Becoming free involved figuring out the inconsistent rules and behaviors of these new authorities. The government, even as it sponsored freedom, was not always a just actor—nowhere more egregiously than in the case of vagrancy laws, which were grounded in the racial prejudice that black people are criminals.

On the surface, vagrancy has nothing to do with race. The homeless and the jobless come in all colors. And the idea of criminalizing people who are “wandering about without proper means of livelihood” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) has been around since medieval England. But, in the Civil War-era United States, that described nearly everyone who had been a slave.

Vagabondage may sound like freedom to a hobo singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but to the upstanding citizen it sounds like crime. In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans found themselves caught amid the same kind of dissonance: What freedom meant to them—unfettered mobility, access to education, and the security of their families—was not what it meant to white people.

One of the testing grounds for the post-war racial order was Memphis, a Southern city that fell to federal forces only about a year into the Civil War, in June 1862. The city became a magnet for African Americans in the surrounding countryside, who first came behind Union lines to flee slavery. But as the war went on, they came seeking jobs, reunion with loved ones, and a sense of community. By the end of the war, Memphis’s black population had grown from 3,000 to 20,000.

The growth of Memphis’s free black population meant that west Tennessee plantations were proportionally emptied—to the dismay of cotton planters who needed laborers in their fields. Vagrancy laws provided a convenient solution to the labor shortage: Memphis blacks who could not prove gainful employment in the city were presumed guilty of vagrancy and subject to arrest and impressment into the agricultural labor force. They were brought back onto the plantations, and forced to sign labor contracts.

Using vagrancy laws to enforce “slavery by another name” was an innovation of the post-war South, but the way had been paved long before. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the figure of the vagrant had become distinctly entangled with race, and rhetoric about vagrancy had bled into national debate about emancipation.

In parts of the South, where modest populations of free blacks stood outside the purview of slave codes, vagrancy laws had restrained the movements and behaviors of those African Americans who weren’t enslaved. In free states along the border, like Pennsylvania, rising numbers of fugitives from slavery found themselves ensnared in vagrancy’s legal web.

By the 1860s, with the wholesale abolition of slavery appearing on the horizon, standard rhetoric about vagrants merged with white anxieties about labor markets swamped by a wave of freed slaves. Some whites believed blacks were inherently lazy and would not work if not forced to; even many abolitionists worried that slavery had so brutalized African Americans that they would be incapable of self-sufficiency.

“Worthless” and “idle”—two of the adjectives that most commonly modified the word “vagrants” in the antebellum United States—were ill-suited to describe enslaved people, who had tremendous market value as commodities and were forced to labor unceasingly. But once freed from slavery, black people were slapped with all the standard labels for vagrants.

In Memphis, the convergence was especially pronounced. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which was created in March 1865 to assist former slaves in their transition to freedom, instead wielded vagrancy statutes to do the bidding of white planters. The first superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau office in the city was ostensibly sympathetic with former slaves—he loudly deplored “injustice to the Freed people”—but even he said he was “determined that the Freed people shall not become a worthless, lazy set of vagrants living in vice and idleness.” That superintendent’s successor, Nathan Dudley, wrote that Memphis had a “surplus population of at least six thousand colored persons [who] are lazy, worthless vagrants.”

So it was that the Freedmen’s Bureau—the part of the federal government charged by Congress and Abraham Lincoln to ensure the integrity of black freedom—could authorize patrols that were arresting black Memphians indiscriminately and delivering them up to white employers for bounties ranging from a dollar to five dollars “per head.”

As Anthony Motley, an African-American barber, put it in a letter to Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Clinton Fisk, “the great Slave trade Seems To be Revived in Memphis.”

One of the leading voices of black protest was another barber named Warner Madison. Though barely educated, he was more literate than most African-American Memphians, so he penned multiple letters of protest, including some on behalf of a committee of citizens. In a letter to Fisk he began by describing what was going on: “they go around and arrest all they Can find regardless whether they are employed or not Just ask if you dont want to go with Mr who ever it May be they dont find out whether you want to go or not atall they Make out the agreement sell you for the price that the Man give them.” Then Madison narrated an instance of a young African-American man being taken away “By the point of the baynet” at the direction of a Freedmen’s Bureau agent.

