CHAPTER 1
Though Justice Sleeps
1880–1900
Copyright © 2005. Oxford University Press, USA. All rights reserved.
Barbara Bair
In his 1884 book Black and White, African-American journalist and activist T. Thomas
Fortune analyzed the denial of justice to African Americans and the process of
disenfranchisement that characterized the post-Reconstruction era. He observed that the
exclusion of African Americans from land ownership and voting were the twin roots of the
“great social wrong which has turned the beautiful roses of freedom into thorns to prick the
hands of the black men of the South.” Despite the promises of freedom, including legal
emancipation from slavery and postwar talk of righting economic inequities and providing
opportunities, the majority of African Americans faced landlessness, underemployment, and
lack of access to political rights or protections. Land, as a symbol of freedom and citizenship,
and as a means of independent livelihood, was at the crux of African-American desire in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century.
During this period, nine out of ten of the 6.5 million African Americans in the United States
made their homes in the South. Eighty percent of these black Southerners lived in rural areas,
and most of them were farmers or agricultural laborers. Some were landowners and had their
own small farms, but most were tenants. They rented the land where they worked for cash or a
share of the crops they raised. Others worked for hire.
It was very difficult for tenant farmers working under sharecropping arrangements to get
ahead financially, and having enough to eat and adequate clothing were always worries. Most
faced each new year owing money from years before to the white people from whom they
rented land and to the merchant who ran the store where they purchased their goods. “We make
as much cotton and sugar as we did when we were slaves,” one black tenant farmer in Texas
observed, “and it does us as little good now as it did then.” Laborers who questioned the high
prices charged to them, which would invariably be set at a rate that would encompass or
exceed the value of their entire year’s crop, had little legal recourse. As one black
Mississippian testified to the Senate, “Colored men soon learn that it is better to pay any
account, however unjust, than to refuse, for he stands no possible chance of getting justice
before the law.”
Many African-American sharecroppers and farmers sought greater justice by moving to
different land. When their contracts were up at one place, they would often pack their
belongings and enter into a new arrangement on another tract of acreage, hoping to improve
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over their last year’s experience. One Alabama sharecropper reported the frustration she felt
when she went out in the moonlight to plant rosebushes to beautify the plot of land she was
renting, never knowing whose yard it would be the next year. Some moved even further than
from one plot in the neighborhood to another. They migrated from the South to form new black
towns in the West, or dreamed of a life of justice and independence in an all-black Africa.
Leaving, for families already in debt and under white economic control, was no easy matter.
It was hard to do without much money, and it could be dangerous. White Southerners did not
want black laborers to leave, because their low-paid work made white economic gains
possible. Despite the risks involved, thousands of laborers and middle-class people desirous
of greater opportunities left for Kansas, Oklahoma, and other areas outside the South. “The
word it has been spoken; the message has been sent,” wrote Sojourner Truth in verse she
composed about the migrations. “The prison doors have opened, and out the prisoners went.”
For Truth and other older activists who had worked hard to bring about the end of slavery, the
post-Reconstruction treks to new lands were seen as one more step in the march toward real
emancipation. For other leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, the migrations were a mistake.
Douglass felt that African Americans should remain where they were, confront violence, and
take a stand for equal rights. This was difficult to do, and while many African Americans did
work and speak out to change conditions in the regions where they lived, others, particularly
the poor, who lived under harsh circumstances, longed to escape rather than place their hopes
in reforming political and economic systems that were so weighed against them.
Some black leaders argued that the federal government should make public lands available
to black settlement as compensation for the centuries that Americans of African descent had
spent in slavery. In 1887 William H. Thomas wrote in the African Methodist Episcopal Church
Review that he saw the involvement of the government in the distribution of land as an issue of
morality and legal principle, mandated by the “equity of justice between man and man, and
government and citizen.” If slavery was wrong, Thomas argued, then “Negroes were illegally
held to service; some measure of compensation, therefore, is due them, not only from
individuals who were the nominal owners, but from the National Government which was the
prime factor in their enslavement and maintenance in bondage. … No measure of compensation
would work such beneficial results to the free people, … as the ownership of land.” Thomas,
like many others who had come before and would follow him, proposed the creation of a
separate black territory or state within the United States. In Thomas’s vision, the government
would buy expanses of land in Southern states and divide their acreage into small homesteads
that would be made available for black settlement.
The longing for land and political control that beckoned laborers and middle-class investors
West also made them think of Africa. Henry Adams and Benjamin Singleton were among the
African-American activists who advocated mass black emigration from the South in the late
1870s and 1880s. These advocates contacted organizations founded to provide passage to
African Americans who wanted to move to West Africa, including the long-established (and
white-dominated) American Colonization Society and several newer enterprises such as the
black-administered Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. Gathering support from
tens of thousands of rural black Southerners, Adams and other organizers like him viewed
Liberia as a potential home for working people with agricultural skills.
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Other African Americans, especially middle-class leaders, saw West Africa not so much as
a place to escape from white violence or as a land of opportunity for workers with few
resources, but as a place where educated blacks of African and African-American origin could
develop their own business enterprises and political structures. In the mid-1880s and 1890s,
grassroots groups like Benjamin Singleton’s United Transatlantic Society, based in Tennessee
and Kansas, continued to advocate migration to Africa as a means of racial unity and progress
at the same time that they encouraged Southern blacks to move westward.
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an
advocate of black emigration, had traveled to Liberia and wrote and spoke of its promise.
Organizers for the American Colonization Society also toured through the South, speaking at
churches and community centers about African heritage and black nationhood in Africa. When
African Americans read Turner’s letters about Liberia that were published in church
newspapers in 1891, they responded. They formed local clubs to encourage emigration, and
many wrote to inquire about securing passage or came East in hope of boarding a transatlantic
steamer, but the colonization society did not have enough boats to carry them or the funding to
promise future voyages. These disappointed travelers became temporary urban refugees. They
either returned West or made homes in the city.
While the influence of the colonization society declined as a result of its financial hardships
and administrative reorganization after 1892, several independent movements were formed in
the 1890s. Emigration remained an important topic of discussion among lower-and workingclass African Americans.
Small groups of emigrants successfully left for Africa, but the overwhelming majority of
African Americans remained in the United States. Many who wanted to go to Africa could not
afford to pay for the passage. If they decided to leave the South, they looked instead for places
relatively close to home to secure land and contribute their labor. Since the late 1870s, black
people from Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee had been establishing new lives in Kansas and
in small settlements on the Western prairies. Just as national proponents of African repatriation
visited churches and schools to teach African Americans about Africa and the possibility of
going there, so promoters of migration clubs who wanted to encourage relocation to the West
organized through existing black social institutions.
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For a fee of five dollars, black settlers of Nicodemus, Kansas, were granted this certificate entitling them to any vacant lot in the
town. The chance to own their own land was a powerful lure for many African Americans.
The motivation for going to other states was similar to the idea of going to Africa. “We as a
people are oppressed and disfranchised,” one westward migrant wrote in a letter in 1891. “We
are still working hard and our rights taken from us. [T]imes are hard and getting harder every
year. We as a people believe that Affrica is the place but to get from under bondage are
thinking of Oklahoma as this is our nearest place of safety.”
In 1889–90 portions of what was called the Unassigned Lands in Indian Territory and all of
Oklahoma Territory (areas that in 1907 would become parts of the state of Oklahoma) were
opened to settlement by non-Indian peoples. Indian Territory had been the home of relocated
Indian peoples since federal policy had forcibly moved Native Americans from their
traditional homelands in the East in the 1830s. Many blacks and people of mixed race living in
the region were former slaves, or the descendants of those who had been held in bondage by
Cherokee, Creek, or other Indian peoples for generations. Many of these freedmen and their
families were themselves citizens of the Indian nations. In the early 1890s, African Americans
from neighboring Arkansas and other Southern states were attracted to the land grants available
in the areas newly opened to settlement by outsiders. More than seven thousand of them moved.
They did so with the hope not only for property, but for political independence.
Several all-black towns were established in the territories. These were places where
African Americans could form their own municipal governments and protect one another from
white incursions and violence. Langston City was one such town. It had its own newspaper,
and when black residents across the South read about the plans for the town, they joined
dozens of Oklahoma booster clubs that advertised opportunities and promoted migration. A
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few hundred came to Langston. In 1897 Langston University (also called the Agricultural and
Normal University), a college where black teachers were trained, was established in Langston
by the territorial legislature. The town’s primary promoter, Edward (also Edwin) P. McCabe
encouraged emigrants to become involved in Republican party politics and to start businesses.
