APUSH Dr. I. Ibokette

Review Session VII (2017): African Americans

0

Study Questions:1. In what ways and to what extent did the constitutional and social developments

between 1860 and 1877 amount to a revolution? Use the documents and your knowledge of the period from 1860 to 1877 to answer the question. DBQ

2. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois offered different strategies for dealing with the problems of poverty and discrimination faced by Black Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Using the documents and your knowledge of the period 1877-1915, assess the appropriateness of each of these strategies in the historical context in which each was developed. DBQ

3. Analyze the changes that occurred during the 1960s in the goals, strategies and support of the movement for African American civil rights. Use the documents and your knowledge of the history of the 1960’s to construct your response. DBQ

4. What role did slave labor play in colonial American society?

5. Account for the increased urbanization of Black Americans in the period 1914 to 1945.

6. The leadership, organization, and programs of ethnic and racial minority movements after 1945 represented a fundamental departure from those which had existed from 1900 to 1945.Discuss with reference to Black Americans or Mexican Americans, giving about equal attention to the periods before and after 1945.

7. What accounted for the growth between 1940 and 1945 of popular and governmental concern for the position of Blacks in American Society?

8. Although the 1960s is usually considered the decade of greatest achievement for Black civil rights, the 1940’s and 1950’s were periods of equally important gains. Assess the validity of this statement.

9. Compare the goals and strategies of Black reform movements in the period 1890-1910 to the goals and strategies of Black reform movements in the period 1950-1970.

10. Controversy between integrationists and separatists viewpoints has long been a dominant theme within the Black community. Analyze the controversy among Blacks for the period 1920 – 1970.

1

Overview“For many years past, this race has been a source of contention so momentous

as to jar the very pillars of the constitution; and now whether we will or not, the black question mingles itself with every movement of public policy, with all our foreign relations, with our state governments, and with our domestic arrangements. It enters our halls of legislatures, our churches, our houses and interlocks itself with all our interests.” (Minutes of Alabama Baptist State Convention, November 3, 1849.)

1. The seventeenth century witnessed the introduction of the slave mode of production based on enslaved Africans into the New World. The eighteenth century witnessed the entrenchment of slavery not just as an economic system but as a social institution. While Northern states abolished slavery within two decades after the War of Independence, in the South, it became central to the region’s raison d’être:

“a social system and … civilization with a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology and set of psychology patterns…” (Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 1967.

2. During the first six decades of the nineteenth century, the institution increasingly became “a source of contention so momentous” that it polarized the country into two antagonistic sections.

The Civil War (1861-65) marked a turning point in the history of (AA) in the U/States.

a) It made possible the abolition of the “peculiar institution”b) It produced a decade of high hopes and expectations and anxietiesc) It ushered in a century of widespread de facto and de jure, legal and extra-

legal subjugation of Blacks. In most parts of America, Jim Crow reigned supreme.

3. Paradoxically, it was during the reign of Jim Crow that the significance of AA to the evolution of the US became even more comprehensive. While during the previous two and one-half centuries AA had been largely confined to the creation of economic wealth for white Americans, the post-slavery decades (1870s – 1930s) were marked by the creation, refinement, reconfiguration and popularization of uniquely AA socio-cultural institutions. These added radically new and significant dimensions to the American identity.

a) New regional and national Black leaderships and survival strategies emerged b) Northern cities were inundated by AA who were driven from the South by

“Jimmy” and drawn to the North by better socio-economic prospects.

Crystallized in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and 30’s, the AA cultural reawakening was characterized by

a) the popularization of jazz and other artistic and literary works; b) a new separatist movement, the Back to Africa Movement, led by the

Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey;c) AA involvement in numerous labor and socialist movements

2

4. This era was replaced by a significantly different geo-political and socio-cultural milieu of WWII and the post-WWII decades – the decades of the Civil Rights Movements (1950s-1970s). The government began to more forcefully and effectively implement most of the legal and legislative promises of Reconstruction during this period.

