often brutal – setbacks to Blacks as Whites who were determined to reimpose their hegemony over Blacks seized power. Groups like the Redeemers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Red Shirts used intimidation and violence to suppress Black voters and squash the political alliances that Blacks formed during Reconstruction with White Republicans.
In 1882, a coalition between Blacks and a White political faction in Danville, Va., called the Readjusters, produced an interracial city government in that majority- Black town. The Readjusters, some of them former Confederate officers, clamored for economic and education reforms that appealed to Blacks.
When Danville voters went to the polls in May 1882 to elect a city council, Blacks and the White Readjusters each won four seats on the town’ s 12-member governing body. But the governing coalition they formed was short-lived.
Richmond Dispatch newspaper on November 4, 1883, left no doubt as to whom it blamed for the violence:
“ Every white man’ s blood was boiled when he read of the indignities to which the whites of Danville had for some time been subjected by the negroes there. These negroes had evidently come to regard themselves as in some sort the rightful rulers of the town. They have been taught a lesson – a dear lesson, it is true; for the whites did not come out of the conflict without the smell of fire upon their garments – but nevertheless a lesson which will not be lost upon them, nor upon their race elsewhere in Virginia.”
Before the violence ended on November 7, 1883, Black elected officials and their White allies were forced from office and control of the city council was firmly in the hands of white supremacists.
The last three decades of the 19th century were a tumultuous period of great economic growth – and disparity – in the United States that came to be known as“ the Gilded Age.” It was also a time of military adventurism that saw U. S. interventions in China, Korea and Hawaii, in the Pacific, and in Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile and Cuba in the American hemisphere.
For Blacks, the closing years of the 19th century were a time of brutal suppression.
Black Codes – laws designed to force Black workers into a state of neoslavery – were enacted throughout the South. These laws made it a crime to be unemployed or homeless.
On November 3, 1883, a race riot erupted in Danville after a White clerk slapped one of two Black men he was arguing with on the sidewalk outside his store. The ensuing violence lasted several days and left five men( four Blacks and one White) dead. An editorial in The
Under the Black Codes, African Americans without proof of employment could be arrested for“ vagrancy” and forced into labor
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