African-American Studies

1
African-American Studies

• The Rise of the Jim Crow Era
• 1878-1915
• Unit 5

2
Start of Jim Crow

• The post-Reconstruction period in the South,
  which witnessed the rise of the Jim Crow system
• This marked a time in which race relations were
  at their worst
• Whites pursued efforts to reassert power over
  blacks on every front, from taking the right to
  vote away to school segregation.

3

• The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated
  between 1828 and 1831, when Thomas Dartmouth
  Rice, considered the "father of minstrelsy"
• He developed a song-and-dance routine that
  mimicked an old, crippled slave named James Crow
• By the late 1800s the term, as used principally,
  by southern whites, had come to refer to a system
  of racial segregation and discrimination that was
  beginning to take hold in the South
• It was meant to continue to assert power over
  blacks by whites which occurred during slavery

4
(No Transcript)
5
Purpose of Jim Crow

• Firmly locked in place throughout the South by
  1915, Jim Crowism had two cardinal features
• 1) Legalized separation of the races
• 2)Disfranchisement (taking the right to vote
  away) of African Americans

6
Legalized Separation

• After Reconstruction, Southern states and local
  communities passed laws that segregated blacks in
  virtually every aspect of public and social life
  such as
• Schools Trains
• Restrooms Water fountains
• Parks Dance hall
• Penitentiaries Restaurants
• Theaters Hospitals
• Asylums Institutions for the blind and deaf
• Cemeteries
• As early as 1870, Tennessee, regarded as having
  pioneered Jim Crow legislation, passed a law
  prohibiting interracial marriages

7
Disfranchisement

• Initially, whites opposed to black political
  equality did not always bother to disfranchise
  blacks
• Sometimes they simply used bribery, violence,
  intimidation, and ballot-stuffing to record black
  votes for the Democratic Party
• In fact, there were enough black voters between
  1877 and 1901 to enable eleven black southerners
  (all Republicans) to sit in Congress
• Southern states prevented blacks from voting by
  passing
• Literacy Test
• Poll Tax
• Grandfather Clause
• By 1915 the combined use of such methods had
  effectively stripped southern blacks of the
  franchise.

8

• Efforts to eliminate black suffrage were
  basically inspired by the desire to remove the
  possibility that blacks would use any political
  strength to oppose the second-class citizenship
  status that was imposed on them
• As a result, the destruction of the Republican
  Party in the South thus became important
• Due to the factors mentioned, the Democratic
  Party controlled politics in the South for nearly
  a 100 years . This period is known as home
  ruleSoutherners would be able to pass laws that
  were hurtful towards blacks

9
Violence in the Jim Crow Era

• An increase in violence against African
  Americans, especially lynching, accompanied the
  rise in Jim Crowism
• During the 1890s, lynchings occurred with greater
  frequency than in any other decade
• In 1892, for example, 161 blacks were lynched in
  the South, the highest yearly total ever (3,446
  blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1964)

10

• The epidemic of race riots that swept the nation
  in the early twentieth century added to black
  feelings of insecurity
• Perhaps the most sensational instance of white
  lawlessness during this period took place in
  Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1906
• The city was paralyzed for four days as white
  mobs set out on a general destruction of black
  property and lives. Four African Americans were
  killed and many injured

11
Social Darwinism

• Helping to provide a philosophical justification
  for wholesale white terrorism was Social
  Darwinism
• Distinguished white scholars in the biological
  and social sciences argued that the Negro was the
  least intelligent of all racial groups - - a
  separate species next to the ape
• Drawing on the notion of "survival of the
  fittest," they also asserted that the
  evolutionary process had actually stopped for
  blacks who, in the face of an increasingly
  scientific, technical, and industrialized world,
  would become extinct

12
Jim Crow Support in Literature

• At a more popular level, anti-black, racist
  thinking was promoted through such works as
• 1) Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast (1900)
• 2) Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) ), which
  served as the literary basis for D. W.
  Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), a blatant
  cinematic appeal to white racism and sexual
  fantasies/fears about black men
• 3) Robert ShufeIdt's The Negro A Menace to
  Civilization (1907)
• 4) Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel Tarzan (1914),
  which became a movie series in 1918.

13
World Domination

• After Reconstruction of the idea of "the white
  man's burden," the mission of whites to
  "civilize" (rule) the darker and inferior peoples
  of the world, served to support southern racist
  sentiment
• This belief in whites as "civilizers" coincided
  with the rise of European imperialism, especially
  in Africa in which most of the continent was
  ruled by European powers
• During this period the United States emerged as
  an imperial power itself, mainly as a result of
  the Spanish-American War of 1898 (through which
  its major acquisitions were Puerto Rico and the
  Philippines).

14
(No Transcript)
15
Effects of Imperialism in Africa
16
(No Transcript)
17
Court Cases uphold Jim Crow

• Two key decisions by the Supreme Court added to
  the difficulties that blacks faced during the
  post- Reconstruction period
• In 1883 the Supreme Court invalidated the 1875
  Civil Rights Act, contending that the Fourteenth
  Amendment did not apply to discriminatory acts by
  individuals or local governments
• Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896, which upheld a
  Louisiana law requiring separate railroad coaches
  for blacks. This ruling established the "separate
  but equal" doctrine that became the key legal
  sanction for Jim Crow laws

18
Exodus from the South

• One of the ways in which African Americans,
  especially the masses, responded to the rise of
  Jim Crowism was migration
• In this sense their movement was a form of
  protest, one that, to the extent it involved
  movement out of the South
• Leaders like Frederick Douglass, opposed this
  movement, they felt that the salvation of blacks
  rested in struggling to achieve their citizenship
  rights in the South
• The exploitive conditions of sharecropping and
  the violence attendant to political activities
  were the main motivating factors for this
  movement

19

• One area to which blacks moved in large numbers
  was the rural Midwest
• Through the Exodus of 1879, the first significant
  movement of blacks out of the South,
  approximately six thousand migrants from
  Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and
  Kentucky, headed to Kansas, where they
  established, in one instance, an all-black
  community, Nicodemus (1879)
• After Reconstruction five thousand other African
  Americans headed West to become cowboys,
  participating in the great cattle drives that
  linked Abilene, Texas, and Dodge City, Kansas.

