America’s first true democracy did not end by a landslide vote.
It was a coin flip.
After the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, democracy began to spread through America like COVID-19 during Trump’s first term. In the former Confederate states, formerly enslaved people were outvoting their white counterparts. The American education system exploded across the map. For the first time in history, liberty and justice for all was an actual possibility.
Something had to be done, and the presidential election of 1876 presented a perfect opportunity to stop equality from going viral. Of course, there was no way to overturn a presidential election. Whichever candidate earned 185 electoral votes would become president, and there was nothing anyone could do to change this fact.
Have you met white people?
When all the ballots were counted in the election of 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden had 184 electoral votes. He only needed one vote to win. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had 165. Twenty electoral votes in four anti-Black states—Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina—were in dispute. To settle the disagreement, an all-white, 15-person commission went into a room at a Black-owned hotel and essentially chose the president. By a vote of 8 to 7, the commission gave all 20 disputed votes to Hayes.
Thirty days later, to satisfy his part of the grand bargain known as the Compromise of 1877, Hayes replaced the 13-year-old democracy that Black people built with 90 years of Jim Crow.
This is the part of America’s past that Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) uses as a mirror for our current times. At Friday’s Congressional Black Caucus Foundation session—moderated by Dr. Bobby Donaldson, director of the University of South Carolina’s Civil Rights Research Center—Rep. Clyburn, NAACP policy chief Patrice Willoughby and I traced a straight line from the Hamburg Massacre—which erupted 150 years ago this year—through Wilmington in 1898 to Tulsa in 1921. Then Clyburn ended by pointing to a document:
Project 2025 is a direct descendant of America’s ongoing plan to destroy democracy.
Today’s Reading List
150 Years Ago, a Traffic Dispute Destroyed American Democracy by Michael Harriot
The Great White Heist by Michael Harriot
The Historically White Heist: How America Looted HBCUs by Michael Harriot
America is an Act of Violence by Michael Harriot
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