Reconstruction and The Civil Rights Movement

Union Deaths

360,000

Confederate Deaths

258,000

35.2 Million

(1865)

Impact of the Civil War

Slavery is Abolished (Done) What problems are created with the end

of slavery? Confederate $$$ is worthless Railroads and

infrastructure destroyed

Lincoln’s Last Act

Wade-Davis Bill

Majority of White Men Take a Loyalty Oath

No Slavery

Elect New Government

No Former Government Officials or Confederate Military Leaders

Lincoln says NO – It’s too harsh of a punishment Uses a Pocket Veto

President Johnson v. Radical Republicans

Andrew Johnson

Thaddeus

Stevens

(PA)

Charles

Sumner

(MA)

Reconstruction Issues

What to do with… Confederate Leaders Confederate Soldiers Confederate Citizens Former Slaves

Retribution/Justice v. Rehabilitation Rights of citizenship, land, education, etc. Radical Republican Power Grab?

Freedmen’s Bureau

Freedmen’s Bureau Family Reunification Education Basic Needs

Affirmative Action

Percentage of Children in School in 1890 and Literacy Rates

White Black

% in School 50% 31%

% illiterate 15% 65%

Reconstruction Review

13th Amendment – Freed Slaves Black Codes are Enacted (Jim Crow)

Blacks cannot… Testify in court, buy property in certain areas, carry

firearms, etc.

14th Amendment – equal protection under the law and citizenship

15th Amendment – right to vote

To the tune of “Three Blind Mice”:

Free, citizens, vote,13th, 14th, 15th.

It all happened after the Civil War,It all happened after the Civil War.

Free, citizens, vote,13th, 14th, 15th.

Military Reconstruction Act of 1867

Registered Texas Voters

White: 59,633

Black: 49,479

(Blacks were 30%)

Freedmen’s Bureau & Progress

Blacks were a majority in MS, LA, and SC 1,000 Elected officials in NC b/t 1894 and 1898

Ku Klux Klan

Founded 1866 Pulaski, TN

Targeted carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks

Issues

Carpetbaggers Scalawags Land Issues

Sharecropping Racial Tensions Ku Klux Klan

Ulysses S. Grant

Inexperienced “Whiskey Ring” Panic of 1873 1874, Democrats won seats in Congress

Radical Republicans in Trouble

Compromise of 1877

Samuel Tilden (D)

Rutherford B. Hayes (R)

VS.

End of Reconstruction

Compromise of 1877 Pres. Hayes removes troops from South in order to “win”

the Presidency Jim Crow (basically the Black Codes again)

No voting, no representation on juries or in law enforcement; separate transportation, movie theatre seating, hospitals, amusement parks, restaurants, bars, hotels, and schools…

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – separate but qual schools are legal (8 to 1 vote)

Mississippi

190,000 black voters in 1890 8,000 black voters in 1892

How?

“…at no time in the history of our freedom has the effort been made to mold public sentiment against us and our progress so strongly as is now being done. I can no longer live in North Carolina and be a man.” George H. White, North Carolina 2nd (1901)

Last black congressman (70 years until the next)

Wilmington Race Riots

“Estimable Lady Grossly Assaulted by Black Negro” Raleigh News and Observer Headline (1890s)

14 killed 1400 fled the city

The Southern Rape Complex

The point where the Negro American was furthest behind modern civilization was in his sexual mores. Immodesty, unbridled sexuality, obscenity, social indifference to purity were prevalent characteristics.” Arthur W. Calhoun, Historian

“There is only one crime which merits lynching, and Governor as I am, I would lead a mob to lynch the negro who ravishes a white woman.” Ben Tillman, Gov. of South Carolina

5,000 from

Reconstruction

to1960

Lynching (Marion, IN 1930)

1880 to 1930

3,320 blacks were lynched 723 whites were lynched

In MS blacks were 56% of the population 90% of prison inmates Why?

3 Options for Southern Blacks

Leave – The Great Migration Who left?

Protest – organize, file lawsuits, play politics

Accommodate – deal with Southern segregation and adapt

Ida Wells (Rosa Parks2) Orphaned at 16 1883 (1st Railroad Incident) 1884 (2nd RR Incident) Wrote about Lynching

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and… a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

Stopping lynching might require blacks “to burn up hole towns.”

Booker, W.E.B., and Marcus

“The Great Accommodator”

Complete Separation

Founder of NAACP

Booker T. Washington (1856 – 1915)

Tuskegee Institute – AL Technical School (Lots of Teachers)

Accommodation

and Segregation

Washington’s Controversial Positions

In favor of educational and property qualifications for voting Literacy Test What do you think?