McCabe had earlier helped settle the black town of Nicodemus, Kansas, which was named for
an African prince who was brought to the American colonies as a slave and later purchased his
own freedom. He hoped enough black people would respond to the Oklahoma Territory land
rush that voting majorities of blacks would be created in the territory’s local districts. African
Americans who came would own land and businesses, and would be able to govern
themselves.
Most newly arrived residents in the West and Midwest lived in simple dugouts and took up
subsistence farming, much like the African Americans who were already living in the region. A
more prosperous middle class also emerged, and these people operated hotels, blacksmith
shops, barbershops, saloons, and other service-oriented establishments. Other blacks became
deputy marshals or worked on ranches as cowboys and wranglers. Black churches, women’s
groups, and fraternal orders were founded. By 1900, more than 55,000 African Americans
were living in Oklahoma and Indian Territories, and between 1890 and 1910, twenty-five
black communities were founded in the Oklahoma region.
Efforts at westward migration and the formation of black towns, like transatlantic emigration
to West Africa, were plagued by the relative poverty of the majority of black workers and
subsistence farmers. Neither the emigration clubs nor African colonization organizations and
companies had funds for long-term investment. Middle-class organizers and developers
involved in the black-towns movement and in Liberian colonization schemes tried hard to
attract settlers who had the financial capital to start or support businesses, purchase land, and
establish long-lasting schools, churches, and civic and social associations. Accomplishing
these things was difficult to do for those with little money. Colonists in Africa faced prolonged
rainy seasons and types of illnesses and fevers they were not used to, and they often arrived in
Africa to find that provisions and resources that had been promised to them were scarce.
Blacks who participated in the westward exoduses purchased more than twenty-thousand
acres of land in Kansas in the early 1880s, but at the same time thousands of individuals
arrived after difficult journeys, impoverished, undernourished, and in need of help. For them,
basics like seeds, clothing, and farming implements were hard to buy. Many took jobs on the
railroads or in towns instead of establishing their own small farms as they had hoped to do.
Crop failures and droughts made conditions worse. The economic depression of 1893–94
drove down cotton prices and raised interest rates, burying tenant farmers in deeper debt
within the credit system, and made cash and jobs even more scarce than before.
Still, there were successes. The presence of a nearby railroad line could make a big
difference in a black town’s ability to last over time. Mound Bayou, Mississippi, had a
railroad depot. Mound Bayou was a town with a majority black population that, like sites
further to the West, was founded on the principles of racial pride and economic opportunity.
Black citizens there were able to steadily increase the number of acres of land under tillage in
surrounding farms. They established several commercial businesses, such as cotton gins and
sawmills, whose success was linked to the availability of rail transportation that quickly
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moved products created or processed by the businesses to the market. In the 1890s, the
residents of Mound Bayou replaced dugouts and log cabins with wood houses and built five
new churches and a school building. Black people were elected as city aldermen and held
office as mayor.
In the 1890s the Langston City, Oklahoma, Herald newspaper emphasized the desire of town
leaders and promoters to attract middle-class people to their town. Ads called for shoemakers
and other artisans, and invited those who could begin new businesses such as a lumberyard and
a harness shop. Several grocery stores already existed, as did saloons, blacksmiths,
barbershops, feed stores, mills, yeast and soap factories, a bank, hotels, and an opera house.
The newspaper’s editors also promised black readers that political liberty and justice would
be by-products of life in Langston.
But in the same period when this promise was being made, African Americans saw their
political rights increasingly under attack. By the 1890s, Jim Crow laws segregated people of
different races in public places such as schools, restaurants, and theaters. They also applied
different rules that affected blacks’ and whites’ ability to do things like vote, secure loans, or
chose a place to live. The term “Jim Crow” was an old pejorative way of referring to black
people. It had been in popular use since the 1830s. The Jim Crow laws made areas of the West
and Midwest, which at first had seemed attractive, difficult places for blacks to fulfill their
dreams of independent lives free of white control or repression. Despite injustices, people
made good lives for themselves and their neighbors. They worked hard, raised families, and
looked after one another in their communities. African Americans also had a large presence in
the West serving in the U.S. military and working in ranching and the cattle industry. Many
experienced black cowboys were born in the West or had served in U.S. Army infantry and
cavalry regiments stationed in Western states.
Black cowboys in Texas around 1890. During the last part of the nineteenth century black cowboys played a large role in the
development of the Western economy, participating in cattle drives and working on ranches.
With the coming of the railroads and the fencing of the land, the massive trail drives in
which African-American cowboys had traditionally found employment gave way to the
shipment of cattle by train. In the last part of the nineteenth century, the proportion of cowboys
who were black varied from twenty-five to sixty percent in different areas of the West. Many
of them worked in Texas and Indian Territory. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, these hands
worked for hire on individual ranches, sometimes farming their own homesteads on the side
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and raising small herds. Other highly skilled cowboys entered the roping contest circuit,
turning the work they did on the range into performance art. They competed for prize money as
horseback riders and ropers in small town exhibitions, large regional expositions, and state
and county fairs. Their presence on the roping circuits set the stage for the later achievements
of men like Bill Pickett, a black cowboy at the Miller 101 Ranch who became famous for his
performances in rodeo and Wild West shows.
Unlike men who made their living in the cattle industry and its offshoots, women in the West
were employed primarily in farming family plots. And many were employed in the service
economy, working as cooks, cleaners, and laundresses in households and boardinghouses or
hotels, raising other people’s children, or for a few, working in black-owned stores.
For most black women who remained in the South, the kinds of domestic chores and
farmwork that they did had not changed much since emancipation. They worked long hours
scrubbing floors, cooking and preparing food, sewing, washing, mending, and doing dishes.
They cared for their children, and they planted, chopped, and picked cotton and helped with
wheat, corn, and tobacco crops. They also grew small gardens or sometimes kept a cow in
order to add greens, butter, and milk to the regular family diet of cornmeal, salt pork, and
molasses. They often would try to do what they could to earn a little cash: raise chickens and
sell the eggs, pick wild berries for market, or take in extra laundry.
Most African-American households were headed by a husband and a wife, and on average
they had four or five members living under one roof. Men usually were married by the time
they were twenty-five years old, and women by age twenty. Hard manual labor, poverty, and
poor nutrition among the majority of African Americans who worked as sharecroppers were
reflected in low fertility rates, high child mortality rates, and an average life expectancy for
black men and women of just thirty-three years. Many families lived near other kin, and as
women and men grew older they often took into their households other relatives and boarders
from outside their immediate family. In addition to caring for her family, a woman living in the
rural South would also be involved in working with other women in her neighborhood.
Some African-American families left agricultural life behind completely. Moving to the city,
like migration West and repatriation to Africa, was one of the forms of movement that African
Americans engaged in as they searched for a better life. While tenant farmers or sharecroppers
would often move from one plot of rented land to another, country people also moved from
farms to small towns and from towns to cities. In the 1880s and 1890s, although four-fifths of
African Americans still lived in rural areas, the concentration of black populations in the urban
parts of the South and of black workers in industries continually increased. For them, it was
not land but work that was the focus of their search for equality and rights.
Labor: “Let Us Put Our Shoulders to the Wheel”
In a letter published in the United Mine Workers Journal on July 14, 1892, African-American
union organizer Richard L. Davis talked about the rights of working people and addressed
some thoughts to those who saw solutions for blacks in migration or back-to-Africa
movements. “The negro has a right in this country,” Davis wrote, “They are here and to stay.”
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One of the places that African Americans were staying was in the cities of the South. Some
black urban residents had been in the cities since before the Civil War, when they worked
either as slaves or as freemen and freewomen. Others came or were born there in the last
decades of the 1800s, when the numbers of black people in large Southern urban centers grew.
In 1880, for example, the U.S. census showed 16,337 black people living in Nashville,
Tennessee. They made up thirty-eight percent of the total population of the city. By the time of
the next U.S. census, in 1890, there were 29,395 blacks in Nashville, comprising thirty-nine
percent of the city’s population. While African-American citizens were still a minority in
Nashville in 1890, they made up more than half the populations of other cities, including
Montgomery, Alabama, and Raleigh, North Carolina.
Although in this period only a small percentage of the black population of the United States
lived in Northern states, of those who did, most lived in cities. In the great migration
movements of the 1900s, many black people moved to major industrial urban centers like
Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but in the 1880s and 1890s, Philadelphia had the largest
number of black residents of any of the Northern cities. In 1880, 32,000 African Americans
were living in Philadelphia, and by 1900, 63,000 black people had made their homes there and
accounted for four percent of the city’s population as a whole. Proportionately small but
significant black populations also lived in the Southern-Northern border city of Washington,
D.C., in Baltimore, Maryland, the New England city of Boston, and other urban areas of the
North.
