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.

Faulkner, William: (1897-1962) Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner was the great-grandson of William Clark Falkner, a southern novelist and Confederate officer killed in a duel. He dropped out of high school in 1918 and took a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (where, for the first time, his name was spelled "Faulkner" in employee records, possibly the result of a typing error). He enlisted as a cadet in the Royal Canadian Air Force with illusions of glory, but the war came to an end before he finished his training. In 1919 he enrolled at the University of Mississippi at Oxford under a special provisions for war veterans, but dropped out after three semesters. Growing up in Mississippi, he watched blacks endure unbelievable cruelty and was amazed at how the blacks conducted themselves with dignity and courage. As a novelist, he is considered by many to be American's greatest writer. His novels and stories experimented with new forms and new structures of writing--sentences that run on for pages without punctuation--and the use of historical settings and historical tragedy. His third novel Sartoris (1926), presented a southern family saga set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Thereafter in novel and short stories, Faulkner's characters were suicide-driven men and grief-stricken and struggling women--all clinging to old values and the legacy of slavery played out in the Jim Crow South. His writings experiment with interior discussions, thereby probing his characters most hidden anxieties. Two of his books, Light in August and Intruder in the Dust deal specifically with racial issues, including blacks passing for whites and racial violence. In 1949 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Over the next decade, Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award. He was also involved in numerous film projects, including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). He died July 6, 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi of a heart attack.

Fayetteville State University: A school established in 1867 by seven black citizens of Fayetteville, who pooled their resources and bought two lots on which they built a school for the city's black children. Ten years later, Howard School became the State Colored Normal School by an act of the North Carolina State Legislature. In 1880, Charles W. Chesnutt, who later achieved some fame as a noted novelist, became the school's principal at age 22. By the early 20th century, the school had grown to eight buildings on a 92-acre campus. In 1939, the school was renamed Fayetteville State Teacher's College and received regional and State accreditation. By the mid-1950s, Fayetteville's curriculum expanded to include other fields of study in addition to education, and, in 1963, it became Fayetteville State College. An act of the State Legislature brought the school into the University of North Carolina system in 1972.

Fifteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: An amendment that prohibited states from depriving a citizen of his vote due to race, color, or condition of servitude. It essentially enfranchised black males. The Amendment also empowered Congress "to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." During Congressional Reconstruction, this Amendment, along with the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, enabled blacks to vote and black leaders to hold office. For a brief decade, blacks held an array of elected offices, including serving as judges, superintendents of education, state officers, such as lieutenant governors, members of state congresses and the House of Representatives, and two United States senators. The 15th Amendment was ratified on March 30, 1870. But this victory was short-lived as southern whites began to enforce measures aimed at disfranchising black voters. These actions included such regulations as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause, as well as the use of violence to intimidate blacks. Taken together these measures effectively eliminated black votes in the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Filibuster: A parliamentary device used in the US Senate by which a minority of senators seek to frustrate the will of the majority by literally 'talking a bill to death." Custom and Senate Rule 22 provide for unlimited debate on a motion before it can be brought to a vote. A minority of senators seeks to gain concessions or the withdrawal of the bill by delaying tactics. These include prolonged debate and speeches on various topics, parliamentary maneuvers, and dilatory motions. Until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the filibuster, or threat of it, had been used successfully for many years by southern senators to forestall civil rights legislation. Senator Strom Thurmond holds the record for the longest individual filibuster, speaking for more than 24 hours against enactment of civil rights legislation in 1957.

Fisk University: A school that began as Fisk Free Colored School during the Union occupation of Nashville in 1865. Named for Union General Clinton Bowen Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau, who supplied the school with abandoned Union army barracks to house its students and faculty, the school was dedicated on January 9, 1866, under the sponsorship of the American Missionary Association, the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission, and the Freedmen's Bureau. Initially, it provided only an elementary education, but soon it began focusing on teacher education. On August 22, 1867, the school received its charter as Fisk University. In 1869, the Normal Department added a model school, high school theology department, and liberal arts college. In only a few years, the school outgrew its donated buildings and launched a campaign to raise funds to expand its physical plant. In 1871, the school choir, the Jubilee Singers, embarked on a school sponsored national tour to raise money for new buildings. Using the entire school treasury for traveling expenses, the tour proved a resounding success, not only in garnering building funds but also in exposing the sounds of gospel music to many in America and Europe for the first time. Among the more notable Fisk alumni are W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and John Hope Franklin. Charles Spurgeon Johnson, another Fisk alumnus and its first black president in 1946, established the Race Relations Institute in 1945, which continues to offer scholarly research on racism, training on race issues, and strategic advice to foreign nations for overcoming racism worldwide.

