Three of the 33 Georgia lawmakers prevented from taking their seats in 1868. (Image: Moon Rabbit Media)
The temporary expulsion of two Black Tennessee legislators was a reminder of why even a tiny semblance of Black political independence is feared and hated. The expressions of support from traitorous Democratic Party leadership were reminders of of why a true independence struggle must continue.
In September of 1868, white lawmakers in Georgia expelled all 33 African American legislators elected to the state’s General Assembly. It was, to be sure, a bipartisan affair, with 15 moderate Republicans joining the more conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives, while in the Senate, four Republicans voted for expulsion; in both chambers, a total of 38 Republicans abstained.
The federal government would ultimately intervene and the expelled lawmakers were reinstated to the 197-member body in January of 1870. Among their first official acts after they’d been re-seated was to vote solidly in favor of a resolution authorizing back pay to the very delegates who had unlawfully replaced them in the General Assembly.
This gesture was likely not motivated purely by the freedpeople’s magnanimity but as a bargaining chip to negotiate for increased spending for public schools or some other populist policy on their long checklist. Still, in their short time as elected officeholders, Georgia’s African American legislators had already established themselves as the state’s most progressive, and class conscious politicians, voting to fully fund public education, dole out $30 million in low-interest loans to poor farmers, lower property taxes, slash interest rates paid to the state’s wealthy creditors (thereby saving taxpayers’ money) and, perhaps most astonishingly, oppose proposals to bar former Confederates from holding public office.
The freedpeople were not the least bit interested in retribution; their interest lay in building a Beloved Community for themselves and their neighbors.
The ordeal of 33 Georgia lawmakers 155 years ago anticipated the purge and reinstatement earlier this month of two Black delegates, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, from Tennessee’s House of Representatives, putatively for violating the body’s rules of decorum by participating in a raucous–albeit peaceful–anti-gun rally on the chamber floor. A vote to expel a third lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, fell short; she is white.
“That is racial,” a Black Democrat from Nashville, 31-year-old Angelo Tate, told NPR following the expulsions. “It makes us feel like our choice and our voice is not valued and we seem to be moving backwards politically.”
Said Rachel Tate, 30, another African American who identifies as a Democrat:
“White men don’t care what we think,” Tate said. “They took our representative away from us.
“It’s like our vote doesn’t matter.”
You can indeed draw a straight, unbroken line between the ouster of duly elected lawmakers from Southern legislatures in the 19th and 21st centuries, and the clear racial animus that motivated both. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the expulsions occurred within a broader political context which can best be summarized by Fred Hampton’s profane prophecy:
“It’s a class struggle, Goddammit!”
What white lawmakers in both instances feared is not merely “Negro rule”--as it was often described in the Reconstruction era– but the outbreak of democracy that it portends.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans have consistently been America’s fiercest class warriors, and most progressive political actors. Consider that between roughly 1865 and 1900, every single state below the Mason-Dixon line experimented with some form of what post-colonial scholars have dubbed “racial democracy,” in which Black legislators collaborated with whites to enact populist reforms. Not all of these political movements had the same outcomes but they all enjoyed some measure of success in redistributing wealth downward, from the haves to the have-nots as it were, and in the process laid the Keynesian cornerstone for a modern industrial state so prosperous that it would become the envy of nations as disparate as Argentina and Albania.
From Radical Reconstruction to the New Deal, the New Left to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, a radical Black polity is the sine qua non of America’s most democratizing social movements, and the vanguard of all pluralist revolutions. In Tennessee, the two Justins, as they are now known, were removed from office for leading a gun control protest on the House floor after the slaughter of six people, including three 9-year-old children, in a Christian school in Nashville. That the rally included schoolchildren and protesters of all races represented a clear and present danger to Tennessee’s Republicans, and their corporate bosses at the National Rifle Association.
From the House floor, Justin Jones raised the specter of fascism in denouncing his expulsion: “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.”