For African Americans in the cities, North and South, employment helped determine the way
marriages and families were organized. Racism limited black people to a small number of
occupations, mostly very poorly paid. Severe racial discrimination also affected where
African Americans could live within cities. These conditions made options regarding marriage
and family for black people different than those of their white counterparts.
Life was very difficult for the white urban poor also, especially for recent immigrants from
Europe who were impoverished and subjected to ethnic prejudice from native-born whites.
But while employment options expanded for American-born whites and white-ethnic
immigrants, especially in factory and industrial work, opportunities for African Americans in
the cities became even more narrowly defined in the 1880s and 1890s.
Earlier in the century, most free black men and male slaves (and, after the Civil War, exslaves) who worked in the cities were manual laborers. A significant proportion of men also
worked in skilled positions or as artisans and in construction trades such as carpentry and
masonry. Richard R. Wright, who became a social scientist, recalled that when he was a young
man in Savannah, Georgia, he could walk down the streets and see black carpenters,
bricklayers, and wood sawyers at work. Much of the construction of the public works and
transportation systems that made Southern cities function, their “railroads and streets …
sewers and water works,” Wright remembered, were “largely constructed by Negroes.” Over
time, however, black men were increasingly excluded from the trades and the variety of their
presence in the city work world was diminished.
The racism that grew more overt in the last two decades of the 1800s meant greater
segregation, restriction, and exclusion of black men from apprentice opportunities and from
higher-paid skilled types of work. Some black men in the cities continued to work as artisans
Kelley, Robin D. G.Lewis, Earl. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. Accessed February 28, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
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—as shoemakers, blacksmiths, coopers, bakers, and barbers. Indeed, one of the most famous
shoemakers of the era was an African American named Jan Matzeliger who lived in Lynn,
Massachusetts. He revolutionized the shoemaking trade when he invented a machine that he
patented in 1883. His lasting machine shaped and stitched the upper portion of a shoe to its
sole, something that previously had to be done by hand.
Despite their skill and achievement, black artisans and small shopkeepers were increasingly
segregated and saw white patronage disappear. They found their customers among the growing
number of African Americans coming to the cities, many of whom were very poor. Although
there were very successful black businessmen and -women who achieved wealth, it was
difficult for most black artisans and shopkeepers to make enough money to achieve middleclass status. Most of the relatively small number of middle-class blacks who made up the elite
of African Americans in the cities were professionals—teachers, doctors, or lawyers—or
were employed in white-collar government work.
The majority of black men in the urban work force after 1880—about seventy-five percent—
were confined to manual labor positions or jobs in personal service. The laborers were
stevedores, sailors, hod carriers (who carried supplies like mortar or brick to bricklayers,
stonemasons, and others at a construction work site), janitors, and the people who did the
heavy labor rebuilding city streets or installing public works such as sewer lines. One-third of
the African Americans in Philadelphia in the late 1890s worked as servants. They were house
servants, valets, coachmen, porters, hotel help, or waiters. Men made more money in personal
service occupations than manual laborers or women in similar service jobs. Given the more
strenuous alternatives for employment, they formed a kind of social elite who tended to look
down upon those who made a living in ways that involved more dirt and brawn.
Women, too, were restricted in the types of jobs they were allowed to do. The majority of
African-American women worked in household service or as laundresses or washerwomen. A
few were dressmakers, hatmakers, seamstresses, typists, nurses, or teachers, but it was
difficult to get these kinds of work because of white prejudice. White shop girls or office
workers would refuse to work beside black women, and white women would not patronize
black women who had skills to offer in health care or fashion. Prostitution was also an urban
occupation for women. Like live-in personal service, it was a way of making a living that
made child rearing difficult.
One out of five African-American residents of cities, men and women combined, worked as
domestic servants within white households. Though many went home at night from these jobs,
significant numbers lived in the household where they worked, separated from their families.
As cities grew, many African Americans found themselves living among networks of friends or
kin but outside a formal nuclear family structure. Besides the nature of employment that took
them away from their families, many city dwellers were single men and women who had come
to the city from the country seeking work. People who were poorly paid in their jobs, or who
could not find work, or who were turned away because of prejudice, waited longer to marry.
As a result, African Americans in the cities remained single later than those in the country and
began having children when they were older. Among the poorest black urban residents—
people who suffered most from the strains of overcrowded housing, poverty, and crime—
relationships might not be formalized and family arrangements might not last. Because of work
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conditions that fueled the cycle of poverty, black families tended to be smaller in size in the
city than in the country. In the Northern cities, many more black women than those in the rural
South remained childless throughout their lives. Whereas all members of a sharecropping
family, old and young, worked in the fields and contributed to the family income, in the city it
was the individual adult, rather than the family unit, who was most involved in earning support.
A neighborhood survey conducted in 1896 in Philadelphia found that 57 percent of black
women and 48.7 percent of men over the age of fifteen were single, widowed, or divorced.
These figures included the 85 percent of women over the age of sixty who were either no
longer or never married. Black women outnumbered black men in major Southern cities such
as Atlanta, New Orleans, Mobile, Richmond, and Savannah. This was true in Philadelphia as
well, where an 1896 survey of the black population of the Seventh Ward revealed that there
were 1,150 females to every 1,000 males. Of those African Americans who established
families, about eight out of ten, in Southern and Northern cities alike, lived in households that
were headed by two parents. But about twice as many urban as rural black households were
headed by a woman alone.
In 1896–97 the African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois interviewed hundreds of black
residents about their families in a house-to-house study he conducted with the help of Isabel
Eaton in Philadelphia. Their findings were published in a book called The Philadelphia
Negro. In addition to noting “an abnormal excess of females” among the black people in
Philadelphia, Du Bois reported that an African-American “woman has but three careers open
to her in this city: domestic service, sewing, or married life.” Staying home from work to make
married life a woman’s “career,” although it might have been desired by working-class
couples, was mostly just an option for the middle class. While white women of all classes
viewed marriage as an alternative to employment, and most endeavored to stop working
outside the home when they married, this was not true for black women. Many black women
worked for pay throughout their life spans, in spite of marriage, child rearing, and old age.
Residential segregation meant that African Americans were excluded from living in the
nicer sections of cities, which were occupied by whites, and were crowded into
neighborhoods that had become defined as black. In Washington, D.C., blacks lived in brick or
wooden-framed houses in alleyways, built in the middle of blocks behind more stately
buildings fronting the main streets and occupied by whites.
In other cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, the backyards of existing buildings were
filled with new tenements to accommodate the great need for housing. Theft, violence, and vice
were part of black city life, and became more so in the 1890s as black young people who were
reared by working parents with little means could often find no jobs for themselves and were
welcomed into a developing criminal subculture. Illness also had its impact on black families.
Becoming seriously ill was a constant threat for poor city dwellers, who lived in conditions of
malnourishment, poor ventilation, and lack of heating in which infectious disease could
flourish.
Pay for all African Americans was low. Black men were paid at lower rates than white men
or women for equivalent work, and black women made less than black men. In Philadelphia in
the late 1890s, according to the Du Bois study, a black man working as a cementer reported
that he “receives $1.75 a day; white workmen get $2-$3.”
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At the same time that pay was lower, rent for African Americans was higher than that paid
by whites for the same accommodations. Black Philadelphians living on one street in 1896
reported that African Americans paid “twelve to fourteen dollars and the whites nine and ten
dollars. The houses are all alike.”
Skin color made a difference in employment. Lighter-skinned women and men of mixed-race
heritage were more likely than blacks to be middle class or wealthy, to have inheritances, own
property, have acquired skills through education, be involved in the leadership of
organizations, and work in professional or entrepreneurial capacities. Clergy, teaching,
medicine, and the law were the most common professional occupations among middle-class
African Americans in the city. Still, because of the racial prejudice of whites, a majority of
mulatto people were restricted to the same narrow range of occupations and opportunities as
their darker-skinned sisters and brothers. The bottom level of urban employment was filled
with literate and capable African-American men and women who had skills and abilities they
were not allowed to use in the workforce and who were vastly overqualified for the work that
they were hired to do.
African Americans did many things to counteract job discrimination and to overcome the
isolation and family problems that were the social side effects of that form of prejudice. Social
status among blacks in cities came from sources other than a person’s occupation. As in the
country, women who moved to towns and cities often took up residence near kin and friends,
so that their household existed not in isolation but in a network of others. They also boarded in
the homes of siblings, cousins, or acquaintances, or took in boarders themselves. Black
benevolent societies, mutual aid associations, fraternal orders, and church auxiliaries also
thrived in the cities, with women’s groups very active among them. In places like Petersburg,
Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1890s black women’s volunteer groups such as the
Ladies Union, the Ladies Working Club, the Daughters of Zion, the Sisters of Love, and the
Sisters of Rebeccah provided help in the form of food, clothing, medical care, and assistance
with funeral arrangements to working women and families in need. They also functioned as
social clubs, bringing community activists and neighbors together for fun and friendship. Like
these associations, black churches combined social welfare functions and opportunities for
socializing. In addition to providing services such as food kitchens and informal employment
bureaus, they were key centers for mass meetings and political debates, spiritual renewal, and
shared expressions of faith.
