The Reconstruction 'decade' as it was called, lasted from approximately 1865 until 1877: the 'official' end of this period was marked by the removal of Union troops from the South. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 created the Freedman's Bureau, which opened schools and set up cooperatives to help newly freed African Americans make a successful adjustment to freedom and citizenship This era saw the rise of the first Historically Black Colleges such as Fisk, Howard, Talladega, Tuskegee, Morehouse, Atlanta, and Hampton (544).
Three important laws were passed in the early years of Reconstruction. The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal; the Fourteenth Amendment extended the government's protection to African Americans; the Fifteenth Amendment extended the vote to black men. The latter, as our text points out, caused a rift among progressive organizers, particularly feminists. Government preferred to give the vote to black men only (and usually only those who owned property), which eroded the support for equality for blacks formerly extended by the suffrage movement (545). While many laws were created to enfranchise blacks, this period in history saw the re-emergence of slavery in a different guise: while many black southerners fled their homes during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, those who stayed behind were still working in de facto servitude for their former owners. The sharecropping system ensured this return of effective slavery, and Jim Crow laws made racial segregation the law of the land.
Meanwhile, the formerly progressive organizations that supported abolition were divided on the issue of full enfranchisement of free African Americans, and "the antislavery societies, by and large, had been segregated" (544). As the social reformers of the time turned their focus from equal rights to other social issues (such as prohibition and suffrage for women), the nation also turned its attention from the issues of the war and reconstruction to pacifism and nostalgia. Writers such as Thomas Nelson Page, a native Virginian, became popular for writing romantic elegies about the "Old South." In collections such as Marse Chan and Other Stories, the author painted scenes of happy slaves in the fields tilling cotton, while the Master and his family enjoyed the prosperity of the day. This era of "Moonlight and Magnolias" prized a wistful glance at a mythology of the South as an 'ideal civilization.' Other writers such as journalist Joel Chandler Harris, presented his own renderings of black dialect and folk tale in his collections on Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
The first World War gave rise to a growing sense of global nationalism, while locally, racial tension intensified with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan: a violent terrorist organization. The rebirth of the KKK was galvanized by two events: the publication of Thomas Dixon's book The Clansman and D.W. Griffith's subsequent adaptation of the novel to film, Birth of a Nation. Both texts outlined the tenets of white racist mythology that cast the black male as a sexual predator of white females. White males arrogated themselves as the valiant protector of southern female virtue while ushering in renewed hope for a fallen South. One concludes that during this period of financial devastation following the war, the South found its scapegoat in the black male and leveled its fury against him.
Wells moved to the North to stay with her friend Frances E.W. Harper when her Memphis office was vandalized following the publication of A Red Record. Here, the former schoolteacher exposed the racist motivations and concocted myths about black males as "The Old Threadbare Lie," and sought to expose the violence for what it was. Though she was forced to flee the South after the publication of A Red Record, the impact of her publication and the bravery she exemplified are of considerable historical significance.
