http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s35puUhqQJc
Today’s Lecture
• The Problem
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The Failure of Reconstruction
Plessy Vs. Ferguson
De Jure/ de facto discrimination
Lynching
• Notable People
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Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. DuBois
Marcus Garvey
NAACP
• The Catalysts
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Migration
World War I
Harlem Renaissance
World War II
• Improvements
• Double ‘V’ Campaign
• Jim Crow and the Supreme
Court
• Brown v. Board of Education
The Failure of Reconstruction
• The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
• The ‘Reconstruction Amendments’: 13th Amendment (1865); 14th
Amendment (1868); 15th Amendment(1870).
• The ‘death of the Negro’:
“They neglect or starve their offspring,
abandon the sick to their own resources,
indulge every animal passion to excess
and, when they have money, spend their
nights in the most disgusting and
debilitating debauches”. New York Times, 1877
• 12% of America’s 75 million
population in 1900
Failure of
Reconstruction
• Against: President Andrew Johnson
and Supreme Court
• Civil Rights Act of 1875 was not upheld.
• Election of Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes (1877-1881)
• Traded for the premature withdrawal of federal troops from
the South/ enabled Southern Democrats to regain control of Dixie politics
• Blacks retained token appointments
• No direct action civil rights campaigns for 25 years after Plessy Vs.
Ferguson
Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
• Separate Car Act passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 1890
• Challenged by Homer Plessy, an ‘octaroon’.
• Arrested on 7th June 1892; orchestrated by the Committee of Citizens in New Orleans
• Argument: arrest denied Plessy his constitutional rights (13th/ 14th
Amendments)
• Case escalated to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, then
• the US Supreme Court/ finally lost in 1896
• Established precedent for ‘separate-but-equal’
facilities (facilities were rarely actually equal)
• Symbolised the end of reconstruction and the
trend to recognise African American civil rights
De Jure
Discrimination
• Legally mandated discrimination
• Varied from state to state; much more powerful
in the South.
• Disenfranchisement of black voters.
• Achieved through a variety of ‘legal’ measures’
• Amended state constitutions and placed
qualifiers on enfranchisement
• Poll tax; residence requirements; property qualifications; literary tests; ability to
read; ‘deliver a reasonable interpretation of the federal or state constitution’;
grandfather clause
• Education: Separate but unequal.
• College; career paths; professional organisations; pay scales; Doctors; nurses; lawyers; teachers;
barbers.
De Jure
Discrimination
• Access to public places
• Separate movie theatres, toilets, water fountains,
hospitals, telephone booths, supermarkets, sports,
prisons, cemeteries.
• Segregation within facilities
• Separate spaces on public transport, separate sections in
restaurants, transient entertainment, libraries, beaches,
• Some railroad companies provided dining and sleeping cars for whites only with no comparable
provision for black travellers
• Laws did not always extend to whites.
• Illegal for African Americans to be unemployed, in debt, to loiter, but Intermarriage illegal for all
• US Law - Could not choose not to be racist
• Illegal to protest or to circulate materials against Jim Crow
De Jure
Discrimination
• Housing
• Baltimore Housing Ordinance (1910)
• Soon copied by other cities
• The National Housing Act (1934)
De Facto Discrimination
• More common in the North where de jure
discrimination had not taken hold
• Most whites believed that African Americans were literally an inferior
race, and therefore not comparable to whites.
• Even whites who did not support segregation and were opposed to lynching often did not see
African Americans as equals
• Remained long after Jim Crow was abolished
Lynching
• Term derived from Charles Lynch, 17th Century Justice of the Peace
• About two African Americans a week were lynched between 1880 and
1920.
• Not reserved for African Americans alone, but majority of those lynched were African American;
Usually tortured beforehand – dragged, mutilated, burned etc.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett – Muckraking Journalism – Free Speech
• Discovered that over half of those lynched had been charged with minor offences, such as
shoplifting, or no offence at all, such as refusing to cross the street to move out of the way of a
white man.
• No justice, regulation or order to lynching
• It was not illegal, yet it was not ‘standardised’ – could be lynched for anything.
• Nearly 4,000 people lynched in America before 1930. 4 ‘lynchers’ were
prosecuted
Notable People: Booker T. Washington
• Born into slavery in Virginia on April 5th 1856
• Formally educated an became a teacher; Made principal of the newly created
Tuskegee Normal Negro Institute in 1888
• Education and good character more important to progress than
enfranchisement.
• Believed African Americans needed to prove themselves
• Popular with whites due to moderate tone
• invited to dine at the White House by T. Roosevelt
• Founded the National Negro Business League
but ensured it did not focus on civil rights
• Disliked by other prominent African Americans
of the period, but this tone enabled Washington
to remain one of the most politically influential
black men until his death in 1915
Notable People:
W.E.B. DuBois
• Born in Massachusetts on 23rd February 1868.
• Orphaned at 16; attended Fisk University in Tennessee
• Flux: saw Jim Crow laws first hand/ First African
American to receive a PhD from Harvard
• “Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and
socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and to do so primarily for their own
sakes. Industrial freedom of opportunity has by long experience been proven to be
generally best for all”.
• The Souls of Black Folk (1903); The Crisis (1909-1934)
• Victim of McCarthyism: indicted as a Communist in 1951; joined the Communist party
in 1961.
