Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow

The years immediately after the Civil War offered something remarkable in Georgia. Formerly enslaved people voted, ran for office, and won. Between eighteen sixty-eight and eighteen seventy-one, thirty-three Black legislators served in the Georgia General Assembly, among them Henry McNeal Turner, a minister and political organizer who would later become a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For a brief span, Georgia had something close to interracial democracy.

Then came what white Georgians called Redemption. In September eighteen sixty-eight, the Georgia legislature voted to expel its Black members, declaring that while the constitution permitted Black men to vote, it did not explicitly guarantee the right to hold office. Federal intervention temporarily restored the expelled members, but the pressure never lifted. By the early eighteen seventies, through a combination of political maneuvering, economic intimidation, and organized terror by groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Republican power in Georgia was broken.

What followed was nearly a century of systematic exclusion. Georgia was among the earliest and most aggressive states in adopting Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, the white primary, vagrancy statutes designed to re-create forced labor for Black men convicted of nearly anything. Between eighteen seventy-seven and nineteen fifty, Georgia led all Southern states in recorded lynchings. The actual number was certainly higher than the documented record.

The convict lease system, used extensively in Georgia from Reconstruction through the nineteen twenties, was perhaps the most direct successor to slavery. The state leased out prisoners, disproportionately Black men convicted under the new vagrancy laws, to railroads, mines, and turpentine camps under conditions that observers repeatedly described as worse than slavery. Reform journalist John Spivak exposed conditions in Georgia chain gangs in the nineteen twenties and thirties, helping build national pressure for the system's end. Georgia formally abolished convict leasing in nineteen oh eight, but prison labor through chain gangs persisted long after.