RECONSTRUCTION

1865-1919

Recovery and Changes

Slavery Abolished Societal Role

undetermined

Convinced their rights must be incorporated into new country.

For Slaves For previously free African Americans, women, indigenous Americans, and Immigrants

THE CHALLENGE

To create a U.S. more connected to the Constitution than in the Antebellum U.S.

A desire to REMAKE not repair the country.

First we should look at the other history and social ideas happening at the time.

What’s this mean for U.S. as a whole?

For Women- Gender Roles and Rights

Women recognized their status and condition in relation to the enslaved blacks, even though they were THE BACKBONE of the anti-slavery movement.

Women in the Civil war took new roles and gained personal independence, why would they just go back to allowing the fraternity decide their liberties?

New Territories and Immigration First Transcontinental

Railroad in 1889. Asians, blacks, and poor

exploited Allowed rural and small

towns to urbanize

Huge wave of European immigrants entered the U.S. between 1860-1900 (about 14 million).

NYC population skyrockets from 500,000 in 1850 to 3.5 million in 1900

Chicago- from 20,000 to 2 million

Melting Pot Solution?

Cultural interaction and assimilation as a benefit but in the process destroyed other cultures (like Native Americans).

The answer to this was---- the melting pot concept but this was more like a “stew characterized by meat and potatoes, mildly flavored with a little salt- almost no pepper. Rice, Yams, and Maize were excluded from the recipe and the Rice, Yams, and Maize eaters were allowed only at the table to serve.”

THE RECONSTRUCTION

Emancipation: the Plantation System takes a gut punch

Individual fortunes were destroyed

Happy comfortable living conditions uprooted

Who will feed us, work our land, and take care of us now?!

Sharecropping Tenant Farming Inspired by a

reconfiguration of post-war industrial expansion.

Plantation Owners- 0 Freed Slaves- Score

Free--- now what do we do?!

While some freed slaves gained work and transitioned from slave to free, many were just set free. And what happens then?

Newly freed slaves had no education, work, skills, or social contacts (or skills). And not much has been collected on how many regarded their new found “freedom”.

With nowhere to go- Starvation was common.

Many fled plantations and escaped to Union forces and found themselves refugees in Contraband Camps.

Contraband Camps

http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2011/may-june/the-forgotten.html

What’s a Contraband Camp?

By war's end, approximately half a million formerly enslaved people and other African American freedmen had sought protection behind Union lines.

These "contraband," as they became known, usually lived in camps hastily erected almost anywhere the army was stationed.

The camps became recruitment centers for African American troops and workers willing to dig trenches, build fortifications, and aid the Union cause on numerous fronts.

Slavery Outlawed and the South Freaks Out Again

Protecting its personal interests with legislation and white supremacist ideology.

Discouraging Black Voters without technically denying or violating the right to vote.

Fifteenth Amendment Violated in a sneaky way

Worth Comparing to Current Events?

Creating laws that required people to pay a poll tax before voting.

Required people to pass a reading or writing test before voting.

Example: Mississippi had a sentence or two for whites, and part of the state law for blacks to read or copy.

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/recon/code.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/pennsylvania-voter-id-law-enforcement-halted-by-judge/2012/10/02/bf240ffc-0c9d-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html

“PA VOTER ID LAW which required specific forms of photo identification that many residents — the number is disputed — lack. Lawmakers and new Republican Gov. Tom Corbett say the changes are necessary to combat voter fraud and restore confidence in the integrity of elections.

Civil Rights groups allege that the real purpose of such laws is to suppress turnout of poor, urban and minority voters, who are the most likely to lack photo IDs. Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson, who upheld Pennsylvania’s law when he first considered it this summer, ruled Tuesday that state officials had not made enough progress in supplying photo IDs for those who lack them. He said it seemed likely that some otherwise qualified voters would be disenfranchised.”

15th Amendment violations in the 1800s

Voter ID Laws in the 2000s

Black Codes

Black Codes were laws in the United States after the Civil War with the effect of limiting the civil rights and civil liberties of blacks.

Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state.

South Carolina persons of color contracting for service were to be known as 'servants,' and those with whom they contracted, as 'masters.'

All the slave states passed laws banning the marriage of whites and black people, so-called anti-miscegenation laws, as did several new free states, including Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.

