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.

Lampkin, Daisy Adams: (1884-1965) Daisy Adams Lampkin was best known as a community and civil rights leader and an ardent speaker for black female suffrage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was the president of the Negro Women's Franchise League in 1915 and an active member of both the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women.

Lane College: A school of higher education that has its roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which was founded by James Osgood Andrew, a former southern bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who was forced to separate from his church in 1844 because he owned slaves. Two years later, Andrew, with the support of other southern bishops, formed the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and they encouraged their members to proselytize to their slaves and worship with them. Shortly after the Civil War ended, the MEC church reorganized on behalf of its black members. Out of the 1870 General Conference in Memphis, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was born (renamed the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1954), armed with a mission to attract more black members and start more black schools in the South. A small committee of church members headed by Bishop Isaac Lane recommended the establishment of Colored Methodist Episcopal High School in Jackson, Tennessee, also known as Jackson High School. Due to a yellow fever epidemic, the school's opening was delayed until 1882. Two years later, the school's name was changed to Lane Institute to honor its founder. The same year, the State of Tennessee granted its charter. Principally established for religious and teacher training, by 1896, the school installed a broader, classical curriculum and changed its name to Lane College. In 1915, the college enrolled 218 students, of which ten were in college level courses. By this date, moreover, all of its teachers were African Americans. The school currently enrolls over 700 students and has continued its relationship with the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Laney, Lucy Craft: (1881-1954) The co-founder of the Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta and one of the most important African-American educators in the South. She devoted her life to assuring African-American women of their freedom to educate themselves and to educate others.

Langston University: A school officially established in 1897 as an agricultural university. It roots trace back to before the Civil War, when Edwin P. McCabe, an African American from Kansas arrived in Oklahoma with the hope of establishing a black refuge in the area. Toward that end, he helped create 27 black towns, including Langston. In 1892, black citizens of Langston petitioned the territorial government for an institution to provide them an education. Aided by the second Morrill Land Grant of 1890, the State agreed to establish the Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston. The community then built the school on 40 acres it bought, through enormous group effort, from the State. Upon its establishment, the school became the only historically black college in Oklahoma and the only one in the West. Chiefly a teaching and industrial institution, the school's first bachelor's degrees were conferred in 1901. In 1941, the name of the school was changed to honor the namesake of both the town and college, John Mercer Langston, an elected representative to the U. S. House of Representatives from Virginia. The campus and curriculum expanded and, in 1944, the Board of Regents of the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges assumed the supervision of the school. True to its roots as an agricultural school, Langston is well known today for its agricultural research. It also offers degrees to its nearly 4,000 students in 49 other fields.

Langston, John M.: (1829-1897) Born in Louisa County Virginia, Langston was one of the first African Americans elected to office before the Civil War. After the war, he became the first dean of Howard University's School of Law and, in 1890, he represented Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Larsen, Nella: (1891-1964) Born of a Danish mother and a West Indian father who died when she was still quite young, Nella Larsen grew up as the only "black" child in an all-white family. She attended private schools in Chicago, the Fisk University, the University of Copenhagen, and Lincoln Hospital in New York City. She then spent two years as the assistant superintendent of nurses at the Tuskegee Institute. Later she would return to Lincoln Hospital, marry physicist Elmer Imes in 1919, and begin publishing in The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine. In the 1920s Larsen became a librarian at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library and then the children's librarian. She published several brilliant novels and was the first African-American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. By the end of the 1920s, she had emerged as the leading novelists of the "New Negro movement." In rapid succession her novels Quicksand and Passing appeared, making her among the handful of writers depicting the "complex reality of African American Life." They differed from the other writings of the Harlem Renaissance, however, in their powerful examinations of female psychology and modern consciousness as their heroines seek self-definition and sexual meaning as a black woman in the worlds of the southern and northern U. S. as well as Europe. In her novels, women are buffeted by the drives for self-agency and autonomy, sexual passion, and the realities of being black and poor. Unfortunately, scandal plagued her later in life when she was accused of plagiarism in her short story "Sanctuary", an accusation she was able to disprove, and became involved in a sensationalized divorce surrounding the infidelity of her husband. Much a broken person after these episodes in the 1930s, she disassociated herself from the literary world and lived out her life as a nurse in Manhattan.

