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.

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Saint Augustine’s College: A college, affectionately known today as "St. Aug's," founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1867 by a group of prominent Episcopal clergymen for the education of freed slaves. In its early years, it was an elementary and secondary boarding school, enrolling 264 students in 1915. It also offered an evening school for adult elementary education for much of the 20th century. Although it paid considerable attention to industrial education, it did not place this instruction above academic pursuits. The college first awarded baccalaureate degrees in 1931.

It continues to be supported by the Episcopal Church as a member of the Association of Episcopal Colleges. According to a recent survey, St. Augustine's has a student body that is 94 percent African-American. Its core curriculum is based on in-depth programs in the social sciences, business, computer science, teacher education, the natural sciences, and mathematics.

The college is located on a 110-acre campus featuring three historical landmarks and serves a student body of 1,900 students, half of whom come from North Carolina. Among its most famous graduates are: Ralph Campbell, State auditor of North Carolina; Coach George Williams; Ruby Butler DeMesme, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force; Hannah Diggs Atkins, member of Oklahoma's House of Representatives; and the famous centenarians and authors, the Delany sisters, who wrote Having Our Say.

Saint Paul’s College: Founded in 1888 as Saint Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia, by the Episcopal Church under the directorship of Dr. James Solomon Russell. Its name was changed to St. Paul's Polytechnic Institute in 1941, when the State granted it authority to offer four-year degrees. In 1957, it changed its name to St. Paul's College. Located on 100 acres of landscaped grounds in southern Virginia, St. Paul's today is still an Episcopal Church related institution. Kept intentionally small to increase student-faculty contact, this small coeducational college of 700 students, 96 percent of whom are African-American, principally offers majors in operations management, sociology, business administration, criminal justice, and computer science.

Sambo: This was a stereotyped character created by whites to ridicule and denigrate blacks. It is Hispanic in origins, rooted in the word Zambo, which means a bowlegged monkey-like person. By the late 19th century, this character resembled an ever-smiling buffoon and was depicted in popular drawings, cartoons, postcards, playing cards, and on billboards and posters. After WWII, a national restaurant chain used the image for its logos. Sambo figures appeared everywhere: salt and pepper shakers, pillows, and dolls. Its essence was that of a childish, dependent black person who posed no harm or threat to white society. Since the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s, the Sambo character has practically disappeared from popular culture.

Savannah State College: Originally founded as the Georgia Industrial College for Colored Youth in 1890, it was the first State-sponsored college for African Americans in Georgia. It also served as a land grant institution until 1947. Initially holding classes in Athens, Georgia, it relocated to Savannah in 1891. Upon arriving there, students and faculty members joined in the construction Hill Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus. Female students were first admitted the college as boarding students in 1921.

The college's founding president Richard R. Wright, Sr., a prominent black educator who also founded the Negro Banker's Association, served the college for 30 years. A strong advocate of quality academic instruction, even offering students Latin and Greek, Wright never received significant northern philanthropy. Enrollment stood at 310 males and 80 females in 1915. The college eventually became a four-year-degree-granting institution in 1928 and was renamed Georgia State College four years later. It became Savannah State College in the 1990s, and achieved university status in 1996.

Located on 165 acres of land in Savannah, Georgia, the college offers 23 undergraduate degrees and three graduate degree programs. Over 90 percent of its 2,600 students are African Americans, and most come from the State of Georgia. The campus sponsors 75 student organizations and 15 intramural sports.

Scarborough, William S.: (1852-1926) Born in 1852 to a free-black father and a multiracial, slave mother, William S. Scarborough became president of Wilberforce University in Ohio, a classical scholar, and the elected president of the American Philological Association. In his youth, Scarborough learned to read and write from white neighbors and a free-black family, as well as carpentry and shoemaking. Emancipated during the Civil War, he entered Atlanta University in 1869 and attended Oberlin College. After a brief stint of teaching in the South, Scarborough returned to Oberlin and received his MA in the classics before accepting a teaching position at Wilberforce, where he rose to become a vice president in 1897 and president in 1908. Scarborough was knowledgeable in a number of classic languages, published papers on a wide variety of subjects, and was active in both the Republican Party and the African-Methodist-Episcopal Church. His widely used textbook, First Lessons in Greek, reflected his reputation and respect. His influential articles in progressive journals challenged the Booker T. Washington model of industrial education, and argued forcefully that blacks were not less able than whites to succeed in the liberal arts. Active politically in Ohio, he played a major role in winning legislation prohibiting legal segregation in the states' schools. As president of the Afro-American League of Ohio, he challenged Jim Crow railroad cars coming into the state from the South. In the 1920s, he served within the Department of Agriculture under President Harding.

