“Are Not Our Interests the Same?”: Black Protest, the Lost Cause, and Coalition Building in Readjuster Virginia

Abstract

Virginia’s Readjuster Party was the most successful interracial political coalition in the post-Reconstruction South. Initially arising from a conflict over the payment of Virginia’s massive public debt, the new party became a force of liberal reform and democracy in the Old Dominion. It represented an alternative path before Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement became the norm. While the Readjusters have long interested historians, the significant work performed by Black Readjusters in building and sustaining the always-tenuous coalition has gone understudied. Knowing their white counterparts were anxious about interracial political alliances, Black Readjusters eased these anxieties by using the Lost Cause. Black Readjusters condemned carpetbaggers as corrupt and repurposed the myth of the faithful slave to strengthen the interracial coalition, press for their own demands, and demonstrate their status as true southerners. The strategy and its seeming contradictions succeeded in some cases and failed in others, and its ultimate effects remain unclear. By shifting focus to Black Readjusters’ coalition-building labors, this article centers Black political activism and challenges the presumptions scholars make about interracial politics and white supremacy.

Keywords

• politics
• race
• US South
• civil rights
• labor
• white supremacy