Fitzgerald, Ella: (1917-1996) "The First Lady of Song" known internationally for her brilliant innovative musicality and beautiful, perfect pitch, spent her first years in Virginia until her parents, Temperance and William Fitzgerald, separated. She moved to Yonkers, New York, with her mother and lived there until her mother died in 1932 after which she was cared for by an aunt who lived in Harlem. At age 16 she entered a local talent competition at New York's Apollo Theatre as a dancer in the style of the then popular Snakehips Tucker. But a bad case of stage fright paralyzed her at the last minute. Desperately reaching to do something, Fitzgerald started singing The Object of My Affection in the style of another current favorite, Connee Boswell. She won the contest. Soon after she began appearing with Chick Webb's band. Unusual for the time, Fitzgerald was the band's featured musician primarily because she outshone everyone else on the stage. She recorded her first hit, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, with the Webb band in 1938, and established herself as a musical innovator through her unique interpretation of the old nursery rhyme favorite in swing time with the injection of jazz elements. Henceforth, Fitzgerald's songs were noted for being musically rather than lyrically driven. Living in the richest cultural community for African American in the country during the 1930s and 1940s, New York's Harlem, Fitzgerald became acquainted with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and others who would become lifelong collaborators and friends. Unlike other popular singers of the 1930s and 1940, such as Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby, Fitzgerald never had her own radio program because advertisers shied from a public association with an African- American performer. Following a relatively undistinguished period, performing to largely segregated audiences Fitzgerald met Norman Ganz whose Verve record label would catapult Fitzgerald to international renown with the recording of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook in 1956. Until 1964, Fitzgerald was the undisputed queen of jazz and pop whose vocal talents included an irrepressible improvisation of phonetic musical sounds known as scat. Although her star faded somewhat in the mid-1960s, she continued to record and tour worldwide and was regarded by her many fans as peerless. She accumulated numerous Grammys and honors among them a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement award in 1979. By the end of her life she had recorded over 100 albums and sold more than 25 million records worldwide. She continued performing until poor health limited her vision and mobility, forcing her to stop touring. She died in Beverly Hills, California in 1996.

Florida A&M University: The first school of its kind for African Americans in Florida, it came into being as the State Normal College for Colored Students in 1887. Owing its existence to the Morrill Land Grant of 1890, the school's campus expanded and changed its name to the State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students by 1900. The school's first president, Thomas DeSaille Tucker, attempted to establish a nursing school for women in addition to the normal school education already offered, but his request was repeatedly denied. Soon after, Tucker left the institution. His vision was realized by his successor, Nathan B. Young, in 1904. By 1925, the nursing curriculum had grown from two to three years and was a hospital-based program. Dedicated to developing a liberal arts curriculum in addition to vocational training, Young fought a State Legislature bitterly opposed to such offerings for African Americans. Young left the school shortly thereafter. In spite of such struggles, the school continued to expand in population and course offerings. In 1953, the school gained university status and the name Florida Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University. The school now contains eleven schools and colleges, enrolls over 9,000 students, and ranks among the "Top 50 Colleges for Black Students" by Black Enterprise magazine.

Florida Memorial College: A liberal arts school founded through efforts by a group of African-American Baptists in 1868 in Live Oak, Florida, to form a black academy in their area. They raised $2,000 from local Baptist donations to purchase three and a half acres of land, complete with a half-built courthouse. In 1876, they incorporated their school and, in 1879, the Florida Baptist Institute commenced instruction under the leadership of Reverend J.L. Fish. In 1941, the Florida Baptist Institute merged with the Florida Baptist Academy that had been founded in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1892. The combined school, now renamed Florida Normal and Industrial Memorial Institute, moved to St. Augustine and, by 1945, offered a four-year, liberal arts curriculum. In 1963, the name changed again to Florida Memorial College and, five years later, relocated once again to Miami. Today, the school enrolls over 2,200 students, offers 38 degree programs, and has continued its Baptist tradition as the centerpiece of its educational philosophy.

