By 1900 what was the condition of blacks in the south

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some , Black soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in , and 38, lost their lives.

Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them.

The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan KKK —sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence.

By , when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black Americans had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region. On May 18, , the U. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. By an 8—1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars.

Plessy vs. Board of Education. As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered.

Many Black people looked to Booker T. Washington , the author of the bestselling Up From Slavery , as an inspiration. By , peanuts had become the second cash crop in the South.

Like Washington, Carver had little interest in racial politics, and was celebrated by many white Americans as a shining example of a modest, industrious Black man. While Washington and Carver represented a philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, another prominent Black educator, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W. Du Bois, became a leading voice in the growing Black protest movement during the first half of the 20th century.

In June , a group led by the prominent Black educator W. Du Bois met at Niagara Falls , Canada, sparking a new political protest movement to demand civil rights for Black people in the old spirit of abolitionism. A wave of race riots—particularly one in Springfield, Illinois in —lent a sense of urgency to the Niagara Movement and its supporters, who in joined their agenda with that of a new permanent civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP.

One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts. Those efforts—including a nationwide protest of D. Garvey appealed to the racial pride of African Americans, exalting blackness as strong and beautiful.

Their only hope, according to him, was to flee America and return to Africa to build a country of their own. After an unsuccessful appeal to the League of Nations to settle a colony in Africa and failed negotiations with Liberia, Garvey announced the formation of the Empire of Africa in , with himself as provisional president. Other African American leaders, notably W. In , the U. After serving a two-year jail sentence, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and immediately deported; he died in London in In the s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West.

Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening the doors of mainstream culture to Black artists and writers. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some , seeing action overseas.

According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units. Frustrated Black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U. West Virginia , carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes.

In the spring of , graduates of the first all—Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in , headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron.

Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr. The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3, missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans. Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July , President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U. By , the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced.

Army he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus. His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball. Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, ; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the next nine years, Robinson compiled a.

Despite his success on the field, however, he encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike. His groundbreaking achievement transcended sports, and as soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that Black people could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope.

As his success and fame grew, Robinson began speaking out publicly for Black equality. The children involved in the landmark Civil Rights lawsuit Brown v. On May 17, , the U. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since Ferguson , in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups.

In August , a year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations.

Thousands of mourners attended, and Jet magazine published a photo of the corpse. Rosa Parks sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after the Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal on the city bus system on December 21st, On December 1, , an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man.

I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen. About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott , including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy.

On November 13, , in Browder v. Gayle, the U. Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education , the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful reelection campaign.

The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of the African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments.

Rap Brown. By the early s, SNCC was effectively disbanded. Founded in by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality CORE sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action.

Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel. In Boynton v. Virginia , the Court extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms and other related facilities, and CORE took action to test the enforcement of that ruling.

Bound for New Orleans , the freedom riders were attacked by angry segregationists outside of Anniston, Alabama, and one bus was even firebombed. Local law enforcement responded, but slowly, and U. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy eventually ordered State Highway Patrol protection for the freedom riders to continue to Montgomery, Alabama, where they again encountered violent resistance.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. By the end of the s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident.

With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September , the U. When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in , but the struggle to integrate higher education continued.

Despite Martin Luther King, Jr. In mid-September, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during Sunday services; four young African American girls were killed in the explosion. Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Some black entrepreneurs — including several women — managed to find financial success through hard work and good fortune.

Former slave Biddy Mason used the money she earned as a nurse to invest in Los Angeles real estate, becoming a wealthy philanthropist and founding the First AME Church. Mary Ellen Pleasant, another former slave, ran several businesses and restaurants in San Francisco and used her resources to fight for African American civil rights.

African Americans were also part of the popular culture, although their participation was often segregated. A photograph shows African American musicians, the Hartzog Radio Night Hawks, just one of many such jazz bands of the s.

Despite some notable success stories, most African Americans found it difficult to break out of the "traditional" occupations of domestic work and manual labor. This situation began to change as the United States entered World War I, and they found work in war-related industries. At the end of World War I, immigration from outside the United States was largely curtailed, cutting off the flow of new workers to industry and contributing to the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the South to industrial centers in the North.

World War II brought more change. As one photograph shows, African Americans enlisted in the military, and they also moved up the blue collar ladder to careers such as firefighting. In both the armed forces and the fire department, they served in segregated units, as the photograph of Oakland's Engine Company 22 shows.

They found work in war industries, including shipping, as illustrated by the photographs of workers at the Richmond Shipyards. Many of these migrants came to Los Angeles. Ironically, as illustrated by the photographed captioned "Wartime housing in Little Tokyo's Bronzeville," a number of newcomers found housing in former Japanese American neighborhoods — in homes and apartments left vacant when residents were incarcerated in internment camps.

Racist real estate policies, including restrictive covenants, limited their ability to move out of segregated urban neighborhoods. He believed that education for blacks had to include more than learning a trade, and he demanded access to higher education.

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