Lee, Robert E.: (1797-1870) More than any other figure, General Robert E. Lee became the hero and idol of the Confederacy and the lost cause. Lee was the son of Revolutionary War hero "Light Horse" Harry Lee and a graduate of West Point in 1829. He is remembered as one of the heroes of the War with Mexico. In 1852, he became superintendent of West Point. In 1859, he led the U. S. troops that countered John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, capturing Brown in the process. With the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War, Lee resigned his position in the army of the United States, unwilling to raise his hand against his native Virginia, and was later placed in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia to stop the Union's Peninsula Campaign. A brilliant tactical military commander who inspired his troops to great feats on the battlefield, Lee was recognized as a military genius. In early 1865, Lee was named Commander in Chief of all Confederate armies, until his surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Following the war, Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College (today Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia. Lee also fought a successful legal battle to receive compensation for the loss of his Arlington, Virginia estate and the Custis-Lee mansion, which today serves as the National Cemetery of the United States. He died in 1870 and is buried at Lexington. Lee was known as the consummate gentleman and became the chief heroic figure in the South's romantic embracement of the myth of the "Lost Cause" in the Jim Crow years following upon the end of Reconstruction.

Legal Papers: In order to certify their freedom, free blacks were required to register their status with a local county clerk. The clerk then provided the free blacks with papers that verified their status. Free blacks traveling away from home had to carry these papers to prevent them from being mistaken as a runaway slave. Any black person caught without papers was assumed to be a slave and subject to being jailed and even sold in public auctions. Sometimes these papers were misplaced or stolen, as in the case of the kidnapped free person of color Solomon Northup. Although a free man with papers, Solomon was kidnapped in Washington D.C. in April of 1841 and sold into twelve years of slavery. His papers were destroyed in the kidnapping by a slave trader, who passed Northrup off as a slave from Georgia.

LeMoyne-Owen College: School formed by the merging of LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School and Owen Junior College in 1968. LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School was founded by Lucinda Humphrey, a member of the American Missionary Association and a nurse at Camp Shiloh. She began the small school after recognizing the educational needs of hundreds of contraband slaves fleeing plantations and seeking asylum in the Union camp at Corinth, Mississippi, during the spring of 1862. Originally named the Lincoln School for Negroes, the school moved to Memphis in 1863, burned in 1866 during the Memphis riots following the withdrawal of Federal troops, but was quickly rebuilt and reopened the following year. Nevertheless, the school struggled until Dr. Francis Julian LeMoyne, long time abolitionist and life member of the American Missionary Association, bequeathed $20,000 to the college. The school was renamed LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School in 1871 and carried a high school curriculum by 1901. Its enrollment reached 285 students by 1915, and, in 1934, it became a four-year college. Owen Junior College was organized by the Tennessee Baptist Missionary and Educational Convention in 1946 and opened in 1954. Today, LeMoyne-Owen College continues to educate Memphis' African-American leaders, claims over 1,100 graduate and undergraduate students, and offers 15 different fields of study leading to Bachelor's of Arts and Bachelor's of Science degrees.

Lincoln University (MO): Originally, an educational institution for African-American children established by members of the 62nd and 65th United States Colored Infantry regiment (Missouri) after the end of the Civil War in 1866. The regiment was comprised almost entirely of former slaves who had the experience of a rudimentary education while in the army. The soldiers' combined donations of $6,400 enabled them to open the doors of the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City with Richard Baxter Foster (former first lieutenant of the 62nd) serving as its principal. In a dilapidated, abandoned shanty located on what was known as Hobo Hill, the institute's first two students commenced their studies. Community hostility to the school remained virulent, but the school survived with aid from the Freedmen's Bureau and other church groups. Another needed boost came in 1890 with the second Morrill Land Grant allowing Lincoln to expand its campus and its curriculum by adding industrial and agricultural training to its normal school training. In 1915, the Institute enrolled 393 students and was noted for subordinating both agricultural and industrial education to the academic. Renamed Lincoln University in 1921, the school was accredited in 1925, and added graduate instruction in 1942. Today Lincoln University enrolls over 3,000 students and recently awarded bachelor's degrees in 39 different fields.

