Faced with a spike in violence against blacks since slavery ended, blacks in the southern United States have often resorted to military force to protect themselves and their communities.
Compared to similar efforts by warring slaves before the Civil War, the defensive efforts of blacks during the so-called Reconstruction (the period of US history after the Civil War) were larger and more successful.
However, the numerical and military superiority of whites, as well as the reluctance of the federal government to come to the aid of the fighting African Americans, made the resistance of the blacks a dangerous undertaking, which, as a rule, led to brutal retaliation and failed to stop the onset of segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks.
As a consequence of the Union victory in 1865, a wave of racial violence swept through the South in the months and years after the war. White southerners beat and murdered black men, raped black women, and terrorized black communities.
Ku Klux Klan
One of the most violent anti-black organizations was the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society founded by former Confederate soldiers in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee. Together with the Knights of the White Camellia and other white supremacist groups, the Ku Klux Klan was most active in areas where blacks were a significant minority.
From 1868 to 1877, all elections in the South were accompanied by white violence.
In 1866, whites killed dozens of African Americans who tried to organize politically during the racial riots in New Orleans and Memphis. Two years later, violence erupted again in New Orleans, and similar riots occurred in the 1870s in South Carolina and Alabama.
Reconstruction has increased racial tensions. The sight of black voters and officials infuriated former Confederates, who intensified their violent efforts to "redeem" the South. Neither the small contingent of Union troops stationed in the South nor the Freedmen's Bureau (an institution designed to facilitate the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom) were unable or unwilling to stop this.
As the federal government refused to intervene in the region, the southern states continued to destroy black political power with impunity. In 1873, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Reconstruction era, a large army of white racists killed more than one hundred black policemen in Colfax, Louisiana.
Two years later, Mississippi authorities initiated the so-called "shotgun policy" that led to further massacres and prompted many blacks to leave the state. The Hamburg Massacre of 1876, in which Confederate veterans murdered a group of black militias in cold blood, marked the brutal climax of the reign of terror.
Weapon
Yet many African Americans have refused to remain passive in the face of white terror, using their newly acquired weapons for collective or individual resistance.
The end of the Civil War marked a watershed moment in the history of black resistance in the United States. Slaves were forbidden to own weapons, which made it extremely difficult for the slaves to resist and the possibility of their rebellion.
After the war, the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution not only ended slavery and made African Americans citizens of the United States, but also allowed them to carry weapons. Across the South, African Americans were buying rifles, shotguns and pistols, which gave goosebumps to white planters.
Conservative newspapers in rural Louisiana complained about the practice of blacks carrying concealed weapons even while working in the fields. For black men, in particular, the right to bear arms has become an important symbol of their new freedom. The ability of freedmen to defend themselves and their families from former masters was a source of important psychological transformation. For them, the meaning of citizenship went beyond the right to vote and the ability to farm their own land.
In many parts of the South, former black veterans of the Civil War have formed paramilitary organizations to protect their communities from the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. Black militias failed to completely stop the rampage of terror that whites began after the war, and as with the Colfax and Hamburg massacres, militant resistance often meant death for black defenders.
The informal networks that united black communities after the Civil War fostered spontaneous acts of resistance. Sometimes armed freedmen came to the aid of black politicians who were threatened by racist colleagues. On other occasions, they defended members of the black community from the Ku Klux Klan. These forms of resistance were most effective in areas of the South where African Americans were in the majority. For example, in the lowlands of South Carolina, large black communities were well organized and could easily repel attacks by racist whites.
Among southern whites, such episodes of black self-defense sparked deep-seated fears of black uprisings, echoing fears of slave uprisings before the Civil War. The so-called "Black Codes" adopted by the legislatures of many southern states after the war were one attempt to eliminate this perceived threat. While these laws were primarily aimed at maintaining cheap black labor on white plantations, they also limited the ability of African Americans to defend themselves.
The Louisiana Code of 1866 prohibited blacks from carrying firearms without written permission from their employer. The Mississippi Code went a step further by completely banning gun ownership for blacks. Some scholars have suggested that the former Confederate states were keen to maintain such restrictions after the abolition of the "black codes" in 1867 with the passage of hidden weapons laws. However, the implementation of such rules has proven difficult.
Since legal restrictions on the ability of blacks to carry weapons tended to be unsuccessful, most southern whites continued to rely on extrajudicial violence to suppress black militancy. As in the post-slave uprisings, rumors of resistance were often enough reason for white warriors to indiscriminately ransack African American homes and take their weapons.
Despite fears by former slave owners that slaves would kill thousands of whites as soon as they were freed, very few blacks called for retaliation.
