“New South” – • Remains Agricultu

Directions: 1) Read each excerpt and answer the corresponding questions with details. “New South” – Remains agricultural based on cotton farming, dependent on cheap labor (sharecropping and tenant farming by poor blacks and whites) Only a few pockets of industrialization despite attempts to industrialize the “New South” Racism: Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), limited economic opportunity Voting Restrictions: literacy test, poll tax, Grandfather Clause, Solid South (Democrats only) Violence: KKK o Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiUom0q4CUE (20:10 to 23:50) 1) What was the most horrific part of the “New South” according to Ida Wells? What actions did she take? What impact did her work have? Jim Crow Stories - PBS In March of 1892, Ida B. Wells, a journalist and former Memphis school teacher, started a crusade against lynching after three friends of hers were brutally murdered by a Memphis mob. Tom Moss and two of his friends, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, were arrested for defending themselves against an attack on Moss' store. Moss was a highly respected figure in the black community, a postman as well as the owner of a grocery store. A white competitor, enraged that Moss had drawn away his black customers, hired some off-duty deputy sheriffs to destroy the store. Moss and his friends, not knowing the men were deputies, resisted. A gun battle broke out and several deputies were wounded. Moss, his two friends, and one hundred other black supporters were arrested. Several nights later, masked vigilantes dragged Moss and his two friends from their cells, took them to a deserted railroad yard, and shot them to death. Enraged by their deaths, Wells lashed out at the refusal of Memphis police to arrest the well known killers. She encouraged blacks to protest with boycotts of white-owned stores and public transportation. The lynchings were a turning point in Ida B. Wells' life. She began to investigate and reveal the real motivations that lay behind lynching. Like many middle-class African Americans, Wells had accepted the myth that only poor blacks were lynched for heinous crimes. Wells was now shocked into recognizing that even innocent middle-class black people could be targets. Wells wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. She was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington and had personal, if not ideological, difficulties with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells-Barnett continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Lynch Law in America," The Arena, January 1900 OUR country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an "unwritten law" that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal. The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased. But men, women, and children were the victims of murder by individuals and murder by mobs, just as they had been when killed at the demands of the "unwritten law" to prevent "negro domination." Negroes were killed for disputing over terms of contracts with their employers. If a few barns were burned some colored man was killed to stop it. If a colored man resented the imposition of a white man and the two came to blows, the colored man had to die, either at the hands of the white man then and there or later at the hands of a mob that speedily gathered. If he showed a spirit of courageous manhood he was hanged for his pains, and the killing was justified by the declaration that he was a "saucy nigger." Colored women have been murdered because they refused to tell the mobs where relatives could be found for "lynching bees." Boys of fourteen years have been lynched by white representatives of American civilization. In fact, for all kinds of offenses--and, for no offenses--from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same. A new name was given to the killings and a new excuse was invented for so doing. In 1892, when lynching reached high-water mark, there were 241 persons lynched. The entire number is divided among the following States: Alabama......... 22 Montana.......... 4 Arkansas........ 25 New York......... 1 California...... 3 North Carolina... 5 Florida......... 11 North Dakota..... 1 Georgia......... 17 Ohio............. 3 Idaho........... 8 South Carolina... 5 Illinois........ 1 Tennessee........ 28 Kansas.......... 3 Texas............ 15 Kentucky........ 9 Virginia......... 7 Louisiana....... 29 West Virginia.... 5 Maryland........ 1 Wyoming.......... 9 Mississippi..... 16 Arizona Ter...... 3 Missouri........ 6 Oklahoma......... 2 Of this number, 160 were of negro descent. Four of them were lynched in New York, Ohio, and Kansas; the remainder were murdered in the South. Five of this number were females. Ida Wells Ted Ed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fygjGXnaV9w Review the information: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ 2) What were Booker T. Washington’s strategies to fix the “New South?” Why is Washington’s strategy for racial reconciliation in the Atlanta Compromise speech? Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856. In spite of the fact that it was illegal to teach enslaved blacks to read and write, Washington was able to obtain a primary education, and subsequently entered Hampton Institute in the fall of 1872. He proved to be an exemplary student, and over the years, an equally respectable teacher and speaker. The principal of Hampton Institute was so fond of Washington that he recommended him to a group of Alabama legislators as a viable candidate for director of an African American school that they wanted to establish in their state. In 1881, Washington became president of that Alabama school, known as Tuskegee Institute, which he and fellow colleagues built from a little shanty and church to a major educational institution for blacks. Primarily a training ground for teachers, Tuskegee's program provided students with both academic and vocational training. (Source: Library of Congress) Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Compromise Speech, 1895 On September 18, 1895, African-American spokesman and leader Booker T. Washington spoke before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His “Atlanta Compromise” address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Although the organizers of the exposition worried that “public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step,” they decided that inviting a black speaker would impress Northern visitors with the evidence of racial progress in the South. Washington soothed his listeners’ concerns about “uppity” blacks by claiming that his race would content itself with living “by the productions of our hands.” (Source: History Matters) To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.

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