African-American Studies

The Rise of the Jim Crow Era1878-1915

Unit 5

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.

• 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

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

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 TrainsRestrooms Water fountainsParks Dance hall Penitentiaries RestaurantsTheaters HospitalsAsylums Institutions for the blind and deafCemeteries• As early as 1870, Tennessee, regarded as having pioneered Jim

Crow legislation, passed a law prohibiting interracial marriages

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 TestPoll TaxGrandfather Clause

• By 1915 the combined use of such methods had effectively stripped southern blacks of the franchise.

• 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 rule”—Southerners would be able to pass laws that were hurtful towards blacks

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)

• 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

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

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.

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).

Effects of Imperialism in Africa

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

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

• 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.

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

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

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

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

• 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)

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

• 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

• 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