Black Congressmen During Reconstruction: A Documentary Sourcebook

(Hardback)

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Description

During the Reconstruction, African Americans from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginiaformer slave-owning stateswere elected to Congress in remarkable numbers. They included lawyers, teachers, businessmen, editors, and ministers. African Americans gained the right to vote through the Reconstruction Acts and the Civil War Amendments, and elected 2 blacks to the Senate and 19 to the House of Representatives. This book provides brief biographical sketches of these extraordinary politicians and excerpts from documents illuminating their activities in Congress. These politicians took an active role and spoke out on issues from civil rights legislation and policies on Native Americans to the Chinese Exclusion Bill and foreign policy. They demanded a federal law making lynching a capital crime, denounced massacres in the South, and decried the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. They played important roles until the South successfully drove blacks away from the polls and from Congress.

Reviews

[S]ignificant contribution to Reconstruction historiography by examining the careers of twenty-two lawmakers who represented eight southern states in Congress from 1868S1901....Middletown has rescued black officeholders from the grasp of the Dunning School and near obscurity....Serious readers of souther history will find a place for Middleton's well-written book in their libraries.-The Alabama Review
Stephen Middleton's excellent new documentary history gives us the record of the two black senators and twenty black representatives who held national office from 1870 to 1901, when the last of them was driven from office....Middleton's collection of congressional speeches will be a permanent contribution to the history of racial politics during the Gilded Age and a corrective to racist ideas that were dominant for the better part of a century.-The Journal of Southern History
The words spoken by these men in the House and Senate shed much-needed light on the state of race relations in 19th-century America.-College & Research Libraries News
"Significant contribution to Reconstruction historiography by examining the careers of twenty-two lawmakers who represented eight southern states in Congress from 1868S1901....Middletown has rescued black officeholders from the grasp of the Dunning School and near obscurity....Serious readers of souther history will find a place for Middleton's well-written book in their libraries."-The Alabama Review
"[S]ignificant contribution to Reconstruction historiography by examining the careers of twenty-two lawmakers who represented eight southern states in Congress from 1868S1901....Middletown has rescued black officeholders from the grasp of the Dunning School and near obscurity....Serious readers of souther history will find a place for Middleton's well-written book in their libraries."-The Alabama Review
"The words spoken by these men in the House and Senate shed much-needed light on the state of race relations in 19th-century America."-College & Research Libraries News
"Stephen Middleton's excellent new documentary history gives us the record of the two black senators and twenty black representatives who held national office from 1870 to 1901, when the last of them was driven from office....Middleton's collection of congressional speeches will be a permanent contribution to the history of racial politics during the Gilded Age and a corrective to racist ideas that were dominant for the better part of a century."-The Journal of Southern History

Author Bio

STEPHEN MIDDLETON is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is the author of The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Greenwood, 1993). His specialty is U.S. Constitutional History with a research interest in race and constitutional and legal history.