What is This [African]
American, This New “Man”?
Booker T’s Bucket vs. Dubois’s
Talented Tenth
Reconstruction & “Jim Crow”
• 13th 14th & 15th
Amendments
– Enforced by army
• Civil Rights Act of 1866
– 700,000 blacks register
to vote vs. 600,000
whites
– No blacks elected to
governorship, no
legislative majorities
• Republican majority
abandons blacks, sides
with big business &
WASP elite
• Black Codes
– Voters must be of “good
character,” property
owners, literate & pay
poll tax
– Cannot testify in court
unless voter
• 1896 Supreme Court:
Plessy vs. Ferguson
– “separate but equal”
– Jim Crow laws
• Lynchings
Anti-Negro Cultural War
• “modern ethnologists have established the fact
that in all essential qualities the Negro Race
seems to be thoroughly incapable of
development”
– UC Berkeley anthropologist Joseph Le Conte, 1890
• “there is no place in this land for the arrogant,
aggressive, school-spoilt Afro American who
wants to live without manual labor”
– Tom Watson, early 20th-century Georgia politician
• “the black man copulates solely for the
gratification of the passion – for the erotic
pleasure it affords him”
– James K. Vardaman, Mississippi politician
Negro Labor or Negro Thought?
• Booker T. Washington
(1859-1915)
• “Cast down your bucket
where you are”
• Accepts social & civil
inequality w/o protest
• Loyalty to capitalism &
its myths
• Vocational education
more important than
higher education
– Tuskegee Institute
• Up from Slavery (1901)
• W.E.B. DuBois (18681963)
• Attacks Washington’s
“compromise”
– Denies basic rights
– Builds no future
– Destroys “manhood”
• Connects racism with
critique of capitalism,
U.S. imperialism
• Later, a socialist
• Souls of Black Folk
(1903)
The Exodus Northward
• Eight million African Americans in 1900
–
–
–
–
1/3-1/4 of southern U.S. population
90% still live in South
95% functionally illiterate, most from farm
Driven from skilled jobs in southern cities
• Enormous migration at beginning of 20th C.
– Expanding industry in NY, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Cincinnati, Cleveland, D.C. – labor shortage
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•
•
•
Competition with whites & immigrants – new racism
2nd generation Irish 12-24% white collar
2nd generation black 7-9%
Immigrant ghettos no more than 60% homogenous –
black ghettos close to 100%