The self-reliance and loyalties that were fostered by these group aspects of urban life were
also reinforced by the choices that black men and women made about their labor. Although
white employers in the cities wanted black women to supply the domestic labor that was
necessary to maintain white households (much as white rural landlords wanted black
sharecropper families to work the land for white profit), black women preferred the greater
autonomy that they had working as independent laundresses instead of as household servants.
As isolated live-in maids and cooks, they rarely saw their own children and were never far
from their white employer’s beck and call. By working in white households but living in their
own homes, or taking in washing and ironing and staying at home, domestic workers and
laundresses were able to give more time to their own families and social networks.
The Atlanta washerwomen’s strike of 1881 is an example of the successful statement black
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working women could make by standing together. White city boosters in Atlanta organized an
International Cotton Exposition to celebrate the New South’s embrace of industrialism and
Northern capital investment. The washerwomen, meanwhile, spread the word through church
congregations that a mass meeting would be held at a certain church, and in July 1881 they met
and formed a Washing Society. On July 19 they went out on strike, demanding higher wages to
be paid to all members at a standard rate.
The white city council threatened to levy a business tax against the women workers, and
landlords punished strikers who were their tenants by raising rents. The August 3, 1881,
edition of the Atlanta Constitution reported that the strikers countered by announcing that they
were willing to pay fees to the city “as a protection so we can control the washing for the city.”
They also told the council members to make up their minds soon: “We mean business this week
or no washing.” The influence of the initial mass meeting at the church continued to grow
wider, as household workers, asking for higher wages, walked off their jobs and black male
waiters at a prominent Atlanta hotel refused service to the dining room until their wages were
raised.
In addition to doing service and trade work in the cities, African Americans worked in
industries. Sometimes families that were primarily from the country would combine farming
with seasonal industrial work. When men would go away for part of a year to work for wages,
the women and young people in the family would remain behind to work the farm. Different
sorts of wage work were available. In Florida in the 1890s, for example, more than 100,000
black men worked in the forestry industry, felling trees.
Sometimes the pattern of leaving and staying among men and women was reversed: for
families who lived along the Atlantic coast, it was often the women, rather than the men, who
would leave home to find seasonal work in seafood processing plants. In rare instances,
women would do jobs usually done by men, stepping in, for example, when a husband or
brother was unable to work and filling his place in earning wages for the family in industry or
manual labor.
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While the majority of African-American women found employment as laundresses or in domestic service, a growing number
were employed in industry, including those who removed stems and sorted leaves in tobacco processing plants.
Not all labor that African Americans did was voluntary. The convict lease system, in which
prison officials collected fees from private employers who contracted with the state for work
done by prisoners outside prison facilities, was a source of revenue for the penitentiaries and
states that allowed the practice. It also provided industrialists with a steady labor supply
otherwise unavailable in the South, where a majority of white as well as black workers were
trained in agriculture rather than industry and were used to seasonal or part-time patterns of
working.
The Black Codes made black people susceptible to arrest for petty crimes and, once
imprisoned, made them available to be assigned to do forced labor. Under these laws, for
example, black men who were homeless or unemployed could be arrested by whites and
imprisoned on charges of vagrancy or loitering. Once convicted of a crime, they could be made
to work under guard for the duration of their prison term rather than spend the time inside a
penitentiary or jail.
The states of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee all had convict lease systems, and the brunt
of the system was borne by African Americans. Eighty to ninety percent of all inmates in
Alabama in the 1880s and 1890s were black. In Tennessee, more than sixty percent of the
prison population was black, and black convicts made up more than seventy percent of those
who were leased out to work in coal mines. Between October 1888 and September 1889,
twenty-six convicts died from injuries suffered in the Dade Coal Company mine in Georgia.
Others were flogged for rebelling, and two men were shot trying to escape.
In 1891 labor activists in eastern Tennessee challenged the policies of the Tennessee Coal
and Iron Company, which was by that time one of the major employers of convict labor in the
state. In July 1891 hundreds of miners held a mass meeting. After the gathering they began a
series of actions in which they armed themselves and took control of convict camps, freeing the
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men who were held within them. In the first such action, they freed convicts who were being
sent to work in the company’s Briceville mine and put them on trains headed for Knoxville or
Nashville. Most of the liberated prisoners were black. More than one hundred of them were
able to escape, but most were eventually recaptured and returned to prison.
The free laborers were furious that the mining company planned to replace them with less
expensive convict workers whose labor they could better control. One observer of the
rebellion of the free laborers, H. H. Schwartz, reported in the United Mine Workers Journal
that “whites and Negroes are standing shoulder to shoulder” in the actions. Their protest
sparked surprise investigations of the mines, during which the investigators found many safety
and health violations. It also forced the Tennessee State Legislature to hold a special session to
reconsider use of the convict labor system. When the legislators decided to continue the system
because of the money it made for the state and the contracting companies, the scattered protests
became an organized uprising. Support for the Tennessee protestors spread among miners in
Kentucky and Virginia. In August 1892 the convict camp at Tracy City, Tennessee, was burned
to the ground by protesting miners, and the inmates set free. Hundreds of miners were
imprisoned by state militia that had been called out to subdue the protesters, and Jake Witsen, a
black miner who was a leader of the free laborers’ actions, was shot to death by soldiers.
Thousands of opponents of the convict lease system attended his funeral in respect for his
leadership and to bring public notice to the injustice of his death. As a result, in 1893 the
Tennessee legislature passed a bill abolishing convict leasing as of January 1896, which is
when the Tennessee Iron and Coal Company’s contract with the state ended.
Several of the activists who led the convict wars in eastern Tennessee were involved in the
Knights of Labor or in the United Mine Workers of America. The United Mine Workers was
formed in 1890 during a time when mining was expanding as an area of employment for
African Americans. By the turn of the century, some ten to fifteen percent of the 400,000 people
working in mines were African Americans. They worked mainly in areas bordering between
the North and the South (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee) and in Alabama. In the 1890s
some of them also went to work in mines further North—in places like Ohio, Illinois, or
Pennsylvania—as did immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who joined the Irish
immigrants and native-born whites who had previously made up most of the workforces in the
mines. Instead of organizing these different groups of miners separately, the United Mine
Workers attempted to join members of different backgrounds into what were called “mixed”
locals. African Americans were an important part of building the union, and by 1900 twenty
thousand black miners belonged to it.
Richard L. Davis was a black organizer in Ohio. He was one of the founders of the United
Mine Workers and became a national leader of the union. He was born in Virginia at the end of
the Civil War and had begun working in a tobacco factory in Roanoke when he was eight years
old. At age seventeen he became a coal miner and went to work first in West Virginia and then
in Ohio, where he married and had a family. He and other workers in the town of Rendville,
Ohio, faced long periods of unemployment in the mid-1890s, when an economic depression
caused many of the mines in Ohio to shut down or operate on irregular schedules.
A powerful speaker, Davis was elected to the national executive board of the United Mine
Workers in 1896 and again in 1897. He often used verses from the Bible and examples of
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things that his fellow workers knew well from church to explain the importance of standing
together to try to win greater rights, and to look for justice in this world as well as in heaven.
“I know that in former days you used to sing ‘Give me Jesus, give me Jesus, you may have all
the world, just give me Jesus,’” he told his audience of miners in a letter to the United Mine
Workers Journal on April 18, 1892. “But the day has now come that we want a little money
along with our Jesus, so we want to change that old song and ask for a little of the world as
well. Don’t you think so, friends?”
Davis was involved in the Knights of Labor as well as in the United Mine Workers. The
Knights of Labor was organized in 1869 and reached the height of its influence in 1886, when
more than seven hundred thousand members belonged. The membership included between sixty
thousand and ninety thousand black people, who, like Davis, joined through the locals in their
communities. But unlike most traditional unions or the United Mine Workers, which focused on
skilled workers or those in a particular trade, the Knights of Labor welcomed all kinds of
laborers: farmers, field workers, women, men, black and white crafts workers, and those
employed in all kinds of jobs in different industries.
