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.

Next >>

M Street High School in Washington, D.C.: Founded in 1870, the M Street High School was the first public high school for black students in the United States. It was initially established in the basement of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church but by 1891 had moved several times, eventually finding a home at the corners of 1st M Street and New Jersey Avenue, NW. M Street High School had very poor facilities, but prided itself in its academic achievements, and most of its graduates went on to college. Among its chief administrators were Emma Hutchins, the only white administrator during the early years, Richard T. Greener, Mary Patterson, considered the first black woman to receive a college degree in America, and Francis Cardozo. Dunbar High School became the successor to M Street High School and thereafter served the African-American youth and community of Washington D.C. with a continued tradition of high academic standards.

Madgett, Naomi Long: (1923 - ) Naomi Cornelia Long Madgett published her first book of poetry at the age of 15 and received her BA in 1945 from Virginia State University. In 1956 she earned her Med. and taught in the Detroit School system for 13 years before advancing to teach at Eastern Michigan University. During the Jim Crow era she established her presence as a teachers of African-American literature and creative writing, with most of her most important personal writings appearing after 1960. In the early 1970s, Long began the Lotus Press, which has become a major resource for the publication of African-American literature in the last generation.

Malaria: A protozoal disease transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito, it is one of the oldest in human history. It derives its name from the Italian word for bad air, mal'aria, because early Romans associated the sickness with the foul smelling vapors from nearby swamps. It probably originated in Africa, and it was commonly believed during the era of the slave trade that certain West Africans carried a resistance to the disease in their blood. European slave traders and their African captives carried the disease to the Americas, where it ravaged the white, Native American, and African populations for three centuries. Most historians doubt that the purported immunity to malaria worked to the benefit of enslaved Africans. The death rate of slaves who worked in the mosquito infested low country of the rice colonies and sugar plantations was extremely high. In the rice county, two out of three enslaved Africans died before the age of 16, compared with one out of three in the cotton regions. Prior to the late 1800s, when the disease was connected to the mosquito as its carrier, heavy doses of quinine, which was extracted from the bark of the Cinchona tree in South America, was the only known treatment for the disease.

Maluvu: Tshiluba maluvu, palm wine. Produced throughout Africa from sap or juice collected from palm trees. African Americans continued to make it in Savannah, Georgia; in South Carolina, the palmetto tree is the source of this potent brew. In some cases, African Americans extracted material from the center the palmetto tree, called palm cabbage or palmetto cabbage, and cooked or fermented it for wine.

Manly, Alex: (1866-1944) An African-American newspaper owner and editor in Wilmington, North Carolina. His newspaper, The Wilmington Record, became the focus of racial tensions when, in August of 1898, Manly wrote and published an editorial in response to a statewide campaign by white supremacists who emphasized the alleged lust that black males felt for white women. Supremacist leader Charles Aycock and others urged whites to "keep wives and sisters safe from black rapists." Such rhetoric led to the harassment of blacks and their white allies across eastern North Carolina. Rebecca Felton of Georgia even called for whites to "lynch a thousand times a week if necessary" to protect white women. In his editorial, Manly observed that not every liaison between black men and white women was forced. In response supremacists vowed to destroy Manly and his newspaper. Tensions boiled over into the November 8th election that pitted a Democratic Party favoring white supremacy against a Republican Party sympathetic with the plight of blacks.

The climactic outcome was the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. On Election Day, there was little violence, but many blacks were afraid to vote and the ballots of those who did may not have been tallied honestly. The next morning, Democrats passed a "Wilmington Declaration of Independence." It declared, "We will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin." It also singled out "the Negro paper" for "an article so vile and slanderous" that "we therefore owe it to the people ... that the paper known as The Record cease to be published, and that its editor be banished from this community ... If the demand is refused, ... then the editor Alex Manly will be expelled by force." Manly had already fled, but 2,000 whites paraded through downtown Wilmington on November 10th and demolished Manly's newspaper office. Some blacks armed themselves, and gun battles broke out. Almost a century later, however, some details are still in question. The event marked the climax of the white supremacy campaign of 1898 and a turning point in the State's history. Restrictions on African-American voting followed, marking the onset of the Jim Crow era of segregation.

