English 2130: American Literature
Race and American Culture between Civil War and World War II
1) Reconstruction:
(adapted from The Oxford Companion to United States History)
The attempt to rebuild and reform the South politically,
economically, and socially after the Civil War, and to refashion
race relations throughout the nation. The Reconstruction Era is
generally identified as the period between 1865 (end of the Civil
War) and the “Compromise of 1877.” Reconstruction began with
the North’s attempt to remake a “backwards” and defeated region
and the South trying to prevent the enfranchisement of African
Americans and halt Northern influences. In 1866, white
Southerners rioted in Memphis and New Orleans, where they
killed 89 African Americans in full view of the national press.
Southern opposition and the victory of the Republican in
presidential elections turned Reconstruction more radical, with the
federal government placing 10 southern states under military rule.
New republican state governments in the south—protected by the
military—tried to overturn infamous “Black Codes” that denied
African Americans the right to vote, serve on juries, and buy or
lease real estate. The Compromise of 1877—negotiated between a
Republican White House and a democratic Congress—ended
military rule in the South and virtually ended reconstruction
efforts. According to the Southern “myth of Reconstruction,” for a
decade after 1867 carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen ran the
government of the southern states, looting their finances, passing
high taxes, denying whites a role in the government, and spreading
terror throughout the region. This myth nurtured the idea of past
abuses at the hands of the North among generations of
Southerners.
2) Jim Crow/Jim Crow Laws
(adapted from Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance)
First introduced by the white minstrel performer T. D. Rice in the
late 1820, by the 1830s “Jim Crow” became a popular term
describing African Americans as slow-witted, clownish, and
contented slaves. By the late nineteenth century, “Jim Crow” had
become synonymous with the entire culture of formal and legal
separation of the races. In order to roll back civil rights given to
freed slaves during Reconstruction (Reconstruction Act of 1867
and Civil Rights Act of 1875), white supremacists in the North and
South instituted a set of legal acts—known as “Jim Crow
Laws”—that affirmed and naturalized the subordinate position of
African Americans. Throughout the 1870s several statutes enacted
across the South prohibited intermarriage between the races, and
the repeal of the Civil Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 1883
allowed businesses to discriminate on the basis of race. By the
mid-1880s, segregated educational facilities became mandated by
law in most southern states; poll taxes and literacy tests
disenfranchised virtually all African American men. “Jim Crow
Laws” were epitomized by the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision on
Plessy v. Ferguson, affirming the constitutionality of racial
segregation in public facilities and institutions, with the dubious
proviso that the separate facilities for blacks were also “equal” to
those reserved for whites (hence: “separate but equal”). Outside of
the legal system, violence against African Americans—such as the
lynching of supposed sex offenders or intimidation at polling
stations—further cemented the power of “Jim Crow” as a cultural
and social system.
3) Invisible Empire/Ku Klux Klan
(Dictionary of American History, ed. Stanley Kutler)
A Reconstruction-era terrorist group founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in
1866, the KKK has been resurrected in a variety of forms from that time
to the present. The Reconstruction-era Klan used violence or the threat
of violence to thwart perceived challenges to white supremacy and
Democratic rule. Its mayhem was intended as a means of controlling
black labor, reinforcing social deference to whites, disciplining
perceived instances of interracial sexual relationships, and punishing any
whites sympathetic to or working on behalf of the Republican party.
Targeting African American leaders such as ministers, teachers, and
politicians, the Klan used murders, floggings, beatings, or sexual
assaults to demoralize the wider black community. Though fading in
importance after the end of Reconstruction, the Klan was idealized in
Thomas Dixon’s book The Clansman and the 1915 motion picture Birth
of a Nation as a savior of white civilization and helped reviving a
“second” Klan during the 1920s. The second Klan developed a highly
effective and hierarchical organization, with local, state, and national
leaders, public relations, marketing operations, and mass recruitment
efforts. It had widespread membership in the South, Midwest, and West,
gaining control of state politics in states such as Alabama, Oklahoma,
and Indiana. The second Klan professed to uphold a general sense of
white, protestant hegemony, with perceived threats coming from
Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and a sense of decline in religion,
“pure womanhood,” and the family. The rise of the Civil Rights
movement in the 1950s again spurred Klan violence, now originating in
a number of regional, independent organizations, committing hundreds
of murders and acts of intimiation against civil rights activists. The Klan
lost influence with increased media coverage and a rise in sympathy for
the sacrifice of civil rights workers.
4) The Jazz Age
a. Historical Background
i. The Twenties
1. images of bathtup gin, speakeasies, and
decadence,
2. superficial image masks a more complex history
3. America grappling with disruptions of ethnic and
cultural conflict, growth of mass media, and a
consumer culture, as well as a transformation of
women’s roles
4. A decade of prosperity
5. big business enjoyed unprecedented approval
6. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,
the man who works there, worships there.”
President Calvin Coolidge ((1923-1929)
7. booming stock market
8. especially booming automobile industry
9. more and more Americans work for corporations
10.
more leisure time, but also more alienating
labor
11.
consumer goods revolution
12.
much money spent by average Americans on
consumer goods and entertainment
13.
increasingly sophisticated advertisement
industry
14.
changing role of women:
15.
the persona of the flapper
a. bobbed hair, cosmetics, short skirts,
smoking, drinking, jazz dancing and sexual
experimentation
16.
19th amendment: right of women to vote
17.
greater number of women joining the work
force
18.
but: women still faced much discrimination
in the work place
19.
another change: now the majority of
Americans lived in urban, rather than rural areas
20.
cultural conflict: supposed permissiveness of
the age found a backlash from religious
fundamentalists and conservatives
21.
e.g.: The Scopes Trial: prohibiting the
teaching of evolution in public schools
22.
18th amendment: 1920: prohibition of
alcohol
23.
also: large-scale anti-immigration
sentiments, as well as racism, and lynching in the
South
24.
high cultural activity
a. besides F., Hemingway, William Carlos
Williams, Gertrude Stein, and the writers of
the Harlem Renaissance
i. Zora Neale Hurston
ii. Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay
5) The Great Migration
a. Great Migration occurred primarily between the two world
wars. However, between 1910 and 1970, approximately six
and a half million African Americans migrated out of the
South. While in 1910, 80 percent of blacks lived in the South,
less than half lived there by 1970, with only 25 percent in the
rural South.
b. Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as other
Northern cities, were the initial destinations of most
migrants. The West later became a major destination.
c. Life in the South was difficult for African Americans for a
variety of reasons, including problems associated with
sharecropping and the accompanying natural disasters of the
late 1910s and '20s; Jim Crow legislation, which resulted in
segregated public facilities, transportation, and schools; and
violence, symbolized by the Ku Klux Klan and most
graphically displayed in public lynchings.
d. The North was viewed as the promised land, an idea
perpetuated by the need for factory workers and the fact that
pay in such factories was typically as much as three times
more than what blacks made working the land in the South.
e. While segregation was not legalized in the North, as it was in
the South, blacks experienced prejudice and racism in the
North, commonly known as "de facto segregation."
f. Life in the North presented its own challenges for blacks,
including poor living conditions and harsh, often dangerous
work environments.