These characterizations belie a more ominous reality: Black Americans are canaries in the democratic coal mine — the first to detect when the air is foul, signaling the danger that lies ahead.

To be Black in America has often meant to act in political solidarity with other Black people. Sometimes those politics have been formal and electoral, sometimes they have been of protest and revolt. But they have always, by necessity, been existential and utilitarian.

Black America’s introduction to the democratic republic came via the cold calculus of the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise. A full accounting of the enslaved Black population would have empowered the states championing enslavement by giving such states more representatives in Congress and more votes in the Electoral College; a total exclusion would have expunged their personhood from the sacred text. Democracy to enslaved Black Americans thus initially presented as little more than a negotiation on how their rights and humanity could be bartered away.

When Black men were first enfranchised after the end of the Civil War, they faced a partisan politics reduced to one stark choice: Side with those who would extend more rights of citizenship to Black people or with those who would deny them. Naturally, they largely supported racially progressive Republicans who advocated for Black suffrage and representation. In Virginia, more than 100,000 freed Black men registered to vote for delegates to the convention that would help facilitate the state’s readmission to the Union. On Election Day in October 1867, 88 percent of them voted — often under the threat of job loss — securing a supermajority of convention delegates for Republicans, more than a third of whom were Black. The convention, filled by the electoral solidarity of Black voters and delegates, helped lead to the state’s successful re-entry into the United States, formalize suffrage for freedmen and extend civil rights.

The ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments codified freedmen’s participation in the electoral process at a time when upward of 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states, constituting actual or near majorities in more than a few. This led to more than 300 Black state and federal legislators in the South holding office in 1872, a level not seen again for more than 100 years. These elected officials were overwhelmingly Republicans swept into office by the unity of Black voters, who assembled to demand equality and liberty that hinged on keeping white segregationists from power.

This was the Black monolith’s forceful debut. In a thriving democracy, one aligned to the nation’s professed values, a competition for these new voters would have ensued. The monolith would have dissipated as individual Black voters sought out their ideological compatriots instead of being compelled to band against segregation and racial violence.

Instead, a campaign of white nationalist terrorism swept across the South, targeting Black Republican legislators and voters. In Georgia, the 1868 State Legislature voted to expel its Black members, all of whom were Republican. They were eventually reseated, but not before white racist vigilantes in the town of Camilla opened fire on Black marchers attending a Republican rally, killing, by some accounts, nearly a dozen and wounding dozens more. That same year in South Carolina, white vigilantes killed a number of Black legislators. One of them, Benjamin F. Randolph, was shot in broad daylight at a train station. No one was ever tried for the crime, let alone convicted of it. In the Colfax Massacre of 1873, dozens of Black Republicans and state militiamen were killed during an attempt to overturn election results in Louisiana.

Source: New York Times

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