Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

Constitution had assumed that they had “no rights which
the white man was bound to respect,” the racist foundation
of the American polity was laid bare.
But the decision was in effect for only about a decade.
The slaves’ emanicipation occurred in 1863 as the by-product
of a war to save the Union from southern secession.
During the Reconstruction period that followed the war,
the exigencies of the struggle between the Congress and
President Andrew Johnson over the terms under which the
seceded states could be readmitted to the Union led to the
nullification of the Dred Scott decision. The Fourteenth
Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote equal citizenship for
all people born in the United States (except “Indians not
taxed”) into the Constitution. But the federal effort to enforce
civic and political equality for blacks during Reconstruction
failed because the government proved unwilling
or unable to commit sufficient resources or apply enough
force to overcome the violent white resistance to black
equality that erupted in the South. Antiblack racism peaked
in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the
First World War, the era that historian Rayford W. Logan
has called the “nadir” of the African American experience. 55
Emancipation could not be carried to completion because
it exceeded the capacity of white Americans—in the
North as well as in the South—to think of blacks as genuine
equals. A sectional consensus emerged after Reconstruction
to the effect that the nation was well rid of slavery, an
institution that had retarded the economic development
and prosperity that a system of capitalism based on wage
labor now made possible. But efforts to extend the meaning
of emancipation to include black civil and political equality
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