While President
Johnson and Congress were increasingly at odds over
Reconstruction, violent race riots erupted in Memphis and New
Orleans. During the Civil War, the black population in Memphis
had quadrupled, and racial tensions were high. A carriage
accident between a black man and a white man sparked a
riot
on May 1, 1866. When it ended three days later, 46
blacks and two whites had been killed, five black women raped,
and hundreds of black homes, schools, and churches had been
vandalized or destroyed by arson. Three months later, a riot in
New Orleans began as a protest against the state constitutional
convention called by Louisiana Governor James Madison Wells, who
endorsed enfranchising black men and banning former Confederates
from voting. On July 30, 1866, white delegates and black
supporters assembled at the constitutional convention. A fight
on the street outside the hall escalated into a
riot,
which left 34 blacks and three white Republicans dead, and over
100 others injured.
A
cartoon by Thomas
Nast in the September 1, 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly
blamed President Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies for
allowing anti-black and anti-Union violence in the postwar
South. The cartoonist incorporated images of the race riots in
Memphis (upper-left) and New Orleans (upper-right) as symbols of
the sustained and extreme violence against blacks committed by
some Southern whites. |