As his letter rose to a pitched fury, Madison began to punctuate almost every word, as if stabbing at the paper with his pen: “i think, it is, one of the most. obnoxious. and foul, and, mean. thing. that exsist on, anny. part. of. the. Beauraur. Why My Childrem has, to, get. passes, now. to, go, to. schooll.”

Madison’s climactic complaint—that black children on their way to school were being considered “vagrants”—echoed in other Memphians’ protests. Anthony Motley drove home the same point in his own letter to Fisk: “Children going to School With there arms full of Book have Been arrested and Put up in Pens Like Sheep.”

Fisk replied politely but made no mention of these schoolchildren. When Nathan Dudley of the Freedmen’s Bureau investigated these and other claims and issued a report to his superior, he concluded, “I can find no evidence whatever that School children, with Books in their hands have been arrested, except in two or three cases, which was done by a misconstruction of the order.”

It is a curious turn of logic to say that when something is done two or three times, however inappropriately, there is “no evidence whatever” of its having happened. But that would not be the last time an egregious racial injustice was written off as an anomaly, rather than seen as a red flag. It would take 100 years and a great protest movement before U.S. courts acknowledged vagrancy laws’ enormous potential for abuse. During the Civil Rights era, most of them were invalidated.

What hasn’t disappeared is the cultural and legal association of blackness with criminality. In Memphis in 1865, the apparent innocence of being a school-bound child didn’t trump the presumptive guilt of being black. And in Memphis as recently as 2012, African-American youth were more likely to be incarcerated than white youth with the same criminal records—among other racial inequities severe enough to warrant intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice. And even as Memphis marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination this month, its juvenile court will remain under federal oversight.

Less strict oversight, though: The current administration backed off last summer. This inconsistent defense of our racial justice remains yet another legacy of the Civil War era.

The post After the Civil War, Memphis Vagrancy Laws Kept African Americans in ‘Slavery by Another Name’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

White racial resentment was still a critical factor at that point. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unfavorable numbers were at least 25 points higher in 1968 than in 1963, and his faltering appeal over the final years of his life was also a consequence of appearing to fall behind his times in some respects even as he was leaping well ahead of them in others.

A day after returning home in December 1964 from a tour whose most important stop was Oslo, the Nobel Laureate for Peace joined a picket line at Atlanta’s Scripto Pen factory, where some 700 workers were striking for better wages for less skilled employees. Though it was a remarkably humble gesture for someone who had received such a lofty affirmation, King’s actions that day and his call for a nationwide boycott of Scripto products won him few friends in his hometown’s white, staunchly anti-union business community.

His picketing also foreshadowed a future in which King would move beyond the bloody battles against blatantly illegal state and local racial practices in places like Birmingham and Selma. Not content with the gains registered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he resolved to pursue a more expansive, aggressive, and (to white Americans, especially) unsettling socioeconomic and political agenda, one that would draw him into another fateful labor dispute some three and a half years later in Memphis.

While still involved in the Scripto affair, King sat for a Playboy interview with Alex Haley, in which he endorsed a massive federal aid program for blacks. Its whopping $50 billion price tag was, he pointed out, less than annual U.S. spending for defense. Such an expenditure, he argued, would be more than justified in “a spectacular decline” in “school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting, and other social evils.” Many poor whites were “in the very same boat with the Negro,” he added, and if they could be persuaded to join forces with blacks, they could form “a grand alliance” and “exert massive pressure on the Government to get jobs for all.”

King had made passing allusions to this possibility before, but a straightforward call for an active biracial coalition of have-nots was just as terrifying to white ruling elites, be they on Peachtree Street or Wall Street, as it had been when raised by the Populists in the 1890s.

King did nothing to quell these concerns when he later told David Halberstam that he had abandoned the incremental approach to social change of his civil rights protest days in favor of pursuing “a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” one which would “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”

King’s vision of a “revolution in values” was not purely domestic. In April 1967, he denounced American involvement in Vietnam, once at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and once at Riverside Church in New York before 3,000 people, on April 4, precisely a year before he was killed. He decried the hypocrisy of sending young black men “eight thousand miles to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia or East Harlem.” Beyond that lay the painful irony of seeing them join white soldiers, with whom they could “hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta,” in “brutal solidarity” as they torched “the huts of a poor village.” In this they were, however unwittingly, agents of a U.S. policy that destroyed and depopulated the countryside, forcing its former inhabitants to take refuge in cities teeming with “hundreds of thousands of homeless children” who were “running in packs on the streets like animals.”