Lincoln University (PA): School of higher education that came into being when a frustrated Presbyterian minister failed to gain admission to theological seminary for two black students. With the support of the Presbytery of New Castle, John Miller Dickey succeeded in opening the Ashmun Institute in 1854 with the intent of providing a scientific, classical, and theological education to male youth of African descent. Before the Civil War, it was one of only five institutions in the United States with the purpose of providing a post-secondary education to African Americans: Wilberforce University, Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (later known as Cheyney College), Avery College, an academy for black girls in Washington, D.C. (later known as Miner College), and Ashmun Institute in Chester, Pennsylvania, (known as Lincoln University by 1866). In 1865, the Ashmun Institute became the first black college to confirm a bachelor's degree. By 1915, the school enrolled 216 students, of whom 52 pursued a theology degree. In that year, not only were the trustees of the college all white men and typically prominent Presbyterian ministers, but 12 of its 14 teachers were also white. Instruction emphasized the classical and literary over vocational studies. During the 20th century, the school's alumni included numerous famous African Americans: Langston Hughes (1929), Thurgood Marshall (1930), and Horace Mann Bond (1923), who also became the college's first black president in 1945. In 1952, 99 years after its founding, women were admitted. Lincoln University was taken over by the State of Pennsylvania in 1972 and now operates as a public institution. It enrolls approximately 2,000 students and offers 26 different fields of study.

Literacy Tests: Tests used by the southern states to circumvent the 14th Amendment in the Jim Crow era through provisions that usually said an aspiring voter had to be able either to read any section of the state constitution or to understand that section when read to him. This was supposed to be a color-blind test that would apply to any male regardless of color; however, most southerners knew that the understanding part of the provision was, in fact, a loophole that would allow southern, illiterate whites to interpret the read sections to the satisfaction of the test-giver. Congress permanently banned these tests in 1975.

Liverpool: Along with London and Bristol, Liverpool was one of the three ports in England that dominated the British slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century Liverpool surpassed the other two, handling five-eighths of the English trade and three-sevenths of all the European slave trade. By 1798, some 52,557 captives were carried from Africa to the Americas in 150 Liverpool ships. Almost everyone in the city was caught up in the slave trade as merchants, outfitters, handlers, shipmen, and suppliers. Hugh profits were made, linking the city intimately to British plantations in the West Indies.

Livingstone College: A school originally established for theological training in 1877as Zion Wesley Institute in Concord, North Carolina, by Bishop James Walker Hood of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The tiny one-house school built on seven acres struggled to survive until Bishop Hood appointed the young, brilliant John C. Price to become its president. Price had impressed Hood by his unusual gift of oratory at the Great Ecumenical Conference in England, and Hood felt certain Price could use his charismatic talents to raise money for the school. Price accepted the challenge and, within one year, raised $10,000. The nearby town of Salisbury offered an additional $1,000 to the school if it would relocate there. After accepting the offer in 1879, the school moved and renamed itself Livingstone College to honor the British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer, David Livingstone. Price's vision for the school was to provide an education to any African American and included a culture of "head, hand, and heart," which influenced the development of the Booker T. Washington's model of education. By 1884, Livingstone offered four courses of study: grammar, normal, theological, and classical schools in addition to industrial training. The school occupies 272 acres, enrolls over 1,100 students, and offers undergraduate studies as well as a graduate school of theology (Hood Theological Seminary).

Locke, Alain Leroy: (188?-1954) Born in 1886, Alain Leroy Locke went on to become the first African-American Rhodes scholar after graduating with his bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Following his studies in Europe he began teaching at Howard University as a professor of English and philosophy. In 1916, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard and shortly thereafter resumed his association with Howard University, while publishing The New Negro.

Locke is most widely known for his leadership in both the New Negro movement of the 1920s--which emphasized black pride and was a prerequisite to the civil rights movement-- and also in the African-American adult education movement in the 1930s. In 1946-1947 he served as the president of the American Association for Adult Education, making him the first black national-level president of a predominantly white educational association. Well known in the 1920s as the chief philosopher and art critic of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain described the era as " an artistic awakening of racial self-consciousness and a collective self-renewal for black people." He published the book Race Contacts and Interracial Relations as well as several other books and numerous articles. Locke died in 1954, just one month shy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Logan, Adella Hunt: (1863-1915) The child of a black mother and a white father who served in the Confederate Army, Adella Hunt was born in 1863 and educated in the local Sparta Bass Academy as well as Atlanta University. In 1883, she taught at an American Missionary School and later was hired at Tuskegee Institute to teach English and Social Science and to be its first librarian. In 1888, she married Warren Logan, a teacher at Tuskegee, and together they had nine children, six of whom survived to adulthood. Adella Logan was a strong supporter of black female suffrage and actively campaigned for its adoption through the Tuskegee Women's Club, the NAACP, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Tragically and unexplainably, Adella Hunt Logan committed suicide by jumping from one of Tuskegee's buildings following the death of Booker T. Washington.