This Encyclopedia Biography was submitted by Rod Cameron, an English teacher at Abraham Lincoln High in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

References
State Library of North Carolina
http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/nc/bio/afro/riot.htm

Manly, Alex. Editorial in Wilmington Record
http://www.mindspring.com/~lmno/riot.html

Poverty and Race Action Research Council
http://www.prrac.org/topics/mar99/loewen.htm

Southern Cultures
http://www.unc.edu/depts/csas/socult/revs/sc63rev6.htm
Alex Manly Lesson Activity Suggestions.

Marksville, Louisiana: This small town located in Central Louisiana has long served as the parish (county) seat of Avoyelles Parish. Its present-day population stands at about 5,500 people. The town was named after Marc Eliche who settled in the area in 1796. When the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, Eliche donated land on which government buildings were soon situated. It was in Marksville that Henry B. Northup, a white man from New York, convinced a local judge that the enslaved Solomon Northrup, who later wrote the popular anti-slavery book, was a kidnapped free man of color from New York. Northrup’s book, Twelve Years as a Slave, was published in 1853 and sold over 30,000 copies.

Marshall, Thurgood: (1908-1993) The first African-American Supreme Court Justice who, before his appointment to the Court, argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, convincing the nine justices to strike down the Plessy decision and end racial segregation in public schools. Thurgood Marshall was born 12 years after the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a Supreme Court case that established the "separate but equal" doctrine, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother was a teacher and his father was a headwaiter.

Marshall graduated from Lincoln University with honors and from Harvard Law School in 1933 with highest honors. He immediately went to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as legal counsel and fought against discrimination in the Maryland law school that rejected his application. Marshall was appointed in 1939 as Legal Defense Director for the NAACP, serving until 1961. Two of the most famous cases he argued and won were Shelly v. Kramer (1948), a case resulting in making housing discrimination illegal, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), perhaps the most famous case in Supreme Court history. This resulted in a unanimous Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of schools with "all deliberate speed."

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Second Court of Appeals over objections from southern Democratic senators. He wrote 112 opinions, none of which were overturned. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall, who had served a short stint as Solicitor General for the United States arguing and winning cases for the government, as the first African-American Associate Supreme Court Justice. He was confirmed by a 69-11 vote and established a legacy on the Court writing opinions that furthered individual rights, civil rights, abortion rights, rights of the accused and rights of Native Americans. Marshall retired from the Court in 1991 due to ill health. Thurgood Marshall died in 1993 at the age of 84. He will always be remembered as a fighter and a man of principle.

This Encyclopedia Biography was submitted by Curt Lader, a social studies teacher in New York.
Thurgood Marshall Lesson Activity Suggestions.

Mason, Lucy Randolph: (1882-1959) Mason was a leading force in the woman's suffrage movement in Richmond and a supporter of organized labor. As General Secretary of the National Consumer's League, she became a driving force in the labor movement and New Deal reforms.

Master Farad Muhammad: (1877-1934) Also known as W.D. Fard, Walli Farrad, Farrad Mohammed, F. Mohammed Ali, and Wallace Fard Muhammad, he founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1930. He had immigrated to the United States some time previous to 1930 when he established the University of Islam, the Temple of Islam, and the Fruit of Islam. Farad Muhammad suggested the inevitability of race war with followers of Christianity. He also offered his black followers new Islamic names to replace their 'slave' names and a sense of moral and cultural superiority. In 1934, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances that some detractors have linked to Elijah Muhammad. Later, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam deified him as Allah, while Elijah Muhammad became known as Allah's Messenger.

Matthews, Victoria Earle: (1861-1907) An author, journalist, and social worker, Victoria Earle Matthews was born to a slave mother who fled to New York shortly after Victoria was born, fleeing a viscous master who was probably Victoria's father. Eight years later, her mother returned and won custody of Victoria and her sister, bringing the girls to New York around 1873. Although deprived of extensive formal education she read extensively from her employer's library where she worked as a domestic. After her marriage at age eighteen to William Matthews, Lamartine became a cub reporter for several city newspapers and contributed stories to an array of African-American newspapers, including the Boston Advocate and the New York Globe. Most of her writing dealt with overcoming internal difficulties to exhibit outward triumphs. She especially urged black women to release their "suppressed inner lives" onto the printed page. In 1892 she founded the Woman's Loyal Union, helped found the Federation of African-American Women in 1895, and the White Rose Industrial Association in 1897 to free African-American women from sexual exploitation. She campaigned to reform the urban employment agencies of the day that were fronts for the entrapment of rural blacks girls into urban prostitution. Her efforts eventually grew into the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, one of the founding organizations of the National Urban League.

