Jim Crow and Civil Rights

1. Jim Crow and Civil Rights The African American Experience

2. Guiding Questions: • What difference did the rise of Jim Crow policies make in the day-to-day lives of African Americans at the turn of the century? • How did African Americans respond to the racial hostility they experienced in the Jim Crow era?

3. What was Jim Crow? • The legal and extralegal forms of racial segregation • A system of racial domination

4. When and where did the Jim Crow system exist? • 1880s-1900s – codification of the separation of blacks and whites • De jure segregation vs. de factor segregation • North and South

5. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, "segregation would have been impractical under slavery…” • Discuss this statement • For additional reading see http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/solguide/VUS08/essay08c.html

6. Why race relations worsened in the late 1880s and 1890s is a hotly contested question. • it reflected the collapse of the cotton economy, which led many whites to search for scapegoats. • also related to a fear among many southern whites that a new generation of African Americans which had been born after the Civil War and not been subjected to slavery would not defer to white authority. • a reaction against the increasing economic independence of southern blacks. From 1880 to 1900, black farm ownership increased from 19.6 to 25.4 percent, while sharecropping, declined from 54.4. to 37.9 percent.

7. A System of Racial Domination • Economics • Politics • Social

8. Jim Crow • Must help students understand that Jim Crow was more than a series of strict anti-black laws. It was a way of life. • List of typical Jim Crow laws • Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia). • Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana). • Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia). • See “What Was Jim Crow?” by Dr. David Pilgrim at www.jimcrow.org

9. Jim Crow etiquette A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them. Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names. If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat or the back of a truck. White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.

10. Race and Place

11. Social Jim Crowism: Segregated Transportation • Challenges against Segregated Transportation (see “All the Women were White”) • Niagara Movement (see next slide) • The Niagara Movement was organized in 1905 by W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, Ida Wells Barnett, and other middle-class but militant Black intellectuals. It was a repudiation of the conservative and stifling leadership of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine. (see “The Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles” at http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1152.htm ) • NAACP • The NAACP was formed in 1909 through the merger of two organizations: the Niagara Movement and the National Negro Conference.

12. The black laws / speech of Hon. B.W. Arnett of Greene County, and Hon. J.A. Brown of Cuyahoga County, in the Ohio House of Representatives, March 10, 1886. • Members [of the Ohio House of Representatives] will be astonished when I tell them that I have traveled in this free country for twenty hours without anything to eat; not because I had no money to pay for it, but because I was colored. Other passengers of a lighter hue had breakfast, dinner and supper. In traveling we are thrown in "jim crow" cars, denied the privilege of buying a berth in the sleeping coach. This monster caste stands at the doors of the theatres and skating rinks, locks the doors of the pews in our fashionable churches, closes the mouths of some of the ministers in their pulpits which prevents the man of color from breaking the bread of life to his fellowmen. • This foe of my race stands at the school house door and separates the children, by reason of color, and denies to those who have a visible admixture of African blood in them the blessings of a graded school and equal privileges...We call upon all friends of Equal Rights to assist us in this struggle to secure the blessings of untrammeled liberty for ourselves and prosperity. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapprot.html

13. Excerpt of “The Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles” (1905) • Protest: We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust. • Color-Line: Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest; but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. • "Jim Crow" Cars: We protest against the "Jim Crow" car, since its effect is and must be to make us pay first-class fare for third-class accommodations, render us open to insults and discomfort and to crucify wantonly our manhood, womanhood and self-respect.

14. Economic Jim Crowism

15. Sharecropping System – the dominate form of labor relations • What did black farmers want? • What did white planters want? • Cycle of debt • “fixing the books” • “settlin’ time” • Debt peonage • Credit system • Vagrancy laws • Convict lease system • Involuntary servitude

16. Sharecropper Contract, 1882 http://chnm.gmu.edu/acpstah/unitdocs/unit6/lesson3/sharecropper.pdfhttp://chnm.gmu.edu/acpstah/unitdocs/unit6/lesson3/mapcontractquestions.pdf To every one applying to rent land upon shares, the following conditions must be read, and agreed to. To every 30 and 35 acres, I agree to furnish the team, plow, and farming implements . . . The croppers are to have half of the cotton, corn, and fodder (and peas and pumpkins and potatoes if any are planted) if the following conditions are complied with, but-if not-they are to have only two-fifths (2/5) . . . All must work under my direction. . . . No cropper is to work off the plantation when there is any work to be done on the land he has rented, or when his work is needed by me or other croppers. . . . Every cropper must feed or have fed, the team he works, Saturday nights, Sundays, and every morning before going to work, beginning to feed his team (morning, noon, and night every day in the week) on the day he rents and feeding it to including the 31st day of December. ...for every time he so fails he must pay me five cents. The sale of every cropper's part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to sell, and after deducting all they owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds. Work of every description, particularly the work on fences and ditches, to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am satisfied that it is done as it should be. SOURCE: Grimes Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Robert D. Marcus and David Burner, eds., America Firsthand (1992), pp. 306—308.