Both in their 20s, Jones and Pearson have a history of community activism, having come of age during the Black Lives Matter movement. Both men are well-spoken– reminiscent of the generation of civil rights leaders whose oratory was shaped by the Black church–and led the protest for stricter gun control legislation after a high school shooting last month in Nashville left six people dead, three of them students. The New York Times wrote of the two men:
Mr. Pearson and Mr. Jones, whose districts include parts of Memphis and Nashville, are a generational break from the current political norm, and a throwback in many ways to the tactics and styles of civil rights leaders from the 1960s and ’70s. Their style is in communion with a tradition of African American activism in which civic and spiritual life intertwine, and political reprimand from the opposition is worn like a badge of honor.
Such uncompromising advocacy on behalf of their constituencies has not only put them at odds with Republicans but is almost certain to clash with the older generation of Democrats, especially Blacks, whose politics have been shaped by the party’s rightward shift under the Clinton administration in an unimaginative effort to compete with the GOP for disaffected white voters.
Days after lawmakers voted to expel Pearson and Johnson, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Tennessee to give a speech at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, to express the Biden administration’s support. "We are here because [Jones, Pearson and Johnson] and their colleagues in the Democratic caucus chose to show courage in the face of extreme tragedy. They chose to lead and show courage and say that a democracy allows for places where the people’s voice will be heard and honored and respected."
You needn’t be a cynic to understand Harris’s remarks as an attempt to circumscribe an uprising from the Democrats’ left flank. An avowed Zionist, who preferred to prosecute struggling single mothers of truant schoolchildren more than bankers who had illegally foreclosed on thousands of homes, Harris has no more tolerance with an outbreak of democracy than do the white, Republican lawmakers who expelled Pearson and Johnson. But feigning support for the two young Democrats buys the party stalwarts time to bring Pearson and Johnson into the fold, and gradually discipline their demands for policies that benefit the working class, of all races. This strategy approximates, more or less, the Democrats’ corruption of the Black Lives Matter movement, rendering the organization ineffective as an advocate for the African American community, similar to the Black misleadership class in Congress and city halls across the country.
Whether or not the Justins can withstand the inevitable overtures from corporate Democrats is anyone’s guess. But their politics to date is redolent of the transcendent class consciousness that animated Black radicals such as Fred Hampton, Huey P. Newton, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and a Negro caulker named Issac Myers.
When Baltimore’s white caulkers and ship carpenters successfully lobbied their bosses to fire 100 Black caulkers and longshoremen in 1865, Myers made a bold proposal at a brainstorming session a few days later: what if the dismissed dockworkers pooled their resources to buy their own shipyard and managed it as a workers’ cooperative?
The group quickly raised $10,000 from investors that included Frederick Douglas, borrowed another $30,000 from a white ship captain, took out a six-year mortgage and purchased a shipyard and railway extension two days before Valentine’s Day in 1866. Within six months the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company employed 300 blacks in Baltimore and other cities along the Atlantic seaboard at an average wage of $3 per day. Buoyed by several government contracts, the company repaid its mortgage and all outstanding debts within five years, and as the cooperative expanded, hired white laborers in addition to blacks. At a meeting of the National Labor Union in Philadelphia in 1869, Myers pleaded with white delegates to integrate with blacks; a united front would allow all the workers on the waterfront to wrest even higher wages from the shipping magnates.
“ I speak today for the colored men of the whole country,.... when I tell you that all they ask for themselves is a fair chance; that you shall be no worse off by giving them that chance; that you and they will dwell in peace and harmony together;... The white men of the country have nothing to fear from the colored laboring man. We desire to see labor elevated and made respectable; we desire to have the highest rate of wages that our labor is worth; ... And you, gentlemen, may rely on the support of the colored laborer of this country in bringing about this result.... American citizenship with the black man is a complete failure, if he is proscribed from the workshops of this country.”
Continuing, Myers invoked the Baltimore stevedores cooperative efforts:
“ We gave employment to a large number of the men of your race, without regard to their political creed, and to the very men who once sought to do us injury. So you see gentlemen, we have no prejudice.”
A former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.