Mays, Benjamin: (1895-1984) A graduate of Bates College and the University of Chicago who became one of the most influential educators in the South. After being a professor he served as president of Morehouse College and became the first African-American president of the Atlanta School Board, speaking frequently against segregation and for educational equality for blacks.

McCray, John: (1910-1987) McCray was the publisher of the Columbia Whitehouse and Informer, who, with Osceola McKaine, organized the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party, ensuring that African Americans could participate in the Democratic National Convention with their own party.

McKaine, Osceola: (?-?) Leader of the Sumter branch of the NAACP who became one of the South's most effective and determined organizers for African-American voter participation in South Carolina.

McKay, Claude: (1890-1949) He was born the son of a farmer on September 15, 1889 in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, and had two books of poems published when he was just 20 years old. In 1907, McKay began writing dialect poetry rooted in the island's folk culture, eventually publishing Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constable Ballads (1912). He came to the U.S. in 1912 under the pretext of studying agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and at Kansas State University, but soon moved to New York to pursue his writing. During this period McKay associated with political and literary radicals, joined the International Workers of the World, and traveled to England and Europe while completing a collection of work entitled, Spring in New Hampshire. He then returned to the U.S. and became associate editor of The Liberator. During the 1920s, dissatisfied with efforts of the American liberals and socialists to confront racism, McKay traveled to the Soviet Union, where he was well received, publishing a series of essays collectively known as Negroes in America. Returning to Europe, McKay lived for a time in Paris, Berlin, Southern France, and Morocco. He completed Harlem Shadows in 1922, Home to Harlem (1928), and Banjo (1929), a novel focusing on international drifters living in Marseilles. He returned to the U.S. in 1937, ill and impoverished, where he published his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937). In 1940 he published Harlem: Negro Metropolis, an anti-Communist treatise, which called for the rise of a community-based, African-American leadership. He converted to Catholicism in 1944, and finished an account of his youth, My Green Hills of Jamaica, published in 1979. His final work, Selected Poems, was published posthumously (1953). Winston Churchill read his poem "If We Must Die," an assailment of lynchings and mob violence in the South, during his address of a joint session of Congress during World War II. He died May 28, 1948 in Chicago.

McKinney, Susan: (1847-1918) Born of mixed racial heritage, Susan McKinney entered the New York Medical College for Women in 1867, graduating three years later as valedictorian. She became the third African-American female physician in the United States, and the first in the State of New York. She assisted in the founding of the Women's Royal Union of New York and served as an active member the Kings County Homeopathic Society. She was also active in the AME Church and in the women's suffrage movement.

Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was born on February 15, 1519, in the town of Avilés in Asturias, Spain. As a naval commander, he fought against the French and Mediterranean pirates. Appointed Captain General of the Fleet of the Indies, he commanded treasure fleets from Mexico to Spain. In 1565, King Philip II sent Menéndez to Florida to explore and colonize the peninsula, destroy Protestants, and convert the Native Americans to the Catholic faith. Accompanied by eleven ships and 2000 sailors, soldiers, clergy and settlers, Menéndez discovered a harbor on August 28th and named it for St. Augustine. He continued to explore and on September 4, located the French Protestant (Huguenot) settlement at Fort Caroline. He returned to St. Augustine’s harbor and on September 8th landed, celebrated Catholic mass, and began work on a fortified settlement.

When a hurricane wrecked the French attack, Menéndez quickly marched north, destroyed Fort Caroline, and then returned to Matanzas Inlet where he massacred the French forces. Menéndez used a combination of trade, religion, and force in his relations with the Timucuan and Calusa tribes. He built watchtowers along the Florida coast, garrisoned San Mateo (formerly Fort Caroline), and established outposts at St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and as far north as the Chesapeake Bay. He financed this network out of his own resources, not only to defend Florida from the French, but also to fight pirates. Menéndez left Florida in 1567 to get supplies from Cuba and did not return until 1571. Although he was governor of Florida until his death on September 17, 1574, he never returned to his colony.