Louis, Joe: (1917-1981) A champion boxer--he dropped the family name of Barrow--and the son of Alabama sharecroppers whose family moved to Detroit, Michigan in the late 1920s. Before a record crowd of 62,000 fans, Lewis defeated Primo Carnera in 1935. The fight pitted an Italian-American against a black man just as Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship in Italy was about to invade the oldest black independent nation in Africa, Ethiopia. He also beat the German fighter Max Schmelling in a symbolic victory over Nazism in 1938. He retained his heavyweight crown until 1949. As the most celebrated black man in America, Louis' status bolstered confidence among American blacks--although few whites changed their attitudes about blacks in general. His personal life was marked by the squandering of his earnings, bouts with drugs and depression, and the humiliation of ending his life as a "greeter" at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Loveless, H. A.: (1851-1921) Henry Allen Loveless was born in 1854 in Bullock County. While working during the day, Loveless attended several semesters at Selma University. He would make Montgomery, Alabama, his home and became one of the founding members of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would pastor in the 1950s during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Loveless opened a wood and coal yard, served on the Alabama Realty Company, and was a member of the Negro Businessmen's League.

Loyal Leagues: (1866-1876) African-American and white Republican organizations formed in the South during Reconstruction to support the Republican Party. Viciously attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups, the Leagues functioned as political and military clubs in defense of black civil rights.

Lynch, John R.: (1847-1939) Born in 1847 as a slave in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, John Roy Lynch would become perhaps the most powerful black politician in Mississippi during the Reconstruction era, serving as a U.S. congressman and temporary chairman of the Republican convention in 1884, during which he became the first black man to be a keynote speaker at a national political convention. Following the Civil War, John R. Lynch settled in Natchez, Mississippi, and learned the photography business. In 1869, he entered political life when elected the justice of the peace for Natchez (Adams) County. In November, 1869, he won election to the Mississippi House of Representatives and was reelected in 1871. Although blacks never formed a majority of representatives in the state legislature, Lynch was elected Speaker of the House in 1872. Building upon his career in local and state politics, Lynch won a seat in the U. S. Congress for two terms in 1872 and 1874. In 1872, Lynch was elected to Congress and was reelected in 1874. After losing two bitterly contested bids for reelection, Lynch challenged the outcome of the election of 1880 and was eventually returned to his congressional seat. Although Lynch retired from politics and settled on his plantation near Natchez in 1883, he returned to politics as the fourth auditor of the U.S. Treasury under President B. Harrison and was a delegate to the national Republican conventions of 1872, 1884, 1888, 1892, and 1900. His book entitled The Facts of Reconstruction (1918) was a major revisionist tract, published during the height of white supremacy. It did much to counter the white supremacist interpretations of the Reconstruction era then popular in the establish scholarship dominated by southern white historians. He also contributed several revisionist articles to The Journal of Negro History.

Lynching: A practice under which whites, motivated by extreme racism, would attack black Americans in myriad brutal ways to control them. Between 1882 and 1901, more than 100 people were lynched each year in the United States, and the great majority of them were southern African Americans--numbering nearly 2,000 men and boys killed in those two decades. The wave of mob murder continued unabated in the first two decades of the 20th century, numbering nearly 4,000 people by 1932, before tapering off in the 1930s and 1940s. Two or three people were lynched every week in the nation for over 30 years. Whites used mob violence and lynching to control all kinds of black behavior, from voting to manners and attitudes. Most lynchings happened in rural area and small towns whereas mob violence took place in cities. People were brutally murdered by being hung, burned, beaten, mutilated, dragged behind wagons, and other acts of savage torture. In most cases, the local police allowed the lynchings to occur, and witnesses often included the entire white community. In many cases, the victim's body was cut up for souvenirs. Lynchings were usually justified as community responses to black assaults on white women. In fact, the vast majority of such attacks involved no alleged rape at all, and, typically, the black victims were men and some women who were politically active or economically successful. Many were innocent bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Blacks responded by launching a national movement to pressure Congress to pass Federal anti-lynching legislation, but these legislative attempts suffered defeat year after year due to the power of southern white senators. For a partial map of lynchings during the Jim Crow era, click here.