Foote, Julia A. J.: (1823-1901) The daughter of devout Christian slaves, the young Julia Foote came to religion early in life. Sent away from her family at the age of ten to work and live in Albany with a well-off white family, she received from them some rudimentary schooling and limited kindnesses. Moving with the family to Albany in 1836, Foote discovered the African Methodist Church and converted when she was fifteen years old. Married to a sailor, George Foote, at the age of sixteen, Foote moved to Boston with him and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of Reverend Jehiel C. Beman, a leading antislavery advocate. Convinced she had been divinely called to preach the gospel and seeking Beman's permission to do so, she was instead barred from preaching and then excommunicated from his church. Undaunted, Foote could not deny her calling and proceeded to preach wherever she could in spite of the efforts of her husband and family to dissuade her. She became an itinerate preacher, traveling to Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Michigan, California, and Canada before settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Preaching against slavery and appealing to women, her determination and eloquence drew a large following, white and black. In 1879, she published her autobiography A Brand Plucked from the Fire detailing her conversion experience and her commitment to a Christian life. In 1894 she became the first woman to become an AME Zion deacon. In 1900 she became the second woman to be ordained an elder. She died the following year.

Force (or Federal Elections) Bill: A law calling for the Federal Government to supervise Federal elections to protect African-American voters who were being deprived of their vote in the South through various devices such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The bill passed in the House on June 19, 1890, but failed in the Senate. A number of Republicans abandoned the bill in exchange for southern votes for the McKinley Tariff, a pro-business measure backed by northern industrialists. The bill's sponsor, Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, had hoped it would enable Federal marshals to fulfill the promise of the 15th Amendment.

Foreman, Clark: (1901-1977) Representing a new generation of white southern liberals during the New Deal era, Foreman served as "Special Adviser on Economic Status of Negroes" under the secretary of the interior during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. He was also the chairman of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) and the national treasurer of the Progressive Party.

Fort Caroline, Florida: Fort Caroline National Memorial is located 14 miles northeast of downtown Jacksonville, Florida. French naval commander Jean Ribault explored the site along the modern St. John’s River in May 1562 and claimed it for France, erecting a stone marker. In June 1564, René de Laudonniere and 200 settlers, many of them Protestant Huguenots, established a colony on the site. He named it "la Caroline" after King Charles IX of France. The settlers had difficulty farming the land and relied on the Timucuan tribe for help. The following June, Ribault returned with supplies and 600 new settlers. On September 4, 1565, the Spanish threat, in the form of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his fleet, appeared off the coast of Fort Caroline. Unable to destroy the ships commanded by Ribault, the Spanish returned south to establish a base at St. Augustine. Ribault hoped to surprise the Spanish and sailed south, but his ships were driven off-course by a hurricane and shipwrecked near modern Daytona Beach. Menéndez and 500 Spanish soldiers marched through the storm and swampland to Fort Caroline. On September 21st, he overwhelmed it and killed 142 French defenders, sparing only women and children. Menéndez renamed the fort San Mateo, left 200 soldiers in the fort, and then returned south to find Ribault’s force. He located Ribault and 333 of his men trapped south of the inlet that leads to St. Augustine harbor. After ferrying the French over ten at a time, Menéndez massacred Ribault and all but 16 of the French, whom he considered religious heretics. The inlet received the name Matanzas, the Spanish word for "slaughter."

Fort Valley State College: A school opened in 1895 as Fort Valley High and Industrial School by F.W. Gano, who traveled from Michigan to Georgia to purchase land to build a school for black education and training, and 17 other black and white citizens. By the early 20th century, the school had grown into a campus of several buildings, many constructed by the students themselves. In 1939, Fort Valley merged with the State Teachers and Agricultural College that had been established in 1902. Supported by the Julius Rosenwald Fund and renamed State Teachers and Agricultural College in 1939, the schools became Fort Valley College, which awarded its first bachelor's degree in 1941. It became part of the Georgia University System in 1996 and was renamed Fort Valley State University. The school currently enrolls over 1,500 students and offers degrees in over 50 different fields of study.

