Dark Sky Rising

This narrative history for young readers traces the arc of African American freedom, struggle, and betrayal from the Civil War through the rise of Jim Crow, the system of laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and Black subordination across the American South. The book spans from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the fiftieth anniversary of abolition in 1915.

The book opens on January 1, 1863, at Camp Saxton in Port Royal, South Carolina, where Black soldiers and civilians gathered to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which declared people enslaved in Rebel-held territory free. An elderly Black man began singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee," joined spontaneously by other Black voices. Among those present was Sergeant Prince Rivers, a color bearer who had been enslaved for roughly 40 years before escaping to Union lines.

The authors trace Black people's flight to Union territory to May 1861, when three enslaved men escaped Confederate labor in Norfolk, Virginia, and rowed to Fort Monroe. General Benjamin Franklin Butler, the fort's commander, refused to return them, classifying them as "contraband of war," or enemy property not to be surrendered to enslavers. Fort Monroe became known as "Freedom's Fortress," and Congress codified Butler's stance through confiscation acts that set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.

When Black men were finally allowed to enlist, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass recruited aggressively, with two of his own sons among the first volunteers. Black soldiers fought with distinction at battles including Milliken's Bend, Fort Wagner, and the Siege of Petersburg, despite lower pay than white soldiers. Robert Smalls, an enslaved man from Beaufort, South Carolina, commandeered a Confederate gunboat and steered it to Union waters with his family aboard. By war's end, nearly 180,000 Black men had served in the Union army. Nearly 4 million people were freed through flight, legislation, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.

As the war concluded, Reconstruction, the process of rebuilding and reunifying the nation, took center stage. Lincoln offered pardons to Rebels who accepted emancipation, but Radical Republicans in Congress, including Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, demanded harsher terms and genuine justice for freed people. In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, reserving roughly 400,000 acres of confiscated coastal land for Black families, up to 40 acres per household. The order stemmed partly from a meeting with 20 Black ministers in Savannah, where spokesman Garrison Frazier articulated that freed people most needed land and self-sufficiency. Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau in March 1865 to provide food, shelter, schools, and other aid.

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated, and Vice President Andrew Johnson, a former slaveholder and Democrat from Tennessee, became president. Though Johnson had promised a Black rally in Nashville that he would be their "Moses" (58), he proved a severe disappointment. He issued proclamations granting amnesty to most Rebels, and in October 1865 he revoked Sherman's land order, returning the 400,000 acres to former Confederates and evicting roughly 40,000 Black settlers.

Southern states instituted Black Codes, laws limiting Black freedom and forcing freed people back to agricultural labor. Mississippi's codes compelled Black people to sign yearly labor contracts and declared those without contracts "vagrants" subject to forced labor. Violence against Black people was rampant. Congress fought back, refusing to seat representatives from former Confederate states and passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto, deeming all people born on American soil citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment cleared Congress in June 1866, embedding citizenship into the Constitution and guaranteeing equal protection under the law.

Over Johnson's veto, the First Reconstruction Act became law on March 2, 1867, placing 10 former Confederate states under military rule. Subsequent acts put military commanders in charge of voter registration and elections. Black participation in the resulting constitutional conventions varied widely; South Carolina's convention included over 70 Black delegates out of 124, and its new constitution established free public schooling and public assistance for the elderly and people with disabilities. Under Congressional Reconstruction, roughly 2,000 Black men were elected or appointed to public office. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black US senator in 1870, and Robert Smalls served five nonconsecutive terms in the US House.

These gains met fierce resistance from white supremacist paramilitary organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts. In 1870, Klansmen dragged Wyatt Outlaw, a formerly enslaved Union Army veteran and town commissioner in Graham, North Carolina, from his home and hanged him. Congress responded with force acts empowering President Ulysses S. Grant to deploy military force, but violence continued. At the Colfax Massacre on Easter Sunday 1873, White League members killed between 70 and 165 Black people in Louisiana.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denying voting rights based on race, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. But by the mid-1870s, key Radical Republicans had died, Democrats held the House majority, and the Republican Party, weakened by the Panic of 1873, grew weary of Reconstruction.

The contested 1876 presidential election brought Reconstruction to its end. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden competed for the presidency, with 20 electoral votes disputed: 19 in three Southern states still under Republican governments and one in Oregon. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats agreed to let Hayes become president in exchange for the withdrawal of the last federal troops from Southern statehouses. Prince Rivers, the formerly enslaved color bearer who had once carried his regiment's flag with pride, abandoned politics and returned to work as a coachman, the role he had held under slavery.

In the aftermath, most Black Southerners remained in the South, many trapped in the cycle of sharecropping, though waves headed west to Kansas. The legal foundations of Black rights crumbled. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not empower Congress to prohibit discrimination by private businesses. Douglass likened the decision to the Dred Scott ruling, which had denied Black citizenship, calling it a manifestation of "moral weakness in high places" (145). Mississippi instituted poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the Black vote in 1890, and by 1910, all former Confederate states had effectively disenfranchised their Black citizens.

Lynching surged as a tool of terror. In 1892, a white mob in Memphis executed three Black men whose grocery store's success angered a white competitor. Journalist Ida B. Wells, a close friend of one of the victims, launched an anti-lynching crusade, publishing pamphlets documenting widespread extrajudicial killings. In 1895, Booker T. Washington, head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, delivered his "Atlanta Compromise" speech urging Black people to focus on economic development rather than agitating for social equality. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson; only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, predicting the decision would prove "quite as pernicious as" the Dred Scott ruling (158). The decision entrenched Jim Crow, mandating separate and unequal schools, parks, hospitals, and public facilities across the South.

Despite these conditions, Black Americans built institutions and fought back. In 1896, Black women formed the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard, cofounded the Niagara Movement in 1905 with editor William Monroe Trotter to challenge Jim Crow and Washington's philosophy of accommodation. After a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, concerned citizens founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Du Bois launched its magazine, The Crisis, in 1910. In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, the second Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, later launching Negro History Week, the precursor of Black History Month.

The book closes at the 1915 Lincoln Jubilee in Chicago, a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of abolition that showcased Black progress. The authors acknowledge that Jim Crow persisted deep into the twentieth century but emphasize that Black Americans refused to accept the status quo. The book quotes Du Bois's summation of Reconstruction: "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery" (186), while affirming that the fight for justice continued, sustained by the hard-won Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.