Racist Reporting During Reconstruction

loss of the Civil War by Southern whites threatened to shift the balance of political power to blacks. Radical reconstruction which disfranchised many whites gave most blacks the vote. These events caused racial conflict in the South and stimulated a wide variety of communicative strategies and discussions among blacks and whites. In this essay I consider one of the ways whites used to stifle sociopolitical progress of blacks in Southern society. The government of the country, argued the Charleston Mercury (Nov. 9, 1867), should not be permitted to pass from the hands of the white man into the hands of the negro. Mercury urged each white who could to arm himself with the ballot: Many white men have been killed and others have emigrated, while there has been some influx of Northern white men and country negroes.... Let every man who can register do so at once (Aug. 14, 1867). Public discussions concerning the future of blacks were also heard in the white church. On November 17, 1867, Reverend J. L. Girarde, spoke in the Zion Presbyterian Church in Charleston on the topic, Is the Negro a Beast? (Mercury: Nov. 19, 1867) In the Citadel Square Baptist Church on December 8, a few weeks before the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, Reverend E. T. Winkler answered the theme of What is the Negro's Ethnological Status? with the conviction that indeed blacks were human enough to receive salvation. So important was this sermon considered by the

Criminology · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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  Cal M Logue, Thurmon Garner•Southern Speech Journal•1988

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• It Ain't What You Say, It's the Way You Say It

  Open Access•Brenda Smith, Brenda V Smith•Journal of Black Studies•1979

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• Rhetorical ridicule of reconstruction blacks

  Cal M Logue•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1976

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