Civil rights movement (1865–1896)
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States.
From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, southern states passed new constitutions and laws disenfranchising most Black people and excluding them from the political system, a status that was maintained in many cases into the 1940s.
In response to Radical Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) emerged in 1867 as a white-supremacist organization opposed to Black civil rights and Republican rule.
[7] Following the end of Reconstruction, many Black people feared the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Jim Crow laws which continued to make them second-class citizens.
[8] Motivated by important figures such as Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, as many as forty thousand Exodusters left the South to settle in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.
Eric Foner reports: The Union Leagues promoted militia-like organizations in which the Black people banded together to protect themselves from being picked off one-by-one by harassers.
"[23] In terms of racial issues, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins argues: In 1894, a wave of agrarian unrest swept through the cotton and tobacco regions of the South.
[33] Historian August Meier reports: During the war thousands of slaves escaped from rural plantations to Union lines, and the Army established a contraband camp next to Memphis, Tennessee.
"[43] The Black community and its white supporters in the North emphasized the critical role of education is the foundation for establishing equality in civil rights.
[56] Of even greater influence was Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, founded in 1881 by the state of Alabama and led by Hampton alumnus Booker T. Washington until his death in 1915.
"[61][62] The John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen was created in 1882 with $1.5 million for "Uplifting the legally emancipated population of the Southern states and their posterity.
[72] Black Americans, once freed from slavery, were very active in forming their own churches, most of them Baptist or Methodist, and giving their ministers both moral and political leadership roles.
He served as a pastor, writer, newspaper editor, debater, politician, the chaplain of the Army, and a key leader of emerging Black Methodist organization in Georgia and the Southeast.
He not only created and fostered his network of AMEZ churches in North Carolina, but he also was the grand master for the entire South of the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, a secular organization that strengthen the political and economic forces inside the Black community.
[87] Unlike the Methodists, who had a hierarchical structure led by bishops, the Baptist churches were largely independent of each other, although they pooled resources for missionary activities, especially missions in Africa.
Besides their regular religious services, the urban churches had numerous other activities, such as scheduled prayer meetings, missionary societies, women's clubs, youth groups, public lectures, and musical concerts.
[90] After 1910, as Black people migrated to major cities in both the North and the South, there emerged the pattern of a few very large churches with thousands of members and a paid staff, headed by an influential preacher.
Southern white preachers said: God had chastised them and given them a special mission – to maintain orthodoxy, strict biblicism, personal piety, and traditional race relations.
They appreciated opportunities to exercise their independence, to worship in their own way, to affirm their worth and dignity, and to proclaim the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
[95] The Southern states In the 1890–1905 period systematically reduced the number of Black people allowed to vote to about 2% through restrictions that skirted the 15th amendment, because they did not explicitly mention race.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 ruled in favor of Jim Crow in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, declaring that "separate but equal" facilities for Black people were legal under the 14th Amendment.
[97] Legal segregation was imposed only in schooling, and marriage, but that changed in 1880s when new Jim Crow laws mandated the physical separation of the races in public places.
They passed segregation laws and imposed second-class status on Black people in a system known as Jim Crow that lasted until the civil rights movement.
Some notable plaintiffs included Elizabeth Jennings Graham in New York,[101] Charlotte L. Brown[102] and Mary Ellen Pleasant in San Francisco,[103] Ida B.Wells in Memphis, Tennessee [104] and Robert Fox in Louisville, Kentucky.
Lynching was higher in the context of worsening economic conditions for poor rural whites in heavily Black counties, especially the low price of cotton in the 1890s.
Wells (1862–1931) used her newspaper in Memphis Tennessee to attack lynchings; fearful for her life, she fled to the more peaceful precincts of Chicago in 1892 where she continued her one-person crusade.
[110] In the mainstream national and local media of the late 19th century, "Black people were persistently stereotyped as criminals, savages, or comic figures.
Ambitious young Black men had a difficult time becoming lawyers, with few exceptions such as James T. Rapier, Aaron Alpeoria Bradley and John Mercer Langston.
Its central thesis was that the educational, moral, and spiritual progress of Black women would improve the general standing of the entire African-American community.
The essays in A Voice from the South also touched on a variety of topics, from racism and the socioeconomic realities of Black families to the administration of the Episcopal Church.
