Other Americans Seek Justice
Progressives fought to advocate 2 things:
1.) working-class rights
2.) women’s rights
Remember
us?
…but they often neglected the rights of minorities
African
Americans
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Jim Crowe laws
Low-paying jobs
Refusal to rent homes in “white neighborhoods”
Jobless whites took out anger on blacks, as they
could get away with it (that’s messed up!)
• 1890s = 1,000+ African Americans were lynched:
murdered by mobs
Booker T. Washington
speaks for many African Americans & presses
white & blacks to live in harmony.
The System:
1. Work patiently to move up in
society
2. Learn trades & earn money
3. Then they’d have the power to
demand money
NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, promoting equal
rights for African Americans
Mexican
Americans
• Thousands move to the West & Southwest U.S.
• 1910: famine & revolution in Mexico = pushing them into
the states
• Met with a lot of racism & prejudice
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Worked as field hands
Build roads
Dug irrigation ditches
Factory workers
Paid FAR less than white workers
Denied skilled jobs (not even given the opportunity to succeed)
Neighborhoods
• Barrios: Mexican neighborhoods where language &
culture is preserved, traditional festivals & memories of
Mexico are shared.
– Los Angeles = nation’s largest barrio
• Mutualistas: mutual immigrant aid groups who pooled
money to buy insurance and pay for legal advice. They
also collected money for the sick and needy.
Asian Americans
Chinese Exclusion
Act (1882) sparked
racism
&
Kept Chinese from
settling in U.S.
Still a demand for cheap labor
– Philipinno & Japanese workers came
• Many come to Hawaii: sugar plantations
• Very skilled in farming, lumbering & mining
STILL – Asians denied skilled jobs
and paid less than whites
• Forced to attend separate schools
• Barred from owning any land in the U.S.
Japan was creeping up on the radar as building a VERY strong
Navy… we wanted to keep good ties with them, so as to not
create an enemy
Gentlemen’s Agreement: 1907 – agreement between
the U.S. & Japan to limit Japanese immigration
–Teddy Roosevelt would lift the segregation in schools
between whites & Japanese students
–Japan would stop any more workers from going to the U.S. if
the U.S. would allow Japanese women to join their husbands
who were already in the country
Native Americans
• Dawes Act (1877) divided reservation lands into
family plots, where Indians were supposed to
become farmers & assimilate with American life
(sound familiar?...)
BUT
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Much of the land these Indians received was in-farmable
Many had no farming skills (Hunter gatherers)
Sold land at cheap prices to white pioneers
No land, money, food, shelter
Native Americans
• Society of American Indians: group that
worked for social justice and tried to push
Native Americans into the American
mainstream
– Writers
– Artists
– Christian ministers
– Lawyers
– Doctors
– Worked for social justice and to educate white
Americans about Indian life