It’s Black History Month and this year’s theme, from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), is “Black Resistance.” This is Part 2 of last week’s column about the Shreveport and Bossier-area freedman Henry Adams, whom the ASALH upholds as an example of Black Resistance. The ASALH highlighted that Adams (and Benjamin “Pap” Singleton) led a mass exodus westward of Southern Blacks in the Reconstruction period following the U.S. Civil War. The ASALH credited Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church with organizing an emigration of Southern Blacks to Liberia in West Africa. Local sources show that Henry Adams, in the time of Reconstruction, also led a movement to Liberia, especially of Black Louisianans.
Leading a colonization movement to the Midwest or the African continent was not originally part of Henry Adams’ plan. Henry Adams was asked to appear as a witness in the U.S. Senate’s investigation into the exodus of African Americans from the South. He said the secret committee he established to travel the South was investigating conditions for African Americans, to see if it was safe enough to live as free citizens among those who had held them in slavery. According to Adams’ testimony, the committee’s answer was that it was not safe.
Question (from Congress, in the Senate Report 693, 46th Congress, 2nd Sess., part 2):
I am speaking now of the period from 1870 to 1874, and you have given us the general character of the reports that you got from the South; what did you do in 1874?
Henry Adams:
Well, along in August sometime in 1874, after the White League sprung up, they organized and said this is a white man’s government, and the colored men should not hold any offices; they were no good but to work in the fields and take what they would give them and vote the Democratic ticket. That’s what they would make public speeches and say to us, and we would hear them.
The White League was a paramilitary group allied with the Democratic Party in the South. In 1874 and 1875, the White League was responsible for widespread violence against black and white Republicans in Louisiana and Mississippi. The White Leagues particularly flourished in parishes along the Red River, which were largely reorganized from the Democratic memberships of earlier incarnations of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia.
The White League likely gained some starting fuel from the contested gubernatorial election of 1872, in which Republican William Pitt Kellogg prevailed, and which coincided with the first of a series of cases where Black plaintiffs successfully sued white Louisianans who had violated civil rights and public accommodation statutes. However, Tulane University historian Lawrence Powell claimed that what really gave the White League momentum was “the visible, unmistakable retreat from Reconstruction on the part of the federal government and judiciary.” Indeed, Henry Adams testified that he and his committee members appealed for protection, but to little avail. (Understand that his testimony includes details of violence):
…We first appealed to President Grant…That was in September, 1874…at other times we sent to Congress…We told them our condition and asked Congress to help us out of distress and protect us in our lives and property, and pass some law or provide some way that we might get our rights in the South…we appealed when the time got so hot down there, they [White Leaguers] stopped our churches from having meetings after nine o’clock at night. They stopped them from sitting up and singing over the dead, and so forth, right in the little town where we lived, in Shreveport. I know that to be a fact; and after they did all this, and we saw it was getting so warm—killing our people all over the whole country—there was several of them killed right down in our parish.
The next step was to leave, and Adams’ committee re-named themselves the Colonization Council. Adams testified that they either wanted territory in the United States set apart for African Americans fleeing the South, or to get money appropriated to aid them in emigration to Liberia, a colony in West Africa set up by the American colonization Society in 1824 for the purpose of relocating free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans.
Henry Adams appeared to work both angles. He testified that in 1875 and 1876 he was shot at in DeSoto Parish for helping to organize “Exodusters”, the name given to African Americans fleeing the South (especially Louisiana) for the Midwest and West, most notably Kansas. In November 1877, Shreveport and New Orleans newspapers reported meetings over which Henry Adams presided for making colonization plans in Liberia. Meeting attendees chose representatives to go to Washington to request financial assistance from the Federal government. In addition to Adams, Richard Pickett of Bossier and Henry Bullocks of Webster Parish were selected. In a later meeting, in addition to Adams, Pickett and Bullocks, Rev. John Hooks and Rev. Robert Griffin of Caddo Parish and Jordon Mims of Bossier Parish were chosen to go to Liberia for reconnaissance.
However, President Hayes denied federal funds for the colonization of Liberia and members of the Colonization Council‘s own support was waning. They were suffering financially and had to return to their farming jobs. The Exoduster movement was losing steam, too. The farm land available to the African emigrants was not very productive, and little support was given the Exodusters.
After Adams testified in 1880 about the cause of the Black exodus from the southern states, Shreveport newspapers ridiculed him and said he was “a liar cut from whole cloth.” On the other hand, a newspaper in Ohio printed much of his actual testimony, including descriptions of horrors such as, “I saw white men whipping colored men, just the same as they did before the war, or before freedom in this State. I saw white men beating a colored man because he had been a United States soldier. They beat him all but to death.”
In 1882, Adams was reported in New Orleans attending a memorial service for the Liberian ambassador from the United States. Soon after, he disappears from the historic record. It is unknown if he made it to Liberia. Over the following three decades, 11,000 southern blacks settled in Liberia, and likely many of those were due to Adams’ influence.
To read newspaper accounts of Henry Adams and the experiences of other freedmen, or to share accounts from your family’s history, come visit us at the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center, located at 2206 Beckett St., Bossier City, LA. We are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org. For other facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB
Images attached:
Map of Liberia, the American Colonization Society, Library of Congress
Headline from the “Memphis Daily Appeal” Sat, Mar 13, 1880
Article by: Pam Carlisle