African Americans like Davis were among the organizers who went into neighborhoods,
churches, and workplaces to encourage other laborers to join. Many who became involved in
the Knights of Labor did so for idealistic reasons. They believed, as Davis wrote in a letter to
the mine workers’ journal, in the “brotherhood of all mankind no matter what the color of his
skin may be” and in the inherent equality of black and white people. Organizers like Davis
who believed in these values established a tradition of interracial unionism among lumber
workers in Florida, coal miners in Birmingham, Alabama, freight handlers in Galveston,
Texas, and male and female tobacco workers in Richmond, Virginia.
Although many white members of the Knights opposed the organization of black workers, the
Knights took steps to defy public practices that denied social equality to blacks. In October
1886, for example, they held a convention in Richmond, Virginia, at which a black delegate
named Frank Ferrell, who was from New York, spoke to the assembly along with white
dignitaries. He did so in defiance of local custom, which barred black people from sitting with
whites in public places or from speaking to audiences made up primarily of whites.
Terence V. Powderly, the head of the Knights, believed that white and black workers doing
the same kind of work should have equal wages. He also noted that one of the goals of the
Knights was to provide education to working-class children, not just to those of the middle and
upper classes. In a speech to an assembly in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1885, he explained
that in the places where the Knights had become established the “colored men are advocating
the holding of free night schools for the children of black and white. … The politicians have
kept the white and black [working] men of the South apart, while crushing both. Our aim shall
be to educate both and elevate them by bringing them together.”
For many working-class African Americans, participation in Knights of Labor activities was
one way of being treated with the kind of respect that was afforded mainly to middle-class
people, and to the working class within their own churches and secret societies. This was
especially true for the women. The African-American journalist Ida B. Wells reported on a
meeting of the Knights of Labor that she attended in a piece published in the January 22, 1887,
issue of the Cleveland Gazette. “I noticed that everyone who came was welcomed and every
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woman from black to white was seated with courtesy usually extended to white ladies alone in
this town,” Wells observed.
The Knights of Labor also tried to use collective actions to better working conditions. In
Louisiana the year after Frank Ferrell spoke in Richmond, some six thousand to ten thousand
laborers, mostly black, walked off their jobs in the sugarcane fields in support of a Knights of
Labor strike for higher wages. Like the mine workers who participated in the convict wars in
Tennessee, they faced white violence as a consequence of their demands, and several black
strikers were killed when companies of state militia were sent in to end the strike.
African-American workers had success organizing in New Orleans, where in 1880 black
and white dockworkers who pressed, moved, and shipped bales of cotton on the Mississippi
River wharves formed a labor coalition called the Cotton Men’s Executive Council. The
council coordinated the goals of several dock unions, and covered common laborers as well as
men working in the trades. Prior to the formation of the council, black cotton rollers, teamsters,
coopers, wheelers, and freight handlers had already created their own separate benevolent or
mutual aid associations similar to the Washing Society that black washerwomen had formed in
Atlanta. They met together to set uniform wages for their specialties and to help each other in
times of need. Demands of the unions involved in the council, which represented some fifteen
thousand workers, centered around the need for higher wages. In September 1880 black
unionists joined whites in their same industries in a series of strikes that brought wage
increases for teamsters, loaders, and other dockworkers.
A year later the unionized waterfront workers struck again, asking for fair wages and for the
employers to recognize the union as the representative of the workers. Black unionists kept
order until the second week of the general dock strike, when a lone policeman attempted to
arrest a black teamster on a city street. The teamster, James Hawkins, was a person that the
September 1881 Weekly Louisianian described as a “law abiding, peaceful man.” He
proclaimed his innocence when approached by the policeman and resisted the arrest. The
policeman’s actions drew the ire of the local African-American women, who threw frying pans
and utensils at him from their windows. In the resulting commotion, the police officer drew his
gun and shot Hawkins twice, killing him.
Hawkins was murdered, as one of the Weekly Louisianian reports of the killing put it, “for
no other cause than that a negro has no rights which a police officer is bound to respect.”
Hawkins’s death galvanized the working-class neighborhood.
White unionists joined black dockworkers and their families at Hawkins’s funeral, and they
emerged determined to defy the powers that would deny them a better standard of living and
their desire to have a say in the structure of their own work. They shut down work on the
riverfront. Soon all parties involved in the strike met and negotiated a settlement. The strikers
succeeded in winning the employers’ agreement to standard wages on the docks for each
category of labor and some protections for the unions in hiring. More important, they set a
standard for biracial working-class unionism that lasted in New Orleans into the 1890s.
The closely related populist and agrarian movements of the 1890s were other ways in which
black workers sought to organize both among themselves and, for greater strength, with white
working people. Their goals were the defense of racial justice and economic equity in
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American society. Populism and small farmers’ associations were part of a grassroots political
movement whose supporters sought to form alliances between poor and working people,
especially those who made their living in agriculture.
For example, black farmers in Lovejoy, Texas, formed the Colored Farmers’ National
Alliance and Cooperative Union in March 1888. Their membership expanded and they joined
with white farmers’ groups from the Midwest and South. By 1891 the alliance had more than
one million members in twelve states. Like the Knights of Labor, the farmers’ alliances
supported the idea of workers’ cooperatives, enterprises in which workers would pool their
resources, exchange labor or contribute goods, and share profits. They also wanted to reform
wage work to give working people better payment for their labor, and they organized boycotts
of merchants who engaged in unfair practices. They sponsored consumer cooperative stores in
Southern cities, helped members who were struggling to pay mortgages on their land, and
worked to improve the education provided to rural black children.
While the farmers’ alliances were being formed, the Populist or People’s party emerged as
an independent political party in February 1892, when farmers, labor unionists, and reformers
met in St. Louis to develop a program to challenge business interests and the low prices being
paid for agricultural goods. Populists supported the rights of non-landowning laborers,
including black tenant farmers and field workers, and wanted reform of the country’s financial
system.
In some areas, one of the party’s strategies for change was to try to elect black officials to
public office. These officials, it was hoped, would be committed to black civil and political
rights, including an end to convict lease systems, the right of black people to serve on juries,
and what one black delegate from the Colored Farmers’ Alliance termed a “free vote and an
honest count.”
This strategy had some success in North Carolina, where ten black candidates were elected
to the state legislature on Populist-Republican tickets in the 1890s, and many more gained
county and municipal offices. Racism as well as class differences marred the progressive
aspects of the Populist cause over time, as white small farmers who owned land saw their own
interests diverge from those of black sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did not own
property.
There were many successes in black-white working people’s cooperation in farmers’
alliances, populist political coalitions, the Knights of Labor, and among unionists. But one of
the unresolved questions in black industrial workers’ minds at the end of the 1800s was
whether it was better to compete against free white labor for jobs or to join in coalition with
white workers to collectively demand better wages and conditions. Skepticism about the
genuineness of whites’ desire for long-range cooperation was rampant. As John Lucus Dennis,
a black worker at the Black Diamond Steel Works in Pittsburgh, put it in a letter to the New
York Freeman: “Our experience as a race with these organizations has, on the whole, not been
such as to give us either great satisfaction or confidence in white men’s fidelity.”
Mining and work in the cities were two areas where the dilemma between competition or
attempted coalition continually played out. In the North, mine workers in the late 1800s were
almost all white. Mine operators’ use of Southern black workers as strikebreakers thus took on
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more directly racial meanings than it did in the South, where blacks found themselves on both
the unemployed and free-labor sides of such conflicts. In both the North and the South,
industrialists used racial differences to divide the work force and prevent unionization. They
paid black workers less money than white workers for the same labor, and they denied the
higher-paid and higher-status positions in industries to blacks. Organized labor often followed
these kinds of prejudiced policies. White union members often prevented blacks from
becoming apprentices in trades or members of unions, and even unions that claimed biracial
principles were dominated by white leadership and weakened by segregated practices,
including the organization of separate locals for whites and blacks. African-American
experience in unions varied a great deal from industry to industry and from one region or
locale to another. It also varied in the same places over time: A successful action in which
white and black union members rallied together could be an exceptional event. A long history
of exclusion and discrimination might precede and/or follow the period of cooperation. Many
black workers were alienated from the very idea of involvement in organized labor because of
their association of labor activism with white working-class racism and with union opposition
to black industrial employment. At least fifty strikes took place in American industries between
1880 and 1900 in which white workers opposed the hiring of blacks.
Blacks who worked in crafts like carpentry, woodworking, or bricklaying were among those
who suffered from white policies of exclusion. This was one reason why the number of black
artisans and crafts workers that had once seemed so prevalent in the cities declined, and black
men were gradually moved more and more into unskilled areas of labor.
Nonunion white women spinners and weavers in textile factories often spurned working
with newly hired black women. Workers who did not have a trade or do skilled work were
often excluded from union eligibility of any kind, since craft unions—such as those that
represented conductors, locomotive firemen, or engineers in the railway industry—did not
accept unskilled or semiskilled workers into their membership.
