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Theme 1: Treatment of Blacks and Response

Module by: Richard Daniel

Summary: This module teaches important events and people of Theme 1: Western Development & The New South

Key 2 Treatment of blacks and

response

OVERVIEW Southern states passed laws that discrimi­nated against blacks, and the U.S. government supported segregation by its court decisions.

Jim Crow laws: Passed by one Southern state after another, beginning in 1881.

  • These laws instituted racial segregation of public facilities.
  • By the 1890s, the Supreme Court had validated such legislation(see below).
  • Reaching into almost every area of Southern life, these laws pro­vided a means for whites to retain control of social relationsbetween the races in the urban and rural south.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): This landmark Supreme Court case involved a law that required separate seating for blacks and whites on railroads.

  • The Court decided that separate accommodations did not depriveblacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal.
  • The decision survived as the legal basis for segregated schoolsuntil the landmark decision of Brown \. Board of Education in1954.

Williams v. Mississippi (1898): This case validated literacy tests for vot­ing and thus illustrated the Court's willingness to let Southern states define their own suffrage standards, even at the expense of blacks.

Gumming v. Board of Education (1899): This case laid the foundation for segregated schools. The Court held that laws establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks.

Lynchings: White violence against blacks increased as another means of controlling blacks through terror and intimidation and inhibiting their agitation for equal rights.

  • The prime example of such violence involved lynching of blacksby white vigilante mobs.
  • Black prisoners or blacks simply accused of crimes were some­times executed in public rituals.

•During the 1890s there were about 187 lynchings each year, overfour-fifths in the South.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett: A black journalist who launched an international antilynching movement whose goal was a federal antilynching law.

Booker T. Washington: A chief spokesman for the black middle class that emerged in the New South.

  • He was the founder and president of Tuskegee Institute inAlabama.
  • His self-improvement message urged blacks to seek a technical,rather than a classical, education.
  • He believed that by adopting white middle-class standards inspeech, dress, and habits, blacks would gain the respect of whites.
  • In his philosophy of race relations, known as the AtlantaCompromise, he advocated the pursuit of economic gains forblacks as a step toward the attainment of social equality.

W. E. B. DuBois: A leading black critic of Booker T. Washington.

  • He urged the "talented tenth" of the black race to attend collegeand become professionals.
  • These blacks should lead the fight for the immediate restoration oftheir civil rights.
  • In 1905 DuBois founded the Niagara movement, which arguedagainst the accommodationist tactics of Washington.
  • The group's "Declaration of Principles" demanded suffrage andcivil rights by opposing Jim Crown laws.

NAACP (1909): W. E. B. DuBois's Niagara movement provided the groundwork for the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

  • This was an interracial organization whose goal was the attain­ment of equal rights for blacks through the use of lawsuits in fed­eral courts.
  • It opposed the political and economic subordination of blacks forpromoting the leadership of a trained, black elite.

KEY QUOTATION

The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to enforce the absolute u|iiality of the two races . . . but not to abolish distinctions based upon color. . . .

Court establishment of "separate but equal" doctrine

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

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