Study Guide
Takaki, chapter 13
To “The Land of Hope”
1. Up South to the Promised Land
2. The push: debt peonage, cotton prices, boll weevil, and Jim Crow
3. The pull: industrial jobs in the urban North – Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, New York
4. Key African American institutions
5. The role of the Black press
6. Richard Wright (p 317)
7. Patterns of settlement in the North
8. Restrictive covenants (Hyde Park Improvement Protective Club)
9. African Americans and the labor movement (p 321) – Richard Parker and the “Square Deal”
10. Racial antagonisms
11. The New Negro (and Black veterans)
12. Chicago riot (1919)
13. Claude McKay “If We Must Die”
"If We Must Die"
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
14. Marcus Garvey and the UNIA “Up you mighty race”
15. Harlem
16. Housing/rent prices
17. Harlem Renaissance
18. Langston Hughes – “I’ve Known Rivers” (p 329)
19. Jean Toomer – Cane
20. Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. Life below the Mason Dixon line
22. The Great Depression
23. “The surplus man, the last to be hired and the first to be fired” – sociologist Kelley Miller
24. The New Deal
25. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)
26. The Works Progress Administration (WPA)
27. Langston Hughes – “Waitin’ on Roosevelt”
Ballad of Roosevelt
The pot was empty,
The cupboard was bare.
I said, Papa,
What’s the matter here?
I’m waitin' on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Waitin' on Roosevelt, son.
The rent was due,
And the lights was out.
I said, Tell me, Mama,
What’s it all about?
We’re waitin' on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Just waitin' on Roosevelt.
Sister got sick
And the doctor wouldn’t come
Cause we couldn’t pay him
The proper sum—
A-waitin on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
A-waitin' on Roosevelt.
Then one day
They put us out o' the house.
Ma and Pa was Meek as a mouse
Still waitin' on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
But when they felt those
Cold winds blow
And didn’t have no
Place to go
Pa said, I’m tired
O’waitin' on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
Damn tired o‘ waitin’ on Roosevelt.
I can’t git a job
And I can’t git no grub.
Backbone and navel’s
Doin' the belly-rub—
A-waitin' on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt.
And a lot o' other folks
What’s hungry and cold
Done stopped believin'
What they been told
By Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt—
Cause the pot’s still empty,
And the cupboard’s still bare,
And you can’t build a
bungalow
Out o' air—
Mr. Roosevelt, listen!
What’s the matter here?
28. W.E.B Du Bois – A “cooperative and socialistic state”
29. UMWA and John Lewis
30. Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and industrial unionism
31. Support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party