Reconstruction and the Gilded Age (roughly 1865-1920) witnessed unparalleled transformations in the lives of the nation’s African American population. The end of slavery, the promises of the Reconstruction Amendments, and a short-lived commitment to equality from the Republican Party quickly gave way by the end of the century to the Jim Crow order in the South. This order was replete with widespread poverty, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, and a culture of white supremacy. How did African Americans navigate these changing fortunes? How did the quest for freedom and equality continue despite precarious circumstances? To what extent were Progressive whites allies or enemies? The historians on this panel use intellectual history, labor history, and political history to begin to answer these important questions.

Malaurie Pilatte’s paper focuses on how a group of Black American women (Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and others) exploited a knowledge of France and the French language in their fashioning of identity. These women in turn drew on a deeper tradition of African American Francophilia that depicted France as a truly egalitarian society. By contrast, Jennifer Mills’s paper takes us to the sugar fields of Louisiana during the 1880s. She shows how a diminishing federal military presence affected the Knights of Labor’s effectiveness and the ability of Black workers to organize and strike effectively. Gilded Age politics were important too: Benjamin Wetzel’s contribution is a case study of two African Americans (William D. Crum and Minnie Cox) whom Theodore Roosevelt appointed to patronage posts. When southern racists opposed Crum and Cox, Roosevelt backed them up. Wetzel examines African American reactions to these episodes to argue that Roosevelt tried in these instances to keep open a “door of hope” for Black opportunity. Tragically, the flip side of the Black Freedom Struggle was the white supremacist movement. Paul Yandle examines the links between Confederate memory, disfranchisement, and racial violence. He argues that white supremacist rhetoric in the Gilded Age produced latter-day descendants committed to notions of white American identity that were intricately bound up with violence.

This panel brings fresh research to bear on perennial questions about race, equality, and the shifting fortunes of Black rights in the fraught and transformative period of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.