1/ In today’s #LessonsFromHistory we’re talking about the 1876 Republican National Convention. Like today, racial tensions were running high. Though the Civil War was over, areas of the former Confederacy were still under military occupation eleven years later…
2/ Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican nominee for president. In an effort to rebuild the Republican Party in the South, Hayes supported removing troops and creating “wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government.”
3/ Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery as a young man and was the nation’s most prominent abolitionist, was slated to speak at the convention. Despite supporting the party of Reconstruction, Douglass was regularly critical of the Republican Party as well.
4/ At an unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial earlier that year, Douglass said of Lincoln: “He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,”
5/ Douglass was angry that the Republican platform focused more on the interests of Southern Democrats than on helping newly freed slaves. Though the KKK had been largely wiped out, smaller militias were popping up across the South, intent on maintaining white supremacy.
6/ Hayes won the election, and the next year US Army troops were pulled out of the South. Over decades, historian @historicities writes, much of the progress made during Reconstruction was whittled away by a rapidly growing infrastructure of Jim Crow laws wapo.st/2QB9SRG
7/ In a speech in 1888, Douglass called emancipation “a villainous swindle,” noting how Black Southerners were now oppressed by debt and low wages. Later that year, at the R.N.C., he became the first Black man to receive a delegate vote for president.
8/ For more on the history of American political conventions, check out our playlist:
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