Black workers also sometimes found themselves in a tug-of-war between industrialists and
the unions. In 1890 a leaflet was circulated among black miners in Birmingham, Alabama, that
stated “WANTED! COLORED coal-miners for Weir City, Kan., district, the paradise of
colored people. … Special train will leave Birmingham the 13th. Transportation advanced.
Get ready and go to the land of promise.” When the black miners who responded to this call
arrived in Kansas, they found the white workers at the mines on strike and manning a stockade
barring the entrance to the work site. Some joined the strikers; others returned home to
Alabama when the union paid their way. Still others seized the opportunity for employment at
higher wages than they earned in Birmingham, but under conditions that hardly constituted a
paradise for black people.
What was happening in the places where people worked mirrored the changes that had
slowly been occurring on the political front since the end of the political Reconstruction that
followed the Civil War. The exclusion from skilled and better-paying jobs and from union
representation that African Americans were experiencing in the workplace coincided with the
loss of rights to vote, to be elected to office, to live where one chose, or to receive the kind of
education that black parents wanted for their children.
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Justice: “They Have Promised Us Law … and Given Us Violence”
It was a spring day in May 1884. A young, well-dressed schoolteacher named Ida B. Wells
refused to comply with a conductor’s request that she move from the first-class “ladies’”
section of a Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad train to a second-class smoking car
further back in the train. Ida B. Wells was twenty-one years old. She often took the ten-mile
train trip between Memphis, Tennessee, where she lived, and the town of Woodstock, where
she taught public school.
But this day was different. On this day the conductor who came to take her ticket tried to
enforce a Jim Crow law that had been passed in Tennessee two years before, authorizing
separate accommodations for black and white travelers. When the conductor asked her to
change cars, Wells protested. Then the conductor tried to pull her from her seat. Soon the two
of them were scuffling in the aisle of the ladies’ car as he tried to force her off the train and she
attempted to keep her seat. Two other railroad employees came running to aid the conductor,
and Wells was dragged away, resisting, and removed from the train, which was stopped in a
station at the time the incident took place. When Wells chose to resist the trainmen, she turned a
corner in her life. She began what would become a lifetime of public activism in which she
would use words and deeds to challenge the injustices the American legal system dealt to
African Americans.
On that May day she did not stop with standing up for herself inside the train. When she got
home after the incident, she sought out a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against the railroad. Legal
victory was briefly hers. The judge who heard the case in the local circuit court in December
1884 ruled in her favor. Although he did not question the policy of segregation itself, he found
that the smoking car did not constitute accommodations equal to those of the first-class
passenger car, and that Wells, having paid for a first-class ticket, deserved first-class
conditions of travel. The railroad appealed his judgment, however, and at the beginning of
April 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling.
“I felt so disappointed,” Ida B. Wells wrote in her diary on April 5, 1887, describing how
she reacted to the news of the high-court decision. She went on to explain what she had wanted
to accomplish by filing the case. “I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people
generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we
appealed to it, give us justice.” She then voiced her disillusionment in discovering that this
ideal was not supported. “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged,” she confessed to
her diary, “and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away
with them.” “O God,” she continued, “is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for
us?”
Ida B. Wells’s act of defiance and her decision to bring the issue before the Tennessee courts
made her a key part of the African-American challenge to a larger legal process that was
occurring throughout the 1880s and 1890s. During this time American laws that had been
created in the Reconstruction era to guarantee the extension of rights to former slaves were
reinterpreted by state and federal courts. As a result, the standard of justice by which black and
white citizens lived was altered for decades to come.
These changes in rights came in two important areas. One was in a series of laws and court
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rulings about the right of blacks to equal access to public places such as inns, restaurants,
parks, and—perhaps most important—schools, as well as the ability to travel in the same way
as whites on trains, ships, and streetcars. These legal actions raised questions about how the
principle of equality should be understood, and also how that principle should be justly
applied to society. Most specifically, they created a legal debate about racial integration
versus segregation.
The second area where legislation and court cases changed the meaning of racial justice was
in regard to political or citizenship rights. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, states
began to pass measures that resulted in the loss of political participation by African
Americans. The loss of Reconstruction-era protections of the right of African-American men to
vote influenced other rights as well, including the ability of blacks to be elected to political
office, participate in political parties, and serve on juries. This last loss was doubly harmful,
because the exclusion of African Americans from juries interfered with the right of black
defendants to have their cases heard by juries of their peers—to be judged, according to the
law, by people like themselves.
The most terrible outcome of this erosion of rights was the denial of due process of law:
People who committed crimes against African Americans failed to be arrested or prosecuted,
and African Americans who were accused of wrongdoing were not assured a fair trial. In the
years when statutes were going into effect limiting black people’s social and political rights,
violence was often directed at African-American citizens. Black men and women were hurt or
killed without being tried for alleged misdoings, and the white people who committed
atrocities against blacks were not penalized for them. Often the misdeeds for which African
Americans were punished outside the law was the simple “crime” of success itself.
Ida B. Wells’s case against the railroad fit squarely into the first area in which AfricanAmerican rights were denied. Her refusal to give up her seat on the train and the lawsuit that
stemmed from her action foreshadowed a similar protest that a man named Homer A. Plessy
would begin aboard a train in Louisiana in 1890.
Plessy’s case, which was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, would set the legal
precedent by which other similar cases would be judged and made it possible for states to
continue to enforce racial segregation laws and practices. Jim Crow laws created between the
1870s and 1910 would remain in force for decades. They would not be overthrown until a
successful legal campaign by a new generation of African-American activists led to the U.S.
Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and to the Civil Rights
movement that followed it.
In filing her suit to protest the railroad’s attempt to segregate its passenger cars by race,
Wells became the first African American to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of 1883
that denied access to blacks to transportation, theaters, hotels, or other places regularly used by
the public. That case had revolved around the meaning of the 14th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which guaranteed that no state could make discriminatory laws or “deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The justices ruled that this amendment was
not meant to be applied to what they called “private wrongs,” or the experience of
discrimination by individual persons on private property. (The justices included in their
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definition of such property privately owned theaters, trains, and hotels.)
African-American journalists and politicians were in the forefront of the public outcry
against the legal decisions and state laws that endorsed segregation. The newspaper writers
and editors who gathered at the Afro-American Press Convention of 1890 denounced the
consignment of black people to second-class facilities aboard railroads. Black members of the
state legislatures in Louisiana and Arkansas fought against the segregation bills that were
introduced in their legislative bodies in 1890 and 1891. Resistance also continued among
African-American citizens’ groups in cities and towns around the nation.
In Atlanta, Georgia, in 1892 a group of black citizens organized a successful boycott of the
city’s streetcars after the city council ordered separate cars for white and black passengers.
Similar public demonstrations and boycott actions took place in Augusta, Georgia, in 1898,
and in Savannah, Georgia, in 1899.
Homer A. Plessy was one of the countless number of African-American activists in cities
North and South. The case that carried his name, Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard in the courts
as the result of organized local African-American opposition to the Louisiana Separate Car
Act of 1890. The new Louisiana law required what was termed “equal but separate”
accommodations for white and nonwhite passengers on railways, with seats to be assigned in
segregated cars according to race. In practice, these separate-but-equal regulations actually
resulted in segregated and unequal treatment, with whites receiving the best accommodations
or services available and blacks given inferior accommodations. According to the Louisiana
law, passengers who refused to comply with the rules of segregation could be removed from
trains and were permitted no legal recourse.
African-American members of the American Citizens’ Equal Rights Association in New
Orleans reacted immediately to the threat of the separate car bill. They filed a memorial with
the Louisiana legislature on May 24, 1890, protesting that the measure violated the principle
that all citizens are created equal before the law. The leaders of the protest action were Dr.
Louis A. Martinet, a lawyer and physician who owned the New Orleans Crusader, and
Rodolphe L. Desdunes, a customs clerk. Both men were prominent middle-class members of
New Orleans’s mixed-race creole community. They used the Crusader as a forum to attack the
Separate Car Act and called for cases to be brought to the courts that would test the
constitutionality of the new legislation.
The first major test case was instigated by Homer A. Plessy, a thirty-four-year-old friend of
the Desdunes family, who was also a light-skinned member of the elite New Orleans creole
community. Plessy was arrested soon after he boarded the East Louisiana Railway on June 7,
1892, and sat down in the coach set aside for whites.