Schomburg, Arthur: (1874-1938) Born in 1874 to an unwed freeborn mulatta mother and a German born merchant in Saint Thomas, U. S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Puerto Rico, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg moved to New York in 1891 and worked in the mailroom at Banker's Trust Company for 23 years. There is no evidence that he ever received as a child or later in life any support or acknowledgement from his white father. During his years in New York, Schomburg assembled over ten thousand books, pamphlets, and objects of historical significance to African Americans. Although never formerly educated, he achieved wide acclaim for his prodigious knowledge of black culture and for his bibliographic acumen. In 1911, he joined with John E. Bruce to form the Negro Society for Historical Research. His collection of artifacts was purchased in 1926 by the Carnegie Corporation and donated to the Negro Division of the New York Public Library and placed in the 135th Street Branch, in Harlem. Schomburg was hired in 1932 to be the curator of this collection, a position he held until his death in 1938. Today this vast collection is housed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and is one of the world's most outstanding collections of materials concerning the "history and culture of people of African descent."

Scottsboro Case: (1931-1952) One of the most celebrated civil rights cases of the 20th century, in which nine young black men were convicted of rape at Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The nine youths had fought with a group of whites aboard a slow-moving freight train, eventually forcing the whites off the train. Two young white girls on the train swore that they had been raped by the black men, who ranged in age from 12 to 19. Quickly arrested, the nine youths were found guilty, and eight were sentenced to death. Protests broke out throughout the South, and the Communist-dominated International Labor Defense organization underwrote the "Scottsboro Boys" appeal. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction on the grounds of inadequate counsel. The State of Alabama then retried the youths, convicted one of the men, Clarence Norris, whose lawyer presented evidence that one of the women was a well-known prostitute, while the other alleged victim had admitted that no rape had occurred. When he was found guilty nevertheless, the Supreme Court, in Norris v. Alabama, overturned the conviction because blacks had been systematically excluded from the grand jury that had indicted him. Although the State courts freed four of the youths in new trials and paroled the rest, the supposed "ring leader" of the group, Haywood Patterson, was sentenced to 75 years in jail. He escaped from prison in 1948 and fled to Michigan, where he was convicted of the stabbing death of another black man in 1950. For a lesson linking the Scottsboro Case to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, click here.

Seasoned or Seasoning: Seasoning was a process of forcing the enslaved Africans to accept their new lives as menial workers with no rights before the law. It was a process of behavior modification. It began soon after capture or purchase in Africa, but was intensified once in the Americas. Most of the Africans brought into North America prior to 1740 came by way of the West Indies. The most valuable slaves were those born in the Americas--known as Creole slaves, and the least valuable were those directly from Africa. Traders tried to present the enslaved African as being as much like a Creole slave as possible in look and behavior. The process began with the sale itself. Although no standard applied for everywhere in the Americas, the most experienced slavers usually cleaned up the Africans by shaving all the hair from their bodies, washing them with water, and oiling them down with palm oil. The about-to-be-sold slave was also fed often but in small amounts for a few days prior to the sale, trained not to resist having all parts of their bodies examined--especially their reproductive organs, and sometimes allotted a little rum to liven their spirits. In the West Indies, traders might put those slaves destined for the American South into sugar plantation work gangs for a few weeks labor to break them in to the routine. After 1740, when the demand for slave labor was highest, most enslaved people sold into the American South came directly from African, and they had to be "seasoned" by their American owners. Already branded in Africa with the traders mark, they might be branded again with the mark of the new owner. They also would receive new names--usually Christian ones, or names from Classical Rome and Greece--such as Jupiter or Plato, or African-sounding names--like Quack (which was derived from the African word Quaco, meaning a male born on Wednesday) or Squash (which probably came from the word Quashee, meaning a female born on Sunday). Usually older slaves would be put in charge of the seasoning process, teaching the newly purchased enslaved African how to work in gangs, how to conduct themselves, and how to adapt what they knew in Africa to the new environment of slavery.