Forten, Charlotte: (1837-1914) "I will spare no effort to prepare myself well for the responsible duties of a teacher, and to live for the good I can do my oppressed and suffering fellow creatures," wrote seventeen-year-old Charlotte Forten in 1854. Hailing from an affluent, activist, abolitionist, black family of Philadelphia, the young Charlotte Forten was schooled by private tutors instead of attending the city's strictly segregated schools. Completing her education in Salem, Massachusetts, Forten began the first of five diaries which spanned her next thirty-eight years. In her unique journals she chronicles her life as an elite free black woman before the Civil War, her travails as an educated, upper class black, and her dedication to improving opportunities for her race following the war. After receiving her teacher education at Salem Normal School, Forten taught briefly in Massachusetts, the first African American woman to teach in a white Salem classroom. Ill health (probably tuberculosis) interfered with teaching, and forced Forten to take considerable time off between teaching positions in Massachusetts and her home in Philadelphia. Encouraged by family friend John Greenleaf Whittier, Forten enlisted in the Port Royal Experiment as a teacher in 1862. An island off the coast of South Carolina abandoned by its fleeing white planters when the Union Army occupied it in 1861, Port Royal was established by the army as a training and education endeavor for the former slaves who remained there. Forten taught on Saint Helena Island for two years until her poor health once again compelled her to return home. An account of her experiences was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. In 1878, after having taught in Charleston and Washington, D.C., she married Reverend Francis Grimke, a nephew of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke. She continued to be politically active in spite of her failing health, until she died at her home in Washington D.C. on July 22, 1914.

Fortune, Thomas T.: (1856-1928) A journalist and civil rights activist who was born a slave in Marianna, Florida. Fortune graduated from Howard University and moved to New York where he established the New York Freeman, which later became The New York Age. He was a staunch supporter of Booker T. Washington and served as chair of Washington's Negro Business League.

Foster, Autherine Lucy Juanita: (1909 - ) Less than two years after Brown v. Board of Education, Autherine Juanita Lucy sought to enroll at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa after receiving a letter stating that she could. Lucy is the first African American admitted to this campus. She arrived on campus on the first of February of 1956, accompanied by an army of reporters; student photographer Jim Okaley took several remarkable photos of her and the hostile reaction she received. Three days later, she was forced to flee the campus under threat of violence and the barring of her by the University's Board of Trustees "for her own safety". She was again granted the right to enter the University by the Courts, but was again barred by the Trustees. It would be seven years before another African American finally was admitted. Autherine Lucy Foster went on to receive her master's degree in Education from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, in 1992, the same day her daughter received a bachelor's degree from the same school.

Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: An amendment that, because of doubts about the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, defined national citizenship to include African Americans and provided for a proportionate reduction in representation when a state denied suffrage to its citizens. It passed Congress on June 13, 1866, was rejected by most southern states, and its ratification was made a condition of restoring the Union. Ultimately, the 14th Amendment was ratified and put in effect on July 28, 1868. A key provision prohibited states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Most former Confederate officials were disqualified from holding public office and the Confederate War debt was repudiated. After 1877, most southern states ignored the civil rights guaranteed by the Amendment, and the Federal Government did not act to rigorously enforce these provisions until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

Freedmen's Bureau: (1865-1872) A government agency created (March 3, 1865) after the Civil War to assist black and white refugees in the defeated Confederacy. Officially titled the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, it was headed by General Oliver Otis Howard and staffed by white Union officers. The Bureau functioned as an employment agency and arbitrator between blacks and whites in the early years of Reconstruction. When southern states passed various "Black Codes" aimed at the limiting freedom of the formerly enslaved peoples of the South, Congress furthered empowered the Bureau to use military courts to try those accused of depriving freedmen and freedwomen of their civil rights. It helped the formerly enslaved people reunite with families separated by slavery, established over 40 hospitals, and set up 4,239 schools with around 10,000 teachers and nearly 250,000 African-American students. President Andrew Johnson tried to kill the Bureau by veto, contending that its military courts violated the Fifth Amendment. On July 16, 1865, Congress passed the enlarged bill over the President's veto. Thereafter, he worked actively to undermine its operation by appointing pro-southern white officers. Congress, unwilling to fully support equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved, allowed the Bureau to die in 1869.

