Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese and Cruikshank

by Goldman, Robert M.

• ISBN13: 9780700610693
• ISBN10: 0700610693
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

On Easter Sunday in 1873, more than one hundred black men were gunned down in Grant Parish, Louisiana, for daring to assert their right to vote. Several months earlier, in Lexington, Kentucky, another black man was denied the right to vote for simply failing to pay a poll tax. Both events typified the intense opposition to the federal guarantee of black voting rights. Both events led to landmark Supreme Court decisions. And, as Robert Goldman shows, both events have much to tell us about an America that was still deeply divided over the status of blacks during the Reconstruction era.

Goldman deftly highlights the cases of United States v. Reese and United States v. Cruikshank within the context of an ongoing power struggle between state and federal authorities and the realities of being black in postwar America. Focusing especially on the so-called Reconstruction Amendments and Enforcement Acts, he argues that the decisions in Reese and Cruikshank signaled an enormous gap between guaranteed and enforced rights. The Court's decisions denied the very existence

Author Biography

Robert M. Goldman is a professor in the department of history and political science at Virginia Union University

Table of Contents

Editors' Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(6)
``We Are Americans, We Are Citizens''	7	(16)
Enforcing the Enforcement Acts	23	(19)
Massacre at Colfax Courthouse	42	(18)
Lexington, Kentucky	60	(11)
The Supreme Court Hears the Cases	71	(17)
The Supreme Court Decides	88	(20)
``A Free Ballot and a Fair Count''	108	(16)
``That Evil Was Possible''	124	(20)
Conclusion	144	(13)
Chronology	157	(4)
Relevant Cases	161	(2)
Bibliographical Essay	163	(8)
Index	171