5. The Promise Land, 1980+i. Integration and Segregation: the “inner city” as a metaphor

ii. Endemic, subtle and systemic racism

iii. Enduring Stereotypes

o Racial profiling

o “Driving While Black” (DWB)

o Being in the ‘wrong” neighborhood

o Successful AA perceived as beneficiaries of affirmative action and

unqualified.

iv. The Drug War; tough on crime policies = mass incarceration & the New Jim

Crow (Michelle Alexander)

6. - The “Age of Obama”: Post-Racial America (?)

i. Economic disparity and wealth gap

ii. The Black Live Matters movement

On their way to the 2009 inauguration of President-elect, Barack Hussein Obama, a kid asked his parents,

“Are we there yet?” “Not really pal”, came the answer. “We are within the city limits and, very soon, we

will arrive at the “promised land”, provided that we do not encounter another group of deconstruction workers: white “men at work”.

“Who are those, dad?” “Well, this group was originally founded in the 1860s. It is made up of really insecure WASPs who do not like minorities”

“What do they look like, mom”? “They are mainly men who think that they are tough machos, but prefer to hide under

white-hooded dresses”. “Dad, are they members of the (Boston) Tea Party”? “No, son, they are the KKKs. “Is that like three strike-out signs in baseball”? “Oh, no! Baseball? Not again”

3

1. Slavery 1619-1865:a. Origins and Raison d’être

David Christy, Cotton is King (1856). Christy’s basic argument is that the centrality of cotton to the Southern economy could not be maintained profitably by free labor and that the world-wide increase in the demand for cotton, which was largely met by the South, necessitated a vast enlargement of cultivation requiring an increased amount of labor. He concluded that the importance of cotton and the concomitant slave labor system was such that slavery could not be abolished.

b. CharacteristicsFrederick Douglass, The Narrative… - the “peculiar institution” : family structure; social status (chattel, personal

property); brutality (physical, sexual, psychological)

“… Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. … A [n word] should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best [n] in the world…. If you teach that [n] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master…. As to himself, it would do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy….”

Demography of Slave states, 1854:White pop. 6.2 millionSlave pop. 3.2 millionFree AA .2 million

Demography of Cotton States, 1854 (SC, GA, FL, AL, MI, LA, AR, TX)White pop. 2.1 millionSlave pop. 1.8 millionFree AA .3 million

c. Politics: The South’s “psychological pattern” or sense of being was challenged by the

rapidly changing socio-economic patterns from the early nineteenth century. The country as a whole was undergoing a process of change manifested in industrialization and urbanization. Given the importance of the slave labor - as a pivotal mode of production - to the southern economy; and given the centrality of the institution of slavery to the southern society as a whole, how did the South, predicated upon its “peculiar institution” respond to these changes?

i. Three-Fifth Compromise & Commercial Compromise

ii. the 1820 Missouri Compromise

iii. the 1848 Wilmot Proviso

iv. the 1850 Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act

v. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

4

vi. the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act

vii. the 1857 Dred Scott’s Decision

viii. John Brown’s Harpers Ferry (1859)

ix. President Lincoln’s Election and Secession

2. Reconstructiona. the Emancipation Proclamation

i. April 62 abolition of slavery in DC

ii. June 62 slavery outlawed in the territories

iii. July 62 Confiscation Act freed all slaves owned by persons in rebellion

against the US

iv. Sept 22 Emancipation Proclamation publicized and made effective 1/1/63

v. EP driven by “military needs and to win the support of liberal opinion in

Britain”

vi. Lincoln justified it as a means to weaken the enemy

vii. “necessary war measure”

viii. “military necessity”

ix. Southerners viewed the EP as “an incitement to slave rebellion”

x. Abolitionists - limited

xi. Foreign opinion - mixed

xii. Northern whites - aggravated racial prejudice

xiii. Democrats made large gains in the N/west as result of the EP

“Republican politicians who defended the EP did so with racist arguments” and the government pursued a policy of “containment”

b. the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th)

c. the Ku Klux Klan, founded 1866 and greatly weakened in the 1870s

d. the 1877 Compromise: AA disenfranchised and segregated

“The Compromise of 1877 marked the abandonment of principles and force and a return to the traditional ways of expediency and concession. It wrote an end to Reconstruction and recognized a new regime in the South. More profoundly than Constitutional amendments and wordy statutes, it shaped the future of four million freedmen and their progeny for generations to come.” (C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction)