17. Sharecropping:Continuity or Change? http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogeler/w188/planta3.htm

18. Frustrated SharecroppersRobert Curtis Smith (turn of the century) in Litwack, Trouble in Mind, p. 134 • If you make a crop and don’t clear nothin’ and you still wound up won on your sharecrop and on your furnish’ and you try to move, well the police be after you then all right. But if you’re clear well mostly, you cant go too far because of the money. If you move, or if you try to move, they know if they like the way you work they make you pay somethin’ just for holdin’ the house up. If, after you pay that you want to move, well you can’t go too far because…you gonne need money to carry you on to the place where you can get work. And if you caint get work at one place you go to the next place, but you caint go too far, because you aint got enough in hand to go that far.

19. Sharecropping in Virginia • http://www.mcps.org/ss/5thgrade/ShareCropTN.pdf

20. How did African Americans respond to the limits of Southern labor systems? • Maintain self-sufficiency • Tenancy • A tenant owned the crop he produced, the sharecropper did not • Black women’s labor

21. Housing • In the rural South, blacks lived in the same housing that had been built for slaves. What did this housing look like? • When did housing improve? How?

22. Housing • 1895-1896, U.S. Department of Agriculture report on housing in the Tuskegee region of Alabama: • Practically all the negroes live in cabins, generally built of logs, with only one or at most two rooms. The spaces between the logs were either left open, admitting free passage of the wind in winter as well as in summer, or were chinked with earth or occasionally with pieces of board. The roofs were covered with coarse shingles or boards and were apt to be far from tight. The windows had no sash or glass, but instead, wooden blinds, which were kept open in all weather to admit the light.

23. W. E. B. Du Bois (1908) • As cooking, washing and sleeping go on in the same room an accumulation of stale sickly odors are manifest to every visitor…A room so largely in use is with difficulty to kept clean. ….animals stray into the house; there are either no privies or bad ones; facilities for bathing even the face and hands are poor…The average country home leaks in the roof and is poorly protected against changes in the weather. A hard storm means the shutting out of all air and light; cold weather leads to overheating, draughts, or poor ventilation; hot weather breeds diseases….

24. Georgia farm operator (turn of the century) • The original plantation houses of the South, I regret to say, were mostly 1-room affairs, 20 or 25 feet square, and those were mostly of logs. The modern house is a frame house, boarded and sheathed with 3 rooms – a general family room, which is used only to put the family bed in and then a separate bedroom, and a kitchen. The general modern tenant house is a 3-room house.

25. 1901, Georgia commissioner of Agriculture • Landlords have been forced to build better tenant houses and provide them with modern systems that are adapted all around, in order to retain and keep the best labor. That is really the way that a great many of our best people succeed in keeping their labor, and the better class of labor, by making everything around them as comfortable as possible.

27. Sharecropper’s cabin

28. The Politicsof Jim Crow • Disfranchisement and Political Intimidation

29. Disfranchisement – 2 Parts • Disfranchisement I: The Politics and Culture of Violence • Use of violence to suppress black political action • Disfranchisement II: Literacy Requirements, property qualifications, Poll Taxes, Grandfather Clauses, and Understanding Clauses • Disfanchisment Laws had to be carefully crafted to avoid 15th amendment, they could not explicitly use race as a barrier to voting.

30. The Culture of Violence and Intimidation • Chain GangsConvict Lease System

31. Taken from the third chapter of "The Reason why the colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition," published in 1893 • … the convicts are leased out to work for railway contractors, mining companies and those who farm large plantations. These companies assume charge of the convicts, work them as cheap labor and pay the states a handsome revenue for their labor… • ..[The] reason our race furnishes so large a share of the convicts is that the judges, juries and other officials of the courts are white men who share these prejudices. They also make the laws. It is wholly in their power to extend clemency to white criminals and mete severe punishment to black criminals for the same or lesser crimes. The Negro criminals are mostly ignorant, poor and friendless. Possessing neither money to employ lawyers nor influential friends, they are sentenced in large numbers to long terms of imprisonment for petty crimes. • …Every Negro so sentenced not only means able-bodied men to swell the state's number of slaves, but every Negro so convicted is thereby disfranchised. • http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fredouconlea.html