The results, as in Ida B. Wells’s case, were not what the African-American activists who
planned the test case had sought. Instead of upholding the rights of equity and federal protection
guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, as the Citizens Committee activists had hoped, the court in
effect dismantled the authority of the amendment’s equal protection clause and instead ruled
that separation of races on railways was valid. The court also ruled that the passage of
separate-but-equal Jim Crow laws was an appropriate and reasonable exercise of state
legislative authority. The court thus provided the constitutional basis by which Southern states
Kelley, Robin D. G.Lewis, Earl. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. Accessed February 28, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
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could enforce the practice of racial segregation.
It was not only the 14th Amendment but the 15th that came under fire by white supremacists
in the 1880s and 1890s. The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed that the “right
of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or
by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Beginning with
Mississippi in 1890, South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, and North Carolina in 1900,
and Alabama and Virginia shortly after the turn of the century, several states amended their
constitutions with the intention of denying blacks the right to vote. In other states, the
legislatures passed laws that were similarly designed to eliminate black voting. These
included laws that required people to pass a literacy test, hold property, or reside on the same
property for long periods of time in order to register to vote.
Literacy tests discriminated against all people who were not middle-class or wealthy and
who thus did not have the benefit of education. But they had a particularly devastating effect on
former slaves who had been barred under bondage from learning to read. Residency and
property requirements worked against the majority of African Americans in the South, too,
because most of them worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. They neither owned property
nor stayed on the same land from year to year. Poll taxes, or fees that had to be paid in order to
be eligible to vote, were among the most effective means of excluding blacks from the ballot
box, because African Americans made up a disproportionate number of the poor who could not
afford to pay the taxes.
In many Southern states, grandfather clauses stated that anyone whose father or grandfather
had been qualified to vote in 1867 did not have to pass literacy or citizenship tests or be
subjected to other hurdles to registration. Since the 15th Amendment enfranchising black men
was ratified by Congress in 1870, these clauses virtually excluded African Americans, while
making it possible for poor whites who might otherwise not be able to pass the tests to vote
without having to take them.
What was called the “white primary,” or exclusion of blacks from participation in the
Democratic party’s primaries, also nullified the black vote. That was because the Democratic
party so dominated the South by 1900 that whoever was designated as a Democratic candidate
was virtually assured of victory in the subsequent election.
These white supremacist measures were effective in taking the vote away from African
Americans. The changes they wrought were dramatic. The promises of citizenship for blacks
that had been part of the rhetoric of the federal government during the Reconstruction period
were undone by state actions and the failure of the federal government to counteract them. The
federal government failed to act in part because of racism and in part because of a desire to
heal the divisions between the national government and the power of the states, especially the
Southern states, that were still ripe from the Civil War.
Passage of voter restriction laws had a very substantial effect. In Louisiana, where literacy,
property, and poll-tax restrictions were enacted, there were 130,344 black registered voters in
1896 and African Americans made up the majority of voters in twenty-six parishes (districts).
By 1900, after these laws were passed, there were only 5,320 black registrants and not one
parish had a black majority. By 1904 the number of black registered voters had slipped to
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1,342. In Alabama in 1900 there were only 3,000 registered African-American voters, out of a
potential pool of almost 150,000 black men who were of voting age.
Corruption and intimidation had preceded the passage of these restrictive laws and helped
whites control and limit the black vote. Black support for alternatives to the white supremacist
platform of the Southern Democratic party was often suppressed by violence. In Virginia in
1883 there was a white backlash against the Liberal Readjuster party, a coalition of radical
Republicans who had supported black emancipation and postwar Reconstruction, lower-class
white farmers, owners of small businesses, and black farmers, sharecroppers, and factory
workers that had gained power in the elections of 1879 and voted in progressive reforms that
benefited black people.
In Danville, Virginia, shortly before election day, November 6, 1883, a group of prominent
white businessmen issued a circular in the town decrying the idea of black people in positions
of authority and claiming that by gaining some political representation, African Americans had
become less tractable workers in the white-owned tobacco industry. Blacks were warned not
to be on the streets on election day. One conservative proclaimed that the white supremacists
would win the election in Danville “votes or no votes” if they had to do it “with double barrel
shotguns, breach loading shotguns and Smith and Wesson double-action.” White vigilantes took
control of the town, forcing campaigning by black and white members of the liberal reform
coalition to end. On November 3, they killed three black citizens.
Elsewhere in Virginia, black residents of towns rallied successfully to ensure their ability to
get to the polls. In Petersburg, Virginia, African-Americans organized a parade and guarded the
polling places in the city precincts.
Mob violence and lynching were an effective tool by which conservative whites controlled
all kinds of black behavior, not just the effort to exercise citizenship rights, hold political
office, or vote. Lynchings most often happened in rural areas and small towns, but mob riots
were the creatures of the cities. Violence or the threat of violence was random and
widespread. When a black man named Baker was appointed postmaster in the small town of
Lake City, South Carolina, in 1898, a white mob surrounded his house and post office in the
night and set the building afire, with him and his family members inside. When Mr. and Mrs.
Baker and their children attempted to run from the burning house, they were shot on the
threshold, Mrs. Baker with her infant in her arms. In the same year that the Bakers died, whites
went berserk in Wilmington, North Carolina, at election time and swept through the black
district of the city, setting homes and businesses afire and killing and wounding African
Americans whom they encountered.
Between 1882 and 1901 more than one hundred people were lynched each year, the great
majority of them blacks living in Southern states. Almost two thousand lynchings of African
Americans were officially reported in those two decades. Additional murders by lynching
occurred, but they went unreported as such in local records and overall statistics.
Lynchings were attacks motivated by racism during which people were brutally murdered—
sometimes in the night, but often in a public way with many witnesses. Lynchings often
involved the hanging of victims, but lynch mobs also killed people in other ways. Some
victims endured terrible atrocities, such as being dragged behind a wagon, beaten, seeing
Kelley, Robin D. G.Lewis, Earl. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. Accessed February 28, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
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loved ones harmed, being tied up and burned or having parts of their bodies dismembered, and
other forms of torture. These vicious attacks occurred outside any due process of law, and
sometimes with the knowledge or participation of law enforcement officials. State and local
courts did little to punish lynchers, and if attackers were identified, penalties for killing
African Americans in this way were small and considered to be in a different legal category
from other kinds of murders. African-American men were the most common targets of lynch
mobs, but women were also hurt and killed. Men were the most common members of white
mobs or vigilante groups, but white conservative women were among those who supported the
practice and participated in it as spectators.
African-American activists were not silent in the face of the injustices of lynching. In 1899
black churches observed Friday, June 2, as a day of fasting and prayer in which parishioners
gathered to pray for justice for African Americans in the courts and for freedom from violence.
In this unified effort to demonstrate, as the New York Tribune described it, “ceasing to be
longer silent,” ministers were asked to make the following Sunday, June 4, the occasion for
sermons on these topics. Refusing to ignore lynching, activists scanned local newspapers and
records and compiled and published data on the names of individuals who had been killed and
the dates on which they died. Middle-class leaders raised the issue at public meetings and
addressed it in editorials. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a writer and African-American
feminist, spoke out at a meeting of the National Council of Women held in Washington, D.C., in
February 1891. “A government which has power to tax a man in peace, [and] draft him in war,
should have power to defend his life in the hour of peril,” she told her audience.
Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells with Maurine, Betty, and Tom Moss jr., the family of Memphis grocery store owner
Thomas Moss, who was lynched in 1893.
Among all the prominent African-American lecturers and journalists who took a public
stand against lynching and worked tirelessly to bring an end to the practice, the most important
was Ida B. Wells. Just as her test of the constitutionality of racial segregation laws was
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sparked by her expulsion from the railroad passenger car, so her campaign against lynching
began as the result of a specific incident. This time the incident of discrimination was not just a
question of equality and dignity, but one of horror.
Three African-American small businessmen, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry
Stewart, owned and ran a very successful cooperative grocery store called the People’s
Grocery that was located in an African-American district of suburban Memphis known as the
Curve. Moss and his wife, Betty, were the best friends of Ida B. Wells, and Wells was the
godmother to their little girl, Maurine. Thomas Moss worked as a letter carrier by day and in
the store by night, and he was very active in his church and his lodge. Because of his deep
involvement in the community and its functions, everyone in the neighborhood knew him, and
he was much beloved.
An economic rivalry soon developed between the People’s Grocery and an older, less
successful store that had been in the neighborhood longer and was owned by a white man
named W. H. Barrett. Barrett had a deep resentment of Moss because of the success Moss and
his partners had achieved in their business. That hatred deepened one day when a sidewalk
quarrel broke out between black and white boys over a game of marbles. The AfricanAmerican children bested the white children in the fight, whereupon the white parents,
including Barrett, tried to take legal action against the black boys. The case was dismissed
after the payment of small fines.
