The Warmth Of Other Suns Summary

From the book The Warmth of Other Suns, the author Isabel Wilkerson writes of the economic disparity and the abject poverty suffered by African Americans during the reconstruction. “Sharecropping, slavery’s replacement, kept them in debt and still bound to whatever plantation they worked. But one thing had changed. The federal government had taken over the affairs of the South, during a period known as Reconstruction, and the newly freed men were able to exercise rights previously denied them. They could vote, marry, or go to school…even college set-up by northern philanthropists, open businesses, and run for office under the protection of northern troops.”
Claiming their rights to citizenship created strained

relationships with the former slave owners who now employed them. However, the federal government could now enforce the principle of equal rights and gave black Southerners their rights to vote and hold office. Professor Vernon Wharton was struck by the flowering of second-level leaders in Mississippi. “Something amazing about the suddenness with which, all over the state, (local leaders) emerged from the anonymity of slavery to become directors and counselors for their race. …Negro leaders were preachers, lawyers, or teachers from the free states…”
In Fayette, Reconstruction enabled men (not women) the right to vote and to hold office. The first African American Sheriff in Jefferson County was Merriman Howard; he was a Republican (Party of Lincoln). Our family’s connection to the Howard family is that his nephew Radford Howard married Sarah Lillian Jackson, great granddaughter of Delaney and Easter. In an article written in 1937 Mrs. Effie Harrison Snyder gave her description of the time post-Civil War: “Mr. Harrison (papa) was the owner of many slaves and all were good and faithful servants. Only one, Merriman Howard, who became Republican Sheriff of Jefferson County ever gave trouble. He was doing well until influenced by three Republicans who nearly caused his destruction. They made Merriman their tool, but Judge Geo. W. Shackleford, Mr. Dick Truly, Sr and Mr. Harrison (papa) went to his assistance and saved his life. He went to Washington City (Washington D.C.) and until his death was to Mama and Papa most faithful and respectful. Merriman had been papa’s slave. His mother was left free and she herself bought Merriman free for a small sum before the Civil War.” The article was written just before she died.
Sheriff Howard in addition to becoming the first sheriff of Jefferson County, was a Board Member at Alcorn College. He served under Senator Hiram Revels, the first African American Republican Senator in Congress and the first president of Alcorn. Merriman left Jefferson County, MS, and as stated, moved to Washington, D.C. He took various jobs and left a last will and testament giving his son Comanche Merriman F. Howard his remaining estate of about $300. He died at the age of 80.
Post – Civil War Labor
Post-Civil War, the landowners and former slaves were often engaged in labor contracts (the contract was created and supported by the federal government written by the Freedman’s Bureau.) ”... Agreements between freedmen laborers and planters stating terms of employment, such as pay, clothing, and medical care due the freedman; the part of the crop to be retained by him; and whether a plot for growing subsistence crops was to be provided.” Working relations between the landowner and the former slaves were tense. The white planters not wanting to adjoin into these contracts with the newly freed slaves, tried immediately after the war to hire white workers for the fieldwork but found them not to be good workers. White workers would work one or two days and quit.
Thus, the Freedman’s Bureau had to negotiate labor contracts for those former slaves, both men and women, so that contracts and wages were fair.

“The Bureau encouraged former major planters to rebuild their plantations and urged freed blacks to return to work for them, kept an eye on contracts between the newly free laborers and planters, and pushed whites and blacks to work together as employers and employees rather than as masters and slaves.”
By 1872, Congress abruptly abandoned the program, effectively shutting down the Bureau and of course, once the Freedman’s Bureau ceased operation in the area, these contracts were voided and planters/farmers went back to the old way of doing things. A rigid paternalistic society continued once the bureau was disbanded. Exploitation of these freedmen again reappeared in the form of reduction of wages, cost of the crop to market, lodging (quarters/shack), and subsistence crops. The property owner would now deduct what he said was owed from the salary and announce that this pay period was a break-even

week.
Standing as a silent witness to the slave trade, the cruelty and ugliness of it all, one would think the only thing to learn here was fear, hate, and anger. Delaney Jackson came away with his own observations from the slave trade and from observing the slaveholder. He learned how to use basic business skills; having also observed how to determine the value of land, how to bargain and trade property, and the art of negotiation, which would serve him well in later life. The best of times for Delaney was that he could now own land and he did; the land where he toiled and worked with his own hands, where he was enslaved, and in April of 1868 he became the owner of 50 acres in the Norris Field of Poplar Hill Plantation.
Two writers and historians have written articles that explain the issues of Reconstruction, Eric Foner and Jason Phillips. Both agree that Reconstruction was a failure. The following excerpts are from their web-based articles: “Reconstruction was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States, but most historians consider it a failure because the South became a poverty-stricken backwater attached to agriculture, while white Southerners attempted to re-establish dominance through violence, intimidation and discrimination, forcing freedmen into second class citizenship with limited rights, and excluding them from the political process.” Historian Eric Foner argues, "What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks, its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure."
The struggle of reconstruction was also spoken of in the online publication called “Mississippi History Now”, part of the Mississippi Historical Society. The article “Reconstruction in Mississippi 1865 - 1876” authored by Jason Phillips, who wrote: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way’.
“With these words, Charles Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities, his novel about the French Revolution in the late 18th century. The same language could describe post-Civil War Reconstruction in Mississippi. Depending on your perspective, reconstruction was the best or the worst of times, an age of political wisdom or foolishness, a time of heartfelt belief or profound doubt, a brilliant period of limitless possibilities or the darkest chapter of our past. … Reconstruction for Mississippi’s black and white citizens was particularly intense. Black and white Mississippians grappled with a devastated economy and a new social structure.”
Delaney, in his lifetime witnessed all of this. In the case of Jefferson County, it truly was the best and the worst of times. The worst of times was the inequality of those who lived through the dark days of slavery with its cruel and inhumane treatment of men and women; the enslaved, and then after emancipation those who ran the countryside with an iron fist to keep things as they once were.
By 1877, Reconstruction had succumbed to bitter opposition and backroom politics. Federal troops then occupying the South were withdrawn, and white supremacists were left to reestablish the racial hierarchy that had existed before the war. Across the former confederacy, informal practices of racial discrimination were written into law. States instituted poll taxes, literacy tests and other requirements that disenfranchised Negroes.
They passed “Jim Crow” laws, which imposed segregation and other restrictions on blacks.

A few blacks challenged the system of legal discrimination. In New Orleans, a man named Homer Plessy deliberately defied the Louisiana State law requiring separate rail cars accommodations for blacks and whites. He was arrested and jailed. But the incident led eventually to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Plessy argued that the law infringed on his 14th amendment right to equal protection. But, most of Justices disagreed. The court’s opinion read, in part: Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS): "Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences… if one race is inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane (1896).”
This was a landmark constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but

equal".
The Court affirmed that segregation was constitutional as long as accommodations were “separate but equal.” It also left it up to the individual states-not the Federal government-to guarantee equal standards.
As the lone dissenting opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote: “The thin disguise of “equal” accommodations… will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done.” Plessy versus Ferguson became a landmark decision. It sanctioned a system of institutionalized racism that would persist for decades.