Reconstruction era
The Reconstruction era was the period from 1863 to 1877 in American history. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights; the term has two applications: the first applies to the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War. Reconstruction ended the remnants of Confederate secession and ended slavery, making the newly-free slaves citizens with civil rights ostensibly guaranteed by three new Constitutional amendments. Three visions of Civil War memory appeared during Reconstruction: the reconciliationist vision, rooted in coping with the death and devastation the war had brought. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson both took moderate positions designed to bring the South back into the Union as as possible, while Radical Republicans in Congress sought stronger measures to upgrade the rights of African Americans, including the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, while curtailing the rights of former Confederates, such as through the provisions of the Wade–Davis Bill.
Johnson, a former Tennessee Senator, former slave owner, the most prominent Southerner to oppose the Confederacy, followed a lenient policy toward ex-Confederates. Lincoln's last speeches show that he was leaning toward supporting the enfranchisement of all freedmen, whereas Johnson was opposed to this. Johnson's interpretations of Lincoln's policies prevailed until the Congressional elections of 1866; those elections followed outbreaks of violence against blacks in the former rebel states, including the Memphis riots of 1866 and the New Orleans riot that same year. The subsequent 1866 election gave Republicans a majority in Congress, enabling them to pass the 14th Amendment, take control of Reconstruction policy, remove former Confederates from power, enfranchise the freedmen. A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all the southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U. S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau; the Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, set up schools and churches for them.
Thousands of Northerners came south as missionaries, teachers and politicians. Hostile whites began referring to these politicians as "carpetbaggers". In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature; the first bill extended the life of the bureau established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and freed slaves, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens with equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills, Congress overrode his vetos, making the Civil Rights Act the first major bill in the history of the United States to become law through an override of a presidential veto; the Radicals in the House of Representatives, frustrated by Johnson's opposition to Congressional Reconstruction, filed impeachment charges. The action failed by one vote in the Senate; the new national Reconstruction laws – in particular laws requiring suffrage for freedmen – incensed white supremacists in the South, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan.
During 1867-69 the Klan murdered Republicans and outspoken freedmen in the South, including Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds. Elected in 1868, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant supported Congressional Reconstruction and enforced the protection of African Americans in the South through the use of the Enforcement Acts passed by Congress. Grant used the Enforcement Acts to combat the Ku Klux Klan, wiped out, although a new incarnation of the Klan would again come to national prominence in the 1920s. President Grant was unable to resolve the escalating tensions inside the Republican Party between the Northerners on the one hand, those Republicans hailing from the South on the other. Meanwhile, "redeemers", self-styled conservatives in close cooperation with a faction of the Democratic Party opposed Reconstruction, they alleged widespread corruption by the "carpetbaggers", excessive state spending, ruinous taxes. Meanwhile, public support for Reconstruction policies, requiring continued supervision of the South, faded in the North after the Democrats, who opposed Reconstruction, regained control of the House of Representatives in 1874.
In 1877, as part of a Congressional bargain to elect Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president following the disputed 1876 presidential election, U. S. Army troops were withdrawn from the three states; this marked the end of Reconstruction. Historian Eric Foner argues: What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. In different states Reconstruction ended at different times. In recent decades most historians follow Foner in dating the Reconstruction of the South as starting in 1863 rather than 1865; the usual ending for Reconstruction has always been 1877. Reconstruction policies were debated in the North when the
City
A city is a large human settlement. Cities have extensive systems for housing, sanitation, land use, communication, their density facilitates interaction between people, government organizations and businesses, sometimes benefiting different parties in the process. City-dwellers have been a small proportion of humanity overall, but following two centuries of unprecedented and rapid urbanization half of the world population now lives in cities, which has had profound consequences for global sustainability. Present-day cities form the core of larger metropolitan areas and urban areas—creating numerous commuters traveling towards city centers for employment and edification. However, in a world of intensifying globalization, all cities are in different degree connected globally beyond these regions; the most populated city proper is Chongqing while the most populous metropolitan areas are the Greater Tokyo Area, the Shanghai area, Jabodetabek. The cities of Faiyum and Varanasi are among those laying claim to longest continual inhabitation.
A city is distinguished from other human settlements by its great size, but by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there, can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than rural territory. A variety of definitions, invoking population, population density, number of dwellings, economic function, infrastructure, are used in national censuses to classify populations as urban. Common population definitions for a city range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most U. S. states using a minimum between 5,000 inhabitants. However, some jurisdictions set no such minimums. In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the government and remains permanently, resulting in some small cities, such as Wells and St Davids. According to the "functional definition" a city is not distinguished by size alone, but by the role it plays within a larger political context.
