What one man's life and death can teach us about the fight for the Black voteĪnd between 18, over 1,500 Black men took political office most not for long, as their efforts were cut down by mobs of violent White men.ġ868 Louisiana - African Americans participated in Constitutional Conventions like this across the South where delegates argued over Union demands, drew up new laws and elected new leadership. That evening among the crowd of listeners was an enraged John Wilkes Booth, who would go on to assassinate the President just three days later at Ford’s Theatre.įor decades after Lincoln’s death, White supremacists would wage a war of intimidation, murder and massacre on anyone, Black or White, who dared covet a share of their power. Plantation-owning elites, Southern Democrats and White supremacists, however, would not easily concede political power to those who had so recently been their slaves. Grant just two days earlier.īut that evening, Lincoln’s speech was about Reconstruction, readmitting Louisiana into the Union and a proposal for “giving the benefit of public schools equally to Black and White, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man.” They had gathered there expecting a celebratory speech on Confederate Gen. On April 11, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered what would be his last speech from a window at the White House to the crowd below. 150 years ago, Republicans fought hard for Black voter turnoutīy Channon Hodge, Ken Borland and Frank Fenimore, CNN
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