Former Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Chairman Stokely Carmichael observed that, in this case, King was taking on not a hapless, wholly unsympathetic villain like Birmingham’s Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor, but rather “the entire policy of the United States government.” The consequences were swift and severe: An outraged President Lyndon Johnson cut off all contact with King. And a great number of black Americans—including many old allies and colleagues from the civil rights years—warned that his stance could have devastating consequences for their cause.

King hardly fared better in pursuing his domestic agenda. It was one thing to capture public sympathy nationwide when pitted against the raw hatred and brutality that seemed the peculiar province of whites below the Mason-Dixon Line. It proved quite another to persuade whites outside the South to share their neighborhoods and jobs with blacks, or to support expensive federal assistance programs dedicated to helping blacks overcome the historic disadvantages imposed on them by whites of earlier generations.

King had a better grasp of what he was up against after his 1966 open-housing campaign in and around Chicago, where he confronted white mobs he described as more “hateful” than any he had seen “even in Mississippi or Alabama.” In this context, his own stern insistence on strict adherence to the doctrine of nonviolence met with growing disdain among a younger generation of black leaders. Tired of relying on the excruciatingly slow process of peaceful protest and tedious negotiation, some mocked King’s ministerial oratory and called him “De Lawd.”

It was impatience with King’s doctrine of nonviolence that turned what would prove to be his last march, on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 28, 1968, into a riot. Some marchers quickly broke ranks to break store windows, and looting was soon underway. An aggressive police response, complete with tear gas and billy clubs, led some protesters to retaliate with Molotov cocktails. By the end of the confrontation, one person was dead and some 50 others wounded. Feeling repudiated and ashamed by this failure to prevent violence, King had to be pressured into returning to Memphis a week later for yet another march, one that a single assassin’s bullet on April 4 assured he would never lead.

When Stokely Carmichael originally scheduled a press conference for April 5, 1968, he had planned to use it as a platform for demanding the release of fellow black militant H. Rap Brown, who had been stuck in a Maryland jail for several weeks. Instead, he devoted but a few sentences to the plight of “Brother Rap” before declaring that “white America made its biggest mistake last night” by killing Dr. Martin Luther King.

King’s slaying meant the death of “all reasonable hope,” Carmichael warned, because he was “the only man of our race … of the older generation who the militants and the revolutionaries and the masses of black people would still listen to” even if they no longer agreed with what he had to say. There would be no more “intellectual discussions.” Black Americans would now retaliate for the murder of one of their leaders by seeking their justice not in the courtrooms but in the streets.

And so they did, in classically Pyrrhic fashion. Younger, more militant black spokesmen who had spurned King’s commitment to nonviolence and peaceful negotiation proceeded to stoke outrage over the slaughter of someone so un-menacing and well-intentioned. A week-long orgy of violence raged across more than 100 cities, leaving at least 37 people dead and many more injured and millions of dollars in property destroyed. This was a bitterly ironic sendoff for someone who had sacrificed his life to the cause of achieving social justice by peaceful means.

King’s view of the Vietnam War would approach the mainstream of American thought within a few years. And his condemnations of American militarism and gross disparities in wealth and opportunity still echo, though to little more effect than he was able to achieve 50 years ago.

Yet the basis for today’s approval rating north of 90 percent can be captured succinctly in carefully cropped newsreel footage of King’s countless confrontations with vicious, inflammatory bigots and his magnificent oratory that day in August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial when achieving his “dream” seemed largely a matter of rallying his countrymen against institutionalized racial persecution in the South. Overly narrow historical memories typically serve a purpose, and in this case it is far more comforting to focus on Dr. King’s success in making a bad part of the country better than to contemplate his equally telling failures to push the whole of America to become what he knew it should be.

The post Why Martin Luther King Had a 75 Percent Disapproval Rating in the Year of His Death appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.