Symposium looks at Reconstruction

For program-specific information and registration questions: contact Joel Walker, National Archives at Atlanta, at 770-968-2530.

The days were desperate, the nights, dreadful. Terrorists had risen in York County, S.C. They called themselves night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. Former slaves quickly learned that those riders had simply given up one fight — the Civil War — for a more personal, hateful conflict.

Word reached Washington. Officials in the nation's capital dispatched investigators to South Carolina to learn more. They specifically wanted to know if the riders were violating the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave the vote to freed male slaves.

"They found a gang, if you will," said Joel Walker, an educational specialist at the National Archives in Atlanta, located in Morrow.

Their findings also formed the foundation of some of the first civil rights cases in American history. Those cases comprise one of the topics featured in “The Enduring Chronicle: Reconstruction and the Promise of Freedom.” The free, one-day symposium takes place Saturday at the archives, a sprawling compendium of records dating from 1716 to the 1980s. The facility, one of several located across the nation, is located at 5780 Jonesboro Road, Morrow.

The symposium is held each February, Black History Month. This year, its focus is the early 1870s, when the South underwent Reconstruction following the Civil War.

For Velma Maia Thomas of Atlanta, that period was a time of hope — and, ultimately, disappointment — for some freed female slaves living on the coast of Georgia. Her presentation is entitled, “Southern Claims: Give Me What Is Mine.”

The name is apt, she said. Following the war, the former Chatham County slaves applied to the federal government to pay back what federal troops had taken in their push to the sea.

“These women were very vocal, and very particular, in what they felt the government owed them,” she said.

One woman, said Thomas, asked the government to compensate her for cooking utensils. Another bemoaned the loss of a cow. “Their testimonies,” said Thomas, “are fascinating.”

At about the same time, 227 members of Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta signed a petition and sent it to the federal government. It contained a simple request: pay for their church, which Union troops destroyed as they left Atlanta on the march across the state. Replacing the wooden building, they said, would cost $7,000.

The church, said Big Bethel historian Jackie Herring, is still waiting for the cash. “They never paid us back,” she said. Her talk is entitled, “Big Bethel AME Church: From Slavery to the 21st Century.”

That first church, erected before the Civil War, took shape just blocks from a downtown slave market. Church members chose brick for the replacement, built in 1868. A third church, standing today on Auburn Avenue, was built in 1891 of Stone Mountain granite.

“It is truly historical,” Herring said.

Other participants include:

• Heather Andrea Williams, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s the author of “Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery,” and “Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.”

• Angela Walton-Raji, a genealogist and author of “Black Indian Genealogy Research: African-American Ancestors among the Five Civilized Tribes.” She’ll talk about tracking geology.

• Lisa Bratton, a history professor at Tuskegee University. Her presentation deals with the 1871 trial of James Rufus Bratton, from whom she derives her surname. The owner of Brattonsville Plantation, Bratton was tried for the lynching of Jim Williams, who’d been a slave.

• Sharon McMeans-Lukiri, a history teacher at Lovejoy High School in Hampton. Her presentation is entitled, “Reconstruction: An Overview.”