The North’s Reaction

Outrage over Black Slave codes After 1866 the South was put under military rule. Mass support for abolition, but some still didn’t

believe in equal black rights. Black men were okay to vote, but not women. European Immigrants given first dibs in the labor

force. Leading to the beginning of Segregation and the

early beginnings of the Jim Crow Laws (they should be free, but I don’t really want to drink from the same water fountain or sit next to them in a restaurant, ya know?)

Enter Jim Crow Laws and Segregation

Who’s Jim Crow anyway?

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s.

• Blacks had little legal

recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials.

• Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings. Almost all of which occurred in Af. American communities.

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm

Plessy vs. Ferguson

On June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts.

Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy's lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Plessy decision set the precedent that "separate" facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were "equal."

The "separate but equal" doctrine was quickly extended to cover many areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. The doctrine was a fiction, as facilities for blacks were always inferior to those for whites.

Not until 1954, in the equally important Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, would the "separate but equal" doctrine be struck down.

The Story: Result:

In the mid-19th early 20th centuries

African American Literature:

Literary Elements during Reconstruction

Used to confirm and manifest creativity and genius Documenting and shaping social, political, and spiritual aspirations and conditions. As with the past- literature influencing public attitudes by using narratives/personal

testimony/biographies/memoirs. Championed rugged individualism and successful transcendence characterized both

the American dream—convincing blacks to buy into it. Combined capitalist possibilities with strong spirit of community and mutual effort

that typified social, political, and religious sentiments of the time. Concentrated on lessons learned from slavery and progress after emancipation.---as

models for present and blueprints for a better future. Some studies of those who endured trials but experienced triumph assuaged the

fears of whites and others who worried about revenge against or dependency on them.

Some biographies were to show white readers blacks were capable of contributing to the rebuilding of the nation and to instruct other African Americans of the way to a more satisfying future—to elevate them or raise them up.

National African American Press was created and gave many Black writers the opportunity the addition of publishing poems, letters, essays for writing contest or otherwise. This is where the majority of Af. Am. Writers were published first and most frequently.

Booker T., where do you fit in?

1856-1915

He began work at the Tuskegee Institute 1881during a time of rapidly disappearing interracial cooperation.

The focus of Washington’s philosophy at Tuskegee, his answer to post-slavery life was Industrial Education and economic advancement. He also believed in accommodation of southern white supremacy, an emphasis on racial pride, solidarity, and self. He said: "My plan was for them to see not only the utility of labor but its beauty and dignity. They would be taught how to lift labor up from drudgery and toil and would learn to love work for its own sake. We wanted them to return to the plantation districts and show people there how to put new energy and new ideas into farming as well as the intellectual and moral and religious life of the people."

ATLANTA COMPROMISE

Atlanta Compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities

The ATLANTA COMPROMISE earned him the name “the Great Compromiser”

Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal he struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who had taken over government after the failure of Reconstruction. The agreement provided that Southern blacks would submit to discrimination, segregation, lack of voting rights, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities.

Up From Slavery (1901)

That Up From Slavery was “a demonstration of the good a black man could do for himself and his people if given a chance to obtain and education and engage in useful, productive work.”

Emphasizes racial pride, solidarity, and self- help. Popular with whites, because he masked his personal and

social agenda with "folksy” and “unassuming" storytelling. Has an inspirational tone, lucidity of style, constructive

contribution to racial problems in the South. Washington labels some scornfully as “intellectuals” who

doubted his overall approach to race relations in the South The impact of slavery and significance of race on the

prospects of African Americans creates a double-edged interpretation.

Discussion

The school is got emphasis on vocational training and manual labor and the school didn’t challenge segregation- instead founded on thrift, hard work, self-reliance, and patience and emphasized “cast down your bucket where you are.” What’s that mean? Why is it important to Washington’s Philosophy or overall point?

He thought it was important for blacks to share “privileges of the law”- but to “be PREPARED for the exercise of those privileges.”---- what did this imply?

What is Washington’s central/overall point?

What does he suggest African American’s do to raise themselves up?

How does the mood contribute to the readers understanding of Booker T’s ideas?

What are some common themes discussed and where are some places where these themes occur in the text?

What is the climax of the story? Who might we consider to be the

antagonist of the story? In what way do the minor characters

influence Washington’s ideas and philosophies at Tuskegee?