Fufu: Called "turn meal and flour" in South Carolina. A mixture of cornmeal and flour is poured into a pot of boiling water. From this fufu mixture, enslaved Africans made "hot cakes" in the fields, which were sometimes called ashcakes or hoecakes. These evolved into "pancakes" and "hotwater cornbread." Fufu is a common food throughout Africa and the New World; it consists of yams, plantains, and cassava roots (manioc, tapioca) cut into pieces and boiled together; maize or Indian corn beaten into one mass and eaten with pepper, boiled in a pot with okra. A substantial dish of fufu is composed of eddoes, ochas, and mashed plantains made savory with rich crabs and pungent with cayenne pepper.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1793: A pro-slavery clause in the U. S. Constitution provided that persons "held in service of labour in one state, escaping into another ... shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service of labor may be due." To implement this clause, Congress passed a law in 1793, allowing masters or their agents to pursue slaves across state lines, capture them, and take them before a judge. If the slaveholder could prove ownership by the presentation of evidence, the captive could be returned to the legal custody of the master. This law meant that those who had escaped from slavery by going to a free state in the North could be captured and returned to slavery at any time. In fact, any northern black could be seized under the provisions of this law and taken to a southern judge to be enslaved. The fugitive slave had no rights before the law to contest his capture, no right to a trial or to testify in one's own defense, and no guarantee of habeas corpus (the legal requirement that a person not be imprisoned without a trial). The law was difficult to implement, however, because northern communities often resisted slave catchers. And some states passed personal liberty laws that made it illegal to assist in capturing runaway slaves. For these reasons, white Southerners demanded a stricter law. They got it in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which was one of the harshest measures ever passed by Congress. The law required U. S. marshals, local police, and even citizens to assist in capturing runaway slaves. Those who refused could be fined and jailed. Slave catchers were paid a bounty for each slave captured. Some 332 captives were taken by force back to the South and to slavery during the time the law was in force. In response to the law, northern abolitionists were outraged. Hundreds of blacks left the U. S. for Canada. Northern communities organized active defiance of the law. Most importantly, the law convinced many Americans from all parts of the nation that the Union would not be able to survive half slave and half free.

Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick: (1877-1968) Growing up in post-Civil War Philadelphia, Meta Warrick enjoyed a comfortable life as the daughter of a wig-maker mother and businessman father. While still in high school she displayed a talent for art and was selected to attend the J. Liberty Tadd Industrial Art School after which she won a three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. While in school, Meta Warrick engendered a reputation for crafting sculptures of the grotesque and macabre such as The Man Eating His Heart. Encouraged by her mother and aunt, in 1899 she traveled to Paris to continue her studies and was one of the first women to attend the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In 1902, she met Auguste Rodin and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. Her association with Rodin was particularly instructive, but Fuller vigilantly protected her own artistic style and continued to explore and express human despair and anguish earning her the moniker "the delicate sculptor of horrors." Upon her return to Philadelphia, Fuller changed course and embarked on expressing African-American themes, religion, and mythological figures. In 1907, she became the first black woman to win a federal art commission for which she created a tableaux representative of the advance of African American for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. She married Liberian neurologist Solomon Fuller in 1909, relocated to Framingham, Massachusetts, and had three children. A fire in her Philadelphia studio in 1910 tragically destroyed much of her early work and for a period, Fuller refused to sculpt. But in 1914, she created one of her most famous works Ethiopia Awakening, a bronze sculpture of a beautiful woman clad in the costume of an ancient Egyptian queen emerging from a mummy-cocoon. Fuller described the piece as representative of the average African American who is "awakening, gradually unwinding the bondage of his past and looking out on life again, expectant and unafraid." By 1919 she was known as the "foremost sculptor of the Negro race" a reputation she maintained for the rest of her life as she continued to sculpt and exhibit widely. She died at age 90 in 1968 at her home in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Fusion: In politics, a term referring to the practice of forming coalitions between two different political groups. After the nearly wholesale return of white Democrats to power in the South following the Compromise of 1877, many white and black leaders agreed to work together in a fashion. The white politicians would agree to allow so many African Americans to run for office unopposed, and usually for minor local offices, in return for the acceptance by black leaders of Democratic control of the principal offices in the town, county, and state. This "fusion" arrangement largely explains why a number of African-American politicos continued to hold office up until around 1900, when the white primary and other disfranchisement measures eliminated the black vote over all. The same principle applied to the informal cooperation between white Republicans and white Democrats and/or white leaders of the Populist Party, and excluding black Republicans, in some of the southern states before 1900.