Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Jim Crow. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

Eastman, George: (1854-1943) This notable founder of Eastman Kodak Company was born in 1854 in Waterville, New York. He attended private schools and in 1881, after holding several temporary positions, formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company. During his lifetime, his corporation became the largest film and camera producers in the world, developed the Kodak camera, roll film, the pocket Kodak camera, and 16mm Kodacolor film, which made cinematography possible. Eastman was known throughout his lifetime as a great philanthropist. He did not believe that wealth should be kept to one's self and he donated most of his earnings to either educational institutions, medical institutes, or to programs that specifically benefited his employees--including African-American colleges and organizations.

Eckford, Elizabeth: (1942 - ) On September 4, 1957, fifteen year old Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, attempted to integrate Little Rock's Central High School by herself. Two days earlier Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus vowed to defy federally mandated school integration and dispatched more than 200 National Guardsmen to surround Central High School. The guard, Fabus alleged, were sent "to prevent violence." The nine black students chosen by school authorities to integrate the school had originally planned to meet at Central on September 4th and walk into the school as a group. But because of the heightened danger and the volatility of the white community, the group's leaders decided in the interest of safety to meet off-campus and approach the school accompanied by a group of black and white ministers. Because the Eckford family had no telephone, word of the new meeting place never reached Elizabeth, leaving her all alone to face a jeering, white mob and the National Guard. Believing the guards were present to protect her, she tried to pass through the line several times before being rebuffed by bayonettes and forced back into the white crowd. Terrified, Eckford retreated and started to walk away but the crowd pursued her, spat on her, and clawed her, yelling, "Nigger!" and "Lynch her!" Finally, Grace Lorch, the wife of a local white minister, helped Eckford board a city bus and returned her to her mother safely. The following day Will Counts' famous photograph of the somber and frightened Eckford hounded by a group of heckling whites appeared on countless newspapers, pushing Eckford and the Little Rock crisis onto the national stage.

Over the next few weeks, Faubus continued to fight federal authorities until finally on September 24th, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard wresting control away from Faubus and ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students into the school. For the remainder of the school year, the guard accompanied the students from class to class.

The Little Rock Nine eventually succeeded in integrating Central High School. Elizabeth Eckford later received a degree in history from Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. She served in the United States Army for several years, was a social worker and substitute teacher, and in 1974 returned to live in her family's home in Little Rock, the only one of the Nine to return to that city to live. In 1999, forty-two years after the crisis, Eckford and the other Little Rock Nine students received the Congressional Gold Medal from President Bill Clinton as "a permanent remembrance of their unforgettable moment of courage." She is also the recipient of the Spingarn Medal, the highest award for achievement given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Edward Waters College: A school of higher education, whose comparisons with the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes are not exaggerated--several times since its founding in 1866, the school came close to extinction, but survived. After the Civil War, Charles H. Pearce, Elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, came to Florida to establish a church. While doing so, he became aware of the freedmen's need for education and established a school, as well. With very little money at its disposal, the school struggled until support came from the AME Church and Florida's Governor, Harrison Reed. With a State charter in 1872, the school was named Brown Theological Institute. A few years later, however, the school fell into the hands of its creditors and its doors were closed for ten years. Again, with financial assistance from the AME Church, the school reopened as East Florida Scientific and Divinity High School. In 1892, it changed its name to Edward Waters College in honor of AME Bishop Edward Waters. Disaster revisited in 1901 the school when the Jacksonville fire consumed the college and completely destroyed its buildings. Again, the AME Church engineered its rebuilding, which has progressed without further catastrophe. In 1960, the college granted its first bachelor's degrees, then joined the United Negro College Fund in 1985. Throughout the 1980s, the school dealt with falling admissions, withering funds, and deteriorating buildings. With a revised curriculum and a recommitment to its philosophy to reach culturally distinct students, the college currently enrolls approximately 700 students.