• Died in Accra, Ghana, in 1963. Had become a naturalised citizen.
Notable People: Marcus Garvey
• Born in Jamaica, 17th August 1887
• Background in trade unionism; led a printers strike in 1908
• Formed the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914; spread
to the USA in 1917.
• Similar mission to the NAACP
• Against integration; Back to Africa movement
• He believed "in the principle of Europe for the
Europeans, and Asia for the Asiatics" and "Africa for
the Africans at home and abroad".
• Appealed to post WWI militancy; If willing to fight for
white America, must be willing to fight for African
Americans
• Elected provisional President of Africa in 1920
• Movement ran out of money; Garvey imprisoned for
fraud in 1925, then later deported to Jamaica. UNIA
disbanded in 1930
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
Charter
“To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or
race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to
advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for
them impartial suffrage; and to increase their
opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education
for the children, employment according to their ability
and complete equality before law”
NAACP
• Founded February 12th 1909.
• Mary White Ovington, William E.Walling,
Henry Moskowitz, also Charles Edward
Russell, Oswald Garrison Villard and W.E.B.
Du Bois.
• DuBois only African American founder - first
black President elected in 1975.
• 1919: 310 branches and 91,203 members
• Fought de jure racism wherever and whenever they could.
• Worked with the Government, but with little success in early years
Catalysts: Migration
• The ‘Great Migration’ took place from about 1915 to 1960; roughly 5
million migrants; High school education.
• ‘Migrated all over the North but especially to Harlem, New York, Chicago’s South
Side and Detroit, Michigan.
• Also migrated within the South: 17% of blacks living in urban areas in 1900; 33% by
1930
• White racial superiority; hostility and lynching; increased job competition
from white workers; lack of jobs due to industrialisation and
mechanisation; work opportunities in northern war industries; loss of
hope and will to change.
• Proved that blacks did matter to America, at least economically
 Southern whites feared their loss of cheap labour
• African Americans and sympathetic whites attempted to use the
movement for social change
 Could not expect African Americans to live in fear and as inferior citizens – if
Southern whites wanted them to stay, their situation had to change.
• Did not become a political issue until America’s entry into WWI
World War I
• Panic over place of African Americans
• Appointments to the government: Emmett J. Scott
appointed as a special advisor to the Secretary of War on
‘black interests’; George E. Haynes as Director of the
‘Division of Negro Economics’
• Widespread black commitment
• An opportunity to demonstrate worth
• Served in segregated units: 9th and 10th Cavalry and
the 24th and 25th Infantry, plus the 92nd and 93rd
combat divisions.
• Southern draft boards favoured black soldiers over
white
• Fear of ‘uppity’ black servicemen
• 1919: increase in lynching/ racially motivated riots
Harlem Renaissance
• Began after WWI and lasted through
the Great Depression.
• Not just in Harlem – most famous location
• Aimed to improve race relations and
black identity
• Culmination of the fight against
Jim Crow?
• Enabled through rising literacy rates, increased awareness of civil rights; strong
black communities, desire for change, individuality and self expression
• Art; Jazz/blues; Literature; Dance
• Focus on heritage; primitivism; ethnicity.
• Many clubs excluded blacks from the audience
WWII and the Double ‘V’
Campaign
• 1 million African American soldiers; Combat troops; officer status;
international situation lead to desegregation of military (1948)
• Racially motivated military riots; whites resisted black economic improvement –
fear of ‘uppity blacks’ mirrored situation post-WWI; first to lose jobs post-war
• Black women exchanged traditional careers for essential war work; ‘for the duration’
• ‘Double V’ Campaign: demanded victory over racism at home as well as the Axis abroad
• Popular campaign: NAACP membership exploded – 500,000 members in 1945
• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded in 1942
• Non-violent campaigners
• There is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro’s
status as a result of this war” – Gunnar Myrdal An
American Dilemma (1944)
• Migration made Southern problem nationwide
• Voting bloc power
• Increase in rights consciousness
Jim Crow and the Supreme
Court
• FDR appointed new, radical Supreme Court Justices:
• Hugo Black, 1937; Stanley Reed, 1938; Frank Murphy, 1940; and Robert Jackson,
1941.
• Missouri ex. rel Gaines V. Canada (1938)
• Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP
• Founded NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (1940)
• Smith V. Allwright (1944); Morgan v. Virginia (1946); Shelley
v. Kraemer (1948)
• Education: Sweatt v. Painter (1950); McLauren v.
Oklahoma State Regents (1950)
• Marshall appointed first African American Supreme
Court Judge by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967
Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka (1954)
• Conglomeration of a number of school segregation cases
• Argued in front of the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall
• Federal government, lead by Harry S. Truman, submitted amicus curiae briefs to the Court in
support of desegregation (1952)
• First instance of the Federal government
submitting a brief to a case they were not
directly involved in
• Overseas reputation had deteriorated due to Jim
Crow laws – post war focus on human rights
• Marshall won his case and made all
school segregation illegal (in theory)
• In practise, Brown did not gain enough power
to implement the ruling until the Higher
Education Act (1965)
• First ‘big’ win for Civil Rights
• Spurred troubles such as the Little Rock Crisis
Next time…
The USA in World War II