette.
It would constitute: “The Seat of Government,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat; “Niles of Arkansas: The Colored Fomenter of Discord,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 17, 1883; “Republicanism and the Negroes,” Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina), October 4, 1883; “Mr. J. W. Niles of Arkansas Thinks That the Colored People of the South Should Take Themselves Up Bag and Baggage and Flee to Some Community Where There Are No White Men,” New York Globe, October 27, 1883; “Negro Colonies: Proposed Separation of the Blacks from the Whites,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), November 9, 1883.