Cities serve as administrative, commercial and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas. Examples of settlements called city which may not meet any of the traditional criteria to be named such include Broad Top City and City Dulas, Anglesey, a hamlet; the presence of a literate elite is sometimes included in the definition. A typical city has professional administrators and some form of taxation to support the government workers; the governments may be based on heredity, military power, work projects such as canal building, food distribution, land ownership, commerce, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are called civilizations; the word city and the related civilization come, via Old French, from the Latin root civitas meaning citizenship or community member and coming to correspond with urbs, meaning city in a more physical sense. The Roman civitas was linked with the Greek "polis"—another common root appearing in English words such as metropolis. Urban geography deals both with their internal structure.
Town siting has varied through history according to natural, technological and military contexts. Access to water has long been a major factor in city placement and growth, despite exceptions enabled by the advent of rail transport in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river. Urban areas as a rule cannot produce their own food and therefore must develop some relationship with a hinterland which sustains them. Only in special cases such as mining towns which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them. Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would in theory favor the creation of market places in optimal mutually reachable locations; the vast majority of cities have a central area containing buildings with special economic and religious significance. Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos; these spaces reflect and amplify the city's centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence.
Today cities have downtown, sometimes coincident with a central business district. Cities have public spaces where anyone can go; these include owned spaces open to the public as well as forms of public land such as public domain and the commons. Western philosophy since the time of the Greek agora has considered physical public space as the substrate of the symbolic public sphere. Public art adorns public spaces. Parks and other natural sites within cities provide residents with relief from the hardness and regularity of typical built environments. Urban structure follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, concentric and curvilinear. Physical environment constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structure may rely on winding roads, it may be adapted to its means of subsistence. And it may be set up for optimal defense given the surrounding landscape. Beyond these "geomorphi
James Bevel
James Luther Bevel was a minister and a leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As the Director of Direct Action and of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he initiated, strategized and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, the 1966 Chicago open housing movement, he suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963. Bevel strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which contributed to Congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Prior to his time with SCLC, Bevel worked in the Nashville Student Movement, which conducted the 1960 Nashville Lunch-Counter Sit-Ins, the 1961 Open Theater Movement, recruited students to continue the 1961 Freedom Rides after they were attacked, he directed some of the 1961 and 1962 voting rights movement in Mississippi. In 1967, Bevel was chair of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
He initiated the 1967 March on the United Nations as part of the anti-war movement. His last major action was as co-initiator of the 1995 Day of Atonement/Million Man March in Washington, DC. For his work Bevel has been called a father of voting rights, the strategist and architect of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, half of the first-tier team that formulated many of the strategies and actions to gain federal legislation and social changes during the 1960s civil rights era. In 2005 Bevel was accused of incest by one of his daughters and abuse by three others, he was tried in April 2008. Bevel was convicted of unlawful fornication. After serving seven months he was freed awaiting an appeal, he was buried in Alabama. Bevel was born in 1936 in Itta Bena, the son of Illie and Dennis Bevel, he was one of seventeen children. He grew up in Cleveland, he worked on a cotton plantation for a time as a youth and in a steel mill. He was educated in Cleveland, Ohio. After high school he served in the U. S. Navy for a time and seemed headed for a career as a singer.
Called in a different direction, he attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, from 1957 to 1961, becoming a Baptist preacher. He joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While at seminary, he reread Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, which had earlier inspired his decision to leave the military. Bevel read several of Mohandas Gandhi's books and newspapers while taking off-campus workshops on Gandhi's philosophy and nonviolent techniques taught by James Lawson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Bevel attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School taught by its founder, Myles Horton, who emphasized grassroots organizing. In 1960, along with Lawson's and Horton's students including Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, Diane Nash and others, Bevel participated in the Nashville Sit-In Movement to desegregate the city's lunch counters and got to know many student leaders. After the success of this action, with the aid of SCLC's Ella Baker, activist students from Nashville and across the South developed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Working on SNCC's commitment to desegregate theaters, Bevel directed the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement. At the time the Open Theater Movement had success in Nashville, this was the only city in the country where activists had organized such an action. In this same period, the Congress of Racial Equality organized the 1961 Freedom Rides through the Deep South to challenge southern state laws and practices that segregated interstate buses and their facilities despite federal laws for equal treatment. After buses and riders were attacked, including a firebombing of a bus and beatings with police complicity in Birmingham, Alabama, CORE suspended the rides. Diane Nash, the Nashville Student Movement's chairman, urged the group to continue the Freedom Rides, called for college volunteers from Fisk and other universities across the South. Bevel selected the student teams for the buses, he and the others were arrested after they arrived in Jackson and tried to desegregate the waiting-rooms in the bus terminal.