Second Reconstruction: (1954-68) Refers to the period nearly 100 years after the First Reconstruction (1865-1976) when federal courts, the U. S. Congress, and the American Presidency pushed through a tidal wave of Civil Rights legislation and ruling in an attempt to desegregate the South and end Jim Crow laws. The era is considered to have begun with the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created a permanent civil rights commission to study issues, and far-reaching legislation in 1964, 1965, and 1968. A popular explosion of civil rights activism, non-violent peace marches, boycotts of public transportation, and sit-ins closely identify the era. A bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama (1955), which lasted for 381 days, demonstrated that African Americans would organize and sacrifice for their rights. Momentum gathered steam when Freedom Rides were organized in 1961 to educate southern African Americans on their voting rights. The rides generated national attention, which led to increasing pressure for federal action. By May 1963, the Justice Department had become involved in voting rights issues in 145 Southern counties. This encouraged civil rights leaders to embark on a massive voter education program that was met with violence, often from southern law enforcement officers themselves. Unlike the infighting that occurred between President Andrew Johnson and Congress during the First Reconstruction period, The Second Reconstruction saw President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress, and the Court work together in opposition to state resistance to civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended official racial discrimination in public accommodations, public schools, housing, labor unions, employment, and economic opportunity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided for federal examiners to monitor elections, allowed for the registration illiterate citizens provided they were qualified otherwise to vote, and directed the Attorney General to challenge the legality of poll taxes. In 1968, Congress passed another Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination in the rental or sale of housing.

Selma University: A four-year, private, coeducational, college in Selma, Alabama. It is affiliated with the Baptist Church and was founded in 1878 as the Alabama Baptist Normal and Theological School to train African Americans as ministers and teachers. Built upon the town's former fair grounds, Selma University was incorporated in 1884. By 1915, the school enrolled 268 students, principally at the elementary level. In 1929, it officially changed its name to Selma University and conferred its first BA degrees to students several years later. The 35-acre, 12-building campus includes the Jemison-Owen Auditorium-Gymnasium, the Stone-Robinson Library, and the New Dinkins Memorial Chapel, which was rebuilt in 1920 after a fire destroyed the previous chapel. Most campus facilities were built before 1980. The predominant structure on the campus in 1895 was a four-story brick building.

With an enrollment of just over 280 students, Selma University is located near the beginning of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The school remains a sponsored school of the Alabama Missionary Baptist Association. Selma University has graduated over 3,000 students in the liberal arts and sciences, as well as several thousand ministers for the Baptist Church in the South.

Among its alumni, author Juanita Lucy attended Selma University before she made news by attempting to be one of the first African Americans to enter the University of Alabama. Nathan B. Young received an honorary doctoral degree from Selma University before he went on to be president of Florida A&M University, as did Representatives Alvin Holmes (D-Montgomery, AL) and Thad McClammy (D-Montgomery, AL). In addition, it should be noted that George Washington Carver gave the commencement address in 1942.

Sesame: Sesamum indicum, or sesame, also known as benne seed in South Carolina were brought as seeds by West Africans to South Carolina. Slaves raised large crops of sesame, being fond of the plant's nutritious seeds for making soups and puddings. They also used sesame oil for cooking and lighting lamps within private estates as well as on the public roads.

Shadd, Mary Ann: (1823-1893) Mary Ann Shedd was born in 1823, the oldest of 13 children but moved to Canada in 1851, shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. While based in Toronto she edited and published the abolitionist newspaper Provincial Freedman and a widely read tract promoting black immigration to Canada: Notes on Canada West (1852). After the death of her husband, Thomas F. Cary, Shadd moved to back to the United States and recruited African American soldiers in Indiana for the U. S. Army. With the end of the Civil War, she moved to Washington D. C. and assumed the duties of principal of a public school and wrote articles for several newspapers. In 1869 she became the first female law student at the Howard University and became one of the first African-American women to practice law. As a strong supporter of suffrage for women, she founded in 1880 the Colored Women's Franchise Association. Up until the time of her death she worked on expanding job opportunities for women, establishing coop businesses, and training programs for equal rights.

Shaman: A shaman is a spiritual leader believed to have special abilities to contact the spirit world and use its power to help body and soul. A shaman may chant, drum, fast, or undertake a journey to enter a trance state. In this trance, he or she may have visions, speak prophecies, conduct healings, or contact the spirit world. The Seminole shamans, or hillis haya, use herbs (button snakeweed, rabbit tobacco, bayleaf, French mulberry) and animal symbols to treat mental and physical disorders. They activate the medicine by singing traditional chants and blowing through a tube onto it, imitating their Supreme Spirit, the Breathmaker.