Miles College: A historically black college founded in 1908 in Birmingham, Alabama. Founded by the Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church (CME)--an offshoot of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South--it resulted from the merger in 1902 of two schools, one in Thomasville, Alabama, and one in Booker City, Alabama. Originally, the college was located in Booker City until 1907, when it moved to Birmingham and was chartered in 1908 as Miles Memorial College. Among a handful of small colleges sustained by the CME (Lane, Paine, Texas), Miles relegated industrial education to a separate and distinctly secondary position in its curriculum. For many years, black Methodists in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a northern group, held the CME in contempt because of its close association with the white Methodist Episcopal Church, South. When W.E.B. Du Bois rated black colleges in 1910, he put Miles in a third category of good but "other colored colleges." In 1910, the college nearly folded from severe financial difficulties until help came from the white Methodist Episcopal Church, South. At that time, the management of the college was taken over by a committee composed of representatives from both church groups. Today, Miles College is a liberal arts institution proudly committed to placing emphasis on "the personal development of all individuals, regardless of race, who, upon graduation, will possess an understanding of their own mission in a global society." Present enrollment is approximately 750 students.

Miller, May: (1899-1995) May Miller was born in 1899 in Washington D.C. and became a playwright and poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. She studied with prominent African-American dramatists at the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and then graduated from Howard University in 1920. She then directed, acted, and produced plays in collaboration with Allain Locke and Montgomery Gregory, founding thereby a black drama movement and becoming the most widely published playwright of the Harlem Renaissance era. Later, she taught speech, theater, and dance at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore and poetry at Monmouth College, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Philips Exeter Academy. She also edited anthologies of plays, authored several which won drama prizes, and several volumes of poetry. Her plays often included white characters who are affected positively by their contact with blacks and frequently make use of humor to challenge the values of middle class African Americans. Much of her piety is traditional in form and language and is written with a lyrical intensity that move readers to engage humanistic values and emotions that go beyond race and gender. Miller read her poetry at the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Millet Bread: The seeds of various grasses made into bread were used as food on the slave ships that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas.

Mills, Florence: (1895-1927) The daughter of illiterate former slaves, Florence Mills was known as the "Queen of Happiness" and one of the greatest singers and dance performers of jazz as a member of the famous Mills Sisters. She actively performed in Vaudeville, in the New York cabaret scene, at the Plantation Club, and in the hit play Blackbirds. She moved to London and became to that city what Josephine Baker was to Paris. She died following surgery in New York in 1927.

Minstrel: A term referring to a traveling entertainer, originally used during medireview times in Western Europe. In America, minstrel show performers were popular in the North and South before and after the Civil War, and many of the acts included stereotypical caricatures of silly Afro-Americans performed by whites in black face (burnt cork). One of the most popular characters was named Jim Crow. By the 1840s, black-faced minstrelsy had become a recognized mode of entertainment featuring stylized performances by a troupe of actors. Among the most popular minstrel entertainers were George Washington Dixon, Thomas D. Rice, Dan Emmett, E. P. Christy, and Stephen Foster. Ironically, the distorted and stereotypical performances did set the stage for a better appreciation of African-American humor and music among whites. After the Civil War, black performers began appearing in the shows, but they were forced to perform the insulting racial jigs and songs created by white actors. Among the most famous blacks were James Bland, Billy Kersands, and Bert Williams. Bland wrote over 600 songs in his day, including "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." Williams' career spanned from the minstrel era to vaudeville. He was a brilliant humorist who performed with the Ziegfield Follies, but his characters were always trapped in the role of the slow-witted and double entendre antebellum darky. The white comic actor W. C. Fields once said that Williams "is the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew."