Tensions escalated, and the whites, still vengeful over the success of Thomas Moss’s store,
which had taken much of the business away from the white-owned grocery, organized a raid on
the People’s Grocery. They carried out the raid on a Saturday night, just as the store was
closing. When they burst in, Moss was busy working on the store’s accounts and McDowell
was waiting on the last customers. Fearing that threats of violence would be carried out,
friends of the partners had stationed themselves in the rear of the shop to guard the store. When
the white men broke in through the back of the store, they were met by gunfire, and three of
them were wounded.
The next morning there was a general raid of the black households and businesses near the
Curve in order to locate the men who might have fired the shots that wounded the white
vigilantes. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were among those picked up and incarcerated in the
jail. Black members of the Tennessee Rifles, a local militia that had an armory nearby, guarded
the jail against white attacks for the first two nights. But when it was clear that the men who
had been shot would recover, they felt that tensions had passed and ceased their watchfulness.
On the third night, a mob of white men was given access to the jail. They dragged Thomas
Moss and his partners from their cells, loaded them aboard a railroad boxcar, took them
outside the city limits, and lynched them. According to an eyewitness newspaper report of the
lynching, McDowell tried to struggle with the lynchers and was mutilated before he was killed.
Thomas Moss pleaded with his abductors to spare his life on behalf of his wife and children,
including his young daughter Maurine and the unborn baby his wife was carrying. His plea was
ignored, and when asked for a final statement before he was shot to death, he said: “Tell my
people to go West—there is no justice for them here.”
Hundreds of black residents of the Memphis area heeded Thomas Moss’s last words. As
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Wells recalled in her memoirs, which were published after her death, the “shock to the colored
people who knew and loved both Moss and McDowell was beyond description.” And the
violence had not ended. Whites rampaged through the black neighborhood the day after the
murders, and a white mob looted goods from the People’s Grocery and then destroyed the
contents of the building. Black reaction was swift. Like the many migrants who had left farms
and sharecropping plots before them and moved West or to black towns, many city dwellers
sold their property and took their families to Oklahoma Territory. Two leading pastors in the
Curve community organized their entire congregations to go. Meanwhile, those that stayed
instituted an informal economic boycott of white businesses and stayed off city streetcars.
Ida B. Wells went into action. She had become part owner of the Memphis Free Speech
newspaper in 1889, and had lost her job as a teacher when she used its pages to protest the
inferior quality of schools serving black students. After the murder of her dear friend Thomas
Moss, she used the newspaper to encourage the black citizens of Memphis to leave town and
went to churches to urge black parishioners to support the consumer boycott of white-owned
and -run streetcars. The exodus from the city did more than help African Americans escape
from the racist violence that had seized Memphis. It had a very real economic impact upon
whites. After the lynching, as Wells recalled in her memoirs, white people discovered a
“dearth of servants to cook their meals and wash their clothes and keep their homes in order, to
nurse their babies and wait on their tables, to build their houses and do all classes of laborious
work.”
Wells set out to become an expert on lynching and to dispel some of the myths that were
popularly accepted about why lynchings occurred. Thomas Moss was an upstanding citizen
who was killed because he had acquired wealth and property. But white newspapers typically
claimed that lynchings occurred because of black men’s criminality. They especially claimed
that lynchings happened because black men sexually assaulted white women. Wells knew that
Thomas Moss was neither a criminal nor a rapist, and so she questioned these allegations
about lynching in general. She personally investigated every lynching that she heard about in
Mississippi in the months after Thomas Moss’s death. Then she published an editorial that
strongly implied that when the charge behind a lynching was rape, the actual fact of the matter
was that in the overwhelming number of cases a black man and white woman had agreed to
have a sexual relationship with each other. In short, no rape had occurred. “Nobody in this
section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women,”
Wells wrote in her editorial for Free Speech in May 1892. The charge of rape was used to
cover up the real violence—that of white men against black men. And the reason for this
violence was to deprive blacks of political and economic power—to keep them under the
thumb of the white establishment.
When the editorial was printed, Wells was traveling in the North. She soon learned of the
outcome. The same fate that had met the People’s Grocery had been visited upon her
newspaper office. Whites had gone to the Free Speech office at night, two days after the
edition in which the editorial was published, and destroyed the type used to print the
newspaper and all the furnishings of the office. They left a note saying that anyone who
attempted to publish Free Speech again would be killed.
Ida B. Wells was not easily silenced. She was exiled from her home in the South because of
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her defense of black rights in the face of lawlessness. She took a newspaper job in the North
and continued to claim for herself the right of free speech. She wrote editorials under the pen
name Iola and prepared pamphlets on the lynching issue that challenged the standard view of
lynchings presented in the white press, North and South. Once her writings began to be well
known, she traveled widely as a lecturer, speaking on the issue of lynching to women’s
organizations, churches, and African-American groups.
Wells published her findings in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its
Phases in October 1892. The pamphlet was dedicated to African-American women in
Manhattan and Brooklyn, because women’s groups in the New York area had raised the funds
to make the publication of her work possible. Victoria Earle Matthews, a freelance journalist
and women’s rights activist who in 1897 established the White Rose Mission, a settlement
house that provided social services for black women workers and girls, and Maritcha Lyons, a
Brooklyn schoolteacher, were very impressed when they read Wells’s articles. They organized
a series of small meetings in African-American households and church lecture rooms in which
Wells presented information about lynching to groups of women. More than 250 black women
attended these meetings and joined in forming a committee that organized a major fundraising
event with Wells as the keynote speaker.
Though justice seemed to be sleeping in the last decades of the nineteenth century, African
Americans like Wells were wide awake. Many African-American sharecroppers, like the
people who had known Thomas Moss in Memphis and who decided to leave the city after his
murder, migrated West, away from the lawlessness of the Deep South. Black industrial and
farm workers tried forming labor and political coalitions with whites, and other individuals,
like Wells and Homer A. Plessy, challenged the reversal of legal protections in court. All over
the land people less well known than Wells and Plessy took their own private stands against
discrimination, acting in defense of honor when personally confronted by racism. Black
intellectuals wrote newspaper articles and books and gave speeches decrying injustices. And
black middle-class people set about founding their own schools, churches, businesses, and
self-help organizations. If the law offered no guarantee of equal access to existing institutions
and services, or protection of black citizens’ well-being from violence, then African
Americans would create the means for achieving advancement on their own.
Self-Help: “To Hew Out His Own Path”
Johanna Bowen Redgrey was a midwife and healer who lived on a small farm on the outskirts
of Tuskegee, Alabama, in the 1880s. She had been born into slavery near Richmond, Virginia,
the daughter of an African-American mother and her mother’s Irish-American master. When
she was a teenager, her father sold her and her brothers to a white family who had a plantation
in Macon County, Alabama. Johanna was a striking woman, six feet tall. She was muscular and
strong from the field work she did, with a head of fiery reddish hair and a determined
disposition to match her appearance. When the Civil War came, Johanna’s brothers joined
other young men who escaped from the plantation to try to fight for the North. She assumed they
died in the attempt, because she never saw them again nor learned of their fate. She spent the
latter part of the war and the early years after war’s end working for wages for her former
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master. Then she met and married Lewis Redgrey.
Lewis Redgrey was a Native American who had spent part of his life in Mexico and spoke
Spanish as well as English. He had a fifty-five-acre farm outside Tuskegee, and Johanna went
to live with him there. Together they raised hogs and corn and grew a cash crop of cotton. They
were both important people in the community. Johanna Bowen Redgrey had gone to school and
worked with doctors, and she knew a great deal about plants and herbs and how to make
medicines. She delivered babies and nursed both black and white families in times of illness
or accident. She was deeply religious. She taught Sunday School and was very active with
other women in the neighborhood in her own African Methodist Episcopal Zion church and in
the Baptist church located on a nearby hill.
The Redgreys were determined to provide good educations for their son and the other
African-American children of Tuskegee. For them, making education available was the key to
improving the lives of all African Americans. They were members of a committee of Tuskegee
residents who worked to start a school in the town. The committee sought a schoolmaster to
run such a school, and sent for one to Hampton Institute, a school in Virginia that trained
African Americans for careers in nursing, teaching, farming, and trades, to find a schoolmaster
to run it. They were among the group of black townspeople who gathered to greet the young
teacher who came from Hampton. His name was Booker T. Washington, and he arrived in
Tuskegee in June 1881. Classes in what would become Washington’s famed Tuskegee Institute
began a few days later, on July 4. The classes met in Johanna Bowen Redgrey’s church on Zion
Hill.
Church, family, neighbors, and school were at the heart of the Redgreys’ lives. These
connections between people were avenues for personal fulfillment, community, and mutual
care. They also were means of self-expressio...
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