The Freedom Riders reached their goal of New Orleans, generating nationwide coverage of the violence to maintain Jim Crow and white supremacy in the South. While in the Jackson jail and Bernard Lafayette initiated the Mississippi Voting Rights Movement, they and others stayed in Mississippi to work on grassroots organizing. Activists retreated to regroup. Efforts in Mississippi developed as Freedom Summer in 1964, when extensive voter education and registration efforts took place. Lafayette and his wife, Colia Lidell, had opened a SNCC project in Selma, Alabama, to assist the work of local organizers such as Amelia Boynton. In 1962, Bevel was invited to meet in Atlanta with Martin Luther King Jr, a minister, head of the SCLC. At that meeting, suggested by James Lawson and King agreed to work together on an equal basis, with neither having veto power over the other, on projects under the auspices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, they agreed to work until they had ended segregation, obtained voting rights, ensured that all American children had a quality education.
They agreed to continue u
Kirkwood (Eutaw, Alabama)
Kirkwood is a historic plantation house in Eutaw, Alabama. The house was recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934 and by Carol M. Highsmith in 2010, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 17, 1976, due to its architectural significance. Kirkwood is built in the Greek Revival style with Italianate influences. Foster M. Kirksey began building the house in 1858. Construction was halted by the American Civil War; the house is wood framed with two primary floors and a large cupola crowning the low-pitched hipped roof. The roof eaves are ornamented with wooden brackets. A Carolina-type monumental portico with Ionic columns wraps around two sides of the house; the balcony railings and several minor features were completed in the 1970s, when Roy and Mary Swayze restored the house. The Swayze family was awarded a National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award in 1982 for their restoration efforts. Historic American Buildings Survey No. AL-210, "Kirkwood, Mesopotomia Street & Kirkwood Drive, Greene County, AL", 8 photos, 3 data pages Media related to Kirkwood at Wikimedia Commons
Birmingham campaign
The Birmingham campaign, or Birmingham movement, was a movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by Martin Luther King Jr. James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth and others, the campaign of nonviolent direct action culminated in publicized confrontations between young black students and white civic authorities, led the municipal government to change the city's discrimination laws. In the early 1960s, Birmingham was one of the most racially divided cities in the United States, both as enforced by law and culturally. Black citizens faced legal and economic disparities, violent retribution when they attempted to draw attention to their problems. Martin Luther King Jr. called it the most segregated city in the country. Protests in Birmingham began with a boycott led by Shuttlesworth meant to pressure business leaders to open employment to people of all races, end segregation in public facilities, restaurants and stores.
When local business and governmental leaders resisted the boycott, SCLC agreed to assist. Organizer Wyatt Tee Walker joined Birmingham activist Shuttlesworth and began what they called Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke mass arrests; when the campaign ran low on adult volunteers, James Bevel, SCLC's Director of Direct Action, thought of the idea of having students become the main demonstrators in the Birmingham campaign. He trained and directed high school and elementary school students in nonviolence, asked them to participate in the demonstrations by taking a peaceful walk fifty at a time from the 16th Street Baptist Church to City Hall in order to talk to the mayor about segregation; this resulted in over a thousand arrests, and, as the jails and holding areas filled with arrested students, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water hoses and police attack dogs on the children and adult bystanders. Not all of the bystanders were peaceful, despite the avowed intentions of SCLC to hold a nonviolent walk, but the students held to the nonviolent premise.
King and the SCLC drew both criticism and praise for allowing children to participate and put themselves in harm's way. The Birmingham campaign was a model of nonviolent direct action protest and, through the media, drew the world's attention to racial segregation in the South, it burnished King's reputation, ousted Connor from his job, forced desegregation in Birmingham, directly paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring practices and public services throughout the United States. Birmingham, Alabama was, in 1963, "probably the most segregated city in the United States," according to King. Although the city's population of 350,000 was 60% white and 40% black, Birmingham had no black police officers, sales clerks in department stores, bus drivers, bank tellers, or store cashiers. Black secretaries could not work for white professionals. Jobs available to black workers were limited to manual labor in Birmingham's steel mills, work in household service and yard maintenance, or work in black neighborhoods.
When layoffs were necessary, black employees were the first to go. The unemployment rate for black people was two and a half times higher than for white people; the average income for black employees in the city was less than half that of white employees. Lower pay scales for black workers at the local steel mills were common. Racial segregation of public and commercial facilities throughout Jefferson County was required, covered all aspects of life, was rigidly enforced. Only 10 percent of the city's black population was registered to vote in 1960. In addition, Birmingham's economy was stagnating as the city was shifting from blue collar to white collar jobs. According to Time magazine in 1958, the only thing white workers had to gain from desegregation was more competition from black workers. Fifty unsolved racially motivated bombings between 1945 and 1962 had earned the city the nickname "Bombingham". A neighborhood shared by white and black families experienced so many attacks that it was called "Dynamite Hill".
