The Rise of Segregation
In the late 1800s, Southern states passed laws that
denied African Americans the right to vote and
imposed segregation on them.
• After Reconstruction, most African Americans were
sharecroppers, or landless farmers who had to
give the landlord a large share of their crops to
cover their costs for rent and farming supplies.
 In 1879 Benjamin “Pap” Singleton organized a
mass migration of African Americans, called
Exodusters, from the rural South to Kansas
 Some African Americans that stayed in the South
formed the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance
 The organization worked to help its members set
up cooperatives
 Many African Americans joined the Populist Party
 Threatened by the power of the Populist Party,
Democratic leaders began using racism to try to
win back the poor white vote in the South
 By 1890 election officials in the South began
using methods to make it difficult for African
Americans to vote
 Southern states used loopholes in the Fifteenth
Amendment and began to impose restrictions
that barred almost all African Americans from
voting
 In 1890 Mississippi required all citizens
registering to vote to pay a poll tax, which most
African Americans could not afford to pay
 The state also required all prospective voters to
take a literacy test
 Most African Americans had no education and
failed the test
 Other Southern states adopted similar restrictions
 The number of African Americans and poor whites
registered to vote fell dramatically in the South
 To allow poor whites to
vote, some Southern
states had a
grandfather clause in
their voting restrictions
 This clause allowed
any man to vote if he
had an ancestor on the
voting rolls in 1867
 In the late 1800s, both the North and the South
discriminated against African Americans
 In the South, segregation, or separation of the
races, was enforced by laws known as Jim Crow
laws
 In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil
Rights Act of 1875
 The ruling meant that private organizations or
businesses were free to practice segregation
 Southern states passed a series of laws that
enforced segregation in
 The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson
endorsed “separate but equal” facilities for
African Americans
 This ruling established the legal basis for
discrimination in the South for over 50 years
almost all public places
 In the late 1800s, mob violence increased in the United
States, particularly in the South
 Between 1890 and 1899, hundreds of lynchings–
executions without proper court proceedings–took
place
 Most lynchings were in the South, and the victims were
mostly African Americans
 In 1892 Ida B. Wells, an
African American from
Tennessee, began a crusade
against lynching
 She wrote newspaper articles
and a book denouncing
lynchings and mob violence
against African Americans
 Booker T. Washington, an African American
educator, urged fellow African Americans to
concentrate on achieving economic goals rather
than legal or political ones
 He explained his views in a speech known as the
Atlanta Compromise
 The Atlanta Compromise was challenged by
W.E.B. Du Bois, the leader of African American
activists born after the Civil War
 Du Bois said that white Southerners continued to
take away the civil rights of African Americans,
even though they were making progress in
education and vocational training
 He believed that African Americans had
to demand their rights, especially voting rights, to
gain full equality