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Urban Experience. IMMIGRATION. -Old Immigration Western Europe - New Immigration , 1890 Eastern Europe Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland (to East Coast) Asian Immigration Come to America to mine, worked on railroads, then as farmers (West Coast) Hispanic Immigration
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IMMIGRATION • -Old Immigration • Western Europe • -New Immigration, 1890 • Eastern Europe • Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland (to East Coast) • Asian Immigration • Come to America to mine, worked on railroads, then as farmers (West Coast) • Hispanic Immigration • Come to the South and East for political freedom “America…We were so near it seemed too much to believe. Everyone stood silent- like in prayer…Then we were entering the harbor. The land came so near we could almost reach out and touch it…everyone was holding their breath…” ~Rosa Cavalleri, Italian immigrant
NEW LIFE • -difficult journey • 1-3 weeks in steerage with diseases and not much food • -Ellis Island, NY • immigrant processing • Physical exam, government inspection (criminal record) • -Angel Island, SF • Harsher examinations, detentions Waiting in line at Ellis Island in New York. This was the major immigrant in-processing station in the nation, as 17 million immigrants passed through its gates to gain entrance to the United States.
NEW LIFE • -Culture Shock • Need a home and job in a brand new culture • ethnic communities • Similar language/customs • -Melting Pot • Mixing together of all cultures by assimilation • -Nativism • Favoring native-born Americans over immigrants • Chinese Exclusion Act • Banned Chinese immigration for 10 years Once in America, new immigrants had to endure physical examinations (to check for disease and lice), as well as governmental examinations, which checked your criminal record in your previous country. While many were admitted, some were sent back home.
URBAN GROWTH • -urban life • 1/12 in 1840--1/3 by 1900 • -immigrant settlement • In cities for cheap housing and available jobs • -decline of farmers • new technology, fewer workers • -closing of the frontier • People move to the cities • -industrialization • Available jobs • -cultural opportunities Most immigrants settled in and around the major cities because of their proximity to jobs, as well as allowing cultural groups to stay together. When this happened, places like “Little Italy” and “Chinatown” sprang up across major cities.
We cannot all live in the city, yet nearly all seem determined to do so.” ~Horace Greeley
URBAN PROBLEMS • -poor housing • row houses • Single-family dwellings that shared side walls with other similar houses • tenements • Multi-family dwellings; over-crowded, unsanitary • -transportation • Mass transit to move people to jobs (street car, subway) • -rising crime rates • Small police forces and the poor are very desperate
“I looked about the narrow streets…ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ashcans and garbage cans cluttering the sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down on my heart-the first doubt of America.” ~Anzia Yezierska, Russian Immigrant
URBAN PROBLEMS • -few city services • water • Indoor plumbing rare, water unsafe to drink • sanitation • Manure, sewage and trash in streets, foul air • fire • Wood dwellings with candles and oil lamps • Small fire departments with limited water supply • -pollution and disease • Lack of sanitation
“’One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there. “Suppose we look into a tenement on Cherry Street…Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny helpless cry…The child is dying of measles. With half a chance it might have lived. But it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.” ~Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
RAISING AWARENESS • -Social Gospel • Christian theme of helping the less fortunate • Salvation Army • -Jacob Riis • “How the Other Half Lives” • Book about the urban poor written to get help • -Jane Addams • Hull House, Chicago • Settlement Houses • Community centers in slums that provide services to the poor Jacob Riis and Jane Addams crusade for the poor to improve their urban living conditions in the major cities. “Presently she established a kindergarten, a gymnasium, evening classes, clubs for young people and clubs for old people, and a day nursery where workingwomen might leave their children. As her work advanced she experienced the need of more room and several buildings were added to the original brick Hull House.”
Discrimination WARNING: Many of the images in this presentation are graphic
Voting Discrimination • Democrats limit blacks’ rights • -literacy tests • Limit the vote to those who could read (black and white) • Would ask blacks harder questions than whites • -poll taxes • An annual tax to be paid before qualifying to vote • Too poor to pay tax • -grandfather clause • To reinstate white voters • Could vote if your grandfather could in 1867 (no blacks) To limit the freedman’s rights, especially in the South, Democratic leaders began passing literacy tests and poll taxes as a stepping stone to the polls. This also limited poor whites from voting. To protect them, they issued the grandfather clause, which stated that if your father or grandfather could vote on January 1, 1867, then you could vote. At that point, black people did not have the right to vote.