Black churches in which civil rights were discussed became specific targets for attack. Birmingham's black population began to organize to effect change. After Alabama banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1956, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights the same year to challenge the city's segregation policies through lawsuits and protests; when the courts overturned the segregation of the city's parks, the city responded by closing them. Shuttlesworth's home was bombed, as was Bethel Baptist Church, where he was pastor. After Shuttlesworth was arrested and jailed for violating the city's segregation rules in 1962, he sent a petition to Mayor Art Hanes' office asking that public facilities be desegregated. Hanes responded with a letter informing Shuttlesworth that his petition had been thrown in the garbage. Looking for outside help, Shuttlesworth invited Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC to Birmingham, saying, "If you come to Birmingham, you will not only gain prestige, but shake the country.
If you win in Birmingham, as Birmingham goes, so goes the nation." King and the SCLC had been involved in a campaign to desegregate the city of Albany, but did not see the results they had anticipated. Described by historian Henry Hampton as a "morass", the Albany movement stalled. King's reputation had been hurt by the Albany campaign, he was eager to improve it. Determined not to
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States federal government's official list of districts, buildings and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance. A property listed in the National Register, or located within a National Register Historic District, may qualify for tax incentives derived from the total value of expenses incurred preserving the property; the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 established the National Register and the process for adding properties to it. Of the more than one million properties on the National Register, 80,000 are listed individually; the remainder are contributing resources within historic districts. For most of its history the National Register has been administered by the National Park Service, an agency within the United States Department of the Interior, its goals are to help property owners and interest groups, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, coordinate and protect historic sites in the United States.
While National Register listings are symbolic, their recognition of significance provides some financial incentive to owners of listed properties. Protection of the property is not guaranteed. During the nomination process, the property is evaluated in terms of the four criteria for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places; the application of those criteria has been the subject of criticism by academics of history and preservation, as well as the public and politicians. Historic sites outside the country proper, but associated with the United States are listed. Properties can be nominated in a variety of forms, including individual properties, historic districts, multiple property submissions; the Register categorizes general listings into one of five types of properties: district, structure, building, or object. National Register Historic Districts are defined geographical areas consisting of contributing and non-contributing properties; some properties are added automatically to the National Register when they become administered by the National Park Service.
These include National Historic Landmarks, National Historic Sites, National Historical Parks, National Military Parks, National Memorials, some National Monuments. On October 15, 1966, the Historic Preservation Act created the National Register of Historic Places and the corresponding State Historic Preservation Offices; the National Register consisted of the National Historic Landmarks designated before the Register's creation, as well as any other historic sites in the National Park system. Approval of the act, amended in 1980 and 1992, represented the first time the United States had a broad-based historic preservation policy; the 1966 act required those agencies to work in conjunction with the SHPO and an independent federal agency, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, to confront adverse effects of federal activities on historic preservation. To administer the newly created National Register of Historic Places, the National Park Service of the U. S. Department of the Interior, with director George B.
Hartzog Jr. established an administrative division named the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation. Hartzog charged OAHP with creating the National Register program mandated by the 1966 law. Ernest Connally was the Office's first director. Within OAHP new divisions were created to deal with the National Register; the division administered several existing programs, including the Historic Sites Survey and the Historic American Buildings Survey, as well as the new National Register and Historic Preservation Fund. The first official Keeper of the Register was an architectural historian. During the Register's earliest years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, organization was lax and SHPOs were small and underfunded. However, funds were still being supplied for the Historic Preservation Fund to provide matching grants-in-aid to listed property owners, first for house museums and institutional buildings, but for commercial structures as well. A few years in 1979, the NPS history programs affiliated with both the U.
S. National Parks system and the National Register were categorized formally into two "Assistant Directorates." Established were the Assistant Directorate for Archeology and Historic Preservation and the Assistant Directorate for Park Historic Preservation. From 1978 until 1981, the main agency for the National Register was the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service of the United States Department of the Interior. In February 1983, the two assistant directorates were merged to promote efficiency and recognize the interdependency of their programs. Jerry L. Rogers was selected to direct this newly merged associate directorate, he was described as a skilled administrator, sensitive to the need for the NPS to work with SHPOs, local governments. Although not described in detail in the 1966 act, SHPOs became integral to the process of listing properties on the National Register; the 1980 amendments of the 1966 law further defined the responsibilities of SHPOs concerning the National Register.
Several 1992 amendments of the NHPA added a category to the National Register, known as Traditional Cultural Properties: those properties associated with Native American or Hawaiian groups
Greene County Courthouse Square District
The Greene County Courthouse Square District is a historic district in Eutaw, Alabama. It is centered on the old Old Greene County Courthouse and extends outward along U. S. Route 11 and Alabama State Route 7, it features examples of commercial architecture. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 31, 1979