Miscegenation: A term referring to the interbreeding of persons of different races. Local and state laws often forbade interracial marriages in the antebellum South, and custom strongly frowned upon any sexual relationships between the races. Census enumerators usually listed light-skinned slaves and free blacks as mulattoes, meaning the offspring of white and black parents. The number of mulattoes in the South was very high on the eve of the Civil War, perhaps the majority of slaves in some regions. Many of these people were the children of light-skinned slaves and dark-skinned slaves; many were the offspring of mulatto parents; and many were the products of interracial relations. After the Civil War, the term miscegenation started being used as a derogatory word covering the whole range of mixed racial offspring, and the word mulatto was dropped from the vocabulary and from the census. Instead, census takers listed any and all light-skinned African Americans as simply "Negro." The Reconstruction governments removed the bans on interracial marriages, but many southern states reinstated these laws after 1876, and some states even wrote anti-miscegenation provisions into their state constitutions. Most importantly, whites commonly believed that no white women would willingly become involved with a black man of her own free will--and that children born of such relationships resulted because the black man had assaulted the white woman. Such "beasts" deserved a fate worse than death--a rationale that lay behind many of the horrible lynchings that occurred throughout the South after 1880.

Mississippi Plan--First: (1875-1876) A strategy by white Mississippians--who united as never before during a veritable revolution in voting and political power in 1875 and 1876--of using open force and violence to control the black vote in the State, although black Republicans controlled office-holding as late as 1875. Mobs of whites killed hundreds of black voters in a bloody rampage that recognized no boundaries. Riots erupted in Yazoo and Coahoma Counties, as well as in the towns of Clinton and Aberdeen, when armed and undisguised whites attacked Republican campaign rallies, killing schoolteachers, church leaders, and Republican Party organizers. As a result, the Republican vote in the State declined precipitously, and many of those blacks that continued to vote in the planter-dominated Delta cast Democratic ballots for the first time. The State election of 1876 gave the Democrats five of the six Congressional seats and a four to one majority in the Legislature. Immediately after the election, the new State Legislature impeached and removed the African-American Lieutenant Governor, Alexander K. Davis, so that a black would not be in the line of succession as they forced the Republican Governor, Adelbert Ames, to resign and leave the State. At the peak of the violence, President Ulysses S. Grant refused to send in troops, fearing a rebellion among those northern Democrats and Republicans weary of the so-called southern problem.

Mississippi Plan--Second: [1890] A legal mechanism devised by the Mississippi State Legislature during a constitutional convention in 1890 to circumvent the 14th and 15th amendments in ways that would not bring Federal intervention in State elections. The convention was called due to pressure from white members of the Farmers' Alliance, the State Grange, and white, racist Democrats. The outcome involved several requirements of voters that essentially eliminated blacks from exercising suffrage, including these provisions: voters had to have lived in the State for at least six years before registering to vote, pay a poll tax of $2.00, pass a literacy test or be able to understand any part of the State constitution when it was read to them, and be free of any criminal convictions from a list of petty crimes. The poll tax provision disfranchised most blacks in the State, as well as many poor whites, while the "understanding clause" opened the door to fraud and unequal treatment of blacks by white registrars. Thereafter, the black vote, and the Republican Party, practically disappeared from State politics. Supporters of the constitutional disfranchisement provisions argued that such measures would not violate the 14th and 15th amendments because the provisions applied to all potential voters without regard to race. In fact, however, the test fell most heavily on blacks because of the way the tests were administered by white registrars. Other supporters reasoned that legal disfranchisement would lessen the level of violence in the State, because law would replace force.

Mississippi Valley State University: An institution established as Mississippi Vocational College in Ita Bena and formally opened in the summer of 1950, even though legislation authorizing its establishment was enacted in 1946. The college opened with an enrollment of 305 in-service teachers and began its first full academic year, 1950-51, with 14 regular students and seven faculty members. The college offered a bachelor's degree in science in 14 areas and provided extension services; in 1964, it changed its name to Mississippi Valley State College. The college was then authorized to offer a liberal arts degree, as well as degrees in science and education, and it emphasized training in pre-professional areas, as well as technical and specialized areas. During the civil rights activities of the 1960s, the college, with the two other Mississippi colleges (Jackson State and Alcorn), was under the control of the segregationist State Legislature. Students were not allowed to protest or demonstrate under threat of expulsion. A number of its students participated secretly, however, and some left the school to attend the more activist Tougaloo College. On March 15, 1974, the Governor signed into law the bill granting university status to the Institution, which, since that time, has operated under the name of Mississippi Valley State University (MSVU). The university opened its graduate program in 1976. Today, MVSU enrolls 1,675 students and offers master's degrees in Environmental Health, Elementary Education, Criminal Justice, Special Education and a Master of Arts degree in Teaching.

Next >>