African American History

D

Increased Disfranchisement

White Southerners also increased their domination in the South by denying blacks the right to vote. Because the 15th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, white Southerners developed other ways to disfranchise blacks. Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, they passed laws making it more difficult to vote, such as those that required a person to pay a poll tax or pass a literacy test. These laws discriminated against blacks who were often poor and illiterate, and many were removed from the voting rolls. Officials exempted poor whites who could pass the 'good conduct test' by having a person of good standing in the community vouch for them. After 1898, Southern states adopted 'grandfather clauses,' which allowed illiterate and propertyless men to vote if their grandfathers had been eligible to vote prior to the abolition of slavery in 1865. Almost no blacks could meet this requirement.

Perhaps the most effective barrier to black political power was the white primary election. The primary determined the candidates who would run in the general election, but since the Democratic Party was the majority party, the candidates that it nominated in its primary always won the election. Primaries were the real election. Beginning in the 1890s Democrats were able to bar blacks from voting in the primary on the pretext that the party was a private club and thus not subject to federal laws prohibiting discrimination.

As Democrats reasserted political authority in the South, African Americans had few legal or humanitarian protections. Throughout Reconstruction, blacks were hanged without formal charge or trial. The reported lynchings increased from about 50 a year in the early 1880s, to about 75 a year in the mid-1880s, and averaging well over 100 a year during the 1890s. Between 1890 and 1900 more than 1200 African American men and women were lynched in the United States. Thus, by the end of the 19th century, Southern black people lived under the constant threat of terrorism, were denied access to public facilities supported by their taxes, were relegated to the worst schools, and labored under an unjust economic system enforced by discriminatory laws.

XIII

African American Responses

A

Rise of Populism

In the 1890s black farmers and white farmers, joined by common poverty and unjust treatment from wealthy planters and business interests, attempted to construct an interracial political alliance. This populist movement (see Populism) organized a political party, the People’s Party, and recruited blacks, some of whom were still voting in the mid-1890s. The party advocated political equality, and white populist leaders such as Georgia’s Tom Watson spoke out against the poll tax and other measures that discriminated against blacks. African Americans saw the populists as potential allies against the racism that threatened their rights, and many risked their lives to campaign for populist candidates. Black minister H.T. Dole gave 63 speeches on behalf of Watson; in Georgia, 15 black populists were killed during the state elections of 1892. Some white populists saw African Americans as allies in their campaign to take power from Southern Democrats and elected blacks to positions in the People’s Party.

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But the appeal of white supremacy was too strong. This coalition fell apart after 1896 as a result of intimidation and racist appeals to whites. The Ku Klux Klan's racist beliefs that all whites were superior to all blacks meant that whites were never at the bottom of society. In the end these beliefs were far more appealing than the prospect of an interracial political alliance.

B

Racial Accommodation

African Americans debated the best response to the rising tide of racial discrimination. Black educator Booker T. Washington reacted to this erosion of rights by advocating a policy of racial accommodation. Washington, who had been born into slavery, believed that protest aiming for social integration and political rights was doomed to failure in the South. Instead, he urged blacks to acquire occupational skills for economic advancement. He argued that African Americans were the backbone of Southern labor and urged sympathetic whites to encourage manual and agricultural education for blacks to strengthen the Southern economy. With the financial support of wealthy white businessmen, he established the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama in 1881 to educate black workers.

Washington's school was remarkably successful, considering the racially hostile atmosphere. His accommodationist stance made him one of the most influential African Americans among powerful whites during the late 19th and early 20th century, but many blacks resented his seeming willingness to accept without protest the deprivation of African American rights.

Many college-educated blacks disagreed with Washington and pursued equality through political and social protest. Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, William Monroe Trotter, and W.E.B. Du Bois were among those who established such all-black groups as the African American Council, the Niagara Movement, and in 1909, the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They demanded their civil rights and worked against the Jim Crow system of segregation through the courts and, where possible, through politics.

XIV

Black Culture in the Early 20th Century

During the last quarter of the 19th century, black urban societies in the South grew as many agricultural workers sought work and the relative safety of the city. Black women in particular found jobs as domestics in the homes of the growing white middle class. A few African Americans found work in the new Southern textile mills and tobacco factories, but most of those jobs were reserved for whites. Generally, Southern blacks in the cities, like those in rural areas, teetered on the edge of poverty, although such Southern cities as Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, and Atlanta had small but significant black middle class communities.

As black urban communities grew, they offered a broader range of social institutions and educational opportunities. Cities attracted many blacks who had been educated at Howard, Fisk, Atlanta, Hampton, and other black colleges established during the 19th century. The growth in the size and literacy of the urban black populace stimulated cultural and intellectual activity. Blacks published newspapers and magazines in all substantial African American communities.

The composers Scott Joplin and W. C. Handy and the poet-novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar were among the black artists who achieved prominence at the turn of the century. Many other lesser-known musicians and writers combined Western musical styles with rhythmic and melodic forms rooted in Africa and in slavery to create American jazz. This musical style reflected African notions of improvisation and community and developed distinctive regional styles, from the Dixieland popular in New Orleans and the western South to the more sophisticated sounds that became the cool jazz of the southern Atlantic states. As blacks migrated to the West and the North, they carried these regional musical styles with them.

XV

The Great Migration

During the first decade of the 20th century, the infestation of Southern cotton crops by insects called boll weevils diminished production and curtailed the need for farm labor. Growing unemployment and increasing racial violence encouraged blacks to leave the South. Soon after, in 1914, World War I broke out in Europe. Although the United States did not enter the war until 1917, its factories supplied the combatants. American industry needed labor, and the war slowed European immigration. In response, Northern manufacturers recruited Southern black workers to fill factory jobs. From 1910 to 1930 between 1.5 million and 2 million African Americans left the South for the industrial cities of the North. By 1930 more than 200,000 blacks had moved to New York, about 180,000 to Chicago, and more than 130,000 to Philadelphia.

The sudden influx of newcomers to established Northern black communities brought not only new vitality but also new problems. Tensions grew between long-time black residents and the new emigrants, who were generally poor and sometimes illiterate. Cheap taverns and dance halls sprang up to cater to them, and they established new churches (often storefront quarters) that rivaled older more traditional black churches.

As black communities in Northern cities grew, black working people became the clientele for an expanding black professional and business class, gaining in political and economic power. This new black leadership replaced traditional leaders whose status often depended on their connection to influential whites. New leaders were more likely to have power based in the black communities and were freer to express a sense of racial pride and solidarity with working class African Americans.

Under these conditions, many social conflicts gradually gave way to an increasing sense of racial pride and social cohesion. While Jim Crow laws and political terrorism continued to discourage blacks from voting in the South, African Americans in Northern cities became an important political force. Black fraternal orders, political organizations, social clubs, and newspapers asserted an urban consciousness that became the foundation for the militancy and African American cultural innovations of the 1920s.

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