5

3. “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” 1870s-1930si. Jim Crow and Plessy V. Fergusson (1896)

ii. Lynching & Migration

iii. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Bu Bois (accommodationism and

confrontationism: “Bootstraps” and the “Talented Tenth”)

iv. Formation of NAACP

v. The Great Migration

vi. The Harlem Renaissance

v. A/Americans and the G. Depression shift in pol. party affiliation

with a few exceptions, the implementation of New Deal laws largely conformed to existing racial divide and did not challenge Jim Crowism

4. The Second Reconstruction & Liberationa. 1940s: During World War II, President Roosevelt had responded to complaints about discrimination at home against African Americans by issuing Executive Order 8802 in June 1941.This stipulated that Af. Americans be accepted into job-training programs in defense plants, forbade discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). After the war, President Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, faced a multitude of problems and allowed Congress to terminate the FEPC. However, in December 1946, Truman appointed a distinguished panel to serve as the President's Commission on Civil Rights, which recommended "more adequate means and procedures for the protection of the civil rights of the people of the United States." When the commission issued its report, "To Secure These Rights," in October 1947, among its proposals were anti-lynching and anti-poll tax laws, a permanent FEPC, and strengthening the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. In February 1948 President Truman called on Congress to enact all of these recommendations. When Southern Senators immediately threatened a filibuster, Truman moved ahead on civil rights by using his executive powers. Among other things, Truman bolstered the Civil Rights office in the DOJ, appointed the first African American judge to the federal bench, named several other African Americans to high-ranking administration positions, and most important, on July 26, 1948, he issued the Executive Order 9981which abolished segregation in the armed forces and ordered full integration of all the services: "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." The order also established an advisory committee to examine the rules, practices, and procedures of the armed services and recommend ways to make desegregation a reality. There was considerable resistance to the executive order from the military, but almost all the military was integrated by the end of the Korean conflict.

* the temporary break up and regional realignment of the Democratic Party, 1948

6

b. 1950s:i. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

ii. The murder of Emmett Till (1955)

iii. Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-6)

iv. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded by James Farmer, 1942.

v. Formation of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),1956

vi. Little Rock Arkansas (1957)

- Civil Rights Act (1957): Congress passed legislation in 1957, 1960, and 1964 that contained voting-related provisions. The 1957 Act created the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice and the Commission on Civil Rights; the Attorney General was given authority to intervene and file lawsuits seeking injunctive relief against violations of the 15th Amendment. The 1960 Act permitted federal courts to appoint voting referees to conduct voter registration following a judicial finding of voting discrimination.

c. 1960si. Social activism and peaceful confrontations

1960 Formation of Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

1961 Freedom Rides

1962 Albany Movement

1963 Birmingham Movement

1963 March on Washington

1964 Freedom Summer

1965 Selma-Montgomery March

ii. Legislative Activism1964: Civil Rights Act: To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer

jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

1964 the 24th Amend.: prohibited any poll tax in elections for fed. offices. ... 1964 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

1965 Voting Rights Act: This “act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified. In those years, African Americans in the South faced tremendous

7

obstacles to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions to deny them the right to vote. In 1964, numerous demonstrations were held, and the considerable violence that erupted brought renewed attention to the issue of voting rights. The murder of voting-rights activists in Mississippi, and the attack by state troopers on peaceful marchers in Selma, AL, gained got national attention and persuaded President Johnson and Congress to initiate meaningful and effective national voting rights legislation. The combination of public revulsion to the violence and Johnson's political skills convinced Congress to pass the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965.

iii. Violent Confrontations & Separatist Politics1963 Assassination of Medgar Evers

1965 Watts Riots- Assassination of Malcolm X

1966 - SNCC expels white members- Formation of Black Panther

1968 - MLK assassinated

“Blacks in more than a hundred cities unleashed their anger in paroxysms of burning and looting… The death of King appeared to destroy the hope that his doctrine of pacific appeal to reason and right could solve the racial problem” Garraty

* the late 60s: Black Power, Nationalism and Separatism

d. 1970s i. The 1970s was marked by a series of tangible and practical manifestations of the

promises of the 1860’s Reconstruction effected through the legislative measures of the 1960s. These included the appointment and election of more African Americans to prominent political offices; the implementation of affirmative action, and the overall improvements in the lots of African Americans.

ii. Collectively, these gains ushered in the beginning of a period of significant social, economic and political mobility by African Americans, a process that unwound the momentum that had sustained the massive grassroots and confrontational civil right movement of the previous three decades.

iii. The 1970s also marked the beginning of a turning point in the role of African Americans in the political landscape of the US. They were no longer “outsiders” looking in but “insiders” struggling to create niches for themselves and become bona vide players in the “establishment”. The political careers of Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Doug Wilder, and Barbara Jordan all attest to the “arrival” of these “representatives” in the corridors of American political power.

