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Program One
Promises Betrayed (1865-1896)
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| The term Jim Crow originated as a white but black-faced, antebellum minstrel character. |
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As the promises of Emancipation are betrayed and Reconstruction comes to an end, African-American efforts to obtain their constitutional and civil rights are repressed at every turn by southern whites. Thousands of African Americans who try to vote or organize voter registration drives for the Republican Party are murdered. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes formally ends Reconstruction as part of a bargain with white southerners for their support for his disputed presidential election. With the end of Reconstruction, tens of thousands of black farmers leave for what they believe will be the Promised Land of Kansas, but the exodus fails as many that leave are poorly prepared for the journey. Blacks are destined to remain in the South until the next century mostly working as sharecroppers on the white man's land.
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In the rural areas, some sharecroppers like the Holtzclaw family of Alabama attempt to escape from their life. The Holtzclaws rent a farm but bad luck and weather defeat their efforts. In order to free their children from a sharecropper's life, they ensure that the children get an education. They, with other black farmers, build a school with their own hands and hire a teacher for their children. Eventually their son William is accepted at Tuskegee and founds his own school.
The faith in education still remains strong in the black community. Booker T. Washington becomes a major educational leader as a result of his success in making Tuskegee an important vocational education school. Dedicated teachers, many of them black women, try to uplift the race wherever they go. But the poverty of life in the countryside leads many young people to gravitate to cities like Memphis in search of work and adventure. Whites, fearful of this new generation of blacks not born under slavery, begin to impose laws segregating public transportation and disfranchising blacks. In Memphis, Ida B. Wells, a teacher, challenges the white community in a series of newspaper articles. Fired for her activism, she becomes a full time journalist. When three friends of hers are lynched in Memphis because they tried to defend their property, Wells organizes a boycott and condemns the lynching. For her boldness she is driven out of the city. She urges the black community to leave Memphis and settle in the all-black towns being built in Oklahoma.
Her friend, Isaiah Montgomery in Mississippi, agrees with her advice. He has already come to the conclusion that confrontation is a dead end. His solution is to establish an all black community as an oasis in the desert of oppression. He founds Mound Bayou and in its early years, it succeeds. Part of the price he must pay for this however, is that he must publicly sanction Mississippi's decision to legally disfranchise blacks. He does so with a plea that disfranchisement will result in racial peace. But even as he speaks, racial violence inundates the black community. The immediate trigger for this is an attempt to form a coalition of white and black farmers to challenge the power of the entrenched Democratic Party through the Populist movement. The struggle opens a Pandora's box of racial animosity. Lynchings soar and Jim Crow laws proliferate. Booker T. Washington attempts to mitigate the situation by publicly supporting segregation and a subordinate position for blacks. For whites and some blacks, he is the hero of the day. For other blacks, he is a traitor. They resolve to continue the struggle for their rights even as the United States Supreme Court, in two landmark decisions, affirm the right of the South to both segregate and disfranchise blacks. Without federal support and subjected to white oppression, African Americans fall back on their own family, church and community institutions to survive the coming storm.
For a Teacher's Guide to the resources on this site that complement Program one, click here.
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