An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  13. For example, see “President’s Annual Message,” December 2, 1872, in The Congressional Globe: The Debates and Proceedings of the Third Session, Forty-Second Congress (Washington, DC: Office of the Congressional Globe, 1873), 5, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30903/.

  14. “Petitions, Resolutions, &c.” Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina Being the Regular Session of 1869–70 (Columbia, SC: John W. Denny, Printer to the State, 1870), 55–56.

  15. “Forty-First Congress,” New York Times, February 5, 1870; “Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 1789–1873” (December 9, 1869), Library of Congress, American Memory, https://memory.loc.gov/ (accessed October 12, 2015).

  16. Members of the Cuban Junta in New York held different political tendencies and attitudes toward US involvement in Cuba’s Ten Years’ War. See Vanessa Michelle Ziegler, “The Revolt of ‘The Ever-Faithful Isle’: The Ten Years’ War in Cuba, 1868–1878,” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007, 185–206.

  17. For information on Governor Pinchback, see Agnes Smith Grosz, “The Political Career of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 27 (April 1944): 527–612.

  18. “Speeches and Resolutions of the Colored National Convention,” Pacific Appeal (San Francisco), May 4, 1872.

  19. “Correspondence Salt Lake, U.T.,” Elevator, July 4, 1873.

  20. See Facts About Cuba (New York: Sun Job Prtg. Off., 1870). For an outstanding account of the movement, see Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823–1957 (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

  21. Carla Peterson, “Black Elites and the Draft Riots,” New York Times, July 13, 2013.

  22. The following account is taken primarily from the booklet on the proceedings, published by the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, titled Slavery in Cuba.

  23. José Martí, “Henry Garnet, Famous Negro Orator,” in Foner, Inside the Monster, 69.

  24. Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, Slavery in Cuba, 16.

  25. Ibid., 16.

  26. Ibid., 5.

  27. “The Colored Citizens of New York,” Christian Recorder, December 21, 1872.

  28. “Public Meetings,” Elevator, December 28, 1872; “Cuban Independence,” Elevator, February 15, 1873.

  29. “Cuban Anti-Slavery Meeting—Addresses and Resolutions,” Sun (Baltimore), February 14, 1873. Several meeting summaries of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee note the participation of women. Given the leadership roles that Black women played in African American communities, they undoubtedly played a major role in the national petition campaign. See “Enthusiastic Meeting in Cooper Institute,” New York Times, October 25, 1877.

  30. Ibid.

  31. “Slavery in Cuba,” New York Herald, February 1, 1873.

  32. “Cuban Independence,” Elevator, February 15, 1873.

  33. For reports of meetings, see “Sympathy with Cuba,” New York Times, February 8, 1873; “Colored Men on Spanish Slavery Meeting in Washington,” New York Times, March 8, 1873; “The Colored Men and Cuba,” New York Times, March 11, 1873. On movement culture, see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), xix.

  34. “The Colored People of the District of Columbia,” New York Times, November 19, 1873.

  35. “Duty of the Colored Population,” Elevator, December 6, 1873; “The Civil Rights Convention,” New York Times, December 15, 1873.

  36. “Oration,” Elevator, April 25, 1874.

  37. “Emancipation of Cuban Slaves,” Christian Recorder, September 10, 1870; “Slavery in Cuba,” New York Times, July 13, 1877; “Samuel R. Scottron,” Cleveland Gazette, June 4, 1887.

  38. “The Corresponding Secretary to the Bishop and Conference,” Christian Recorder, July 23, 1870. Lawrence S. Little, Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884–1916 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000).

  39. “Cuba et Puerto Rico,” Christian Recorder, November 7, 1868.

  40. Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Office of The Republican, 1872), 113; “Hon. J. Henri Burch,” Weekly Louisianan, January 25, 1873.

  41. Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 165–66.

  42. “The Louisiana Colored Men,” New York Times, November 28, 1873.

  43. “Louisiana State Republican Resolutions and Platform,” Weekly Louisianan, September 26, 1874.

  44. “Colored Men on Spanish Slavery Meeting in Washington,” New York Times, March 8, 1873; “The Colored Men and Cuba,” New York Times, March 11, 1873.

  45. “Civil Rights Demonstration,” Weekly Louisianan, June 27, 1874.

  46. A Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the State of Florida at the Sixth Session Held in the Capitol in The City of Tallahassee on Tuesday, January 7, 1873 (Tallahassee, FL: S. B. McLin, 1873), 192–93.

  47. “Speech of Hon. Josiah Walls, of Florida, In the House of Representatives, January 24, 1874, On the Joint Resolution Declaring the Right of the Cuban Republic to Recognition as Belligerent,” Appendix to the Congressional Record, Congressional Record: Forty-Third Congress, First Session, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874), 27–29.

  48. “Samuel R. Scottron: An Interesting Biographical Sketch of a Successful Member of the Race,” Cleveland Gazette, June 4, 1887; “Petition to Accord Belligerent Rights to Cuba,” New York Times, February 20, 1873; “Correspondence,” Elevator, April 12, 1873.