Electoral College: Because the founding fathers of the nation did not trust the general electorate to wisely select the nation's president and vice president, they set up an Electoral College whose members would make that choice. The Constitution provides that each state will appoint to this College a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives from that state in Congress. The state's legislature can determine how these electors will be selected. It was hoped that only the wisest and most responsible men would be sent to the Electoral College. By the 1820s, however, with the rise of political parties, nominees for the Electoral College were expected to pledge in advance of their appointment or election to vote for the candidates of a specific party. Today, when the popular vote in a state is won by one of the dominant parties, individuals pledged to support that party's candidates will be elected to the College. In the thousands of electoral votes cast since 1800, only a handful of delegates broke their pre-election pledges. In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment provided for separate votes in the College for President and Vice President. In 1961, the Twenty-Third Amendment gave electors to the District of Columbia. Because of the way the College is set up, it is possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the nation and still not gain a majority of the Electoral College. This happened in 1888, when Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison, and again in the 2000 election when Albert Gore won the popular vote but lost to George W, Bush in the Electoral College.

Elizabeth City State University: An educational institution that came into existence in 1891 when the North Carolina General Assembly enacted House Bill 383 establishing a normal school for African Americans. It opened the following year with 23 students and two faculty. Although the school's mission originally centered on teacher training, the curriculum expanded over the years from a two-year to a four-year degree granting institution in 1937. One hundred years after it was founded, Elizabeth City State University, which became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1971, boasts a rich, multi-cultural student body of over 2,000. Currently, the university offers 34 degree programs for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Ellison, Ralph Waldo: (1914-1994) "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded."

Award-winning novelist and widely acclaimed American writer. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914, Ellison heard many stories about the frontier as a child in the Midwest. With so much of the American frontier still undeveloped, the possibilities for Ellison must have seemed endless. He would later characterize his attitude through the words of his most famous character, the narrator of his 1952 novel Invisible Man, who spoke of the United States as a place of "infinite possibilities." In his close-knit African-American community, Ellison fell in love with the language and music that were his heritage.

When he enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute in 1933, Ellison intended to study music. However, exposure to literature interested him in writing. In 1936, he left Tuskegee to move to New York City. There he met other black authors, including Richard Wright, and became involved in the Federal Writers Project. Initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt, the project encouraged writing during the Depression when many authors and poets had difficulties finding employment. Ellison published short stories in New Challenge and New Masses. As part of his work for the project, he also recorded African-American spoken language, experimenting with various methods, which greatly affected his later writing of Invisible Man. He wrote of the project, "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded. I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings." He later borrowed a phrase from one interview with a Pullman porter to use in his novel: "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me."

When Ellison's Invisible Man appeared in 1952, reaction was strong, and mainly positive. The work proved remarkable as one of the first to describe the black experience in the United States from a black writer's viewpoint. Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. One statement by the awards committee commented, "Ralph Ellison's impassioned first novel of a Negro rebel in the modern world--Invisible Man-- has a mature literary awareness which the class-conscious novel of the Thirties often lacked: escaping the conventions of realism, it searches--as the title itself indicates--for a universal statement of man's condition in our time."

Ellison later described his experiences with the Federal Writers Project in his 1964 essay collection, Shadow and Act. About this collection, George P. Elliott wrote, "the first two-thirds of this book, for the most part quite personal to the writer, says more about being an American Negro, and says it better, than any other book I know of."

Ellison's second and eagerly anticipated novel was destroyed in a fire in 1967--he never completed it. He did continue to write essays and short stories for publication and lectured often at various universities. From 1970 to 1979, Ellison was honored by an appointment as New York University's Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. In 1985 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. An additional essay collection, Going to the Territory, appeared in 1986.

At his death in 1994, Ellison was one of the most celebrated American authors. The following year, the executor of Ellison's literary estate, John F. Callahan, discovered some unpublished stories. In 1996, The New Yorker magazine published "Boy on a Train," and "I Did Not Learn Their Names." A final collection, Flying Home and Other Stories appeared in 1997 and contained stories written between 1937 and 1954, including several never-before-published works.

Irving Howe published a review of Invisible Man in The Nation on May 5, 1952. He included the following remarks, which, among others, well express Ellison's legacy:

Some reviewers, from the best of intentions, have assured their readers that this is a good novel and not merely a good Negro novel. But of course Invisible Man is a Negro novel--what white man could ever have written it? It is drenched in Negro life, talk, music: it tells us how distant even the best of the whites are from the black men that pass them on the streets; and it is written from a particular compound of emotions that no white man could possibly simulate. To deny that this is a Negro novel is to deprive the Negroes of their one basic right: the right to cry out their difference.