Sharecropping: (1866-1955) When the federal government refused to confiscate and redistribute the lands of ex-Confederates to the formerly enslaved, a new system of agricultural labor emerged known as sharecropping. Landless farmers contracted to work the land for a share of the crop as their wages, using the remaining shares to pay rent and supplies. In time, most southern states passed "crop lien" laws that gave the merchant suppliers first claim to the crops of those working on shares over the claims of landlords. This crop lien enabled merchants to ensnare black sharecroppers and tenants into a system of debt and high interest rates from which there was virtually no escape. Those croppers who fled from their debts to the merchants rather than carrying over the debt to the next crop could be prosecuted in criminal courts. Black farmers who rented the land, called tenants, also became entrapped in the debt system because they had to give crop liens in order to obtain credit for seed, mules, tools and supplies. Most "furnishing merchants" insisted that sharecroppers and tenants grow only cotton on their lands rather than cultivating gardens or food crops. For teacher-reviewed external web sites on sharecropping, click here.

Shaw University: Shaw University was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. The Raleigh Institute, as it was known prior to being named Shaw University, is one of the oldest African-American universities in the American South. It changed its name in 1870 to Shaw Collegiate Institute to honor its chief financial supporter Elijah Shaw of Wales, Massachusetts. In 1875, it was chartered by the State of North Carolina as Shaw University. It was initially intended that the curriculum would be based on "freedom theology" and Biblical Interpretation. Within fifteen years, however, it broadened its curriculum to include the liberal arts.

Henry Martin Tupper came south immediately after the end of the Civil War. He established the Second Baptist Church of Raleigh, and later he and his Bible study students constructed a two-story church, with one story being dedicated to the church and the other to the Raleigh Institute. By 1915, still supported by ABHM, its enrollment numbered close to 291 students nearly evenly divided between males and females.

Shaw offers its students 22 majors, and one master's (divinity) degree. In 1993 it began to emphasize programs in ethics and values, as designed by then president Talbert O. Shaw. It remains one of the few schools in North Carolina to receive full accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. Shaw University is made up of 85 percent African-American students and is a founding member of the United Negro College Fund.

Two noteworthy buildings exist on the campus of Shaw University. Ester Hall, built in 1873, was the first on-campus dormitory for women, on a coeducational campus in the United States. The Leonard School of Medicine was founded in 1885 and is the oldest four-year medical school to serve African Americans in the United States. A law school followed in 1886, and a pharmacy school in 1891.

In 1995, Shaw University undertook a study of why no African Americans had received a Congressional Medal of Honor for service in World War II. They submitted their report to Congress and recommended ten names for this high award for valor. One year later seven of the ten names were accepted and granted the Medal of Honor.

Shaw University has been called the "Mother of North Carolina African-American Colleges" since its students and graduates went on to found four other colleges. In addition, as an outgrowth of a conference held at Shaw University in 1960, in the midst of the Civil Rights era, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was established.

Among the notable graduates of Shaw University is Angie Brooks, of Liberia, who was the president of the 24th General Assembly of the United Nations.

Shepperson, Carrie Still: (?-?) An English teacher at Union High School in Little Rock, who protested the nonexistence of public library facilities for African Americans. To raise money for the creation of a library, she staged benefit productions performed by local students in the Kempner Opera House.

Shockley, Ann Allen: (1927 - ) Ann Allen Shockley is the only daughter of Henry and Bessie Allen, both social workers. She was editor of the Fisk Herald while a student at the university and wrote articles for several other newspapers and journals. As author of a weekly column called "Ebony Topics" for the Federalsburg Times and for the Bridgeville News from 1849 to 1953, Shockley celebrated African-American family unity praised black heroes, and honored individual excellence. Many of her pieces championed women's issues. Trained as a librarian at Case Western University, Shockley became the curator of African American collections at Delaware State College, the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, and at Fisk University. Her published and unpublished essays examine the attitudes of African-American librarians towards their jobs, the need for African-American archives and race consciousness on the part of professional black archivists, and lesbian and gay themes. Her major contribution to African-American literature is in this lesbian literature, wherein she focuses on homophobia in the African- American Church and the African-American community.

Shotgun Policy: In 1875, White Mississippians discarded the masks of the Ku Klux Klan and openly waged a campaign of violence against blacks that became known as "the Shotgun Policy." Three hundred blacks were attacked by white mobs near Vicksburg, and thirty teachers, church leaders, and Republican officials were killed in Clinton, Mississippi in 1875.

Simmons, William J.: (1849-1890) Clergyman and writer who, after serving in the Civil War, moved to Lexington to become pastor of the First Baptist Church. He quickly rose to prominence in religious and educational circles, editing the American Baptist and restructuring the Normal and Theological Institution into the State University of Kentucky.