  49. “Meeting of Congress, President’s Message,” Weekly Louisianan, December 7, 1872; “Petition to Accord Belligerent Rights to Cuba,” New York Times, February 20, 1873; “The Spanish Republic,” New York Times, February 24, 1873; “Correspondence,” Elevator, March 25, 1873.

  50. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration, rev. ed., vol. 1 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), 180–81.

  51. Richard H. Bradford, The Virginius Affair (Boulder: Colorado University Press, 1980), 14–15. See also Ziegler, “Revolt of ‘The Ever-Faithful Isle,’” 175–89.

  52. “Cuba,” Christian Recorder, March 6, 1873.

  53. “Cuba,” Savannah Tribune (Georgia), November 11, 1876.

  54. “Protest Against Cuban Slavery,” Christian Recorder, November 8, 1877; “The Freedom of Cuba,” New York Times, October 25, 1877.

  55. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

  56. Martí, “Henry Garnet, Famous Negro Orator,” 68–69.

  57. “Emancipation Celebration in Florida,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 11, 1865.

  58. Menard wrote a poem in homage to the struggle against slavery in Cuba and Brazil in 1879. See “Hail Free Cuba!” People’s Advocate (Washington, DC), September 27, 1879. For information on Menard, see “Elected to Congress, Menard Lost Seat in Bitter Contest,” Chicago Defender, November 21, 1925; “Florida Citizens Meet with President Hayes,” Sunland Tribune, March 31, 1877; John Willis Menard, Lays in Summer Lands, ed. Larry Eugene Rivers, Richard Mathews, and Canter Brown Jr. (Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2002). Menard also served as principal of the Douglas School on the island. See “The National Capital,” New York Globe, December 1, 1883.

  59. “Grant in Cuba,” Daily Inter Ocean, January 31, 1880. Gerald E. Poyo, “Cuban Revolutionaries and Monroe County Reconstruction Politics, 1868–1876,” Florida Historical Quarterly 55 (April 1977): 407–22.

  60. José Martí, “To Cuba!,” in José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 321.

  61. Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florid
a from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 34–43.

  62. Ron Hayduk, “Florida History: Resident Noncitizen Voting in Florida,” 2016, http://ronhayduk.com/immigrant-voting/around-the-us/state-histories/florida-history/ (accessed November 16, 2016); Virginia Harper-Ho, “Noncitizen Voting Rights: The History, the Law and Current Prospects for Change,” Law and Inequality Journal 18 (Summer 2000): 273–83. Alexander Keyssar discusses the rise and fall of declarant alien voting nationally in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 136–71.

  63. “Constitution of the State of Florida, 1868,” Florida Constitution Revision Commission, http://archive.law.fsu.edu/crc/conhist/1868con.html (accessed January 3, 2016).

  64. Knights of Labor, Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor of America (General Assembly, 1887), 1385, 1717; John Rogers Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States: Nationalisation, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1918), 463; Melton McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 81–82; Canter Brown Jr., “Prelude to the Poll Tax: Black Republicans and the Knights of Labor in 1880s Florida,” in Florida’s Heritage of Diversity: Essays in Honor of Samuel Proctor, ed. Mark I. Greenberg, William Warren Rogers, and Canter Brown, Jr. (Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 1997), 69–81. See also Leon Fink, Workingman’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 28; Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Politics of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 218–54; Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 209–35; Ileen A. DeVault, United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 147–51.

  65. Report of the Royal Commission on Strikes (Sydney: George Stephen Chapman Government Printers, 1891), 209; Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), 5.

  66. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 232–57; Gerald E. Poyo, “Cuban Patriots in Key West, 1878–1886: Guardians at the Separatist Ideal,” Florida Historical Quarterly 61 (January 1979): 20–36; Horne, Race to Revolution, 141–42.

  67. On the expansion of these markets, see C. B. Rogers to W. J. Lutterloh, January 5, 1870, File #5, Washington J. Lutterloh Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

  68. “Peculiarities of Key West,” New York Age, November 3, 1888; “Florida Market Gardens,” New York Times, November 24, 1889.

  69. “Peculiarities of Key West.”

  70. J. W. Menard to Joseph E. Lee, January 24, 1880, Joseph Lee Papers, Private Manuscript Collection of Ike Williams III, Jacksonville, Florida (henceforth cited as Joseph Lee Papers). The Cigar Makers International Union of America counted at least 300 union members in Key West as late as 1903. See “Organization,” Cigar Makers Official Journal 28 (April 15, 1904): 9.

  71. William Artrell to Joseph E. Lee, April 27, 1880, Joseph Lee Papers.

  72. “Peculiarities of Key West.”

  73. Sheriff Dupont’s obituary in 1938 noted, “A political division which led to a coalition between Negroes and Spanish-Americans brought about his election with a considerable majority.” “Florida’s Only Negro Sheriff,” quoted in Tampa Sunday Tribune, October 2, 1938, box 1, folder “1938,” Florida Negro Papers, Florida Works Progress Administration, University of South Florida, Tampa; Horne, Race to Revolution, 141. For a brief profile of Dean, see “A Beautiful City,” Freeman (Indianapolis), November 29, 1890.