Ralph Ellison spent his life pursuing, tagging, and offering up for public display and evaluation just such differences.

This Encyclopedia Biography was submitted by Virginia Brackett, Ph.D., a professor at Triton College.

Enforcement Acts: In response to the terrorist attacks by whites, such as the Ku Klux Klan, on black and white Republicans in the South during Reconstruction, Congress passed a set of three laws known as the Enforcement Acts on May 31, 1870; February 28, 1871; and April 20, 1871. These acts made illegal the intimidation of voters, "going in disguise upon the public highway" with the intent of denying a citizen his constitutional rights, and the failure to perform one's duty if an election officer. The third Act provided for Federal supervision of elections in both northern and southern cities with a population of over 20,000. Thousands of people were arrested under the provisions of these acts, but the conviction rates were small-for instance, less than 15 percent of the 1500 people arrested in South Carolina. Moreover, sentences were usually mild. In the end, these Acts did help break up the Klan; however, most scholars contend that there was little need for the Klan after 1876 when Reconstruction ended because disfranchisement could be obtained by economic, political, and legal intimidation in the open and in broad daylight.

Enticement Laws: Legislation that penalized or made illegal any effort to entice sharecroppers and farm laborers to leave the region for work elsewhere, either in the South or in urban industrial jobs. These laws were among those passed by numerous southern states in the years after the Civil War to limit the mobility of sharecroppers and tenants, including vagrancy laws and restrictions on immigrant agencies.

Evers, Charles: (1922 - ) Civil rights activist and leader of voter registration drive in the 1950s. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, Evers served in the U.S. military during WWII and attended Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University). After college, Evers openly opposed the State's blatant forms of Jim Crow racism and discrimination. His activism made him a natural choice to lead the drive for voter registration in the early 1950s. Threats and attempts on his life persuaded him to leave Mississippi for Chicago in 1956, where he made money working for a time in the "numbers racket" and as a tavern owner. After his brother's assassination in 1963, Evers returned to Mississippi to take over his dead brother's position as field secretary for the NAACP. In that job, Evers organized boycotts of white businesses and stepped up the drive to register black voters. In 1969, he made history when he was elected the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a biracial community. He served three terms as mayor, and he ran serious but unsuccessful campaigns for governor and U. S. Senator.

This Encyclopedia Biography was written by Cynthia Weeden, a teacher at Hope High School in Missouri.
Charles Evers Lesson Activity Suggestions.

Evers, Medgar Wiley: (1925-1963) Civil rights activist and protest leader born in 1925 near Decatur, Mississippi, where he lived until serving in the U.S. military during WWII. After the war, Medgar graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from the historically black Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University) in Mississippi. Moving to the all-black community of Mound Bayou in the Yazoo/Mississippi Delta, where he sold insurance for a living, Evers established local chapters of the NAACP. Committed to using peaceful but direct action means to resist Jim Crow, he organized boycotts of gasoline stations that barred blacks from their restrooms. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers applied for admission to the Law School of the University of Mississippi. Although he was denied admission, his efforts brought him into the national spotlight. Evers then moved to Jackson, the State's capital, to serve as the first field secretary for NAACP chapters in Mississippi. Over the next several years, Evers conducted mass meetings, sit-ins at lunch counters, a boycott of city merchants who discriminated against blacks, and other forms of mass action. As the State's leading advocate for civil rights, Evers persuaded James Meredith, an African American, to seek admittance into the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith was eventually accepted, but riots ensued on the college campus, leaving four people dead.

As a result of his civil rights efforts, Evers aroused the hatred of white racists in the State. On June 12, 1963, a white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith, shot and killed Evers in his driveway as he was returning home. Beckwith's two court trials with all white jurors in the 1960s produced hung juries each time. Justice did not come about until 1994, when a third trial found Beckwith guilty; he was sentenced to life in prison for his crime. Evers' death helped focus national attention on civil rights in Mississippi. Public buildings and statues were eventually named and erected in his honor, and many African Americans in the State were inspired by his death to continue more vigorously the struggle for which he had given his life.

This Encyclopedia Biography was written by Cynthia Weeden, a teacher at Hope High School in Missouri.
Medgar Evers Lesson Activity Suggestions.