20
(No Transcript)
21
Opposing Views on Equality

• Black American leadership adopted essentially two
  divergent responses to Jim Crowism
• Booker T. Washington believed blacks should wait
  for equality and gain vocational training
• W.E.B. Du Bois believed blacks should demand
  immediate equality and further their education
• The debate between Washington and Du Bois
  centered over the type of education African
  Americans should receive - - industrial education
  versus academic education

22
(No Transcript)
23
Booker T. Washington

• Until 1910 the prevailing response was
  accommodationism which deemphasized the pursuit
  of social and political equality for southern
  blacks. It's standard-bearer was Booker T.
  Washington
• Founder of Tuskegee Institute in 1881
• From the time of his famous 1895 Atlanta Cotton
  Exposition speech (1895 Atlanta Compromise) until
  his death in 1915, Washington was acknowledged
  as the leader of black Americans. (Frederick
  Douglass, the previously acknowledged leader,
  died in 1895)
• Establishing the National Negro Business League
  in 1900, Washington held up the self-made black
  businessman as the model for the struggling
  masses

24
(No Transcript)
25
W. E. B. Du Bois

• A founder of the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the
  National Association for the Advancement of
  Colored People (NAACP) in 1909
• Du Bois was the most outspoken advocate of full
  integration and militant protest against white
  racial injustices. He stressed such measures as
  demonstrations and litigation
• In contrast to Washington's glorification of the
  black capitalist, Du Bois argued that the
  talented tenth, an elite corps of educated
  blacks, would guide the future course of African
  American people
• He thus stressed an academic education for
  blacks, one that emphasized the dignity of the
  mind -- the importance of intellect in human
  affairs

26
(No Transcript)
27
Formation of Black Communities

• Between the late 1870s and the early twentieth
  century the modern black community was born the
  structure and shape assumed by the community
  during this period have lasted essentially to the
  present day
• Free blacks and former slaves became politically
  and culturally fused, black institutions were
  built on an unprecedented scale, blacks became
  more urban and increasingly residents of
  all-black neighborhoods, and blacks undertook
  greater self-help initiatives in order to survive
  the de facto and de jure debasement received from
  all levels of white society

28

• Among the social and economic changes was a
  decline in the size and status of an
  entrepreneurial class (such as caterers and
  skilled artisans) dependent on a white clientele
  and the emergence of a class of professionals
  (such as doctors and lawyers) and businessmen
  (such as undertakers and storekeepers) that
  catered largely to the black community
• African Americans also established certain kinds
  of enterprises for the first time. The most
  notable of these were banks (the first two were
  founded in 1888), realty associations, and
  insurance companies (the first was established in
  Mississippi in 1889, and the North Carolina
  Mutual Insurance Company, currently the largest
  black insurance company, was established in 1905)

29
(No Transcript)
30

• Moreover, as blacks became more literate the
  black press flourished, and new organizations
  like the Greek-letter fraternities were founded
  (Alpha Phi Alpha in 1906 was the first)
• It was, however, the fraternal orders that
  enjoyed perhaps the most phenomenal success
  through their "mutual aid" function, many served
  as incipient insurance companies
• In the forefront of this growth were the Odd
  Fellows, the Masons, and the Knights of Pythias

31
(No Transcript)
32

• In the religious realm the most striking
  development was the rise in the 1890s of
  Pentecostal churches (Holiness, Sanctified), of
  which the Church of God in Christ, founded in
  Memphis, became the largest
• It was through such churches, located mainly in
  the rural South, that certain slave religious
  practices rooted in African traditions (for
  example, shouts, hand-clapping, foot-stomping,
  and jubilee songs) were continued
• Expressed forms of worship that included spirit
  possession, improvisatory singing, and the use of
  drums and other percussive instruments

33
(No Transcript)
34

• The nation's two oldest civil rights
  organizations were formed during this period
• The previously mentioned NAACP, established in
  1909 by blacks and white Progressives, used
  mainly litigation to win equal rights for African
  Americans
• The Urban League was formed in 1911 to address
  the problems (notably employment and housing)
  that newly arrived black southern migrants
  encountered in northern cities

35
African-American Women Gain Prominence

• African American women were very much in the
  vanguard of the struggle of the race against
  discrimination and oppression
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett led anti-lynching campaigns
  and joined Du Bois and others in organizing the
  NAACP
• Mary Church Terrell established the National
  Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 to
  protest disfranchisement and lynching

36

• Black women also had a presence in
  entrepreneurial activities
• One outstanding example was Madame C.J. Walker, a
  native of Louisiana. Her cosmetology business,
  which catered to black women, began in 1905 in
  Saint Louis and moved in 1910 to Indianapolis,
  where its manufacturing plant ultimately employed
  three thousand persons
• By the time of her death in 1919, Madame Walker
  had amassed a fortune of a million dollars

37

• A second notable woman was Maggie Lena Walker of
  Richmond, Virginia
• Having successfully managed a black mutual
  benefit society, in 1903 she founded and became
  president of the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank
  she was thus the nation's first black woman bank
  president
• The bank she established, which absorbed the
  other black banks in Richmond and became the
  Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, is the
  oldest continuously existing black- owned and
  black-operated bank in the nation