The Rise of Segregation

1. The Rise of Segregation

2. Sharecropping • After Reconstruction most African Americans are living in conditions no better than slavery • Technically they were free but very few could escape the impoverished conditions • Sharecroppers: Landless farmers who gave a share of their crop to the landlord to cover their costs for rent and farming supplies • “Cycle of Poverty”

3. Exodus to Kansas • Mass migration of African Americans from the South to Kansas • Kansas = The land of Abolitionist John Brown and more Progressive and Tolerant • Led by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton: Former Slave, Abolitionist, and Community leader

4. Colored Farmers’ National Alliance • African Americans who stayed in the South joined the fight with other poor white farmers • Set up cooperatives and many African Americans joined the Populist Party • Threatened by the power of the Populist, Democrats use racism to try and win back the poor white vote in the South

5. 15th Amendment ??? • Right to vote shall not be denied by any citizen based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude • Loophole: Doesn’t bar the government from requiring that citizens be literate or own property

6. Poll Taxes • Citizens must pay a sum of money in order to vote • Most African Americans can’t afford this fee

7. Literacy Tests • Most African Americans can’t read and the ones who can don’t fare any better • Complicated Passages from Constitution filled with legalese and convoluted sentences • Write down the section as the registrar spoke it • Asked to interpret questions based on the excerpt you just read

8. What about the poor illiterate Whites? • Whites were given simple passages as election officials were far less strict in applying these tests • Grandfather Clause: Any man may vote as long as an ancestor had voted before

9. Jim Crow Laws • “Jump Jim Crow” • A song and dance done by a white performer in black face during the 1820’s • Lampooned African Americans as being ignorant, lazy and buffoonish

10. Jim Crow Laws = Legalized Segregation • Mandated de jure Segregation of all Public Facilities including: • Public Schools • Public Places • Public Transportation • Restaurants • Hotels • Theaters

11. Bus Station

12. Restaurant in Louisville, KY

13. Schools

14. Drinking Fountain

15. Plessy v. Ferguson • Homer Plessy challenges a Louisiana law that forced him to ride in a separate railcar • He was arrested for riding in a white’s only car • 1896 Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana Law and endorsed a new doctrine of “Separate but Equal”

16. Separate but Equal? • Ruling establishes the legal basis for discrimination for over 50 years • While Public Facilities for African Americans were separate, they were far from being equal • Almost always drastically inferior

17. Lynching of African Americans • Huge Spectacles with 100’s watching • Consisted of Hanging the Victim, Mutilating, and then burning the body

18. African Americans Respond • Ida B. Wells • Journalist who launches a campaign against lynching • Believed that lynching was a result of economics and greed

19. Booker T. Washington • Born into slavery became a successful educator, orator, and author • Wanted African Americans to focus on Economic goals as opposed to Legal or Political ones

20. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Speech • Presented to a mostly white crowd at the Cotton States and International Exposition • “We shall constitute one third of the ignorance and crime of the south or one-third of its intelligence and progress” • Wanted the whites to rely on African American Labor and not immigrant • Washington actually endorsed segregation by claiming that blacks and whites could exist as separate fingers of a hand

21. W.E.B. Du Bois • Concerned with African American voting rights • Helped found the NAACP • Disagreed with Washington’s integration of blacks into the community, wanted equal rights, self government, and unity for African people • Du Bois called Washington’s speech the “Atlanta Compromise”