African-Americans
14th Amendment (1868)
• Section 1.
– All persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States and of the state
wherein they reside. No state shall make or
enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges
or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law; nor deny
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
15th Amendment (1870)
• Section 1.
– The right of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.
Jim Crow Laws
• State laws enacted to keep blacks below
whites / segregated
– Segregated railcars / busses
– Poll Tax / Literacy tests for voting
– Grandfather clause
• Louisiana law – could only vote if voted in 1868, or
descended from someone who did
• Blacks did not have the right to vote in 1868
• KKK forms
1895 – “Atlanta Compromise”
• Booker T. Washington – influential black
leader
• Gave a speech to a largely white audience
– Was seeking economic opportunity, not equality
– Well received by whites because of his willingness
to forgo social equality
– “In all things that are purely social we can be as
separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual progress.”
1896 – Plessy v Ferguson
• Supreme Court declares “separate but equal” to be legal
– “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s
argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced
separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a
badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of
anything found in the act, but solely because the colored
race chooses to put that construction upon it… The
argument also assumes that social prejudice may be
overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be
secured except by an enforced commingling of the two
races… If the civil and political rights of both races be
equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or
politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the
Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon
the same plane.”
Plessy v. Ferguson
• “The object of the Fourteenth Amendment
was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute
equality of the two races before the law, but in
the nature of things it could not have been
intended to abolish distinctions based upon
color, or to enforce social, as distinguished
from political equality, or a commingling of
the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to
either."
1905 – Niagara Movement
• W.E.B. DuBois – advocated a much stronger
stance than Booker T. Washington
– “They do not expect that the free right to vote,
to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will
come in a moment; they do not expect to see
the bias and prejudices of years disappear at
the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely
certain that the way for a people to gain their
reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing
them away and insisting that they do not want
them; that the way for a people to gain respect
is not by continually belittling and ridiculing
themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes
must insist continually, in season and out of
season, that voting is necessary to modern
manhood, that color discrimination is
barbarism, and that black boys need education
as well as white boys.”
– “We have no right to sit silently by while the
inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of
disaster to our children, black and white.”
1909 – NAACP Formed
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
– The NAACP was formed partly in response to the continuing horrific
practice of lynching and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, the capital of
Illinois and resting place of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the
violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white liberals
that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both
the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr. Henry
Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60
people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du
Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call,
which was released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth.
– Echoing the focus of Du Bois' Niagara Movement began in 1905, the
NAACP's stated goal was to secure for all people the rights guaranteed
in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States
Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection
of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively.
Marcus Garvey / Back to Africa
• 1914 – Universal Negro
Improvement Association
(UNIA)
– Urged African-Americans to be
proud of their race, and return
to Africa, their ancestral
homeland
– Founded a steamship company
to transport blacks to Africa
(Black Star Line)
– Tried to persuade government
of Liberia to grant settlers land
(unsuccessfully)
Great Migration
• Southern blacks moved north between 1910-1920
– Seeking economic opportunity (jobs)
• Industry in the North, South still recovering from Civil War
– Escaping Jim Crow South
• Not an organized movement
– “They left on their own accord for as many reasons as
there are people who left. They made a choice that they
were not going to live under the system into which they
were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step
that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.“
-Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Great Migration
• African-American populations in Northern
cities expanded quickly
– Whites resented jobs being taken by blacks
– Considerable tension between whites and blacks
• North had been against slavery, but not necessarily
equality
– Northern blacks worried that their previously calm
lives would be upended
• They were right to worry
1917 – East Saint Louis Riots
• Widespread violence touched off by tension over
blacks being employed in factories
• Arson, beatings, lynchings, drive-by shootings
• Hundreds of blacks killed, thousands fled city
• “…you have black people being murdered in the
most wanton and barbaric manner in East St.
Louis; children being thrown back into flaming
houses, people being boarded up in their houses
before they're torched so that they couldn't
escape. So even by American standards, East St.
Louis was a horror.“ – Winston James
Streetcar being attacked during riot
African-Americans being forced
to leave town after the riots