Segregation • -black codes • Limited freedmen’s rights • -Jim Crow laws • Laws passed to segregate whites and blacks in public • -segregation • Legal separation of the races • -Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 • separate but equal doctrine • Institutionalized and legalized segregation • 60 years of legal segregation (in North and South)
Types of Segregation De Facto Segregation De Jure Segregation Segregation by law • Segregation by fact
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it… Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically.” - Plessy v. Ferguson Majority Opinion- “The present decision...will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.” -Plessy v. Ferguson Dissenting Opinion -
Race Relations • -racial etiquette • Informal rules and customs between blacks and whites • Blacks must show deference to whites • -lynching • Mob killing without fair trial • Ida B. Wells • Fought nationwide struggle to end lynching and racial inequality • -discrimination in the Northern cities also • Discrimination in work and neighborhoods Between 1885 and 1900, more than 2500 African American men and women were shot, burned, or hanged without a trial in the South.
Three of Ida B. Wells’s friends were lynched on March 9, 1892. The men had opened a store that successfully competed with a nearby white-owned store. The competition escalated into violence and the three black owners were arrested. Later, a white mob formed, grabbed the three men from the jail and killed them. Wells recognized lynching for what it was and began to denounce it in her local Memphis paper. The local white press began to call for her to be lynched. She moved to the north, where she continued her fight against lynching. ____________________________ “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” - Ida B. Wells -
Some of the almost 4,000 blacks who were lynched between 1882 and 1962 were lynched in settings that are appropriately described as picnic-like. Phillip Dray, a historian, stated: "Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic." Bray did not exaggerate. At the end of the 19th century, Henry Smith, a mentally challenged 17-year-old black male, was accused of killing a white girl. Before a cheering crowd of hundreds, Smith was made to sit on a "parade float" drawn by four white horses. The float circled numerous times before the excited crowd tortured, then burned Smith alive. After the lynching the crowd celebrated and collected body parts as souvenirs.Often the lynch mob acted with haste, but on other occasions the lynching was a long-drawn out affair with speeches, food-eating, and, unfortunately, ritualistic and sadistic torture: victims were dragged behind cars, pierced with knives, burned with hot irons or blowtorches, had their fingers and toes cut off, had their eyes cut out, and were castrated -- all before being hanged or burned to death. One Mississippi newspaper referred to these gruesome acts as "Negro barbeques.“
Booker T. Washington • -Founded Tuskegee Institute • Taught useful skills in agricultural, domestic, and mechanical work • -gradual improvement was goal • Let white people see value and achievement in blacks • -economic equality first • vocational training • Acquire useful skills and prove value to whites • -Atlanta Compromise • -Washington proposed that races could cooperate on certain economic issues while being separate in social issues “To those of the white race…I would repeat what I say to my own race…Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth…In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” ~Booker T. Washington, Atlanta
W.E.B. DuBois • -Harvard educated • First black man to receive a PhD from Harvard • -demanded full equal rights now • -Niagara Falls Convention • Encouraged blacks to seek a liberal arts education to have well-educated black leaders • -helped found the NAACP Du Bois proposed that a group of educated blacks, the most “talented tenth” of the community, attempt to achieve immediate inclusion into mainstream American life. “We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship,” Du Bois argued, “but by our political ideals…And the greatest of those ideals is that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.”
Booker T. Washington • Former Slave • Founded Tuskegee Institute • Gradual Improvement • Equality through Vocational Work • “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
WEB DuBois • Middle class family in Mass. • Graduated from Harvard • Equality Now • Equality through most talented • citizens • “The honor, I assure you, was • Harvard’s.”
Other Discrimination • -Mexican seasonal workers • Railroads, mining, agriculture • Some forced into debt and sold into slavery to repay employers • -continued resentment of the Chinese • Fear of job competition pushed the Chinese into segregated schools and neighborhoods • Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) Groups like the KKK would ensure racial segregation was upheld, not just in the South, but throughout the entire United States.
