10

10

out in the thousands for political meetings, and they followed politics, day by day, month by month, throughout the year.

Reconstruction was a supreme lesson, the right reading on which might still mark a turning point in our history. For ten years in this county, for one hundered and twenty months, men tried democracy. Black people and white people married each other in the South--and the world did not end. Little black boys and little white girls went to school together--and the Confederate dead did not rise, did not, in fact, make a sound at all, although the Klan said they ware turning in their graves. All over the Sluth, in these years, blacks and whites shared streecard, restaurants, hotels, honors, dreams. The sun rose and the sun set, and Constitution of the United States had some meaning from Maine to Mississippi--for ten years.

Reconstruction was a lesson, first all, for black politicans. It demonstrated clearly the need for bold, hones, and imaginative leadership. And it established, beyond doubt, the black man's right to participate in power.

On the debit side, it can be said that many of the black leaders of Reconstruction were to anxious to prove that they could live up to the Anglo-Saxon idea. They were too anxious to prove that they could do what white politicians could do. Even more decisive was the failure of the black leaders of Reconstruction to mobilize a black power base and to remain in close touch with the cotton-roots of their constituencies. Too many men, then, as now, were living too far away from the people they said they were representing.

We need not concern ourselves here with the myth of corruption men used to overthrow these governments. The black leaders of Reconstruction were not overthhrown because they were corrupt; they were overthrown because they couldn't shoot.

In a very significiant failure of the American political system, the Reconstruction governmentss were overthrown by an open and violent revolution. And this open and violent revolution was legitimized by the Compromise of 1877, a political bargain which gave Rutherford B. Hayes the Presidency in exchange for a suspension of constitutional safeguards which protected black voters in the South.