It’s Black History Month, and last week’s column was about how historian Carter G. Woodson initiated it in 1926 as “Negro History Week” and founded the association that continues today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Each year ASALH announces a Black History Month theme. This year, it’s “Black Resistance.“ The theme is described by ASALH in detail on its website, and in reading a part of it, I was pleasantly startled to find a local name, Henry Adams:
Henry Adams was once a resident and worker right here in the Shreveport-Bossier area, and the location from which he organized his resistance movement. This was a time period in history that still gets little attention: Reconstruction, following the Civil War. As context for Henry Adams’ actions, Reconstruction, especially by the 1870’s, was an extremely violent time for African-Americans, targeted as they were freed from bondage and by law could no longer be considered property.
Accounts of Henry Adams’ earlier life vary. According to the version of one historian, Tabitha Wang on BlackPast.org, Henry Adams was born into slavery in Georgia in 1843, but when he was a young child, the family in which he was enslaved moved to Louisiana. While enslaved he married a woman named Malinda and they had 4 children. He and his wife were able to acquire property during the Civil War, not a common feat. According to late, local historian Eric Brock, the slaveholder’s daughter who had “inherited” Henry Adams freed him and 60 other enslaved people on May 26, 1865, the day Shreveport surrendered to Union forces.
After the war, Henry Adams moved to Shreveport and had a successful peddling and merchant business but he aimed to leave the limited opportunities and maltreatment of African Americans he witnessed and experienced to join the United States Army in 1866. He served in New Orleans and rose to the rank of quartermaster sergeant. Significantly, while he was in the Army he learned to read and write. He returned to the Shreveport area in 1869. He worked as a woodcutter and planation manager. He was much in demand and worked for some of the area’s most prominent planters including Col. J.M. Foster, who had plantations in both Caddo Parish and 3300 acres in cultivation in Bossier.
To relate Henry Adams’ life following his return to Shreveport, perhaps he can tell it the best himself in his moving testimony to the 46th U.S. Congress, in their second session (December 1879-June 1880), where he was called as a witness in the investigation into why so many African Americans were leaving the South. The “Testimony of Henry Adams regarding the Negro Exodus” is available online courtesy of the Yale Macmillan Center’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Understand that some of the details will include violence:
Question: Now tell us, Mr. Adams, what, if anything, you know about the exodus of the colored people from the Southern to the Northern and Western States; and be good enough to tell us in the first place what you know about the organization of any committee or society among the colored people themselves for the purpose of bettering their condition, and why it was organized…
Henry Adams: Well, in 1870, I believe it was, or about that year, after I had left the Army… a parcel of us got together and said that we would organize ourselves into a committee and look into affairs and see the true condition of our race, to see whether it was possible we could stay under a people who had held us under bondage or not…
Some of the members of the committee was ordered…to go into every state in the South where we had been slaves there, and post one another from time to time about the true condition of our race and nothing but the truth….And we worked some of us, worked our way from place to place and went from State to State and worked – some of them did-amongst our people in the fields, everywhere, to see what sort of living our people lived; whether we could remain in the South…
Henry Adams testified that these reports were sent to the committee at Shreveport and they would be read aloud at a meeting. He was then asked again about the object of the committee, if when they began, they intended to “remove [their] people from the South.” Mr. Adams replied:
O, no, sir; not then; we just wanted to see whether there was any State in the South where we could get a living and enjoy our rights…The character of the information they brought to us was very bad, sir…they said in several parts where they was that the land rent was still higher there in that part of the country than it was where we first organized it, and the people was still being whipped, some of them, by the old owners, the men that had owned them as slaves, and some of them was being cheated out of their crops…
Question: Was anything said about their personal and political rights in these reports, as to how they were treated about these?
Henry Adams: Yes, some of them stated that in some parts of the country where they voted they would be shot. Some of them stated that if they voted the Democratic ticket they would not be injured.
Question: But that they would be shot, or might be shot, if they voted the Republican ticket?
Henry Adams: Yes, sir.
To find out how the committee came to the realization they needed to pivot their sights to exodus, and how they planned to achieve such a mass movement, be sure to read the continuation of this story in the next column.
The Bossier Parish Libraries History Center is 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
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