Singleton, Benjamin “Pap”: (1809-1892) An advocate of the "Great Exodus," he led thousands of African Americans out of the post-reconstruction South into Kansas and other western states in an attempt to establish an African-American "promised land." He later became a pioneer in Black Nationalism and launched one of the first back-to-Africa movements in America.

Slaughterhouse Cases: [1873] This is the first Supreme Court decision that began a series of narrow interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling left little opportunity for the federal government to use the Amendment to protect the Civil Rights of African Americans. The case had nothing to do with blacks or with civil rights in its origin. It began when butchers in New Orleans challenged a state-granted monopoly on the slaughtering of cattle in the city. They argued that section one of the Fourteenth Amendment protected their property rights as well as their rights to due process and equal protection under the law. The Court ruled in favor of the state saying that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only state law that discriminated against blacks as a class. This meant that the Supreme Court rejected the idea that it could review state legislation which any one person might feel had deprived him/her of basic rights. It argued that the Court could only review state legislation that abridged the rights of national citizenship. Other rights, such as the right to labor or the regulation of corporations were left up to the states to handle.

Slave Trading Vessels: Hundreds of slave trading ships serviced the trade from American and European ports. Known as guineamen or slavers, these vessels were long and sleek cargo ships especially designed for transporting bulk cargo to Africa and then refitted by ships carpenters to accommodate the enslaved below deck. They were about 90 feet long and 25 feet wide, with an average tonnage of 130 pounds. A tightly packed ship could hold more than 300 slaves in slave decks wedged between the lower and upper decks. Some very large ships did work the trade, however, including vessels of 320 tons and holding as many as 600 slaves. The space between these decks ranged from four feet on the average Newport slaver to a little more on Dutch ships, many of which had been especially designed for the trade. Usually a middle platform was crammed between the decks permitting two rows of slaves positioned spoon like one on top of the other. Nearly every inch of space was used in a ship's hold, allowing each person just about two feet of space above and around sixteen inches flat out on one's back. On the voyage to the Americas, the typical slaver allowed women and children the run of the top deck during the day, exercised the shackled men on deck by forcing them to dance and sing for a couple of hours each day, and fed them two meals of boiled rice or cornmeal, stewed yams or beans, and a half a pint of water. On some ships, the enslaved were given a little salt beef, wooden pillows for their heads, sticks to clean their teeth, and palm oil for washing. All were required to be "stowed" below decks during the night, where they slept in chains and great discomfort. Unable to easily reach latrine tubs, many slaves simply relieved themselves where they lie. It was said that the stench of a slave ship could be smelled from five miles distance. Sometimes the slavers had a crude house on deck for the sick or the women and children to use in mild weather. The slave voyage usually took about five weeks, but calm seas and low sailing winds often extended the voyage up to three months.

Slowe, Lucy Diggs: (1885-1937) While being raised in Virginia, Lucy Diggs Slowe was educated in the public schools of Baltimore. In 1904 she became the first woman to graduate from Baltimore Colored High School. She worked her way through Howard University and then was appointed the first Dean of Women at Howard. In 1908 she founded the first national sorority for African-American women, Alpha Kappa Alpha and later received a master's degree from Columbia and was elected the first president of the National Association of College Women.

Smalls, Robert: (1839-?) Born a slave in South Carolina, Smalls stole a Confederate boat and sailed it to freedom during the Civil War. He then became a second lieutenant in the Union Navy. When he was thrown off a segregated streetcar in Philadelphia in 1864, the resulting protests by the African-American community forced the streetcar companies to integrate their cars. In 1870, Smalls won election to the South Carolina senate and served as a U. S. Congressman, becoming one of the most powerful politicians in South Carolina during Reconstruction.

Smith, Amanda Berry: (1837-1915) The oldest of thirteen children, Amanda Berry was born as a slave in Maryland in 1837, and her father purchased her freedom when she was in her teens. Her husband was killed during the Civil War while serving in an African-American regiment. Although she had little formal education, she became known as an excellent speaker and singer. In New York City she received a call to be a missionary, and in 1880 she began a twelve-year missionary journey through Europe, Asia, and Africa. She spent a total of eight years in Liberia and West Africa, establishing missions and temperance societies. In 1893 she settled in Chicago, and helped establish the first orphan's home for African-American children in Harvey, Illinois. Smith retired from her endless fundraising for the home in 1912 and died in Florida in 1915.

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