32. Jackson Weekly Clarion, printed in 1887 the inspection report of the state prison in Mississippi: • "We found [in the hospital section] twenty-six inmates, all of whom have been lately brought there off the farms and railroads, many of them with consumption and other incurable diseases, and all bearing on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment. Most of them have their backs cut in great wales, scars and blisters, some with the skin pealing off in pieces as the result of severe beatings. Their feet and hands in some instances show signs of frostbite, and all of them with the stamp of manhood almost blotted out of their faces.... They are lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through their skin, many complaining for the want of food.... We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stiff with filth. As a fair sample of this system, on January 6, 1887, 204 convicts were leased to McDonald up to June 6, 1887, and during this six months 20 died, and 19 were discharged and escaped and 23 were returned to the walls disabled and sick, many of whom have since died." • http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm

33. Why the convict lease system? • no black crime spree • Southern governments wanted to control the black population. • The system used by the planter class and industrialist to intimidate black sharecroppers and provide workers for the South’s growing industry. • The system reaffirmed white feelings of racial superiority • Helped maintained racial hierarchy of southern society.

34. Other Helpful Websites: • http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/ • Especially see sections on “Jim Crow Laws,” “Lynching and Riots,” and “Jim Crow Stories.” The lesson plans and activities are also useful.

35. Disfranchisement • Almost all southern states passed statutes restricting suffrage in the years from 1871 to 1889 • But, it was in the 1890s that a formal movement for disfranchisement emerged in full force. • Why the Delay? • The Fifteenth Amendment • prohibited states from depriving a citizen of his vote due to race, color, or condition of servitude. • Four main ways disfranchisement was accomplished • Poll Tax , Literacy requirements , Property requirements , Residency requirements

36. Escape clauses • designed so that poor and illiterate whites could still qualify to vote. • (1) Understanding clause • Literacy and educational requirements • http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/17_02/Vote172.shtml LA Literacy Test • Grandfather clause • Could not vote if grandfather could not have voted prior to 1867

38. African-American Responses to Jim Crow Politics • Booker T. Washington • The Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895 (see http://historymatters.gmu.edu for document) • The Washington-DuBois Debate • “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” published within The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (see http://historymatters.gmu.edu for document)

39. W.E.B. Du Bois ,  The Souls of Black Folk.  1903.Chapter III: Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others • …it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—         First, political power,         Second, insistence on civil rights,         Third, higher education of Negro youth,— and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: • The disfranchisement of the Negro. • The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. • The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. •  These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No.

40. Racist Publications and Black Response

41. How are African Americans represented in these photographs?http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/menu.htm

42. Do you see any similarities to depicting people as inferior and the use of violence against them? • Negative images used to justify discrimination and segregationist system

44. Defending black identity • Henry M. Turner • “A man must believe he is somebody before he is acknowledged to be somebody…Respect Black.” (Litwack, Trouble in Mind, p. 462)

45. Black Progress/Black Resistance

46. The Quest for an Education • Discussion starter: Ask students what the importance of education is to them. How significant is it in their lives?

47. The Value of an education • Elderly black woman,” deer fesser, please accept this 18 cents it is all I have. I save it out of my washing this week. God will bless you. Send you more next week.” • A teacher’s diary, “Aunt Hester gave a pound of butter and a dime. Grandma Williams a chicken. Effie McCoy, a cake and five cents; Bessie a dress.” • See Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, p. 49

48. The value of an education: from another perspective • Montgomery Alabama Lawyer, “It is a question of who will do the dirty work…If you educate the Negroes they won’t stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented.” • Unknown, “It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted and desirous of working where he is not wanted…” • See Litwack, Trouble in Mind, p. 95

49. The Quest for Education • Why were students afraid? • One Virginia county man, “down in my neighborhood they are afraid to be caught with a book.” • Caroline Smith, 1871, Georgia “They would not let us have schools. They (KKK) went to a colored man there, whose son had been teaching school, and they took evry book they had and threw them into the fire; and they said they would dare any other [negro] to have a book in his house…

50. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois • Identify significant differences in the early lives of Washington and Du Bois. Where was each man born? Who was born a slave? Where did they go to school? What early experiences played a role in shaping their differing philosophies on elevating African-Americans in American society? • Contrast the educational theories of both men. What did each man believe should be the purpose of education for African Americans?