OTD: March 20, 1870
The Revolutionary Moment: What Tennessee Negroes Are Doing to Upset the State Government.
On this date, March 20, 1870, the conservative Nashville Union and American newspaper reported that a delegation of “colored men from the Colored Convention” held in Nashville on February 21, 1870, presented before the Reconstruction Committee the Convention’s Committee on Crimes. The editors noted that delegates decided not to publish this report for fear of violence if it were made public.
The report from the Committee on Crimes was nothing short of harrowing. It detailed how African Americans were “hunted down like wild animals of the jungles, and murdered in cold blood.” They wrote that “many have been forced to leave their homes and families, their crops and their wages, and live lives of penury and want, by the cruel outrages committed upon them by disguised outlaws and midnight assassins.” Some of the perpetrators even boasted about the “slaughter of innocent men and women.”
Further, they wrote:
It is a common, everyday, or nightly occurrence that some of our people are, without just cause, without excuse, without provocation, put to death in the most torturous manner. Shooting, whipping, burning, and indeed, we might say that the dark and damning catalogue of inquisitorial punishments has been resurrected from long sleep in the bosom of the dark ages of Papist persecutions and exhausted upon the weak and unprotected people in the State.
Read the newspaper report below.