8

e. The Promise Land, 1980+ - See #s 5 & 6 on page 3.i. Integration and Segregation: the “inner city” as a metaphor

ii. Endemic, subtle and systemic racism

iii. Enduring Stereotypes

Racial profiling

“Driving While Black” (DWB)

Being in the ‘wrong” neighborhood

Successful Af. Americans perceived as beneficiaries of affirmative action and

unqualified.

The “Age of Obama”: Post-Racial America (?)

Timeline1619 “Coming to America” - First set of African slaves arrive in Jamestown, Virginia1776 African Americans (AA) and the American Revolution1787 Northwest Ordinance prohibits slavery in the territory1789 US Constitution: Slaves 3/5 human1793 the Fugitive Slave Law1800 Slave Revolts: Gabriel Prosser 1800, Denmark Vessey 1822, Nat Turner 18311817 Formation of American Colonization Society1820 the Missouri Compromise1829 David Walker, Appeal To The Coloured Citizens of the World 1833 Formation of American Anti-Slavery Society1840 Formation of the Liberty Party 1850 the Compromise of 1850 (Slave Fugitive Law)1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford1859 John Brown @ Harpers Ferry1862 Confiscation Act1863 Emancipation Proclamation1965 13th Amendment1868 14th Amendment1870 15th Amendment1871 Enforcement Act1877 1877 Compromise1895 Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address1896 Plessy v. Ferguson1910 Formation of NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois1916 UNIA, Marcus Garvey1917-1920s The Great Migrations, Lynching and Race Riots1920s Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age

9

1941 Establishment of Fair Employment Practices Commission, FDR1946 Establishment of Civil Rights Commission, Truman1948 Integration of the Armed Services, Truman;

-Dixiecrats, Strom Thurman and the Democratic Party

1954 Brown v. Board of Education1955-6 Montgomery Bus Boycott1956 Formation of Southern Christian Leadership Conference1957 Crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas;

- Civil Rights Act

1960 Formation of Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee1963 March on Washington1964 Civil Rights Act of 19641965 Selma Montgomery March;

-Voting Rights Act of 1965-Assassination of Malcolm X

1966 SNCC segregated by Stokely CarmichaelFormation of Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale

1967 Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to be the first African-American justice on the S/Court.

1968 Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

1971: The Rev. Jesse Jackson founded Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity), an influential movement emphasizing African-American economic advancement and education.

1971: Fifteen African American members of Congress formed the Congressional Black Caucus to present a unified African American voice in Congress.

1972: The Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race, and laying the groundwork for affirmative action.

1972: Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) became the first African American woman from a Southern state to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She served three terms in Congress.

1977: Andrew Young became the first African American person to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

1984: Jesse Jackson is the first African American man to make a serious bid for the U.S. presidency.

1986: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday became a national holiday.

1990: Doug Wilder became the first African American to be elected a state (Virginia)

10

governor in the US

1989: General Colin L. Powell became the first African American to be named chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military.

1989: Ron Brown became the first African American person to head a major national political party, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

1991: Following the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, Judge Clarence Thomas joined the S/Court

1992: Carol Mosely-Braun (D-IL) became the first female African American U.S. senator.

1995: Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March of African American men in Washington, D.C.

1998: J.C. Watts, a Congressman from Oklahoma, became the first African American to be elected to a position of leadership in the Republican Party.

2000: After a massive protest rally and NAACP boycott, the governor of South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from the top of the statehouse dome and moved it to a less conspicuous place.

2002: The Slavery Reparations Coordinating Committee, led by prominent African American lawyers and activists, announced plans to sue companies that profited from slavery.

To Be Continued…….

11