  74. Prior to the election of 1888, a white candidate for the county judgeship stepped aside in favor of James Dean. For Dean’s plan to use slavery reparations to fund Florida’s public schools, see The Proceedings of the State Conference of the Colored Men of Florida Held at Gainesville, February, 5, 1884 (Washington, DC: 1884), reel 10, frame 27, Frederick Douglass Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  75. “Freest Town in the South: No Bulldozing Attempted at Key West,” New York Age, November 24, 1888. Livingston would go on to become US consul in Haiti.

  76. Ibid.

  77. On the stresses in the Republican coalition in Key West, see William Artrell to Joseph E. Lee, October 4, 1881, Joseph Lee Papers.

  78. “Freest Town in the South.”

  79. Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed, 33–55.

  80. Christian Recorder, editorial, July 6, 1882.

  81. Quoted in Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 621.

  82. “Everyone Favors the Bill,” Florida Times-Union, April 9, 1889; Samuel Proctor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward: Florida’s Fighting Democrat (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1950).

  83. Florida Times-Union, editorial, April 13, 1889. See also “The Negro Can’t Be Assimilated,” Pensacola Commercial, October 5, 1888.

  84. I am using the term “Jim Crow/Juan Crow segregation” to describe the overarching systems of segregation in the Sunbelt that were used by political elites to disenfranchise African American and Latinx workers. I use the term “Sunbelt” to refer to the South, the Southwest, and the agriculturally important areas of California.

  85. J. Clay Smith Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 276.

  86. On the development of white business supremacy in the South, see Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed, 11–59.

  87. “Pensacola Free,” Pensacola Commercial, March 15, 1885.

  88. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, AL: 2015).

  89. “Florida Topics,” New York Freeman, June 25, 1887.

  90. William W. Rogers, “The Negro Alliance in Alabama,” Journal of Negro History 45, no. 1 (January 1960): 39.

  91. Fortune, Black and White, xxxi–xxxii; William H. Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy: An Appeal on Behalf of the Silent Masses of Our Country Against the Despotic Rule of the Few (New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1924).

  92. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 99; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 89–90; Vargas, Crucible of Struggle, 151–52.

  93. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 98.

  94. “Democratic Doctrine,” New York Globe, September 20, 1884.

  95. Steel boss Andrew Carnegie on the importance of voter suppression in the South: “In the South, the ignorant are the immense majority. To give suffrage without restriction to the blacks would mean that the intelligent whites were powerless, overwhelmed. Government would be in the hands of men steeped in ignorance of political responsibilities to a degree impossible for Northern people to imagine. Only residence among them can give a true impression.” “Mr. Carnegie on the Negro,” Florida Times-Union, March 2, 1904.

  96. “Governor Fowler [sic] Interviewed,” State Chronicle (NC), May 10, 1889.

  97. Robert Winston, “An Unconsidered Aspect of the Negro Question,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1902): 265. See also Dwight Farnham, “Negroes a Source of Industrial Labor,” Industrial Management 56, no. 2 (August 1918): 75.

  98. “Relations of Whites and Blacks” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), April 14, 1901.

  99. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 727.

  100. Ibid., 706.

  101. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959; New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).

  CHAPTER 5: WAGING WAR ON THE GOVERNMENT OF AMERICAN BANKS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

  1. On the life and work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); Sarah L. Silkey, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (Athens: Universit
y of Georgia Press, 2015); Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

  2. “The Act of an Arkansas Mob,” New York Times, February 21, 1892.

  3. José Martí, “A Town Sets A Black Man on Fire,” in Selected Writings, 313; Oscar Montero discusses Martí’s complex approach to US race relations in “Jose Marti Against Race,” in The Cuban Republic and Jose Marti: Reception and Use of a National Symbol, ed. Mauricio A. Font and Alfonso W. Quiroz (New York: Lexington Books, 2006). See also Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 53–68.

  4. Juan González and Joseph Torres, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (London: Verso, 2011), 170.

  5. Martí, “The Truth About the United States,” in Selected Writings, 330–31.

  6. Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1997), 70.

  7. José Martí, “Antonio Maceo,” in Our America by José Martí: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip S. Foner, trans. Elinor Randall (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 374. On Maceó, see Philip S. Foner, Antonio Maceo: The ‘Bronze Titan’ of Cuba’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Robert C. Nathan, “Imagining Antonio Maceo: Memory, Mythology and Nation in Cuba, 1896–1959,” master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2007; José Martí, “The Washington Pan-American Congress,” in Foner, Inside the Monster, 340–41.

  8. “Resolutions Adopted,” Freeman (Indianapolis), January 2, 1897.

  9. Ibid; “Chicago Sympathizes with Cuba,” Enterprise (Omaha), January 1, 1897.

  10. “Gen. Antonio Maceo, A Brilliant Figure Around Whom the Aspiring Negro May Twine His Brightest Hopes for the Future,” Freeman, October 30, 1897.