If Obama Wasn't the First Black President

Imagine this: It's the year 1992. Walking up to the podium to give his State of the Union Address is a young Samuel L. Jackson. After giving an inspiring speech, he concludes his message with "And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!" (that's Pulp Fiction, for you young folk). But anyways...that would be lit! But ANYWAYS (AGAIN), I want you to really take a second and think: What If President Barack Obama wasn't the first black president? I know It's hard to imagine, especially given the fact that people have been trying to get Obama out of the White House ever since he got in. But if we were to go back in time, to look at the 12 years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Reconstruction Era, we would see how plausible it is to have had a black president Prior to President Obama.

The end of the Civil War in 1865 marked the conclusion of a 250 year institution called "slavery" (vocabulary word of the day). The Civil War put an end to slavery- in conjunction with the Emancipation Proclamation- and the history books like to make you infer that black people just couldn't get their act together once they were freed and that's why we are running around shooting each other and then blaming it on the white man. The reason they are able to manipulate the American public into thinking this is because they leave out the 12 years during Reconstruction where a white-run government expected ex-slaves (like ex-convicts... see what I did there?) to assimilate into American society with ease. They expected the newly freed slaves to provide for themselves, take care of their families, get involved in government and businesses, and basically do the impossible. But guess what... They did exactly that. In 1870, Hiram Rhodes became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress, once he was elected to the Senate to represent Mississippi . During Reconstruction, some 2,000 African Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate. Over 600 black men were in local and state legislature and there were 15 black men in Congress. And these are only the strides black people made in government! I haven't even mentioned the success of black men as businessmen, inventors, and fathers. So we did the impossible...only to find out what happens when you start beating the white man at his own game. White people, both in the North and the South, feared that the black race was moving too far, too fast. The result? The Comprise of 1877. Through the Compromise, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was given the White House over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on the understanding that once elected, Hayes would remove the federal troops, whose support was essential for the survival of Reconstruction in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. Black citizens began to face an outpouring of discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. At the turn of the 20th century, most black elected officials were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every southern state (Oxford University Press, 1982 pp. 417–50). It's funny that the history books never talk about this Compromise even though it has had just as significant an impact on this country as the Great Compromise or the Compromise of 1850. If the Compromise of 1877 had never happened, black people wouldn't be hanging from trees by the thousands during the period between 1877 to 1967. If it hadn't happened, groups like the KKK would've been monitored and made ineffective through intervention from federal troops. If it hadn't happened, the South wouldn't have had enough momentum to enforce future laws like the Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. IF the Compromise of 1877 had never happened we might have had a black president, maybe even a black female president years prior to Obama. It's funny how history plays out. But regardless of the what-ifs, if we don't teach what is, we are bound to repeat what was.