Refused to publicly denounce lynching Can you think of any modern issues that

politicians avoid?

Education (Separate and Unequal)The Results of Plessy v. Ferguson (1996)

“The knowledge of books does not seem to produce any good substantial result with the negro, but serves to sharpen his cunning , breed hopes that cannot be fulfilled… creates an inclination to avoid labor, promotes indolence, and in turn leads to crime.” Gov. James Vardaman, Mississippi

In SC in 1915, for every $1 spent on a black child, $5.75 was spent on a white child

In 1910, white teachers earned double compared to their black counterparts

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963)

Founder of NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored

Peoples Editor of The Crisis

“persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.” “industrial training and property getting” will not

alone work Focus on taking cases to the Supreme Court

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

“The Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets himself see himself through the eyes of others. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One forever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

From The Crisis, Du Bois on the subject of a black man being burned alive in Coatesville, PA:

Let the eagle scream! Again the burden of upholding the best traditions of Anglo-Saxon civilization has fallen on the sturdy shoulders of the American republic… The flames beat and curled against the moonlit sky. The church bells chimed. The scorched and crooked thing, self-wounded and chained to his cot, crawled to the edge of the ash with a stifled groan, but the brave and sturdy farmers pricked him back with bloody pitchforks until the deed was done.

Let the eagle scream! Civilization is again safe.

More Du Bois

“We have been cheerfully spit upon and murdered and burned. If we are to die, in God’s name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay.”

Review

What were the advantages of Garvey’s black nationalist movement?

Disadvantages?

What were the advantages of Du Bois’ NAACP?

Disadvantages?

The Harlem Renaissance

Cotton ClubCotton Club

Jazz

Blues

The Great Migration

Duke Ellington

“You’ve just got to a find a way of saying it without saying it.”

Langston Hughes

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise:

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

Early victories* of the NAACP

Guinn v. United States (1915) No grandfather clause exemption from the

literacy test Buchanan v. Warley (1917)

Louisville, KY – city ordinance establishing black and white neighborhoods

*How did whites get around these rulings?

WWI Era

Woodrow Wilson said he would not be “blackmailed” after meeting with black leaders.

Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith Racist portrayal of Reconstruction Pres. Wilson said, “It’s like writing history with

lightning. And my only regret is that it’s all so terribly true.”

The Harlem Renaissance

Cotton ClubCotton Club

Jazz

Blues

The Great Migration

Duke Ellington

“You’ve just got to a find a way of saying it without saying it.”

Langston Hughes

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise:

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

Marcus Garvey The United Negro Improvement

Association The first black nationalist

movement “Africa for Africans!” “The will is the thing that rules men;

the will is the thing that rules the world. The human will is that force… that the white races have used to make themselves the giants that they are in this world today; and because we fail to use that human will, that accounts for our being pigmies as a race… We are believing that we are still too humble to soar to the heights of independence and freedom and liberty.”

More Garvey

“They tell us that God is white. That is a lie. They tell us that all of His angels are white, too. To my mind, everything that is devilish is white. They told as that the devil was a black man. There isn’t a greater devil in the world than the white man.”

The Fall of Garvey

Liberia not all that welcoming

Black Star Line failed Alienation

Complete segregation Met w/ imperial wizard of

the KKK Attacked mulattos

Napoleon syndrome Jailed for mail fraud in ’25

“Garvey undoubtedly holds today an important and controlling influence over many thousands of the Negro race in the United States. He might become an even greater menace” if released from jail.

Attorney General John S. Sargent

Emmett Till He had been beaten and had his

eye gouged out before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. His body was in the river for three days before it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen

The Civil Rights Movement

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Montgomery Bus Boycott

Beginning of civil disobedience 1 year Tallahassee, FL

The Church

Jackie Robinson (1955)

Little Rock Central (1957)

Minnijean Brown

Sit-ins (“Jail-no-bail)

Freedom Riders

SNCC, SCLC, CORE, Nation of Islam, Black Panther Party, Lions, Tigers, Bears Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

Diane Nash and John Lewis

Congress on Racial Equality Southern Christian Leadership Conference

MLK

Nation of Islam Malcolm X

Black Panther Party Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver

March on WashingtonMarch on Washington (1963)

4 Little Girls

Birmingham, AL (1963)

MLK

Malcolm X

Selma

Rosa Parks

Dogs