sign in sign up
<<
Home , Jim Crow laws, Lynching

Reform for African

Jim Crow

The origin of the term is thought to have come from a character in a minstrel show. After the Civil War, many states and localities in the South passed a myriad of race-based laws that were intended to limit the rights of and maintain the segregation of African Americans and whites. Most of the states that had belonged to the Confederacy adopted Black Codes, sets of laws modeled on the laws that had formerly applied to slaves. These laws generally banned intermarriage and required or permitted businesses to have separate areas and services for different races. also existed in places like the Midwest and California. In many places Jim Crow laws applied to Latinos and Asians, in addition to African Americans.

Lynching

Racial tension grew after the Civil War, particularly in the South, but throughout the rest of the country as well. —when a person is executed by a mob, often by , for an alleged crime with or without a trial—was used to terrorize African Americans and other people of color who lived under the constant threat of mob violence. Although whites were sometimes lynched, particularly in the West during the early days when law and government structures were almost non-existent, the vast majority of lynching victims were African American. From 1882 to 1968, at least 3,466 African Americans were lynched. Seventy-nine percent of these occurred in the South.

The Red Record

Born into in 1862 in , Ida B. Wells became one of the most prominent leaders in the fight against racial violence. She died in 1931. Wells started her journalistic career after moving to in 1884 to teach in Memphis and attend Fisk University in Nashville. She saw that African Americans had few opportunities for education and decided to write about it. She began writing in local black newspapers under a pen name in 1891. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade began in 1892 after a mob lynched three of her friends. She started investigating the number of and circumstances surrounding lynchings in the South. She published her findings in articles she wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and a pamphlet called “Southern Horrors.” Wells also gave lectures on the subject and published a detailed study, A Red Record, in 1895. She argued that thousands of African Americans were lynched in the South because they stepped outside of what was perceived to be their correct place by defying white authority or competing with whites in business and politics. She also stated that white mobs justified lynchings of African American men by claiming that the men they lynched posed a threat to their communities and families, especially white women. Her writing struck a nerve. In response to her work, a mob destroyed the Memphis Free Speech office and threatened to kill Wells, forcing her to leave Memphis. Undeterred, Wells continued writing and lecturing about lynching. She traveled to England and helped form the British Anti-Lynching Society in 1894. When she returned to the a year later, Wells settled in and married Ferdinand L. Barnett. Wells-Barnett continued her work from

1 Chicago. She and a group of black and white reformers founded the NAACP in 1909. Additionally, Wells- Barnett founded the Negro Fellowship League, a civil rights organization that also helped Southern African Americans settle in the North, and supported woman through her organization, the National Association of Women.

Two Approaches to Race Relations

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856 in . He died in 1915. After emancipation, he and his family moved to West Virginia, where nine-year-old Washington worked in a coal mine and salt furnace. Even as a child, Washington had ambitions to rise above his circumstances. In 1872, he enrolled himself in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, where he fell under the mentorship of General Samuel C. Armstrong, a Civil War veteran devoted to helping African Americans advance through industrial and vocational education. Washington worked as a janitor to pay for his education and graduated from Hampton in 1875. In his 1901 autobiography, , Washington describes Armstrong as “the noblest, rarest human being” he had ever met. Armstrong certainly had a strong influence on Washington’s career as an educator and leader. Recognizing his talent, Armstrong offered the industrious Washington a scholarship while he was at Hampton. He also offered Washington a teaching position at Hampton, which Washington accepted in 1879 after spending some time in Washington, D.C., teaching children and adults and studying at Wayland Seminary. Finally, when the legislature approved funds to found an industrial and vocational school for African Americans and asked for Armstrong’s recommendation of a white man to head the school, he recommended Washington instead. The Tuskegee Institute Washington was selected to head the new school, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in 1881. As head of Tuskegee, Washington gained national prominence. At the start, Tuskegee was severely underfunded, with few resources for equipment, buildings, and staff. Washington campaigned vigorously for funds. In doing so, he gained much influence among white and African Americans, earning endorsements and support from several leading white philanthropists. Among them was Andrew Carnegie, who donated thousands of dollars to Tuskegee. In his 1895 speech at the Exposition, Washington put forth his vision of racial through economic advancement. He stressed the importance of economic independence and believed that African Americans could become economically independent through craft and industrial training. He also advocated a tactic of accommodation, whereby African Americans temporarily dropped efforts to win civil rights and fight segregation in order to focus on education and advancement in trades and agriculture. Eventually, Washington believed, African Americans’ economic success and rise to a respectable middle-class position would gain respect from whites, leading to a breakdown of race division and eventual civil rights. Washington himself gained prominence by advocating economic advancement over civil rights. His autobiography was widely read and continues to hold an important place in American history and literature. Furthermore, Tuskegee flourished under his leadership, expanding to more than one hundred buildings and a faculty of two hundred teachers of thirty-eight trades and professions by the time of his death.

2 W.E.B. Du Bois

Born in 1868 in Massachusetts and educated at the historically black Fisk University and at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist. He died in 1963 in Ghana, Africa. Du Bois published several pioneering sociological studies of black communities and was one of the founders of the NAACP. In 1910, Du Bois began working as editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, which featured essays, articles, and literature from black writers aimed at uplifting African Americans and supporting the fight for equal rights. Du Bois also taught at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1914 and published his groundbreaking book, , in 1903. In the book, Du Bois explores the experience of being black in early 1900s America. He explains African Americans’ experiences of dual identity, invisibility, and injustice. Additionally, Du Bois criticizes Booker T. Washington’s of accommodation, which Du Bois calls the “Atlanta Compromise.” Du Bois contends that would never willingly grant African Americans rights. African Americans would have to fight for their rights as they always had, and accommodation would only solidify . Like Washington, Du Bois valued education, but he favored a classical liberal arts education rather than the vocational trade training advocated by Washington. The two men had at least one idea in common, though. Du Bois, like Washington, advocated black economic independence as a means to battle both black poverty and alleviate some of the problems of segregation, as long as it went hand-in-hand with political and legal enfranchisement.

3